Buzz Out Loud 922: Hot and junky

Brian Cooley aptly describes YouTube as hot and junky video today. And that, my friends, is why the president has moved his video off YouTube and is hosting the player himself. Meanwhile, we get a few more jabs in at the Authors Guild/Kindle controversy, and Cooley rants about space. Parking space.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

Episode 922

Square Root Day revelers to party like it’s 3/3/09
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-10186121-76.html

Apple tweaks desktops
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10186472-37.html
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/03/apple-releases-trio-of-long-awaited-desktops.ars

Roku box adds Amazon Video
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13746_7-10185922-48.html

AMD, Nvidia play dueling graphics chip launches
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=13772

2009 will be the worst year for PC sales. Ever. By far. (And no, Netbooks won’t save the day.)
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/woe-is-pc-sales-to-fall-faster-than-ever-before/

Atom can’t feed fab monster; Intel outsources chips to TSMC
http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/03/atom-cant-feed-rd-monster-intel-outsources-chips-to-tsmc.ars

Best Buy planning to sell motorcycles it has invested in?
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13746_7-10185922-48.html

Time Warner to sell channels directly on Web?
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/jeff-bewkes-goes-over-the-top/

Finding star power in games: The odd case of Jimmy Fallon
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/03/finding-star-power-in-games-the-odd-case-of-jimmy-fallon.ars

White House ditches YouTube
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/02/2055212

(Google says this report is incorrect)
http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/03/white-house-videos-on-youtube.html

New start-up hopes to push open-source pharmaceuticals
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/02/190242&from=rss

Microscopic magnetic mimic of bacterial motor made
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/03/artificial-flagella.ars

Voice mail
Dodd
Some thoughts on Amazon Kindle and the Author’s Guild

E-mail
Several people wrote in askling if the Kindle menus are spoken. They’re not. But there is a petition that Mike from Serotek sent us if you want to push Amazon into making the Kindle more accessible. http://www.petitiononline.com/Kindle2/petition.html

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Hi guys from buzz out loud

Just found your show and loving it.
Was just Listening and heard your comments about the alert Message in Victoria.
the system that the goverment were talking about implementing appears not to work work as well as it was hoped regarding
messages to most people in Victoria.
I live and work in Melbourne and I got the message which is not close enough to be under attack from fire. this caused undue panic to some people.
worse still the message even missed people that are in the fire effected areas, it looks like the system will need more work before it will be effective.

Brendan
Melbourne Australia

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Is it really so surprising that a Sony exec said something stupid? He did almost get to a valid point, though. Sony made a choice. They chose a complex and novel architecture with very little developer support when it launched. The same was true of the PS2, though, and it’s STILL selling games. The PS3’s tools are vastly improved since launch though. If a developer can afford to put some long and expensive hours into redesigning code, or writing whole new engines, to take advantage of the novelties in the Cell, the results can be stunning. And Sony is gambling on a life-cycle like PS2 to win back their investment.

Now, I’ve written code for Cell, and it is definitely more challenging than most. And the tools have been very slow to roll out. But the problem isn’t that the Cell is hard, or that it might be a doomed architecture (it’s in the hands of Sony and IBM, after all), it’s that all multi-core is still very new. Turns out that all those tools developers take for granted didn’t just come out of thin air. They had to be built, and tuned to use the hardware. New design ideas like a 6-core x86 chip, a GPU, or the Cell are all way beyond what today’s tools can optimize for, without help. So someone has to do it. This is what makes programming fun.

-Mark, the supercomputer repairman

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You were talking about this on an earlier show, and heres an article from EcoGeek:

Cool Idea - Charge Your EV From Underneath

Eric