Tech News Today 64

Tech News Today Episode 64

Tech News Today 64: Side Effects May Include Death

We get jet packs, Digg gets punked, and your house is in a movie.

Hosts

• Tom Merritt (@acedtect)
  • TomMerritt.com
• Sarah Lane (@sarahlane)
  • sarahlane.com
• Erik Lanigan (@eriklanigan)
• Darren Kitchen
  • hak5.org
  • Hack Across America

Top Stories

• Nintendo to drop price on DSi, DSi XL by $20 come 9/12

• Intel to buy Infineon's wireless unit for $1.4 billion
• Intel to buy final piece of the mobile puzzle from Infineon

• Blackberry gets 60-day India ban reprieve

Other Stories

• Angry Digg users flood home page with Reddit links

• Digg freezes manual story submissions amidst anarchy

• Samsung: 1 million Galaxy S smartphones in 45 days in the US

• Google in talks with major studios to rent movies via YouTube

• Will the Oxford English Dictionary go digital-only?

• Jet Packs Finally On Sale: How to Buy Your Rocket Belt

News Fuse

• According to the Telecommunications Market Commision's Blog from Spain, Chile has become the first country to guarantee net neutrality by law. The law assures that any Internet user will be able to use, send, receive or offer any content, applications or legal services over the Internet, without arbitrary or discriminatory blocking.

• Goodbye ATI. AMD officially announced it plans to label its next round of grpahics cards 'AMD Radeon' and 'AMD FirePro' with new logos and everyone. AMD bought ATI four years ago.

• Chatroulette Version 2 has relaunched with a simpler interface and still the same content appearing on camera. Yes that content. Users without video cameras have reported they are unable to use any portion of the site.

• Xbox Live Gold will raise it's price in the US, UK, Canada, and Mexico starting November 1. One month rises from $8 to $10, three months from $20 to $25, and a year goes from $50 to $60. Microsoft's will run a "lock in" promo for a discounted $40 one-year Gold sub starting November 1.

• TechCrunch reports that one of their sources tells them Cisco has made an offer to Acquire Skype before Skype complete's it's Initial Public Offering of stock. Google was also rumoured to be interested but antitrust concerns scared them off.

• Clearwire just launched its Rover service, which offers 4G starting at $5 a day and costing $20 a week or $50 a month. It only uses 4G and you need to buy the $150 Rover Puck WiFi hotspot or a $100 USB stick.

• Google has backed out of the upcoming JavaOne conference. Google's Joshua Bloch said in a blog post, 'Oracle's recent lawsuit against Google and open source has made it impossible for us to freely share our thoughts about the future of Java and open source generally,' Oracle gained Java when it bought Sun.

• Would you like your iPad to work like Microsoft Surface? Bertrand Duplat and Etienne Mineur at Volumique say they have something like that working. One example they're using is a board game. The pieces would be recognized when placed on the iPad’s screen, it would even recognize which direction they were facing.

Kickers and Weird Science

• Google and Arcade Fire Team for HTML5 ‘Experience’

Calendar

• Epic 4G launches tomorrow for $250

• As of today Roku is offering their Roku SD, HD and HD-XR products for $59.99, $69.99 and $99.99 respectively.

• TWiT at Dragon*Con. Meetup Saturday night September 4 - RSVP to lisa@twit.tv
  • Sundial Restaurant

Voicemail

Kevin in Kansas City: Our caller has a question about the clothing with batteries woven in.

Email

Jack from NJ writes:

Here's an article in repsonse to the story that the h.264 video format will be free. Firefox still doesn't like the format.

H.264 Will Be Royalty Free For Internet Video Forever, Kinda, Mozilla Still Doesn't Care

Couple this artcile with the earlier blog posting from the yourtube team of why they don't like HTML5 and it still doesn't look like h.264/HTML5 is a clear winner yet.

Flash and the HTML5 <video> tag

It looks like unless you're on an iDevice, flash will still be the video delivery mechanism of choice for the foreseeable future.

Smashbrosboy writes:

Hey TNT crew, I was just listening to Friday's discussion about Google's introduction of Google Voice into Gmail and how this could possibly light the way for data-only plans for Android phones, letting them use 3G or Wi-Fi to make GV calls. Leo brought up the idea of using Google Voice everywhere on the iPod Touch with a Mi-Fi but dismissed it as Apple does not allow it. As it turns out, you can still use an iPod Touch with Google Voice.

If you are lucky enough to have a Gizmo5 account, you can connect this with Google Voice and forward all calls to one of the SIP apps in the App Store. Using Google Voice's website on the iPod Touch to place texts and calls, you now have a phone using only an iPod Touch and a Mi-Fi.

Stephen writes:

I love watching your show and all the other TWiT.tv shows. I got a good chuckle the other day when you said when all the news was Microsoft (like back in the day) and then a day or two later there was some coverage on the potential new Apple releases and one of them was wireless syncing of the ipod/iphone to itunes as a new feature, but nobody realizes (or mentions) that this has been in place since the original Zune that Microsoft made. This is old news from Microsoft and now it's something ""great"" that Apple has. I still don't get all the hoopla over Apple. I assume the Zune sync will be in the Windows Phone 7 also... just my $0.02

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Picks

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein (UNABRIDGED) Narrated by Lloyd James

Shogun: A Novel of Japan by James Clavell (UNABRIDGED) Narrated by David Case

Production Information

• Edited by: Erik
• Notes: Mediafly publish: 4:30

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