Technology Bytes

Originally heard during Barrett Time and shamelssly ganked from the Geek Speak Blog here are the major events that occured over the 12 year life-span of Technology Bytes:

The First Year: 1995

• Twelve years ago this month, Windows 95 hit store shelves. The day was August 24th.
• Microsoft Internet Explorer is also launched as part of Windows 95, though at this time there were only 18,957 websites on the Internet.
• In September of 1995, online auction site eBay is founded as Auctionweb, and in December, the first multilingual search engine, Alta Vista, is launched.

The Second Year: 1996

• There are now 342,081 websites online.

The Third Year: 1997

• Domain name business.com sells for $150,000.00.
• Web commentator Jorn Barger coins the term weblog.
• Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone hit British bookstore shelves. In the US, the book is titled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

The Fourth Year: 1998

• Kozmo.com launches. This was the site that promised they could deliver just about anything in under an hour. Google opens its garage doors for business.
• The Diamond Rio PMP300 is launched.
• The Recording Industry Association of America, files a lawsuit in the Ninth U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco claiming Diamond Rio player violated the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act. The three judge panel ruled in favor of Diamond, paving the way for the development of the MP3 portable player market. The Rio retailed for $200 and had the ability to play 12 songs at 128 kilobits per second.

The Fifth Year: 1999

• SBC rolls out Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Lines to those lucky enough to be close enough to an SBC Central Office.
• Everquest is launched.
• Shawn Fanning founds Napster.
• The original MySpace site is launched as a personal file sharing service.

The Sixth Year: 2000

• On January 10th, AOL buys TimeWarner for $162 Billion, the largest corporate merger ev4r.
• On the 14th, the Dot Com Bubble reaches its peak.
• There are now nearly 20 million websites online.

The Seventh Year: 2001

• Three years after the launch of the Diamiond Rio, the first generation iPod hits the street.
• Online encyclopedia Wikipedia is founded by Jimmy Wales
• Pope John Paul II sends the first papal email from a laptop in his office. Sadly, the name Pmail didn’t stick.

The Eighth Year: 2002

• This year saw the rise of the bootable linux CD distro, Knoppix being the most notable of the group. This is why Knoppix has difficulties with motherboards that have a BIOS created before 2002.

The Ninth Year: 2003

• Apple launches the iTunes Store.
• The first flash mob is organized in Manhattan via the Web.

The Tenth Year: 2004

• Amazon.com makes the first ever full-year profit since its launch.
• Tim Berners Lee becomes Sir Tim Berners Lee, as he is knighted for his contribution to the Internet.
• The Mozilla Firefox web browser hit 1.0 this year, with Houston Geeks celebrating at a local launch party at the Saint Arnold Brewery.

The Eleventh Year: 2005

• Video sharing site YouTube.com comes online.
• The web grows more this year than during the whole Dot Com Boom as 17 million new sites go online.

The Twelfth Year: 2006

• The iPhone and the end of Harry Potter.
• As of August 2006, there are 92,615,362 websites online.

This Friday!

Dean’s Credit Clothing is located at 316 Main St, Houston, TX

Technology Bytes host Jay Lee was interviewed by Jeff Ehling for a Channel 13 piece that tied in to the recent FBI press release regarding botnet cyber crime.

You can see the news story video here.

So pleased was the Xshot corporation with my blathering the benefits of the Xshot that they have offered the listeners of Technology Bytes an opportunity to pick one up at a discount.

From now until July 15th you can go to xshotpix.com and order the Xshot and use the promo code GEEKRADIO at the time of checkout for a $5.50 discount. Just type GEEKRADIO into the box that says Coupon when you are checking out.

It’s a good deal! I love my Xshot!

Random photo of phliKtid in the studio

The May 30th show featured special guest James Kendrick of JK On The Run. He was kind enough to sit on on the show and field some questions about mobile computing devices.

He even brought a passel of nifty gadgets!

Technology Bytes Podcast - May 30, 2007 [ 2:00:40 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

How many times have you wanted a picture of yourself or a picture of yourself with a friend or even a group of friends? What do you do? Risk theft by handing your expensive digital camera to a stranger to take the shot or setting it down nearby?

Many of us have discovered how to hold a camera at arms length and snap the shot, but these pictures tend to be poorly composed and not very satisfactory.

Enter the Xshot

This nifty little device allows you to attach your compact digital camera and then hold it out and away from yourself, up to 37 inches (94 cm) away! And it retracts down to a small enough size to fit in your pocket, making this device very easy to bring along on any outing.

The Xshot is the perfect accessory for a night on the town or travelling on vacation!

Here’s a picture I took of myself just holding out the camera:

And here is the same picture using the Xshot

As you can see, there’s much more in the picture. This means better travel photos when you want the ultimate self portrait.

Compare after cropping:

By moving the camera away you also get less harshness caused by the flash going off so close to the subject. So when you crop the picture you get a better result. And it’s the perfect tool for the flattering angle shots used on social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace.

Learn more about this device at xshotpix.com

An FYI for our podcast listeners:

We don’t tend to post podcasts of the show while we are in fundraiser.

This is because these episodes tend to be mostly dedicated to encouraging our local listeners to donate money to the publicly funded radio station (KPFT).

If you really want to hear our “beg-a-thon” you can collect these episodes from archive.kpft.org

We’ll resume posting here at geekradio.com after the fundraiser is over.

Look for a new podcast episode on or after May 30th.

Here at Technology Bytes one of the more common questions that we keep getting, both on the phone and in our e-mail, concerns transferring data from one computer to another. The scenario is usually along the lines of needing to move files from an old computer to a new one.

Certainly, if your somewhat computer savvy and have a home network you can configure things so that you can move files back and forth, but it’s a rather involved process and takes some time, effort and knowledge to setup.

What if there was an easier, simpler way?

Enter The Tornado™!

A simple and elegant device, The Tornado is a USB to USB connector. Plug one end into the USB port of one computer and plug the other end into the USB of the other computer. Without having to install anything, a program window will pop up on both computers which gives you an easy to use, File Manager/Windows Explorer style interface that will let you easily and quickly transfer files between the two PC’s by simply dragging them and dropping them into the appropriate folder of either computer.

The Tornado has a 25MB/s transfer rate and is compatible with Windows 98SE*, ME, 2000, XP, and Vista.

Sorry, no Mac support.

* Windows 98SE operating system does not support the auto loading of drivers. To load the necessary 98 driver, click here or come back after you purchase your device and download the driver for free.

Ann hams it up with the crew of Technology Bytes

Behold phliKtid’s might lemon!