Tech News Today 103

Tech News Today Episode 103

Tech News Today 103: Schmidt My CEO Says

Erik Schmidt can't stop talking, porn targets the pirates, new Samsung stuff, and more.

Hosts

• Tom Merritt (@acedtect)
  • TomMerritt.com
• Sarah Lane (@sarahlane)
  • sarahlane.com
• Jason Howell
  • JasonHowell.net
• Darren Kitchen
  • hak5.org

Top Stories

• Samsung to unveil new Android device November 8th

• Galaxy Tab for Sprint confirmed for November 14th: $400 with two-year contract, Best Buy may have WiFi only model for $499.99

Other Stories

• Wi-Fi Direct certification begins today, device-to-device transmission starting soon

• Adobe announces Air 2.5 for TVs, tablets and phones, launches Adobe InMarket to package apps

• Adobe Will Create Tools For All Condé Nast Digital Mags

• Schmidt: Don’t Like Google Street View Photographing Your House? Then Move.

• Google sets new traffic record

• Watch out Pirates, the porn industry is coming for you

• Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04

• Microsoft's outgoing Chief Software Architect on the 'post-PC world'

News Fuse

• Amazon never comes right out and states sales figures for the Kindle, instead they prefer to speak in Delphic riddles. For instance the most recent announcements from the Pythoness proclaim that in its three months or so since release, the new Kindle has surpassed sales of the previous device in its 2009 holiday season. Also Kindle books are outselling print 2 to 1 for Amazon's top 10 bestsellers. On Tuesdays. During a waxing moon.

• Microsoft isn't saying anything about the next version of Windows, unless yous peak Dutch. Then, apparently, it's OK to tell you that Windows 8 is about two years away. That according to a blog posting by Microsoft's Dutch subsidiary.

• Friday marked the completion of the runway of Virgin Galactic CEO RichardBranson' Spaceport America in New Mexico. It will become the first commercial spaceport. The dedication ceremony included about 30 of 380 Virgin Galactic future astronauts who got to see Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnightTwo jet carry the SpaceShip Two in a landing and flyover.

• PluginCars.com reports getting a solid 116.1 miles in the first anecdotal test of all-electric Nissan Leaf. The driver drove casually and slightly below the speed limit. and spent most of the trip with the A/C blasting.

• But if you'd rather have something that burns gas, forget the hybrid. Next year, Mazda will sell a car in Japan that gets 70.5 miles per gallon (mpg), about as little fuel as a hybrid such as the Toyota Prius--without that car's added costs for its electric motor and batteries. The car is a subcompact called the Demio in Japan and the Mazda 2 elsewhere, and improves fuel economy by about 30 percent over the current model.

• Difficult-to-read fonts make for better learning, according to an article to be published in the international journal Cognition. Researchers at Princeton University conducted a test in a real school environment on 222 students aged between 15 and 18.'... 'Students given the harder-to-read materials scored higher in their classroom assessments than those in the control group. This was the case across a range of subjects — from English, to Physics to History.' So today we're speaking to you in Comic Sans.

• The Android Market now houses 100,000 apps for mobile phones. It launched in October, 2008 with just 13. And while it's still a third of the 300,000 in the Apple App Store, it still makes Google’s app store the second largest in the market.

• The Telegraph reports nearly four in ten children questioned wanted something from Apple this year. The report surveyed 2,138 children and parents. As children get older, Apple like iPads and iPhones became more attractive. In fact, technology-related items were eight of the top 10 toys for Christmas. Kinect for Xbox took fourth place and the Flip Video Camera took sixth, with the PlayStation Move, Lego Harry Potter video game and Barbie Video Girl taking eighth, ninth and tenth place respectively. Zhu Zhu Pet Hamsters and the evergreen Buzz Lightyear filled out the list at fifth and seventh.

Kickers and Weird Science

• Bees Beat Machines At 'Traveling Salesman' Problem

Calendar

• Microsoft Kinect Hits Stores Next Week

• Barnes and Noble is expected to announce a new Nook at an event in New York tomorrow October 26.

• Sony PSP2 Shown Off in Private Meeting, Coming Fall 2011

• PSP Go's price drops to $199

• Sony Discontinues the Walkman

Voicemail

• from DC: A possible explanation of Germans opting out of Street View

Email

"Hello Tom and TNT team!

I would like to begin by saying Iove your show and listen or watch it every day. I wanted to follow up on your news story from Friday about the Chinese man that got his arm stuck in the toilet. His arm was stuck because he excessively wrapped his arm with newspaper before plunging his hand in the toilet bowl (like that would help keep germs off) and the paper expanded when it was saturated and his arm was stuck. He did also recover his dropped phone, no word if it still works or not. Again I love your show, keep up the good work!

-Ben"

"Hi TNT crew

On show 102 you talked about James Gosling's answer to Jobs' claim that Sun/Oracle provides Java for ""every"" other platform. Sun is providing Java for Windows, Linux, and Solaris. See: http://java.com/en/download/manual.jsp

Maybe Gosling is right about HP, IBM etc. doing their own versions for some embedded systems (I guess) and the likes. But Since Sun/Oracle do Java for any other consumer OS (Win/Linux), it would be pretty weird if they chose not to do it for OS X too, wouldn't it?

Just thought that was worth considering :).

Love the show, Søren in Denmark

-- Søren Hugger Møller"

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Production Information

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