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robyannetta writes "Australian companies providing Linux products and services may soon have to pay up to $A5000 a year to licence the operating system name (warning: Registration Required), if the patents agency IP Australia grants a trademark application it is reviewing. About 90 companies with products, services or websites containing the word "Linux" recently received letters of demand from Perth lawyer Jeremy Malcolm. Acting for user group Linux Australia Inc, he asks recipients to sign statements saying their use of the word is subject to the group's licence agreement, which has fees of $A200 to $A5000 under a successful trademark application."

SFEley (Stephen Eley) writes "Todd Cochrane's Podcasting: The Do-It-Yourself Guide has been heavily pushed in the podcasting community as the first of a wave of podcasting books to be released in the next several months. All of these books will surely cover the same themes, more or less: what podcasts are, how to listen to them, and how to produce your own. The popularity of podcasting is exploding right now, with coverage in every press outlet and Apple hyping it as The Next Big Thing. It's easy to see that there will be a huge demand for these books, even if they don't do much more than state the obvious. So what about this one? Other than being the first, does it offer any compelling virtues for the would-be podcaster or listener?" Read on for Eley's answer to that question. Podcasting: Do-It-Yourself Pirate Radio for the Masses author Todd Cochrane pages 281 publisher Wiley rating 4 reviewer Stephen Eley ISBN 0764597787 summary How to find, record, and publish podcasts

Before we can even begin to talk about the book, we ought to cover the preliminaries. If you've been living under a rock for most of 2005, you may not know that podcasting is the latest Internet publishing wave, getting most of the same hype that blogging has gotten but much faster. In its simplest form, it's just people producing audio files (talk, music, whatever) and syndicating them over an RSS feed. Listeners can then use one of several apps to automatically download them and load them onto an MP3 player. The mainstream media, feeling some embarrassment for missing the last few Web boats, has jumped on podcasting and given it, frankly, a lot more press than it probably deserves right now.

A note on the author: Todd Cochrane produces Geek News Central, a very popular tech podcast wherein he reads out news headlines and offers commentary. He also founded and manages the Tech Podcast Network, a consortium of other technology podcasts that band together for cross-promotion, content standards and advertising, and he's the main force behind the heavily advertised and sponsored Podcast Awards. It's fair to say that Cochrane has done a lot for podcasters in various ways, and although I've disagreed with him on some of the details of his projects, I respect him highly for his tremendous energy and the work he's done to make podcasting a respectable form of media.

Another note (and disclaimer) on myself: I also have my own podcast, a moderately popular one that narrates science fiction short stories. In a practical sense this makes me both a podcaster and a literary editor. Which means, in turn, that I have a sensitivity both to poor information on podcasting and poor writing.

And with all that said... I'm afraid Podcasting: The Do-It-Yourself Guide is a marginal book at best. It doesn't suck, and there's nothing horribly wrong with the information it gives, but it has two endemic problems. Cochrane's responsible for both, but I put the real blame on his editors at Wiley, who likely ignored them in their rush to get the book out before any others.

The first problem is the writing. It's possible that this bothers me more than it would others. Todd Cochrane may be an intelligent, selfless, wonderful guy -- I truly believe that he is -- but the man can't write. The entire book exhibits a rushed, forced-casual, eighth-grade English paper style that grates on me like nails on a chalkboard. Cochrane even admits this in his acknowledgments: "Early on, I made it clear to Chris [Webb], my acquisitions editor, that I was a geek/tech guy first and that he did not want to see my English grades. Even so, he assured me that I was their man, and I went to work."

Well, Chris Webb, you're a dumbass. You picked someone who admitted he couldn't write to write a book on a breakthrough technology. As a result, the book is vague, meandering, and frequently redundant, e.g.: "You will want to use this Recording Control window to control your default recording device." That phrase ("You will want to ...") crops up everywhere: the book's not only in second person, but it's a second person that tells the reader what he/she wants. The only sentence opener that appears more often is "Obviously" -- which frequently precedes a thought that is neither obvious nor related to the sentence before it.

You will also want to ignore the poor punctuation and comma splices, the frequent intersplicing of Notes and Tips paragraphs that seem indistinguishable (in both font and content) from the main text, and very often, the simple use of the wrong words. In many cases this is simply amusing: "[Dave Winer's] analogy was that it was taking longer to download the video than it was to play it." Uh, that's not an analogy, dude. In at least one case it leads to a technically incorrect statement: "The reading on the software-controlled meter in my audio-recording package showed nearly 40 dB of baseline noise," when what he really meant was a noise floor of -40 dB. Two very different things.

The other major problem is the narrow perspective. It's really Podcasting: The Do-It-Todd-Cochrane's-Way Guide. Everything in this book is about Cochrane. Every example is his own podcast, every screenshot of a Web page is his own, and he's got multiple photos of himself in various dorky situations. Any photos of other podcasters? Mur Lafferty, perhaps, or Soccergirl? You wish. I have no problem with Cochrane using himself as a starting point, but it's a very diverse field, and nobody podcasts with quite the same gear or the same techniques as anybody else. Cochrane says he spent significant time interviewing software developers for the chapters on applications, but there's no indication anywhere that he spoke to any other podcasters in writing this book. That's a huge mistake, rushed deadlines or no rushed deadlines. Not only does it reduce the book's utility, but it also makes the prose seem dreary, monotonic, and egocentric.

So there's my overview. For those who think the book may still have some use to you (and it might, if you can put up with the above) I'll break it down by section:

Part I: Listening to the Podcast Revolution This section has three chapters, and they're useless. The book begins, "Do you have specific interests? How about triathlons? I have to admit, most radio broadcasts don't deal with those kind of subjects. But that's about to change." Yeah, okay. The problem here (beyond the clumsy writing) should be obvious: if you have no idea what podcasting is, you're not interested enough to buy a book on podcasting. The first chapter, "What Is a Podcast?" has Cochrane spiraling around the subject of podcasting for twelve pages without ever giving a simple definition. Then we've got two chapters which together describe the leading software tools used to download podcasts, and tutorials for using them to subscribe to -- can you guess? -- Todd Cochrane's podcast. To be fair, it was a pretty decent overview of the major client applications at the time of the book's writing; which means it's already obsolete, as iTunes 4.9 has totally changed the landscape since then. Of course, that can't be helped. The real weakness of this section is its superfluity: if you're willing to pay $20 for a book on podcasting, it's because you want to make podcasts. Even Grandma's not going to buy this book to learn how to listen to them.

Part II: Joining the Revolution: Your Own Podcast Here's where the book starts to get genuinely interesting. The obligatory but stupid chapters on listening to podcasts are behind us; now it's all about making them. The first chapter here, "Choosing a Podcast Format," actually has little to criticize. His basic message is sound: Follow your passions; develop a show structure and follow it; and be aware of copyright issues if you're playing music. All of that is good advice, and his detailed description of his own show structure and notes is appropriate here. This is followed by a completely unnecessary chapter about computer choices, in which he shows his Windows colors and comes off a trifle condescending toward the Mac. ("In researching materials for this book, I found I could not do the reviews justice unless I had a Mac, so I purchased a Mac Mini ... I knew that if I could record a podcast on a Mac Mini, it would probably make the Mac fans happy.") Then, at last, he delivers the first truly crunchy chapter: "The Semiprofessional Podcast Studio." This chapter's honestly very good, running the gamut of sound cards, microphones, mixers, Firewire interfaces (he dismisses USB interfaces rather unfairly), digital recorders, even quiet case fans. Some of it's hand-waved, and some of it's so vague it's just silly: "A condenser microphone is generally never found in households. People might have them, but they usually are not aware that they do." On the other hand, his discussion of quality sound cards does have much of value (barring the "40dB of baseline noise" misstatement I mentioned above), and he gives one of the best descriptions of mixers and effects processors for novices that I've found. If you have no idea what sort of equipment you might need for quality sound in your podcast, you'll get a decent grounding here. Not an excellent grounding, but perhaps enough to parse a little bit more of the serious sound FAQs on the Web.

Part III: Recording Your Podcast and Performing Postproduction Tasks (Yes, the man can't even name things with brevity.) There's one weak chapter here and two great ones. In "Recording Locations," Cochrane reveals that you can podcast at home, in your car, at a restaurant, or walking around. Whee. Then we get to the actual process of recording and postproduction, and the book honestly shines. He describes step-by-step how to set up Audacity (the excellent freeware Win/Mac/Linux sound editor) to record, how to set up a typical mixer, and best of all, how to set levels properly. Levels are the bane of any audio amateur, and these half-dozen pages are gold; it's the one thing a novice podcaster is likely to turn back to and reference several times over in his first few recordings -- or ought to, anyway. His advice on noise reduction, amplifying, and normalizing is spot-on, the steps listed for MP3 encoding are simple but solid, and he even gives several good options for ID3 tagging. (A step too often overlooked by podcasters.) I could complain about a few weird digressions -- e.g., the postproduction chapter tells you how to upload to Openpodcast.org, which is an utterly bizarre thing to advise -- but they're easily ignored, and overall this section truly shines.

Part IV: Hosting and Preparing to Publish Your Podcast This section's ... okay. His chapter on hosting is mostly a treatise on how to evaluate service agreements, which is valuable enough in itself but can be overkill for someone just starting out. There are a few math exercises for estimating bandwidth -- useless when you don't know your potential audience size -- and a brief list of "podcast-friendly hosts" which is, of course, already obsolete. His coverage of publishing methods is about weblog software -- wait, scratch that, it's about MovableType. He's infatuated with MT, and devotes several pages on a step-by-step for hacking MT's code and templates to support enclosures with full-source RSS code listings, then mentions virtually offhand that Wordpress and Radio Userland support enclosures out of the box. This is another case where having multiple podcaster perspectives would have helped. Finally, we get a chapter named "The Life Breath of a Podcast: RSS 2.0 With Enclosures," just barely longer than its title, which covers how to use FeedForAll to hand-crank an RSS file if you don't have blogging software that will make one for you. It might have been a valuable chapter if he'd spent any real time explaining RSS 2.0 or enclosures.

Part V: It's Show Time A closing section that's nearly pointless, but mercifully brief. There's an entire chapter about using graphical FTP clients -- lame because anyone who's that blinking-twelve was lost back at Chapter 6. The meaty chapter is called "Feedback, Promotion, and Paying the Bills," and it has some moderately useful information and some large gaps. Feedback apparently means "have a mailing list and a voicemail line, and hang out on Skype." Okay. Promotion's about directory listings and exchanging promos with other podcasters; then he offers a long commentary on advertising and why it's a fine thing to have. Unfortunately, other than creating a media kit he has nothing much to say on how to contact and market your show to advertisers. And the final chapter of the book, "Where Do We Go From Here?" offers a few vapid musings of the sort all podcasters talk about over beer: we're going to kill mainstream radio, podcasts will band together and commercialize, all the starving children of the world will have an MP3 player ... And Yes, in his final sentences he invokes the already-tired "Podcasting Revolution" chestnut. Not much to say here, but rest assured, he says it.

So there you have it. That's the entire book. Worth buying? That depends. If you're itching to get started with podcasting, if you're an absolute beginner when it comes to sound recording, if the online resources at Podcast411 and other sites don't float your boat, and if you can't wait a few more months for books like Podcast Solutions and Podcasting for Dummies to come out ... then sure. There are at least three or four good chapters in here with information you can use. It's not all the information, and you have to take Cochrane's style and limited viewpoint with a big grain of salt, but it'll get you started. For less than twenty bucks, at least it isn't a high-risk investment.

On the other hand, if you're the bootstrapping type, or you already know most of what you're doing, then there's not much in here you can't figure out online and through experience. And if you're patient, there will be other books, and I'm almost positive they'll be better written.

You can purchase Podcasting: the Do-It-Yourself Guide from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "As Linux enters the mainstream, adopters 'are demanding many features found on commercial software, including a large variety of add-on application programs and management tools that are easy to use,' the Wall Street Journal reports. 'How quickly open-source programs can narrow the gap with commercial software is a hotly debated topic in the computer industry. The transition may determine whether the technology will continue its momentum, or stall in the face of tougher competition at the heart of corporate computer networks.' Eric Singleton, chief information officer at retailer Tommy Hilfiger Corp., which recently switched its e-commerce site 'Tommy.com' from Linux to Microsoft software, calls Linux 'a great product,' but adds, 'it's got to get the final tier of reliability and predictability that I'm going to bet a multi-billion dollar corporation's future on.'"

Rockstar's next title, Bully, has already come under fire from anti-bullying groups. Activists have taken it up another notch, though, by demonstrating outside of the NY Rockstar offices. They've also laid out a list of demands to the game developer, hoping to get the company to change its ways. The Peaceoholics demand Rockstar "Not to release Bully under any circumstances, Volunteer to sell its violent and sexually explicit games in adult video stores only, Let parents return Grand Theft Auto for a full refund until they do a national awareness campaign to educate parents of content and possible effects, Create a fund for victims of unauthorized use of a motor vehicle and car-jackings, etc, Make a national apology for misleading and lying to children, parents, and legislators about their intentions and causing insurance premiums to sky rocket, Give a written response within five business days of receipt of these demands" Press the Buttons has commentary, and uses some words I'd like to myself.

Gldm writes from South Africa that "things are heading towards all-out war down here. Our regulatory board ICASA (think FCC) finally woke up and publihsed the results of hearings on 446 complaints about monopoly broadband provider Telkom, which was deregulated back in Febuary, and proposed new regulations to take effect in four weeks. ICASA demands the 3GB monthly traffic cap be removed, port shaping removed, minimum speed requirements be enforced, and that Telkom stop double-charging customers." Read on for the rest; it sounds like (for once!) broadband customers in the U.S. can be grateful for relatively good broadband, instead of envious of South Korea's ubiquitous high-speed access.

"Currently we pay exorbitant rates: a monthly fee for the physical line of R87, then Telkom charges a fee of R270 to R477 depending on line speed 192-512kbps, and THEN the standard ISP fee, which is typically another R300-500 or more. This means a total monthly DSL cost of around R1000 or about US $160 for a 512k line with 3GB of traffic before you get cut off, and all ports but 80 useless internationally. ICASA says Telkom should charge a fixed fee to cover the line cost when it is installed like every other country, not a monthly fee.

Telkom's response is that ICASA doesn't know how to run a network and this would make the network "unsustainable" and prevent them from recovering R1bn in investments. They've threatened to not only to stop investing in new infrastructure, but also shut down all DSL service in the country, bringing business to a standstill.

Local politcal group the Inkatha Freedom Party has sided with ICASA and is saying Telkom must not be allowed to hold the country hostage. They're calling for the Minister of Communications to step in, but so far no official word from high up in the government."

EconolineCrush writes "Command queuing has long been a feature of high-end SCSI drives meant for demanding multi-user environments, but it's now starting to pop up in the latest generation of desktop Serial ATA drives. Desktop Serial ATA drives are generally subjected to far less demanding single-user loads, making command queuing's benefits a little harder to quantify. However, it turns out that Native Command Queuing can significantly improve the performance of Serial ATA hard drives with disk-intensive desktop multitasking. With dual-core processors trickling into the mainstream and multitasking poised to become more popular, Native Command Queuing could prove essential for desktop hard drives."

Anonymous Cowherd writes "Paul Thurrott, a journalist that usually writes about all things Windows related (and sometimes about Apple affairs too), made a call in a recent article to boycott Internet Explorer, due to Microsoft's approach (continued in IE7) of not supporting web standards: 'My advice here is simple: Boycott Internet Explorer. It is a cancer on the Web, and must be stopped. IE is insecure and is not standards-compliant, which makes it unworkable for both end users and Web content creators... You can turn the tide by demanding better from Microsoft and using a better alternative Web browser. I recommend and use Mozilla Firefox, but Apple Safari (Mac only) and Opera 8 are both worth considering as well.'"

Pascal Klein writes "William Szilveszter, a Gnome desktop artist has recently released an extensive suite of goodies for our Gnome desktops, including a GTK theme, Firefox and Thunderbird themes, an extensive icon set and 2 media player skins, as well as a high in demand wallpaper. His Graphic Suite, on Gnome-Look.org has become the most highly rated contribution to the Gnome-Look.org community in just under 5 days, and has scored over 4900 downloads to date.

Wombat has interviewed him in light of his recent release... You can find the interview here."

flip-flop writes "In the wake of recent terrorist attacks, police here in the UK have asked for sweeping new powers they claim will help them counter the threat. Among these is making it a criminal offense for people to refuse disclosing their encryption keys when the police want to access someone's files." From the article: "The most controversial of the police proposals is the demand to be able to hold without charge a terrorist suspect for three months instead of 14 days. An Acpo spokesman said the complexity and scale of counter-terrorist operations means the 14-day maximum is often insufficient."

elzurawka wrote to mention a BBC article discussing Microsoft's boost in profits as a result of an upswing in PC demand. From the article: "The company announced record revenue of $39.79bn for the fiscal year ending on 30 June, an 8% increase over the $36.84 billion reported last year. The main drivers of sales for Microsoft's Windows, Office and Server software products - PC makers and Asian component manufacturers - have reported healthy demand for PCs."

daria42 writes "This is an interesting interview with Sun's chief information officer Bill Vass, about his experiences as the CIO of one of the world's best-known high-tech company. In particular, Vass talks about corporate blogging (and frustrated lawyers), problems providing IT support to finicky Sun engineers (who sometimes demand Indian help desk support knows kernel details), Sun's programs testing its software internally on employees before it goes out, and how ultimately, his job is like any other CIO's...just with some cool toys."

darkonc writes "The CBC is reporting that about 15 copies of "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince" were accidently sold at a 'Great Canadien Superstore' in a suburb of Vancouver BC. The Canadian Distributor, Raincoast Books managed to get an injunction prohibiting the people who recieved the books from talking about them and demanding that they return the books to Raincoast until Friday. To add a carrot to the stick, raincoast is offering various goodies including a signed bookplate."

Gamepro has an editorial up asking the question are Massive Games only for the hardcore? From the article: "Part of it has to do with the conventional pricing model. With a game demanding $15 a month, you can't afford to just casually log in a few hours on the weekend without feeling jipped. So the casual gamer's MMO has to be a game entertaining enough to pull people away from their usual games (let's face it, most MMOs are boring), and rewarding enough in a 1-2 hour timeframe so it doesn't require you to neglect your daily routines."

boarder8925 writes "Enterprise computer maker Sun Microsystems announced its first-ever laptop yesterday, saying the machine was designed to let engineers and scientists perform demanding computer tasks away from their desks. Sun, which has seen sales fall for the last four years, said that it was also lowering prices for some of its computers by up to 40 percent."

Xanderoth writes "Engadget has an article on 'Dead on Demand' technology to destroy your disk drive should it be compromised by any number of ways. From the article: 'Configurable triggers such as removal or tampering of the drive, removal of device from a resting GPS point, cellular telephone call, or even a change in temperature will release a chemical mist into the drive (not the computer) destroying it layer by layer.' Of course the drives, due out next year, are expected to be priced between $2,500 to $9,000 each, plus a yearly fee."

Ubergrendle writes "A poll conducted by Ipsos on behalf of the Associated Press and AOL confirmed that 73% of movie viewers prefer to watch movies at home rather than at a theater. This article comes on the heels of a consistently poor box office this year, even despite the presence of the new Star Wars film. Despite this demand for home viewing, only 5% admitted to downloading a movie from the internet."

euphonaesthesia writes "In this article from Fortune, Dell CEO Michael Dell mentions that he would offer OS X to customers if Apple were so willing. The author speculates also that Apple would probably demand certain specifications. Having OS X would probably require a higher price point--this both Apple and Dell would probably like."

suitepotato writes "In this article, Ingrid Marson reports to CNet News that in a small survey of companies such as Dell, HP, and Lenovo, there are no real plans to deploy Microsoft's Windows XP N which was the version required by the European Union. It would seem that despite the rants of anger towards Microsoft that they were unfairly bundling Windows Media Player with Windows XP, the public at large would not seem to agree and is not actually demanding any such stripped down version. Perhaps the EU's actions were unnecessary?"

congaflum writes "The Pragmatic Bookshelf recently released the second beta of their upcoming book Agile Web Development with Rails. By releasing the book to the public in beta form, the authors are able to gather feedback about the books content from a larger audience that would normally be the case. Readers get to influence the direction on the books content by posting feedback to the publisher's website. And of course there's the benefit of simply getting to read the book early. Could beta-version books be a sign of future changes in the commercial publishing industry? And with the availability of things like print on demand these days, how about books that are much more frequently revised (why buy a year-old Edition 1 of something, if you can have Edition 1.1.18?)"

Universal and Fox are apparently close to coming up with a deal Microsoft is happy with for the in-the-works Halo film. Gamespot reports that the two movie studios will cofinance the hugely expensive movie title. From the article: "while Universal and Fox's offer is now the only game in town, Microsoft is still unsure if it wants to play ball. Variety and the Times say the agreement is held up on two fronts. First, the two studios requested that Microsoft relinquish its demands and that the Halo movie strictly follow a Bungie-penned "bible," which would ensure that it would not deviate from the Halo mythos or conflict with "sequels" to the game (i.e. Halo 3). The second reported sticking point was Microsoft's insistence that principal shooting begin as soon as possible, possibly as early as this fall."