Technology Bytes Radio

Photo by Kymberlie R. McGuire

Technology Bytes Podcast for July 27, 2011 [ 1:59:37 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1315)

All right. Unless you’ve been living under a mountain, you’re probably familiar with the major movie milestone manifesting itself this week. Although the story was initially aimed at a younger generation, many adults have developed a soft spot in their heart for this work as well.

I mean, what’s not to like? A boy, living a life of perceived obscurity in a cookie-cutter collection of homes, finds out that he has special abilities that set him apart from other humans, and, at the end of the story arc, it’s up to him to save everyone he’s ever known or loved. Of course, the movie I’m talking about is The Last Starfighter, starring Robert Preston of Music Man fame and Lance Guest, who plays the protagonist, Alex Rogan.

Released 27 years ago today, the movie tracks the adventures of Alex and his high score on the video game (slash interplanetary recruitment tool) Star Fighter, which earns him a spot as a gunner in an actual Star Fighter in outter space.

This movie was released on the heels of the wildly successful Star Wars trilogy, so it’s not surprising that the Alex Rogan character has some similarities with the young Luke Skywalker of A New Hope. People may also draw some parallels between this story and that of Harry Potter, but, uh, I just don’t see it.

Something you *can* see in the original movie is a very young Wil Wheaton running around wearing a red jersey. As he wasn’t officially part of an away team at the time, he was able to proceed to play the role of young Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation, which
is referred to as TNG by Star Trek aficionados. Another actor in the movie, Marc Alaimo, went on to play Gul Ducat, the very first Cardassian in the Star Trek series, Deep Space Nine. And that’s not all! Several other Starfighter cast members went on to work in one Star
Trek franchise or another.

Dan Mason, who played Lord Kril in the movie, went on to play Accolan in Star Trek: TNG.

Barbara Bosson, who played Alex’s mom, Jane Rogan, went on to play Roana on Deep Space Nine, aka DS9 for those in the know.

Norman Snow -> who was Xur in StarFighter -> went on to play Torin on TNG

And Geoffrey Blake -> who played the small role of Gary in StarFighter -> went on to play Arjin on DS9.

But… The most uber of all the Trekkie tie-ins is that of Meg Wyllie, who played the role of Granny Gordon in The Last StarFigher. Any guesses as to her significance?

She played the role of The Keeper in the pilot episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, which was called The Cage. Though the pilot was completed in 1965, it wasn’t broadcast in it’s entirety until 1988 due to the fact that NBC rejected Gene Roddenberry’s original submission. A two-part episode was substituted for the network premier of the series. Titled The Menagerie, this new pilot contained much of the footage originally shot for The Cage. It also contained a entirely different enterprise crew than the original pilot. Only one
crew member is common across both pilots. Anyone want to take a guess as to which?

The answer is Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy, who got the very first line in all of Star Trek, “Check the circuit!”

So… As far as trivia questions go, that first one was a toughie. No worries that no-one got it.

I’m sure if I had asked someone to name the five houses of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, they’d certainly be able to. Anyone want to take a try? Dwight? Sorry, but in the words of Admiral Ackbar, “It’s a trap!” I think Ackbar would have made a cool Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher…

And in other happenings, the Movie which Shall not be Named is hitting theaters tomorrow night. Really, whether or not I see the movie this weekend depends entirely upon when Apple’s new OS, Lion, hits, but that’s another story, which we’ll loop back to in a second.

If you don’t have a clue as to who Harry, Hagrid or Hermione are or what the House of Hufflepuff is, you may want to head over to the Houston Area Apple Users Group Semi-Annual Swap Meet to shop for some amazingly “new to you” computer deals. If you missed the release of the first film in 2001, then you probably also missed the release Apple’s OS 10.0 (code name Cheetah), earlier that same year, meaning that most of the stuff you’ll come across at the Swap Meet will be so technologically advanced, it may even appear to be magical.

Muggles and Luddites alike are free to stop by the Bellaire Civic Center this Saturday, July 16th, between nine AM and noon to peruse the peripherals up for sale or trade. 7008 South Rice Avenue is where you want to be, and the site www.haaug.org will certainly help you get
there.

Well, That’s nearly it for your last night of sleepless Slytherin sensations and that’s that for BarretTime.

All right.

If you’ve ever known the joy of owning an Apple product, then you’re no doubt familiar with the sting of obsolescence that eventually follows every purchase. One reason Apple owners may have such a bad reputation for being flashy with their gear is that they have such a short window in which to feel superior. What contempt Steve Jobs giveth, he also taketh away in the form of a steady stream of new product announcements.

My own Precious is about to be lapped by the newest line of MacBook Airs sporting Intel’s Sandy Bridge. I feel a little betrayed, and even though I knew it would happen, I didn’t think it would happen so soon. That’s the bad part. The new gear doesn’t even have to be out yet to send you spiraling into the sickly space inhabited by owners of newly old Apple hardware.

If you don’t want to follow in my footsteps of despair, your best bet is to start with something that’s old already. The only place to get your hands on old Apple gear available for sale or trade this side of Cupertino may be at the Houston Area Apple Users Group Semi-Annual Swap Meet, happening Saturday, July 16th, at the Bellaire Civic Center. The Civic Center is located at 7008 South Rice Avenue in Bellaire, Texas. Things go from nine AM until noon, so chances are good you could be poring over an OS 8 manual by lunch, reveling in the fact that only Woz has control
over you now.

And when Lion hits, all you’ll have to do is pull up your Platinum Interface to catch the curiosity of any apple-head in your immediate vicinity.

And who knows… If you come across the correct hipster, you might be able to trade up to something with Sandy Bridge. Your magic word for this impromptu-swap meet will be Vintage. It also doesn’t hurt to say that music just sounds better on old (Correction: vintage) gear. Don’t go overboard and answer ‘yes’ when asked if it contains any vacuum tubes (and they will ask you) but promising to produce a vintage Apple v-neck t-shirt will definitely help you seal the deal.

For details about the group or next Saturday’s Swap Meet, surf to haaug.org. Or call the HAAUG Hotline at 832.305.5999 to find out the latest news on future HAAUG meetings or to report any blinking lights.

If you’ve had an opportunity to venture out to the Houston Hacker Space known as TxRx Labs, you would have surely noticed the spread of mechanical and electrical tools they have at their disposal. The group now intends to delve into the arts of computer science just as deeply with a series of regular discussions centered around any given area of computer science. The group is newly formed within the hackerspace, and certainly fills a bit of a void in Houston in the non-institutional comp-sci community.

So, if you’re at all interested in the amalgamation of black arts and best practices that make up the field of computer science, surf over to www.txrslabs.org and look for the CompSci @ TX/RX link.

A little more in our immediate future, the Houston Linux Users Group will be hosting their first of two monthly meetings covering topics of a Linuxy nature. Things run from two to four this Saturday afternoon at the HAL-PC Headquarters, located at 4543 Post Oak Place Drive, Suite 200. Some past presentations can be found at the site, video.houstonlinux.org. You can also surf there to pick up the live video stream of the presentation if you can’t make it in person. The group also inhabits an IRC channel, #hlug, on irc.freenode.net in case you can’t wait until
Saturday to get your Linux fix.

A cool ancillary trivia question: Does anyone know what city the monthly magazine, “Linux Journal” calls home? It’s published by Belltown Media of Houston, Texas. A little more Trivia for you: the first issue was published by Phil Hughes and Red Hat co-founder Bob Young in March of ’94, and included an interview with Linus Torvalds.

That’s it for Apple Obsolescence Avoidance 101 and that’s that for BarretTime.

Here on Technology Bytes we always take great joy in reporting the various April Fools jokes perpetrated by the various tech sites around the Internet. One of the more popular was an item advertised at ThinkGeek as the iCade. A device that would turn your iPad into a retro Atari gaming console. This was April Fools Day 2010.

The fake device received a LOT of attention, even from other tech sites. SlashGear called the iCade a “fake with real promise.” Engadget editor-in-chief Joshua Toplovsky tweeted out “man, I SO want the iCade to be real!” Waxy said it was “particularly cruel, because it’s an awesome idea that needs to exist.”

Fast forward to, well…now. ThinkGeek has actually made the iCade a reality.

The iCade is a really clever device. It doesn’t actually plug into you iPad. It connects as a bluetooth device that is paired with your iPad.

Once you assemble the iCade (comes with necessary tools, much like a piece of Ikea furniture) you simply follow the instructions to pair it with your iPad.

You will need to download the Atari Greatest Hits from the Apple app store. The free version contains Missile Command. For an additional fee you can purchase additional games. There’s everything from Asteroids (and Asteroids Deluxe) to Swordquest. 18 classic Atari arcade games and 92 Atari 2600 games. 100 in all.

The iCade is pretty solid and the controls work well enough. It does take a little getting used to being so small. But it is a real hoot and quite a trip down memory lane.

All right. Technology Bytes has been here for sixteen years, and, as the old saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. So what has Technology Bytes had to contend with over the years? 1995? Is that the year? We’ve got Internet Explorer 1.0, the birth of Ebay and Hotmail, Java and Javascript, Windows 95 and PHP, as well as the introduction of the venerable ATX motherboard form factor from ATX.

Netgear was founded in 1996, known for more than a decade for their blue metal boxes. This is the year that personal computing power hit an all-time high as Intel released their 200MHz P6 chip. Duke Nukem 3D hits the shelves and the domain name myspace.com is registered. HTTP/1.0 becomes a standard and the IMDB makes the hop from Usenet to the web. Google also gets is start in 96, and Creative Labs drops the first dedicated gaming graphics card, the 3D Blaster.

Dr. Thomas Pabst creates the website, (any guesses?) Tom’s Hardware.com and Apple stock hits a ten year low at a valuation of $18.00 a share.

In 97, the Internet2 Consortium is established, AOL gets sued by subscribers with connectivity issues, the Intel Pentium II ups the processor ante, and CD-RW drives and readable/writable media are introduced, heralding the death of the mix tape. Bill Gates becomes the world’s riches businessman and steps in to save Apple with a $150 million dollar bailout investment on August 6.

Internet Explorer 4 and Microsoft Office 97 are released shortly before Windows 98 is announced. This is also the year that WiFi arrives. Slashdot comes online, as does Hotmail. At this point in History, both sites are Linux related…

In 1998, online web journals or Blogs start to hit the web and congress, much to the dismay of technologists everywhere, passes the Digital Millenia Copyright Act. This is the year that Bill Gates is hit in the face with a cream pie and people across the world start to donate their spare processing power to help in the search for extraterrestrial life with Seti@Home. Windows 98 is Released on June 25 in *1998*, and MS IE passes Netscape in Internet Browser Market Share less than 20 days later. Funny how bundling a browser along with an Operating System will put you ahead like that. This is also the year that Microsoft goes to court over anti-trust concerns.

On the Open Source Side, MySQL is released. And on the non-free side, Paypal comes into existance, as does Rockstar Games. Hot Coffee, anyone?

In 1999, RIM realses the Blackberry and a Victoria’s Secret fashion show becomes the first major webcast on the web with over 1.5 million viewers. Wiki’s hit the web this year, and the Relational datbase management program Access becomes MS Access. And gamers rejoice as Nvidia introduces the GPU. Naptster is sued by the RIAA and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is named Time Person of the Year.

In 2000, the world trudged on after the very uneventful Y2K event. Twitter.com comes online this year, and EA releases the SIMS. Win2K hits and ATI introduces the Radeon line of graphics cards. And only two short years after legal proceedings began against Microsoft, Judge Thomas Penfield announces that Microsoft be split into two companies. Of course, this didn’t happen, but it was a nice gesture, all the same.

In 2001, Wikipedia starts ammassing user created content, and we start to lose the first of our living computer history with the passing of William Hewlett at 87 and Claude Elwood Shannon. Shannon is known for his work in the 40s at Bell Labs as he laid the foundation for modern information theory. He was 85. With the old guard gone, the Code Red worm also starts wriggling through the world wide web and Dell continues to thrive, becoming the world’s largest PC maker during a fifteen year low in computer sales. Apple’s OS 10.1 comes out. Does anyone remember the codename? Puma. Serial ATA and USB 2.0 are introduced and Microsoft decides to kill off Clippy shortly before the release of Windows XP. I still pour out a sip for the Clip every time I drink and work with MS Office docs… I hope you do, too. And after producing the last fireball, Qantum sells off its hard drive business to Maxtor. This was also the first year you could stumble upon stumbleupon.com. Oh, and one more thing. The iPod. Yep.

In 2002, Dean Kamen unveils the Segway. Have we ever had any Segway support calls? I guess George Bush wasn’t a fan of the show at the time. PCI Express is approved as a standard and Roxio picks up the Napster name at a bankruptcy auction.

In 2003, The Smaller worm does it’s thing and becomes the fastest spreading work in history after infecting hundreds of thousands of computers in it’s first three hours of life. SCO becomes the target of everyone’s ire as it sues IBM for its alleged contributions to the Linux kernel. Apple opens the iTunes store, and LinkedIn launches. This is the year that Skype goes public, and Apple releases OS X 10.3. Panther.

In 2004, the Official MySpace site launches, though still managing to hold onto a look that predates it’s domain name registration. Mark Zuckerberg launches TheFaceBook, which is later shortened to just FaceBook. And on April 1st, Google announces the creation of GMail, which many percieved as a joke. Sorry, Hotmail. And modern warfare truly enters the information age as the first five human beings are killed by an unmanned ariel vehicle or UAV in South Waziristan on June 18. OK, that’s definitely a bummer, but something insanely great did happen that year, the release of OS X 10.4 (codenamed? Anyone? Tiger!) just ten days later at the World Wide Developers Conference. Ubuntu 1.0 is released, as is the game World of Warcraft. In terms of the balance of good and evil, this one’s a wash. This is also the year that the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42 enter our collective consciousness.

In 2005, we all become a little less lost, as Google Maps is introduced. And we’re all given a video voice as YouTube comes online. Does anyone remember the title of the first video uploaded? Me at the zoo. And speaking of 800 pound gorillas, Apple announces that it will leave IBM for Intel as the main supplier of chips for its personal computing line. Microsoft swaps the name Longhorn Windows Vista and IBM halts sales and support of it’s own Operating System OS/2.

In 2005, the XBox 360 hits store shelves, ushering in a new era of Internet connected gaming consoles. And while everyone else is out buying XBox games, Yahoo buys Flickr, News Corporation buys MySpace, eBay buys Skype, Adobe buys Macromedia, Yahoo! buys del.icio.us and Seagate buys Maxtor.

Blu-Ray brings in 2006 as Wikipedia publishes its millionth article. Toshiba releases the first HD DVD player as Apple announces BootCamp. Twitter is officially launched, lengthening its name from Twttr, though still restricting users to 140 characters. Cloud computing comes of age as Amazon Web Services fire up for the first time. Nintendo launches the Wii as Sony releases the Playstation 3. And Time Magazine names *Me* as the Person of The Year. Well, actually, it was you. But me just sounds better.

In 2007, Apple announces that it will drop the “Computer” from it’s name, as it becomes a company that deals with more than just computers. Apple then announces that it intends to stick the letter “i” in front of every common word Steve Jobs could write down in the 24 hours before the release the first iPhone at the Macworld Conference and Expo. Things get twice as nice this year, as Intel drops the Core2 Duo. Of course the cpu-hungry Microsoft Vista and Office 2007 are there to eat up any spare cycles you may have left over from the extra proc. And Google shows us what we look like from a smart car as Google Street View is folded into Google Maps. Google continues to have a big year with the release of Android, and Amazon starts to change the publishing game as it starts to sell the Kindle along side its books in print. Aplpe releases OS X 10.5. Codename? Leopard.

In 2008, the Blu-Ray HD DVD wars come to an end as HD DVD throws in the towel. Hopefully not the towel they got from the industry that helped push Blu-Ray into the winner’s circle…

In 2009, Google produced a shiny new browser, Chrome, and Microsoft hits back with the release of Internet Explorer 8. Microsoft announces the Bing Search Engine and Google announces the morphing of Grand Central into Google Voice. Microsoft inks a ten year deal to replace Yahoo! search with Bing and after 5 years, Gmail finally gets out of Beta. And not to be outdone by anyone, Steve Jobs is named CEO of the Decade by Fortune Magazine. Oh yeah, and Barnes & Nobles release the Nook.

In 2010, Apple produces the iPad and Google gives us Buzz. And in contrast to our military milestone, the first all-robotic surgery is performed in Montreal.

And in 2011, Watson beats the two highest ranked Jeopardy players, thus replacing the holy grail beating human chess players with that of beating game show contestants.

And here we are. Duke Nukem still looks like Duke Nukem, we still live in a world without Clippy, and I still don’t have my flying car. Maybe in another 16 years IBM will produce a computer that’s really good at Monopoly. Or dodgeball.

That’s (about/been) it for the Bed music and that’s that for BarretTime.

Of course, we still need to talk about the Geek Gathering. It creeps me out a little to do BarretTime without the BarretTime Bed Music. I feel like it’s kinda up to me to keep the baseline going…