2006: The Good, the Bad, and the Geeky

It’s a full house with geeks Lyle Troxell, Sean Cleveland, John Tracy, Miles Elam, Dedi Hubbard, Drew Meyer, and Alex Sleeis discussing the best and worst tech of 2006.

Vista Minimm Requirements

Microsoft releases [minimum system requirements for Windows Vista|http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=5410].

Fast Fiber Optics

Data travels at [107[Gb|gigabits]/sec|http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=5439] with the help of fiber optics and Siemens.

Some links are bad in Texas

[Deep linking ruled illegal|http://news.com.com/Judge+Cant+link+to+Webcast+if+copyright+owner+objects/2100-1030_3-6145744.html?tag=nefd.top] by a US district judge in Texas.

AMD goes very small

AMD releases their [first 65[nm|nanometer] processors|http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q4/athlon-65nm/index.x?pg=1], which can fit 2,000 transistors in the space taken up by just one transistor twenty five years ago.

*! Highlights

The Geeks’ favorite Linux distribution: [Ubuntu|http://www.ubuntu.com/], available in Live CD format too!
Also check out [Edubuntu|http://www.edubuntu.org/], a version of Ubuntu meant for kids. And it’s free!
Watch out for image spam, especially the [pump and dump scam|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump] variety.
[Virtualization|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization] gets some [competition|http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2006/12/22/6381] on the Mac.

! Calls
!! George from Seaside, CA
Windows XP Home edition, having errors, NTLDR is missing. Sean suggest going through the Windows fix which he detailed on the [November 25th show of GeekSpeak|http://geekspeak.org/shows/2006/11/25/] and follow his 8 easy steps.

George also had some problems with the loss of color support and is limited to only 16 colors on the display. We suggested getting the most recent drivers for your video card. For ATI All in Wonder get the Catalyst Drivers from http://ati.amd.com/

!! Diana from Santa Cruz, CA
CD Writing funky music with iTunes, Error Code 4000… buffer under-run?
We suggested slowing the burn time or maybe getting better quality discs.
!!! Steve from Danbury, CT wrote in with some feedback:
“I bet you missed the real problem with the caller who had buffer underrun issues burning more than 12X on her burner. I had a similar situation on a machine which was clearly fast enough and determined that I was stuck in PIO (not DMA) mode on the burner. Turns out Windows XP had a “feature” where it dropped down to PIO mode if a certain error count was hit on the drive. The easy fix was to uninstall the CD driver and let Windows re-detect it which caused it to go back to DMA mode." He suggested this [discussion of the issue|http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=190410].

!! Tom from Moss Landing, CA
Digital Camcorder as a web cam? <- you bet. As long as the digital video camera has FireWire, which most do, then you should be able to use that with iChat on a Mac OS X machine.

!! Michel from Pebble Beach, CA
What is up with cheep cellphone and [VoIP|Voice Over Internet Protocol]?
Well, VoIP is very common and inexpensive, but not really for cellphones. You may want to take a look at http://www.voipreview.org/ and compare different VoIP offerings. Dedi suggests [iPhone|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone] from Cisco/Linksys, a hardware device that dose cell phone and VoIP in one.