SDR2006-10-15 Podcast – SDRNews
Andy McCaskey: [musical sound] This is the tech podcast. If it’s tech it’s here.
[music]
This is Slashdotreview for October 15, 2006. My name is Andy McCaskey. This podcast contains highlights of recent items from Slashdot, Dig, Credit and other sources. Today’s show is sponsored by GoToMeeting. Business meetings that work. The dial in line 408-731-6848. First of all thanks to August Jackson and Glen Gardner for their continued underwriting support.
Some iPod killers for the holidays. Mp3 newswire says that they have 29 in this year’s crop. They also might point out that since 2004 they’ve reported on 149 portable players and not one iPod killer has emerged from the bunch. But there may be two that have some possibilities this year: the zoom portable of course and SanDisk eight gig E280 flash unit are most compelling to high end users.
The one that is kind of is a solid player though the Sony PSP which they judged to be the best portable media player on the market. Lots of room to grow. Only 10% of households have a digital portable music player at present.
In Seattle the post intelligence are talks about a 911 call tracking site that’s stirred some concern. It seemed like Seattle911.com displayed 911 calls on a map in real time. The objective that they feared was it would make it easier if terrorists were planning an attack. Now the information continues to be available on the fire department site. It is just displayed in graphics not available in text.
Bruce Nier, who is of course famous for security issues says that this is an illusion of protection. If they are really worried about it they should pull the whole thing off the web in its entirety.
You recall the item from a few days ago on Dutch secured E-voting. The Nedap voting machine that supplied about 90% of the electronic voting in the Netherlands was hacked on live television as a demonstration and ended up playing chess by the end of the half hour. The government has reacted to that and ordered all software to be replaced.
All hardware to be checked, and unflashable firmware to be installed. In addition an iron seal is to be placed on the voting machines and the Certification Institute will double check all the measure and on election day will select random machines for accuracy checks. Unfortunately in this country the story kind of fell off the news wire a few weeks ago surplanted by this instant messaging Congressman scandal that seems to be far more entertaining if not less substantive.
French have a controversial study that links higher body mass index to a lower IQ. It’s a five year study more than 2200 adults were involved and it is published in French Neurology Journal. They take four mental ability tests and then repeat them five years later. That’s the process. Of course body mass index is a measure of body fat. 20 or less, BMI of 20 or less could recall 56% of the words on a vocabulary test. Where BMI of 30 or higher could remember only 44 percent.
They are speculating that the theory that hormones secreted from fats could have a damaging effect on cells in the brain or since obesity is widely known to be a cardiovascular risk factor there may be something due to thickening and hardening of the blood vessels in the brain. So you’ve got facts. You have some question as far as causality. Politics is not far behind and this sounds like a story we’ll hear more of as the week goes by.
In Hungry an airport is talking about tagging passengers with RFID. But this is not just any RFID. These are tags that passengers would be instructed to hang around their necks when they get to the airport and their identify and whereabouts would be tracked on a network of high definition cameras.
What makes it different from the RFID that might be used to track say lettuce or potatoes in the supermarket is that these have a range of 10 to 20 meters and thousands of them can be tracked simultaneously. BBC has raised some obvious questions covering the story. They say well how can you ensure that the tags aren’t switched between passengers or removed without notification. A solution looking for a problem. I guess is a way to say that.
RAA has had another blunder. This is the Wilkie case in Chicago. First of all he wasn’t the Paul Wilkie under which the name he was sued under. Number two he never possessed on his computer any of the songs listed in exhibit A from RAA, the list of songs that the investigator claims were downloaded and then three he only had a few of the songs from Exhibit B on his computer and those were from legally purchased CDs that he owned. He never used any online media distribution system. It seems to be the latest in hand fisted attacks on soft targets which we have seen before.
Interesting though Wal-Mart has made some noises. In fact Wal-Mart told the music industry to lower their prices. This is interesting because Wal-Mart represents nearly 20% of major label music sales yet music is only about 2% of Wal-Mart sales. So they get out of selling music it would mean nothing to Wal-Mart but could certainly could certainly have some impact on the music business.
Here’s an idea, may not be a good one but here’s an idea, nuclear plants on barges. This comes from Popular Science. Russia is planning for their arctic territories a 200 million dollar floating power plant. It’s slated for construction next year and it could provide relevantly inexpensive electricity for up to 200,000 people. Every ten years or so people would come in and perform regular maintenance overalls. It is interesting because it is based on two 60 megawatt reactors that are already in use on three Russian nuclear-powered icebreakers. Of course in the Arctic hurricanes aren’t too much of a problem. So they may have some reliability issues when it moves to other parts of world.
Some growing pains in the SDR News Extra Edition. It has been running now for about a week. You can sign up on the site by clicking on the bright red orangeish badge at the top of the page or you can dial into 408-731-6848 and sign up. Well growing pains for the last two nights. I think 1:48 a.m. Eastern time is when it fires off. The system calls everybody on the list. It is not me. I am not sending you any messages at that time because I am monitoring what’s going on, my phone rings and I can just say that I feel your pain.
You hear me use GoToMeeting for tech roundtable but the biggest use that I employ every couple of weeks is a 650 mile remote text support mission for family members. It saves time and is affordable. This next ad talks about business issues but you might find an additional use would be right up your alley. It’s easy to try and you can try it out for free.
[commercial]
You know that online meetings save you time and money but with so many choices which one is right for you. GoToMeeting is the easiest to use web conferencing service. With GoToMeeting you can hold meetings with just a click, show any application to your attendees even if they don’t have the same program. You can record your meetings for playback later or post on your site. It makes collaboration easy with drawing tools. You can highlight, draw and get your points across faster. Best of all you can meet as much as you want for one flat rate. You can try GoToMeeting free for thirty days. GoToMeeting.com/techpodcast. GoToMeeting, online meetings made easy.
Continuing with the news the FCC is proposing to let wireless devices use empty TV channels. You know we are going to be switching to digital broadcast in 2009 and they are going to permit wireless devices to operate in vacant television channels or at least some of them. Channel 37 is out because it is used by radio astronomers. 52-69 are out since they are allocated for public safety use and portions of 14-20 might be out because 13 US cities currently use parts of that spectrum for public safety communications. However, if you look at all that has been done in the license free band yet 2.4 gigahertz I think you will agree that there is some exiting stuff that could come out of this particular ruling.
Here’s an item I picked up last week and failed to include in the podcast. It concerns Vista and virtual machines. If you look closely at Vista licenses they will be limiting OS transfers and actually ban use in virtual machines. It will allow you to move it to only one other device for example, if you replace the motherboard you can transfer vista to that again but if that motherboard goes bad then you get to buy a new copy. Also the license agreement forbids users from installing Vista home basic and Vista home premium in a virtual machine.
Home basic users can’t copy ISOs to their hard drive, can’t run in a virtualized environment and can only share files and printers to a maximum of five network devices. So a little bit of the fine print there might influence your decision to jump on the Vista bandwagon immediately.
Here is something called Patty mail. It gets its name from Patty Dunn from Hewlett Packard. CNet has an article on how HP bugging was used to find this boardroom leak. The company operates as an online service free trial which lets anyone send 25 bugged emails according to the Website and then subscription are about $24 a year. These web bugs one pixel square web graphics that trigger files on a remote server but it turns out that this sort of vulnerability is far worst than you might first think. Microsoft Outlook for example, won’t have a patch until 2007 that would be able to detect these things and so you may be more vulnerable then you think.
Today’s YouTube video on the Slashdot review group is the Sony eReader EBook. The New York Times has a review. Some new information that I wasn’t aware of is that you can leave this thing on more or less permanently. The only time it uses power is when the pages are turned and so you can finish the book and just leave it lay on the end table and it won’t be drawing any current at all. New York Times conclusion few rough edges cumbersome software. Bottom line was there is still some advantages to this wood pulp substrate approach that we have used here for the past 5000 years.
[music]
That’s the show for today. Please don’t forget the dial in line 408-731-6848.. CommentsSlashdotreview@gmail.com. My name is Andy 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, Sony Erickson phones. Thanks for listening and we will see you tomorrow.
SDR2006-10-16 Podcast – SDRNews
Andy McCaskey: This is the tech podcast network if it is tech it is here.
This is the Slashdotreview for October 16th 2006. My name is Andy McCaskey and tonight SDR news features highlights from Slashdot, Dig, Credit and other sources. Today’s show is brought to you by godaddy.com your one stop source for internet needs.
At the start of the program this evening I have to point you to YouTube, the Slashdot review group on YouTube. Some genuine excitement because the feature tonight is how one man could have built Stonehenge, it is absolutely must see TV and truly amazing. You can find that one the YouTube logo on the site or Youtube.com/group/slashdotreview.
Big story tonight: TV and autism. Cornell university has found a statistically significant relationship between autism rates and television watching by children under age three.
This comes from a article in slate. They found as they studied autism incidents in California, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Washington State that as cable television became common, in Pennsylvania beginning around 1980 childhood autism rose more in the counties that had cable than in the counties that did not have cable. Their conclusion is “We are not saying we found the cause of autism, we are saying we found a critical piece of evidence”.
The word from big media: Saber rattling lawyers. Newscorp, General Electric, NBC, Universal and Viacom have concluded YouTube could be liable to copyright penalties of $150 000 per unauthorized video. And since Viacom claims that Comedy Central and Nickelodeon clips are shown 80,000 times a day via YouTube even the deep pockets of Google aren’t going to be able to rescue this one.
Of course you may want to keep your lawyers at bay because big media really has a dilemma: They are afraid of Google because of its size and clout but they know Google can also be a valuable partner distributing their content and drawing advertising. Recall they struck deals with NBC and Universal and Warner as well as Sony’s Bertleman group a joint venture. And YouTube of course is building a system to help automate identification of the video that might contain copyright material on the site and allow owner to get a portion of ad revenue. So you see it is all about the Benjamins.
Interesting note from Japan: Some infected Mp3 players, 10 000 of them being handed out at McDonalds in addition to the preloaded songs apparently there was a variant of the QQpass password stealing trojan.
Real worlds demand real taxes. Even if it is happening in the virtual world. Second life and World of Warcraft have millions of dollars worth of virtual goods and services which get transported or exchanged everyday. People who cash in on these things and turn them into real world currency are required to report their income to the Internal Revenue Service.
I think I finally have a handle on the details here regarding Spamhouse and the email servers. Spamhouse as you know has a user base of around 650 million and its lists block 50 billion spams per day. There is something that is called the Rockso, registered known spam operators.
However David Linhart of a company called E360 in Chicago, E360 insight. Came up with a court order that could cause a temporary tenfold surge in the amount of spam.
What happened was he got listed as a Rockso, even though Spamhouse maintains a Illinois court has no jurisdiction over a organization based in the UK, district judge Korakis awarded a total of almost $12 million in damages to Linhart he also ordered Spamhouse to remove evidence of Linhart spamming from Rockso and further the court says Spamhouse must cease blocking Linhart spam. Because it is illegal in the UK but is still legal in the US. Linhart turned the tables and asked the court to suspend the spamhouse.org domain until the anti-spam organization complies with the order.
More than 90% of all email is now spam and if the Spamhouse list was eliminated conceptually that could turn into a tenfold increase in traffic. Others are estimating Spamhouse’s blocking efficiency closer to 75%, by this metric spam would increase fourfold not tenfold. By this metric spam would increase fourfold, not tenfold. Altogether a royal mess.
Here’s what’s new today. You can subscribe to the SDR news extra edition without fear. I.e. Without fear of being awakened at about 10 minutes to 2:00 in the morning. Track down the issue. It turned out that I had subscribed to another podcast as well. Their RSS feed changed in the middle of a mike. I did find out you do need to give a good one or two second tone to get the message to play on some phones. You should be able to subscribe to this new service without fear. You can dial in directly or you can click on the reddish orange badge at the top of the page when you come to our site. Our sponsor today is GoDaddy.com Here’s the word from GoDaddy.
[music]
Main word from GoDaddy is domains. You can see why godaddy.com is the number one main register 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, free blog, complete email and much more. Enter code slash when you checkout. Save an additional 10 percent on any order. Your piece of the Internet at godaddy.com.
[music ends]
If you’ve ever had a decision that you regretted, you probably don’t regret it quite as much as this fellow. He is the founder of Friendster, which is the social network that no one talks about anymore. New York Times had an interesting article about Jonathan Abrams. He was in a spot, he could take the safe bet, accept 30 million dollars from Google. I think this was in 2003. If Google had paid him in stock Abrams would easily be worth a billion dollars today. It seemed that there were some rock star temptations and some venture capitalist friends that turned out not to be the best of friends. Pulled him in a particular direction and it looks like he missed this boat ride.
Information from John Ferrell, one of our listeners on our story on BMI, Body Mass Index. John says that BMI is really a poor man’s way of measuring body composition. A ratio of height and weight. The problem here, if you have a very lean body fat wise but carry a lot of muscle, you’re going to be considered obese. John is 5’11″, weighs in at 190 pounds, so by BMI he’s obese. However his body composition, 14 percent fat because every weekend in one day he rides between 75 and 100 miles and lifts weights daily so he’s in really really good shape. The only solution, John says, is a bioimpedence scale, which will give your percentage of fat, which is a much better benchmark than your height/weight ratio.
Now we didn’t even get into the French study we talked about yesterday, the relationship between IQ and BMI. Two observations, first though. There is human desire to have a golden metric, something that a lay person finds totally reasonable, that could be measurable. But you may be measuring something totally different, partially correlated, or totally bogus. You don’t know. The other thing is that normal events in the normal universe are normally distributed. It would be very interesting to see how the data is distributed around BMI and vocabulary test data. Just hate to ask these embarrassing questions, it messes up the story.
Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, had a very thoughtful link on context and the sorts of embarrassing questions that could and should be asked of any story that you hear in the news. True cost of standby power. Almost four percent of our power generation capacity is used to power TV sets and similar devices that are switched off, just waiting for the signal from the remote control. It might be that the led that glow in your home stereo or power break that’s attached to cell phone charger even when there’s no phone attached.
Well engineered ones consume only milliwatts. But most are not and some can consume up to 30 watts. AC/DC adapters with transformers even in a no load state. The cost of all that standby power can actually exceed the cost of having the device on. You’ve heard of the Energy Star program that allows TV’s to use three watts in standby. PCs can draw up to 30 watts and color copiers can burn 175 watts and still get that star. Goal by 2010 is to have power usage for standby devices fall below one watt.
Quick word on slashdot review tech support. We continue to need review of listener support because unintended consequences of minor changes in our production process here. We don’t set out to break things but sometimes that happens. In fact or bit torrents had to have a few kicks in the power strip here over the past day or 2.
Dwight Ilk and Peter York help keep all this working. There is a help and FAQ on the site. You can reach them directly at slashdotreviewhelp@gmail.com.
That’s it for this evening our dial in line is 408 731 6848. You can get slashdotreview by FeedBlitz, which is a free email that arrives daily. Sign up at the bottom of our site.
Comments and suggestion to 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 show on selected Motorola, Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones
Thanks for listing and we’ll see you tomorrow.
SDR2006-10-17 Podcast – SDRNews
Announcer: This is the Tech Podcast Network. If it’s tech, it’s here.
Andy McCaskey: This is Slashdot Review for October 17th, 2006. Today’s show is sponsored by GoToMeeting, affordable business meetings made simple. My name is Andy McCaskey, and this podcast contains highlights from Slashdot, Dig, Readit, and other sources. Today, as always, Bittorrent and archive distribution is available courtesy of DownloadRadio.org.
It is a complete Video iPod. In fact, it is so complete it has the Windows Raymon E virus. Apparently 25 units were shipped sometime after September 12th. No effects on Macs or iPods, but for Windows it is a different manner. It was traced to a manufacturing line of a supplier, and Apple officially regrets the incident.
There is a Slingbox client up for the Mac. It is a sneak peek at the Slingbox player from Mac OS10. It is in a well-protected YouTube video that I could not copy or get to add to my group; but Slingbox is an absolutely awesome product. I have used it from Santa Rosa, from other places in California, other places in the States. I have used it from Tokyo. Most of the time it gets used from the downstairs, upstairs to the sewing room. So now I will be able to host that on the Mac Mini Core Duo as well, without firing up Parallels and Windows XP. Cool technology, a very reasonable price, and if you are a Mac user you may well want to take a look at that.
Listening for cancer cells–this comes from the University of Missouri in Columbia. Photo-acoustic detection uses a laser to make cells vibrate, and then they use ultrasound techniques to pick up the sound of cancerous cells. Apparently it is so sensitive, they can pick up even ten melanoma cells in a total blood sample.
The DNA computer is similar to the invention of the first microchips with hundreds of logic gates. The system needs between two and 30 minutes to compute each move of tic-tac-toe, and a second machine is required to translate the fluorescent signals generated each time into a move in the game. A DNA logic gate consists of a strand of DNA that binds to another, specific, input sequence. This binding causes a region of the strand to work as an enzyme, modifying yet another short DNA sequence into an output string. Literally, a string variable.
What Web numbers are real? With the discussions of YouTube and MySpace, you might get the impression that online advertising is the most dependable and trackable ad medium of all time. BusinessWeek points out that is not the truth. In fact, independent traffic analysis becomes even more important as advertising dollars flow online and the threat of click-fraud emerges.
Ajax is not the only technology that is upending traditional Web measurement. Ajax, of course, does not indicate the amount of time that is spent on a site, because a lot of the activity is processed locally. With RSS, where you can sign up to have news articles, or blogs, or even podcasts sent directly to the computer, that does not register on the credit for the page view on the site. Widgets will not direct you back to a given site, so they do not show up on the particular traffic figures.
Plus, you could have a situation–the example they used was an Italian shopping mall site, which would have the phrase “home equity”. They might rate higher on Google in “home equity” in the first page of the results, even though there are hundreds of sites dedicated to consumer finance; but Google and Alexa give higher credence to the shopping center site simply because it has more visitor, even though the bulk of those visitors are not seeking a home equity loan.
Peer-to-peer music sites are being targeted at the international level. The International Federation of Phonographic Industry (IFPI), going after 8000 alleged file sharers facing legal action. Seventeen countries, involving Bittorrent, eDonkey, Soulseek, and WinMX. The International Federation of Phonographic Industry is kind of the international version of the MPAA.
More news after this:
[music]
[commercial break]
Andy: An interesting blog post, called “Struggling Work From Home.” Eric Sink and Bob Walsh have a blog called “Business of Software, ” and they ask if they are the only ones that have trouble with lack of structure, the endless work, loneliness, concentration problems, and basically whacked-up sleeping patterns? The telecommuter buttons got pushed. They have at least 30 replies posted, and I know they will be getting more. If you have comments on that topic, please call our SDR News hotline, 408-731-6848, hit two or “Reply” and leave your comments, or you can leave audio on the site, here at Slashdot Review.
[musical interlude]
Andy: Well, you might ask what’s new, and I can honestly say, “Not a thing.” At least some of this October transition is becoming more stable. I did find out Cashblaster is just not going to work, so I am back into the digital recorder for the time being.
New link to an editorial page for SDR News. I will try to put some opinion pieces up there which have kind of fallen into disuse in the new format, here.
I did find the problem, I believe, with the Treo that we talked about. When I encode at 65 kilobits per second, that shifts the sample rate to an oddball sample rate, which turns flash players into chipmunks, and that may have been what scrambled the Treo on the fellow’s call here a few days ago.
How would you feel about spyware if you knew it was coming up front? Battlefield 2142 is very up front about it: they are going to bundle spyware. It is mandatory spyware; it tracks your browser views and serves up targeted ads. The question is, is it better to be up front and in the open about this, and how will the market decide? Maybe, like TIVO, the benefits of the product are so strong that you really don’t mind the intrusion.
Sun is about to unveil Project Black Box. You may remember, Robert X. Cringely speculated about Google in a shipping container. At that time, last summer, he talked about 5000 Opteron processors and three-and-a-half petabytes of disc storage, dropped off overnight by tractor-trailer rig. Well, Sun has this as a product, a data center in a 20-foot steel box. It is to meet the needs of customers running out of space, power, and cooling. Fast, cost-effective data center deployments.
Popular Mechanics has an interesting article on the hydrogen economy. Other than production, distribution, storage, use, and greenhouse gases, hydrogen economy is a great solution. Actually, we have got 90 years of petroleum economy that we have to work off, but the article has a really good summary of the tradeoffs, with a target date of 2040. Here are some numbers:
If you want to do this, it will require five times the amount of uranium production that we have on an annual basis now, or double the amount of coal production. The break point, interestingly enough, is around $3 per gallon of gasoline equivalent, which means that natural gas, coal, wind, biomass, and nuclear all pass the test. Natural gas is probably the easiest one, except for that pesky carbon dioxide that gets created.
Carbon dioxide on the YouTube video tonight. I do not know who comes up with this stuff, but it is fun. If your mother will not let you make a potato cannon out of PVC, you may consider building this device: Ruben’s Tube. That is the subject of our YouTube video. It involves flames and propane, and if you observe, the guy did this inside of his garage. You be the judge.
Google’s campus is about to become solar powered. 1.6 megawatts of electricity–enough to power 1000 California homes. It will make Google’s Mountain View campus the largest solar-powered office complex in the United States.
BBC has an article up from the London School of Economics on the human species. 100 000 years from now, the human species may split into two branches. This comes from an evolutionary theorist, Oliver Curry. Near-term–let’s say 1000 years–humans will be six to seven foot tall, and have a 125-year life span; but over the long haul, descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent and creative, while the underclass would be knuckle-dragging trolls, dimwitted, ugly, and squat, and based on all these articles we have had in the past couple of days, probably would have a Body Mass Index greater than 30.
[musical interlude]
Andy: Don’t forget, Area Code 408-731-6848. That is the SDR News Extra Edition hotline. It contains extra stories if we run long. It is a direct hotline channel to me, and it is private voicemail outside of the phone network. We can push messages back and forth, and phone numbers on both ends are kind of held in escrow. Slashdot Review is also brought to you by Feedblitz, which is a free email at our site. Comments and suggestions to SDR@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 the program on selected Motorola, Nokia, and…