Today in Tech History – Aug. 19, 2014

20140404-073853.jpgIn 1839 – At a crowded meeting of the Paris Academy of Sciences, Louis Daguerre demonstrated the process of making photos called daguerreotypes.

In 1906 – Philo Farnsworth was born on Indian Creek in Beaver County, Utah. He would grow up to inspire the beloved professor character on Futurama. He also gets credit for inventing the first completely electronic television.

In 1934 – Gordon Bell was born in Kirksville, Missouri. He would grow up to help build PDP computers and oversee the development of DEC’s VAX series.

In 2003 – Dave Winer posted an experiment with RSS enclosures. It allowed subscribers with the right aggregator to have an MP3 of an interview Chris Lydon did delivered with no click-wait. This would lead to Christopher Lydon becoming the first podcaster before it was called podcasting.

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Subscribe to the podcast. Like Tech History? Get Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

DTNS 2302 – Orchestrated Brain Surgery

Logo by Mustafa Anabtawi thepolarcat.comAlex Hanna joins the show to talk about the leaked Moto 360 watch, Twitter messing with your stream, and updates tot he Xbox One that make it easy for Microsoft to take your money.

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If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting the show here at the low, low cost of a nickel a day on Patreon. Thank you!

Big thanks to Dan Lueders for the headlines music and Martin Bell for the opening theme!

Big thanks to Mustafa A. from thepolarcat.com for the logo!

Thanks to our mods, Kylde, TomGehrke and scottierowland on the subreddit

Show Notes

Today’s guest:  Alex Hanna, web developer and host of Diamond Dialogue

Headlines:

MacRumors spotted some pictures on Chinese website Dianxinshouji.com of a purported Apple lightning cable with a reversible USB end. The USB 3.1 Type C cables will come with reversible USB on both ends. But these alleged Apple cables fit into a current Type A USB port by making the connector thinner. Ars Technica reports a company called Tripp Light offers reversible USB Type-A cables.

Mashable reports that a Best Buy spokesperson confirmed that a page for the Moto 360 was accidentally published on the store’s website over the weekend. The page listed the device for $250 with a 1.5-inch round backlit LCD face and voice-activation. It would run Android Wear and be water resistant as well as available in silver or gray. The Moto 360 is expected to be announced at Motorola’s September 4th press event in Chicago.

ReCode reports Twitter started experimenting with surfacing posts favorited by people you follow, making favorite work like retweet. The favorite is used by a lot of people to bookmark something or sometimes to silently compliment or even be sarcastic about a post. Making it work like retweet seems like it would be redundant to make it work like retweet.

TechCrunch reports US hospital operator Community Health Systems announced that attackers have stolen about 4.5 million records with patient names, addresses, birth data, phone numbers and SSNs. The data seems to have been stolen between April and June of this year. Community Health Systems will offer identity theft protection to all the patients whose data was stolen.

GigaOm reports that Softbank announced Monday it will be the exclusive carrier for a new smartphone from Sharp, called the Aquos Crystal. The phone will come in two screen sizes, 5-inch 720p and 5.5-inch 1080p both with a Snapdragon 400 CPU and 1.5 GB of RAM. Both phones have almost no bezel meaning the front is almost all screen. The 5.5-inch Aquos Crystal X will arrive in December with the 5-inch version coming to Japan August 29th. The Acquos Crystal is expected to be available later in the US on Softbank-owned Sprint.

GigaOm reports Uber is no longer banned in Berlin as the company has lodged an appeal. The prohibition of Uber is suspended until the case is resolved. Uber did not stop operations after the ban was issued last week.

Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen has a new game called Swing Copters. The Verge says the game will be free to play with a small ad or dollar to play ad free.You essentially tap to lift a character with a propeller hat up and avoid swinging hammers. Touch Arcade says the game should be available in the iOS app store on Thursday. 

Everybody who’s been yelling that Nintendo should make games for mobile can shut up now. Bloomberg affiliate the Pokemon Co. announced a trading card game for the iPad. There is already a Pokemon trading card game for the desktop. The iPad game will come to the US and Europe though a release date was not announced.

Engadget has a great story about a violinist named Roger Frisch who started experiencing tremors, but only while he was playing. Doctors determined that he needed a brain pacemaker, but in order to know exactly where to implant the device, they needed a little musical assistance. The patient stayed awake during the surgery and played violin with a special bow, equipped with a motion-tracking device– when Frisch played steadily the surgeons knew their equipment was in the right place. The operation was a success, a link to the video will be in the show notes, or you can just wait for Season 11 of Grey’s Anatomy. 

News From You:

jaymz668 submitted a How-t-Geek article about how shocked, shocked they are to find fake versions of programs in the Windows Store. The smokingest of the guns they found were several links to fake VLC media players that charged you money and then just linked you to the real VLC app. They found loads of other examples, some that don’t even have Windows Store versions like iTunes. Microsoft certifies Windows store apps for content compliance before making them available and has offered promotions where they paid developers $100 for every app accepted in the store. Howtogeek did not claim any of the apps had malware.

tm204 wants to know: Are you feeling a bit confused? Do you lay awake at night, wondering whether all those terrible new stories in your feed are legitimately outrageous or just outrageously funny? Well, you may be suffering from Satire Awareness Deficiency. Or as it’s know around here, SAD. According to Mashable, Facebook is testing out a new tag to help SAD users distinguish fact from funny. How will it work? The tag will put the word SATIRE in front of SATIRICAL ARTICLES from publications such as The Onion. But how you ask, will the algorithm determine which articles from The Onion are satiric, and which are legitimate reviews of your new TV show? Don’t worry, if there’s anyone I trust to know comedy, it’s an algorithm. 

Metalfreak pointed out the LinuxGizmos post about a non-profit spinoff from the UNiversity of Cambridge called lowRISC is developing an open-source 64-bit SoC that hopes to enable fully open hardware from the CPU to the development board. The SoC is based on the new 64-bit RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture out of UC-Berkely. RISC-V comapres favorably to the 32-bit ARM Cortex-A5. You can find out more at http://www.lowrisc.org/

Discussion Links: 

http://www.cnet.com/news/xbox-one-august-update-lets-you-buy-and-download-games-remotely/#ftag=CAD590a51e

http://www.cnet.com/news/major-xbox-one-update-rolls-out-to-preview-members/

http://majornelson.com/2014/08/17/next-xbox-one-update-begins-rolling-today/

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/smartglass

http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2014/08/18/xbox-one-august-update-starts-rolling-today-bringing-new-activity-feed-mobile-purchases/

Plug of the day: Daily Tech News Show Shirt  with Mustafa from thepolarcat.com’s logo now available in white, black and Ash. Look in the podcasts section.

Pick of the Day: 

 

Tuesday’s Guest: Molly Wood!

Today in Tech History – Aug. 18, 2014

20140404-073853.jpgIn 1937 – The first Frequency Modulation or FM radio permit was granted to W1XOJ, in Paxton, Massachusetts. It went on the air with scheduled programs in May 1939 and operated with the highest output power (50 kilowatts) granted prior to World War II.

In 1947 – Eight years after William Hewlett and David Packard founded it, Hewlett-Packard was officially incorporated.

In 2005 – The largest and most widespread power outage in history happened on the Indonesian island of Java, affecting almost 100 million people.

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Subscribe to the podcast. Like Tech History? Get Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

Today in Tech History – Aug. 17, 2014

20140404-073853.jpgIn 1944 – Larry Ellison was born in the Bronx in New York City. 9 months later, after contracting pneumonia, he was taken to Chicago to be raised by his Aunt and Uncle. He would grow up to drop out of college, move to Berkeley and co-found Software Development Labs, one of the most successful corporations in history. Today it’s known as Oracle.

In 1982 – Royal Philips Electronics manufactured the world’s first Compact Disc (not counting test pressings) at a Polygram factory in Langenhagen, just outside of Hanover, Germany. The CD was “The Visitors” by Abba.

In 2000 – Nielsen/NetRatings announced that according to their data, more than half (52%) of United States households had Internet access for the first time. This confirmed Media Metrix’s report from April which estimated that 51% of US households now had Internet access.

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Subscribe to the podcast. Like Tech History? Get Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

Today in Tech History – Aug. 16, 2014

20140404-073853.jpgIn 1989 – A solar flare created a geomagnetic storm that caused three hard drives to fail in an otherwise fault-tolerant system at the Toronto Stock Exchange. This prevented access to critical market data, leading the exchange to be shut down for three hours.

In 1993 – Ian Murdock announced the Debian Linux distribution system. The name combined his then girlfriend Debra’s name with his own, Deb-Ian. And now you know how to properly pronounce it.

In 1994 – The IBM Simon went on sale, combining a mobile phone with computer functions. It weighed 500 grams, could run apps and be linked to a fax machine, selling for $899. The word smartphone hadn’t even been coined yet.

In 1995 – The first version Microsoft’s Web browser, Internet Explorer 1, debuted. It was based on Mosaic, which Microsoft had licensed from Spyglass Inc.

In 2011 – Xiaomi launched their first phone, the M1or ‘Xiaomi Phone’ with a 1.5 GHz dual core chip and 1 GB of RAM for ¥1,999.

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Subscribe to the podcast. Like Tech History? Get Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site

DTNS 2301 – IE by any other name…

Logo by Mustafa Anabtawi thepolarcat.comBrian Ibbott is on the show and we’ll talk about 50 Cent’s new earbuds that measure your heart rate and the way the ice bucket challenge for ALS is revealing subtle secrets about tech moguls. And Len Peralta is here to illustrate the episode!

MP3

Multiple versions (ogg, video etc.) from Archive.org.

Please SUBSCRIBE HERE.

A special thanks to all our Patreon supporters–without you, none of this would be possible.

If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting the show here at the low, low cost of a nickel a day on Patreon. Thank you!

Big thanks to Dan Lueders for the headlines music and Martin Bell for the opening theme!

Big thanks to Mustafa A. from thepolarcat.com for the logo!

Thanks to our mods, Kylde, TomGehrke and scottierowland on the subreddit

Show Notes

Today in Tech History – Aug. 15, 2014

20140404-073853.jpgIn 1877 – In a letter to T.B.A. David, president of the Central District and Printing Telegraph Company in Pittsburgh, Thomas Edison suggested using the word ‘hello’ to indicate a telephone connection was active. Alexander Graham Bell had reportedly preferred ‘Ahoy’ as the greeting.

In 1960 – A long-distance phone link was tested using the Echo 1 satellite. William Victor placed a call from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Goldstone, California to William C. Jakes Jr. at the Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, bouncing off the satellite to make the connection.

In 1994 – Microsoft programmer Benjamin Slivka sent an email to his team suggesting they make a Web browser for Windows 95.

MP3

Subscribe to the podcast. Like Tech History? Get Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.