The first thing you need to do is decide if you need to do anything at all.  This flow chart prepared by The Consumerist tells you what you need to do. To summarize the chart, you don’t need to do anything if:

• You don’t have a television
• You don’t use an antenna to watch TV because you subscribe to cable or satellite service
• Your TV has a digital tuner (new televisions sold after March 1st, 2007 are required to have digital tuners)

That  means that if you use an antenna and have an old television without a digital tuner, you’ll need to get a converter box. Otherwise, you’re fine right now and don’t need to take any action.

Converter boxes are available now from most electronics retailers both on and offline, and you can get $40 coupons to defray the cost.  Consumer Reports has a page with detailed information about the DTV transition, as well as reviews of converter boxes.  Wikipedia has a page all about the DTV transition as well.

One more thing. The broadcasters in your area are already broadcasting in digital, so if you use an antenna and you already have a converter box or a television with a digital tuner, you are probably watching digital channels already.  On June 12th most broadcasters will change frequency.  You may find that some or all of the channels you were watching don’t come in any more.  To overcome this, just have your television or converter box scan for channels again and it will find them.  Mark your calendar.

You can see which stations are broadcasting in your area, and which frequencies they’re on now, and where they’ll be after June 12th, on AntennaWeb.org.

Mashable has an article today about another predictor of Idol results: Google.  The theory is that you can see who Google users (i.e. everybody) are more interested in based on the number of searches for different contestants.  Mashable looks at the Google statistics for past American Idol contests and makes a good case for the predictive power of the search engine.  This year, if history is any guide, there’s a pretty clear front runner.

Google certainly seems to have the pulse of the people these days, and unlike subject specific tools like Dial Idol, Google is a generic tool.  American Idol isn’t the only contest to be predicted by analyzing search traffic.

We have all this information, and behind that an even larger amount of data.  How do we deal with this?  That’s easy: Google.  We turn to sophisticated search engines that look at all the data we’ve collected and rely on them to give us what we’re looking for.  Google works amazingly well, and even more amazing than that, it somehow produces results in fractions of a second.  It’s almost as if Google knows what you’re going to ask before you ask it.  Google, however, is not perfect.  It can get you information, but it’s up to you to know what to do with it.

Wolfram Alpha contemplates major US Cities

This is where Wolfram Alpha comes in.  The web has been ablaze with talk about Wolfram Alpha since its launch on Friday.  It seems that everywhere I turn, I hear somebody whispering Wolfram Alpha.  What is it?  Nobody really knows yet.

That’s not entirely true.

We do know what it isn’t.  It’s not a search engine.  Sure, it looks like one, but if you go to it expecting to get something Google-like out of it, you’ll be disappointed.  Wolfram Alpha is an information engine.  Under the hood, Wolfram Alpha is powered by historical and live data sets from a wide variety of sources, all hooked together with software called Mathematica, the brain-child of British physicist Stephen Wolfram.  Wolfram believes that computational methods can do more than deal with known physics; he asserts that, by iteration, a computational engine could even discover new physics. (This is a vastly simplified summation of his work.)

Wolfram Alpha is an extension of this thought.  When you pose queries the software looks through its database to figure out what you’re asking about, and then returns information about that subject or subjects.  It also performs computations based on the data.  For example, if you enter “Los Angeles, New York”, it figures out that out that you mean New York City, and displays a variety of data about the two cities, such as population, elevation and current time.  Additionally, it calculates the distance between the two cities, and estimates how long it might take to fly between them.  If you wanted to know more about the population of those cities, “population Los Angeles, New York”  generates a graph with historical population data for both cities.  Wolfram Alpha uses its computational abilities to create new information.  John C. Dvorak calls Wolfram Alpha “the CIA World Factbook combined with a calculator.”

To make the site useful, we must forget our conditioned search engine behavior.  Wolfram Alpha’s information creation capabilities also make it difficult to know what it might be able to come up with in the future, especially as new data sources are entered.  Try it out for yourself, and read more about Wolfram Alpha here:

• Five Things Wolfram Alpha Does Better (And Vastly Different) Than Google
• Wolfram Alpha set for launch, first look unveiled
• Wolfram Alpha is discussed on the latest episode of This Week in Tech, including an interview with Stephen Wolfram

Ars Technica reports today that Microsoft has released a beta of its Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor tool which examines your computer and gives you a sense of how it stacks up and what you may need to consider upgrading before you decide to upgrade to Windows 7.

I’ve heard that Windows 7 is less resource intensive than Windows Vista, so if you’re already running Vista happily you stand a good chance of being able to run Windows 7 without difficulty.  I don’t know if I should believe what I hear, because this would be a first for Microsoft, but if you’d like to find out what the Upgrade Advisor tool says about your computer, download it from the Microsoft Download Center.

See you in week 2, and beyond!

Your First Bytes Editors,

Nik and Michelle

Summary of Terms
Welcome to the Official Mobile IQ Quiz! After completing the mobile quiz, we will calculate your score and ask you to enter your cell phone number to gain access to your IQ results as well as a mobile content subscription. Depending on your carrier and cell phone manufacturer, the mobile content may include ringtones, games, wallpapers, or fun text messages. This content will cost as much as $19.99 per month and will be sent to your cell. If you would not like to sign up for the subscription content to your phone to see your results, simply click the Get Results link on the cell phone entry page to view how you did!

They take advantage of the reader’s expectation that the page is just another online quiz, and our habit of glossing over fine print or ignoring it altogether, to stick people with a $20 per month subscription to cell phone junk.  These sorts of things appear on your cell phone bill and are often difficult to unsubscribe from, if you even notice it’s happening.  Good luck ever getting your money back if you don’t figure it out right away.

The take away lesson here is that you should always be aware of fine print online, especially when being asked to divulge personal information such as your phone number or email address.  Privacy policies often exist to disclose that you have no privacy.  Worse, criminal phishers who try to trick you into revealing information such as bank account details don’t presume to legality and have no use for privacy policies, just as muggers have no impulse to make their victims sign personal injury waivers.

Be careful out there, and be aware of the ramifications of giving information away.  Just like in the movie, WarGames, the only way to win this IQ test is to not play.  Read the Consumerist article here.