Livewrong

Friday Funnies

News is next on LeoTV. The first hospital in the US was opened in Pennsylvania on this day in 1752. Robert Fulton patented the steam boat in 1809. Nelson Mandela was freed in 1990. Thomas Edison was born in 1847. Tina "Ginger" Louise was born in 1934.

1. Carly Fiorina is out at Hewlett-Packard, saying she quit in a dispute with the board over the future direction of the company. The board's chair was quoted in the NY Times as saying "These things always seem precipitous when they occur. But the board has been deliberating the company's performance, and the C.E.O.'s performance, for quite some time." But don't cry for me Fiorina, Carly's getting a severance package worth $21.1 million. HP shares closed at 21.53 up nearly 7% on the news. When Fiorina started with HP in 1999 the stock price was over 40.
2. The Motion Picture Association of America has taken over LokiTorrent. The bittorrent tracker site was attempting to raise money to fight the MPAA, but a court order shut it down yesterday. Even more chilling, the court ordered LokiTorrent to give the MPAA their domain and all the server logs. The site now features the threat, "You can click but you can't hide. Stealing movies leaves a trail. The only way not to get caught is to stop." Makes me want to steal a movie right now.
3. Just in the nick of time, Philips has developed a way to fingerprint films so they can be tracked on P2P networks.
4. The FCC has told cable companies that they needn't carry all the digital channels offered by local television stations. The shift to digital has made it possible for a single TV station to broadcast several shows at once, creating an issue for cable companies who don't have the benefit of the additional bandwidth.

5. FreeBSD is retiring its daemon logo. A public competition will be held to choose a replacement. Toy Story director John Lasseter created the earliest versions of the daemon - the current version is copyrighted by Marshall Kirk McKusick. I kinda like it, but then I like Underwood Deviled Ham, too.
6. There's a big flaw in nearly all of Symantec's products on Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and AS400 systems and Brightmail clients. The flaw could allow an attacker to run arbitrary code on these systems. Symantec has patches so run LiveUpdate now.
7. Temco is suing a web site that published hacks to its Xbox game Dead or Alive Xtreme Volleyball. The hack allowed users to strip the game's characters naked. And this hurts game sales how?

Listen in tomorrow at 7:45a Pacific for my weekly news commentary on KFI 640 AM in Los Angeles.

Cherry Blossoms

Tuesday's Takedown

Time to take a look at the world of tech. Socrates was sentenced to death in 399. Galileo Galilei was born on this day in 1564. Charles Lewis Tiffany in 1812. Susan B. Anthony in 1820.

1. Michael Malone, in a commentary last week for ABC News, declared that it's the beginning of the end for Microsoft. And he makes a lot of sense. It's stuff I've been saying and thinking for some time now.
2. While you're at it, check out Hakon Lie's tirade against Microsoft. The CTO for the Opera browser says even Microsoft's own interoperability statement discriminates against Opera.
3. The RSA Conference opens today in San Francisco. To once again underscore Microsoft's commitment to security, Bill Gates will keynote. The biggest computer security conference of the year brings 11,000 security experts and 275 companies to Moscone Center. Last year, Gates (incorrectly) predicted the death of spam. This year he's expected to announce new anti-virus and anti-spyware products from Microsoft.
4. Yesterday the last insider lockups at Google expired, meaning as many as 176.8 million shares worth around $3.5 billion could come into play creating hundreds of new millionaires at the company. The stock, which opened at $85, has been as high as $211 closed at $192.99 Monday, up nearly 3%.
5. It's a landmark for music on the Internet. Jazz composer Maria Schneider took home a Grammy on Sunday for her album "Concert in the Garden," without selling a single copy in a record store. Her music was produced with financial help from fans and sold exclusively online. She spent $87,000 making the album and has already made her money back.
6. Last month everyone was talking about SBC buying AT&T, now Verizon has agreed to buy MCI for $6.7 billion, reducing the number of big phone companies to four: Verizon, SBC, BellSouth Corp. and Sprint Nextel.
7. Internet phone provider Vonage said it's asked the FCC to investigate allegations that a "major" broadband operator is deliberately blocking Internet phone calls - they won't say who it is, though. I figure it's either a phone company that doesn't want the competition, or a cable company that's offering its own VoIP services. That doesn't narrow it down much, does it?
8. Apple has announced a 2-for-1 stock split. Its shares have almost quadrupled over the past year due to the success of the iPod. Shares climbed further yesterday after a very positive report from a UBS analyst on prospects for the Mac mini and iPod shuffle. The analyst, Benjamin Reitzes, also predicted new, higher capacity, iPods later this year.
9. That's what plucky little Mac rumor site, Think Secret, has been predicting. Undeterred by an ongoing lawsuit from Apple, the site says the fifth generation iPods will have 80GB drives and silver enclosures to match the Mac mini and Powerbooks. There will also be upgraded 5GB iPod Minis, probably just in time for summer vacation.
10. The movie companies announced a new form of copy protection for DVDs. The existing technology, CSS, was cracked in 1999. The new Macrovision RipGuard will prevent copying by most existing DVD ripping tools - so far it hasn't been employed on any DVDs.
11. But there is some good news for downloaders who have been quaking in their Aerons ever since the MPAA was awarded LokiTorrent's server logs by a judge last week. A LokiTorrent partner says that the logs are useless - and no torrent site does more than register the download of a .torrent file, not the movie itself. Something that is, as yet, still legal.
12. Mainstream media is taking on the bloggers. Conservative blogs were instrumental in taking down Dan Rather over the memogate scandal earlier this year and CNN News Executive, Eason Jordan, is the latest casualty. Jordan resigned in the face of a firestorm created by bloggers who jumped on off-the-record and still unpublished remarks by Jordan at the World Economic Forum. Both the Wall Street Journal and the Columbia Journalism Review have decried this trend, calling the bloggers "salivating morons" and a "lynch mob."

In One Ear...

Well we made it through without any wounds. My earpiece kept dying, and I'm helpless without it. It's the only way the producer can tell me what's next, whether to stretch, or wrap it up immediately. Rayvon, our incredible sound man, looked at it afterwards and found that the tube was frayed at the end. He snipped it off, remounted it, and it should work fine. Those earpieces are custom made for each individual's ear. You can use a generic ear bud but they tend to pop out, so if you use an earpiece regularly (and I do on every show) it's best to have one custom made. They're generally made by hearing aid companies. I had my done at San Francisco Audiological Services. They pour some kind of rubbery plaster into your ear. It hardens in about 15 minutes then they pop them out with a huge sucking sound. They use it to mold a plastic earpiece that fits very comfortably into your ear canal. It's attached to a 6 inch long hollow tube which snaps into a wire halfway down your back. The wire has a mini speaker at the tube end, and plugs into a wireless pack about the size of a garage door opener. I keep the pack hooked onto my belt. I have two left earpieces which I had made for $125 each three years ago. I'm getting a right ear made tomorrow. The director, sound man, and line producer can all use it to talk to me, but usually it's only the producer. He or she uses it fairly infrequently - a lot of traffic is very confusing - mostly to give time cues or to tell me to get my hand out of the show. There are people who think I have a team of experts looking up the answers to the questions and feeding them to me. No way. It wouldn't work anyway. It's very hard to speak coherently while someone is talking to you in your ear! And it looks really dorky if you stop speaking and your head as if you're hearing voices. Even though you are. Gotta run. I'm going to do an OS X tip on Call for Help in half an hour. Then it's time to get ready for the all new Screen Savers! I don't think the Boot Camp open is ready, yet. Should be there on Wed or Thurs.