Well this is it, our last show before the holidays, but don't worry, we'll be back in February 08 for more of the same. And we're not leaving you empty handed - there's a great extended mix summer series which has all the bits of the interviews we've had recently.

Tonight's website - elf yourself! It's a must see for Christmas!

We’ll we’ve reached the end of 2007 and hasn’t it just flown.  Lot’s of exciting things have happened in the past year, what with the changing of the guard politically, the Telstra shenanigans, the launce of Naked DSL (at last) and for the computer buffs, the release of Microsoft’s Vista and Apple’s Leopard and not to forget the infamous iPhone, to name just a few. There have been more toys and gadgets thrown at us this year, than any time I can remember, and if you’re into the gadgets, or more importantly you have a partner who understands your passion, it shouldn’t be too hard for him or her to find something for your Christmas stocking later this month.

We’re going to round out the year with some invaluable information about website design and take a look at the harsh reality for Telstra and the newly elected Labor government. Last week, it became official – Telstra had been found to be misleading when it came to claims surrounding its NextG mobile data network. As Adam turner would say – “No! - Say it isn’t true” This will most likely put Telstra on the back foot leading into 2008 and make the prospect of high speed broadband for this country just that little bit more distant. How much more of this do we, the consumers have to put up? Somehow, I think 2008 will be more swings and round-a-bouts for broadband in this country.

Did I mention web design? How important is a good looking site these days. The answer is very! Did you know that 75% of web users admit making judgments about the credibility of an organisation based on the design of its website and 83% of businesses use the internet to search and find potential vendors?  If that doesn’t surprise you, then count yourself amongst 75% of web users. On our final show this year, we’re going to talk to Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus, authors of a new book, Web Design for ROI, or return of investment. Based in Sacramento California, Lance and Sandra walk us through the right things and wrong things to do, when building that perfect website. Whether you’re a CEO of a large corporation, or just rebuilding the website for the local footy club, this is must listen radio. Check out the web design for ROI website for more info!
  

This week on Tech Talk Radio

• Adam Turner plans to jump off the SS Microsoft in quest of greener pastures
• The Federal court rules Telstra lied about NextG
• The gloves are off with Kevin and Sol
• Three drops it’s broadband pants inline with Optus and Vodafone and
• Google and Tom Tom team up together.

We’ve heard it all before. The carrot has been dangled on many occasions, but what of the reality of Video on demand in Australia.

For those unlucky enough to be a Telstra broadband customer, Video downloads are possible via there bigpond movies portal, and considering it’s been operating since February 2006, it must stand half a chance. Touted as a free download to bigpond customers, these films have a nasty habit of self destructing.

Rather than "buying to keep", users of the service will be able to rent content on either an overnight or weekly basis (much like a traditional rental stores). The timer counts down from when playback first begins, and users have a maximum of 30 days to watch all TV content and some older movies, while new release movies must be watched within seven days. The only exceptions to the aforementioned rules are music videos, which can be kept indefinitely by the user and have no expiry period.

So what of Reeltime, Quickflix, ICETV and Anytime, just some of the names being bounced around at the moment? And don’t forget Joost, and other off shore organisations already up and running in bandwidth rich countries.

Australian’s are notorious when it comes to the downloading and sharing of Movies and TV shows. It’s an emerging trend spawned by the lack of foresight by tv company executives. Instead  of dishing up such delicacies as soon as they are released in the US market, views are often starved of the favorite sitcoms and telemovies for weeks if not months at a time. And these programs are offered up as a smorgasbord of bit torrent links, it’s overwhelmingly and irresistibly tempting to click the link to salvation.

OK, so we’ve all downloaded a movie from the net - Naughty Naughty - but who hasn’t. Doesn’t the level of demand for instant – just click the link video, tell the providers of such content to lift their game? Well cue the arrival, or should that be pending arrival of Video on demand services in Australia.

Kevin Rudd, Australia’s prime minister elect, has a big job on his hands to woo the sleeping giant Telstra into rolling over and becoming submissive to a fibre to the node broadband network – the key to the delivery of rich media content to the homes of all Australian’s.

This week on Tech Talk Radio

• Adam Turner looks at the new mobile broadband plans
• Google unveils mobile GPS
• New Zealand man behind global botnet ands
• Australian encourage online fraud.
  

For the first time in more than 11 years Australians are waking up to a changed political landscape, with Labor readying itself to take power.

Kevin Rudd swept aside the Prime Ministership of John Howard with a stunning victory, turning a 16-seat deficit into a majority of about 22 seats, depending on the final outcomes in a handful of electorates. We’ll now see a changing of the guard in the communications portfolio with Stephen Conroy set to take up where Helen Coonan left off.

It’s time to see how Labor has woo-ed Telstra. There seemed to be no love lost between the outgoing Liberal government and Telstra, so now its time to see if the Rudd Government lives up to its election promises. Nearly 8 months ago on March 23 2007, Kevin Rudd released his broadband plan. He said Labor are proposing to invest up to $4.7 billion in this proposal in a partnership with the private sector for it to be constructed over a five year period which will deliver for 98 per cent of Australians, a broadband service which is up to 40 times faster than they currently enjoy. The funding for this undertaking is to come from the future fund, the public services superannuation fund.

Kevin Rudd: “If I look out into the future and I look to the needs of the 21st Century economy, they lie very much with the development of a national broadband network. Therefore we, being the party of the future, will grasp that vision and we'll go forward.

Will there be resistance on the way through? Of course, that's the nature of any democratic political party. We had a robust debate today in the last couple of hours in the Caucus.

But we believe this is the right course of action for the country, we believe the Government has failed to act in this area for some years now, and small business, and business in general, and the community more broadly, and regional and rural Australia has suffered as a result.”

Well Kevin, Governments don’t win elections, incumbents loose them. The Australian people have entrusted you to take them into the future, to fulfill the promises you made, and to build a state of the art, future proof, high speed broadband network for all Australians. Kevin, we’re watching.

This week on Tech Talk Radio

• Adam Turner joins us live for our post election wrap
• CBA tests mobile e-payment system
• Bluray closing the format gap
• The Internet could face meltdown by 2010 and
• Copper theft is on the rise again.
  
  
  

As Australia heads to the polls this weekend we take an indepth look at what both sides are promising. Google Search with David Baily form Google at Mountain View, and Sype comes to the mobile.

As we start the downhill run to the finish line of the 2007 federal election, we thought it high time to take a look at the communications policies of both the Labor and Liberal parties.

This coming weekend is an opportunity for all Australians to have a say in the way the country is run, and up there with climate change, the economy and  work choices one of the most important issues which will affect everyone for many years to come, the roll out of the next generation of communications infrastructure.

In recent times there has been much pushing and shoving in the broadband arena, involving the federal government, Telstra, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and various other telco's in one form of another. Who we vote for this weekend will affect our technological evolution in the long term. Internet bandwidth and its subsequent delivery the two major issues facing us.

Both sides of politics have a plan to achieve this, Telstra has a belief that it has the right to roll out the technology, and the ACCC is doing what it thinks is best for the consumer. One thing is for sure, - it’s going to cost a lot of money. Like the telephone revolutionized the country last century, high speed broadband will do the same this century. The key to a successful roll out is provisioning for future growth. Right now 20 to 50 Mb per second sounds a lot, but in a few years time, we’ll need 20 to 50 Gb per second, and that sort of expansion and headroom needs to be though about now. Digging holes in the ground and running fibre optic cable is not cheap, so we don’t want to be in the same position again a few years down the track.

So as we embrace high speed broadband technology, regardless of which side of politics we support,  a change is coming – how revitalizing the storm will be is up to us this Saturday.

We hear from David Bailey who is a member of the search team at Google.

David calls Mountain View home, and Lidija Davis caught up with him in building 43 at the Googleplex. Pictured here David is under Space Ship One acquired from the Smithsonian, which was the source of some speculation last year. David is an engineer at Google where he leads the company's Universal Search effort.  Prior to that he led various search, navigation and information extraction projects at Amazon.com and Junglee.  David holds a Ph.D. in computer science from U.C. Berkeley, where he studied child language acquisition.

This week on Tech Talk Radio

• Lidija Davis talks search with David Bailey from Google
• Coonan and Conroy speak on the record
• Google launches a software competition and
• 3’s free Skype mobile calls go live.
  
  
  

It was’t so long ago that we were all agasp and our jaws hit the floor about the 11 million dollars that Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo pocketed as part of his annual Salary and Bonus package. It was equated to the Prime Ministers salary of around $380,000. Well now, showing absolute contempt for the companies shareholders, Trujillo’s salary will edge close to or if not exceed $20 million.

Telstra shareholders delivered what amounted to a resounding vote of no confidence in their Board of Directors at the companies Annual General Meeting in Sydney last week. Two-thirds of shareholders voted against the company's remuneration report. That's the one which includes hefty pay and perks rises for the chief executive Sol Trujillo.

Among those who took offence at the size and structure of Mr. Trujillo's salary package was the Future Fund, the country's biggest investor, which owns 16.5 per cent of Telstra. But the vote was non-binding and so Telstra plans to do nothing at all to change the way that it rewards its executives. Not bad for a company who blatantly goes around saying what it’s doing, or in most cases not doing, is in the interest of the shareholders. And given the Future Fund owns 16.5 per cent of the company, you would think its opinion might count for something. – Obviously not.

In July 2005, when Sol Trujillo came to Australia from the US and brought his friends to run Australia’s largest technology company, Telstra shares were at $5.06, they're now around $4.80. Now that's pretty simple arithmetic and for shareholders they're simply saying, he gets paid $11.8-million dollars last year, and now we're looking at a salary that would be in excess of $20-million dollars. They can't see any justification for it.

This week on Tech Talk Radio

• Lidija Davis talks search with Tim Mayer from Yahoo in the US
• Google lets an android on the loose
• The telecommunications ombudsman receives record complaints
• The battle for the broadband vote heats up and
• Australia sees a surge in domain names.

Hugh Williams is Principal Development Manager of Microsoft's Live search based in Redmond USA. He talks openly about the new features and facilities of live.com

Hugh is a Melbournian, born and bred in this part of the world, he was a student and an associate professor in Information Retrieval at RMIT.

Check out Hugh's handy work at live.com

The coming federal election is going to be one of the most defining elections in our history. Not because of the party policies, but because of the technology now available to political parties, broadcasters, analysts and us!

The online world has certainly been well and truly embraced by all concerned. Australia's government broadcaster, the ABC, is no exception. The Election 2007 website showcases the best mash up yet for Google maps. Aunty has gone to great pains to build an interactive overlay of every electoral boundary which reveals seat details with a mouse over.

Not to rest on their laurels, the ABC has also provided an SMS service where users can subscribe to a news service keeping them up-to-date with all the antics by politicians far and wide. Their website states:

The ABC Mobile Election News application provides up-to-the-minute coverage of the 2007 Federal election straight from the ABC News room to your mobile, no matter which provider you're using. During the campaign receive news, election-related and general, opinion and comment on national issues as well as two-day national weather forecasts, searchable by post code or town. There's also an electorate search by post code or town, with a short description of every electorate; on election night get updates of the count in any electorate at any time.

Now you may not be an election junkie, but this is real 'WOW' technology. Never before have we had so much information at our fingertips. If nothing else, appreciate the effort these organisations go to in the online era even if you don't give to hoots for any of the parties contesting this poll.

This week on Tech Talk Radio

• Lidija Davis talks search
• Apple stealthfully launches a new notebook
• The skypephone is launched in Australia
• Telstra launches it’s own political website and
• Adam Turner turns his attention to bandwidth hungry mobile applications.

This week on Tech Talk Radio

• Lidija Davis talks wordpress for dummies
• Adobe Fixes PDF bug
• Coonan trumpets United Nations Wimax decision
• Skype and 000 don’t see eye to eye and
• Microsoft buys a $240m share in facebook

As the current federal government moves into a caretaker role in the lead up to this years federal election, one has to ask what’s going to happen now with the most important technological change this country has seen since the roll out of the telephone?
While the chaser boys target John and Kevin, we thought we should turn our attention to Helen and Stephen.

But firstly, Telstra have become quite noticeable by their absence. In an out of character act of supposedly good will, Telstra voluntarily turned on ADSL broadband in 200 exchanges that previously had none. One journalist even reported that “Telstra had started flipping switches rather than flipping the bird” Maybe this is an act of reconciliation with the Honorable Senator  Helen Coonan after taking her to the Federal Court accusing her of handing OPEL a contract to provide broadband in the bush in a somewhat dubious circumstances.

Now Stephen Conroy, the shadow communications minister, has come out to deposition the governments deal with OPEL saying that it’s fundamentally flawed and only fulfills half the coverage of that promised. He says The Opel broadband scheme has so many black spots; it looks like Swiss cheese and that the Howard Government's broadband plan is based on lies and the minister for communications should come clean."  He promised to release maps "showing the entire Federal Government network - known as Opel - is a complete sham.

Mmmm. Now if I didn’t know any better I would have sworn those words would be spoken by none other than the out spoken Phil Burges or even by the top man himself Sol Trujillo.

So who’s courting who? Have Helen and Sol buried the hatchet? Or is it all over, and is Stephen now the new toy boy? We’ll find out in four weeks I guess.

And then there’s the CDMA switch off.  Helen Coonan handed the ‘Yes you can / No you can’t” baton to Philip Rudd, Australia’s Attorney General. One can only speculate why? Was it the fact that she’s just had enough crap from Telstra and just wanted to share the love?  Last week Telstra announced in a 5pm press release that both Next G and CDMA were identical, and all future network development would only enhance the next G experience. It’s now up to ACMA, the Australian Communications and Media Authority to pass judgment.

This week on Tech Talk Radio

• Apple finally lets the leopard out of the cage
• Microsoft links phone and video to Office
• VOIP and 000 not talking
• Votes for sale on eBay
• Channel 7 treats HD viewers with contempt and
• Apple to open iPhone up for Developers

Website of the week: Videohelp.com

Today we’ve passed the milestone of 150  shows. Since November 29 2004, hopefully we’ve managed to enlighten and educate listeners in the wonderful world of gadgets, internet, and telecommunications. Throw into this mix guests who are experts in their respective fields including law enforcement, toll ways, mobile communications, broadcasting and software development, Tech Talk Radio continues to grow and earn the respect of listeners and industry elders as an independent tech talk show.

There have been many highlights along the way and we’ve had the privilege of speaking to many movers and shakers within our industry. Today the network of radio stations that take Tech Talk Radio continues to grow both here in Australia and overseas.
 The number of global listeners thanks to the technology of podcasting and streaming, is also on the rise. 

One of the best things about making the show is hearing from like minded listeners. Tech Talk Radio is nothing without you, our regular listeners and contributors, and we welcome everyone's opinions and perspectives on technology and the providers of technology.

Everyone involved in the show is passionate about technology and contribute their services because they want to.
  
So upward and onward as we head to the next milestone. With politics becoming a main force in the evolution of technology in this country, and ostracizing of Telstra, our largest technology company, who seems to  have managed to alienate most of its customers, there will no doubt be plenty more water to pass under the Tech Talk Radio bridge in the coming weeks.

This week on Tech Talk Radio

• Large flat screen televisions labeled environmentally unfriendly
• The world’s most famous document reader open to hacks
• Apple accused of unlawful monopoly
• We see our first iPhone, and road test one for real in the studio
• Coonan makes another U-turn and
• Website hackers are on the rise.

The first thing your tech support guru will ask you when you come to ask for computer help. Is “When did you last back your stuff up?” It’s about this time that most people go bright red and curl up in a ball in the corner in the foetal position. I learnt the value of backing up software last week when, accidentally, while I was cloning data from one server to another, I mistakenly deleted two files while talking on the phone. This in itself wasn’t a problem, because the files on the other server, which were intact, were more recent.

Having taken 5 phone calls in as many minutes, I reached over to the mouse and clicked the clone button on the desktop. It was at this point in time; I was distracted yet again and wandered off from the server. The cloning software I use actually clones the last action performed on a file before it looks at the time date stamp on the file, and you guessed it, the last action performed on these two files was a DELETE. Normally I would force a file copy and write the new file into the space where the old file had been deleted. With all the distractions in the office, I didn’t – instead clicking the clone button instead. The result – the software performed the last action and deleted the two good files as it would normally do.

Later in the day – several hours after the backup was long forgotten, I went to open the software which used these data files. Mmm that’s strange I thought to myself as the file not found dialogue box graced my screen. Then all of a sudden I realized what I’d done. Noooooooo I thought to myself. Fortunately I have an automated backup of one of my servers using the Microsoft’s backup program. Thank god for that I thought, and I simply restored the file to yesterdays copy.
The moral of the story is Backups can save your day. Whether it be family photos or important business documents, you can never have enough backups. Hard drives are cheap – the time to resurrect lost data is not. Sometimes a $200 hard drive insurance policy will save the day. In my case I lost a days data – it could have been a lot worse – oh, and the files that were deleted… they were quick books data files.

This week on Tech Talk Radio

* The giants tackle phishing
* Coonan and Howard rattle Telstra’s cage
* Adam looks at the media centre community
* Telstra calls for complaints and
* Airports turn to biometrics.

If you’re an avid listener of tech talk radio, then you’ve no doubt hear the discussions on the panel about the quality of audio which has been compressed into a MP3. Chances are you’ve even heard the compression when listening to music on a good quality sound system or through headphones other than those ear buds that seem to be surgically implanted in the ears of the youth of today.
It’s that strange watery sound which is extremely noticeable on instruments that make sharp sounds such as symbols and high hats.

Here’s a techy insight into MP3. MP3 compression is an acronym for MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 audio layer 3. MP3 is the file extension for MPEG audio layer 3. Layer 3 is one of three coding schemes (layer 1, layer 2 and layer 3) for the compression of audio signals. Layer 3 uses perceptual audio coding and psycho acoustic compression to remove all superfluous information (more specifically, the redundant and irrelevant parts of a sound signal. The stuff the human ear doesn't hear anyway). It also adds a Modified Discrete Cosine Transform that implements a filter bank, increasing the frequency resolution 18 times higher than that of layer 2.

Now that’s clear, the reality behind compression is that it is a loss process. Take your favorite track of music with say runs 3 or so minutes. In its uncompressed format, such as a wav or aif file, it would take require about 50Mb of storage to save the 3 minutes on a disk. The same track would take about 3Mb when compressed to an MP3. There’s a bit more to it than that, but that’s really all it is. The process of removing data from the file and reconstituting it on replay creates this watery sound. The same can be said for television.

I found myself wandering through a white goods store last Friday night looking at this large flat screen LCD and Plasma TVs. My background is broadcast television, and maybe I’m spoilt looking at pictures straight of the back of a Standard definition or high definition camera, but by the time these amazing images are broadcast to consumers via free to air television and delivered to our flat screen TV in the lounge room, the same degradation that happened to MP3s happens to video as well. Every time an audio or video is compressed and re constituted, the signal is degraded. By the time your HD picture leaves the TV station, it is squashed into a bandwidth pipe which now carries four standard definition pictures, an electronic program guide and a toke HD channel. The more detail in a picture, the more data is required to keep the detail. When the bandwidth limit is reached, the picture just falls apart.

Back in the old days when VHS machines were all the rage, Broadcast quality television exceeded that of what we had at home, now we’re seeing a reversal of that, what we can play off our DVD and Bluray players at home, can now exceed the quality of an off air TV signal. Even some Divx downloads off the internet are superior in quality.

Compression of audio and video signals is a necessary evil in this day of limited spectrum and bandwidth, but at what cost? If you’ve never had the awesome experience of seeing a true high definition television picture, then you’ll never appreciate the amount of degradation these images go through to be broadcast to our homes. And if you hadn’t notice, you can’t buy an old CRT TV these days no matter how hard you try, and to this day, I’m yet to see a large flat screen TV even come close to the quality of my CRT 16x9 tube TV. Then there’s pay TV – don’t start me on that!

This week on Tech Talk Radio

• Channel 7 buys unwired
• Prime TV launchs new online service
• Adam Turner talks adblock plus and
• ABC TV show the others how it's done online.
  
  

It seems we’re not alone in this country when it comes to slow broadband, shoddy customer service and mobile phone sharks. This week alone see’s the UK frustration on the rise over broadband and in particular mobile phones. For years in Australia we’ve had contracts lock us in to inflexible long term payment structures, to cover the so called subsidy that phone companies allegedly, out of the kindness of their heart, offer us – the consumer. 12 month or two year contracts seem to be the norm these days.

Recently, with the commissioning and switching on of HSDPA data services in Australia, we’re still well and truly entrenched in the honeymoon period of pricing – not for us, but the Telco’s, and nearly 12 months down the track from the day Sol Trujillo launched Next G, that Telco in particular are still charging the same amount as they did on launch day.

To give you an idea of where we are with data right now, Telstra, Australia’s incumbent Telco, charge $109 for 1Gb of data, and at the other end of the spectrum, 3 charge just $30 for that same Gb. Telstra offer a casual or 24 month package and 3 offers a 12 month package.  In fairness though, 3 is a city centric provider where as Telstra offer nationwide coverage, although this is in itself the subject of litigation between Australia’s consumer watchdog – the ACCC and Telstra.

Back to the UK though, the launch of the iPhone and the talk about unlocking the device so it can be used on anyone’s network, has raised the question of being able to buy the handset of your choice unlocked, so you – the consumer – can have the choice of not being locked into a contract and therefore switch carriers as you like based on the good old customer values of price and service! After all, when was the last time you satisfied with either from a Telco? Also, have you ever tried buying a mobile device which is free of network restrictions?

The freedom provided by unlocked phones is particularly useful for people who travel, since they can avoid roaming fees by converting their mobile into a local phone in most countries by simply inserting a local SIM card. What a concept! If we, the consumer insisted on buying un locked, un branded mobile phones, maybe we’de see the return of customer service, and more importantly quality of service. One things for sure, apart from making the real cost of a handset apparent , we’d all have the benefit of changing our handsets as the new technology rolls out, without the payout penalty set to steal the majority of the cost of the new handset. So as a consumer I ask you this… Has complacency and habit put us at the mercy of the Telco? Maybe it’s time to spend that little bit more and swing the scales back in our favor.

This week on Tech Talk Radio

• Adam Turner checks out SCO and Linux
• Coonan seeks to sensor the web
• Lidija Davis joins us from California to talk video search
• Justin Dunlop returns to the studio to update us on mac hardware and software
• The ACMA says we’re a very connected nation and
• We reveal just how much Bill gates earns in one day.

Website of the week: Howtogeek.com

Welcome to The How-To Geek, the friendliest source of "how-to" articles anywhere.

With a federal poll looming later this year, all sides of politics are ramping up the rhetoric to fever pitch, but with a slightly different edge. This year more than ever, new technology is being used to communicate to the constituents. There seems to be a definitive swing away from traditional and main stream media channels to get the political message out there.

Facebook and Youtube are certainly new tools in the political marketing machine’s arsenal, but in an effort to bring the latest political trends and swings to the desk top, this week sees the search juggernaut Google launch a new service for Australian voters. Last week Google launched an election website that will enable voters to access video footage, user-generated content and customised information feeds as it and other key publishers gear up for what will be Australia's first YouTube election campaign. That’s right you heard it correctly, Australia’s first you tube election campaign.

If you’re a user of iGoogle, a customizable desktop allowing the display of user chosen information, you’ll be familiar with the use of tabs for different topics. With the click of your mouse on the www.google.com.au/election2007 website, a new tab will be installed which displays the latest youtube videos from each political party, the latest news from your electorate, user configurable election trends, even a section called Australian MPs on the record, where google returns documents containing the name of the MP and the selected issue.
Is this a sign of the times or what? It seems that Australian voters are indeed, connected. You can even add special Australian election content to Google Maps. Why not find your electorate, and see your seat in satellite view, explore marginal seats and view candidates. But wait there’s more...

So as we head for the local polling booth in the next few weeks, it seems that Google has just about thought of everything except for one small minor detail. We need a Chaser gadget for - when we need that well earned break from reality.

This week on Tech Talk Radio

• iTunes Success
• Telstra sets the watch dog on coonan
• Sony ramps up the HD Challenge
• Winemakers embrace open source
• Web 2.0, blogs and litigation. 2clix and
• Google funds a $30m moonshot

Website of the week: REAL AGE CALCULATOR

Your health, lifestyle, and habits have a dramatic affect on your lifespan. We know smoking robs a person of several years of his life, as do many other activities. It is also well documented that stress, sleep habits, and dieting can affect ones life. A 30 year old man who smokes, is highly stressed, sleeps 5 hours per night, and is overweight could be in equivalent health to a 38 year old man who does not share these conditions. This is called Real Age or Health Age. There are far more conditions that affect age than can be listed here. This test is for entertainment only. If you are concerned about the results please see a doctor. Real Age is free for anyone to add to their website.

In this day of consumerism, and in particular that of cheap disposable printers, this week I finally came across a new way to make cheap printers even cheaper and those who purchase them infuriated. A colleague of mine recently decided to purchase an office laser printer, not for high volume printing, he just wanted to have documents that looked a little better than an ink jet printer could deliver and something a bit more water resistant.

Having sung the virtues of my first laser printer, a device made by Hewlett Packard and as good today as it was 12 years ago when I bought it, I told my colleague that he couldn’t really go wrong with today’s black and white laser printers. He chose a Konica Minolta $99 special which he bought off the shelf from Harvey Norman. How could he go wrong?

Having unpacked the printer and thrown away the packaging the new printer was going strong. The printer was delivering the quality prints you’d expect from such a device. Then, a couple of days and about 10 or 20 pages down the track, the printer decided to stop printing, instead it chose to flash a continuous error on the front control panel. There was no paper jam or cartridge jam, just a continuous error despite our best intentions of solving the problem. The documentation that came with the printer consisted of a multi language document of just several pages. It showed in pictorial form, how to unpack the printer and connect it to a computer. Nothing about fault finding, or frequently asked questions – nothing.

We turned to the internet in the hope of finding more information on the Konica Minolta website, but couldn’t get past the broken link on their website after selecting Laser Printers.

The site returned Error reading from remote server Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat) Server at www.printer-konicaminolta.com Port 80 which is still there to this day. At this point in time we resorted to the Australian support telephone service, and, after a lengthy wait, we were give no useful information about the product and told to return the product to whence it came. Mmmm No box or packaging. Great we thought, so off we went, back to Harvey Norman receipt and faulty printer in tow. Harvey Norman were fantastic. To their credit, they swapped the printer over no questions asked. – however as you’d expect, they kept the new box. 

We now had a new Konica Minolta laser printer with the added bonus – it worked! A month into the second printer, and not even a ream of paper, we ran out of toner. What? We all thought? It’s only a month old! We rang a toner supply company which informed us that companies like Konica Minolta supply their printers with a demonstration cartridge. What’s a demonstration cartridge we all asked, to which the response was “Now we know why they’re so cheap” These are toner cartridges with about a 10% fill of toner. Why bother!! So we learnt our lesson. Like everything in this world, when a deal looks too good to be true, it quite often is.  
This week on Tech Talk Radio

• iPhones are the choice of hackers
• Telstra executive emails now interest the government lawyers?
• Microsoft take on Google in the online application wars
• We compare television services in Australia to that of Europe and
• Google joins the hunt for lost adventurer Steve Fosset

Website of the week: Alexa.com

About the Alexa Traffic Rankings A listing of all sites on the Web, sorted by traffic... Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users. The information is sorted, sifted, anonymized, counted, and computed, until, finally, we get the traffic rankings shown in the Alexa service.

Making it easier to part consumers with their hard earned money has always been high on the list of priorities of many companies. There have been many attempts over the years, but not since the arrival of the SIM based mobile phone, has this prospect become closer to reality. Way back in January 2007 Nokia demonstrated a mobile phone which doubled as a credit card at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Then, the credit card company Visa joined forces with mobile phone maker Nokia to try and make this a reality.
The process of making a purchase would be to wave your mobile device over a sensor. At the time, this was dubbed Near Field Communications and would rely on the technology being accepted by consumers, retailers, telcos and banks and subsequently rolled out. This week saw another push for this technology by the National Australia Bank,Visa, and Telstra as they begin a three month trial in the Melbourne CBD involving 200 NAB and Telstra staff and 30 stores.

This time the consumer’s information will be embedded in the SIM Card, the chip which contains the mobile phone account details, phone numbers and now a NAB Visa card application. It’s rumored that the stores targeted in the trial are chemists, restaurants and convenience stores. After the initial tests, the trial will be opened up to include customers of other banks Instead of having a wallet or purse full of plastic cards, you could soon have them all supported on a single mobile phone, providing enhanced security and convenience.

Now while on the subject of security, this is the great unknown. At this point in time, there are no details available outlining what happens in the very likely possibilities of losing your mobile or having it stolen, nor the finer details of how the transaction actually takes place. So here we go again – another step closer to the cashless world of commerce.
 
This week on Tech Talk Radio

• Teenagers sleeping habits affected by technology
• ID Fraud cost Australia Billions?
• Optus turns to BPL to compete with Telstra
• If you hack apples iPhone you stand to be rewarded
• Microsofts vista due for its first major update in early 2008 and
• Drugs, Blogs and the mainstream media

Website of the week: Website Grader is a free SEO tool that provides an SEO score for your website with custom search engine optimization and marketing advice for your website.  Use the form to enter your website, your keyword phrases and your competitors to receive a report about the marketing effectiveness of your website.

As a parent of a young girls who have already started using the internet, I thought I’d take a personal look at what the Federal Government has on offer when it comes you making the online world just a little bit safer for our kids.

Firstly, if your mind has been elsewhere in the past few weeks, the Federal government through the ACMA, have released software which can be downloaded free of charge from the Net Alert website and installed on PCs using  Windows 98 through to Vista and Macs using OSX 10.4 or later.

Net Alert states: Internet content filter reduces the risk of your family coming into contact with something upsetting or dangerous online. Internet content filters offer a range of different functions to help block, screen and monitor unwelcome material. However, they do not offer total protection and work most effectively in association with a range of strategies to stay safe online.

Instead of one application, there are in fact 3 to choose from, Interguard, OptiNet, and Safe Eyes. So you have to do a bit of research to find out which one works best for your environment, and we’ll talk about these later in the show.
All in all, the site is well presented and easy to navigate – a plus for non net savvy parents. If you consider yourself a luddite when it comes to computers and the internet your not alone, To find out more about the online world – which as a parent you should, the first place to visit on the Net Alert website is the Advice section where you can download a parents guide, or even read it online if don’t know how to download it. This document runs a dozen or so pages, and talks about potential online dangers, and highlights ten things you can do right now to help your children stay safe online. It even explains commonly used terms such as Chat rooms, peer to peer file sharing and Spam.

As a parent, you’re responsible for your kids until their 18 years of age, and this includes what they do online. As kids grow and learn, they adapt quite easily to the new technologies, and most use it for good rather than evil, but unfortunately, there are a few who choose to bully classmates from afar. This can include things like identity theft, through to SMS taunts at 3 in the morning, and as a parent of a child who goes down this path, you are legally responsible for their actions. The last thing you want is a visit by boys and girls in blue, informing you of what your child has been up to online.
So do it for yourself, and do it for your kids. Get informed, and get online. It’ll open up a whole new world of possibilities.

This week on Tech Talk Radio

• A phone company misleading consumers – never.
• What is unified messaging and what does it mean to me?
• Australia’s Smart Card is too smart by half and
• The PC Game market grows 50percent in 4 years

Website of the week: Orb! Orb is simple and fast to use. The Orb application is free to download and install, and there are no fees for MyCasting. You only need a home computer to get setup, and can use any web-enabled media player with streaming capabilities, portable or otherwise, to remotely play the media you desire.

Once the Orb software is installed on your "always-on" home PC, your computer acts like your personal broadcasting system. You now have the ability to stream content through any internet-connected device like a mobile phone, PDA, laptop or any other computer.

There have been many technological revolutions over the years, but one stands head and shoulders above the rest. It’s not the telephone becoming mobile, nor is it this fan-dangled internet thingy, it’s actually the ubiquitous compact disc. The promise of taking sound reproduction from an analogue format into a lossless, digital format was not only appealing to the masses; it proved to be a technological milestone. Nearly everyone alive at the time can remember their first CD; mine was Love over Gold by Dire Straits.

The CD is still evolving. When it first hit the market 25 years ago last Friday, it was really an audio only device, or at least that is what we were led to believe, but as we now know, audio was just the beginning. The CD started life as an optical storage device which was capable or storing 70 odd minutes of music, before moving into the realm of computer data storage. We were amazed by the ability of such a small disc to store so much data – a concept which really revolutionized our way of thinking.

It was Aug. 17, 1982, and row upon row of palm-sized plates with a rainbow sheen began rolling off an assembly line near Hanover, Germany. An engineering marvel at the time. Those first CDs contained Richard Strauss' Alpine Symphony and would sound equally sharp if played today, says Holland's Royal Philips Electronics NV, which jointly developed the CD with Sony Corp. of Japan.
Today the CD has evolved into the DVD which in turn mutated into Bluray and HD DVD formats. But in this ever changing technological landscape, you have to wonder about the future of the Compact Disc. In the age of iPods, memory sticks, digital downloads and disposable generation Y, I still believe the Compact disc has got another 25 years in it at least, and possibly more. After all, the manufacturers all sold us on the fact that the CD – if look after – could stand the test of time of and last at least, one hundred years. As for Love over Gold – it’s just turned 25 too and looks and sounds as good as the day I bought it.

This week on Tech Talk Radio

• Skype experience a major outage
• The wiki scanner reveals big brother is editing
• Microsoft patches come thick and fast and
• Farmers are up in arms over Next

Website of the week: Want to know what the number of the phone is in the corner? Access Communications have a great list of test numbers for the Australian phone system

There’s plenty to talk about in the Australian technology scene at the moment, what with Sol Trujillo’s 3 million dollar pay rise, John Howard’s free porn filter for all, and the sweet victory by Ice TV over the Nine network in relation to Nine’s outrageous allegation that it owned the copyright of it’s TV program guide.

But first this week, I bet you didn’t know that Sol Trujillo’s salary is 38 times that of the Prime Minister of Australia. Yes you heard me correctly – Mr Trujillo's total pay packet increased by $3 million last financial year to $11.78 million - 38 times the prime minister's salary.

John Howard said on Radio last week that he wasn’t complaining about the salary he gets but he did think the average Australian, who gets paid a lot less than he does regards that sort of salary as being absolutely unreasonable – a sentiment that I whole hartedly agree with – with one exception, I’d substitute the word unreasonable with obscene.  As a shareholder you would have to ask if you thought it was good value for money.

Also this week, the free to air television networks are finally coming to a harsh reality that the way consumers get their news and entertainment is changing. The days of free to air tv’s dominance in the market place is changing. Recently the Seven network announce a partnership with TiVo in an effort to provide commercial free TV to the masses at a cost, and this week PBL’s Nine Network lost a case over it’s alleged copyright of its program guide.

This week Tech Talk Radio regular Adam Turner gets off the couch and visits the Tech Talk Radio studio... and this week IceTV wins copyright battle with Nine Network! You can read Adams article on iTwire.

Also we catch up with Julius Sinkevicius, Senior Product Manager of Windows Server Division of Microsoft from their US Headquarters. Julius will run us through the new Server 2008 technology as Sever 2003 gets a makeover.

Julius started working in information technology in 1991, and has held various positions in systems and network administration. In 1998, he joined Microsoft as part of the Microsoft Consulting Services group and worked with some of Canada’s largest companies deploying infrastructure servers. In 2000, he moved to Redmond, Washington and worked in the Microsoft Learning and Tablet PC groups.

This week on Tech Talk Radio

• Adam Turner Joins us live in the studio to talk about living room convergence
• Microsoft talks to Tech Talk Radio about Server 2008
• We get the panels reaction to Sol’s $3m pay rise
• The election campaigning ramps up with John Howard’s porn filter for all and
• Coonan opens up the broadband race.