>> Coming up on CNET Live, a gaming PC from HP and it's hot. Its liquid cooled.
>> Plus, Internet Radio alive and well, but for how much longer?
>> Not long. And another unnecessary iPod accessory from Nike. It's all coming up on CNET live.
>> I like when he starts to show us unnecessary stuff.
>> Like us! I'm Tom Merritt.
>> And I'm Brian Cooley. I don't need to be here either.
>> Let's go.
>> But we're here together to facilitate your calls.
>> Oh, that's right. We have to take calls.
>> Triple 8, 900 CNET. The phone number hasn't changed, but the hosts have. I wanna thank Molly Wood for covering for me last week while I was out.
>> Molly not only covered for you, but for our guest who didn't show up.
>> That's right.
>> But John Dvorak has apologized, he just made a mistake. He's gone be back on the show in a couple of weeks, so we will have him back.
>> And we wanna get your calls in, of course, at Triple 8, 900 2638. You're the start of the show.
>> That's right. When you call, Sheryl is waiting to pick up the phone and get you all lined up so we can talk to you, so give us a call.
>> But we always start off with a little bit of tech candy, some things we crave.
>> Here are some of our favorite things from the crave log at crave.cnet.com, and today I'm looking at a tuc that plays music.
>> What?
>> Yeah, that little skull cap, stocking cap, whatever you call it.
>> Yeah.
>> One of those cold weather caps, it covers your ears, has headphones in it. Headphones go right into your ears so you can listen to music.
>> Sounds dorky. Impress me.
>> iPod Nano fits in here as well.
>> Ahhh.
>> And it has controls on the outside of the hat. You have the headphones and the controls all on your head while your ears are warm.
>> A lot of fun when you're going through like the metal detector at a football game. They're gonna love ya.
>> Ah, a Nano sized flask might fit in there.
>> Oh, I like that, especially for the cold weather coming up.
>> Now it's useful.
>> Okay. Now we'll go to useful times, truly beyond the flask. This is called the REplug. This guy is a, basically think of Apple's MagSafe Power Adapter, which breaks away easily from magnetic connection, but this lets you convert any eighth inch mini jack to the same technology.
>> I could say a word that I'm not allowed to say, I would say it before brilliant. Because that I love.
>> Is brilliant. Now what I love about it is it's a small thing that you plug into the actual jack. You see that little silver button there, that's the top of the little silver part. Unfortunately the next part that connects is this rather ungainly plastic dongle, which has a strange kind of a barbell shape that I don't quite understand.
>> I wonder if that's to keep it from getting unbalanced and pulling off the mat?
>> Oh yeah, that could be. You're right.
>> A little bit flexible.
>> A little bit of strain relief there. Yeah.
>> You don't know how many headphones I've ripped off.
>> You bang it and you bang it and you break off the eighth inch mini. Plus with cars having Ox jacks these days, they're gonna be snapping off those little patch cords all the time that go from the device to the head unit. Nice. No place yet, by the way, set for fall release.
>> All right. we'll keep an eye on it.
>> I bet it's 30 bucks or less. Yeah.
>> No it can't be too pricey, right?
>> No.
>> Good stocking stuffer.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
>> All right. Let's go to the phones. 888-900-CNET. And Eric in Maryland is on the line. Hello Eric, how are ya?
>> Hi. I'm good.
>> Thanks for calling the show. What's your question?
>> I run my home network and I'm looking for a good piece of software, preferably free, to manage it and get like a network diagram and get info about devices on the local network.
>> Oh.
>> Okay. Something to monitor it, like Network Magic, for instance, but for free.
>> Yeah. Basically.
>> Okay. Network Magic is usually my recommendation for that. I don't know of anything like that for free. Do you Brian?
>> No, but there are a lot of good network utilities up on Download.com that are free or at least honor system, so at least free as you want them to be, that tend to do very narrow things. I've never found one that does a really elegant job though, of monitoring my network and giving me a nice visual dashboard. Those seem to be more pro level software that you've gotta pay for, you know, IT level stuff as opposed to user.
>> There's a few interesting things here. Radman's Server and Viewer allows you to not only remotely control computers over a network, but also monitor them, file transfer, text and voice chat, telnet, messaging. That might be one to look at. That's totally free. And user's have ranked it four and a half stars out of five, so it's a pretty popular download.
>> Yeah, a good sign.
>> At Download.com. Then there's, like Brian said, there's a lot of mini utilities there, like IP Scanners and Active Ports and VNC and stuff like that. You could cobble together a solution that way, too.
>> Right. you could kind of make your own desktop, your own dashboard, if you will, with a bunch of these fairly vertical little utilities. But go to Download and look under the network utilities, you're gonna find a lot of stuff to start with. I imagine you've already done that, but if not, do that for sure. Let's go to line four. Nelson's in New Jersey calling in with an interesting pocket device question.
>> Hi Nelson, welcome to the show.
>> Yeah, I'm a trio fan.
>> Yep.
>> I wanna ask, is there any program on this device or on a PC that you can convert a Palm Trio program to a Window's program?
>> Okay. First of all I didn't know that anybody drove in New Jersey this time of year with the top down, but I'm glad you called in. A little hard to hear you there, but I think I got your question. Can you convert Palm OS Program to run on a Pocket PC device? I don't think so. I don't know of any utility that'll do that.
>> No.
>> I don't anything that like parallels that you'd run on Pocket PC to run Palm, because the demand is probably that big. And it's a very different code base, I would guess. I'm no programmer, but it's got to be real, apples to oranges, just based on the sophistication of what's going on with those two OS's. They're from completely different generations. I don't know. It doesn't sound likely to me.
>> I've got one hit here, just looking around on Google. I found a piece of software called StyleTap, which allows you to run Palm Apps on Windows mobile of Windows Mobile Five.
>> Really?
>> Yeah, so it seems to be, it even works on Smart Phones without the touch screen, like the black jack. So.
>> Look at that. It sure does.
>> So StyleTap.com.
>> Okay. There it is.
>> I've never heard of it before right now, so I don't know anything about it, but it is something you could give a shot and try it out.
>> Yeah. It looks like it's an emulation deal that will work on Pocket PC and Five and Six of Window's mobile.
>> That's why we always hesitate to say that it doesn't exist at all.
>> I know. It always does.
>> We like to say we haven't heard of it. Because there's always something out there.
>> Can we find it in time.
>> Yeah.
>> Before we have to move on to the next element of the show? That's the real honest answer we should give you. We'll start doing that from now on. We have time for one more call here.
>> All right. Let's take another call.
>> Ryan's in Kentucky. We don't get too many calls from Kentucky, that's why it's good to have you on board. Ryan, welcome to CNET Live. What's your question today?
>> Thanks. How's it going?
>> Good.
>> I saw a video on CNET TV the other day that Rich DeMuro had, [inaudible], and he's talking about Magic [inaudible], which looked pretty cool, so I was wondering about converting to that from a LAN line. So I was wanting to know if I take too many performance hits with internet speed, computer speed and basically is the technology mature enough?
>> For VOIP?
>> What's your guys take on that?
>> What kind of internet connection do you have?
>> 3MB per second DSL.
>> Okay.
>> But going up is what? What's your uplink speed, do you know?
>> That's a good point.
>> I think 384K.
>> 384, okay.
>> So that's a pretty decent, for DSL, it's decent.
>> That's a pretty decent line.
>> Yeah. Yeah.
>> 56 would be, I'd get a little nervous.
>> It's okay. 1.5 is usually what I like, but yeah, that's pretty rich.
>> Yeah. Most people aren't gonna have that. The question is if you've got a lot of other simultaneous stuff going on at the same time on your home network, feeding out that uplink, you know, if you start getting down to 128 available, I don't know. I don't know what the system's using in terms of actual uplink bit rate, but then you take in the latency and the real world non-availability, and I like to have plenty of head room.
>> I do Skype on 1.5 DSL connection with other people in the other room doing who knows what kind of video transferring and everything.
>> Yeah.
>> And I'm fine. No bad dropouts. The new Skype is really good with the compression. It makes your voice sound pretty good. So if it's okay on that, again I'm not using it as my main line though. When you talking about getting something like what Rich was showing off, or Vonage, they're gonna be a little more reliable than Skype, yes or no, I mean there's arguments about that, but they're in the business to be reliable.
>> Yeah.
>> So they're gonna try to help you out there. But, 384 is reallypushing it.
>> And that's what you've gotta consider is your connection.
>> Yeah. 384 doesn't sound like enough going up, I think, to become a stand alone, VOIP only telephone household. That's my gut.
>> I should say if you pay Skype, they're gonna help you out too.
>> Right.
>> But if you're just using Skype for free.
>> That's right, there's a big difference between a freebie and the real account.
>> All right, Jeff in Chattanooga gave us an email at CNET Lice at CNET.com saying, I get the general feeling that anything with the yellow, red and white RCA cables are basically going to be obsolete. Not only that, but with the new connectors, I will not be able to listen to digital music channels through my stereo speakers. Are there adapters available for this once everything goes digital, or am I correct in thinking that everything will have to be replaced. No, Jeff, you don't necessarily need to replace anything, although you might want to. and you still might have to lay out some money for some adapters or a really good AV receiver. Rich DeMuro and John Falcone walk you through converting to HGMI in today's Ask Anything.
>> Welcome once again to Ask Anything, where there are no stupid questions. I'm Rich DeMuro with CNET TV, joined by our home theater expert at CNET, John Falcone. And today we're talking about having a really clean home theater installation where everything you have, all of your components, are hooked up to one home theater system and sort of switched out. Why is that important?
>> It's important because you're using these latest AV receivers to maximize the convenience of your home theater system. In addition to everything else they do, they AV receiver switches between all of your audio and video components. And especially on the video end, for maximum convenience, what you want is just a single HGMI cable going from the receiver to your TV and then all of your other video inputs converting into that. And then you only have to worry about switching from DVD to the game console, to the cable box, and so forth.
>> All through here.
>> Right.
>> And this is a pretty serious system, so I'm assuming it's a little more expensive than most systems out there, but also I notice they've designed it with that in mind, because the out is highlighted, and it's just one HGMI out cable to your TV, and then everything else would come in to the back of this receiver.
>> Right. and this is kind of a higher, mid ranger receiver, but we're starting to see these receivers as down, as low priced as 500 and 400 dollars. So don't think just because you have a really low budget that you can't get a receiver that actually does this sort of video out conversion.
>> Now when we talk video out conversion, a lot of like your old DVD players, if you plug them into here using, let's say, component video, is that gonna up convert through the HGMI to make it HG resolution, or what?
>> If the receiver has that feature, like this one does, it can do that. There's sort of many shades of up conversion, so sometimes it just puts it straight through, sometimes it deinterlaces it to 480T, which guarantees best compatibility with a lot of HDTVs, and some more expensive receivers even have video upscaling built in so you can set the output resolution to any HD resolution that you want, no matter what the input resolution is.
>> So I used to sort of do this with my old receiver. I had everything coming into it before HD, and just one video out cable, a monitor cable, to my TV. But there is a little trick you say, if you don't wanna spend so much, you can get a good universal remote that will do this?
>> Yeah, if you're not ready to upgrade your receivers, you're happy with your old one, you can, for about 100 dollars, get any good universal remote that can handle all of this stuff and you just program it so that the TV changes the input at the same time as the receiver. So you hit watch DVD, and your TV goes to component as your receiver goes to the DVD input.
>> Because the whole goal here is to not leave the couch as much as possible.
>> Absolutely.
>> Thanks John Falcone, I'm Rich DeMuro with CNET TV. This has been another edition of Ask Anything, where there are no stupid questions. Bye - bye.
>> All right. thanks Rich and John. I hope that helps you out Jeff, gives you a little bit of an answer. Now we have a special guest in the studio with us today, Rusty Hodge, from SOMA FM, which is a series of internet radio stations, actually, is here to talk about the internet radio fight for survival with the copyright royalty board. Find out if I'm over exaggerating when we talk to him. There's some fees involved here that they want the internet radio stations to pay. Now this is a question Brian Cooley has been thinking quite a lot about.
>> What if new royalties really do kill internet radio? Could I learn to love a regular radio station? One that has the freshest mix of the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's for my work day, with 60 minutes of commercial free music every thirty minutes? Or would I just shoot myself? Hmm.
>> I would shoot myself, I could promise you. Well, Rusty Hodge is here. Rusty and I go way back to KPIX Television here in San Francisco. We were some of the early guys involving getting them on the web as one of the first CDS TV stations.
>> I think they were the very first.
>> They were the very first.
>> It was then Westinghouse. But anyways, that's our old story. But he also runs SOMA FM, a fantastic array of what, six channels?
>> No, we've got 11 channels now.
>> 11 channels.
>> And then thirteen at the holiday time. We've got two holiday channels.
>> That's for holiday music. So SOMAFM.com is where the streaming happens. Big numbers. They are one of the most popular of the independent streaming stations. You can see how they look right here on the screen right now. Now Rusty, how did you get started in this real briefly, how does an internet peer play broadcaster get started?
>> You know, luckily I had a background, I was doing a lot of web stuff, like we were at KPIX, we were really streaming type technology, so I knew about the technology. When it first started the quality was horrible, so I said ah, it's not gonna work for music. And I kept playing with it over the years and it kept getting better and finally the shoutcast forum, which was MP3 streams started to get some traction, and it sounded okay. So I was like oh, I think it's now time to do this. And I've been playing around doing a little bit of microbroadcasting at the Birmingham Festival and I got a lot of positive feedback from the formats who were doing it out there, and so said hey, let's take this on the internet. So the end of late 99 I started beta testing with Drone Zone, which was our first channel, and then in early 2000 Grew Solid and Secret Agent were born and then like over the years added more channels and a few other people are helping out programming them.
>> So there's the beginning. It's gotten really big. You do big traffic. Now, of course, the battle is back on. As it is, we're at the second or third time in your history.
>> This is the second big time in our history for the royalties.
>> Okay. So they're trying to put you down with huge royalties that would put you out of business. Give me a rough idea of what it would cost to run your operation if these new royalties went into place.
>> We average 8000 people listening at any given time, which isn't a huge number compared to over the air, but it's.
>> Big number.
>> It's a big number for internet radio and our royalties would go up from being around 20,000 dollars a year to the Sound Exchange, which is the sound recording copyright, and there's two other royalties we pay, it goes up from about 20 to 22,000 dollars a year to over a million dollars a year under the new.
>> Which is.
>> Yeah, which is about four times as much as we hope to make this year.
>> And of course, this is on top of bandwidth charges, electricity and all of that.
>> Yeah. And also we have [inaudible], they're the underlying composition royalties. So we pay them. Together, I think, we pay them about 4 percent of revenues we pay them.
>> So that's relatively small potatoes. It's a copyright royalty board thing that could kill ya. Now we heard that this got put into some kind of a detente a couple of months ago. Where does it stand? Is it done or not?
>> Yeah. It's not done. We're at this point where both parties are negotiating. Sound exchange, I don't think, wants to get in a big fight with the smaller web casters. On the other hand they don't wanna see the rates get set so low, they're kind of believing that there's a lot more money to be made in internet radio than there is. They here things like Last FM got sold for 200 something odd million dollars.
>> Yeah, big, big money.
>> And they're like see, those guys, they didn't maximize their revenue. They got a huge audience. Then they flipped their company for a huge amount of money and we got totally cut out of that royalty wise.
>> Yeah.
>> But when you actually look at the thing, you found out that LAST FM had all these private deals in place where they had been negotiating and now they have in place with all the big record labels, as well as a lot of the independent record labels. So they had.
>> There's a lot more value that went into the sale price.
>> Yeah.
>> This is not a big money business.
>> No. it's not.
>> You're doing 8,000 some odd streams at any given time, like you said, that does not compare to even a midsized single broadcast station.
>> Correct.
>> They're doing far, a multiple of that.
>> yes.
>> Even if they're not terrible successful as a radio station.
>> Yeah. I mean like I've seen some numbers, like WBGH, Boston's public radio station. They say that they have an average of 80,000 people listening to them at any given time. 10 times what we've got. And that's once city.
>> One station, one market. So the people are converned about this and rightly so, because there are a lot of stations, like you say, it's a very fragmented space. There aren't a few biggies, there are a whole lot of small and mid sized internet streamers and that's the choice that people like about it.
>> Yeah.
>> And let's face it, commercial free is a nice thing. But a little bit of royalty will kill a lot of stations because of that.
>> Well it's a lot of royalty. It's not a little bit. Most broadcasters are okay with a little bit of royalty. And even though over the air broadcasters don't have to pay anything, the fact that we have to pay and have been paying in the past 10 to 12 percent, you know, most of us could survive and deal with that, but the new royalties are, you know, put us all out of business.
>> Now there's no new number floating around yet in terms of what the next rate might be?
>> There's been some negotiations and there's been an offer made by Sound exchange, which basically extended the original small web caster's agreement, which is the thing we got past in 2002, but it ran out in 2006. the catch was it limited the audience size to, they use the number of listener hours, 5 million listener hours, which is equivalent to about an average of 6800 listeners at any given time.
>> You'd be over the top right off the bat.
>> So yeah, we'd be over that right off the bat.
>> Without any room for growth.
>> And so would most of the other top ten independent internet broadcasters.
>> So if I love internet streaming, what do I do now as a user, because it sounds like it's still going on behind closed doors.
>> It has. We need to make more noise in congress. There is a bill that's in congress called the internet radio quality act. And if you go to savenetradio.org, there's a place where you can write your congressman and ask them to support that.
>> Okay.
>> And you know, we've got a moderate amount of support behind it, but ya know, it doesn't look like it's got enough energy to get it passed. However, if we get the congressmen and the senators interested in this, they put pressure on Sound Exchange.
>> Yeah.
>> And say listen. You guys have got to come up with some sort of compromise here that will work for everybody.
>> Do they get it? Do the power brokers get it or is this just some weird internet thing?
>> Yeah, one thing, no the power brokers get it. In fact, the one thing I've been back to meeting with congress twice now and the one thing that they've said is that we find independent internet radio is extremely important for media diversity. We don't wanna see it killed. However we were all hoping that there could be a private agreement worked out. They're on our side, but they don't wanna codify anyone.
>> Yeah, they obviously rather would stay out of it and let you all figure it out.
>> Unfortunately, because we operate under this thing called the compulsory license, which means that any copyright owner has to license to use the fee set by the copyright office, that means the government is setting that fee, so they're in that business.
>> Right. They're already in the game.
>> Yeah.
>> All right. So Savenetradio.org is the place to stay in touch, help things out. SOMA FM is Rusty's operation. Outstanding channels. Groove Salad, baby. That's a great channel for internet radio. And this is an example of the great diversity and choice you get that is the anecdote to the conglomeration of internet radio over the last few years. This is where it's at. And let me tell you, the projections for inernet streaming [inaudible] in the next couple of years, as wireless IP on the road happens, that's a big breakthrough. But more about that in another interview some other time. Rusty, thanks so much for joining us.
>> Thanks Brian.
>> Thorny, thorny issue. I'm glad we had Rusty on to talk to us about it. Now, coming up next we've got a download of the week that promises to rid your inbox of spam, but you'll need a new inbox. It's coming up right after this.
>> Searching for more tech treasure? Go to CNETTV.com.
>> Let's check the tech. Check the tech. Check the tech.
>> Technology is leading the way and I wanna show you some tech highlights.
>> CNET TV. Up to our necks in tech.
>> okay folks. Welcome back to the thing we call CNET Live.
>> I call it CNET Live sometimes, but.
>> He's just joking. Phones are open at triple 8 900 CNET. Triple 8, 900 2638.
>> We're funny. Time now for the DL of the week.
>> Download of the week is brought to you by our good friends at CNET Download.com where they bring you free programs that are spyware free. And today we're talking about Mozilla Thunderbird, an old classic. It's been around for a while. This is a free email client from the makers of firefox that you can download. And take a look at it. This is an excellent replacement for outlook express. If you're using outlook express, don't. use this. Go get thunderbird right now. It's also a pretty darn good replacements for lotus notes or outlook depending on the situation. One of the problems is that it doesn't have a calendar. If you don't care about that so much. It does imap. It can get your pop mail. And it's got all kinds of cool features.
>> I see a [inaudible] drop there.
>> It's got [inaudible] built in. it's got an encryption button up there. it's got a junk mail filter to die for. It uses [inaudible] filter that really, really works at filtering out spam. It's not 100 percent, none of them are.
>> No.
>> But it's one of the most effective I've seen.
>> Nice interface. Very clean. Very gettable.
>> And they just announced it, I think that they're gonna spin thunderbird off the way they did firefox, so they'll have a devoted team working on just thunderbird.
>> This has great buzz. This has Firefox level buzz around it.
>> The only thing that's not so great about it is that it doesn't have a calendar built in. other than that I love it.
>> Yeah. See, the one I use, and I have to admit, the way I use outlook express right now, I don't think calendar. It's not even on my mind.
>> Yeah.
>> Forget it.
>> For outlook users.
>> And big outlook, that's a coporate backend for me. I have to use two email clients, let's face it, most of us do. This should be my other one.
>> There you go. So thunderbird, you can get it a CNET download.com or at mozilla.org.
>> Let's do line one. It's new jersey. We've got Josh calling in with an iPhone question. Hey josh, welcome to CNET Live.
>> Yes. Hi. How are you?
>> Good. What's on your mind?
>> I want to find out if there are any free programs to unlock the iPhone?
>> Yes. There is with a caveat. If you still have iPhone firmware 1.0.2, you can go to iPhone Dev Wikki and get their free software. It's iPhone.540.net, and get their free software for unlocking the iPhone. That's what everybody was using before the new firmware. However, you can't upgrade to the new firmware after you've done that unlock.
>> you'll break it.
>> Well, you might break it and you might have to unlock and relock it and restore it and it's a mess. Don't do it. However, they are working on an unlock for 1.1.1. so if you've already upgraded for that firmware, or you want to upgrade to that firmware, the current status is they've got [inaudible] from 1.1.1 and a free unlock is coming soon. At least that's what they say October 11th at 7:20 a.m. so they have figured out how to get into the file system of 1.1.1, and they can actually install third party apps now, although it's not easy. So that's a long way along the road to getting it unlocked again.
>> Okay, have you upgraded to the new firmware?
>> Yeah, I did actually.
>> You did already. Okay. Well so there you go. You just need to keep an eye on iPhone Dev Wikki to find out when they get a new unlock available.
>> Thanks for the call. Let's go one more call here. Let's jump on, we've got Joseph in California with a question about WiFi Interference. I get a lot of these from people I know. Hi Joseph, welcome to CNET Live.
>> Hi. My question is what WiFi interefernce detector would you guys recommend, because there's a couple that we've searched through but I've never used one before, and I think I might need one for the school that I work for.
>> Now by interference, do you mean interference, or do you mean trespass?
>> It could be both. Right now I'm not sure if it's.
>> Your bit run is low.
>> Intentional or unintentional.
>> But you're feeling that you've got some bandwidth problems on your wireless network, is that the bottom line?
>> Yeah. Some sort of interference. It's happening near one building, but not in the other buildings.
>> That's probably interference, not trespass.
>> Now what are some of the ones you've said you've researched? Are they devices?
>> Yeah. I've looked up there's a product called Bumblebee by [inaudible] electronics. Then there's like three products that are sort of in the [inaudible] families, [inaudible].
>> That's the ones I've heard of.
>> And then there's something by Medic Geeks called WiSpy and then there's Fluke Networks.
>> Okay.
>> I'm not sure which one to use. I'm, they're all kind of pricey with the exception of the medic geek one, which is about 400 dollars.
>> Okay, I haven't heard of the medic geeks one. I've heard of Fluke networks before and it's got a free trial, which is the nice part. You can download it. But I think it requires that you have a particular radio currency. You might wanna investigate that. This is all institutional stuff. This is not home stuff.
>> Yeah. I was gonna say.
>> This is heavy stuff. The [inaudible] one, I know, is like 3000 bucks.
>> Yeah.
>> So you're doing some heavy duty. You might wanna look around. You've probably already done this. But there's a lot of good tutorials on the web about how to reduce the obvious stuff. Have you gone through all of the basic steps already?
>> I've switched the channels around, just to figure out if it's one channel or something else, and that doesn't seem to help. And I've used three kinds of wireless access point and one of the buildings, the one that we're having constant problems on.
>> This is pretty, yeah this is actually outside of our consumer focus actually, but I would say look up one of those tutorials on the web. Try to find out that you've gone through all the steps like repositioning, making sure the antennas are pointed in the right direction, go through all the trouble shooting steps. There's a lot of good tutorials like that out there. and then I would go and look up some of the wireless hacking tools. I'll put one in our show notes at blog.centtv.com, there's some packet sniffers and things that you can do to make sure that nobody's in your network. Some hacker type tools just to run, just to make sure that there's no outside interference, and then if none of that works, then you're probably gonna have to drop a couple thousand dollars, or maybe the 400 dollars. I just don't know.
>> And also sort of bear in mind that a lot of times the problem with a wireless network is not that you have too little a signal, but too much. You get so much multi packets bouncing off metallic things like metallized windows at your school or a wall that's full of chicken wire and you end up with so much signal bouncing that the radio can't discriminate, so sometimes just repositioning APs and routers can make a difference, even though you think you're getting farther away from the client. So try that out as well. Okay. Thanks for that call.
>> Wanna take another call?
>> We're taking a first look.
>> Oh. No. let's take a look at the first look.
>> Actually, this is cool. This is so cool.
>> Yeah, it is an HP gaming rig that is bigger than our reviewer and the winner of CNET's editor's choice. Take it.
>> Hi, I'm Rich Brown, senior editor for CNET.com. today we're gonna talk about the editor's choice winning HP Blackbird OO2. this is the first product of the HP Blue partnership and it totally delivers on the promise of a unique, high end gaming desktop. This is, of course, a very imposing system. The black, all metal case and it's angular design actually looks kind of like an accordion. It sits up off the top of your desk too, because there's a vent under here that actually increases the air flow, it helps keep the system nice and cool. Now on the front of the system there's actually two drive slots here and a third one behind a door. On the top, there's a media card reader. Although the exterior of this Blackbird may be impressive, the inside is where the system really shines. Now inside, this is one of the cleanest systems we've ever seen. And HP and Voodoo designed this system to be almost totally tool free as well. They make it really easy to add and rmove hard drives thanks to these removable trays. Same thing with the spare optical drive. They pop, just pull out this little lever, slide the tray out and you can put a new drive in in about 30 seconds. They also put together a segmented plastic system in order to keep the heat and airflow very well managed inside the box. Even the case door itself is removlable. So inside this might look like any other high end gaming pc. You have a liquid cooled, quad core CPU, two ati graphics cards, also liquid cooled, a giant power supply down here, room for added memory here, as well as the heat exchanger and general fan assembly up here on the top. Now thanks to all of these parts, the system is just as fast as we expected. It's set multiple benchmark records and you would definitely be excited to have this as your high end gaming system. But what earned this system the editor's choice award is that it not only supports two ATI graphics cards, it also supports two Nvidia graphics cards. Most motherboards are specialized, they'll only take one or the other. HP and Voodoo worked with their suppliers to make this system both formats, which gives you tons of options for upgrading down the road. So thanks to it's unique design, it's high end performance, and the truly innovative technology going on here, this system very easily earns our editor's choice award. So I'm Rich Brown, this is the HP Blackbird 002.
>> Okay. That was the biggest PC ever.
>> It's not a small [inaudible].
>> Tiny. It looks like it reviewed a TV there.
>> You could toast bread inside that thing.
>> I love that ability to just snap the hard drive out and switch the boards in and out.
>> Finally, a machine that you can work on without bringing a box of bandaids.
>> Yeah, I don't have to like wrap my wrists.
>> Like Lawrence of Arabia going into battle.
>> Oh, I hate that.
>> All right. Let's get a couple more calls in here. Let's go to Jerome is in Brooklyn with a question about home AV. Hi Jerome, welcome to CNET Live.
>> Hi. How ya doin?
>> Good, what's your question this week?
>> Okay. I have a question about the, I have the Yamaha RXV 1400.
>> Yep. Good receiver.
>> And I'm looking to upgrade to the [inaudible] TXSR605. I'd like to know if it's better than the one I have.
>> Yes.
>> Let's see. What's the number again?
>> Yes. TXSR605 is top of our list of best five home audio products.
>> Yeah. And check out this. I'm gonna show you here the actual run down on CNETs reviews on [inaudible] receivers. Look at this on my machine here. 8.4, two of those, a bunch of 8's. a bunch of 8's. more 8's. high 7's. I don't know if any other brand of AV receiver as a family scores as high as [inaudible]. They have been bad ass since the late 70's when I was in quadraphonics. [inaudible] had this stellar.
>> I had a quadraphonic LP.
>> Well bring it in. Kind of slightly niche reputation. They've never gotten to be super mass marketed, because they kinda keep the quality spot on and that 605's a killer, so you can't go wrong. So jump on that, all right?
>> Best AV receiver for under 500 bucks.
>> Done. Enough said.
>> Yeah.
>> All right. we want to get our last call here.
>> Let's go with the Windows, no, let's go with the OS 10. I'm sorry I faked you out.
>> Stevie in New York.
>> hi. Yeah.
>> You're the last call baby. What's on your mind?
>> Yeah. I have window's vista, and I was wondering what the OS X operating system was like, so I tried OS X 86 using VM ware, and it didn't really work. Like it would install, but when it booted it would stall out on this fire wire problem. And I looked on insanelymac.com, but I couldn't find any working solutions.
>> That's a good question for Tom Merritt, because he's gotten OS 10 to run on everything, including a Rutabaga last week, so Dr. Merritt.
>> If you're not getting it to run in VM wear, there's all kinds of issues. We could trouble shoot all day on it, so I'd keep poking around in the forums. I don't know. I haven't used VM wear all that often, so I'm not as into what causes it to have issues. You might try some other virtualization solutions. I mean there's other ways to run OS 10 virtualized, which is a lot safer than trying to install it directly or dual boot it the way I tried to do it. It's problematic in and of itself. So you might look at trying a different virtualizer, too.
>> Did you ever get it to boot off the iPod?
>> I have not gotten it to boot off the iPod.
>> Try to get back to that. That's one of the most intriguing projects you've ever done.
>> I'll keep it on the backburner.
>> Bring it back. I wanna see it. All right folks. That takes care of CNET Live for this week. Thanks for your calls. Who's up next week?
>> Well, some crazy person earlier today on CNET TV said that the CEO of Blinx was going to be coming on today, but he's coming on next week. [inaudible], and I know I just butchered his name, but we'll get it right next week when he's here to talk about Blinx, a video search engine.
>> That's CNET Live next week, next Thursday at 1 pacific, 4 pm. Eastern, 9 pm London.
>> Love that.
