My Appearance on WGST's "The Sully Show" 5/9/14 Talking Tech Topics and More

I join Sully for our weekly chat on 640 WGST and "The Sully Show" to talk a little on my travels to the Outer Banks of North Carolina and the Wright Brothers Memorial.  Then we dive into the tech topics of the week.

Have a listen:

listen to ‘The Sully Show May 9, 2014’ on Audioboo

Show Notes:

Rick was on a media trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina this week and visited Kitty Hawk to see the National Park and site of the Wright Bros. forst flight...very cool experience

See more at: www.OuterBanks.org

Current tech topics

Sony Re-invents the cassette tape

While we were throwing old cassette tapes away as trash, Sony has reinvented the device to store a massive amount of data, and massive is sized here at 185TB. That’s pretty huge, what with 60 million songs easily accommodating in it (Movie buffs, replace songs with almost 3,700 Blu-Ray movies. There you go!) But thankfully it’s not that tedious plastic tape that we used to rewind impatiently using our finger. Sony’s world-record setting magnetic tape technology has made it possible to hold 185tb of data on a single cartridge (roughly 148GB data per inch of tape), and this is a figure that heavily buries the standing record of 35Tb set in 2010 by Fuji.

IBM  helped develop this cassette tape.

Sony in its press release, stated that it’s looking to commercialize this technology, as well as continue bettering it.

Streaming Games Coming to Comcast

- You will be able to order games like your order movies

Electronic Arts and Comcast are close to finalizing a deal that would bring EA-published games to Comcast's X1 TV operating system through cloud-powered streaming. Five separate sources told Reuters that this was the case.
According to Reuters, Comcast and EA have tested such a streaming service for more than two years. Games from the Madden, FIFA, Monopoly, and Plants vs. Zombies franchises were called out as those being available for streaming. The report goes on to say that you'll be able to use a tablet you already own as a controller to play the games, suggesting the games on offer will be smaller, mobile games rather than bigger, console-level titles. The list of available games is reportedly still being hashed out.
Sources told Reuters that Comcast will focus on casual and family games first, before later considering FPS and action games. It will all come down to user preference, the report says.

Comcast has more than 22 million customers in the United States, which would (potentially) make the company a major player in the home gaming space if the deal goes through. An EA representative declined to comment when approached by GameSpot, while we've yet to hear back from a Comcast representative about this reported deal.


Three Chinese Telecom companies will join up to form a huge Monopoly in China

$10 billion company may fix the mobile problems in China

The three largest telcos will spin off part of their business into a jointly owned tower firm to coordinate tower facilities construction in China.
The new firm is developed by the three largest telcos – China Mobile, China Telecom and China Telecom – to further improve the level of joint construction and sharing of telecom infrastructure, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), confirmed the rumor on its website on Wednesday.
The jointly-owned firm will be "responsible for coordinating the construction of communication tower facilities" in China, MIIT noted on the website, without providing further information.
According to a follow-up Tencent news report on Friday, the new firm which is likely to be named as "National Tower Company", will become giant in size as its registered capital will reach 10 billion yuan (US$1.6 billion), and it will positioned on the "same level" with the three parent operators.
It will carry out tower, site and pipeline constructions and maintenances for the three Chinese operators, and collect rent from them in accordance with the lease contracts.
The move comes after Chinese telecom operators have been chasing to invest in 4G network developments when the country approved the first batch of licenses in late 2013.
The approach is likely to resolve pipes and towers sharing issues by eliminating unnecessary repetitious infrastructural developments among the three state-owned operators.

Microsoft issues another, yet another patch for Internet Explorer

*Update:  Last Thursday, Microsoft released an update to address the zero day vulnerability recently disclosed in all versions of Internet Explorer. Windows XP is listed as among the affected platforms, in spite of its support period ending weeks ago.
Adrienne Hall, General Manager, Microsoft Trustworthy Computing stated "[T]he security of our products is something we take incredibly seriously. When we saw the first reports about this vulnerability we decided to fix it, fix it fast, and fix it for all our customers."
Users with Automatic Updates enabled do not have to do anything, although running Windows Update will apply the fix immediately.


New app for warning us about severe weather 

Cost $9.99  iOS or Android

MyWARN is an app that delivers critical National Weather Service severe weather risks, watches and warnings to your smartphone based on your location.

**** How It Works ****
MyWARN constantly monitors the latest tornado, severe thunderstorm and flash flood watches and warnings from the National Weather Service. It uses the location services in your device to notify you immediately when an alert is issued for where you are.
**** FEATURES ****
* Only Alerts For Where You Are: Legacy warning systems, like sirens and NOAA Weatheradio, issue warnings for entire counties. But National Weather Service warnings are drawn very precisely. MyWARN only notifies you when you are in the precise alert area.
* Only the Alerts You Want: MyWARN lets you filter out alerts that you don’t want.
* Always On: MyWARN sits silently in memory waiting for a match from the MyWARN servers.
* AlertsInMotion: MyWARN notifies you when you drive into or out of an alert, no matter where you are in the United States.
* Early Heads Up: MyWARN alerts you hours in advance by notifying you when severe weather is forecast for your location by the experts at the Storm Prediction Center.