| Friday, 30 April 2004, 3:01 pm Tags: |
Ending the week with a bang not a whimper.
Tonight is the TechTV farewell party. Watch my moblog for incriminating photos. The New York World’s Fair opened in 1939 previewing new technology like FM radio, robotics, fluorescent lighting, the fax machine, and the first public demonstration of TV. The ice cream cone is 90. Grandpa Munster, Al Lewis, is 94. It’s Arbor Day. Plant a tree today.
- The US Senate voted 93-3 last night to extend the Internet tax moratorium for another four years. The Internet Tax Non-Discrimination Act now goes to committee to resolve differences with the House.
- Shares in Google will be sold via an online Dutch auction to give everyone a chance to own a piece of the action. The IPO, expected next month, may raise as much as $6 billion for the Internet search company. A web site will open soon for bidders to register. You will have to fulfill certain as yet unknown requirements, most likely a cash deposit to cover your bid. Google will use early bidding to set a price for its stock.
- Comcast has agreed to drop its bid for Disney. That means they’ll be able to pour all those billions into the new G4/TechTV. Comcast is expected to complete the acquisition of TechTV May 10.
- Next time you go to a rock concert you may come home with a thumb drive filled with that night’s music. Next month eMusic Live will install digital kiosks into Maxwell’s, a small club in Hoboken. For $10 for the recording plus $20 for a reusable thumb drive you can go home with the music from the show you just saw, recorded directly from the club’s sound board.
Tune in tomorrow at 7:40a Eastern for my weekly visit with John Donabie on 1010 CFRB Toronto. And, of course, listen to my show every Saturday and Sunday, noon to 3p Pacific on KFI, Los Angeles.
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| Friday, 30 April 2004, 4:00 am Tags: |
BASIC turns 40 on Saturday. Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code was created by Dartmouth math professors Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny who hoped to make a language anyone could learn and use.
- Google did it. It filed today for an IPO – a stock offering expected to value the company at $2.7 billion (actually it’s $2,718,281,828 or e x 109). In the filing Google revealed some of its financials for the first time. Google generated $961.9 million in revenue in fiscal 2003 and posted $105.6 million in net profit. In the quarter ending March 31, Google earned $64 million on revenues of $390 million. Sounds like a good buy.
- The first arrests under the CAN-SPAM act went down Wednesday. Two men were arrested and charged with huge email campaigns marketing fraudulent weight loss products. The men were released on bond of $10,000 apiece. Two others are being sought.
- Windows XP Service Pack 2 is being delayed until the third quarter of this year. The long awaited service pack fixes bugs and holes and greatly improves Windows security model. Microsoft wouldn’t say why the update has been delayed, but there’s speculation that there were still serious security flaws in the update.
- Apple’s iTunes Music Store turned one-year-old on Wednesday. The store has sold 70 million songs – fewer than the projected 100 million this year, chiefly due to a disappointing results from the Pepsi bottle cap promotion. Only five percent of the 100 million winning caps were redeemed.
- Meanwhile Apple has update iTunes to version 4.5. Among many new features the software changes the encryption technology it uses to authenticate songs purchased at the iTunes Music Store. The original authentication scheme had been cracked. Within a day the new technique has been cracked as well.
- Meanwhile the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has sued 477 more alleged file swappers. Including 69 college kids in 11 states.
- Two officials of the FTC testified in Congress today that the spyware industry should be allowed to regulate itself. Representative Joe Barton of Texas responded, “You like this stuff? You’re the only person in this country that wants spyware on their computer.”
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| Tuesday, 27 April 2004, 7:58 am Tags: |
A quick news update before I go to bed…
- Survey says the witch-hunt is working. One in seven adults have stopped illegally downloading music since the record industry crackdown. But the Pew Internet and American Life Project reports that the number of Americans who download music – including legal music – has increased from 18 million in November to 23 million in February.
- President Bush says read my lips, no net taxes, but Congress may not agree. The Senate is debating whether to renew the Internet tax moratorium.
- The newest Bagle variant contains poetry of a sort:
“Unique people make unique things
That things stay beyond the normal life and common understanding
The problem is that people don’t understand such wild things,
Like a man did never understand the wild life.”Fortunately the code is as bad as the verse and the virus is not spreading very fast.
Listen in tomorrow at 6:45a Pacific for my weekly news commentary on KGO 810 AM in San Francisco.
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| Friday, 23 April 2004, 4:03 pm Tags: |
Time for tech news.
Happy birthday, William Shakespeare!
- Make sure not to have the words “sex,” “porn,” or “girls” in your URL if you want Google to show your site. According to Cnet, Google’s optional SafeSearch feature blocks any site with those words and others in the URLs, even if they’re not adult sites. Sites like partSEXpress.com and alittlegirlsboutique.com won’t show up in search results if SafeSearch is enabled. Google says it’s best to be conservative. Others say Google should refine its techniques a bit.
- Meanwhile, the San Jose Mercury News speculates that the Google IPO may be imminent. The company my be forced to file this week due to SEC rules requiring companies of a certain size to go public.
- More quarterly P&Ls are coming in. Amazon posted a hefty profit of $111 million on sales of $1.53 billion – that’s the company’s third consecutive profitable quarter. Sales were up 41% over this time last year. Microsoft also beat expectations, consider the cost of settling all those lawsuits lately.
- Dealers picketed Apple yesterday, claiming the company discriminated against independents in favor of its own company stores.
- Network Associates is changing its name back to McAfee.
Tune in tomorrow at 7:40a Eastern for my weekly visit with John Donabie on 1010 CFRB Toronto. And, of course, every Saturday and Sunday, noon to 3p Pacific on KFI, Los Angeles.
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| Friday, 23 April 2004, 5:30 am Tags: |
Midnight news service. We never sleep so why should you?
Happy Earth Day!
- OK, yes there is a fatal flaw in TCP that could bring the net to its knees, but the security researcher for Rockwell Automation who discovered the flaw, says the risks are being overstated. A patch exists and most big ISPs have already applied it.
- The Feds launched a coordinated attack on piracy sites yesterday. The US, with the help of International officials, conducted 120 searches in 10 countries and 27 states in the US. Operation Fastlink busted sites like Fairlight, Kalisto, Echelon, Class, and Project X which were alleged to be the starting point for pirated music, movies, and software.
- California State Senator Liz Figueroa (D-Fremont) has introduced a bill to block GMail – Google’s new free email service, saying it should be illegal to scan email contents even if users agree to the practice. The bill allows scanning of outgoing mail, but prohibits examination of incoming mail except to block spam and viruses. The California Senate Judiciary Committee will hold hearings May 4. I hope they ask Tim O’Reilly why he thinks the privacy issues are bogus.
- California state officials have recommended banning some Diebold electronic voting machines and recommended the state Attorney General investigate the company for civil and criminal liability. One member of the state Voting Systems and Procedures Panel said “I’m disgusted by the actions of this company.” The panel’s chairman said he found Diebold’s testimony “ludicrous and offensive.” As reported here earlier, the Diebold machine’s were allegedly responsible for the loss of thousands of absentee ballots in last month’s California primary.
- Big Brother lives. The Chinese government is installing camera in Shanghai’s 1,325 Internet cafés to make sure customers don’t look at forbidden web site. If a camera reveals a user visiting a banned site, it will automatically send a message to a “remote supervisory centre.” And the thought police will be dispatched immediately.
- Toshiba has announced a new 100GB hard drive for laptops.
- Who needs men? Scientists have created a baby mouse using genetic material from two mothers. No poppa mouse was involved. This is the first example of parthenogenesis in mammals. And I can’t say I like the trend one little bit.
Listen in tomorrow at 8:35a Pacific for my weekly news commentary with Bill Handel on KFI 640 AM in Los Angeles.
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| Tuesday, 20 April 2004, 5:35 pm Tags: |
All the nerds that’s fit to print.
I’m back on Call for Help – tonight at 6p Eastern/3p Pacific.
The Curies isolated radium on this day in 1902. Warner Bros. announced a process to add sound to movies in 1926.
- Microsoft says it’s “pleased” to settle yet another lawsuit. The class-action suit in Minnesota accused the company of using its monopoly to overcharge a million Minnesotans. Terms of the settlement are still being worked out.
- The FTC conducted a spyware workshop yesterday, but one commissioner has already made up her mind. Mozelle Thompson says it’s not time for Congress to outlaw spyware, she prefers educational initiatives instead. Just wait until her browser is hijacked.
- No amnesty for you. The Recording Industry Association of America has dropped its amnesty program in response to a lawsuit that said the program was misleading. In return for deleting your stolen music, the RIAA promised immunity – something it couldn’t offer. Only 1,100 folks had signed up for the program anyway.
- Apple speedbumped its notebooks yesterday. The 17 inch now tops out at 1.5 Ghz. Even iBooks are 1 Ghz now. And the low-end machines are getting faster graphics cards, too.
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| Monday, 19 April 2004, 2:24 pm Tags: News, Technology |
Tech news. Back to work edition…
This is an unhappy day in US history. The American Revolution began in 1775. The first blood in the US Civil War was spilt in 1861. The Oklahoma City bombing occurred in 1995.
Dick Sargent, Darrin #2, was born in 1933. The ABC television network launched in 1948.
- Baystar Capital, a VC firm that pumped $50 million into SCO, wants its money back. The bucks bankrolled SCO’s anti-Linux lawsuits against IBM, Chrysler, and others. Now it wants SCO to convert its shares in the company into cash. Last month BayStar admitted that it was Microsoft that had introduced it to SCO and encouraged the investment.
- The recording and movie industries are rolling out the Automated Copyright Notice System (ACNS) to help stop illegal file sharing at colleges. ANCS will automatically notify students when copyright violations occur and can cut off Internet access until the offending file is removed. And the good news is, it’s open source!
- More news from the Pew Internet and American Life Project (could they dribble this stuff out any slower?). According to the survey, 48 million Americans have broadband at home. That’s 25% of all adults. Among college educated adults under 35 the penetration soars to 52%. 54% use cable modems, but DSL has been surging since late last year and now makes up 42% of all broadband connections.
- But don’t get too uppity, a survey released today puts the US sixth on the list of most wired nations. Denmark, Britain, Sweden, Norway and Finland all offer a superior “social and cultural environment for the Internet” according to the survey conducted by IBM and The Economist magazine. Australia is 12th, Japan 25th on the list. Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan are at the bottom of the list.
- Meanwhile SBC is testing fiber to the home in 15,000 Californian residences. The service costs $26.95 for download speeds of up to 1.5 megabits per second to $139.95 for 6 Mbps. The phone company says fiber is easier to maintain than copper, and unlike DSL, they don’t have to offer access to competing ISPs. Take that Denmark!
- The FTC has until June 16 to set up the Do Not Spam registry mandated by the Federal CAN-SPAM Act, but anti-spam advocates say it’s not going to be easy. The FTC’s public comment period ends this week.
Some mighty big security holes have been discovered in Linux kernels 2.4, 2.5, and 2.6. The buffer overflow flaws have been patched, but many Linux users don’t know how to reccompile their kernels and there’s no easier mechanism to update them.
- Apple is positioning itself to take over the high-end video business with the release of Motion, a real-time motion graphics design program, for only $299. The company has also updated Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio, Shake, and Logic.
- Power Paper demonstrated hypoallergenic, non-toxic, microelectronically-enabled patches that create semi-permanent tattoos in just 20 minutes. The tats last four weeks, just about as long as the typical Hollywood marriage.
Listen in tomorrow at 6:45a Pacific for my weekly news commentary on KGO 810 AM in San Francisco.
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| Friday, 16 April 2004, 3:39 pm Tags: |
Only good news today!
It’s Wear Your Jammies To Work Day. Of course every day is Wear Your Jammies To Work Day on the radio. That’s why I love it!
Charlie Chaplin was born on this day in 1889.
- A 25 gigabyte disc made of paper? Sony has developed a new Blu-Ray high capacity optical disc made of paper pulp and another polymer instead of plastic. The disc is 51% paper and can hold up to 25 gigabytes of data using the new Blu-Ray DVD technology. Not only is it recyclable, but when you want to destroy the data you can cut the disc in half with scissors.
- Earthlink has released the results of the first three months of its Spy Audit service. It said it found an average of 28 spyware items on each PC it scanned, 5.4 program installs and the rest cookies. Over one million computers were scanned. 184,919 trojan horses were also found. The complete results are here.
- The FCC has proposed increased radio spectrum to bring high-speed wireless Internet access to rural areas. But hold on because…
- iBurst is finally here. I interviewed cell phone pioneer Marty Cooper over a year ago on The Screen Savers. He told us then about a new wireless technology he’d invented that offers speeds up to a megabit and can reach up to five miles. It’s being tested right now in Bozeman, Montana, and San Diego-based Broadband One Networks plans a nationwide US roll-out in September. It will be available in major Australian cities this summer.
- Look at the heatsink on that thing. The Nvidia NV40 has been released. I skipped the big party in SF on Wednesday but I know many of my TechTV cohorts were there. The official name of the new card is the the GeForce 6. The basic 6800 will sell for $299, the ultra for $499. Anandtech’s first benchmarks put Nvidia back on top with amazing framerates at even the highest resolutions. ATI’s new chipset is just around the corner, though.
- Kinda thought this would happen. Steve Jobs has rebuffed Real Networks CEO Rob Glaser’s overture. Glaser wrote to Jobs suggesting Apple team with Real to oppose Microsoft. Jobs has no interest in opening the iPod, saying “why would we want to work with #2.” Ouch.
- Microsoft’s April Windows update was so popular it practically killed the company’s servers when it was released on Tuesday. According to Netcraft waits for the server to respond ranged from 1-20 seconds. Microsoft said the requests were double normal. Definitely download the update. It fixed 20 vulnerabilites.
- Well there is some bad news. Netflix has announced it will raise prices by 10% to help stem the bleeding. The company announced a $5.8 million loss on revenue of over $100 million.
- According the the science magazine, Nature, the human brain uses cache much as a microprocessor does. The capacity of this very-short-term working memory is closely linked to intelligence.
Tune in tomorrow at 7:40a Eastern for my weekly visit with John Donabie on 1010 CFRB Toronto. And, of course, every Saturday and Sunday, noon to 3p Pacific on KFI, Los Angeles.
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| Friday, 16 April 2004, 3:12 am Tags: TechTV |
I‘m very pleased to say that thanks to your overwhelming show of support and to a strong desire on both our parts to come to an agreement, TechTV has improved its offer and I’ve decided to climb back aboard the good ship Call for Help.
I’ll be back on the air starting next Tuesday, April 20.
The future is still a little cloudy, however. Comcast assumes ownership of the channel a few weeks later and I have no idea what will happen after that. I am certain they’ve been impressed by your support for the show, however, and if that doesn’t convince them to keep it on the air, I don’t know what could.
I can never thank you all enough for your incredible outpouring of encouragement and support. You really made a difference. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you!
[UPDATE: Vulcan doesn't want me in the studio until the contract takes effect so I won't be back until a week later: April 27. Wil Wheaton will guest host Friday, April 23 and Monday, April 26. UPDATE to the UPDATE: Never mind. It's April 20 again. But Wil will still guest host Friday and Monday. Welcome to my world.]
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| Thursday, 15 April 2004, 3:41 pm Tags: |
It’s Tax Day. I got far enough along on my return to know I won’t owe anything so I’m mailing in the extension to take the pressure off. I’ll finish in the next couple of days anyway. Good to have some extra time to fantasize about how to spend the refund before I apply it to groceries.
The RMS Titanic went down on this day in 1912 taking 1500 souls to the bottom of the Atlantic.
The first McDonalds opened in Des Plaines, Illinois, on this day in 1955. Happy birthday Leonardo DaVinci.
- Inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, received recognition today by winning the first Finland Millennium Technology Prize worth $1.2 million Finnish Innovation Award.
- Amazon’s in the search engine business. It’s new A9 site went online today. It’s very similar to Google (but with a peach colored background instead of white) and it ought to be – since the web search is Google powered – but there are some nice additions like search history and search book results. There’s a Google-style A9 toolbar, too. It works best if you already have an Amazon.com account, but who doesn’t?
- Hallelujah! The FTC has announced it’s going to probe spyware. There will be a hearing in DC on Monday. This may be the first step is regulating the out of control spyware plague. The FTC has also adopted new rules regulating sexually explicit spam. Such email must contain the words SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT: in the subject line. I know that would get my attention.
- According to the New York Times, Real Networks is seeking to ally with Apple in an “anti-microsoft front.” Ick. Apple already has Quicktime and AAC, can’t see what Real brings to the table. According the the leaked email from Real CEO Rob Glaser, if Steve Jobs isn’t interested Real could pursue some “very interesting opportunities” with Microsoft. Rob musn’t know Steve very well.
- Meanwhile Apple’s earnings reports are out. Last quarter’s earning were three times higher than the year before, with revenues up 29%. The company shipped more iPods than computers for the first time ever.
- For copyright reasons, Lindows will be re-dubbed Linspire in Europe. How Linsipid.
Listen in tomorrow at 8:35a Pacific for my weekly news commentary on KFI 640 AM in Los Angeles.
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