Alt-This.com - your technology podcast

About a week ago I was reading a couple of different articles discussing the accuracy of various anti-virus products in detecting various kinds of advanced threats. I have been a long time AVG Anti-Virus customer and have been very happy with their product. It’s reasonably light weight, scans are speedy and I’ve never had a virus slip through the cracks. It just works. But it’s also in my nature to always want to experiment with other pieces of software.

I was reading the Comcast forums over at broadbandreports.com and came across this article. I've read a lot about Comcast and their magical bandwidth limits for users in the past, but something surprised me in the comments to this post. A few of the people responding were bashing the original poster for his "abuse" of Comcast because he was using approximately 200GB a month in bandwidth.

• Intro from the Pubcrawlers
• Welcome to Episode #0006
• Why sometimes it's just easier to steal software than to buy it
• Comcast shuts off customer for using his "unlimited" account
• Wikipedia going broke? Who uses this site anyway?
• The world responds to Steve Jobs calling for a death to DRM
• Study reports that P2P has zero effect on music sales
• It is time for a new way to monitor web traffic
• Why Yahoo's new mail system rocks, and so does Gmail
• Eudora going open source excites Darren
• The RIAA comes up with a new money grab scheme
• YouTube gives "24" uploaders info to Fox
• Alt-This does not advocate piracy
• Belgium newspaper doesn't want to appear on Google News
• Darren and Jeff are amused by anyone NOT wanting to be on Google
• How to keep your computer safe
• Jeff rants on Kaspersky Anti-Virus for slamming his CPU
• A big shout out to Curtis McHale for being the first listener to e-mail the show
• Free file of the week: EasyCleaner registry cleaner
• Thanks for listening, tell a friend!!

And, if you think you're hearing things on this episode of Alt-This because it sounds like we were coming to you live from a bar, you're not. It's a concept I wanted to try to see if we could take our whiskey drinking attitude one step further and try to bring you into our own virtual bar with us as we do the show. I'm sure it would be called O'Neill's Irish Pub if we had to name it, and there would always be plenty of Irish whiskey around for me and plenty of bourbon for Jeff. Heck, there'd even be some Guiness and Smithwick's on tap for all of you non whiskey drinkers! Let us know if you like it or not and we'll know if we should keep the virtual bar theme or not!

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• Intro from the Pubcrawlers
• Welcome to Episode #0005
• Steve Jobs calls for the end of DRM article link
• Music industry fires back at Apple article link
• Apple warns Vista can wreck your iPod article link
• The RIAA thinks CDs should cost a LOT more article link
• Court orders RIAA to pay woman's legal fees article link
• It's Keith Urban vs keith urban in domain dispute article link
• Gates dares hackers to exploit Vista article link
• Naked shotgun wielding teen attacks AT&T techs article link
• We had a DOS attack, did you miss it? article link
• Update on last weeks OpenDNS story
• 10 Things you should never buy new article link
• 42% of 10-17 year olds saw pr0n on the 'net last year article link
• Free file of the week: Treewalk DNS
• Thanks for listening, tell a friend!!

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Yeah, as most of you have probably already heard Gmail is now FINALLY out of beta. I'm sure that surprised a lot of people who like to joke that Google NEVER takes things out of beta...

Well, in this case maybe those people were right. Ever since the boys (and girls) at Google opened up the doors for any Tom, Dick and Harry to snatch up a Gmail account the service has sucked. Most of the times I try to log in I get an error message. Or, if I'm lucky my mailbox will actually load but then when I try to open a message I get an error message.

Come on Google, this is our freakin' e-mail you're messing with here!! Maybe all of these new accounts should have been on new servers or something because I NEVER had a problem with getting my mail before. For a company that can seemingly download and store the whole internet daily I'm surprised they can't handle this.

Get it together, or I'll have to switch over to Yahoo! Mail where I can play with their new Ajax interface.. and where I can even actually log in and actually read my messages without dealing with error codes!

ADDITION: Ok, I am an idiot! I guess Google isn't saying it's out of Beta and I guess I was incorrect in believing that it was open to signups now. I know I read multiple stories on Digg recently that said Gmail was now open. I stand corrected on those items. Gmail HAS been quirky over the last day or so for me though, giving me a lot of error messages and for some reason at one point wouldn't load in Firefox when it would in IE. I'll keep an eye on the problems, hopefully was just something strange.

• Intro from the Pubcrawlers
• Welcome to Episode #0004
• Drinking beers.. Smithwick's and Corona
• Windows Vista launched.. Should you buy it?
• Vista on old systems? Don't even try it
• iTunes not Vista ready
• How does Vista benchmark vs. XP?
• Bill Gates says Vista secure enough to run life support systems
• Are Apple's ads a bit too cocky?
• Kid sued by the RIAA files some great counter suits
• Norway deems iTunes DRM illegal
• Youtube wants to pay you, show you ads
• The guys talk about affilliate programs
• 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year
• 94% of all e-mail in December was SPAM
• Props to DL.TV
• Blue-Ray encryption defeated
• OpenDNS a good choice if your ISP's servers are slow
• Dell selling desktop PCs without Windows
• Your XP key deactivates if you buy an upgrade license of Vista
• Crazy Windows powered machines
• Free file of the week: Comodo Firewall Pro like ZoneAlarm without all the crap!
• Thanks for listening, tell a friend!!

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I can't believe the folks over at digg.com gave this article over 3800 diggs! It makes me wonder what all these techies REALLY know about tech!

The fact of the matter is that while changing from black to white may save some energy on CRT displays, it might actually cause LCD displays to use slightly more energy. The article claims that about 25% of the monitors in use are CRTs, which may or may not be true. Assuming it is though, that means that a change to black would save 25% of the machines some power and could actually cost more for 75% of the machines!!

LCD displays use a constant back lighting to provide light to the panel. When a LCD monitor shows pure black, that's actually the point at which the monitor is working the hardest, closing all of those little doors to block the light from coming through. I'm sure that some tests could be done to show this, even if the power to keep all the little doors closed was minimal the best case scenario is that Google changing to a black background would have ZERO effect on the 75% of the world that uses LCD displays and might actually cost a little MORE energy for them.

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The teacher was convicted in what has to be a huge miscarriage of justice and now faces up to 40 years in prison.

Unfortunately, an expert the defense team hired was unable to testify in court. He did publish his report on-line here. It's sad that this kind of crap can happen to people.

Check out this blog for more info and some good links!

Microsoft has finally completely and totally lost its mind. We all kind of knew that it was coming but I didn't expect it to be this bad. With each release of Windows and Office we moved a little closer to it. I am currently in the process of evaluating Windows Vista and Office 2007 for my company and that requires looking at all the various editions of these products that Microsoft has unleashed on the world. There are eight, count them, eight different versions of Office 2007 that all include different combinations of applications from the Office System. This is insane.