Archive for October, 2007
Hackers
This week substituting for Tim MacWilliam, Dominik tells Stash Kirkbride everything about hackers. Most importantly:
- Hackers are not necessarily evil and often they make the e-world go round (see Wikipedia entry on hackers)
- There is a difference between White hat and Black hat hackers
- Hackers are not antisocial and they regularly gather at conferences; the one mentioned was What the Hack
- You can hack more than just your computer: see Lifehacker.com and Parenthacks.com; there is even palate hacking…
- As for hackers penetrating even the strongest security, quite a bit of it is done through what is called Social Engineering.
- You can become a hacker by adopting the hacker mind set of being interested in how things work and how to make them do other things
- One of the simplest and most important hacks that everybody can and should learn is URL hacking. A fun little URL hack on Google is adding the &imgtype=face at the end of the URL that comes back from an image search on Google. Compare the two results: http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=norwich&hl=en vs. http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=norwich&hl=en&imgtype=face. Another useful hack is to shorten the long URL that comes from Amazon searches when emailing it your friends: e.g. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cognitive-Linguistics-Critical-Discourse-Analysis/dp/1847182275 instead of http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cognitive-Linguistics-Critical-Discourse-Analysis/ dp/1847182275/ref=sr_1_1/202-1838462-5575848?ie=UTF8&s=books& qid=1193065714&sr=8-1.
- And in the middle of it we played Code Monkey, a song by Jonathan Coulton, and talked a bit about distribution of music online. Thanks to its Creative Commons license we were even able include this particular song in the podcast.
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Mac vs. PC (and some news)
This week, Ross, Tim and Dominik were joined in the studio by Future Radio’s production manager Dan Nyman to talk about the differences between Mac and PC.
Here are some Mac vs. PC links:
- An exhaustive feature comparison of OS X and Windows XP (MacOS comes out slightly ahead)
- A performance comparison of OS X and Windows XP (XP is ahead)
- Comparison of OS X Tiger to Windows Vista (a draw)
- A collection of Mac whines by Mac enthusiasts
- Listen to the MacBreak Weekly podcast to hear more about the joys of Apple and the Windows weekly podcast to hear about the world of Windows
Later on Dominik and Tim talked about some more news such as The Archers being available as a podcast now, Radiohead releasing their latest CD online and George Harrison’s catalog being available on the music download services.
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HD TV, HD DVDs, digital radio
This week Ross is visiting Slovakia and Tim and Dominik discuss High Definition TVs and video players. First some news:
- Amazon starts an MP3 download service
- Woman in US loses court case with RIAA for sharing music
What we discussed about HD TV:
- What is HD? Resolution of monitor 720 or 1080 vertical pixels
- Why buy or not buy an HD TV? Not enough HD video sources! Sky HD and some cable.
- Differences between plasma and LCD?
- Why not buy Blueray or HD DVD yet? We shouldn’t encourage the format wars!
- For regular DVDs on an HD TV you need an upscaling or upconverting DVD player.
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Free and Open Source Software
On the 1st October Dominik was talking to Tim and Ross about his trip to Barcelona where he was at a conference of the Open Source project Drupal. The talk was about:
- Difference between freeware and Open Source software
- What kinds of free software people use
- Why is Open Source important for companies and governments
- Why programmers want to create free software
Dominik recorded a few interviews with important Drupal developers (including project founder Dries Buytaert) and played four clips to illustrate. The full interviews will be posted here eventually.
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