SDR2006-11-01 Podcast – SDRNews
Announcer: This is the Tech Podcast Network. If it’s tech, it’s here.
Andy McCaskey: This is Slashdot Review for November 1st, 2006. My name’s Andy McCaskey, and this is SDR News – tech news highlights from Slashdot, Digg, and Redit.
Today’s sponsor is Godaddy.com – comprehensive Internet support, and shortly, some Super Bowl commercials for 2007.
Here’s what’s new on SDR News.
More than a hundred million websites now, according to Netcraft – a little over a hundred, 101.4, actually – an extraordinary year, 2006. Added over 27.4 million sites already; year’s not finished, of course. Internet’s doubled in size since May of 2004, when it hit 50 million. And if you turn the Wayback Machine to August of 1995, you will have found just slightly under 19, 000 hosts. Apache launched in 1995, and IIS from Microsoft in 1996. Currently, Apache has 60% of the server share on the Internet; IIS at 31%, and Sun at 1.7%.
The Register has been reporting that spam’s gone up by about 30% in the last two months, but there’s something more serious to worry about. Bulk mailers, instead of using specific single servers, are beginning to use more and more bot nets, which are compromised PCs; tens of thousands of PCs are counted amongst a single bot net. It makes spam harder to identify and eliminate, and some bot nets can boast as many as a million systems. Now, historically, bot nets have been used to install adware on machines or to initiate a denial-of-service attack on online companies – some sort of extortion scheme or something. But this new system directs all those resources towards creating additional spam.
Not sure what your personal thoughts are on Vista, but here’s mine: I’m in no hurry, no hurry to move forward. In fact, a recent poll shows a good percentage of tech-savvy XP users are looking at Linux over an upgrade to Vista. About 40% of the respondents to a survey at C4.com decided that they were just basically going to stay on XP; they saw no reason to upgrade to Vista unless you have a lot of memory and a fast 3D card. The shiny GUI seems to come from hogging some resources, and it relies on hardware, like Flash-enabled hard drives, to make the OS faster. Even for gamers, it seems like it’s about a 15% advantage, on average. You combine that with the user-friendliness of Ubuntu, and you have perfect weather conditions for, as they say, a migration storm.
Short item: Hard to believe that, if you’re going to have a United Nations Internet summit, that you wouldn’t have Internet connectivity. According to Declan McCullagh, they failed to resolve some connection issues, even though it was a luxury resort on the Athenian Riviera. Not far from the city center. They still couldn’t provide a working Internet connection.
We’ve talked about Dutch voting machines before. You may have recalled the Nedap machines that were polling computers that were hacked on nationwide television, and ended up playing chess before the end of the hour. Well, the Dutch intelligence service, AIVD, has ruled that 1200 e-voting computers made by a different company, a company called SDU, could not be used for the national elections, because the machines could be easily intercepted from a distance of 20 or 30 meters away. Some RF failures. What’s going to happen is that voters in large cities, such as Amsterdam and Eindhoven and Tilburg, now will have to cast their ballots with pencil and paper.
Lots of politics over in the satellite radio world. NPR has found an Achilles’ heel and gone running to the umpire. The National Association of Broadcasters and National Public Radio want the FCC to look into misdeeds by XMN Sirius Radio. What’s driving all this is a prediction that satellite subscribers will continue to grow tremendously – 14 million by the end of this year, expecting as many as 30 million by the end of 2010. Of all the challengers, it seems that NPR has finally found a weakness, because XM supplements its satellite coverage with earthbound transmitters, or repeaters. During a recent test, they found that XM had failed to get a license for 19 of these transmitters, and of another 221 repeaters, they found that 28 percent exceeded their authorized power level.
About seven months ago, the NAB tried to get the FCC’s help to prevent XM from acquiring some new frequencies, providing services such as on-demand audio or video, which would compete more directly with terrestrial radio. Also, NPR claims that many FM modulators that are used to feed programming from portable satellite radio devices into car stereos exceed FCC power requirements. NPR stations have been receiving hundreds of complaints, according to Mike Starling, who is the Chief Technology Officer for NPR labs, which has studied the issue. Some informal tests in the Washington area found that 30 to 40 percent of the modulators in traffic going up and down the roads were exceeding the FCC-mandated power levels. If they wanted to, the FCC could force a recall of vehicles for FM modulators that were installed by the people that bought the radios at retail stores. More than a million cars could be affected by all of this.
Today’s version of Slashdot Review on SDR News is brought to you by GoDaddy. The main word from GoDaddy is domains. You can see why GoDaddy.com is the number one domain registrar worldwide. With three or more domains for a limited time the private listing option is free. And with your domain registration you’ll get hosting, a free blog, complete email, and much more. Enter code ‘slash’ when you checkout and save an additional ten percent on any order. Your piece of the Internet at GoDaddy.com.
Motorola is prepping up a Linux-based Razor smart phone. MobileCrunch has some presentation photos of what appears to be the new Razor PDA. Motorola has a new Linux-based rocker ready to go so it’s likely the Razor will also sport some Linux capability. I hadn’t seen this site before. It focuses on mobile 2.0. The services and devices defining the next generation of connected mobile computing. All of that at Mobilecrunch.com.
Voting machines continue to be in the news. It looks like Beaumont, Texas has a problem. Some early voting for the November elections started yesterday, actually Monday. And during the first week of it, Jefferson County there in Beaumont had experienced high turnout and it seemed the people trying to cast a straight Democratic ticket have problems. Touchscreens seem to indicate that their voting is straight Republican ticket. Now the voters says that it’s not just happening with straight-ticket voting, it’s also happening on individual races as well.
Classified Wiki for the U.S. Intelligence community is a top-secret system called Intellipedia. Sixteen agencies in the U.S. intelligence world that have access has grown to about 20, 000 pages, has 3600 registered users, all this since the beginning around the 17th of April.
It actually could be quite good. It could avoid the sorts of errors that led to the 2002 National Intelligence estimate that said Saddam Hussein possessed large quantities of weapons of mass destruction. Intelligence officials quite enthusiastic. They are providing access to Britain, Canada and Australia, or at least plan to do so. If you’re really curious, you can read about Intellipedia on Wikipedia.
Here’s today’s video. This is put up on the.
YouTube site for Slashdot Review. Today’s YouTube video is Mark Cuban, totally unrepentant. A listener sent this version in. It’s an interview on G4TV. Mark Cuban launches into YouTube, offers a comparison to crack dealers, talks about how good content gets lost when you have a hundred million videos to contend with. He’s fun to watch and that’s what makes YouTube, at least for me, so fascinating. You can find that at YouTube.com/group/slashdotreview and you can click on the YouTube logo at slashdotreview.com.
Incidentally, as I mentioned that particular video was sent along by a listener. If you find something of interest, please send it along either through the YouTube system or to slashdotreview@gmail.com.
If you’re a phisher looking for some productive territory, you might head to the aftermarket for domain names. As you know, most domain names are sold for a few hundred or a thousand dollars or so. That particularly attractive domain can fetch six figure sums. However the Finnish security firm FSecure started looking into what was going up for sale. And you’d have names like filmlist.com but you would also have names that obviously belonged to banks. For example, the site Sedo.com is reselling domains like chasebank-online.com, citi-bank.com, and bankofamerica (with america misspelled).com. Only one reason that someone would want to buy these domains, they are either the banks themselves or maybe, they are a phishing schemer.
I know you’re getting tired of hearing this but there’s some voting shenanigans in Florida. It seems that the touchscreens have a strange attraction for Republican candidates. One voter needed assistance from an election official and even then needed three tries to convince the machine that he really wanted to vote for Democrat Jim Davis, not his Republican opponent.
Apparently, this happens often. According to the Herald, Broward County supervisor of elections said that it’s not uncommon for screens on heavily used machines to “slip out of sync” making votes register incorrectly. Poll workers are trained to recalibrate them on the spot essentially to realign the video screen with the electronics inside. It’s a simple 15-step process outlined in the poll workers manual.
That’s it for this evening. (408) 731-6848 is the home of SDR News Extra Edition. Extra Edition brings you by phone extra items on most days plus a way to talk back on the podcasts or any news item that we’ve had. Also don’t forget that you can go to the site at slashdotreview.com, type in the subject into our search box and get the entire story that we’ve just presented. Comments and suggestions to slashdotreview@gmail.com. My name’s Andy McCaskey, no affiliation with Slashdot other than as a regular reader. Thanks again to melodio.com for providing mobile distribution for the program on selected Motorola, Nokia, and Sony Ericsson phones. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you tomorrow.
SDR2006-11-02 Podcast – SDRNews
Announcer: This is the Tech Podcast Network. If it’s tech, it’s here.
Andy McCaskey: This is SlashDot Review for November 2nd, 2006. My name is Andy McCaskey and this is SDR news, tech news highlights from SlashDot, Digg, and Reddit. Today’s sponsor is GoToMeeting, affordable business meetings that work.
Well let’s get started, take a look at SDR news. Diebold is demanding that HBO cancel the documentary that is supposed to air this evening. It probably is not going to get cancelled. Diebold is crying foul and demanding that it be pulled. The filmmaker claims that Diebold machines are not tamper-proof. I hate to be a broken record on this subject. You probably recall, but even before the Princeton study went up on YouTube, I was reporting on this. Here is the real question–actually, three of them: Number one, have you heard any politician address or even mention this issue of defective voting machines? Number two, have you heard of anyone outside our technology circle even expressing the slightest interest in this topic? The real one is number three: why?
Here are some surprises in Microsoft Vista’s end-user licensing agreement. Lots of things lurking discovered by Scott Granneman over at Security Focus. For example, if you wanted to post some benchmark results, “Any benchmarks must be performed using all performance and best practice guidelines set forth in the product documentation and/or Microsoft’s support web site.” Of course, this forces you to use settings that may not be found in the workday world, and could end up shining the apple, so to speak, and potentially distorting results. A couple of other goodies buried in there.
Windows DRM deciding what you can and cannot listen to, and Windows Defender deciding and removing what it considers to be spyware, automatically. You might want to take a look at some of the choices here once Vista gets cranking. It starts out with a Starter Edition, and that is going to be OEM only, so unless you are HP or Dell, that is not going to be of much help.
Home Basic is going to be $199 for the full-up version or a $99 upgrade, Home Premium, $239 or $159 upgrade, Business Edition at $299 or $199 upgrade, the Enterprise Edition, which is something that will be priced only to OEM, and then Windows Vista Ultimate, almost $400 or a $260 upgrade. Now here’s the kicker: there is no virtualization permitted. Well, at least no virtualization for Home Basic, or Home Premium cannot be used to create a virtual image. However, the end-user license does allow you to use Vista Business–that’s $300–or Vista Ultimate, $400. I wonder if there is any correlation between the price of the product and the ability to run in the virtual mode.
IE seven has finally been released as a high-priority update. It should be available via automatic update or download via Microsoft. It looks like Firefox two is already outnumbering Firefox 1.5. IE seven having trouble getting traction, and it may be that this high-priority force-fed update will get numbers back in line, at least from a Microsoft perspective.
Lots of discussion concerning offshoring threatening combat software. This was an article in Business Week. Pentagon is concerned that maliciously placed code could compromise the security of the Defense Department, and ultimately hurt our ability for defense. The culprits identified as offshore programmers. This issue was flagged as a bigger threat than domestic hackers. I remember, about three weeks ago, SDR News talked about the Commerce Department revealing attacks by Chinese hackers, and forced one of their bureaus to cut off Internet access and discard some virus-infected computers, and there were some earlier attacks in July of this year. It is difficult and costly to test every line of software on increasingly sophisticated weapons systems, and the Pentagon is certainly conscious of the issue.
Comedy Central may be called Comedy of Errors. YouTube has removed Comedy Central clips, but corporate parent Viacom confirmed that it wants to find some way to keep the clips available, so Viacom gave the green light to YouTube. However, notes later on SlashDot indicated that there was an Idealog post where the evidence had come forth that even more clips were disappearing, and some copies of cease and desist letters that came up, directed at YouTube. So it looks like the left and the right hand are obviously not connected to any central intelligent life anywhere at Viacom.
HBO, on the other hand, is biding their time. A lot of deals being cut with YouTube, and all sorts of providers like Lost and ABC, and The O.C. and MySpace owned by Fox. But conspicuously absent from this is Home Box Office or HBO. It looks like the shoe might drop in the next few months, a subscription-based thing that would allow downloading of HBO programming, not only to video, but also to other devices. This is a bit sticky, though. It would put HBO in competition with cable and satellite operators that now pay the bulk of an estimated three-and-a-half billion dollars a year in revenue to HBO. They pay HBO about six bucks a month for each of the thirty million subscribers.
I mentioned that the TechPodcast.com roundtable that we had last Saturday was run on GoToMeeting. GoToMeeting, of course, is on of our main sponsors. One of the features of GoToMeeting is the ability to record an event, and in this particular event, including MotionBox video demo and the Pamela extension for Skype, the demo that we did for that. That is just one of the features that makes GoToMeeting such a valuable product. Since you can’t always meet in person, you need to meet online. Using GoToMeeting you can conduct on-screen presentations, training sessions, or product demos from anywhere. One low flat rate lets you meet as much as you want. No overages, no surprises. You can try GoToMeeting free. You don’t need a credit card, just visit GoToMeeting.com/TechPodcast. GoToMeeting: Business Meetings That Work.
You really don’t want lawyers with a sense of humor, at least when you are writing patent applications. Reddit found this posted from Techdirt, pointing to a somewhat embarrassing claim on a patent application. It just showed that the applicant never bothered to read what the lawyers had put in. Here’s what it said: “Claim No. 9: The method providing user interface displays in an image-forming apparatus. Which is really a bogus claim amongst real claims, which be removed before filing, wherein the claim is included to determine if the inventor actually read the claims, and the inventor should instruct attorneys to remove this claim.” That really highlights a problem in the patents system: it is not the inventors who write most patents, it is most often the lawyers, who are wording the patent very carefully to make sure that it is as broad as possible.
Google Ad revenue in the UK is actually larger than one of the broadcast networks. At the end of the year, UK will have spent more money advertising on Google than they did on UK’s Channel four television station. This article, which is at CNET, suggests that there is going to be a slow erosion of traditional television broadcasting, and with it the death of some of the great television ads. With a bit of British perspective they said, “The US has been forced to contend with heinously patronizing and crude TV advertising for decades, but the UK advertising industry has managed to create art out of the act of selling. Some of the best short films of the last century have been television advertisements.” It continues–this is on CNET UK–”as the Internet becomes more pervasive, we might abandon televisions altogether, stream “television” directly over the Internet. Rather than there being any great paradigm shift as TV advertisers switch to the web, perhaps the web will simply turn into TV.”
I might preface; I am not a lawyer. I am also not a chemist, but found this was an interesting article from “Slate”. It comes our way from Reddit. It asks the question, “How does a gallon of gasoline make 19 lbs. of carbon dioxide?” If you think about it, each gallon of gas supposedly releases 19 lbs. of carbon dioxide when it burns; but how do you take something that weighs about six lbs. and produce three times as much greenhouse gas? Well it is pretty simple. Carbon from the gasoline mixes with oxygen from the air. Gasoline consists of hydrocarbons, and when they burn, the exchange of carbon encircled by atoms of hydrogen, they break apart and recombine with the air.
Octane consists of eight atoms of carbon and 18 atoms of hydrogen: C8H18. Break down the octane, mix it with enough oxygen or O2, you’ve got the ingredients–atoms of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen to make eight molecules of carbon dioxide, nine molecules of water; these eight molecules of CO2 weigh more than the one molecule of octane that you started with. By any estimate, the amount of carbon dioxide that comes from a gallon of gas has to be based on some assumptions, because not all of it actually burns efficiently; that is where you carbon monoxide comes from as well as some other noxious compounds. I am not a chemist. I am not a lawyer, but presumably the EPA chemist who wrote this new what she was talking about.
Somewhere within Microsoft there has been a change of heart, or at least a little bit of adjustment on the end-user license agreement. Apparently Microsoft is going to allow Vista reinstalls, at least for PC home-brew system builders. Actually sounded almost apologetic on the Windows Vista team blog: “Our intention behind the original terms was geared towards combating piracy. It is clear to us that those original terms were perceived as adversely affecting an important group of customers, PC and hardware enthusiasts.” It went on to at least give credit where credit is due, not the least of which because of the support that was provided to Microsoft about the whole development cycle of Windows Vista, and that is why they claim they have made the change.
Another change that was long overdue came at Boston’s airport. The FCC has put their thumb down on the airport’s ban on wi-fi. It seems that Massport had a real deal going, $8 a day for wireless Internet wi-fi access, and to add insult to this financial injury, they were claiming that the use of wi-fi service in airport lounges could jam airline and public safety radio systems. The FCC basically blasted them for raising bogus technological arguments as well as bogus legal arguments. That opens the door for other airlines to begin to offer wi-fi at Logan. In addition to Continental, who have been fighting this for two years, T-Mobile USA was ordered by Massport to shut down a wi-fi service in Terminal B for American Airlines, and then Delta Airlines was also threatened by Massport. So it looks like the FCC in this particular situation has whipped Massport into line. It would just be wonderful if we could have this solved all over the country so that you truly could get the use of your wi-fi, as a business traveler, when you really need it.
Don’t have to belabor this next story. You are probably quite aware of this article in Business Week, taking a look at how YouTube has altered the time-honored tradition of political mudslinging, moved it into the digital age. One notable example, the Virginia Senate race, where incumbent George Allen was way ahead of challenger Jim Webb until one of Webb’s aides happened to capture some footage of Allen making a racial slur during a campaign stop. Almost immediately, that video went to the #1 ranking on YouTube, and stayed there for several days, gaining national attention. Allen has taken a steep drop in the polls, and the Republicans now risk losing a seat that they thought was secure. So YouTube, or more properly modern digital media, or citizen media, or whatever you want to call it, is very dangerous territory indeed if you are a politician. You also have to consider that video–not full frame-rate, but video–can be grabbed by many camera phones and still cameras. It is said a picture is worth a thousand words, and the old adage from the news photographer business was that Pulitzer Prize photos come down to four words: F8 And Be There. In these opening years of the 21st century, that goes double for YouTube video. Not much required if you have got a device and you are there and have a chance to see it.
So quickly, let’s review. Diebold demands that HBO cancel documentary on their machines, a couple of nasty surprises in Microsoft Vista’s end-user agreement, IE7 being released; some concern about military software; YouTube and Comedy Central on and off again; lawyers with a sense of humor; how does a gallon of gasoline make 19 lbs. of carbon dioxide; Microsoft Vista; stupid wi-fi; and political mudslinging. If you need details on these or any of the SDR news, just go to our site at SlashDotReview.com and hit the custom search box. It will pull up the complete article and details on SlashDotReview.com.
Comments and suggestions: SlashDotReview@gmail.com. My name is Andy McCaskey. No affiliation with SlashDot, other than as a regular reader. Thanks to Melodeo.com, continuing to provide mobile distribution for our program on selected Motorola, Nokia, and Sony-Ericsson phones. Thanks for listening. This should hit your Friday morning commute. I hope you have a good weekend, and we will see you Sunday night.
SDR2006-11-05 Podcast – SDRNews
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Andy McCaskey: This is the Tech Podcast Network. If it’s tech, it’s here.
This is SlashDotReview for the 5th of November, 2006.
My name is Andy McCaskey. This is SDR News; tech news, highlights from SlashDot, Digg, and Reddit.
Today’s sponsor is GoDaddy.com, your One Stop Shop for internet needs.
Let’s start off the week right, take a quick look at SDR News.
If you’re sitting in traffic, you may be interested to know that some analysis of the traffic jam might be possible through cell phones. Companies and government’s always looking for alternatives to radar and road centers, and so forth.
Two companies in Atlanta are taking data from wireless carriers and crunching the data to determine how fast phones are moving, and then overlaying them on maps to calculate traffic conditions.
Two companies, one of them is called “Air Stage”, is already partnered with Sprint/Nextel and the Georgia Department of Transportation.
Obvious privacy concerns over the usage of the cell phone location, and most particularly, the accuracy of the date. Wireless companies allow them to process the data from the towers, calculate the position of the phones about twice a second when it’s being used, once every 30 seconds when it’s not being used. The technology can track vehicles to within 330 feet without using global positioning system satellites.
You may remember a discussion that we had on voting machines in Miami. Now, last week we talked machines getting out of sync when they were heavily used, and essentially, having to realign the video touch-screen with the electronics inside. Basically a 15-step process that the poll workers had to master.
Joshua Michael Marshall, at TalkingPointsMemo.com, says: “Can you imagine an ATM slipping out of sync after heavy usage? And billions of dollars of commercial transactions seem to successfully complete each day in the country when operated by consumers, with far more complicated software and more possible choices than an electronic voting ballot.”
His comment: “No excuse for this sort of thing. Anyone suggests this is “par for the course” was either sold a bill of goods or is selling one.”
You know, it’s a rough time to be a PC retailer. The problems exposed by the new operating system, Vista, exploding laptop batteries and changing technology, just basically puts consumers into a foul mood. In fact, consumers many consumers are purchasing PC hardware, but sometime next year; no time soon.
According to market researcher, IDC, PC shipment growth slowed to 7.9% in the third quarter. Normally, it should be double-digit percentage growth, as it was in the past three years.
Consumers may be looking for bargain gifts, and may opt for less expensive gadgets, such as cell phones, video phones, etc. Noise-canceling headphones are of particular interest.
Incidentally, Wall Street Journal this past weekend, had a good comparison. If you have $350 to spend, no question, the Bose headsets are probably the finest you can buy. But they also said the Sony unit was really competitive at $200.
If you took a quick trip to Sam’s or Wal-Mart, or similar sort of popular store, you’ll just be amazed at the number of wide-screen TVs that are there; all sorts of price points. And you can see that the major push is away from the PC world and into the wide-screen TV, at least from a retailer’s standpoint.
A couple of notes on YouTube. The SlashDotReview group at YouTube has some items that are starting to disappear. For example, the Mark Cuban interview was put up and disappeared after just a couple of days; when that was pulled.
Most of the things we have are independently produced and there staying up there well. Video for Today is from the World of Holograms. Basically, a tutorial and that’s the sort of thing that works really well on YouTube. It works even better on Motionbox.
Motionbox is the technology that we demonstrated at the Tech Podcast Roundtable a week or two ago. The thing that makes Motionbox cool is that it allows you to do “deep tagging” into the video, to specific clips or frames inside of the video and then send just those clips in an email to one of your potential customers.
If you’re a small business and are planning on using video in a communication strategy, you really want to look at Motionbox. You should be on that in a “hot second.” And you can tell them that you heard about it on SlashDotReview and STR News.
There is a Zero Day vulnerability, a new one in Windows; both Microsoft and Secunia are warning about the discovery of this vulnerability. It affects all Microsoft operating systems, except Windows 2003 Server. It is an attack factor through Internet Explorer six or 7, so as I say, be careful where you surf to. It is already being actively exploited. It’s an Active-X controller and it allows successful execution of arbitrary code.
YouTube does have its problems. Wall Street Journal had an interesting article about the troubles that YouTube executives are finding when they have to go through all the necessary permissions to license songs and shows that users are putting up on the popular site. YouTube, or its partners, have to locate the parties that could be studios, it could be actors, it could be music composers, owners of the venues, musician unions. And all sorts of people get involved and are trying to get a piece of the action. And of course, where they don’t succeed in tracking all this down, YouTube risks being hit with lawsuits or having to take the content down directly.
It’s an excellent summary in the Wall Street Journal article and it talks about, as bad as it is for music, it’s even worse for video, commercially produced video like, ER or Miami Vice, or something like that.
Time to pause for a moment. GoDaddy has been a long time sponsor or SlashDotReview and STR News. There’s always lots to talk about as far hosting and domains are concerned, but if you’re not in the market for a hosting provider or for a new domain, there’s some other things from GoDaddy that might be very useful to you in your Internet needs.
If you go to the GoDaddy.com page, in one spot, you’ll find something interesting, even if you’re not registering a domain name or looking for a hosting provider. You can add 256 bit secure certificates, or promote your business online with Traffic Blazer. You could set up a quick shopping cart that works with QuickBooks, or get email protected from fraud, spam, and viruses. Special code slash, S-L-A-S-H, will save you ten percent on that new order. It’s a one stop shop for your Internet needs at GoDaddy.com.
Scientists have said that the White House put the muzzle on them. Two federal agencies are investigating whether the Bush Administration tried to block government scientists from speaking freely and to censor research. This investigation came to light from Senator Frank Lottenberg, Democrat from New Jersey. Commerce Department and NASA have begun a coordinated sweeping investigation of the censorship and suppression of the federal research into global warming. Total US emissions – now seven billion tons a year – are projected to rise 14% from 2002-2012.
Talked about this a little bit on Friday – each person generates about 2.3 tons of CO2 each year. As we spoke on Friday it was, I believe, 19 pounds of CO2 for each gallon of gasoline that’s burned. A healthy tree stores 13 pounds of carbon annually – 2.6 tons per acre each year. So an acre of trees absorbs enough carbon dioxide over one year to equal the amount produced by driving a car about 26, 000 miles. Conversely, if every American family planted just one tree, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would be reduced by a billion pounds annually – almost 5% of the amount human activity pumps into the atmosphere each day.
I think the whole system is running close to redline. Half of Europe, apparently, Saturday night lost electrical power. It was an overload in Germany’s power network and that triggered outages that left millions without electricity. It started in Cologne, Germany and shut down parts of France, Italy, Spain, and Austria, Belgium, Netherlands, and Croatia. How much of this is running close to the redline is a matter of interest. Had a conversation with a fellow just a few days ago – he was about to retire from the Pittsburgh area as a power lineman. He said that in addition to all of the technological things going on, there’s going to be a very major demographic shift in the power line business as far as linemen are concerned because of retirement patterns in the next five to seven years.
Notes on mychingo – the audio comment block that we have at slashdotreview.com. Appreciate the audio comments that people try and send them in. But we’ve had two folks that tried to send things in the last couple of days – one person named John and another person named Hamaho. They tried to send in a message a few days ago. In both cases I see the file, but the file has no audio. So you can try again online or you can contact me through the SDR News Extra system – that’s 408-731-6848.
Mainstream media is about to begin something they call crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing puts readers to work as watchdogs, whistle blowers, and researchers in large investigative features. Gannet’s behind this particular one. They want to change their newsrooms to utilize crowdsourcing – just basically a new term. CNN, as you know, has the I-Report system to encourage people to send in videos. The News Press in Ft. Meyers, Florida asked readers to help investigate a local scandal and it turned out that it was very successful for the newspaper. Readers simultaneously organized their own investigations. All sorts of retired engineers looked at blueprints, and retired accountants, and the inside whistle blower leaked documents that showed there was some evidence of bid rigging in that particular situation.
I guess it’s a good trend. As baby-boomers age and retire we’ll probably see more of it not less. Public service, of course, isn’t the only concern the newspapers have. They have figured out that no one wants to read a 400 column-inch investigative feature online, unless you make them a part of the process, and then they get engaged and basically duplicate what online communities have been doing for several years.
Bad guys are not unaware of this. Wikipedia has been used to launch a virus attack in Germany. Hackers posted a link to an alleged fix for a new version of the Blaster worm. Instead, the link itself downloaded malicious software. Then, to add insult to injury, they sent emails advising people to update their computers and directed them to the Wikipedia article.
Nano-optical switches – university researchers in California now using light to control biological nano-molecules and proteins. This is really important because they think they can develop treatments for eye diseases such as a major loss of light detectors in the retina, which is a major cause of blindness. This also affects other degenerative diseases such as macular degeneration. All of this is going to be in the laboratory for a number of years yet but ZDNet has references and photographs of what you can do with these nano switches.
That’s it for today. 408-731-6848 – the Home of SDR News Extra Edition. That’s a source of extra items and news plus a way to talk back and comment on the podcast and any news items that you hear.
Quick review: Traffic jams being tracked with cell phones; ATMs slipping out of sync; PC makers may be left on the shelves; The new zero-day vulnerability in Windows; Signing deals frustrating for YouTube; Muzzled scientists by the White House; Half of Europe without electricity; Crowdsourcing; Wikipedia’s virus; Nano-optical switches.
If you need details on these or any other SDR News item, custom search will pull it up for you, just go to slashdotreview.com. Comments and suggestions – slashdotreview@gmail.com. This is Andrew McCaskey. No affiliation with SlashDot other than as a regular reader.
Thanks to melodia.com, continuing to provide mobile distribution for our program on selected Motorola, Nokia, and Sony Ericsson phones. Hope you get started on a good week. We’ll see you tomorrow.
SDR 2006-11-06 Podcast SDR News
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Andy McCaskey: This is Tech Podcast. If it is tech, it’s here. This is Slashdot Review for November 6, 2006. My name is Andy McCaskey and this is SDR News, tech news highlights from Slashdot, Digg and Reddit. Today’s sponsor is GoToMeeting, affordable business meetings that work.
Here’s today’s SDR News. Steven Balmer had an announcement overnight in Tokyo. Microsoft is going to have VOIP by next year. It’s going to be incorporated into the operating system, desktop applications and server software unified with email, video and instant messaging. Of course, Vista is being introduced now to corporate customers, customers next year. The other thing that Steve Balmer said never again will there be such a long interval between releases.
Remember yesterday, we talked about HBO’s controversial hacking democracy. I guess not yesterday, it was supposed to be last Thursday it was supposed to air. A lot of issues with Diebold voting machines. Well that video is now up on Google video. There is an excellent summary on CNN that talks about Diebold’s history. If you think that electronic balloting is a joke, well there has never been an infallible ballot whether the method was paper ballot, lever machines, or punch cards or optical scanners or electronic, whether it has been in use from the 1700s, or the 1890s or the 1960s, 1970s, there is way to hack almost every system. My personal knowledge extends just back to 1970, so what I consider to be normal, whether it is paper or lever machines or paper punchers chads, probably all has been hacked at one time or another. Question we need to ask before 2008 cranks in, is if we could force electronic machine to open source, how much of this would go away?
You probably have not thought about online stores in The Americans with Disabilities Act. Target is now becoming itself a target by the National Federation for the Blind because it accuses the retailer of not complying with The Americans for Disabilities Act. It seems that the online store for Target is unbrowseable with a screen reader and that excludes 200, 000 blind people who can’t go online to become paying customers. Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, you may have recalled that name, she held that the law’s accessibility requirements applies to all services offered by a place of public accommodation. Since physical stores are places of public accommodation, the ruling said the online store must be equally accessible. It is the same Marilyn Hall Patel who handled the RIAA’s case against Napster in 2001.
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As frustrating as it is for visually impaired readers, it is also frustrating for the web site author; for example, I have been having some frustration with the contact form on the site, slashdotreview.com. It is starting to pick up spam just as WordPress, the comment section, has a lot of trouble with spam. There is a plug-in called a Kismet that takes care of most of that. The contact form is now beginning to attract the attention of spammers and so the solution you have from a web authoring standpoint is to go back and re embed the mailing address into a picture, into a graphic, and, of course, that makes it very hard for physically impaired people to get that address. So that’s one of the reasons I mention it almost everyday being slashdotreview@gmail.com.
It pays to keep an open mind on all sorts of subjects. In fact, one of those that is probably the hardest to keep an open mind on is this whole idea of global warming. There has a bit of very convincing article in the UK Telegraph, which might make you think that the scientific consensus on global warming is maybe not so solid. There was a lot of discussion last week with Gordon Brown and a chief economist who also said that global warming was one of the worst market failures that ever occurred but this article in the Telegraph seems to be very solid and well researched and speaks unfavorably of a whole host of authorities the UN, or editors of Nature and the Canadian government who seemed to have picked a side in the global warming debate without looking at the evidence. The author of the Telegraph piece is Christopher Monckton who is a retired journalist and former policy advisor to Margaret Thatcher.
Some positive news from the world of wireless. BusinessWeek is talking about 3G. Third generation of wireless is finally coming into its own. For years, people talked about 3G wireless as a utopia where voice and data and video would all finally merge together. Indeed there is a new technology known as HSDPA, which is starting to appear on wireless networks in Europe. The technology is promising speeds as high theoretically as 3.6 megabits per second. The big winner in this high speed downlink packet access or HSDPA seems to be Qualcomm. In a typical card, the $73 the component costs inside the card, about $40 is in chips that come from Qualcomm. HSDPA started to appear on the voter phone network in Europe and Cingular Wireless in the US also Bell South. Meanwhile Samsung has also begun to build HSDPA ready phones. Qualcomm as you know for years has had CDMA sewn up pretty much for itself and it looks like it will be something like that with HSDPA. But there’s other companies that build HSDPA chips including Texas Instruments, Broadcom, Motorola, Siemens and Sierra Wireless.
Lighter note leading non-technical people alone in a data center. This story is almost ten years old. It goes back to Georgia Institute of Technology which had a data center that was partially built or being remodeled. They would bring in plastic and lay it down over the equipment in the middle of the night. In the middle of the night there was a serious disk crash. Emergency call to the vendor, rebuild all kinds of frantic effort to get things in place next night, the sys admin heads home for a rest and gets a call the servers failed again. It has all the symptoms of a disk crash, so much so that this time the vendor sent out not only the replacement part but a technician as well. He cracked the thing open and heads had gouged right into the platter and cut grooves right into the metal. Nobody could figure that out, however, a few days, later sys admin was going through just as the contactor returned. No sense of carrying in both of those saw horses, one’s all you need. The cabinet over there is just the right height to hold up the other end of the two by four. Just pass me the sabre saw, we’ll have this wall finished by midnight.
If you don’t want to get sued by the RIAA, just disable your Wi-fi security. Tammy Marsden, of Palm Desert, California, was sued by the RIAA and in court she stated that her wireless router was not secure. Therefore, the file sharing seen on her network could have been from anybody just passing by. The defense worked, the RIAA dropped the case, and that could set a precedent for a number of individual lawsuits, MPAA movies, as well as RIAA music.
[GoToMeeting ad]
Sandia Laboratories has a machine called the ZMachine that can melt a diamond into a puddle. It melts it by creating pressures more than 10 million times that of the atmosphere at sea level. It will turn a diamond sheet into a pool of liquid. The object of the experiment was to understand what would happen in the pressures that diamond would face if it was used as a capsule for a BB-sized pellet of nuclear fusion material. The idea is that the outer shell of the pellet has to transmit the pressure evenly into the interior and diamond as a solid can actually do that; a diamond as a liquid will do that, but somewhere in the middle, between 6.9 million atmospheres and 10.4 million, there’s uneven pressures, kind of an in between phase, and it would ruin the implosion. All this is just another step in the drive to release energy from fused atoms; unlimited electrical power; been seeking this for well over 50 years. Because half a bathtub full of sea water, in a fusion reaction, can produce as much energy as 40 train cars of coal.
Don’t know why anybody would want to simulate E. Coli bacteria, but when you think about it, it might have some actual advantages. A BBC story talks to a scientist who has been developing computational models of bacteria to advance our understanding of actual bacteria. The whole idea is that the molecular systems that allow bacteria to respond to environmental changes can be modeled and that simulation then can be used to extend other research. It’s gotten to the point where you can’t progress without this sort of information, but you’re just drowning in data. The whole idea is that when you get to a point where computer simulations are able to mimic an organism accurately, they can be used as experimental objects in their own right rather than using an biological organism.
Saving democracy with Web 2.0. Actually this is a really encouraging article. First of all, Google has announced it would overlay the 2006 campaign data from the Federal Election Commission and opensecrets.org on top of Google Earth. This sort of thing is laying pipe for 2008. Wired has a piece about Web 2.0, how it can save democracy in the upcoming election. For example, you can already access online data where which companies donate to which political parties and candidates and get some good guesses about what they get in return. Opensecrets.org is run by the Center for Responsive Politics; a startling amount of information on campaign donations and members of Congress and special interest groups. You can tag federal information about expenditures, unpaved highways, or toxic waste sites with Geo-RSS that would let citizens cross-reference the data with other information. Data feeds that use AJAX, Jason, an open GIS web map service, can incorporate externally hosted geo-spatial capabilities in the mash-ups. All of this is going to be, I think, very very interesting, and as I said lays a good foundation for 2008.
NPR had some interesting comments this afternoon, a discussion on product placement of politicians. A little factoid that was claimed in that event surrounded Mike Warner’s SecondLife press conference or more importantly it talked about the fact that, they claim, that there were more people in SecondLife on a regular basis than watch cable news channels. Politicians go where the people are, so look out SecondLife, you’re going to hit up for contributions there as well.
408-731-6848, is the home of SDR News:Extra Edition. I apologize for not getting things up to date, but that’s a different story and relates to some shrink wrap software that just didn’t work. I’m trying to track all that media down. Anyway, let’s review here tonight: Microsoft enters the VOIP marketplace; Hacking Democracy, that video is available online; online stores and 88 legislation; another study out on global warming; practical to sell your net access out on the horizon with 3G; never leave non-technical people alone in the data center, especially with a sabre saw; if you don’t want to get sued by the RIAA, disable your Wi-fi security; the Sandia “Z Machine” melts diamonds; computational simulations of E. Coli; SecondLife politics; and 2008, lots to look forward to.
My name’s Andy McCaskey, no affiliation with Slashdot, other than as a regular reader. Thanks to DownloadRadio.org for BitTorrent and archive distribution of our content. Thanks to odeo.com for continuing to provide mobile distribution for the program on select Motorola, Nokia, and Sony Ericcson phones.
That’s it for this evening, we’ll see you tomorrow.
SDR 2006-11-07 Podcast SDR News
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Andy McCaskey: This is the Tech Podcast. If it’s tech, it’s here.
This is SlashDot Review for November 7, 2006. My name is Andy McCaskey and this is SDR News, news highlights from SlashDot, Digg and Reddit. Today’s sponsor is godaddy.com. It’s Election Day in the US, lots of news. Except for Digg, looks like portions of the Digg site is down for maintenance right at the moment, but we have got a couple of items from them and it is time to move forward for SDR News.
Looks like the plan is that every Vista computer will get its own domain name. Could be quite handy according to APC Magazine because it will allow remote access of files and also eliminates a lot of the pesky DNS issues. There is a catch to it though. To use it, you have to be using IP version six and it looks like the push for Vista might be the thing that finally switches everything from IP v4 to IP v6. At the same time, Microsoft is trying to convince businesses to adopt Vista and Office 2007 all at once. In fact, in all likelihood, Enterprises will tie Vista, Office 2007 and the hardware upgrade cycle all into one big package. The idea is that it is easier to handle one disruption to the IT system other than two, or maybe even other than three.
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Lots of information on voting technology. ACMQ tried to answer the question, does technology help or hinder election integrity. This is a politically-loaded question and merely claiming that research into election integrity is needed is seen as a challenge by many politicians. Really should choose some safe area of inquiry working on evolution or stem cells or something. It depends on your point of view. Different participants tend to point to different threats. Election system vendors and election officials generally focus on effective defense against outside attackers or hackers. Meantime, public interest groups focus on the possibility of the election official themselves corrupting the results.
There is a boom and bust cycle and it occurs in the information technology world just like it did to engineers in the aerospace defense world in the 60s and 70s. This one comes from the IT front in India. The software industry body Nasscom has warned that India faces a shortfall of million skilled workers by 2010. They will need 350, 000 engineers a year but no more than 150, 000. The most highly skilled engineers will be available on each of those years. It’s a new development, exporting of Indian tech jobs back to the US. Of course, the question is who in the US is going to do these jobs? Even Bill Gates has spoken of this in a business forum in Moscow. Anybody that can get those skills now will have a lot of opportunity.
Early returns on electronic voting machines are not pretty. Here is the quote of the day. “We have got five machines, one of them has got to work.” Network World has an exhaustive set of examples and anecdotal evidence of voting machine problems all over the country and when I say exhaustive, I mean like 30 paragraphs of delays, malfunctions and general screw ups, effecting optical readers as well as touch screens and that’s not counting the suspected partisan examples of good old fashion paper ballot shenanigans of some sort from some of the more partisan sources. It’s a fine mess and I know it is going to be covered in main stream press and particularly in close elections. I think some good is going to come out of this, at least generate a call for reform and get us ready for 2008 unless we get distracted by something really important that pushes things off the front burner, something like Brittany Spears’ divorce.
Quick note on SlashDot review, YouTube video of the day. Yesterday, we talked about holograms and today’s video is not a hologram. It’s a form of 3D linticular photography. It is fairly old technology to apply depth to an image. What I really liked in the video was a shift to a younger audience. Part of it’s tongue and cheek but the following explanation is in the video. “This is a special camera that uses a chemically treated light-sensitive film to capture images. Until recently this technology was used for photography in an analog process that required the film to be removed from the camera before the images could be retrieved.”
Don’t normally talk about photographs but there are some striking photos that were cited on RedIt today. These are photos of the highest railway in the world this Pan Himalayan line that runs 16, 640 feet above sea level, across Tibet’s snow- covered plateau between Beijing and La Hasa. Photography is some of the first to be seen of this railway complete with the hermetically-sealed pressurized cars which was completed in October of 2005.
Space telescope has caught a monster flare. NASA swift satellites have seen a giant flare explode from a nearby star, fortunately, not the nearby star. Our sun flares when magnetic field lines in the solar atmosphere snap but this was on a far larger scale, maybe 100 million times as strong. The energy released in the explosion on Two Pegasi was equivalent to about 50 quintillion atomic bombs. A quintillion is 10 to the 18. If the sun were ever to produce such an outburst, it would certainly cause mass extinction on the Earth. Two Pegasi is a binary system 135 light years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus. Two stars are so close that the tidal forces cause both stars to spin quickly; they rotate in lockstep once every seven days, compared to the rotation period of our sun, of 28 days.
Time now for a quick word from GoDaddy.
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Google is moving strongly into radio advertising. It is a company called dMark Broadcasting. Google is hiring scores of radio salespeople in major markets and offering premium wages as well, about 50 percent above prevailing salaries. There is going to be a public test of Google Audio Ads, we think, by the end of the year. Advertisers will be able to go online and sign up for targeted radio ads using the same system as they use to buy AdWords, that they use to buy search ads.
Google made a clear move into radio in January, when they agreed to pay more than $1 billion, depending on performance, for dMark Broadcasting Inc., which connects advertisers to radio stations through an automated delivery system. So with YouTube, the video space, $1.65 billion, dMark and the radio space, $1 billion, you can see Google has got the checkbook out; they are on the move. I sure hope they can hang on to the objective of “Don’t Be Evil.”
Speaking of evil, BotNets have got to be at the top of the list. All this increase in spam that we are seeing is the result of BotNet activities. However the worst one, which we have mentioned before, called SpamThru, spam levels have gone up past three to now three out of four emails are spam. This past months average, 77.4 percent was spam, up from 72 percent two months ago. SpamThru guys are very clever. They are employing numerous tactics to thwart detection. They release new strains of the Trojan at regular intervals in order to confuse anti-virus signatures. In addition, according to MessageLabs, there is Stration, also known as Warezov, a prolific worm that is often attached to a message that poses as a Windows Update. Once it is downloaded and installed, it modifies the PC so the infected computer cannot retrieve anti-virus updates. It then transmits harvested email addresses to its creator. I know on systems around here with Spybot Search and Destroy it has refused to take updates, and I have had to uninstall and then reinstall fresh bits and fresh definitions, and then everything seems to be fine. Then, within the course of a week or two, it will refuse to take updates again and have to redo the process. I’m not sure if you have seen that, but it is certainly disconcerting.
Finally, the Hacker Profiling Project. It is just like CSI, the television show. It is a project aiming to profile hackers, just like the police do common criminals. It is not based out of the U.S. It is a United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute project. The idea is to develop a complete methodology for hacker profiling, and then release it under GNU/FDL. At the end of the project, if a company sends logs relating to an intrusion, just like CSI, they will try and provide a profile of the attacker–for example, his technical skills, probably geographic location, analysis of modus operandi, and other big and small traces that are left on the crime scene. This will permit investigators to observe and where possible preview new attack trends, and show drastic behavior changes, and provide a real picture of the world of hacking and its international scene.
That’s it for this evening. 408-731-6848 is the home of SDR News Extra Edition, or you can catch the orange badge at the site, it is SlashDotReview.com. That is they way I can provide you with some extra items.
Let’s review some of the stories today: Vista computers using IP Version 6; discussion on IT worker shortages, information technology and voting; several stories related to electronic voting machines; a discussion of Scibuntu, the Ubuntu Linux for scientists; a description of a monster flare that was captured by space telescope. One thing I did not mention: MoveOn.org is offering a $250 000 reward for voter suppression evidence that leads to a felony conviction. I did talk about Google moving strongly into radio advertising, and also the Hacker Profiling Project.
You can find details on these and other stories by going to SlashDotReview.com and typing any of these keywords into the search box that you find there. If you need details on these or any SDR News items, custom search will pull it up for you. Just go to SlashDotReview.com. Comments and suggestions: SlashDotReview@gmail.com. My name is Andy McCaskey, no affiliation with SlashDot other than as a regular reader. Thanks to DownloadRadio.org for BitTorrent and archive distribution of our content. Hope you continue to have a good week, and we will see you tomorrow.
SDR 2006-11-08 Podcast SDR News
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Announcer: This is the Tech Broadcast Network. If it’s tech, it’s here.
Andy McCaskey: This is the Slashdot review for November 7, 2006. My name is Andy McCaskey. This is SDR News. Tech news highlights from Slashdot Digg and Reddit. Today’s sponsor is Good Meeting, affordable business meetings that work. Lots of tech news today, here’s SDR News.
As we mentioned, Microsoft is preparing for voice-over IP. It’s kind of a road show that is running high-powered executives all over the globe to flog Vista and Office 2007. In fact, CEO Steve Balmer told attendees in Tokyo that Microsoft is planning on making a move to VOIP and we mentioned that yesterday or the day before. I guess the idea is if you can whip up enough enthusiasm to tie Visa and VOIP together; it might help to move Windows Vista just a little bit faster.
They plan to integrate voice-over IP into Windows Vista itself and unify email, VOIP, video chat and instant messaging all integrated into the operating system. They’d like to see a rapid implementation and adoption of Visa amongst businesses, but it looks like it’s not going to happen for a couple of reasons. Office 2007 is also going to face similar challenges and it puts Microsoft in an awkward position.
Whatever they are able to do with VOIP with whatever they have on hand, they are going to have a ton of Windows XP users who are also running older versions of Office. That means that Microsoft has to simultaneously support three desktop operating systems for the workplace; Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Professional and Vista Business Editions, both Business and Enterprise.
Now, the oldest one is Windows 2000 Professional and it won’t fall out of support until 2010. Reality is that NT four workstations still in use at 19% of businesses that were surveyed recently. 2005-2006 numbers also show Windows 2000 usage on the desktop is not declined in recent years. So I feel a little bit guilty, I’m getting a new XP image on the work laptop on Friday.
According to CNN, human beings may have acquired a gene for developing bigger brains from Neanderthals. About 70% of the population have a variant of a gene that regulates brain size. The variant of the gene being most common in the people of European decent where Neanderthal men lived along side ancient humans and is least common in people of African decent.
Wireless centers have the potential to monitor power grids. Yesterday or the day before we mentioned a blackout in Western Europe ten days ago and that’s just an example, there’s another one in New York State just last month. In some cases, utility companies have to dispatch people all over the place to discover the cause of the power failure or to restore power.
Engineers at the University of Buffalo in New York think they have a better solution Just deploy wireless Nanotech sensors to monitor the network and find the exact location of the failure. If you consider that any major failure costs much more than 30 million dollars, it’s a bit hard to understand why these researchers aren’t finding much funding for their research. Maybe part of the problem is the word Nanotech, it’s trendy but they’re thinking of small sensors, not nano sensors.
320 Megabit per second over copper; that’s what Home PNA is promising. That’s a networking spec that works over co-actual or twisted pair wiring. HPNA stands for Home Phone line Networking Alliance. They’ve jumped the speed from 128 Megabits per second to 320. Good deal faster than competing network standards like Home Plug AV which is a power line based scheme and something called MoCA, multimedia over coax. They’re both competing for the fastest networking technology outside of gigabit Ethernet.
HPNA 3.1 can handle VSDL, ASDL, plain old telephone service and television simultaneously. Home Plug AV, on the other hand, works up to 200 megabit per second with sub carriers between two and 28 megahertz. 802.11n, of course the wireless favorite. Then MoCA the multimedia over coax which has been around since early 2004. MoCA uses coaxial cable and offers max through put of about 135 megabits per second.
The Slashdot Review YouTube Group has two new videos today. A 9-second one on the cloak of Ben’s visibility that revolves around a carefully positioned video camera, a projector and a raincoat screen works just like Harry Potter says it should. The second one is a bit more sophisticated, about four minutes in a serious report from Duke University; the use of composite materials to seriously disrupt the microwave signature of a copper cylinder, in fact, almost to make you disappear. It’s interesting to me because my day job involves simulation of such materials and structures at microwave frequencies.
If you have a video that illustrates your work, please upload it to YouTube and let me know. Be sure and send along your name and a link to the video at slashdotreview@gmail.com.
Dig has a handy reference on how to display.txt files on your desktop. If you keep a work log, grocery list, product ideas or a calendar in.txt files, here’s a way to embed that information directly into your Windows desktop into the wallpaper. It’s a free program called Samurize. You can embed that right in the desktop with that software and it displays a constantly updated.txt file on the computer desktop. You don’t need a text editor or command shell open, it’s there for quick and easy reference.
The Chinese are putting up a GPS system. Its called Beidou and apparently its being opened up for free access within China. Now this has the European investors in the Galileo Navigation system a little bit upset because they’ve put two-hundred thousand Euros into their project and they had anticipated that China would be chipping in something beyond the two million Euros they have already contributed. Initially China declared that access to their system would be restricted to the military only and Europe had then planned to re-coup the costs of their system by selling commercial licenses to China. The Beta system has ten meters of accuracy for commercial use and, then of course, the military restricted system presumably more accurate.
CEO of Google says take your data and run. Google is promising to make the data that they store for in users more portable and they are urging other people to do the same with things like the data from Writely or Google spreadsheets. You can look at it and say they are making it simple for users to walk away from a Google service with which they are unhappy keeps everybody honest. At least that’s what Eric Schmidt said at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco. In other Google news, Google apparently is going to keep the YouTube service separate from Google Video, instead of merging the two together.
Pause for just a moment to hear today’s word from Gotomeeting.
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Skype 3.0 Beta is out. Click to Call is an extension of a feature that was first found and put into the product for Ebay. Some other improvements are redesigned UI, tweaks to some of the language files and improved video device detection. It has been over a year since Ebay purchased Skype still unclear how they are going to recoup the 2.6 billion dollars that it paid for the company. Skype 3.0 beta is for Windows only and is probably going to remain that way. The official Mac 0S 10 client just hit 2.0 last month and Skype for Linux is still stuck at 1.3.
DARBA has come up with a project not thinking small. It is the ultimate speech translation engine project. They are asking that it be capable of real-time interpretation, television and radio programs as well as printed or online textual information in order to be summarized, extracted and presented to human analysts emphasizing points of interest. Pretty tall order.
Strange world when you combine the legal system and technology. In fact a spammer cannot have an accuser’s hard drive. There are reasons for that. Parties have reached a settlement in the Joel Hodgell v. EF Financial LLC, an anti spam case after Joel sued the defendant over spams that he received. Defendant asked the judge to make the Joel to turn over a cop of his hard drive. It might not sound strange until you realize the case in question was 100% on web mail and it was never stored on his hard drive The expert witness should have known that the chances of Yahoo or Hotmail turning over a drive are low, really low.
Quick note, you heard me mention Melodeo. I would like to offer thanks to those who are listening on Melodeo and are listening on a cell phone to help push Slashdotreview and SDR news into one of their favorites on their front page. Melodeo also has an online listening presence. The cool thing about being on the play list there is you can listen at your desk then pause, go to your car, dial in from the phone, and resume exactly where you left off in your podcast listening. It’s kind of a combination of podcast receiver and social network. They also have a good tech podcast network area as well.
Getting down to the last mile for Windows Vista before the release. They have something called sharks and limpets. Sharks are bugs that everyone agrees have to be fixed before the product ships. Limpets are issues that can be fixed but where the needs are less critical.
Segway X2, it’s a golf machine, a bag carrier, a score card holder and special low pressure set of tires that enable the X2 golf to travel gently and cause less damage to the turf then a golf cart. Typical round of golf usually takes at least four hours. The Segways enables 18 holes to be processed in less than three hours. Once more players use the Segeways find that it is easier to talk because all four players can travel the course side by side, rather than having to split up into two separate golf carts.
Finally a discussion on traffic lights. Do you really need them? Well there is an EU backed project known as Shared Space, a study done in the Netherlands. It takes lights away. Instead of stoplights, they put in roundabouts. Turns out that people take more care when the signs are removed and even though there are accidents, there are small accidents because everybody is trying to drive more carefully and it actually speeds things up.
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Kind of like a can of worms in Rochester, NY some years ago. There were two freeways and when they intersected to continue on course, the far left lane had to get to the far right lane just as the far right lane had to move to the far left lane. Actually it worked pretty well.
That’s it for today. Let’s review quickly. Microsoft is prepping its move for voice- over ip. Speculation big brains came from Neanderthals. Wireless sensors monitoring power grids. Home P and A achievements. The way to display text files on your desktop. Encouragement from the Google CEO to take your data and run. Ultimate language translation funded by DARPA. How to have a way to speed up your golf game with the Segway.
Get details on these or any of the SDR stories, with custom search on the site go to slashdotreview.com type in what you remember of the story and it will pull up the rest of it for you. Comments and suggestions to: slashdotreview@gmail.com.
This is Andy McCaskey, no affiliation with Slashdot other than as a regular reader. Thanks again to Melodio.com continuing to provide Mobile distribution for our program on selected Motorola, Nokia and Sony Erickson phones. That’s it for SDR News today. Have a good day and we will see you tomorrow.