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Saturday, January 8, 2005
Show #107
Please note: the show now begins one hour earlier, 11a-2p. Don’t miss a minute because this weekend we’ll have extensive coverage of all the new stuff at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas!
Tune in this weekend for coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show with Patrick Norton, Scott Wilkinson of Ultimate AV Magazine, Robin Liss of CamcorderInfo.com, thebroken.org’s Kevin Rose, Call for Help’s Andy Walker and Amber MacArthur, and many more.
toc | toc
Today’s news items
120,000 geeks descended on the desert for CES Thursday through Sunday. Some of the things they are seeing in Vegas:
Bill Gates crashes Windows and the XBox during his keynote. Showing that even the Chairman of Microsoft can have trouble getting these things to work right.
Tivo announced the long awaited Tivo-2Go which lets users download recorded programs to their PCs and burn them to DVD.
Kodak showed a new high-end digital camera ($600 later this year) that allows users to upload and email pictures directly from the camera using Wi-Fi wireless networking. The camera has a 3-inch touch-screen display and 256MB of memory built in. It can store up to 1,500 pictures, as well as record video.
Samsung unveils a mobile phone that converts your words to text, making it easier to send SMS messages.
Samsung also showed a 102 inch plasma TV - and announced plans to sell the 80 incher they showed last year at CES for $45,000.
In other stories:
Microsoft started offering a free anti-spyware program for download on Thursday. The new software, based on Giant spyware which the company bought last month, seems to work pretty well both in detecting and removing spyware and blocking infections. Microsoft is also offering a virus removal tool that it says will remove the most dangerous threats - but is no threat itself to anti-virus software vendors. Haven’t seen that yet.
Oliver Wine says:
Visit here for a comparison of Spybot Ad-Aware and Microsoft Anti-Spyware.
An iTunes Music Store user has filed a lawsuit against Apple saying it violates state and federal anti-trust laws by offering music that can only play on the iPod, and preventing music from other stores from playing on the iPod.
Apple is suing Mac rumor site Think Secret for revealing details of a sub-$500 Mac that will allegedly be unveiled next week at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. Apple claimed that the information posted on Think Secret in November and December of this year, and earlier, could only have been obtained by someone who had signed a confidentiality agreement with Apple, which makes me think the rumor must be true!
The city of Los Angeles is suing travel sites Expedia, Orbitz, Priceline, and Travelocity over hotel taxes. The city claims the sites pay taxes based on the wholesale rates negotiated with hotels, but charge customers tax based on the marked up retail price. The sites not only pocket the markup on the room rate, but the extra tax. Orbitz says the lawsuit has no merit and will aggressively defend itself.
More news on our Internet habits from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. According to the study, eight million American adults say they have created blogs and readership is up 58%. 27% of Internet users say they read blogs regularly, 12% say they have posted comments, but 62% of Internet users do not know what a blog is.
Mike B’s trivia question of the day
Which is the following is not vaporware?1.
a) Duke Nukem Forever
b) Alienware Video Array
c) Half Life 2
d) 4 GHz Pentium 4
11a-Noon
Kevin Rose, co-host of The Screen Savers
- TivoToGo uses Microsoft copy protection under Windows Media Player
- DAVE Networks is doing television over the Internet home computers running XP. You’ll need a $100 set-top box with a broadband connection. The boxes use a bitTorrent like peer-to-peer network to ease bandwidth use. Content will come from independent producers, and the backend includes ways for them to charge per view.
- Sirius TV
- XM2Go from Delphi
G4techTV’s Best of CES winners
- Over Land, Over Sea: Pioneer’s AVIC-N2
- Audio to Go: Creative Zen Micro Photo
- Video to Go: SC-X105L Sports Cam by Samsung
- Game On: PSP by Sony
- Best of Show: YSP-1 Digital Sound Projector by Yamaha Electronics Corp.
Kevin’s site is www.kevinrose.com
Andy Walker from Call for Help Canada
Beverly in Thousand Oaks - Buying an iMac
I like the 17″ better than the 20 - the 20 is a little clunky. But never buy a Mac the week before MacWorld. Watch to see what Apple announces on January 11. I expect announcements about a new low-cost Mac, solid state iPod, iWork - a new word processor and Keynote 2, and the next version of OS X, code named Tiger.
If you do get an iMac upgrade the memory, but don’t buy it from Apple. I recommend www.crucial.com or www.transintl.com.
Noon-1p
Brian in Camarillo - Mac browsers won’t work
He’s getting a Posix error 13 in Safari. Sounds like his permissions are munged. This happens fairly often on the Mac and can really confuse programs. Open the Disk Utility (it’s in the Applications→Utilities folder) and repair permissions.
Fixing permissions is one of three things you should always try when the Mac doesn’t work right. The others are deleting preference files and restarting with the shift-key held down.
It can also be useful to see if the problem is global or limited to your account. Log in to a different account to see if it occurs there. And it’s a good idea to create a fresh, unused account on every OS X machine for this kind of diagnostic.
Blue_Tiger suggests opening a terminal window and checking your plist files (don’t input the $ character).
LaDonna in Riverside - her Windows 98 won’t shut down
update your anti-virus and spyware software and clean your system. I recommend reading my article Removing Spyware for links to useful free tools. The new Microsoft anti-spyware program is also free, but won’t work on Windows 98 alas.
Al in Panorama City - DVD player recommendations
Don’t spend a lot of money on a DVD player unless you have a high-end TV. You don’t need progressive scan or 3:2 pulldown - that’s for ED and HDTVs.
Do make sure you have video inputs on your TV though. The yellow composite video connector is ok, S-Video is better, Component is better still, Digital (DVI or HDMI) is best. If you have a digital connector, get that high end DVD player!
I highly recommend using www.NetFlix.com for renting DVDs by mail.
1–2p
Leland in Fullerton - XM Satellite isn’t as portable as he’d like
Despite Sir Elton’s commercials, XM MyFi is not truly portable - you still need the satellite antenna, and unless you’re in an urban area where the XM satellite signal is supplemented by a terrestrial signal, you’ll need line of sight to the satellite. That means it doesn’t work inside. I’d recommend an MP3 player with an FM radio. Try
the iRiver H10.
Just remember that whenever Leo makes comments about satellite radio he has a vested interest in the survival of terrestrial radio.
The MyFi however can record 5 hours to it’s internal memory. So for those times where a satellite or a terrestrial signal is not available, switch over to the recorded content.
Richard in Texas - is printer and file sharing safe?
It is if you’re behind a router. I would recommend updating to XP Service Pack 2, however. It makes some changes to file sharing that make it safer.
Karina in Hollywood
Eli in Alhambra
Chat Logs and Show Audio
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1 Answer is c) Half Life 2. Vaporware: A slang term for software which has been announced and perhaps even demonstrated, but has not been delivered to commercial customers. (↑)
