Bitch, I'll cut you.

Record companies want more money. A fact that hasn't changed since the dawn of time. Apple releases a cool digital music download model that works and it's proven to be successful. It sells Apple a lot of iPods, and it somehow got me to purchase tracks online. Something I said I would never do. Some record companies want to raise the price of a track and charge you more for newer music because "it's better." HAHAHA ok, whatever. Mr Jobs tells the record companies that he will not raise the price, and that by raising the price, it will promote piracy. Record companies don't like it when someone tells them no, so they look into other options like taking a percentage of iPod sales of just cutting their library away from Apple. Then they start the mudslinging! Steven Jobs called the labels greedy. Michael Nash, Warner's digital strategy chief, had this to say about Apple.

"The industry got together and said 'We don't want another MTV'. Well, now we've got another MTV, in Apple. And we have to deal with it."

Oh, when did the iTunes Music Store stop selling music and start selling us reality TV shows starring the annoying sister of someone who wasn't that big in the music industry who also has their own reality show on the same channel? There is probably more meaning to his comment, but I mean, come on. Really? Addition on 01 Oct 2005 I would also like to add that iTunes has sold over 500million tracks and they're estimated to hit the 1 billion mark sometime in April 2006. It's not like the iTunes music store isn't doing well.

nerdcast #2 : What kind of sandwich is Brian?

After a two week break, nerdcast #2 is here and in your face. On this episode I took over the editing duties from Brian. Let's see how bad I mess this one up. Totally cool intro song.

The song we used in the intro is called When I Wake by The Changes. You can visit them at http://www.the-changes.com/ to find out all sorts of information about them and download a few, free mp3s if you want.

Brian and I are heading to Ontario California for the Portable Media Expo & Podcasting Conference which is taking place November 11-12 2005. We'll be at the AMP booth. Hardware

-We talk about the Nintendo Revolution's controller and how we want to sex it. -Google is buying up a lot of dark fiber so they can browse the web from a pizza shop down the road. -I want a new digital camera for our upcoming trip to California.

Software

-Opera is now free and our websites don't work right. We're sticking with Firefox -Office 12 looks ugly and bloated. Coming from Microsoft, this shouldn't surprise us.

Entertainment

-The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is out on DVD and I love it. Listen to me tell Brian a thousand times to check it out. -Bestbuy has an exclusive Office Space DVD coming out 11/01/2005. NOW WITH FLAIR! -Also, get a Chris Farley bobble head doll when you buy Tommy Boy on DVD.

Hosts: Runtime: 24:10 Download: nerdcast002.mp3

How Opera is the best talk show ever.

If this was the year 2002, you would probably be viewing this page in Internet Explorer and it wouldn't look this pretty either. Well, you could have been one of the three people still hanging on to Navigator Gold hoping for a Netscape revival. Microsoft pretty much dominated the world and forced Internet Explorer on us. Once they were done feeding us the Microsoft song and dance, they stopped all development on IE by freezing it in an ice block preventing website developers from taking advantage of all the new HTML code and standards that were coming down the pipes. So I'm basically saying that we were stuck in an ice age. MS no longer updated IE and we suffered. Lack of standard support and security holes are no one's friend. So God gave us things like Mozilla's Firefox and all was well in the world. Now, keep in mind. I'm not going to touch the Mac side of the fence. With only 5% of the market share, a browser developed only for the Mac can't really dominate my face and remove IE from the top. Anyways, Firefox came out with a bang. It received a lot of downloads along with the attention, and word was flying that the next browser war had started. Thank God. Firefox has better standard support, looks sharp, functioned real nice like, less security concerns, and tabbed browsing. Because Firefox was so swell and not square like IE, Microsoft reformed their IE team to work on a new browser to compete with Mozilla's offering. However there was a third browser out there named Opera. Now Opera was from a different breed. Oh, it was better than IE and on par with Firefox, but its business model called on the old days. The days before the first browser war. If you wanted to use Opera without the built in ads, you had to pay for it. That's why I called Opera the, "Rich kid's browser." I'm sure people bought it. Actually, I'm positive a lot people bought it. I'm pretty sure those kids that were suckers felt they were a part of some special group that's better than everyone else. Just like the kids who buy iMacs. But during the first browser war, I vowed never to pay for another browser again, so I never bought Opera even though it was a great browser. I also told myself that if Opera wanted to stand a chance against IE and Firefox, they have to adopt the free model. Which they did, and they received over one million downloads in two days because of the switch. Now we're entering another browser war.

I'm buying new pants.

Oh my God, John. Have you seen the controller for the Nintendo Revolution? Oh Em Gee. When E3 hit this year, and the three major console makers showcased their next gen offerings, I sat down and made a priority list. The kind of priority list that said something like, "which one of these upgrades am I going to purchase first, and the other two I'll pick up when they are in the bargin bin at Tommy's Pump an Go?" Well, the Xbox 360 was at the top of the list and that was going to be my first purchase come this November. Then Nintendo had to introduce this little remote, sometimes confused with a sexual toy for a controller. Do I think it's revolutionary? Do I think it has all the characteristics of being innovating? Hells yes. Coming up with new ways of gameplay and immersing us into the game play is innovating. Upgrading the processor, graphics card, recoloring the controller, and slapping it in a new box isn't. At first glance, I was thinking, "what the fuck?" like many of you were. After reading (key word is reading) about what it can do, how it was to be implemented, and watching the video with cute Japanese girls jumping up and down while having a grand ol time. I was sold. This is what the gaming industry needs. While you have the companies on the other side of the fence giving us repackaged crap from five years ago, Nintendo steps up to offer us something a bit different. Now, keep in mind. The games can be devloped using the new remote-like controller, but they don't intend on ignoring the current controllers we've been used too since we was kids, yo. This new controller does have a possiblity of failing and probably bring the Nintendo Revolution along with it leading people to believe that it was all a gimmic. It's up to Nintendo and the game developers to step up and make games that take full advantage of the controller. That's the main thing that gets me about the DS. There are two screens and a mic to work with. Most developers use that second screen as a map that displays character information. There are a few games out there that exploit the potential of having two screens, but again there are only a few. Meteos comes to mind and that's a great puzzle game. One thing I love doing in my spare time is seeing the reaction the gaming crowd has. I will say that it's mostly positive. Mostly. But you do have the kids who just don't get the point. Now, this isn't an exact quote or a real person. I'm taking the general responce made by the negative crowd.

This is stupid. How are you supposed to use this? - Spencer Yates. Age 13. Idaho.

Let me point you to a page that answers your burning question. I'm assuming you just looked at a picture and quickly jumped on the hate train, which was ready to pull out of the station.

That thing does not look comfortable. That will tire you out after only a few minutes of play. - Jacob Jingleman Age 25. Arkansas

If that's the reason you think this controller sucks, then you are a true gamer. You wake up at three in the afternoon. You have a few slices of cold pizza to get the day started, and your body is fueld by Bawls. Yes, if you play a baseball game, you will have to swing the remote like a bat to hit the ball on the screen. Yes, you will have to use more than you thumbs to play a game. I can guarantee that you will work up a sweat. Feels great to be alive, doesn't it? Now, for the Cliffnotes version. I think the new Nintedo controller is the bee's knees, and owning a Revolution will be swell. And for another interesting read. Check out this write up at Lost Garden. GOBOKS!!

Real time chat us in the face!

We finally signed up for an AIM screen name, so all you kiddies can chat to us when we're on, and you can send us those hot photos of your neighbor if you want. (We prefer getting pictures of your sister, but the neighbor thing will be fine.) Sadly, the SN nerdcast was taken, so we had to settle with... nerdcastlovesyou There you go. Add that to your buddy list and spam away. Pay close attention to the away messages. If you see that we are recording a show, you may send us a question and we'll try to answer it. Thanks, -The Management

Please check with your local community college

So, get this. Bill Gates is giving his keynote speech at PDC 2005. During this keynote speech he's talking about all the uninteresting features for the long over-due update to Windows, and on top of that, he's showing off GUI features that got my pants wet back in 1999. Yeah, I said it. I'm not going to get started on how Windows Vista is going to be the most boring thing to happen in 2006 (MS still has time to put my foot in my mouth for me). But I will get started on this new version of Office with an overhaul done to the GUI. You know, I thought they would simplify it for us. I thought they would get rid of the buttons we don't need and you could add them later. I thought I thought I thought I thought wrong. The new GUI looks horrible. But what could I expect; it matches the horrible Vista GUI. I understand the principle behind it. You click the WRITE tab and it brings up all the tools you would need to write a document. Don't get me wrong, I think the ribbon idea is swell, but does it need to take up that much screen space? Does the binocular icon for the find function need to be life size binoculars? After scouring this great tool known as the internet, I found the best quote that sums up my feelings for it. It's short and to the point.

It looks like ass.

So please Microsoft. Send your GUI developers to a graphic design class or two. Do whatever it takes to get this thing to look sexy and functional. Thank God for my 19in monitor running at blazin' high resolution. NOTE: I am totally aware that these programs are still in development and that they can change. From past experience, whatever MS showed off at their conferences is what went final.

nerdcast : Show #1 THE PILOT!

The pilot episode of nerdcast is here. We are still in the test phase of the show. We're trying out new things, and different set ups so bare with us. We're still fleshing this out. We are also listed on Odeo. Leave comments or send us e-mail nerdcast @ gmail.com Hardware

-First up, we talk about this little thing called the iPod nano. You might have heard about it. It's kind of a big deal. You see, everyone is covering the damned thing, so we didn't talk about it much. Like the girls we are, we discussed which color we liked.

Software

-The Firefox 1.5 Beta is out and I love it. We have faster rendering, improved back and forward buttons, and tabs that you can arrange. I'm not loving the Internet Explorer 7 Beta. Basically it's IE 6 with tabs. We're hoping it gets better. Well, it doesn't matter because I'm sticking with Firefox. -We're recording this show through Google Talk. I know my side of the conversation might not sound too hot right now. My mixer is new and my levels aren't right yet. Other than that, we think it's a great program that you should try out. We said so. -Brian tells us about the OPML editor and how he wants to date it. It's a blogging tool that takes a bit of elbow grease to get it up and running. Looks like we won't see Jane blogging about how she's under age and likes to drink and do X.

Entertainment

-The new season of Family Guy premieres on Sunday night. It comes on during Desperate Housewives, but it should be no contest on which show we'll be watching. But there is always TiVo. -Then there is this movie called Doom coming out. Yes, it's based on the video game. It involves a group of people checking something out and they start dying off. We've seen this movie when it was called Alien, but it has The Rock in it, and we all love him.

Lifestyle

-Brian needs a new car. I show Brian the new Chevy HHR. Brian likes it because he likes things like that. Imagine a Toyota Matrix mating with a PT Cruiser while a TrailBlazer watches. The end result would be the HHR.

Hosts: Runtime: 33:28 Download: nerdcast001.mp3

New iPods and iTunes make my pants tight.

Today marks the day that Apple killed off the iPod Mini and replaced it with the NEW iPod nano (that's Spanish for nano). As you can see, it looks a lot like the current iPod, but it's about as thick as a pencil, and you can get it in white or black. It looks like Apple has also killed off the multi-colored look, which is sad because it reminded me of the first gen iMacs. To read more about the features and to see how sexy it is, go to the iPod nano site. Also, iTunes finally hit version 5 today. It sports a redfined look, and it's the first major upgrade to the software in two years. It's introduced a lot of features in its 4.x lifespan, but can you believe iTunes 4.1 came to Windows almost two year ago? It's crazy I tell you. And of course, the iTunes download is taking eight years. It should be no surprise to me that it's getting hammered! Hammered like a thirteen year old boy at his older sister's wedding reception! Then there is that Motorola cellphone that can play iTunes music. Make love to that too.

Shares are down!

I had a feeling I should of paid attention in college. Then I would understand this. http://blogshares.com/blogs.php?blog=http%3A%2F%2Fbataylor.blogspot.com%2F I have no idea what the hell this thing is.

2 day shipping = 1 week.

The mixer is in the mail. I wish I could say that it was delivered on the 3rd like it was supposed to be, but uh, it was moved to the 6th. I wish I could say that it got here today like it was supposed to be, but it was moved to the 7th. You see, 2 days shipping takes a week, while 7 day shipping takes 2 days. Imagine That. Once that mixer comes in and I buy the cables, it will be time to rock podcasting's face. FACE!

nerdcast is Blogger.com powered!

Yes! Getting Blogger's bloggy blog program to post to the pmind.com server was easy peasy. This is a totally upgrade from the MT 2.6something program we were using before. As of now, the only link that works is to the forums. ENJOY!!! Ben Taylor <3