[ Music ]
>>Today is Wednesday, April 1, 2009.
>>I'm Natalie Del Conti
>>I'm Tom Merritt
>>I'm Caroline McCarthy
>>And I'm Jason Howell
>>Natalie: Welcome to Buzz Out Loud CNET's podcast of indeterminate length. This is episode 943 and don't even try and fool us because we're too smart for you.
>>Tom: This is an April fool's freeze on. I'm just kind of over it. [laughter] I mean, really.
>>Natalie: There are a lot of April fools joke's going around the internet including info world stories about how Microsoft wants a bail out and Twitter's going to be part of the emergency broadcast system. I have a wrap up. In today's Loaded, Google's got some kind of mind reading software which they're probably actually not too far off from having, in actuality but if you own a wrap up of that go to CNET dot com slash loaded and learn about my marriage and all of that stuff that is untrue. [laughter] So happy April fools day.
>>Caroline: Wait, so you and Justin are over already?
>>Natalie: No, it was Mark and I who got married on Loaded today but it's already been annulled.
>>Caroline: Wow, what does Justin think of that? I mean
>>Natalie: He came into my office, gave me a very heartbroken look and walked away. [laughter] He didn't say anything at all.
>>Caroline: That's sad. That's just really, really sad.
>>Natalie: But I'm actually not married to Mark so Justin still has a chance.
>>Tom: But Caroline McCarthy is actually in San Francisco instead of in New York at this time for Web 2.0 expo.
>>Caroline: Yeah well the funny thing is that nobody, I tell people that I'm in town for the expo and people don't even seem to realize that it's happening this year because attendance is down, not that much but it's still down. There aren't a whole lot of really impressive product launches. The keynote speakers are sort of, you know you don't have anybody really
>>Tom: Well they're starting it on April fools day so a lot of people probably thought it was just a joke [laughter] and didn't come.
>>Caroline: Well I mean I think some people are sort of taken aback by the fact that we're still using Web 2.0 as the headline of an expo that's supposed to be about innovation whereas calling it that just seems so 2006 right now.
>>Tom: Maybe it should be Web 2.5
>>Caroline: Yeah
>>Tom: We're not quite to 3 but this is an incremental release.
>>Caroline: Yeah, yeah, you know this can be the bug fix. [laughter]
>>Natalie: Hey that's kind of a weird thing to have an expo over something that's about web applications. What kind of things are actually on exposition?
>>Tom: Yes
>>Caroline: Yeah I haven't been over to the floor show yet so I'll have to find out. But I think what's also interesting is that CTIA is going on in Vegas right now and I think that if you were a tech company that had the option of going to Web 2.0 expo or to CTIA you would probably pick CTIA because mobile is more at the forefront than
>>Tom: And apps, you know, a lot of companies wouldn't normally go to CTIA are probably going there now.
>>Caroline: Yeah well because the hot platforms are developed for now are mobile. So I would not be surprised if there are people who may have gone to Web 2.0 last year who are at CTIA this year.
>>Tom: Now if after that big sell [laughter] somebody is interested in following what goes on at Web 2.0 expo
>>Caroline: Well today I'm going to be writing about Tim O'Reilly's keynote so maybe he will have something interesting to say. Last year I know he, last year around this time you know obviously the financial crisis hadn't taken effect yet but people were still sort of like ok this can't be sustained forever, venture capitals drying up and he gave a pretty enlightening talk where he said that there are real crisis in the world that need to be solved, environmental, financial, etc., and then he says, and what are the best and greatest minds doing and he puts up a PowerPoint slide of SuperPoke. I thought that was very insightful.
>>Tom: So Webware dot com is where the other place will be?
>>Caroline: It will be at Webware dot com.
>>Tom: Excellent.
>>Natalie: You know it used to be that you have to give a blood sample to get a web pass to Web 2.0 expo. Is it easier now because the economy's bad?
>>Caroline: I just had to give them a kidney.
>>Natalie: Oh ok
>>Tom: Just one
>>Jason: Who needs a kidney? Now nowadays.
>>Caroline: I've got another one.
>>Tom: And that's a testament to the financial problems of the Web 2.0 expo that they're selling kidneys now. [laughter]
>>Natalie: Doctor expo
>>Tom: You're kidneys on expo. Ooh look, Zuckerberg's kidney. [laughter]
>>Caroline: They're auctioning that one off.
>>Tom: Of course the big news today was supposed to be the conficker worm at least that's what every major broadcast outlet in the country was hoping but as we look at Eleanor Mills countdown to conficker blog we see things like, so far nothing. So far there's been no significant activity.
>>Natalie: I want to quantify that statement. I don't think broadcast networks were hoping something was happening. We were just kind of waiting. Some maybe were hoping
>>Caroline: I think they were hoping
>>Natalie: We wanted a big story, that's true but we weren't really hoping for bad stuff.
>>Caroline: Somebody in the chat room says, we've been confickrolled. [laughter]
>>Tom: That's it. That's exactly what happened. And here's the thing. It is a little bit like Y2K where something bad might have happened if people hadn't gone and taken precautions but because people took precautions and patched their systems and enterprise level security was upped, you know, chicken and the egg, it's hard to say but that's may be why nothing is happening.
>>Natalie: There's still may be something bad happening that we can't see either because conficker is very stealth.
>>Tom: Sure it's not like conficker isn't out there passing data around. It's just not crashing the internet or anything.
>>Caroline: I was hoping it would, you know, put a funny screen saver on everybody's computer [laughter]. It would just turn out to be a nasty prank, you know.
>>Jason: April fool's
>>Tom: The day's not over yet either.
>>Caroline: That's true.
>>Natalie: I personally
>>Jason: And does this mean that there's possibly some sort of resurgence of the conficker down the line cause there've been two dates now, right, that conficker has kind of come up against. It's like, we don't know what it's gonna do on this day but it's says in the code it's gonna call that somewhere. Is there another one that we have yet to look forward to again?
>>Tom: Not that I know of.
>>Caroline: Not that I know of.
>>Natalie: I don't know, I am really tired of all the conficker jokes and just saying that word. In fact I had a nightmare last night about a big conficker worm that looked like the Beetlejuice worm. It was just chasing me around. So it's on my brain and I'm really tired of it. But my favorite conficker joke so far [laughter] that's in my Twitter's where someone said, conficker? I hardly know her. [laughter]
>>Caroline: I had a nightmare the other night but it wasn't about conficker. It was about earthquakes because this trip to San Francisco has been the trip in which I experienced my first earthquake.
>>Tom: Yeah I missed that one.
>>Caroline: You probably don't even feel them anymore.
>>Tom: No and as I may have explained our building here at CNET in San Francisco is by a bus terminal
>>Caroline: Ok
>>Tom: So the building gets shaken a lot anyway so it's hard to tell.
>>Caroline: I thought it felt like the subway and then I was like wait a second. I'm on the sixth floor. I wouldn't be feeling the subway.
>>Tom: I'm going to throw this link in the show notes as well. The conficker war room from Kevin Paulson at Wired is pretty hilarious. Eleven fifty five dashboard oil light illuminated on drive to war room. Conficker in car computer? Investigating. [laughter] Just kind of pointing out the over zealous I guess absurdity, the breathless excitement over something that, it's just a worm. I mean it's bad. It's a bad worm.
>>Natalie: We've been talking about it for a long time though so we've been prepared for that.
>>Tom: Yeah
>>Natalie: Let's talk about something that we know is actually true and happening is Yahoo's new sideline Adobe AIR application. It will allow you to run a monitor of Twitter trends in Adobe Air application. So you can just kind of watch what is going on. You can also set your own groups of search terms that you want to watch. See what's the most popular hashtag happening on twitter right now. But you can't actually watch your own twitter feed. You can't actually post to twitter. So it's just kind of a metric system for twitter.
>>Tom: What use is of that?
>>Caroline: Well think about it. I think there absolutely is a use for that. You think of, I am one of those people who does not think that Twitter is going to get as big as people say it's going to get because not everyone wants to actively participate like that. But if you are a relatively un-tech savvy person who wants to monitor, you know, like the New York Times Twitter feed and CNN's Twitter feed, this sort of puts a new spin on the service as like it is purely information consumption.
>>Natalie: Well if you're a relatively un-tech savvy person you're not going to figure out an Adobe Air application.
>>Caroline: That's true.
>>I mean TweetDeck does the same thing but also allows you to post if you want. You can just follow hash tags and stuff like that. That's how Skoble uses it from what I hear. So this seems limited. I guess the cool thing that ZDNet points out is that it is open source so if people want to take it and build on it. This is just sort of the nut. It could turn into other cool things. It seems like a nice, slick interface.
>>Natalie: Yeah it's fine and yeah ZDNet also points out that this is a way that Twitter could be monetized by building on top of this. So we'll see.
>>Tom: Right like companies could make their own adaptations of it and put it out as a Widget or something like that.
>>Natalie: Yeah
>>Tom: Alright
>>Natalie: Who knows.
>>Tom: Spam is back up, good news for spammers. We had talked a couple of months ago about the drop in Spam below the 90 percent line but New York Times blog reports that the volume of Spam has returned to it's previous levels of 94 percent.
>>Natalie: This comes from Postini which is a division of Google so they would know and probably seems like spam never went down.
>>Tom: Yeah it was just that ISP that took out, it was the McKolo [assumed spelling] event that took out a bunch of spammers for a short period of time but you knew they were going to evolve and adapt. So they say in the slash dot quote here that it's sad news for us all but it's not sad news for spammers. They're very excited.
>>Caroline: You know I wonder have they been hit by the financial crisis?
>>Tom: That's true, that's true. People don't have as much money to waste on Viagra and federal grants.
>>Caroline: Exactly but they are spending more time at home reading those emails.
>>Natalie: And they also can capitalize on fear and panic.
>>Tom: Right because I actually got an email from a guy who needed some help getting some money out of the country and I could use a few extra dollars these days so I might try to help him out. [laughter]
>>Natalie: Oh yeah? You think you can make some money?
>>Tom: He's a prince. [laughter] How can he be lying to me?
>>Caroline: Yeah
>>Tom: Jimmy Wales is giving up on Wikia search. That was the effort to do sort of for search what wiki's did for Wikipedia for encyclopedias. He says he's not really giving up on the concept of it but because of the economy and because of the slow adoption of Wikia search they're gonna shut down the project for now.
>>Natalie: Don't you think that if this were a brilliant idea the economy would have nothing to do with it?
>>Tom: Well yes.
>>Natalie: [laughter] That it would have just taken off on it's on? I mean for them to say, not a great deal right now
>>Tom: You make a fair point Natalie, no happy.
>>Natalie: I mean search is free. This is not even something that users had to pay for so the economy is not, I mean you can't monetize it like advertising so that is a direct result of the economy probably. But that doesn't mean that users want it still.
>>Caroline: Yeah I mean I think it definitely has to do with if there really was space in a really good nation market for it that he would stick it out.
>>Tom: Well Wikia's other projects
>>Caroline: Right, exactly.
>>Tom: Are doing really well, like Wikia answers.
>>Caroline: But then you've got like, I mean it's kind of the same thing of like with Lauren Conrad from Laguna Beach canceling her fashion line and saying, oh it's just to wait out the economy. It's like no. Because the clothes are ugly. It's like blaming the economy
>>Tom: In a good economy you can throw a lot more money at ugly clothes and failing enterprises than you can now so it forces you to make better decisions. Like, you know what? Actually maybe this isn't such a good idea. But he wants to be able to, you know what I think? I think Jimmy Wales believes in this idea and thinks he knows how to fix it but he doesn't have time or money to do it right now and he doesn't want people to get the wrong idea about the idea so, the wrong idea about the idea [laughter], so he's trying to spin it like, no, no, no, I'm going to try it again venture capitalists. Be sure to give me money when you've got more later on. Don't give up on me.
>>Natalie: I'm going to make a prediction that we never see this again.
>>Caroline: Yeah I don't think we will either.
>>Tom: Alright, I'll bet you a shiny nickel.
>>Natalie: I will bet you a Blackberry application which you can buy now in the Blackberry app world which launched today.
>>Tom: Those are expensive.
>>Natalie: They are expensive. Also I was thinking Blackberry's don't have very much storage so you're going to have to make sure you get an expandable card to download all of these applications.
>>Tom: That's true. Most of them have SD card slots though.
>>Natalie: Right but if you don't already have one you've got to go out and get one.
>>Tom: That's true. And there's a slide show up on CNET from Jessica Delacourt if you want to look at the very dark Blackberry app world. And someone emailed us and said there is a fart application already. [laughter]
>>Natalie: Black fart lives.
>>Tom: For $3 [laughter] or $2.99 I should say.
>>Natalie: Alright Buzz Out Loud bingo I want a Black fart in the voicemail by tomorrow.
>>Tom: Computer exercises are helping stroke victims to regain their sight. This is a pretty amazing article from Reuters.
>>Natalie: This study comes out of the University of Rochester eye Institute in New York, didn't we have one from University of Rochester yesterday too?
>>Tom: Yeah we get a lot from University of Rochester I feel like.
>>Natalie: I thought we did. Maybe I should take a trip up there and see what they're up to. So it's says that it has helping, I just got a pop up while I was reading this [laughter]. That it's helping
>>Tom: Thanks a lot, Reuters dot com
>>Natalie: Stroke victims to with their sight and speech and hand eye coordination and that kind of thing and I was thinking that this is probably just an extension of the same thing we've already known about stroke victims is that they just need a lot of information to process in order to practice using their brains and their information processing, what is the word I'm looking for now, take it from here.
>>Tom: Sure Journal of Neuroscience is where they published the results and they said they were using something called Blind Sight. When a person with vision loss actually senses something they can't actually see forcing them to guess and they sometimes guess correctly enabling them to sort of continue to use the computer screen. It took months of staring at the computer screen but they've actually activated parts of the visual cortex and got it to work again.
>>Natalie: So it's the same way when you have a family member that has a stroke which hopefully you have not but the doctor's always tell you to talk to them a lot, read to them so that there's constant information being processed and so this is something that computers can do much easier than human beings.
>>Tom: Yeah the exercise consists of focusing the damaged area of vision on the computer screen. A field of dots appear moving like a school of fish or a flock of birds in one direction and the patient must decide the direction the dots are moving so pretty fascinating stuff. Especially, you know, my dad had a stroke and you want to try everything when something like this comes along so even if you're not in a hospital situation where you know you can take part in an official clinical trial of this. You might just try bringing in a laptop and you know I'm not saying practice medicine on your on but you know put on some videos.
>>Jason: Yeah this kind of goes against the old adage that you don't want to sit too close to the TV screen cause you'll destroy your vision.
>>Tom: Well no [laughter] it doesn't it.
>>Natalie: I'm not sure that's really what it's talking about.
>>Jason: Oh come on.
>>Tom: You need a proper screen that doesn't emit radiation into your eyes.
>>Jason: Alright
>>Tom: Geez
>>Jason: Take the fun out of it.
>>Natalie: You also may need a computer with a new Xeon processor because Intel is launching a new line of 12 new processors that are the Xeon family and they are mid-range. Instead of going forward with their high end models. Maybe Intel also realizing the economy is funky, so launching mid-range processors.
>>Tom: A new server generation so if you're upgrading servers or want a new workstation the Nehalem EP debuted this week and Anand tech and Arstechnica are both raving about the performance. In fact Arstechnica says for now the Nehalem EP has swept performance and price efficiency. There's room in the mid-range for AMD but it's going to keep consistently excellent execution through the next nine to 12 months followed by the transition to 32 nanometers so strong performance of the Xeon EP is not a surprise but it's coming out I guess even stronger than folks expected it to. And they didn't launch just a handful of high end models like they did with the Core i7. They're putting out all 12 at once. They're all quad core except for one model I think is dual core but 11 of the 12 seem to be quad core. So there is little processor fun stuff for the processor geeks in the audience.
>>Natalie: Right and we remember it was around January or February when Intel announced that they were slashing prices on a lot of their high end models from the last season and saying that they were gonna slash prices or keep prices low throughout the year and hope to raise prices again.
>>Tom: The new spring line of processor's have been announced.
>>Natalie: That's true.
>>Tom: See all the fashions at Nehalem. Seeqpod is getting bullied into bankruptcy. Another arstechnica reports, Seeqpod, if you don't remember, was the playable search engine. You could just go on, look up any song, it would search the internet, find an MP3 that was hosted to that song and then make it playable in a flash player. You couldn't download although I think it did have links out to buy the songs at various places like Amazon but all of the major studios went after them. Actually Warner Capital went after them and they can't afford the lawsuit so they're filing for bankruptcy.
>>Caroline: Yeah it's kind of interesting how it's sort of almost like you wonder if the labels and the REA are going to get all scorched earth about this and just say that you know the way that they can get rid of these small companies that are either threatening or could be threatening is just to sue them for such egregious amounts of money that they can't even go to court or whatever.
>>Tom: Yeah exactly they speculate, you know, if they win against Seeqpod that will prevent a lot of smaller companies from trying to do things like I don't know popularize the music that would help the careers of the artist you represent.
>>Caroline: Exactly, that's so lame. Why would you ever want to make music popular?
>>Tom: Yeah why would you ever want to get people to enjoy music and spend money at concerts buying merchandise and other good new ways of making music? That isn't the new model. The new model is suing people. I think that's the new revenue model for now actually.
>>Natalie: Well we should hope not.
>>Tom: We should but I don't. [laughter]
>>Natalie: Let's be idealistic.
>>Tom: Alright let's go back to something idealistic then, researchers are developing Braille for vibrating touchscreen devices. They're working with the Nokia 770 internet tablet and the finished researchers have developed a piezoelectric touchscreen that uses a single pulse of intense vibration to give you the idea that you're on a raised dot, just like in Braille and then a longer vibration with several weaker pulses represents a missing dot. So you can spell out letters on the touchscreen that can be easily read by touch. Folks in the test were able to read a character in as little as 1.25 seconds. So it's a first baby step.
>>Caroline: I really hope this doesn't malfunction as much as my iPhone touch screen malfunctions.
>>Natalie: Yeah right
>>Tom: Well yours malfunctions a lot, huh and you don't have a cracked screen or anything?
>>Caroline: I don't have a cracked screen but I mean sometimes it's slow. It doesn't always push in when I want to, etc.
>>Tom: I think that's the processor. But no this is obviously experimental technology but really cool. The idea that you know you can take a touchscreen and make it work as an alternate accessible input device, not input device but output device so that you can monitor what's going on.
>>Natalie: Right and it's also interesting to think about the learning curve because we have similar lower learning curve on most of our gadgets. Not just, it doesn't matter if there for visual impaired or hearing impaired or anything. Even for those of us who don't have those disabilities.
>>Tom: Yeah you want to get this down to as fast as possible. Right now they're just doing letters. They're hoping that they can move up to words and sentences and make that faster. But you're right, Natalie, it's a learning curve in the broader sense even of just learning how to make a system like this work.
>>Natalie: Well someone else wants to make something work. This is Paramount Pictures is apparently already in the planning stages of this Star Trek sequel that we had talked about. Didn't we talk about this a few weeks ago?
>>Tom: We haven't even seen the first Star Trek yet and they're already saying they've got the cast booked. They've hired Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof to write the screenplay and they're looking at a possible 2011 release for the next Star Trek movie with the same cast. This coming from SFF media dot com through slash dot.
>>Natalie: Hopefully the first one makes enough money. [laughter]
>>Tom: I was going to say, hopefully the first one's good and then I'll get excited about a sequel. But you've got to remember that it's the odd number ones that are bad.
>>Jason: [laughter] Well is this even or odd then?
>>Tom: I don't know whether you count this, do you start counting over with this?
>>Jason: Yeah I don't know how to do that. I mean it's the same thing for Friday the 13th. They went back to the original and it was like, no it was part 11 [laughter] or whatever it was.
>>Natalie: Speaking of Star Trek Mark, my husband Mark Lasaye [assumed spelling] my new, my April fools husband, he saw Zachary Quinto walking down the street yesterday, right near our office. You know who he is? He's playing Spock.
>>Tom: He's Sylar, right?
>>Natalie: He's Sylar from Heroes. He told me that and I go, did you cover your [laughter] forehead and run? He goes, you can't take my powers. It was, inside joke.
>>Tom: What are Marks powers?
>>Natalie: He has many but one of them is he's a black belt in karate.
>>Tom: So Sylar would steal his black belt abilities?
>>Jason: [laughter] No he'd just steal his black belt.
>>Tom: Steal his belt. That's a lot easier than opening up his forehead and taking the powers directly out of his brain.
>>Natalie: That's really messy.
>>Tom: Yeah it really is. It ruins the carpet. Another thing that's really messy is NASA's dispute with Steven Colbert, the host of the popular Colbert Rapport. Got his Colbert nation to vote in an open contest that the new NASA's International Space Station module be named after him. He won the vote. I don't know if it was a fair but it was an open vote and he won it. NASA's contest rules stipulate that the agency would retain the right to do whatever it wants as far as naming goes. But last Thursday Congressman Chaka Fattah from Pennsylvania urged the agency to respect the people's wishes after NASA had unveiled a plan where they would name a toilet after Colbert instead of the whole module. [laughter] And then yesterday on the show Colbert said, so NASA I urge you to heed Congressman Fattah's call for democracy in orbit. Either name that note after me or I too will reject democracy and seize power as spaces evil tyrant Overlord. The ball's in your court.
>>Natalie: Oh man
>>Jason: Colbert has this amazing power with wielding his massive throngs of viewers to do things like this. I'd actually be a little disappointed if his name didn't end up there.
>>Natalie: Yeah me too
>>Tom: One of us needs to go on Colbert and then get their massive powers to boost Buzz Out Loud downloads.
>>Natalie: Oh I don't think I can. You do it.
>>Tom: I'm scared.
>>Natalie: [laughter] Not me.
>>Tom: Alright let's move on to the voicemails. Our first, actually we've got a couple of callers in a row here that were both calling us from Skype on their Windows Mobile phones to school us in how well that works.
>>Hi Buzz Out Loud crew. This is DM calling from Wales. I listened to the show yesterday talking about making Skype calls with 3G on Windows Mobile so I thought this would be a good day for me to lose my Skype virginity. I'm actually calling you now from a HDC touch HD running on Window's Mobile [inaudible]
>>Natalie: Oh yeah
>>[inaudible]. My phone is indeed better than your phone, whatever it may be.
>>[inaudible] Just calling to confirm that Mobile Skype does work. The voice function works and I'm calling from my Sprint phone using a Skype location.
>>Jason: [laughter] That does it.
>>Tom: That's it. That's all he had to say.
>>Natalie: Can you please drop a pin like the Sprint commercials right next to the phone?
>>Tom: From the 90's? This is a pin dropping over Skype.
[ Inaudible sounds and laughter ]
>>Tom: Ok
>>Jason: That's a Skype Windows Mobile fail.
>>Tom: I think that is. I think it's a fail.
>>Natalie: But thank you for trying.
>>Tom: Yeah we loved that. I mean
>>Jason: You know what, it does prove that it is possible.
>>Tom: Frankly the first part of the first callers call sounded great but your data rates just [laughter] they're iffy sometimes. And frankly it wouldn't be any different on any other phone. We don't mean to pick on Window's Mobile here. That's just going to be a problem that's going to crop up sometimes but it was funny that we got two in a row with the same problem. [laughter] Our next caller says that Natalie is being discussed in other quarters of radio land.
>>Hi this is Rob in Phoenix, Arizona. I was just listening to the Howard Stern show and his producer, Gary Dell'abate, was talking about Natalie Del Conte. He's got a little crush on her. [noise]
>>Natalie: Alright, alright [laughter] That's actually true. I've been talking to Gary because Howard has been looking for a phone so I've been kind of advising on that front and since he wanted a touch screen phone with a full qwerty keyboard with threaded text messaging I said well either wait for the Palm Pri or maybe try the T-Mobile G1 and apparently Palm got in on that because they've been hearing about it and they're going to give him a Pri before anyone else has one, which I think is totally unfair.
>>Tom: Especially since you're the one who turned him onto it right?
>>Natalie: Well that's the one I suggested and I said just wait you know, what a month or two? We're thinking what, not more than two months.
>>Tom: And thanks for you suggesting it. They should give you one too.
>>Natalie: I think so, I think so.
>>Tom: I think it's only fair.
>>Natalie: So kind of funny and yes that is me that they're discussing. I'm actually gonna drop off a G1 that T-Mobile sent along today. I'm going over to do Cosmo radio, do Girl Gadget guides so we'll see what their reaction is.
>>Tom: Alright. Our next caller comes from New Zealand in response to yesterday's kiwi caller who said that Mac's were not very prevalent down under, in New Zealand not down under in Australia.
>>Hi Buzz Out Loud, Jonathon here calling to prove that yes I'm a kiwi and I'm calling from [inaudible]. In reference to yesterday's caller sighting less market share the reason stop talking about Mac's. Well I love my Mac and so do plenty of other kiwis. it sounds to me like the market shares growing so please keep talking about the Mac and keep up the good work. Love the show and go the Black Caps.
>>Tom: Little cricket reference there. So there you go. There are Mac lovers and Mac haters
>>Jason: Everywhere
>>Tom: Just like, it shows that they're not so much different from us. They have their hates and loves just like we do.
>>Natalie: It's true.
>>Tom: It's so true. Actually we got a few more comments on that and the emails we'll get to but first after Natalie's response to the critical message yesterday we got a lot of good emails from folks and a lot of good phone calls as well.
>>Just wanted to call in support of Natalie. Natalie, don't listen to those haters who are throwing down on you and making all those rude remarks, sexist remarks whatever. You're great. Keep it up. Love the show.
>>Natalie: Thank you for that and thank you to everyone who wrote email, twitter, facebook, I would say I got a plethora of messages, El Guapo and I did not want to solicit compliments. I hope it didn't seem like that. I just wanted to say you're free to take me to task on anything I say. I regularly have my foot in my mouth. I say stupid things all the time. We have a 40 minute show every single day. It's impossible to be smart and brilliant and accurate all the time so take me to task any time you want, just leave gender and sexism out of it because that's something that I just do not abide.
>>Tom: We had one long voicemail that we didn't have time to play that claimed that all of us got our jobs based on our looks because we're in broadcast. [laughter] And I know when they hired me to do the CNET homepage that they definitely were hiring me for my looks. Like we want, yeah never mind. I don't think that was really true. Alright on to the emails then. Buzz at CNET dot com, Natalie.
>>Natalie: Oh right, sorry.
>>Tom: See
>>Caroline: It's only because you're a girl. Oh my god. I can't believe it. They should never have you on the show, ever. You shouldn't want to be on the show either. I guess I'm just dumb cause I'm a girl.
>>Tom: Yeah and I like girls so I should no. [laughter]
>>Natalie: That's exactly it. I was thinking the exact same thing. Alright, Matthias from Germany, I'm sure I said that really awfully, says Hi Buzz Crew. In episode 942 you played a voicemail asking the question Why Buzz Out Loud is so Apple/Mac centric. You made comments on the voicemail but you didn't answer the question. Do you want to answer the question or don't you have a good answer to the question? I have a theory why Buzz Out Loud and similar podcasts are a little Apple centric but I would like to hear your ideas on the point. I would love to hear a little more Linux and open source news on the show. Love the show.
>>Tom: Alright I felt this was a fair point because we did react to the, you know we reacted in a fun way to the call but we never really directly said why are we so Mac centric? I don't think we're Mac Centric.
>>Caroline: I don't think you are either. I think the truth is that Mac stuff, through a combination of Apple's notorious secretiveness and they're big product launches and that sort of thing. They're so theatrical. They thrive on being talked about and people love to talk about them. It's not as though other things aren't interesting but that's just really, you know, if you're gonna be [inaudible] you have to talk about Mac's a lot.
>>Tom: Well and the thing is we are very, we pay a lot of attention to what you people tell us whether it's on the forums or on the blogs or in the emails or in the chat room and so you know when you're interested in something we continue to cover it and when you don't react at all that's when we stop. And people are interested in Mac's just like they're interested in Microsoft lately and Google and Twitter and iPhone and you know I mean all of the topics that we're, you know the DRM and we hear from you when you start to get tired of it but even when there's some people saying I'm tired of hearing about this there's still other people responding saying I've got another thought on this and I've got another thought on this so you know I'm not saying that we you know only put what you tell us to put. It's a give and take between us but a lot of times people are picking on us for covering things that you know frankly are of interest to a majority of the audience.
>>Natalie: Yeah we cover what we have to and sometimes we get sick and tired of covering this stuff to but we do it anyway. I tell you about 10 months ago if I had to cover the Yahoo and Microsoft acquisition again I was going to throw up. We have to, that's the news.
>>Caroline: I've had to cover the Facebook redesign and people getting ticked off about that and I really wanted to just like put my head under a rock and never hear about it again. [laughter] I was going to say shoot myself in the head but that would be violent. I'm not a violent person.
>>Tom: So you know what? If you want to hear more BOS stories, more FreeBSD's stories, Symbian S60, send them to us. You alone won't make the difference but if you know 20 or 30 of you are sending it along we'll see a trend and go like hey this is hot. People are in to it. And don't create 20 or 30 Yahoo accounts. We'll be able to tell. [laughter]
>>Caroline: Somebody in the chat room said the expression I was looking for is to stork out my eyes. I think that's going to be my new catch phrase. [laughter]
>>Natalie: That's not violent?
>>Tom: Yeah don't do that.
>>Natalie: I said throw up. Throw up can be violent.
>>Caroline: Yeah it can be, it can be. [laughter]
>>Jason: Christos Kalantzis, the my sequel guy, writes in and says, heard about what you said on yesterdays show regarding the Skype iPhone app in Canada. I am a little perplexed. I, an ex Montrealer now in San Jose, was chatting with my ex boss, whose now a friend, in Canada yesterday and we decided to test the app. We both installed it on our iPhones, he in Montreal and me in San Jose and we were both successful and enjoyed a long, free conversation. It is available in Canada, at least it was to him.
>>Tom: Now we got a lot of emails about this. Some people saying, oh it's not available because of patents or it is available, CBC got the story wrong and Roger's hasn't said anything about blocking it. And then one person said that they were able to get it by logging in with a U.S. account, downloading it, putting it on the phone, and then re-logging their phone back into their Canadian account and it still worked. So maybe that's what his ex boss was doing there.
>>Natalie: Who knows.
>>Tom: There's lots of different ways around it so anyway apparently Canadians aren't totally out of luck. Some way or another you will be able to get the Skype app if you care at all. Niels wrote in from Germany and said you mentioned on episode 942 that iPhone users in every country except Canada would be able to have and use the Skype app. Well guess what? T-Mobile is blocking it for German customers as well. I would say bummer but I'm not an iPhone user since the data plans are way too expensive for me. But there you go. He's sent a link along to the local dot DE if you want to read more about that poor German blocked iPhone users.
>>Natalie: And then maybe we'll see tomorrow someone saying I can do it and I am in Germany. [laughter] It's really hard to track all of it. But this does seem to be an official story. We threw up, not threw up [laughter] we threw out
>>Caroline: We work out so many story ideas.
>>Natalie: We threw out a lot of stories that we thought maybe were serious today but we just didn't want to test it because it was April fools. If those stories are still around we'll report them tomorrow.
>>Jason: Caroline we can find you at the social blog, is that right?
>>Caroline: Yeah I'm on CNET news writing a lot so
>>Jason: Cool we'll check that out at CNET dot com and find the social blog. And then also just one other podcast related note, the Real Deal video podcast will be hitting the site today so I'm going to get RSS feeds for that and everything so you can now watch Rafe and Tom go at it on the Real Deal.
>>Tom: Wow
>>Jason: Yeah exciting stuff.
>>Tom: You really still have it there, Jason. [laughter]
>>Natalie: Riveting
>>Tom: Yeah if you want to look at two old guys talk about technology The Real Deal podcast in video on CNET TV dot com.
>>Natalie: We already know you were hired for your looks.
>>Caroline: You should have a kitten on the table and then everybody would watch it. [laughter]
>>Tom: That's not a bad idea. I think I'm going to do that or Pleo [laughter]
>>Caroline: No that's just creepy.
>>Tom: Of course you can find links to everything we talked about on this show at our blog BOL at CNET dot com. It has ways to get in touch with us by email and links to the forums and the Buzz out loud wiki that you all have created and all kinds of things. Go there, hang out, talk to some people, have a good time.
>>Caroline: Don't forget conficker.
>>Tom: Yeah don't forget confickrolled.
>>Natalie: [background music] Thanks for coming in Caroline, bye everyone.
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