Wednesday’s Witticisms
March 31, 2004
News clues…
Don’t bug me, I’m watching Seinfeld and Superman.
I think, therefore I am: mathematician Rene Descartes was born on this day 1596. Daylight Savings Time began in 1918 (spring forward Saturday night). The Hollywood production code was introduced in 1930. Mr. Kotter is 58.
- Bring your laptop the next time you go see the San Francisco Giants play. SBC is installing 121 wireless access points in SBCPark (née Pac Bell Park) making the “world’s largest hotspot.” It’s the first major league stadium with wireless Internet access. Wi-Fi will be free this year, $7.95 per day in 2005 but by then they plan to offer instant replay and play-by-play audio.
- IBM is trying to get the judge to clear the company of any copyright infringement claims in SCO’s lawsuit. Big Blue asked for declaratory judgment yesterday. The filiing drops IBM’s patent infringement counterclaim. If the court complies the case is over and SCO can go bankrupt quietly.
- Bill Gates confirmed that the next version of Windows, codenamed Longhorn, won’t ship until 2006. Speaking at the Gartner Spring Symposium in San Diego yesterday, Gates said, “People are speculating that we’re out in 2006 sometime and that’s probably valid speculation, but this is not a date-driven release.”
- Meanwhile, don’t expect any updates to Microsoft XBox sports titles this year. In a move seen as a move to appease EA Games, Microsoft announced that “NFL Fever,” “NBA Inside Drive,” “NHL Rivals,” “Links,” “Top Spin” and “Amped” will not be updated this Fall. EA has shunned XBox Live and analysts see this move as an attempt by Microsoft to make the economics of Live more appealing to EA.
- The music industry may publicly smear Kazaa, they’re privately looking to online music sharing services for marketing information. According to the San Jose Mercury-News, labels use information from P2P services to pick singles and tailor marketing strategies.
- Buy your next Sun workstation at Wal-Mart. The mass retailer is now selling PCs running Sun Linux in addition to SuSE, Lindows, and Lycoris Linux models. Sounds like Wal-Mart is the world’s largest distributor of Linux desktop systems.
- A former Harvard professor who allegedly bilked students and colleagues out of $600,000 to build a phony SARS research institute in China was himself scammed. He told police he “invested” all the money in a Nigerian business offer that promised a $50 million profit.
Loading ...Tuesday’s Toon Town Tabloid
March 30, 2004
Top of the tech news list for Tuesday…
The pencil with eraser was patented on this day in 1858. The US purchased Alaska for 2¢ an acre in 1867. It’s also Eric Clapton, Celine Dion, and MC Hammer’s birthday.
- Researchers at Harvard and UNC issued a study that shows illegal music sharing is no threat to CD sales . The study tracked sales of 680 CDs in late 2002. Songs that were heavily downloaded showed no measurable drop in sales and in fact, file sharing actually increases CD sales for albums that sell more than 600,000 copies. For every 150 downloads of a song from those albums, sales increase by a copy.
- A group of Italian teenagers calling themselves “The BlackAngels” has written a handy Perl script with a menu based system of attacks on Cisco routers. Security experts are warning Cisco users (which includes nearly all ISPs, web hosting companies, and corporations) to patch their routers now.
- AOL is raffling off a spammer’s $47,000 Porsche Boxster. The company received the car in a judgement from the spammer. (Hint: The Viagra is in the glove compartment.)
- Google Labs has unveiled a new personalized interface to make web surfing easier. You create a profile of your interests to improve search results (and, I presume, help target advertising).
(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5)Monday Misery
March 29, 2004
Top of the tech news…
- Did you see NASA’s hypersonic speed test Saturday? Maybe you heard it! The X-43A scramjet flew at Mach 7 for 11 seconds shattering the plane speed record (and a few ear drums).
- Forget a chicken in every pot, how about broadband for all? President Bush is calling for affordable universal broadband access by 2007. He also said “Congress must not tax access to broadband technology if we want to spread it around.” He also said “The more the price goes down, the more users there will be.”
- Microsoft is ready to rev Windows CE. Version 5, code named Macallan (isn’t that a Scotch?), is a lightweight Windows for phones, PDAs and other small devices . It will ship this summer. Among other improvements this version will support a version of DirectX for improved 3D graphics.
- What happened to Google? It’s simpler, cleaner. Don’t they know busier is better?
So Long and Thanks For All The Fish…
March 25, 2004
I hate long good-byes. I loathe long on-air goodbyes. So don’t expect me to say much tonight on The Screen Savers. But since the news is out on Slash-Dot and the TechTV message boards, I guess I’d better say something here.
Yes, tonight will be my last night hosting The Screen Savers, a show we started nearly six years ago on a far away planet called ZDTV. I’m going to continue to do a daily taped segment, and I’ll come back for specials, but I’ll only be the cabin boy. Patrick and Kevin will captain the ship starting on Monday.
The story of how this came about is long and boring, but suffice to say it was my decision. With the uncertainty caused by the channel’s sale I decided it would be prudent to diversify. I was lucky enough to find a great weekend job at KFI in Los Angeles, but as a result I’ve been working seven days a week. TechTV very graciously has allowed me to cut back so that I can work at both places without sacrificing my health or sanity.
I will continue to host Call for Help every day, and it will air at a new time, 6p Eastern, right next to The Screen Savers. I hope you’ll stop by on your way to The Big Show®.
Hosting The Screen Savers is without a doubt the best job I have ever had, or likely ever will have. Thanks to Kate, Patrick, Martin, Megan, Morgan, Sarah, Jessica, Kevin, Yoshi, Dan, Joshua, and all the behind the scenes people who made the magic happen every night. I’d say I’ll miss you but I’ll be right next door.
Finally, thanks to all of you who have supported me and the channel throughout these amazing years. Whatever happens, at bottom all of us at TechTV do what we do for you. And your enthusiastic involvement in the channel has made this the best six years of my life. In the words of Patrick Norton, geek on, guys. I’ll keep making shows as long as you keep watching them.
Thursday’s Thingamajiggy
March 25, 2004
The tech news is brought to you today in living color on NBC…
The Mercedes debuted on this day in 1901. RCA ships the first color TV in 1954. The 12½” screen cost $1,000. The Concorde made its first supersonic flight in 1970.
- Comcast announced the acquisition of TechTV this morning for an undisclosed amount. The company plans to merge the channel with its gaming channel, G4. Completion of the sale is pending regulatory approval which should take 30-60 days.
- Microsoft announced its new cross-platform gaming platform, XNA, at the Game Developers Conference on now in San Jose. XNA builds on DirectX 9 but will deliver higher quality graphics and pave the way for Hi-Def gaming. XNA will appear first in Xbox 2.
- The Chinese government is cracking down on Internet cafes, saying they endanger teenagers’ “mental health.” Internet cafes may not be operated near schools or homes. Juveniles are barred from entering.
- Dell Computer is a little red-faced over the inadvertent posting of an ad for an AMD Opteron-based server yesterday. Dell admits to privately selling AMD machines to special corporate customers but remains staunchly Intel-only in public.
- Guess I was wrong about the iPod mini. Apple is delaying its global launch citing stronger than anticipated demand in the US.
Wednesday’s Waffle Iron
March 25, 2004
Better late than never… it’s tech news!
- As expected, the EU has fined Microsoft nearly 500 million Euros and forced it to unbundle the Windows Media Player from XP. It’s a record fine, but nothing Microsoft can’t handle. Ten members of Congress fired off a letter to European Competition Commisioner Mario Monti saying that the US was cool with Microsoft and that the Europeans should be, too.
- The RIAA is suing another 532 suspected file sharers, 89 of them college students at Georgetown, Indiana, Marquette, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Stanford, UC Berkeley, USC and Villanova.
- Intel is dropping clock speeds from its chip names, going with such BMW-like designations as M745. Makes sense since mobile Pentiums run faster at slower clock speeds.
- The Feds have nailed the Texas phisher. Zachary Hill of Houston plead guilty to using phony emails purporting to be from AOL and Paypal to collect financial information from consumers. Hill used the information to purchase more than $47,000 worth of goods.
- Online games sales broke the $1 billion mark last year. That’s up 167% from 2002.
- The GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) has hit two. Version 2.0 of the free graphics program is available from gimp.org.
Tuesday’s Traumatizer
March 23, 2004
Smile! It’s news time.
The first recorded use of OK occurred on this day in 1839 in the Boston Morning Post. Believe it or not it stands for “all correct.” The Wright Brothers patented the airplane in 1903. The Dixie Cup was invented in 1913. The first telephone in the White House was installed in 1929.
- A Florida man is pushing for a new domain extension to add to dot-com and dot-net: dot-triple-x. The .XXX top level domain name (TLD) would be for adult sites where anything goes (except child porn). Creating such a domain would, he says, make it easer to avoid adult sites. The .XXX domain has been suggested, and rejected, before on the grounds that it would create an Internet red light district. Other new TLDs that might have a better chance of making it: .mobi and/or .tel for mobile phones, .mail for legitimate mail servers, and .cat for Cat Schwartz fan sites. All the newly proposed sites are sponsored - companies proposing the domains paid $45,000 apiece to get the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to consider them. ICANN will take comments from the public, then study the names internally before deciding by the end of the year.
- Real Networks is dropping its three-year $20 million deal with Major League Baseball. Real says it’s hard to make a profit re-selling baseball broadcasts. MLB is moving to MSN Premium, Microsoft’s $9.95/month premium service. AOL is expected to also offer streaming baseball broadcasts for free to AOL for Broadband customers.
- The New Zealand government is poised to protect CD ripping and other audio format shifting. Sony New Zealand says that’s “taking away people’s rights to earn a living, and that’s horrendous.”
- The RIAA’s web site has been down since late last week thanks to attacks generated by the MyDoom virus. Strange. I didn’t notice. Microsoft.com, another target of the worm, has so far avoided being DDoSed to death.
- One in three hairdressers loves their job, but only one in seven IT specialists feels the same. IT workers rank 9th on the British City and Guilds Happiness Index. Meanwhile media professionals rank 19th in job satisfaction, only one step from the bottom: real estate agents.
- Do you have to show ID when police ask for it? The US Supreme Court is hearing arguments in the case of a Nevada cattle rancher who refused police requests for ID and was subsequently arrested.
- DotComGuy® is selling his trademark. Mitch Maddox, who achieved 15 minutes of fame four years ago by staying inside his house for a year and only using the net to interact with the outside world, is married and his wife wants him to drop the moniker. Want it? Place a bid at dotcomguy.com.
Monday on the run day
March 22, 2004
Tech news from around the world and around the block.
It’s 30 years after 10 Years After played their last concert in 1974. Intel introduced the Pentium in 1993. It was 60 Hz.
- There’s a new bug, the Witty worm, and it’s crashing hard drives. The worm attacks two ISS products, BlackICE Defender and RealSecure firewalls, spreading via a bug in both. ISS is offering a patch on its web site. If you run BlackICE or RealSecure - patch now.
- Sun will demo a server built for the online gaming industry at this week’s Game Developers Conference in San Jose. Maybe we should get one for the LAN party.
- The IBM Blade server network that was built for Lord of the Rings is being rented out now that business is a little slow for Weta Digital.
- A programmer who devised a way to bot Google’s ad server has been arrested for allegedly attempting to blackmail the search company.
News… Weakly
March 19, 2004
I‘m back in town after travels to Tahoe, New York, LA, and Raleigh/Durham. Here’s some of what’s been happening in technology this week.
JJ Jackson, one of MTV’s first DJs, died of a heart attack Wednesday night. He was 62. Now I know I’m getting old.
Congress approved Daylight Savings Time on this day in 1918. Nevada leagalized gambling in 1931. IBM pulled the plug on the PC Jr. in 1985. The swallows return to Capistrano today.
- New variants of the Bagle viruses discovered last night can infect you through email EVEN if you don’t open the attachment. The virus also turns off some security and anti-virus programs, and disables firewalls. Run Windows update to protect yourself.
- Earlier this week the Dept of Homeland Security issued a warning about a computer virus named Phatbot described as a a “virtual Swiss Army knife of attack software.” The virus spreads over the Gnutella peer-to-peer network and attempts to evade detection by anti-virus software.
- Just in the nick of time, AMD has announced a new chip with hardware virus protection. The chip will require an updated version of Windows XP to work.
- Fortunately, it looks like the latest Windows XP service pack is just around the corner. Release Candidate 1 went online Wednesday. SP-2 includes major security enhancements.
- For the first time ever, Microsoft has apologized for its monopolistic behavior. Wednesday an attorney for the corporation admitted in a Minnesota court that the company had been overly aggressive in defending its turf. “Yes, we acknowledge that and we apologize for it,” lawyer David Tulchin said. Though he insisted that no laws were broken, he acknowledged that “the conduct involved competition that went over the line.” Meanwhile Microsoft is facing big fines as settlement talks in the European Union broke down last night.
- Sony has announced dual-layer DVD recorders that can store almost twice as much as standard DVD recorders, 8.5 gigabytes. The drives should ship by June.
- US anti-drug officials say the Internet and cell phones are making it much harder to catch drug traffickers. According to Mark Malcolm, intelligence analyst at the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, Latin American cartels use free electronic mail services to communicate with drug ring members around the world and hook up illegally to wireless Internet routers in cities to avoid being tracked to a land-based server.
- But it’s not all bad news. Camera phones are also being used to 75% of all US households now have Internet access and women are more wired than men. Internet penetration for women aged 35 to 54 was 81.7 percent, compared with 80.2 percent for men in the same age group. For the 25 to 34 age group, Internet usage was 77 percent for women and 75.6 percent for men.
- Our fearless leader (for now), Paul Allen, has donated an additional $13.5 million toward the construction of a new 350 telescope array in Lassen National Forest designed to search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. He donated $11.5 million earlier.
- Don’t buy an Xbox yet - rumors are flying fast that Microsoft plans to drop the price to $149 next month.
Live Again with Regis and Kelly
March 9, 2004
Two upcoming appearances I wanted to let you know about.
I’m going to be on with Regis and Kelly again this morning. Check your local listings. I’m usually on in the last half of the show.
And Cat will be on Howard Stern some time Wednesday morning. Tune in, it should be very interesting!
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Radio Leo (press play)- Jumping Monkeys 45: Dr. Ruthann Russo
- Windows Weekly 58: Mission Accomplished
- Leo Laporte - The Tech Guy 453
- Daily Giz Wiz 565: Snappy Video Snapshot
- Security Now 143: YubiKey - Sponsored by Astaro Corp.
- Leo Laporte - The Tech Guy 452
- Daily Giz Wiz 564: The Socket Pocket
- MacBreak Weekly 88: Drobotized
- Leo Laporte - The Tech Guy 451
- Daily Giz Wiz 563: SanDisk Cruzer Titanium Plus
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