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Archive for October, 2011

GNC-2011-10-10 #712 Facebook App for iPad

Posted by geeknews at 12:58 AM on October 11, 2011

Even though a portion of the country did not work today, there was a great selection of news. In the opening segment we play caller calls, talk about a fabulous green product for the home and a whole stack of tech news.

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Listener Links:
Law Enforcement on Twitter.
Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It

Show Links:
Amazon ready to kill next Industry.
Google+ Down 60%?
Twitter locks us in.
iMessage Disrupter?
Netflix #1
Netflix #2
German Spying on Citizens.
Dance Moves Copyrighted?
SnapTags?
Anonymous Attacks re-buffed.
Big Verizon LTE Roll-out.
Sun M-Class Flare.
Customs.
Tablet App Vision Impaired.
TDK Double Downs.
Facebook iPad App.
Facebook caved to Apple.
HTML5 and Facebook App.
Warner Brothers warms to Digital.
Mobile Ad Trends.
Economic Indicators.
Shopping Online to Increase.
Reddit shutdown parts of Site.
Twitter gets Tweet Trademark.
Steve Jobs Biological Father.
Apple iPhone 4s 3 Million?
Chrome Remote Desktop.
Airtime.
iOs Rules the Net.
Get your Project to the ISS.
Go to ESPN versus Affiliates.
X-37C?
Rover Trek Video.
IR Jammer.
Hungary Raid on P2P.
T-Mobile Booster.
Dual Core Windows Phone.
X-47B

Credits: Jack Ellis – Executive Producer
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TDK Looking to Double Hard Drive Capacity

Posted by Alan Buckingham at 2:00 PM on October 10, 2011

Storage, both HDD and SSD, is growing in capacity and shrinking in price all of the time.  With hard drives currently as large as 2 TB available, and promises of even bigger ones coming it seems there is almost more storage already than anyone of needs.  Plus, for those willing to pay a premium, there are SSD’s, which are smaller in capacity, but much faster in read time.  Plus, we have even heard vague rumors of holographic storage coming in the future.

Now, from the future technologies department comes some news that TDK, the once famous cassette tape maker, has a technology that could double the storage capacity of a hard drive by using laser heaters to write the data.  TDK calls the technology HAMR – heat-assisted magnetic recording.  The laser needs to be combined with a new way of making the drive platters.  Supposedly TDK has used the technology with platters that would normally have held 1 TB of data and successfully stored 2 TB on them.

It sounds very futuristic, and honestly it is.  There is no release date for the technology, no idea of how such drives would be priced in comparison to a standard drive, and no real idea if this technology will ever even hit the market.  Frankly, beyond this one report from the Register, there is really no concrete evidence of this technology existing.  But the science of storage is always moving ahead at a fast pace, so it’s likely that such things as this are at least being tested.

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Posted in Hard Drive, storage

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Thrusters on Reverse! Full Speed Back!

Posted by susabelle at 9:24 AM on October 10, 2011

netflix logoNetflix apparently woke up from its stupor and stepped back from the plan to spin off its DVD-rental service into a separate unit called Qwikster.  Universally panned by critics and users, the attempt to separate the businesses seemed like a terrible, terrible mistake.

Fortunately for Netflix users, it was a mistake and Netflix has been smart enough to reverse course and listen to the wants of its users.  There are other companies I wish would do the same (facebook and Google, I’m looking at you!).  Of course, it is really too late for users like me, who already left Netflix when prices increased by 60% or so.  I was never a fan of their streaming service, since it never had what I wanted as a stream option.  I could get very old things on streaming, including some old television shows, but what I wanted to stream were recent releases most of the time.  Or at least, releases from the last ten years or so.  I thought the idea of streaming was wonderful, since I could use streaming on my laptop when I was stuck in a hotel room in a random town for an evening.  But nothing I ever wanted to see was available through their streaming service.

As for their rentals, We had pretty much watched everything there was to watch that we wanted to watch.  At some point, we realized that we were not getting new rentals very often (maybe once or twice a month) and that wasn’t worth what I was paying.  It certainly wasn’t going to be worth what I was going to be paying once the price went up. There was a time when movies were coming and going from our mailbox like that flap was a revolving door.  But towards the end, when I canceled our service, we just weren’t using the service all that much. That time was past.

And overall, streaming was never really a huge draw for me to begin with, as we have no device with our television that will allow streaming to happen.  We don’t game, so there’s no XBox, and we don’t have OTT boxes either.  It’s not how we, as a family, operate.  And I’m sure we’re not alone.

I’m still happy to see that Netflix knows when it has made a mistake, and is willing to change direction.  And if they’d drop their prices back, we might just subscribe again.  For now, it will be RedBox and whatever we can pick up from our pretty up-to-date local library.  And there’s always MegaVideo, which my teenager uses to watch almost everything.

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Netflix Kills Qwikster, DVD by Mail Still Netflix. Suffers $200 Dollar a Share Loss.

Posted by Jeffrey Powers at 9:21 AM on October 10, 2011

netflix logoMaybe it was the weird spelling, the fact it was too close to Qwikstar (the Amway rebrand) or the twitter is owned by the Pot Smoking Elmo. Nonetheless, Netflix announced today they will not be seperating the company into two. Netflix DVD rental will still be $8 (with an additional $8 for streaming).

How Netflix Screwed themselves in the last 3 Months.

In July, Netflix came to the realization their service was not priced efficiently for the company to make a profit. Therefore, they announced by Sept 1st, they would be changing price plans.

The service separated the streaming from the DVD rental. For $8, you could get one DVD at a time. Add another $8 and you could get Netflix streaming. It was a move that happened too fast, so people lashed back.

Last month, Netflix’ CEO Reed Hastings outlined plans to separate the DVD by mail business and give it’s own name – Qwikster. People started speculating Netflix was planning to sell the DVD mail side and focus more on streaming. Within 14 days, Netflix saw a major decline of customers (Some calling the idea “Qwikstupid”) .

Netflix stock dropped almost $100 a share from Septembers’ announcement, and over $200 a share from July. Netflix lost millions of dollars in the last 90 days with these changes. Needless to say, this is not a great business plan.

What Netflix Needs to Do to Recoup this Large Deficit.

First of all, it would be a VERY GOOD idea to offer at least 1 free month to current customers (although 3 months would be better). After all, these are the people that stuck through it all. Next – cut the service price for DVD rental and streaming. Meet in the middle – $12 a month for 1 DVD at a time and streaming.

Reed Hastings also needs to put together a very big public apology. I don’t think it’s time for him to pass the CEO reigns just yet, but maybe Netflix needs to shake up the board a bit. This was a horrible idea that was ultimately agreed upon by the directors.

Will You Go Back to Netflix?

This is the biggest question. After all these bad decisions, would you choose to go back to Netflix? They do have the most coverage in streaming options, being on most Over the top TV solutions and game consoles. Still, loosing 1/3 of their operating share makes you wonder if they can ever get back to the $300 / share peak they enjoyed back in July.

I personally use the Netflix streaming service – I abandoned DVD rentals simply because they sat on the coffee table for weeks at a time. With new additions in AMC’s Walking Dead and Discovery’s Mythbusters to streaming, I have a month’s worth of shows to watch. Tron Legacy also showed up this month, which gives me more of what I really crave – top movies that are only a year old.

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Podcast Awards Slate Announcement!

Posted by geeknews at 8:24 PM on October 8, 2011

Congratulations to all of the shows that where nominated in this years Podcast Awards. With over 1.4 million listeners nominating almost 2,700 shows the review team had a hard time getting 220 selected. Nearly 13,000 people tuned in to watch the slate announcement. Congrats.

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TMS-2011-10-08 #36 Jobs and Tech

Posted by geeknews at 2:13 PM on October 8, 2011

Today’s show was held in a Google Hangout and we had one of the best discussions ever on the Satuday Morning Tech show. Enjoy the show and please send me feedback on the format @ geeknews@gmail.com

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Virus Infects US Drones

Posted by Andrew at 8:39 AM on October 8, 2011

Predator DroneWired is reporting that a virus has infected the flight systems controlling the Predator and Reaper drone aircraft in the Middle East. The systems have been infected for about two weeks and it appears to be a keylogger-type of virus. Further, the virus has resisted attempts to disinfect the system but the military think it’s benign.

You can read the full article yourself, but as an IT professional I read it with utter horror and dismay. Here we have a (potentially) armed aircraft apparently still operating with an unknown virus in its systems. Does this ring alarm bells for anyone else?

I work in a public sector organisation and our approach to a PC with a virus infection is to pull the plug on the infected equipment and disconnect it from the network until we are able to clean the PC, regardless of whether we think its benign or otherwise. We’re concerned that data might be wiped out. You’d think that the military might have concerns about people being wiped out by a malfunctioning drone but apparently not.

And then there’s the question of how the system came to be infected. Again there seems to be a remarkable lack of knowledge. No doubt we’ll find that the USB ports were unlocked, there was no antivirus software and anybody could plug in a memory stick at will.

Looks like there’s a market opportunity for an AV company…

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Posted in Information, Security, Virus

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ATEM Television Studio Review

Posted by geeknews at 12:04 AM on October 8, 2011

Let me start out by saying that I had very high expectations for the ATEM Television Studio by BlackMagicDesign that I saw demonstrated at NAB. I was sucked in hook line and sinker about what this new Video switcher was supposed to be able to do, sadly they did not deliver critical features that were advertised at NAB.

Let me start with the basics the ATEM Television Studio is a low priced, high powered 6 channel switcher were you have a combination of  HDMI & SDI for a max of 4 inputs of a single type..  It has  2 Program SDI outs, 1 Multiview SDI out, 1 HDMI Multiview out, and 1 HDMI Program out. Note: The HDMI inputs allow you to start with inexpensive consumer grade cameras versus more expensive cameras with SDI Outputs. Review the entire spec sheet over at BlackMagicDesign.

You control the switcher via the ATEM Software control panel software (Mac/PC) that communicates to the switcher via Ethernet. The unit has a USB 3.0 connection that can be used to set the IP of the device or provide program video out to a secondary laptop, (more on that in a moment) Audio is injected through a BNC AES/EBU connection.

Let me add a disclaimer here that I am a Tricaster TCXD 850 owner, and am used to spending big money on broadcast quality gear. The ATEM Television Studio is priced just at $995.00 which is 25x less than my Tricaster. So dollar for dollar the ATEM Television Studio does amazing things for the price!

At NAB I got excited about this product for really two additional features that were promised as part of the shipped set. I was very specific in my questioning of the company rep, as I had a specific need and this was the first device that was going to meet those needs.

1. The ability to record H.264 high quality video/audio from within the ATEM Control Panel without the need for secondary software.
2. The ability to view the camera inputs and switch the from the ATEM Control Panel from the computer with the need for a external monitor.

Considering companies like Wirecast/Vidblaster are already doing some impressive things with video software only solutions, I assumed this would be a no brainer for BlackMagicDesign because they were offloading the heavy lifting of video switching /processing to this external device.

Unlike most folks who would mount this in a rack, my plan was to incorporate the ATEM Television Studio into my travel system. My shows Video quality recording has always suffered when I travel With this new gear, I would have had a lot more flexibility in my video production while on travel. Sadly they did not deliver the 2 key features that would have made this an exceptional value.

1. Instead of having integrated recording within the ATEM Control Panel Software, you have to off board the video via the USB 3.0 port and use BlackMagic Express to do the h.264 recording. But even this has issues as the BlackMagic Express seems to attenuate the audio a considerable amount and getting good audio recordings is not pain free!

Plus the BlackMagic Express H.264 recorder software records a pure .mp4 which is good if you are uploading to YouTube for processing but you cannot use this file if you plan on making it available for watching on a website as the file has to completely download before it will play on a HTML5 browser or flash based player that is designed to progressively play back the video. You will have to load the file In Adobe Premier for editing and re-encoding. The files I have recorded so far are not compatible with Final Cut.

2. The ATEM Television Studio as delivered requires a monitor if you plan on using this as a professional switch to be able to see what you have queued for live. Unlike what they promised at NAB, you cannot view the actual multiview screen on the controlling computer. This is another feature that they did not deliver on what was promised at NAB.

I am hoping that they will deliver the missing features as promised in a future update, they could sweeten the pot and add a streaming component as well so we would not need Wirecast / Vidblaster. If Wirecast and Vidblaster can do it they can. This would make this a true mobile television studio.

While the ATEM Television Studio has other great features I am very disappointed in not getting the features that I really wanted. Having waited 4 months for delivery makes it suck even more. That being said it still is a remarkable piece of gear for the price.

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Adobe BrowserLab 1.6.4

Posted by Alan Buckingham at 6:05 PM on October 7, 2011

Given the people who read this blog, as well as write for it, I doubt I am a minority when I say I have, and use, multiple web browsers on my computers.  At any given time you can find Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome on my PC’s.  I haven’t yet succumbed to adding Safari or Opera, or any of the lesser-known flavors, but I am a regular on the big three.

Web developers are a whole different story.  They need to check and verify everything they do in every browser that has any type of user-base.  Not to mentions other applications like Flash.  There is an easier way than installing and updating all of these, though.

Today Adobe announced the latest version of BrowserLab – 1.6.4.  BrowserLab allows you to test web sites and web apps within the application against all of the major browsers, plus Flash.  The latest version of BrowserLab adds support for the following applications.

  • Chrome 14 was added (Windows), and Chrome 11 was removed
  • Firefox 7 was added (Mac OS X and Windows), and Firefox 4 was removed
  • Safari was updated to 5.1 (Mac OS X)
  • Flash Player was updated to 10.3.183.10 (Mac OS X and Windows)

They keep it up-to-date, but it’s generally a bit behind browser releases.  Plus, they are promising Flash 11 (already available) in the next version.  Still, it’s much easier than trying to manage all of this yourself.  If you develop apps and don’t know about this yet, then you will want to head over to Adobe BrowserLab to check it out.

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With Nuance Acquisition of Swype, Could We See iPhone, iPad’s Siri with Swype Technology?

Posted by Jeffrey Powers at 9:15 AM on October 7, 2011

This morning, Michael Arrington reported that Nuance is going to purchase Swype for over $100 million. This is the technology that lets you slide your finger across the on-screen keyboard to spell out words. It is also known that Nuance works with the new Apple product called “Siri“. Therefore, will we see this technology available for Apple keyboards, soon?

Let’s hope so.

Swype is a technology first discovered at TechCrunch a couple years ago. It was incorporated in some smartphones and found by moving the finger around as opposed to tapping, a person could type words a lot faster. This is the video TechCrunch put out in 2009:

Enter in Siri

Siri is the new technology Apple announced earlier in the week. To read more about that, check out Andrew’s article – Apple’s Siri Delivers on the Sci-Fi Dream.

Siri uses Nuance Technology – even though you might not find someone at Apple or Nuance that will say that. Before Siri was purchased by Apple, it had Nuance as the background software. The company tried Vlingo, but it just didn’t fit Siri’s programming.

So is it safe to say that Nuance is part of Siri? Well, unless Apple was working on their own software to replace Nuance, then yes. If they did change, then we would have heard something of them splitting. Let’s not even get into any patent debate that would have been reported if Apple was developing their own software.

As I always say: The possibility is there, but the probability is pretty low.

Swype on iPhone, iPad

Let’s get back to this idea – I used Swype technology and love it. By moving one finger across the screen keeps my eyes on the keyboard and not switching back and forth to what I am typing. Add in the spellcheck and I could be typing 40-45 words a minute on a mobile device (as opposed to 30 words a minute currently). Swype on iPad would be better, especially since most people use a one-hand type method if they are standing with the device coddled in the other arm.

With a personal dictionary, extensive language support and predictive tap suppot, Swype could be a great added feature to the Apple iPhone. Of course, it would also be a great addition to an Android phone, too (which is available with the FlexT9 Android Application).

So far, this is just a pipe-dream. But if it becomes a reality, the Siri application just got a little bit cooler.

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