WiMAX in Amsterdam Now!
Philly municipal Wi-fi on again after being off again. Toshiba steps up and promotes its R500 laptop. Bumper stickers on your car could indicate you are unbalanced. Microsoft having various issues in Europe. Jon Shirley leaves MSFT board. Google Apps suffer outages. Good news for people pushing cloud computing. Firefox wants 5 million downloads. It’s a publicity stunt all the way. Samsung suing TV makers. Amsterdam to run mobile WiMAX. How did they get into the act?
Click to listen: [audio:http://m.podshow.com/media/12115/episodes/115956/tech5-115956-06-17-2008.mp3]
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DB2 to Go Open Source
XM-Sirius deal on track to go through now that the FCC is on board. AP wants to set guidelines for bloggers. Unsure exactly what the guidelines should be though. Apple will do anything to not use Flash. I wonder why. I went to see the new teraflop GPU from AMD. Nice product. NetGear and Cisco about to start a price war. Cisco says Internet video will swamp the net. TOP story: IBM may make DB2 open source.
Click to listen: [audio:http://m.podshow.com/media/12115/episodes/115853/tech5-115853-06-16-2008.mp3]
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“We’re sorry, this video is no longer available.”
A friend of mine asked me to do some research for him regarding an issue that one of his clients was having. He had posted some videos on YouTube and linked them to the clients website. But when the client would try to view the videos he’d get a message saying “We’re sorry, this video is no longer available.” My friend called several people and asked if they could see it and they all could but the client still could not.
I researched this thing to death and was not able to figure out why this would occur. I did, however, find that many people have seen similar issues. Their list of solutions did not work for me but may be helpful for others so here they are:
- Switching browsers (from IE to Firefox or vice versa).
- Clearing browser cache and/or cookies.
- Updating to the latest Flash player.
- Stopping Google Web Accelerator (if installed).
- Making youtube.com a trusted site in IE.
- Rebooting the network router.
- Switching to the Flock browser.
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A Quadrillion Operations per Second?
iPhone 3G gets more and more ridiculous publicity. This is a classic. Google co-founder decides to go into space on a Russian rocket. Big story beginning: TV viewers do not know to switch from analog to digital. HP new machine takes on MacBook Air. Some guy take 13,000 cell processors with 7000 dual core AMD chips and makes machine to do a quadrillion calculation a second. YouTube scandal over punks doing YouTube video. Carl Icahn won’t go away. My thoughts on Microsoft Office. Employees said they would take a pay cut to work at home.
Click to listen: [audio:http://m.podshow.com/media/12115/episodes/115350/tech5-115350-06-11-2008.mp3]
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Vista Upgrade Controversy
Lance Ulanoff wrote a column for the current issue of PC Magazine discussing the technical loopholes in the Windows Vista upgrade that allow it to be installed fresh. Ulanoff is really talking about the motives behind Microsoft Partner liaison Eric Ligman’s blog posting about the matter. But there is a bigger issue here that’s been bothering me for some time.
When Vista was first released Windows Secrets ran a story (actually a few stories) about how the upgrade disk could be used to do a fresh install of the operating system. Upgrades are supposed to require the user to have a previous version of the product (in this case XP). But the Vista upgrade disk has a loophole that does not require XP to do the install. Windows Secrets went on to suggest buying the upgrade instead of the full version. Apparently both disks are exactly the same except that one says upgrade and the other doesn’t.
It struck me as odd that a legitimate newsletter like Windows Secrets would promote such behavior. Wouldn’t such behavior be unethical? No, Windows Secrets says, the company knowingly left the loophole there instead of closing it so it must be OK.
Flash forward to April 2008 and the release of Vista SP1. Windows Secrets runs a story that says that the loophole is still open in SP1. This article echoes the point that since Microsoft knows the loophole is there and hasn’t done anything about it they must be OK with people using the upgrade disk for a new install. Though he doesn’t directly say it I think this is the article that prompted Ligman’s blog enrty.
I’m still stupefied that a legitimate venue for tech reporting would support this behavior. It undermines the software industry as a whole and not just Microsoft.
When someone develops software they have the right to decide how they will distribute it (open source, shareware etc.). They also have the right to establish licensing on the software. When you buy a piece of software you are not only buying it but you are accepting the conditions of the license. Just because the disk allows you to install it in a way that circumvents the license does not mean you can or should. It is still unethical and probably illegal to install software in this way.
I continue to read Windows Secrets for the technical information it gives. But I have to admit to being a bit jaded about their ethics and motivation.
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