Errata - Correcting Our Mistakes

It was said that Hasselblad cameras are made in Germany. Hasselblads are hand made in Gothenburg Sweden.

The key song writer for the Grateful Dead was not John Perry Barlow but Robert Hunter. Mr. Barlow did not write Casey Jones and Sugar Magnolia as we said on the show, it was Robert Hunter with Garcia and Weir.

We mentioned that Microsoft was planning a new stripped down version of Windows XP that could be used on computers currently running Windows 98 (it was said to only need 64MB of ram). The planning is, in fact, over. Last week Microsoft released it as "Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs." For the most part it functions only as a thin client, that is, it must work in conjunction with a server based version of Windows. Also, it is not available to consumers.

On June 30, 2006, a listener living in China, corrected us about using Skype in China. He wrote: 

In one of your last shows, the one from June 28th or June 21st, someone erroneously mentioned that Skype doesn't work in China. I am a Belgian  living in China's Shandong province (which is about as mainland as you can get, being some 300 miles south of Beijing and around 500 miles north of Shanghai), and I know from personal experience that there are no problems using Skype here. I can use the SkypeOut function (to call actual phones, both in China and abroad) without any problems. I've also called into China numerous times, when on holiday in my old homeland. 

The only problem might be the less than perfect connection I sometimes get, but those are due (in my humble opinion) to the slowish, high-latency ADSL connection I have in my home. And that's mostly the fault of my ISP. I've tried to switch providers, but I live on a campus and I suspect the school here of having a sweetheart-deal with them (Tietong) because they won't hear of any requests for a change. On the upside, I only pay about 3 US$ a month for speeds ranging from 300 to 700 or 800 kbps (speeds are variable, and there is of course the horrendous nuisance of my host country's Great Firewall, but that's a different topic entirely).

Anyway, I enjoy your show very much. Thanks for putting it out there (it's being heard).
Kind regards,
Marceau

To which, Joe replied: 

Dear Marceau

Thank you very much for clearing up the misunderstanding on my part about Skype being blocked in China... there was some chatter in the Skype forums and in Inforworld and the China Herald. Since the story was carried in several media reports, I did believe it. I will post your email on our site by way of clarification.

Regards,
Joe King

It is not true that you have to pay for software to create Adobe Acrobat PDF documents. Commercial software, such as Adobe Acrobat itself, offers lots of bells and whistles, but simpler free software is also available. One such program is Primo PDF which can create a PDF file from any document that you can print. It installs a virtual PDF printer and documents directed to this printer become Adobe Acrobat PDF files. 

The new Google Spreadsheet application is an Ajax-style web page. We mistakenly talked about downloading it, there is nothing to download. 

A caller asked about wiping sensitive files off their computer. This is not something Windows can do, even the Format command in DOS and Windows does not really erase files. For totally erasing a hard disk of all traces of all files, you can use the free Darik's Boot and Nuke. On the show Dave mistakenly referred to this program as NukeIt.