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Saturday, July 23, 2005

Show #163

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Today’s news items

No more Longhorn… the new Windows (due some time late next year) is officially Windows Vista. The slogan: Clear, Confident, Connected: Bringing clarity to your world. Ugh.

quantumBlog in Santa Barbara, CA adds: Here’re a few more links to various Microsoft codenames: WikiPedia, Windows Codenames, and MsCodeNames.

Google profits are up 400% but the company says it can’t go on. Google earned $342.8 million this quarter, more than four times the $79.1 million its earnings a year ago.

Microsoft announced its quarterly results, too, and profit is up 37% on strong PC sales.

Microsoft filed a patent for the smiley face on Thursday. Now that’s the path to profit!

Meanwhile Google is battling with Microsoft over an executive who defected from Microsoft to the search firm. Microsoft sued. Google is countersuing.

The furor over hidden sex scenes in Grand Theft Auto seems to be calming down. The ESRB gave it an upgraded Adults Only rating and that seems to end the issue.

Legal digital song downloads around the world have tripled in the past year, while the growth of music piracy on peer-to-peer networks appears to have slowed, according to record labels.

The typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, e-mail, instant message or other distraction. Takes him or her another eight minutes to recover.

James Doohan, Star Trek’s Scotty passed away this week. We’ll play an audio tribute. His ashes will be sent into space. Trivia question: what was Scotty’s first name?

“GEEPSIE” from Malibu

Caskets on Parade - Book of the Dead database
http://www.msu.edu/~daggy/cop/bkofdead/index.htm

Star Trek Characters
http://www.msu.edu/~daggy/cop/bkofdead/startrek.htm

Maybe they’ll use Google Moon to find a spot to place them. Zoom all the way in for a surprise.

Jeff from San Francisco also misses Jimmy Doohan very much. The famed Star Trek engineer’s ashes will be launched into space by the same company that launched Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s ashes into space. It’s a private company called Space Services Inc.

11a-Noon

John in Sherman Oaks - DVD Authoring

He’s using the SimplyMepis Live CD and loves it. He wants to burn DVDs with XviD or DivX video that will play back in the new players that can handle DivX (like the Kiss DP-450). I don’t think you need to do anything special. That’s the point. These DVD players can playback data discs with properly encoded files on them.
Tony G. adds: Make sure that your divx/xvid files were not encoded with qpel, which is quantization setting selected before encoding. Most mpeg-4 capable DVD players can’t play qpel encoded files. Head over to the doom9.org forums for more info.

He’s also looking for a Linux-based multiple disc burning program.

Glich adds: To answer Leo’s question Linksys bought Kiss.

Mark in Los Angeles - full screen video conferencing

I don’t know of anything except Apple’s iChat that can do that (any Windows suggestions?). But you might want to look at the Packet8 video phone. I use it and love it. They also made a cool 8×8 product that put full screen video on your TV.

Paul in Glendale - computer is oinking, doors are slamming

He recently installed AOL - and of course AIM - I don’t know about the pig but I’d suggest turning off all sounds in AIM and see if it goes away.

BigDave adds: Never versions of AIM let users specify their own sign-on and sign-off sounds that other AIM users hear. That may be what the oinking is :)

Fred in Pasadena - second Firewire port causes the whole chain to fail

He’s a visual effects supervisor and uses Autodesk’s Combustion on his G4 Macintosh.

Sounds like a physical short or other problem with the second port. Just don’t use it.

Leo FYI Mozilla’s Firefox 1.0.6 & Thunderdird 1.0.6 are safe for downloading.
Do not use 1.0.5 Both were Hacked.Also you should know DSLEXTREME in West LA is $30.00 per month
Steve in LA pipes in
West Los Angeles is in Verizon territory. Leo disclaims in the ad that the $14.95 deal is for SBC areas only. SBC also offers DSL for $14.95 per month for a year as well, and DSLExtreme had to drop its price to be competative. Verizon charges $29.95 per month with a one year commitment, DSLExtreme matches that price.

Noon-1p

John in Ontario, Canada - how can I pretend I’m surfing from the US

Use a proxy server based in the US

Bob in Los Angeles - website doesn’t work with Safari

The audio on his web site sounds OK when he plays it on Internet Explorer, but it sounds weird when he uses Safari. Must be the choice of audio codec.

object tag

Carrie in Ventura - bought first computer

Valerie in La Canada - Firefox didn’t upgrade right

Download the full install, uninstall the old version, then install the full version. The upgrade-in-place is unreliable. NOTE: Firefox doesn’t really need an installer, that was added for convenience. You can just plop the contents of the firefox download in the subdirectory after deleting it’s contents and it’s all new.

Cliff in Northridge - voice recognition software

Dragon is still the best. Get lots of RAM and a Pentium IV of 2.4 Ghz or more.

Sis has an old K6–300-based machine that he can’t install Windows 98 on. He gets a stack overflow error. I doubt there’s really a stack issue. You might want to replace the hard drive.

Dean adds: I’ve also seen bad CD drives cause this error.

Andrew from Whittier - starred in Space Command in 1951

Live in B&W on CBL-TV out of Toronto. His lieutenant: James Doohan. William Shatner was an extra!

1–2p

Anne in South Bay - copying Macrovision protected VHS tapes

We’ve got a long discussion on turning VHS into DVD in Show 118.

She’s looking for a recommendation for a video stabilizer. I’ve had mixed results with these. What works for you?

I do recommend HP’s DVD Writer DC4000.

A listener writes: Anne here is a link to most machines that can be hacked.

There are DVD players with backdoors that disable Macrovision. Do VHS players have backdoors, too?

Lee in Los Angeles - replacing stolen CDs

He wants to download the same CDs and reburn them. My favorite music store is iTunes Music Store, but Napster, Rhapsody, and Yahoo Music all have pretty much the same songs for the same price.

I don’t recommend music sharing services like Kazaa, or pirate sites like www.allofmp3.com. Downloading songs from sites like these is stealing.

Smoky from Nashville, TN writes: Since you’re not opposed to buying your music, one suggestion is to buy used. Around here there are a few very good used CD and LP stores with very low prices. Online you can check out a couple of used CD price search engines. Two I found were Find Used CDs and MusicStack Music Marketplace.

Craig fron Hamilton Canada writes: Is downloading from allofmp3.com really stealing? I’ve read that the artists DO get paid for downloads from that site. When you go to Russia and buy a CD, you pay way less than we do here. Are they stealing when they buy their CDs there? This allofmp3.com site is hard to resist, since there’s no DRM, you get to choose how you encode the songs (format, bit rate etc.) and they have a huge selection. Not to mention it’s pennies per song and about $1 for an entire album encoded the way you want. Certainly, for replacing songs and albums you already paid for, this site is very hard to ignore.

Hi, I’ve purchased music from Musicmatch, Walmart and Yahoo, I would buy a lot more if the files were not laced with DRM. I’ve purchased a lot more music from allofmp3 mainly for these files are nonprotected but the quality is not consistent. Does anybody out there know a way around so I can transcode a protected WMA directly to a mp3 or a nonprotected WMA so I don’t have to go through the hassle of burning a CD and then rip it again to make a mp3 of one tune. This method wastes a lot of time and is very wasteful on blank CDs. Of course I did pay this music and I have the legal key. Thanks!

John D Geek adds: This is a good point to Leo’s speach about fair use of content. Once you buy the CD make a backup so you can re-create it if it’s lost or stolen.

Joshua from Upland, CA writes: I’m no lawyer, but my guess would be that you can legally download the songs that were stolen from a place like Kazaa. The record companies argue that buying a cd isn’t really buying it, only buying the rights to listen to the music. If you paid for the cds, and someone else is breaking a law to deprive you of your purchased right to listen to the music, it seems like it would be completely reasonable to copy the music from a friend. If you’re sued, though, it would be useful to be able to prove that you owned the cds at one point, but they were stolen.

Andy in Mission Viejo - He keeps getting the same email over and over

It’s stuck on the server. Remove it (and no other email) using the free
Email Remover.
Steve in Pacific Palisades speaks out Or, if your ISP offers a web interface for their mail (where you can view your email using an internet browser instead of Outlook or OE) just log in there and delete it.

Also, since installing Roxio 6 he can’t burn. This is fairly common, unfortunately. Check for an update from Roxio. Or uninstall and try Nero.

Dean in Fallbrook - his video is stuttering

That means it’s dropping frames. You need a better capture solution. He’s using a USB Dazzle - I recommend a Firewire based capture box. Or get a DV camera.

Leo forgot to mention that Dean should get a seperate storage disk for his video clips. If one disk drive has to access the program and the video on the same disk it will certainly begin to choke as the disk gets full.

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