DaveMason.com
ComputerTalk with Dave Mason
The official archive of all available ComputerTalk with Dave Mason radio shows. Spend some time with Dave. Listen to a full show or explore clips by topic.
3,475 unique clips. Each clip appears in one section. Historical conversations, not current advice. Full episodes remain available separately by date.
562 clips, strongest first.
Dr. Dave remembers when the word firewall sounded frightening and technical to ordinary users, then argues that encryption was passing through the same cultural transition. The moment preserves how security language and expectations were changing in 2012.
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Dr. Dave remembers a successful 1980s software company and traces its founder’s next venture to GoDaddy, seeing the proposed billion-dollar sale as an American story about beginning again after earlier success.
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Dr. Dave records the August 2011 moment when Google’s Motorola Mobility purchase put an Android operating-system company together with a major phone manufacturer and altered the competitive map alongside Apple, BlackBerry, Microsoft and the collapsing WebOS effort.
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Dr. Dave identifies Google’s purchase of YouTube as one of 2006’s largest Internet stories and marvels at the value placed on a young company that had not produced profit. He and Evil Steve see the audience and ubiquitous name as the real assets that made the price rational.
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Flash creators faced a circular adoption problem because designers needed an audience with the player while users needed content before installing it. Macromedia paid Netscape to bundle the player, Microsoft followed, and the audience suddenly expanded from specialists to the mass web.
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Dr. Dave and Evil Steve react to HP ending WebOS devices only weeks after launching the TouchPad, with returned inventory suddenly advertised for a fraction of its original price and customers left to decide whether a cheap unsupported tablet is still a bargain.
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Dr. Dave and Evil Steve examine IBM research for SoulPad, a portable drive intended to carry not only a person’s data but the settings and environment that made another computer feel like their own. Dr. Dave sees promise in taking a complete computing personality anywhere and reducing some needs for remote access.
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Building on John Mellencamp's article, Dr. Dave predicts fewer monolithic gatekeepers and more blogs, small online newspapers, independent films and niche musicians able to reach their own audiences and earn a reasonable return.
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Reviewing 2006, Dr. Dave points to Microsoft agreeing to sell and support Novell SUSE Linux after Oracle offered support for Red Hat. Whatever Linux’s consumer future, he says, these moves by established software companies gave open source a new level of commercial legitimacy.
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Dr. Dave treats Microsoft's extension of OEM downgrade media from Vista to XP as an important implied admission. Manufacturers are not required to offer it, but the extra six months reveal the pressure created by a successful older system, a troubled successor and newly practical Intel-based Macs.
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Dr. Dave reports Microsoft’s plan to replace counterfeit Windows XP copies for unwitting buyers and focus enforcement on the suppliers, capturing the early launch of Windows Genuine Advantage.
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Dr. Dave reports that Fox-owned sites, driven by MySpace, have passed Yahoo in monthly United States visitors. The exchange captures a brief period when MySpace helped reorder the web’s largest audiences and even made Yahoo defend the depth of its users’ visits.
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During the first holiday season for the Wii, Dr. Dave contrasts Nintendo’s planned supply with the scarce PlayStation 3 and praises the Wii price, capabilities and unusual controls. He sees a credible chance for Nintendo to recover from being treated as an afterthought in the console market.
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Remembering the exaggerated promises of the late 1990s, Dr. Dave says the Internet is finally forcing newspapers, television and radio to rethink how they reach people. He and Evil Steve see a symbiotic relationship: publishers supply the reporting, search engines supply enormous reach and both sides risk harming themselves if they attack instead of making the exchange work.
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As Apple ends television rentals, Dr. Dave describes the central problem facing traditional media: audiences and technology are moving online, but established companies fear that embracing the new model will destroy the revenue still supporting the old one.
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Dr. Dave reports the long anticipated sign that Palm would release a Treo smartphone running Microsoft’s mobile operating system rather than Palm OS. For a company whose identity was built around its own handheld platform, he sees the partnership as a revolutionary change made possible by the renewed success of the Treo line.
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Facing a report that Windows 8 would reach stores in January 2013, Dr. Dave works through Microsoft’s development stages and argues that the company would aim for back-to-school and holiday sales instead, preserving a testable forecast from early 2011.
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Dr. Dave marks the closure of Rio as the loss of an early revolutionary portable MP3 player line whose 1998 legal battle helped force the industry to confront digital music distribution. He concludes that technical importance cannot keep a company alive when the business never becomes profitable.
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A reported sales milestone becomes Dr. Dave’s reminder that market excitement around Apple did not erase Microsoft’s scale, with Windows 7 selling one hundred million licenses in six months.
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Dr. Dave marks Silicon Graphics entering Chapter 11 by remembering its importance to high end workstations and Hollywood computer graphics. He explains how increasingly powerful and inexpensive personal computers blurred the distinction between PCs and workstations, then reflects on how even foundational technology companies can be overtaken by industry change.
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With Windows XP still reportedly outselling Vista after roughly eighteen months, Dr. Dave sees buyers mentally skipping the current release and waiting for Windows 7. He remembers Vista's long life under the Longhorn code name, notes the new Windows 7 blog and argues that Microsoft's market power rests more on its business model than product excellence.
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Only weeks after Slingbox appeared, Dr. Dave and Evil Steve hold the unusual silver device in the studio and explain how it can carry a home television signal across a local network or the Internet. They see it as an early step toward making media available beyond the room and device where it originated.
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Disney’s purchase of Pixar makes Steve Jobs its largest individual shareholder and gives him a board seat. Dr. Dave looks back at Jobs making online music sales work when others dismissed the idea and anticipates that the same force could bring Disney films and classic animation further into the digital world.
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Despite persistent promotion from manufacturers and Microsoft, Dr. Dave says his own tablet computer is not bad but still lacks a compelling reason for most people to abandon a laptop. He remembers Bill Gates centering a 2001 keynote on tablets and concludes in 2005 that adoption may still take years.
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Browse by year, then month, to find the episodes from that month.
442 proposed broadcast dates, plus 2 undated entries. Dates are based on archive filenames and may be approximate. Some broadcasts survive as separate parts or incomplete recordings.
