This is a new show, recorded on Monday April 28th because we were pre-empted over the air. Just us talking, no listener phone calls.

Affiliate marketing. Paying taxes in New York on Internet purchases. Hank bought cheap stuff at TCF. A lawsuit about solid state hard disks. HP's new online backup service was broken for 6 days. Can you really get Windows XP on the new HP min-note laptops? AMD is in trouble. Apple bought a CPU processor company. Michael suggests waiting before installing Windows XP Service Pack 3. Lenovo introduced a new ulta-small laptop.

 

Alfred was in the New York Times discussing HDTVs, so we discussed them a bit too. See HDTVs Shrink from April 18th.

Skype lets you call overseas for a flat $10/month, which even includes cellphones in some countries.

Mac users may have a cheap virtual clone. A small company in Florida called Psystar sells a computer for about $400. If you buy a retail copy of OSX Leopard for an additional $150, they will install it for you on their computer thus insuring all the drivers are in place. Apple is not happy as they don't allow OSX to run on anything but Apple hardware. Is that legal? Psystar calls it an open computer.

Our guest was David Perry of Trend Micro. Malware keeps getting worse, Trend Micro is blocking 3 to 5,000 new instances of malicious software a day. All told, their pattern files are blocking 5.5 million "objects". David said the whole pattern file concept is on the way out. He also warned that online banking in the US is not nearly as secure as in other countries. The most secure bank in the US? David says it's Paypal.

David will be speaking at the upcoming Trenton Computer Festival on the 26th and 27th. See tcf-nj.org.

On May 14th, Alfred will be in New York to speak at B and H photo about how to chose the right HDTV. Next week, we are pre-empted over the air but will record a new show that will be available here. Listener phone calls.

 

Just us talking. We were pre-empted over the air, but recorded this new show anyway. No listener phone calls, no guest.

 

Our guest was Dale Dougherty, Editor and Publisher of MAKE Magazine.

A new version of the Adobe Flash player was just released. You can test the version used by your web browser at www.adobe.com/products/flash/about/. The latest version is 9.0.124.0. If you have multiple web browsers installed, each can be using a different version of the Flash player so you need to run this test in each browser.

Before installing a new version, you should un-install the old version(s). Doing so via the Control Panel Add/Remove programs may or may not work, depending on which version of Flash you already have. Better, is to use the Adobe Flash un-installer program available at kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_14157&sliceId=2. There are different versions for Windows and for Macs, there is no un-installer for Linux. After un-installing, go to the version test page to verify that the un-install worked correctly. Then you can install the new version availabe at adobe.com/go/getflash.

 

The Torrentspy search engine shut down, but there are still other BitTorrent search engines to help people find files to download using BitTorrent. We may have given the impression that BitTorrent itself shut down, this is NOT the case. Because so much copyrighted material is available via BitTorrent, the Torrentspy search engine was being sued and they gave up fighting.

To clarify things, the term Bit Torrent has multiple meanings. First, it is a protocol for sharing files in a peer-to-peer network. Second, it is a software program for sharing files using the protocol. There are many programs, such as uTorrent, for sharing files using the BitTorrent protocol. Third, there is a company called BitTorrent that was founded in 2004 and maintains the protocol. See Wikipedia.

A Macbook laptop was hacked easier than Windows Vista or Linux. Sony BMG in France got caught using lots of stolen software. Apple is being sued for mis-representing the technical specs of a 20 inch monitor. Dell is closing a plant in Texas. Finding the free ZoneAlarm firewall. The NLite and VLite programs help lower the disk space used by Windows. What will Microsoft do about low-cost laptops that now run Linux?