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Leo Laporte Returns to G4TV
TimeForGuinness writes "Leo Laporte returns to G4TV along with the show Call For Help. It premieres Monday the 29th of August at 11am ET/8am PT. As a long time ZDTV and TechTV fan, I am happy to see him return." Agreed. Good to see him back on a cable show. The first few episode topics include: "Waterproof Your Gadgets, Find a Wi-Fi Hotspot, Tweak Your TV Tones, Network Enabled DVD Players"
after g4 took over
.. *glances at the TV* .. *kicks the dirt*..
*unblocks G4 from his receiver*
ok, you got me this time, but I'm not enjoying it!
For those of you who don't watch TV anymore :cough:, here's a primer: Call for Help and Leo Laporte.
I always thought that he was fairly intelligent, but where Leo really shines is his ability to talk to non-techies about technical things. I wish they would put Kate back on also. ;)
Seeing the problems that "ordinary people" have with software helps us geeks understand better what it takes to design good software.
that Call for Help never really went away, at least in Canada. Leo moved to Toronto and Call for Help continued on the Canadian version of G4. G4 in the U.S. is now rebroadcasting the Canadian episodes.
Don't worry though, you're not missing much from the Canadian version of G4 as Call for Help and Xplay are the only good shows on our version as well. The worst show has to be Arena. Why would I want to watch a nerd herd playing games I already own?
Anyway, glad to hear the Leo is back on U.S. television.
This is great
Ever since G4 took over, that channel has become increasingly childish and mindless. There is an overabundance of programming devoted to video games and other distractions while the "tech" element has been brushed completely aside. Even if the show is a bit basic, at least it has substance.
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Call for Help had some good interviews. And they had some good segments (usually involving Kevin Rose and some hack or Yoshi and some mod). And yes, it was very n00b oriented. That's the point. It was a show your dad or grandma could watch and learn something from.
Attack of the Show is more like a cross between Slashdot and Fark, but clean enough for television.
Most of the content from G4/TechTV is just awful. It's too MTV-ish geared for zit-faced basement dwelling pre-pubescent kids who'll never get a date. You know, the kind of people that would think some stereotypical black guy with cornrows, bling and a funky nickname interviewing half naked asian pornstars in between showing "drift" races is "really awesome". TechTV wasn't like that. G4 has become that. Of course, G4 is owned by Viacom, which owns MTV - I believe. TechTV was owned by Paul Allen.
Most people who watch G4/TechTV don't do it because it's the best thing in the world. They watch it because it's all there is. What other tech shows are you going to watch on TV? You're not - there aren't any, unless you count a re-run of Monster Garage or a rare episode of Alan Alda hosting Nova (which is probably about my favorite non-fiction series ever on television).
Actually - I wouldn't even qualify Attack of the Show that way. That show actually is good. But everything else on the station is mediocre. Well, except for those cool 'documentary' shows about the history of gaming. That shit is pretty cool.
What I'd really like is to see some sort of a channel dedicated to learning. And then maybe a channel dedicated to science. Unfortunately, the two stations that used to be that are now "The Ladies Channel" that show nothing but "A Wedding Story" and "A Baby Story" and "A Makeover Story" and "A Dating Story" (I'm not shitting you - that's the lineup on The Learning Channel!)... and then Discovery.. I don't even know what that has these days. Probably just a bunch of send-person-out-of-town, redo-house, surprise-person shows.
Windows guy? Apparently, you haven't watched the old Screen Savers. He heavily promoted BeOS and Linux. I was younger at the time, so I don't remember if he promoted both at once or what. I just remember a computer with a huge monitor running BeOS and penguins everyone in various episodes of the Screen Savers. Mind you, this was TSS with Kate & Leo on ZDTV. ZDTV was bought out by someone close to or part of Microsoft or something, so the show started to focus on windows.
What do you expect Leo to be?! He's a fucking television host/radio host who explains tech to average people. A lot of people at Slashdot have careers a lot like that, you know? Just because you're helping people figure their shit out instead of writing the next BitTorrent client or 200-mile wifi cantenna doesn't mean you're a n00b.
And yes, aside form his commentary, his "instructional" information could be learned from a book. You know what book? Probably the book HE WROTE. He writes an extremely popular technical almanac every year and has for quite a few years now. It's not bad. I wouldn't buy it, but if I had a tech-interested family member who was somewhat short on the actual tech experience or knowledge, I'd completely refer them to it.
Leo is a communicator. He's calm and polite and interesting and has a very smooth and helpful way of explaining things that would otherwise be very difficult for non-tech people to understand. He performs an important job in the tech industry - helping people. Some of us could learn a thing or two. If you want to draw in more customers and a larger tech community, you have to start somewhere. You're not going to get it by insulting people and turning them away if they aren't as incredibly 31337 as you and I. you're going to do it by empowering them. Help them through problems. Explain things to them. Maybe expose them to some stuff they weren't familiar with before. I gaurantee the first time a lot of people will hear about what P2P really is or wifi or the RIAA or Windows Update are through that guy.
He isn't going to tell you how to write your own software and port it to the iPod. He's going to tell you how to get your ipod to synch with your mac properly. He's not going to tell you how to create and post a bit torrent... but he'll tell you what bit torrent is and point you to some clients and some information about it.
There are a lot of hack "tech support genius" guys on the radio. They all suck and stay the stupidest shit. Laporte actually knows his stuff. You should listen to his show on KFI on the weekend some time. Or his podcast. Or watch him on TV. Or read one of his books.
If you're like me, you have friends and loved ones who are not computer literate.
You are... maybe too computer literate, and you have a hard time with layman's terms.
Call for Help is a great way to learn to speak non-tech speak to the tech disabled.
It's helped me immensly in the past on how to deal with my parents, convince my grandparents to switch to mac to avoid viruses, and advise friends on purchasing PC parts on their own to build their own PC's.
You want relief? Make your friends build their own PC's and then tell them since they built it, THEY can support it!
Although he occasionally got tech stuff wrong he really did have a gift for talking to noobs. He really helped the geek culture, even if that meant raising the average geek IQ.
Too bad G4 Sucks Ass though.
Yet you don't mind Ask Slashdot?
This is probably the only good thing G4 has EVER done. I still can't figure out why they bought TechTV, since They killed nearly every show, and fired everyone from Screen Savers and changed the name. (Why not just make a new show and leave screen savers alone?) Oh, wait. I forgot Morgan Webb. Is her whiny, sacrastic ass really worth $300 million? Xplay is redundant, since G4 already had a game review show, and everyone hates Adam Sessler because, although he is just as whiny and sarcastic as Webb, he lacks the cleavage to hold the viewers attention and make them forget about how whiny and sarcastic they are. So basically all comcast wanted was her ablility to pull in the geek demographic while at the same time they "urbanize" the network with more hip-hop, "bling" and "whip" style. Hey, comcast! Wake the freak up and see how badly this channel is.
THIS is what happens when you let the marketing people run the programming.
"I forgot my mantra."
Leo's show is definitely good for the beginners and the average user, as others have mentioned. Plus, he's far from a MS fan boy. But what I really miss are some of the other short-lived shows like Big Thinkers, Silicon Spin, Beyond Tomorrow, Cyber Crime, and the ZDTV News. These shows were something I could sit down and tune in to. Despite a few obnoxious hosts, it was nice to see more than sound bites and press releases on tech topics. There just aren't any other shows on TV that do more than casually mention the topics these shows used to dig into. I'm willing to bet their coverage of the recent worm would have been at least intelligible.
That and I still think Erica Hill is one of the brightest talking heads on TV. Too bad she was abducted by CNN at such an early age.
The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. - William McDonough