Archive for the ‘the Geekazine Quickcast’ Category

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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times – for Yahoo, anyway. It was the botched 6 month drama between them and Microsoft that made things so stressful. With Carl Icahn nipping at the heels for a takeover – then subsequent seat offering as a settlement – Yahoo had to create a great first impression to their stockholders so they could move on.

It was a long meeting. There was some debate on who should stay on the board and who should exit. There was even concern over the new seats and who would occupy them.

By the end of the day of August 1st, the meeting had resulted in a switch of power, ultimately leading to Jerry Yangs’ step down as CEO. By the next day, T. Boone Pickens had gotten rid of all his Yahoo stock.

Other items in the Week in Tech History – Fingerprints are used, The TRS 80 line is introduced and Windows Millenium Edition is dubbed “Millenium Alzheimers”.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:20 — 14.3MB)

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This week I take my Podcast talents over to the TPN Weekly Podcast for episode 14. I take the Podcast in a slightly different direction, as I talk a little bit about me and growing up in technology. I throw out some of the computers I used to work with, like the Commodore Vic20, Atari and Apple Macintosh, then my rise into an IT role.

I also talk a bit about the future of technology and where we are going as New Media Specialists. It was a fun show to do simply because I went off the cuff and didn’t talk about present tech news. If anything, it was more of an audio blog.

I also put some Podcast-safe background music into it. It was provided by Kalliopi, and can be found at Ariel Publicity.net.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:11 — 48.7MB)

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It was the system that would rival the Wiki world. Google launched a Beta of their online knowledge system called “Knol”. It was a lot like Wikipedia, except this system would have online advertising. The advantage (at least that some would call): contributors had an opportunity to actually make money off their knowlegde.

Knol stands for “A unit of Knowledge”. It was in Beta until January 2009

Other items in Tech History this week:

• IBM Goes Open Source – Sort of.
• Google and Digg were rumored to be in talks
• Carl Icahn joins Yahoo’s Board of Directors
• Trans Atlantic TV Broadcast with host Walter Cronkite.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:15 — 16.6MB)

Had some technical difficulties with the Podcast rig. Something that I will have to work on tomorrow. For now, WITH will have to hold off until next week. In the meantime – here is the last years’ WITH.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:26 — 10.3MB)

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Google recently took the Beta label off of Gmail and Google Docs. Gmail has been in beta for over 5 years – with a 3 year private beta. By being in Beta, one could easily write off an issue or even think the accountability and liability might not be theirs. So shouldn’t the ISO put some regulation on this small tag?

Google started with Gmail back on April 7th 2004. They were in a Closed Beta – which meant that you had to get an invitation to use it. However, it wasn’t a difficult thing to get an invitation. My entry into Gmail wasn’t until December of that year.

3 years later – Feb 2nd, 2007 to be exact, Gmail removed the restriction. However, the Beta tag stayed on. It generally went unnoticed until this last July 6th, when Google decided to remove the tagline.
Google Docs had a shorter span – Technically starting in August of 2005. I say technically, because it was launched as a program called “Writely”. Google Spreadsheet came in June of 2006 and by October 10th, the two had merged to start Google Docs. Once again – Beta until July 6th of 2009.

Read the rest of this entry »

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:39 — 4.0MB)

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July 8th: In 2007, developer Dan Kaminsky found a flaw in the addressing of the Domain Name System, or DNS. DNS is found on home to commercial routers around the world. The issue was so severe, that they were not divulging the issue until a patch could be implemented on a wide scale.

On March 31st, Kaminsky – along with 16 other developers – gathered at Microsoft to work on a massive patch and synchronize the release so all details could be released as well. Today was the day that patch was released. Microsoft also released patch MS08-037 on the Windows side to counter the issues. Cisco, Sun and BIND fixes would come out shortly after.

Other historical notes: The first Sundae was created (Ok, geeky note). Commodore’s rebirth from the Netherlands. Captain and Tennile on a TI99/4a. Check out the Podcast for all the info

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:55 — 32.9MB)

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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: 32:12 — 14.7MB)

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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: 7:14 — 3.3MB)

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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: 35:21 — 16.2MB)

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: 1:22:07 — 37.6MB)

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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: 30:12 — 27.6MB)