Buzz Out Loud 897: Talk to the Palm

Oh snap, as they say. Palm has decided to get all vague in Apple's face about patents. Molly's back and she's hazelnut brown. And we determine that tech is, in fact, pretty sucky. All that and more, if you can get your sucky tech to work long enough to listen.
Listen now: Download today's podcast

EPISODE 897

Microsoft extends Windows 7 beta
http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/operatingsystems/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212902415&cid=iwhome_art_Opera_mostpop
http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/01/23/general-availability-for-the-windows-7-beta-to-end.aspx

How many versions of Windows 7 will there be?
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/how-many-versions-of-windows-7-will-there-be

Good sign for Blu? Blu-ray theft on the rise
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10148897-1.html

Wikipedia considers limiting user edits
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10149648-93.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7851400.stm

Monster.com suffers database breach deja vu
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/24/latest_monster_security_breach/

Fallout 3game updates coming to Xbox, PC, no PS3
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/things-for-ps3-go-from-bad-to-worse-game-publishers-abandoning-sonys-console-sne

RIM CEO: Buggy smartphone software is the “new reality”
http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/26/rim-ceo-buggy-smartphone-software-is-the-new-reality/

Palm responds to Apple veiled threat
http://i.gizmodo.com/5137691/palm-responds-to-apples-legal-posturing-with-even-more-posturing

G1 for sale in non-3G areas
http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2009/01/23/t-mobile-g1-coming-to-the-rest-of-the-us-retail-stores-tomorrow/

Verizon Internet phone
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10149009-94.html

Obama launches Recovery.gov
http://mashable.com/2009/01/24/obama-to-launch-recoverygov/

Nintendo brain-trainer ‘no better than pencil and paper’
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/gadgets_and_gaming/article5587314.ece

Huge inauguration photo is like a presidential "Where's Waldo?"
http://features.csmonitor.com/politics/2009/01/26/huge-inauguration-photo-is-like-a-presidential-wheres-waldo/

(which he took with a 14.7-megapixel point-and-shoot)
http://reviews.cnet.com/digital-cameras/canon-powershot-g10/4505-6501_7-33280758.html

VOICEMAIL

Tom the Plumber - Here’s how a black hole will kill you

I Miss Molly

E-MAIL
Hello JaNaToX and the Buzz Brigade

(The X is for the guest host, although Mondays are Molly,
so it should be JaNaToMo, but I digress…)

Jason’s back and so is the album artwork!

Some thoughts on the Russian OS:
It could be a fully localised version of one or more
Linux distributions, where both the interface and
documentation is in Russian. I’m not aware of how
far the community-driven localisation has progressed.

In India, the government has funded projects to translate
and localise both Linux and OpenOffice. And mind you,
this involves 15-18 languages! A Debian-derived
distribution called Bharat Operating System Solutions or
BOSS Linux is already available (http://bosslinux.in),
while CDAC, the national computing research establishment,
is working on a localised version of OpenOffice called
BharateeyaOO.o (meaning Indian OpenOffice.org in Hindi).
(See http://www.ncb.ernet.in/bharateeyaoo/details.shtml)

And I fully agree with Tom that governments should be
sceptical (if not paranoid) about proprietary software that
they might need to use. Imagine Russia was using an OS
made in Ukraine, and in the recent gas (natural gas, not gasoline)
dispute, this software vendor decided to push an update to just
Russia crippling the TCP/IP stack. It is certainly possible with
today’s IP Geolocation technology; the only question is how finely
one can tune the “attack” so as to reduce collateral damage and
the resulting bad publicity.

Just my thoughts on the matter.
Eagerly waiting for Ep 900
Aveek from India

**********

On episode 896, you mentioned that Seagate is claiming that they’ve
fixed the firmware issue for the 7200.11 drives.

You asked for reports from listeners of any continuing troubles, which
I’m more (less) than happy to provide:

While Seagate has issued a firmware fix to upgrade existing functional
drives, or drives that were bricked by the faulty update, there’s no
way to fix drives that failed prior to the firmware release, such as
my 1TB drive. The issue with drives that bricked prior to the
announcement is that they don’t appear in your BIOS, and are therefore
inaccessible by the firmware update utility.

Of course, Seagate has been quoted several times in the media as
saying they’ll provide free data recovery for bricked drives. The
unfortunate truth is that when I called about this, their support team
didn’t know about this offer, but told me that I would hear from
supervisor “soon”. That was last week. I called back and was simply
told that my request was “escalated”, however the person I spoke with
couldn’t provide any more information, including who was handling
escalations, how to get ahold of them or when I might hear from them.
All emails to the support line just result in automated responses
about the firmware update that won’t resolve my issue.

Frustrated in Cleveland,
Derek