GNC-2008-10-07 #414 guest host Mike James

Podcast

Todd is on a well deserved vacation this week, todays show is guest hosted by Mike James. All the tech news with none of the lines of Disney Land.

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Show Notes:

Black Friday Deals debate
Mercury flyby
Black Holes
Dish to pay TIVO
Disinfectant worries
DVD Copies
Ubuntu and Fedora
Musical artists want control
Astronaut’s diary
Footprints
Encryption vulnerability
Stressful test
Credit Cards on WEP
AT&T payments
Good grief
Open source victory
Weird Al
Cable service
Big Bubble
Then -vs- Now Moonshot

The Earth at night

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XP Gets Six More Months to Live

Windows

According to multiple sources, Windows XP has received another six-month reprieve. This means that certain manufacturers and OEM providers can still put Windows XP on machines until the end of July, 2009.

I have lots of theories on why this is happening. XP has received two extensions already since Vista’s launch. While I have a couple machines running Vista now, my primary desktop machine at work is XP, and will be for quite some time. This is likely true in a lot of businesses and schools around the country, as upgrading to Vista is proving to be cost-prohibitive for most. The only machines that can run Vista here are ones we purchased especially to do so, which means they are extremely high-end, with at least 4 gb of RAM, which raises the cost of the hardware considerably. On a college campus like mine, where there are upwards of 2500 computers, that additional hardware cost is just out of our reach.

Is this third extension a result of Microsoft listening to its customers regarding the problems with the new Vista operating system? I doubt it. Since Microsoft (and most other businesses) are in the business of making money, the slow adoption rate of Vista is affecting their bottom line. That’s the kind of language they are likely to be listening to, and realizing that they can sell an awful lot of copies of XP while Vista sits languishing.

I, for one, am glad that XP has been granted a few more months to live.

Xohm Quietly Being Offered in Other Cities

Technology

After being formally and loudly introduced in Baltimore last week, Xohm has now quietly been turned on in six other major places: Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and northern Virginia.

As much nay-saying as there’s been about WiMax every coming to fruition, I’m pleasantly surprised by its current distribution and sudden growth. This gives me great hope that WiMax will indeed work, and be available in more and more places throughout the country as time goes by.

WiMax, to me, is the perfect solution to a pesky problem, and can be offered as easily in rural areas as in urban ones, and I live in a semi-rural area that is quickly becoming fully suburban. I figure if they can build a giganto Walmart on our existing infrastructure, then WiMax is more than possible.

Still crossing my fingers that this continues to take off.

Wikipedia manipulation exposed

wikipedia

The Register reports on how the wikipedia entries on short selling, and possibly other financial sections where being controlled by a person with a very biased view on these subjects. The article alleges that one the effects control of this section of articles had was to supress discussion of the negative side of ‘naked short selling’. This type of activity has had an impact on the current financial crisis, and the supression of discussion bridged into the mainstream press.

The worry from a technical viewpoint is that someone was essentially given moderater style controls over a topic that they had a vested interest in. I find this disturbing as these clear conflicts of interest should be easy to avoid. I do not think it is necessary to have any more checks on contributers identities than there already is. There are a number of people that track for spurious entries and it is better to make it easy to contribute so more information comes in.

The topic moderators, acting as editors of the content should be held to a much higher standard of identification. If no person on Wikipedia was allowed to become a moderator, or any kind of administrator, without some verifiable identity checking being performed. It would be silly to expect absolute accuracy from a service like Wikipedia. If it is to survive though, it must demonstrate that it is protecting itself from such gross manipulations as seems to have occured here. It really also needs to take steps to make sure it is protected to some degree from agendas.

Each person with any moderation or administration responcibility needs to verify their true identity in some way. They then need to be vetted for any potential conflicts of interest. A conflict should not bar them from looking after a topic as their knowledge would be valuable in evaluating what goes on there. If there is a conflict a second person that has no conflict should be required to verify their decisions. This second person (or people) don’t need the knowledge they just need to challenge the moderator for evidence to backup their decision. While these people do not need to have their full identities disclosed any potential conflicts of interest should be clearly stated on their profile.

My New “PDA”

Technology, , ,

My New PDA
Do you ever feel overwhelmed by technology and need to unplug yourself? I know I do. I have stuff stored in my cell phone, on my laptop, in an online calendar, and on a clipboard. The bad thing is I have a hard time finding what I need when I need it. It seems like I have all the tools to be organized but the tools themselves become clutter. An example is a simple list of oil & fuel filters I use for all our vehicles. I have it on a piece of paper (somewhere), in my phone (when I can find it), & on my email application. But when it is time to buy the filters I have a hard time getting to the information I need. So last week I de cluttered a lot of stuff. Some crap went on ebay but more went in the trash. Then I went to the Dollar General store in town & picked up my new PDA….. a 3×5 inch spiral note pad (Personal Declutter Assistant). Everything that I need to schedule immediately or remember I write down in this little book and I keep it with me all the time. I also use a pencil with an eraser to write with, something I never used to use except in school. I can hear the giggles coming across the bandwidth as you read this. I used to make fun of older guys carrying notepads with 3 inch pencils but you know what they had very organized & “clean” lives. I am not getting rid of my gadgets or downing technology. I am just cleaning up the life a bit.

The greatest example of this simple lifestyle was when I was right out of high school in 1992 -1993. I was working at a automobile distribution center. We had to purchase our own tools so two different tool companies came around weekly, a Mac Tools guy & the Snap On guy. The Snap On guy was younger with a computer on the truck and some kind of hand held device to enter information. This was the early nineties so high tech is a relative term! The Mac Tool guy was an older gentleman with …… a small notepad and a pencil. Can you guess which one was more successful (at least in my workplace)? The Snap On guy was not there some weeks and rarely had the tool you needed and you had to wait longer to get it. The Mac man was always there every week & usually had what you needed and if not he would get it the very next week. Now if we reversed the guys & tools I think the older guy would have still been more organized. So it really is an attitude & life philosophy more than a tech or non tech thing. I think that we just let our brains get scattered with too many devices to store too much information.

Pimp Your MP3 Player

geeks, ipod, MP3, ,

I just saw a cool open source product to freshen up an old mp3 player from Rockbox. It is a firmware product to improve the user experience if your outdated player needs a kick and it is free of course. It supports a lot of Apple’s players obviously but also does not leave out the less popular players which is a huge positive for me. I have a Creative Zen which is not on the list yet but my daughter has a Sansa which is possible to upgrade. My experience has been that the player may die before I get tired of the firmware but I am very rough on my players. To be honest though, I have never even thought about the possibility of changing the firmware on a player. Good thing this internet thingy is still around for ideas to flow every which way. There may even be a different firmware that is available for my Zen so I will have to start a search. I am pretty happy with what I have but there is no harm in window shopping.

All this being said, be careful & if you don’t know what you are doing you should leave well enough alone. It can void your warranty but chances are that it is out of date anyway if you need new firmware. True geeks won’t have much fear though. Some of the screenshots I saw over at Lifehacker were very nice. So give this software a try on that old ipod that is collecting dust in your drawer. I think I will experiment on my wife’s Nano today since it is jacked up anyway and will not turn off.

Using the Web to Carpool

Info, ,

I may be the only one who has noticed that gas prices are ridiculously high now days. Ok maybe not the only one. Heck, even finding gas was a problem here in Georgia the past 2 weeks. So I have been surfing around to check out carpooling websites. I even thought of creating a simple one for my area, but don’t want to waste my time if there is a good site that I can just link to or promote on my local website. Carpooling is an immediate answer to everyone’s complaints about using their 401K to buy fuel. After the financial problems recently I guess the 401K may not be enough now. Gas is $4 a gallon here which can make fueling up each month as expensive as the payment on the thing (visit Dave Ramsey.com to get educated on why car payments are dumb anyway). So if you spend $400 per month on gas & could carpool to work each week that would save you substantial dollars. Maybe even close to half. So that would virtually make gas $2 a gallon again.

The problem is that carpooling takes work and could be a pain in the buttocks. It is hard enough to get your own family to get on the same schedule much less syncing up with a stranger and depending on him / her to get you to work on time. The last thing you want is to get in trouble at work or miss appointments because you got hooked up with a disorganized individual or worse, a complete nut. But people meet online to date and some even get married so I know it can work out. My best friend & I rode together to work for about 4 years & never had a problem. We were friends so that certainly helped. But you don’t have to be locked into just one carpooling partner. You can have multiple ones. One for work, one for ball games, one for church, etc. Of course this works better in a more populated area but it can work just about anywhere. It just depends on how much pain the gas costs are causing you. I know I am looking into it for our family because it hurts pretty badly right now! Has anyone had any luck with the various carpool websites?