Archive for the ‘the Geekazine Quickcast’ Category

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:12 — 14.7MB)

Brought to you by GotoAssist Express - Get a 30 day free trial

July 4th, 2008 - The company that used to be called “Ask Jeeves”, but is now Ask.com officially announced they acquired the Lexico Publishing Group. The LPG is a company that built a series of reference websites. Most notably Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com. The transaction was an all cash one, and undisclosed.

Other items in Tech history this week: Hotmail is launched, AOL buys Mapquest, the eBay Baby, in 2001 the P4 1.6 was released at $294 and a lot more in the Geekazine Quickcast

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:14 — 3.3MB)

Brought to you by Gotoassist express - get a 30 day free trial.

Well, the US did it. Analog TV is no more. Hail to Digital TV. More channels, better reception and all still over a pair of rabbit ears. However, we’re not totally done with the Digital conversion.  As we ramp down on television, we might have a harder time with this one - Radio.

Each country has their own Digital conversion, and as of now, only 7 countries are fully digital on a television signal. The US went digital on June 12^th, 2009. We were suppose to go digital on February 17^th, but it got pushed back when some stations were not ready to comply. The UK goes 100% digital by 2012 and Japan will go in 2015.

And of course, there are still some stations that are on an Analog signal. Low power, Class A and TV Translator stations - along with emergency band stations - have no requirement to go digital. That is, unless they jump out of their class.

The Advanced Televison Systems Committee - or ATSC signal we receive replaced the National Television System Committee, or NTSC. If you worked with video, you know that certain countries would either be on a NTSC standard, or a PAL standard. Now, it will be ATSC, the MCMC and whatever other standards are created by other countries.

The biggest advantage of going to Digital TV? High definition. Stations will be able to broadcast in 1080p and you will be able to receive it in that. If you have ever watched a Low definition show on a High def TV, you will know that it doesn’t look all that great.

Some channels are opting out of using the HDTV signal so they can produce what are called “Sub-channels”. This will give you more channel choices on over the air TV. For example, our local ABC affiliate has 3 channels. One is the ABC affiliate, another is a channel that plays retro Television shows like Adam 12 and Leave it to Beaver, then the third will show movies all day. Ultimately, we have 12 channels to choose from - as oppose to 4 from only 5 years ago.

Radio is a different issue. It would be harder pressed to switch over a radio than a TV. Sure, you could connect a converter box to a car radio, but it would not look great and it could cost more than getting the HD radio.

There is no conversion date for HD radio. However, if a station was to switch over, they could run 2-3 stations on the same signal. That, in turn, would create more advertising opportunities.

Digital has a contender in Satellite, though. Sirius XM has been running for a few years now. However, their books have not been great as of late, and a bankruptcy filing is telling us that we might want to think before we go Satellite.  Still, many US manufacturers install the full Satellite - HD radios.

The technology for HD radio in the US is called “In Band On Channel” or IBOC. It uses what is called “Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, or OFDM. Orthogonality is a way where cross talk is eliminated between sub channels. In other words, if your station is at 100.3 and you change the station to 100.5, you won’t get bleed through. You can have more channels closer together without a more powerful signal impeding on the next.

I remember reading at one time they wanted to go all digital on radio by 2012. I went looking for that article, but couldn’t find it. Only a vast sea of sites that say there is no conversion date for radio.

We had an interesting time converting TV to Digital. Think about what it would take to make all radio stations the same. Whereas consumers have found that turning the TV off is easy after the DTV conversion, they might not think the same thing when they are stuck on Interstate 54 in the middle of rush hour.

Reality is, radio will become HD until there is no one listening to analog. Then the FCC will step in and say “OK, it’s time to switch”. Radio may be the last great mainstay of analog. Still, there should be more effort to take it Digitally. We can benefit from a better system running our audio and video.

Add to it the radio owners advantage. They can give you more stations and have more airtime to sell. You like that song? Well, press the radio button and get it from Amazon or iTunes.  Heck, you might even be able to run contests and polls right from the radio, instead of calling in.

But for now, we’ll have the Digital TV, and the Analog Radio as our standards.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:21 — 16.2MB)

brought to you by GotoAssist Express. Get a 30 day free trial

We announce the 3rd step in the Summer of Geekazine contest

June 27th - William Gates officially hands the keys over to Steve Ballmer and goes on his retirement. Well, sort of.

Bill announced that he will be stepping down as CEO of Microsoft and letting Steve Ballmer take the reins. He will have interaction with Microsoft. After all, it is his company.

Lots of other cool historical events from Atari, Commodore, Microsoft, Apple and IBM within the podcast

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:22:07 — 37.6MB)

This week we are in Las Vegas for the HP Tech Forum Expo. Andy McCasky did a live stream of the event, but I decided to run the audio of the event as well.

The event included:

Tom Iannotti, Managing Director and SVP, HP Americas and TSG - Master of Ceremonies

Ann Livermore, EVP, TSG, HP on What the previous year has done to make this year really competitive.

Paul Miller, VP Marketing, ESS, TSG, HP on how to make data centers, especially Exocenters, greener

Prith Banerjee, SVP, Research, HP; Director, HP Labs on the future of Technology

Keynote blog is found here.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:12 — 27.6MB)

Brought to you by GotoAssist Express - Get your 30 Day free trial

Mozilla broke free and created Firefox back in 2004. Since then, they have been growing in browser popularity. Being the major browser in Linux, but also downloadable for Windows and Mac helps a lot. The ability to install Add-ons also makes this browser very flexable.

On June 17th, 2008, Mozilla released version 3.0 of the browser (with version 1.9 of the Gecko engine). They wanted to put a big dent into the Internet Explorer market, so they created a “Download party”. The idea was to get a record number of downloads for the launch - a Guiness World record, that is. They created Download Day to promote the record.

However, the day of the launch was not good to Mozilla. They got ready to push out the browser, but a website glitch caused the download to be delayed. Within a couple hours the site was back up and running, but Twitters abroad told of other locations you could go to download the software.

Could this hamper the World record efforts? Well, since there was no world record before, the answer is No.

But what Mozilla DID do is 8 million downloads in the 24 hour period. That was more traffic than Mozilla ever has seen. The Linux community did their part in getting the new browser, but it was really the “average user” that helped bring this number so high.

The Mozilla - IE battle still goes on. Also with Safari, Opera and Chrome in the picture. But did you know that AT&T also put out a Browser? Well, you will find out all these great facts and more in the Week in Tech History.

Also, we mention the 3rd step in the Summer of Geekazine contest. #Geekazine Rocks.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:43 — 12.2MB)

Brought to you by GotoAssist Express - Get a 30 day free trial. - www.gotoassist.com/techpodcasts.

This was a pivitol week on the Yahoo Proxy battle as everything was approved to go. Carl Icahn was given the green light to lobby shareholders and possibly win control to ready for a new Yahoo. The previous week, we saw all the reports of Carl Icahn making the statement: Jerry Yang must go. This week was no different.

In the meantime, Microsoft made one more offer. This time it wasn’t for the whole company - it was only for the search engine. $35 a share for Yahoo Search. This was significant because this was the same bid Microsoft did back in February for the whole company.

Other great items in the Week in Tech History Quickcast - TI/99 restructures, Jacques Cousteau was born. We also saw Commodore, new Intel and AMD processors and the Ruputer was introduced. All this on the Geekazine Quickcast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:36 — 14.5MB)

Brought to you by GotoAssist Express - Get a 30 day free trial at www.gotoassist.com/techpodcasts

It was an interesting week of poising as Yahoo and Carl Icahn butted heads over the impending proxy battle for sale of Yahoo to Microsoft. Yahoo was doing everything in it’s power while Icahn made some general statements about CEO Jerry Yang. As the week went on, the mud started to fly.

Yahoo started the volley - but not by Yahoo’s choice. A court document was unsealed in where it outlined the plans for Yahoo to create a plan to pay workers if a takeover happens. Yahoo was going to provide “100 percent equity acceleration for everyone.” A claim that Yahoo might not be able to cover, depending on how the proceedings went.

In the meantime, Carl Icahn stepped up his campaign by making public his plans for Yahoo. It included a reorganization of the Board of Directors, but up until then, it was just a general statement. This week he basically said that CEO Jerry Yang needed to step down.

Yahoo made a statement later in the day and set their Shareholders’ meeting for August 1st, 2008. This would give both parties to wheel and deal for a happy medium.

This was one of many events in the Week in Tech history. Check out all the events in the podcast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:32 — 2.5MB)

Brought to you by GotoAssist Express - Get a 30 day free trial

Josh Chandler is a regular contributor to Vator.tv. Recently, he wrote on the financial standings of Facebook. He has graciously offered it for Podcast conversion. If you have a blog or article that you would like featured on the Quickcast, drop me a line at 608-205-4378 or Geekazine at gmail dot com.

“Facebook spends between $20 million to $25 million alone on the space that houses its servers”according to reports from a recent InsideFacebook.com article, this comes as reports today from Techcrunch.com wrote that Facebook.com, the world’s most popular social network is receiving potential offer of a $200 million stake from Russian investment firm “Digital Sky Technologies“.

Now, it’s hard to tell where all this data consumption is taking place, one would suspect it is within the photo storage facility which receives 500GB of data every day, over 850 million photos every month. Back in April Facebook developers had to do a complete rewrite of the photo storage facility to implement a new storage standard called HayStack, which was supposedly 50% faster then any “traditional photo storage system”, Bobby Johnson, director of engineering at Facebook said in a ComputerWorld.com interview that “In terms of cost, if it’s twice as efficient, we can have 50% less hardware. With 50 billion files on disk, the cost adds up. It’s essentially giving us some [financial] headroom”

The hardest to imagine and most unrealistic part of Facebook’s data operations, is that they don’t even own the infrastructure,they lease space from Digital Reality Trust and DFT, which obviously has caused sharp increases in costs, as the user base has grown. DataCenterKnowledge.com showed the key data towards Facebook’s costs.

Facebook pays $10.9 million a year for 114,000 plus  square feet of space in two Silicon Valley data centers (leased out by Digital Reality). Rackspace recently said in an SEC filing that it is paying about $5 million a year for server space in the same data warehouse as Facebook.

With all these absurd investment opportunities that Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook seems to be adamantly rejecting, where do you think the buck stops before the likes of Chamath Palihapitiya, VP of Growth, Mobile and International at Facebook step in and tells Zuckerberg directly  that they need some money before things get out of hand. Something tells me, based on the kind of person Mark Zuckerberg is like, it wouldn’t be the case.

Whether or not Facebook accepts ANY money in the near future, there will always be a sense of gratitude towards one certain individual who joined Facebook.com with a very religious based Facebook App, which will certainly keep investors knocking at the door for some time.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:51 — 9.5MB)

Brought to you by Citrix’ Goto Assist Express - Get a 30 day free trial

May 29th 2008 - Comcast had a different type of attack. This one opened the eyes to how our records in ICANN were being handled. The infamous “Comcast Hack” was where hackers did not attack the servers themselves, but they found a way into Network Solutions and changed the DNS of the webpage. Once the DNS is changed, the homepage would then redirect to servers of their choosing.

Other historical notes - The Woodstock of the web. We also heard about the first computer patent and the Dell computer fraud. This is all on the Podcast

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:52 — 13.7MB)

Brought to you by Goto Assist Express - 30 day free trial

May 24, 2008: they claim it was meant as a joke, but people didn’t take it with a grain of salt. The couple put their baby up for auction. 1 euro was the price, which at the time was about $1.57 US.

eBay - who already had a policy of no sale of human beings - took down the listing and suspended the account. What was worse was the child was taken and the parents were investigated for child cruelty. Eventually the charges were dropped and the parents got their little bundle of “Buy it now” back on July 4th.

Other events of WITH: T. Boone Pickens puts in a ton of money into Yahoo after Carl Icahn issues a proxy battle. We also found out about the first idea of a moving sidewalk. Abbyword was released. Apple and CBS were sued over “Mighty Mouse”, AOL buys Bebe and the infamous 5 cent email tax.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:03 — 13.8MB)

Brought to you by Gotoassist Express. Get a 20 day free trial

On May 15th, 2008 - Carl Icahn stepped up to the plate and officially announced his bid to proxy Yahoo so he could work with Microsoft on getting a deal out.  A couple days prior, Eric Jackson decided to pull his bid for proxy and the rumor started to fly that Carl Icahn was going to take over the fight.

Of course we saw how that went - Icahn got a seat on the Yahoo board, and Yahoo stayed with Yahoo.

Other items of note - ZDTV starts, HP and EDS acquisition and the Ethernet Standard is formed. Of course there is a lot more in the podcast.