Dr. Bill | The Computer Curmudgeon

Sigh. The environmentalist wackos are getting to everyone. Check out what Google has done to their home page and logo for “Lights Out Day.”

Ah well… that’s cool… more power for the rest of us!

The Miro Project is having a fund raiser! “Whoopie.”, you say. Well, I just contributed some of my hard earned cash to it. Why? Well, I support the idea of community driven “Open Source,” if you will, Internet TV! If you haven’t checked out the Miro IPTV player, go here:

Get Miro

If you are looking for shows and content go here:

The Miro Guide

And while you are at the Miro Guide, type in “Open Source” in the “Channel Search” bar, and scroll down the page! Look familiar? Yep, Dr. Bill.TV is on Miro! Join the IPTV revolution and spread the word about Miro!

And, if you want to contribute, as I did, click the link below!

Help Support Miro!

Check it out! How cool is this?

New features in OpenOffice.org 2.4.0 (available now)

“OpenOffice.org 2.4 is now released and ushers in new features, bug fixes, and performance improvements. OpenOffice.org continues to face stiff competition. Despite the radical interface and file format changes, Microsoft Office 2007 enjoys strong sales and support from third-party developers. A first step in denting Sharepoint’s enterprise dominance, Google recently expanded its software-as-a-service Google Docs suite with JotSpot, a wiki service, and is laboring to push Google Apps from the web to the desktop with Google Gears. Still, OpenOffice.org stands out on price, license, broad platform support, OpenDocument file formats, robust PDF export, and rapid development. Where it took Microsoft four years to make Office 2007, OpenOffice.org comes out every three to six months.”

OpenOffice.Org Web Site

With all the commercials, how could they not know? But, some are still clueless! Hard to imagine if you are a techno-lover like myself, but, maybe we’re talking the sun-enhanced back-of-the-neck crowd. (Ahem!) Anyway, if you didn’t know… the biggest change is coming to TV since color was introduced (sad to say, I remember, that one as well!) So, get ready for Digital TV!

Survey: 6 in 10 Americans know about the DTV transition

“As late as February of this year, only 59 percent of Americans were aware of next year’s slated transition from analog to digital TV, according to a survey by Frank N. Magid Associates. With the change about to happen on February 19, 2009, these results show a big jump from a similar survey by the same company six months before, when merely 34% of Americans had heard about the transition. Still, though, 41% remain totally clueless about the pending advent of digital-only TV. The findings were slightly better, actually, among ‘over-the-air-only’ households that only have analog TV sets without cable or satellite service. In those households, only 37% were unaware of the transition. Also on a relatively positive note, a similar survey undertaken by Consumer Reports in January showed that only 28% of those with at least one analog TV set were completely unaware of the upcoming change to digital. But Magid’s survey results also came up with the alarming finding that the proportion of Americans who erroneously believe the transition means ‘all TV programs will be available in high definition’ actually rose from 23% to 29% in the six months between Magid’s two polls.”

If you have your email or email server set up to use ordb.org (The Open Relay DataBase) … UNSET it! Having it set up in my sendmail settings hosed my email tonight. If you sent me something, I may not have gotten it… sigh! It went down (The Open Relay DataBase) in December… but, for some reason, it is affecting me now. anyway, a word to the wise… take the reference out of your email server settings!

Who’d “thunk” it? With only two satellite radio companies out there, who would have thought that they would approve of this merger?

Justice Dept. approves XM + Sirius merger

The US Justice Department has approved the merger between XM and Sirius satellite radio services, stating that it could not find any evidence that the combination would substantially reduce competition. In what has seemed like an eternity, the first steps towards a single satellite radio entity began Monday as the DOJ approved the $13 billion deal. XM and Sirius first announced their ‘merger of equals’ last February, with Sirius’ Mel Karmazin assuming the role of CEO, and XM’s chairman Gary Parsons taking the chairman’s position. The two companies had hoped at the time to finish the merger by the end of 2007. However, both the Justice Department and the FCC took their time in studying the merger — even causing the two sides to extend the agreement through May 1 (it was set to expire in February). Broadcast industry groups such as the National Association of Broadcasters had voiced their opposition to the deal, saying it was anti-competitive. In its defense the two companies argued that since satellite radio’s creation, the entertainment industry had changed. Satellite radio was now competing with devices such as music players and other entertainment devices, they claimed. From the DOJ Antitrust Division’s statement, it appears as if regulators agreed, adding other factors played into their decision. The reasons for the approval included ‘a lack of competition between the parties in important segments even without the merger; the competitive alternative services available to consumers; technological change that is expected to make those alternatives increasingly attractive over time; and efficiencies likely to flow from the transaction that could benefit consumers,’ according to the statement.”

Mozilla Firefox Version 3 is just about ready according to Mozilla’s VP!

Mozilla says Firefox 3 ready for prime-time

“A new version of Mozilla’s popular Firefox Web browser is ready for download with improved security and memory use as the tiny company takes a stab at Microsoft Corp’s dominant Internet Explorer. The program’s creators told Reuters on Thursday that the privately-held company’s trial version of Firefox 3 browser is ready for the masses to use after months of development. Until now, the company has discouraged average Internet users from moving on from Firefox 2, which was launched in October 2006. ‘In many ways it (Firefox 3) is much more stable than anything else out there,’ Mozilla Corp Vice President of Engineering Mike Schroepfer said in an interview. Key rivals to Firefox are market leader Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Apple Inc’s Safari browser. Engineers at Mozilla are still putting the finishing touches on the software and hope to release the final version of Firefox 3 by the end of June, Schroepfer said.”

One of the great “hard science” science fiction writers passed away today… Arthur C. Clarke. He wrote science fiction that had a lot of clear, exacting science fact in it, that made his flights of fancy more believable. He was also credited with the “invention” of the earth orbiting satellites that make the communications that we take for granted today, possible. He will be missed.

Arthur C. Clarke, science fiction author, dies at 90

“Arthur C. Clarke, a writer whose seamless blend of scientific expertise and poetic imagination helped usher in the space age, died Wednesday in Colombo, where he had lived since 1956. He was 90. The author of almost 100 books, Clarke was an ardent promoter of the idea that humanity’s destiny lay beyond the confines of Earth. It was a vision served most vividly by ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ the classic 1968 science-fiction film he created with the director Stanley Kubrick and the novel of the same title that he wrote as part of the project. His work was also prophetic: His detailed forecast of telecommunications satellites in 1945 came more than a decade before the first orbital rocket flight. Clarke’s influence on public attitudes toward space was acknowledged by U.S. astronauts and Russian cosmonauts, by scientists like Carl Sagan and by movie and television producers. Gene Roddenberry credited Clarke’s writings with encouraging him to pursue his ‘Star Trek’ project in the face of indifference from television executives. In his later years, after settling in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Clarke continued to bask in worldwide acclaim as both a scientific sage and the pre-eminent science fiction writer of the 20th century. In 1998, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. Clarke played down his success in foretelling a globe-spanning network of communication satellites. ‘No one can predict the future,’ he always maintained. But as a science fiction writer he could not resist drawing up timelines for what he called ‘possible futures.’ Far from displaying uncanny prescience, these conjectures mainly demonstrated his lifelong, and often disappointed, optimism about the peaceful uses of technology – from his calculation in 1945 that atomic-fueled rockets could be no more than 20 years away to his conviction in 1999 that ‘clean, safe power’ from ‘cold fusion’ would be commercially available in the first years of the new millennium.”

My early science fiction habit was cut on books by Arthur C. Clarke, Issac Asimov, and Larry Niven. To know that Sir Arthur was also an inspiration to Gene Roddenberry to develop Star Trek ties him even more to my favorite avocation of reading Star Trek books, and enjoying the latest versions of Star Trek lore, like Star Trek Phase II (formerly Star Trek: New Voyages.)