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>> Tom Merritt: Coming up on CNET Live, we'll show you how to run Linux up a thumb drive inside Windows.
>> Brian Cooley: And he is not kidding. We'll also turn your desktop PC into a guitar amp or at least Donald Bell will do that.
>> Tom Merritt: Plus believe it or not that man Brian Cooley sits down and talk social networking. It took Reid Hoffman from LinkedIn to come in and talk to him about it. All that and more coming up on CNET Live.
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>> Tom Merritt: Oh we're doing it again huh Brian?
>> Brian Cooley: That's right. Here we are.
>> Tom Merritt: Why not?
>> Brian Cooley: Show number 893 I believe.
>> Tom Merritt: If our counting is in binary.
[ Laughter ]
>> Brian Cooley: That's right. All right, so we're back you know we were...
>> Tom Merritt: Phase 2.
>> Brian Cooley: We were mutually on the road for so many weeks. We're still gonna you know enjoying the reunion.
>> Tom Merritt: Hex, let's count our episodes in hex from now.
[ Laughter ]
>> Brian Cooley: Let's do that. And let's use base 6 just to make the addition really difficult.
>> Tom Merritt: Sure why not, 888 900...
>> Brian Cooley: We'll have to go and get HP Calculators and run routines in them to do that.
>> Tom Merritt: We should give out the phone numbers in hex as well.
>> Brian Cooley: You go ahead and do that. I'll do it in...
>> Tom Merritt: 888 900-CNET.
>> Brian Cooley: I'll do it in Arabic 888 900-2638, 888 900-CNET and when they call I wonder what happens.
>> Tom Merritt: They actually get to talk to Sheryl.
>> Brian Cooley: That's a good thing. Hi Sheryl!
>> Tom Merritt: Who is waiting around to take your calls and I'm trying to find the hex. The number is [laughter] OX211D3688E.
>> Brian Cooley: See the same guy's gonna put Linux on a pen drive to run inside the Windows could give you the phone number in hex and only this audience will be able to say, "Oh, cool!"
>> Tom Merritt: Google. Google does it for you...
>> Brian Cooley: And dial us that way.
>> Tom Merritt: Just put any number and then in hex then do a Google search, it translates it for you.
>> Brian Cooley: Really! Another tool I didn't know about. Okay. I've learned something new in Google. Before we get started and move off this absurdity and go to your calls. Let's look at the couple of things we crave.
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>> Tom Merritt: This are some of our favorite things from the crave blog at crave.cnet.com and just put heated floor in my bathroom.
>> Brian Cooley: Did you really?
>> Tom Merritt: We did a whole bathroom remodel so we got it nice on the tootsies in the morning.
>> Brian Cooley: Sin, I'm never would have taken you for a guy who's out there with a trowel and mortar and not...
>> Tom Merritt: Oh no, I'd paid someone to do it.
>> Brian Cooley: Okay, that's good to say. Don't say we just, okay.
>> Tom Merritt: When I say we I mean we wrote the check for the guys to go with the trowel.
>> Brian Cooley: Okay. All right let's be honest here. You were on the horse but you didn't fire the arrow.
>> Tom Merritt: Let's make that clear.
>> Brian Cooley: All right.
>> Tom Merritt: I think I wouldn't even get close to the horse. But yeah, we got the heated floor in there so it got me thinking what other things could we just put heated. This! This is a heated touch screen from Glacier Computer. This is their Everest model. It's actually meant for warehouses where you're moving forklift in and out of a freezer perhaps or chilled area.
>> Brian Cooley: Oh yeah because LCDs don't like extreme temperatures.
>> Tom Merritt: Well yeah. You get condensation on there and there are freezes and process problems so you have the heated touch screen. It keeps that screen nice and clear. First of all, I didn't feel too bad on the fingers.
>> Brian Cooley: I was gonna say it's kinda nice to touch. You want to sit there and linger on the button press. That kind of gets a nice little joke that it's called glacier but it's warm.
>> Tom Merritt: Well that's the name of the company I mean.
>> Brian Cooley: All right. But it works. I'm just having a little...
>> Tom Merritt: They specialize in cold weather equipment.
>> Brian Cooley: It's funny how all the weatherized or tough stuff has a similar design look with kinda you know Nazi little corners and edges. It's like a lot of that ruggedized phones we've seen.
>> Tom Merritt: Yeah.
>> Brian Cooley: It's kinda got of some that Panasonic Toughbook looks at it.
>> Tom Merritt: Because it works.
>> Brian Cooley: That's right. That's right Tom because Glacier products work.
>> Tom Merritt: What do you got for us another car?
>> Brian Cooley: I've got another car, you and me and the cars. This is the Ford Transit Connect. Let me show you what the thing looks like on the overview. This is a vision for a new cab for urban areas because the Crown Victoria is eventually gonna fade away and the Mercury Marquee is its sistership. This is based on I believe Ford of Europe vehicle, a service truck that's already in production so they could really do this. Notice how it's nice and high and roomy like an English cab but when I go inside the photos here and again it's a mockup but this is the LCD screen you're...
>> Tom Merritt: Oh, it's like the Star Trek interface.
>> Brian Cooley: Does it? Doesn't it exactly? The font's the same.
>> Tom Merritt: Yeah totally.
>> Brian Cooley: That's crazy and then you go up here and you can see a little better view of how it lets you see a map of where you're being taken in case you're being taken for a ride.
>> Tom Merritt: The cabbies are gonna love this when they're trying to avoid rush hour and try to, "Oh sir the computer says you have should have taken a left back there."
>> Brian Cooley: No, that's not the right route. Oh yeah. You could see it's a real car upfront. This is not some crazy concept so they could really do this and they also have great laudability getting in and out if you ever you know wedged your shoes in behind the security barrier, behind the driver.
>> Tom Merritt: Trying to get you briefcase or your backpack or what you have.
>> Brian Cooley: There's no room in the cab these days. Well, they've securitized them, not a problem here so no word on when this might the streets as an offering from Ford but it can happen soon enough for me and my lanky legs and my love of that back seat tact so that's the Ford Transit Connect.
>> Tom Merritt: All right let's get to your calls at 888 900-CNET on the line is Joe from Vallejo, California. Hey Joe, thanks for joining us today.
>> Joe: How's it's going on Tom and Brian?
>> Tom Merritt: Oh we're doing all right. We're doing all right. What can we help you with?
>> Joe: Yeah I'm in the beginning phases of doing some video editing and I'm really, really considering getting a MacBook Pro but I was wondering is there may be you know in the way now of the pros and cons is there may be like a higher MPC that can match the performance level of the MacBook Pro.
>> Tom Merritt: Sure.
>> Brian Cooley: What software are you gonna run to do your editing is the key.
>> Tom Merritt: That's the key.
>> Joe: Right. Well, I mean I've used both Avid and I've used Final Cut Pro. I know when like kind of in the broadcast industry I know both the kind of you know the standard. I'm comfortable with using both but I guess prefer Final Cut for a more but I'm willing to use both.
>> Brian Cooley: Yeah you know I'll tell you I actually not too long ago polled the video pros who were surrounded by right now in our control room because we at Avid and Final Cut here at CNET and we also well, I have the Adobe Premier program and we looked at all 3 of those to go PC or Mac or which software to run and everybody's gonna point you to Final Cut. It is the best program out there in so many ways and running it on the Mac platform that is so optimized for media I gotta tell you it really performs better than I think any of the reasonably priced Windows software and machine combinations. The Mac just does media so well. I've really say go Mac even though I don't use the Mac I wish I did.
>> Tom Merritt: The way you put the question I would totally agree you wanna do FCP on a Mac.
>> Brian Cooley: Yeah.
>> Tom Merritt: But if you are gonna do Adobe Premieres on your editing then there is you know the Dell XPS systems are pretty high powered. There's definitely more powerful machines out there that you could get.
>> Brian Cooley: I run Premier CS3 which is the current version on a pre-effi AMD Athlon 64 which is a 2 and a half year-old, 3-old machine the one I've got, it runs great.
>> Tom Merritt: What kind of video editing do you think you'll do?
>> Joe: I'm kinda interested in doing like short documentaries. Also doing may be some more like short films also.
>> Tom Merritt: Uh-hmm, so whatever you get you're gonna need a tunnelette a RAM because you're gonna have huge amounts of video. You're gonna be moving around. You're gonna want FireWire and you're gonna want large drives, those external and internal.
>> Brian Cooley: And a great way to optimize the performance of any of these programs that will make the machine run a lot better or feel like it runs better is to use external drives that are FireWire as Tom mentions is the only to go for video and run them in what is striping, Raid Zero?
>> Tom Merritt: Yeah.
>> Brian Cooley: Yeah Raid Zero which is the striping of multiple discs so that you get better performance that's different than Raid 1 where you have disc mirroring each other for data security. For video editing as long as you trust your drives, Raid Zero, gives you much better performance. So that's really what's gonna do more for you. That and the RAM are gonna really give you more performance boost than which platform you pick to be honest. But Final Cut is the best program in terms of interface.
>> Tom Merritt: All right. Thank you Joe. Appreciate the call. I mean that's the thing Avid is so much expensive than Final Cut too.
>> Brian Cooley: And really hard.
>> Tom Merritt: Yeah.
>> Brian Cooley: It's got a much uglier learning curve.
>> Tom Merritt: Let's go to Colorado then. Zeek, you on the line?
>> Zeek: I am sir.
>> Tom Merritt: Hey, thanks for calling Zeek. What can we help you with?
>> Zeek: I have an old T23 Laptop that won't stay on for longer than 5 minutes. It will stay on for about then and then the screen will flicker and then it will just stop working.
>> Brian Cooley: It's not battery? We've ruled that out?
>> Zeek: No, it's not the battery. I've tried it without the battery with the AC plugged in.
>> Tom Merritt: And you're sure it stops working it's not just that the monitor goes out?
>> Zeek: Yeah. It's like it have little pressure points. If you push the right pressure point the screen will come back on but the mouse won't move and you can get...
>> Brian Cooley: Oh, so you're laptop's broken. It's been dropped bottom line.
>> Zeek: Yeah.
>> Brian Cooley: Yeah, okay. Boy, so what to do to fix that up? That's internal.
>> Tom Merritt: The only way to get that may be pull that drive out. Do you have any other computers?
>> Zeek: I do, yeah.
>> Tom Merritt: May be pull that drive out and put it in an enclosure and mount it up on another computer and if you can access that drive well, then you can pull all of your data off of there and then you could migrate it to a new computer I mean other than sending it back to IBM or Lenovo if it was under warranty. I don't think there's much I can think of that you could do to that laptop.
>> Brian Cooley: Yeah, it's hard to buy replacement parts especially if it might be a cracked mother board or a contact or a trace on the board that got ripped or torn because it was dropped or something. If you can press the machine and fix the problem you know it's mechanical and or electromechanical and probably not something you may be able to get repair parts for because laptops are pretty proprietary.
>> Tom Merritt: All right. Hold that drive and then duplicate it, back it up.
>> Brian Cooley: Yeah, at least save the info that way. All right coming up I'm gonna sit down with the cofounder of LinkedIn, the only social network I still use. So that's pretty exciting.
>> Tom Merritt: Strong words for Mr. Cooley. First of though we got an e-mail to CNET Live at cnet.com involving Ubuntu disc thumb drive and Windows, take a look.
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>> Tom Merritt: Joshua e-mailed us and also accosted CNET's Randall Bennett at CES asking this. Could you guys, you Tom, make an Insider Secret on how to put Ubuntu on a jump drive? Well, if I jump drive you mean a USB thumb drive like this? Then yes. That's what I'm gonna show you how to do on today's Insider Secret.
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>> Tom Merritt: There are lots of variations of Ubuntu and different ways to put them on a thumb drive. I recommend going to pendrivelinux.com for all the details. They have their own Linux distribution plus tutorials on other variants. So have fun looking around. There are 2 options for putting Ubuntu on a USB drive. The persistent install is the bootable one and as you can see might make a horrible video. Now type CP space dash RFCasper space disc3 disc install pics pool precede space yeah, somethings are better in print. However, they also have a way to put Ubuntu 7.1 on a thumb drive that you can then run in Windows and that's what I'm gonna show you how to do today. First, wipe out the thumb drive. You need at least a giga byte of free space then create a folder called QPU710. Download QPU710.exe from pendrivelinux.com and extract it to the QPU710 directory. There you go. Then go to ubuntu.com and download Ubuntu's 7.10 desktop edition for a standard computer. Put that ISO file in the QPU710 directory. Click the QPU710.bat file. The first time you'll need to install the QEMU accelerate module. I installed mine to the thumb drive. You can choose to install each time you run it on a different computer if you wish. When the Ubuntu boot screen comes up press F6, this gives you the boot options. Type persistent at the end of that boot stream, press Enter and Ubuntu will continue to boot. The persistent option allows you to save most of your settings onto the USB thumb drive and use them on your next boot. Now, you'll wanna know a few key commands. Press Ctrl Alt to switch back and forth between the Ubuntu desktop and the host desktop. Press Ctrl Alt F to make Ubuntu full screen and make it back into a box. Press Ctrl Alt 2 to switch to see the QEMU monitor and then type Help to get a list of QEMU commands. Then press Ctrl Alt 1 to switch back. When you're ready to shutdown choose the shutdown button as you would normally. When it prompts you to remove the disc press Enter. Don't remove the USB drive yet. Press Ctrl Alt to get your cursor back to Windows and close the window. If you just closed the window before going through the shut off process it can corrupt your persistent image according to pen drive Linux and now you have a handle little Linux you can carry around your neck. Isn't that fashionable? That's it for this edition of insider secret. I'm Tom Merritt, cnet.com.
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>> Brian Cooley: Only Tom Merritt ladies and gentlemen, only Tom Merritt. Good stuff there and I defy you to be more creative. Now, let's talk about something that I actually like in the space of social networking which is, what a thing for me to say, LinkedIn. Cofounder Reid Hoffman is here from LinkedIn to kick around some ideas about it, what it is and some of my questions about it. This is like my own little personal session you get to listen in. Reid thanks for being on the show.
>> Reid Hoffman: My pleasure.
>> Brian Cooley: Quick thumb nail sketch, LinkedIn is what for folks that aren't totally getting their hands on it yet?
>> Reid Hoffman: LinkedIn is the largest global business networking site. We think it's different from social networking because it's all about business so how you're effective day by day, week by week.
>> Brian Cooley: So it's networking but you might take the social out and put business?
>> Reid Hoffman: Yes. No photo sharing, no game.
>> Brian Cooley: Yes, bless you. Bless you, yes.
>> Reid Hoffman: Yes, exactly. So the question is essentially look at it as a way of and one has like an address book of your contacts but it's also how you make them useful. So like for example when you're searching for an expert, how do you find someone who is an expert on say for example viral marketing or open source or for example Ubuntu on thumb drive.
>> Brian Cooley: Right.
>> Reid Hoffman: How do you find those experts? Well, it's that sort of professional people search and part of the reason why the network's important is when you say, "Well, does this person really know what they're really about?" Well, if for example you know someone in common you can call that person and ask them and say, "Does this person really know this?"
>> Brian Cooley: That's where the networking part of it is use. Otherwise, people might look at it and say, "Well, it's another contacts database. I've got that on my PDA. I might have that already on Outlook, at the Office." How do you rationalize in a sense you are another contacts database but you go further. How do you rationalize being yet another pool of contacts in my life?
>> Reid Hoffman: Well hopefully we will build to being the professional pool of contacts for you. That's what we're building towards. Well we start started with value propositions you couldn't already get out of like your Outlook store or an address book store which is how do you reach pass just the people you know to other people as well.
>> Brian Cooley: Yeah, people you really don't know directly already.
>> Reid Hoffman: Yes, exactly. Because frequently when you're trying to solve a professional task like say for example you're saying well, I would like to know what's the right way of integrating with scene into my product and I wanna find experts and people who've done that. Well, I may not know one directly but I may know someone who knows someone.
>> Brian Cooley: You're giving me that 2 degrees of separation mentality of someone I know will know somebody.
>> Reid Hoffman: Exactly.
>> Brian Cooley: And refer me or clue me in or get me connected.
>> Reid Hoffman: Exactly.
>> Brian Cooley: What one of the things that comes up and I'm sure you've heard of this before is you join LinkedIn you start getting a lot I wanna be connected to you from who you are. I don't know who you are. It's like I'm sure you know where I work by looking at my thing. Are you just looking for a job contact? I seem to get a fair number.
>> Reid Hoffman: This is unfortunately I think a little endemic to the internet. It happens on every kind of you know active site, right where people are and we've designed it so that you should only connect to people you already know. Because what we do is when you and I connect we help each other, right? Well, that's only really useful if in fact we know something about each other. We know each other enough to say sure I'll help you, you help.
>> Brian Cooley: Because the user who just collects connection of yeah I want you and you and you and you so I can show a big number, that's not model.
>> Reid Hoffman: Yeah and it's not useful, right? So there's 2 ways for example connections with me so one is search. So for example if we're connected I find you know somebody and I want to essentially ask you for an introduction of them. Well, if you don't know me it's like okay I'm never...
>> Brian Cooley: Gonna introduce you.
>> Reid Hoffman: Yeah exactly so useless on that and then the other one is we have variety of services to help pool answers from in our within as service called answers. So for example if say I wanted to ask a question like well, like one of the ones I asked in my network was which city in Europe should we consider locating a European headquarters and why, what are the factors. We actually got a variety of different answers pieces like for example one of the ones I actually haven't thought of was make sure there's a number of direct flight set, right, between Europe. Like I just wouldn't have...
>> Brian Cooley: And this is from people that were in your network who you know or the broader LinkedIn community.
>> Reid Hoffman: Well, because what happens is we promote it to the people who you're connected to because those people who have an interest in helping you...
>> Brian Cooley: And they kick it out to others they know.
>> Reid Hoffman: Exactly.
>> Brian Cooley: Okay, so again degrees of separation taking that old theory and putting it together this way. You mentioned to me you've got some new stuff about corporate information and profiles on companies. A lot of folks looking for jobs especially in a tough economy, how might they use this?
>> Reid Hoffman: Well, so what we've done is we have a huge number of professionals. Like 80 percent of LinkedIn people are university graduates and you know everything and they enter in information about kind of which companies they work at and what their position is. So we actually have like where the locations of the company is based, what does the company do, what are the typical degrees and typical titles that people have in the company. We also show it with people in your network who work there, people who've recently been promoted, you know.
>> Brian Cooley: And what about people who work there, can they start to add color to that.
>> Reid Hoffman: Yes. Well, that's future releases.
>> Brian Cooley: Okay, so that will be coming. Now, last thing I wanna ask you here is for people who, because social networking or business networking is pretty open, is pretty democratic. Do you ever have to guard against your users deciding I like their technology but let's go in there and make it a social network. They could misuse it and just use it as a tool to do something else if a large number of people decided go there because of the tool.
>> Reid Hoffman: Yeah, it's only really happens spottily when people don't get the idea, right? So for example we launch pictures as thumbnails and most people got the idea which is head shots. It's like oh, I wanna remember who this is [inaudible].
>> Brian Cooley: Not vacation photos, not party photos.
>> Reid Hoffman: Yes. Not me on the beach.
>> Brian Cooley: And you're not hosting music and videos.
>> Reid Hoffman: Yes, exactly. So we had almost no problem with people kind of trying to make it too social. It's only like one person kind of going oh, I'm used to Facebook and I wanna put up the photos of my you know my drunken party and then they kinda realize oh, wait this is where everyone's doing this and...
>> Brian Cooley: It's basically a social shame I guess is part of the best collector for that. All right, Reid Hoffman cofounder of LinkedIn. Again, Cooley says it's the network that I still use. I already flashed them at Facebook and MySpace, Twitter. I never used Twitter, did I Tom? Anyway, coming up we've got our Download of the Week shortly and Tom's gonna show us a very user friendly newbie way to get in to IRC. It's coming up next on CNET Live.
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>> The evolution of my Blackberry has really changed the way that I do business. I don't think I would have been able to accomplish the expansion of our company without the ability to communicate the way we do.
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>> Tom Merritt: Welcome back to CNET Live. Lines are up at 888 900-CNET but first before we get to some more calls time for the Download of the Week. [Music] Download of the week is brought to you by our good friends at cnetdownload.com purveyors of free spy ware-free programs and you know IRC, right?
>> Brian Cooley: That's old school.
>> Tom Merritt: Yeah, the totally open chat room. You can make it as restrictive as you want. You can make it as open as you want, start your own chat room, you could change your nickname all the time.
>> Brian Cooley: Great channels, right? IRC channels.
>> Tom Merritt: Yes the pound symbol of IRC like come chat with me at pound you know Barbie dolls with another [inaudible].
>> Brian Cooley: Don't go there.
>> Tom Merritt: Yeah, that's IRC. That's what we're talking about. So XChat 2.8.5e...
>> Brian Cooley: Oh the e-version.
>> Tom Merritt: Is one of my favorite real simple ways to get into IRC chat. If you're always like great I don't know how to get into these things. Bingo! There you go. This is XChat running the BOL Chat, IRC chat room that EB30 created to go along with our live streaming so there's folks in there chatting away saying hello and as you can see it's got you know all the people right here. You've got everybody that's in over here so you can say this is the tech guy, I need to boo him. You can right click on people and let's see Doc live, should I give you the boot. I got my operator interactions I could find out a little like where he's coming from with IRS.
[Simultaneous talking]
>> Brian Cooley: Absolutely, he really ruled up all the IRC tools and data tags all into a really nice interface. What's nice about IRC and we still haven't crack this nut in the IM world is full universal interoperability. I mean it's just the one platform that everyone can come together on. As you mention it's a pool, it's a room as opposed to a lot of point-to-point IM going on although if you do join a room with 100 persons it's IM.
>> Tom Merritt: Now, there's a lot of other more fully functional IRC chats out there but that is a...
>> Brian Cooley: I like that.
>> Tom Merritt: Good real basic one especially if you just wanna get involved and you have never done it before.
>> Brian Cooley: Good looking too. Let's go to the phones now and see what we've got. Let's jump over to, I think we can go to line 2 and talk to Manatuk in Connecticut who's got a question about his optical drive acting up but not in a simple way. Manatuk welcome to CNET Live.
>> Manatuk: Nice talking to you guys. Great show.
>> Brian Cooley: Thank you!
>> Manatuk: What I've got here is I've got a computer that the BIOS will see the device, CD/DVD player, it will boot off my DVD. It will not see or boot off at the CD at all. Same problem also exists once I actually do get into XP. External USB drives work fine. I'm leaning towards it's the controller but when it fails I've never seen it not work for just one you know.
>> Tom Merritt: Now, is that right that we have 2 lasers in there, one for DVD and one for CD.
>> Brian Cooley: I thought so because there are different wavelengths to read a very different compactness of data pits on the disc.
>> Manatuk: A little more detail I've tried 7 different drives, 8 different cables, all these drives are no good. I've also tried mostly for PDI.
>> Brian Cooley: Okay, it's not the laser.
>> Tom Merritt: Yeah, I would say that that controller card I think you've nailed.
>> Brian Cooley: Is this an IDE drive you're using?
>> Manatuk: Yes, it's IDE I have fed in the machine.
>> Brian Cooley: Have you tried this where you've moved the mother board and of the IDE cable to the other IDE header. There's usually at least 2.
>> Manatuk: Oh yeah.
>> Brian Cooley: Oh yeah. Okay, you've tried that.
>> Manatuk: And jumpers, different cables, 80-conductor, 40-conductor, both conductors on the cable like I said.
>> Brian Cooley: He's down to the controller chip on the mother board although...
>> Tom Merritt: Yeah or another mother board issue.
>> Brian Cooley: Yeah.
>> Tom Merritt: Of some sort.
>> Manatuk: The machine plays games perfect. It's my wife's machine and she games on it. She plays BioShock and stuff like that. The machine does not blue screen. This is the only issue I have with it.
>> Brian Cooley: The only I would try that you've done yet is to go to the manufacturer's web site and look for anything that is machine and brand specific about that model. What brand of computer is it?
>> Manatuk: It's a home built.
>> Brian Cooley: It's a home built. All right. So you're kinda stuck. You really can't go to the manufacturer's site. Yeah.
>> Tom Merritt: Do you have an NVIDIA Driver?
>> Manatuk: It's actually the Asus M2N-E SLI Motherboard. I also have the 8600 GTS Video Card. All drivers are fully updated even flashed the BIOS. I have reset the BIOS.
>> Tom Merritt: Because I've found one person who was having a similar problem and they uninstalled the NVIDIA chip set drivers.
>> Brian Cooley: That did it?
>> Tom Merritt: And it fixed it.
>> Manatuk: It's before it even gets into XP though. It's happening at my [inaudible]
>> Tom Merritt: I know.
>> Brian Cooley: All right so the drivers are being invoked.
>> Tom Merritt: Yeah.
>> Brian Cooley: Yeah. That's a tough one I'm afraid. Where do we send him?
>> Tom Merritt: Send him to the Forms. Go to the forms if you haven't already and poke around in there but I think you narrowed it down as far as we could which is there's something funky with the controller or you might need to replace the mother board if you wanna keep it.
>> Brian Cooley: He's going deep already. You wanna do live photos?
>> Tom Merritt: Yeah let's do that.
>> Brian Cooley: Let's do it. Let's go to Damian in Georgia, just arrived from 3 hours ago so let's sling me back in time to the ATL. Hey Damian! How are you?
>> Damian: I'm great guys. How are you?
>> Brian Cooley: Good thanks. What's on your mind today?
>> Damian: Well, basically my roommate and I are sharing photos over iPhoto and so we have our sharing feature turned on and I'm the only one adding the photos and I have my tags nicely organized. But whenever I want to share them with him my iPhoto has to be open. I was wondering if there's a way around that or if there's another software that could help us with that.
>> Tom Merritt: Well you know what you can do is you can use Picasa which has a plug in for iPhoto and then you could share photos through Picasa whether you have iPhoto running or not.
>> Brian Cooley: Through the Picasa web.
>> Tom Merritt: Yeah. So you could use Picasa's plug in for iPhoto to share amusing iPhoto but then if you don't have iPhoto and you wanna share photos you could just do it through Picasa.
>> Brian Cooley: That might work.
>> Damian: Oh cool. So basically I just send them to the web site and he sees the photos.
>> Tom Merritt: Yeah if iPhoto isn't on and you wanna share it that way then they'd all be up there on your Picasa account as well.
>> Brian Cooley: Yeah on the Picasa web site, picasaweb.com.
>> Tom Merritt: So there are link to how you can do that into our show notes at blog.cnettv.com. All right?
>> Damian: Thanks a lot!
>> Brian Cooley: Good! That was an easy one.
>> Tom Merritt: All right forget Guitar Hero, will you?
>> Brian Cooley: Oh yeah [laughs] like I've been obsessing on it.
>> Tom Merritt: You're always talking about it. For those of you wish to play real guitars, Donald Bell's got a first look at some hardware that could turn your PC into an amp. [Background music] Take a look.
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>> Donald Bell: All right. Hey, I'm Donald Bell senior editor for digital audio and MP3 and today we're not talking about Guitar Hero. We're talking about Guitar Rig which is a plug in [guitar playing] for actual guitars. This is a really cool 500 dollar solution of anyone who wants to have unlimited access to all kinds of cool emulations of amplifiers, effect pedals, different recording situations, different microphones, different speaker cabinets, all this stuff is included in Guitar Rig. The hardware aside from looking really cool is actually really road worthy and really rugged. Something that you can actually imagine musician wanting to use that has a foot pedal that you can use with all kinds of effects and then you've got 8 buttons which you can assign to either kicking in distortion, turning on a reverb, turning on and off a delay so you can make your dream setup in software exactly what you like to use with the hardware. So one of the great things about Guitar Rig the software is that it's not only just capable of really distorted guitar tones or kind of garage band guitar tones you're accustomed. You can [music] also do really authentic emulations of clean guitar tones from vintage amplifiers.
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>> What makes Guitar Rig software even better in some regards than having the dream setup of all your vintage amplifiers is that you can do stuff with the software that you really won't be able to do easily in real life.
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>> It also acts as a high speed USB 2.0 audio card. You can see all kinds of quarterings, inputs and outputs for plugging in a guitar, plugging in multiple guitars if you want. I don't usually go all gaga about USB connections but for this little hook on top of the USB connection that prevents the core from being ripped out accidentally. This is a really cool little idea that keeps you rocking. The Guitar Rig software itself has been around for pretty long time and on it's third generation it's really well developed so you get this virtual rack of gear that you can drag and drop different amplifiers, different guitar effects and you can see them you've got hundreds of pre-assess to choose from that are all divided into different genres. So that pretty much sums it up for Guitar Rig 3. I'm still gonna stick to Guitar Hero because [music] I'm just not nearly as good a guitarist as Guitar Rig would demand of me. I'm Donald Bell and now the first look at Guitar Rig 3 Control Edition.
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>> Tom Merritt: Next Thursday we're still working on a secret super special [background] guest but we will definitely have more of your calls and e-mails so keep them coming. Go to our show notes at blog.cnettv.com to find links from today's show and tune in again next week.
>> Brian Cooley: Next Thursday 4 o'clock eastern, 1 o'clock Pacific. We're back at 10 a.m. Hawaii.
>> Tom Merritt: 10! 10 a.m. Hawaii, you got it wrong last week.
>> Brian Cooley: That's right. See you next week folks.
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>> My Blackberry is my lifeline. The communication in my children's school now occurs via e-mail. Mom's at baseball practice, people I work with in the publishing industry, it's a wide range of folks that use the...
