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Tech News & Commentary
Bob in El Paso, Texas listening on KROD, calling via the app asked: “With all the electronics sales, how do you know when it’s time to buy a warranty for a new product? I’ve heard mixed emotions on either side, if the device of good quality you don’t need a warranty, I don’t wanna waste money, but I know some big box stores are offering a year extension, like Costco offers another year on top of the manufacturer’s warranty. What’s your opinion on buying aftermarket or extended warranties for new products, Dave? Thanks.”
That all depends on the product and how expensive the warranty is. It may or may not be worth it. The “fine print” also should be considered. Does the warranty cover repairs in full?, or just offer a discount on a repair or replacement in case something goes wrong? Many respected people — like us and the Consumer Reports folks — say they are usually not worth it. And our friend Dave Ramsey says: I don’t believe in extended warranties at all—on cars, electronics, anything. I’ve done the research, and I’ve seen the math. The math says that—depending on the item—about 75–85% of the amount you pay for the warranty is for marketing and commissions. If you pay $1,000 for a warranty, $750 of it is going to the dealership and to the salesman who sold it to you.
If you buy something with your credit card, you can also check with the card issuer to see if the company offers purchase protections as part of your card service. If it does, you may not need an extended warranty.
Extended warranties are only as good as the companies behind them. Costco, for example, stands behind their extra year warranty with a vengeance, we’ve heard many stories of them coming through on fixing or replacing items beyond the manufacturer’s warranty period, so that becomes a good reason to buy from them, especially because they don’t charge for their extra coverage — it’s just an incentive to buy from them.
But an extended warranty that you have to purchase, for real cash, you have to ask yourself carefully about. Spending $300 to cover a laptop may seem good at the time of purchase, when that laptop is worth $1000 to you. But a year from now? When you really want that new laptop? Wouldn’t you like to have that $300 back toward the purchase of next year’s model? And you definitely don’t want to buy an extended warranty that doesn’t come from the company selling you the product.
Also consider whether the warranty covers damage from accidents, or only defects in materials and workmanship. Most electronics don’t break because they fail, most electronics break because we pour a soda on them, or drop them on the ground, or go swimming with them in our pockets, etc. Extended warranties rarely cover that.
AppleCare is sort of a special case, since it not only extends the warranty from one year to three years, it also extends your period of toll free technical support from 90 days to three years, and it gives you some priority scheduling should you need to take your Apple to the local Genius Bar.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
“Into
Gaming Update” Weekly Feature with Mark Lautenschlager
Bad news out of BioWare this week. The company announced that one of its key designers for Star Wars: The Old Republic (hereinafter “SWTOR”), Rich Vogel, has left after seven years with the company. This followed news that the game had already lost 400,000 subscribers and was considering moving to a free-to-play model. BioWare is learning the same lesson that Mythic Entertainment learned before them. When Electronics Arts is your parent, you game needs to make money NOW, make LOTS of money, and KEEP making money…or heads will roll. I personally can’t think of a worse publisher for an MMORPG, which is a game genre that requires a lot of patience. I’m not trying to defend SWTOR, mind you. I bought it and bought a 90 day game card for it so I could review it on this show. I said then that it was an okay game, pretty to look at but not very deep to play, and it would likely keep only the hardcore Star Wars fans in the long run (much like LOTR Online and Star Trek Online have existed thanks to dedicated fans of those franchises). It looks as though my prediction was correct.
In sad news, a Taiwanese gamer spent 40 hours in a marathon Diablo III gaming session before collapsing and later dying in a local hospital. The 18 year old rented a private room in an Internet cafe on Friday and played through Sunday without stopping to eat or rest. He was discovered by cafe employees who said they’d check on him several times prior and he was “fine.” I’m as hardcore as anyone when it comes to video games, but even I can tell you that on those rare days when I have time to play Rift for ten straight hours, I feel a little woozy when I eventually stop. Moderation in all things, my friends. EVEN in video games.
That’s your Into Gaming Update, I’m Mark Lautenschlager.
Willy in Columbia, Missouri asked: “Someone just getting high-speed Internet, I am looking to revamp my home theater. Want to know the most cost-effective way to hookup the components and the most user-friendly way to stream movies from the Internet.”
The best way to hook up components will depend on what components you have and on how you decide to stream from the internet. The easiest way would probably be to buy an Internet-enabled TV. Many Internet-enabled TVs will give you access to services like Netflix, Hulu Plus and Vudu.
If you don’t mind another box in your home theater, you can try something like a Boxee box or a Roku box. Those will give you access to both movies and TV shows. They connect to your home theater via an HDMI cable, and they’re controlled by a remote, which is pretty user friendly.
You can also try an AppleTV, which supports 1080p video (from 720p previously). It will give you access to Netflix and Apple’s iTunes’ library of movies and TV shows. It also connects to your TV via HDMI and is controlled by a remote control. However, unlike Roku and Boxee, it will not give you access to Hulu Plus or most other TV sites.
Or you could look at something like a PlayStation 3 game console. It’s a very good game console, it has bunches of apps for streaming movies (like Netflix), and it’s also a very good Blu-ray DVD player. Regarding that whole hook up business, it’s pretty hard for us to tell you the most cost-effective way to hook things up when we don’t know what you have. But we’ll offer you this generic advice: Buy decent cables, when you’re transmitting HD signals the cable quality DOES matter, and remember that HDMI is best, followed by DVI, and then component video. Connect using HDMI sources and inputs, with quality cables, and you should have excellent results. Good luck!
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Alex in Normandy, France listens via his iPad and asked: “I built a 3.7 terabyte FreeNAS server for Time Machine backups and file management (movies, music, pictures and so on and so forth. I was wondering what is the best way to wire the house with a gigabit switch (about 24 Ethernet ports). As always, I love your show keep up the great work and see you at IFA!”
Alex, the best way we can think of to wire a house with a gigabit switch is to wait until the 802.11ab WiFi standard becomes available and use that… if that’s not an option, you’re in for a fair amount of work.
You’re going to have to figure out how much cable you need, and then probably add some more, since you won’t always be able to run cables in straight lines.
If you’re looking at gigabit you’re options are going to be Category 5e cables and up. A Cat 5e cable will allow you to transfer data at speeds of up to 1Gb/s, a Cat 6 cable will allow speeds of up to 10Gb/s but only for distances of up to 55 meters, you know how long that is but, for the rest of our listeners, that’s about 180 feet, a Cat 6a cable will allows speeds of up to 10Gb/s too, but it removes the 180 feet limitation.
Now, wiring won’t be easy, you’ll have to figure out a way to get the cable through walls, which can be a big problem in place where concrete is more common than drywall, and Normandy is probably one of those places, to avoid interference and just for the sake of safety, you will want to avoid running network wires close to power wires.
Even after you figure that out you have to place a connector at the end of each cable. Wiring a house that requires 20+ ports is a big job, so you may be better off leaving it to a professional or waiting for gigabit WiFi to become available for consumers.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Guests in this hour:
Dr. Atul N. Shah, Medical Director – Center4AsthmaAllergy.com
Are you allergic to technology or consumer electronics? Is it possible that devices such as cameras and cell phones could be a new type of indoor allergy trigger?
“IFA History Feature” brought to you by Messe-Berlin
The tube based TV sets dominated the market since the beginning of the real mass market in the early 50ies.The screens got bigger, but also very heavy and bulky. Stereo sound and color TV were the only innovations, until the introduction of a remote control; In the beginning connected to the TV with a cable, introduced first by Zenith in the US, named “Lazy Bones”. Then remotes went wireless – first using ultrasound technology, but as this was not very reliable, the switch was made to infrared, a technology still used today. IFA was, of course, showing all these latest innovations.
Listener Teresa asked: “This may be an odd question but as invasive as Google (browser/portal/etc) has become about collecting info, does it have access to gadgets running Google Android OS’s? Or are they completely separate entities?”
Not only are Google products running on Android not separate entities, but privacy concerns should probably be worse for Android users.
Google is going to be consolidating each users information into a single database, that means that whatever they know of you from YouTube, Gmail, Calendar, Voice, Reader, Google Search and every other service won’t sit in separate databases any more but in a single one, and it will be linked to your individual user.
Google claims they won’t track you if you’re not logged in, so computer users can get around that by either closing their Google accounts, or by logging out when they’re not using them, for users on Android that’s a harder step to take though.
Android users can use their phones without being logged into any Google service, but that their phones will prompt them to use their Google account from the time they first turn them on, logging out isn’t always easy (for example, logging out of Gmail requires going to Settings, Manage Applications and clearing the app’s saved data), and without a Google account they can’t download applications from the Android Market.
To make matters worse, an Android phone that’s signed into Google services could share other information from phone calls, to text messages, to GPS locations, and that’s another extra layer of concern that computer only users don’t have to deal with.
That being said, we have to echo the words of Scott McNealy, former CEO of Sun Microsystems, who famously said “You have no privacy anyway, get over it.” That’s a fact. Yes, Google tracks the people who use its services. So does everyone else. Apple does it, Microsoft does it, Amazon.com does it, Netflix does it. Everyone you do any sort of business with is keeping every tab on you that they can. You don’t even want to know what your credit card companies could tell someone about you.
There is only one way to be truly private in this day and age. Don’t use a computer, or a smartphone, or a credit card. Cash your paychecks at the bank they’re issued from, and spend only cash. Do not own real estate of any kind, buy all your cars with cash, and pay for all your healthcare with cash. There are entire books written on the subject of how to live off the grid, for just that reason.
Google is a big company who develops some products and acquires others. Each of these products used to have its own privacy policy. That’s a logistical nightmare for them. So they are going to have a unified privacy policy and a unified user account database. If you don’t want to use their products, then don’t. But they’re no more evil than any other technology company. The ones who claim they don’t track you… just haven’t been caught doing it yet.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Luis in Miami Lakes, Florida listening online asked: “I am a huge fan of music, and over the years I have amassed a huge collection (over 3000 CD’s). My wife and I started the painstaking task of uploading all of our music onto our hard drive, and archiving the collection. Do you know of any hardware/software interface that could help us in speeding this process up with out manually having to archive it ourselves. Not a big iTunes fan either, and was really looking for a way to do the transfer ‘in bulk’, with the ability to arrange it later.”
There are options available to automate the process, but you won’t want to use them. Ripstation, for example has a “cheap” consumer version that will automatically grab your CDs from a pile, put them in the drive, and rip them, but they’re version of “cheap” is $1400.
The rest of the automated options are about as expensive, and they even go higher than that, they’re clearly meant for professional operations. There are also services that will take your CDs and rip them for you, but the cost of shipping 3000 CDs alone will make that extremely expensive for you, and the services are not cheap either, you’re talking about more than a dollar per CD.
To be honest, your best bet might be either to pay a couple of high school kids to start putting a dent on your collection, or to just do the ones you listen to the most, and the rip the other ones as needed, at least you’ll slowly go through them and it won’t be a horribly repetitive task that will never seem to end.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
If you have any questions about any of this week’s show info, please email us here.
This Week’s Prizes for Our Listeners
Boingo: Several 60-day Certificates — With Boingo you can connect online at free and paid Wi-Fi hotspots.
Idea Incubator: Several txtRng — “the stylus with style”. This is a unique stylus Rob recently featured it on our Product Spotlight.
NQ Mobile: Activation codes for NQ Mobile Vault (Premium Version) — An Android app that keeps your text messages, pictures, and videos safely hidden from prying eyes.
ZoneAlarm by Check Point Software: Several download keys for ZoneAlarm Extreme Security (antivirus, firewall, spyware protection)