Month: March 2004

Intel Corp. will begin doing what
its competitor Advanced Micro Devices
Inc. did more than two years ago and stop referring to its chips by the clock speed of that
chip. Instead, Intel will name its chip kind of like car makers
like Mercedes-Benz or BMW. Just as Mercedes has S-class cars or BMW has
300-series cars, Intel is going to market its processors as 300-series,
500-series or 700-series processors. The higher the number within each
series, the better the chip, better in this case meaning full of more
features and not necessarily faster.
Clock speed, it seems to me, has always been overrated. I remember a Walt Mossberg from a couple of years
back in which he said that for most users, a computer with a
microprocessor clock speed of 500 megahertz was plenty enough to do
e-mail, some Web surfing and some word processing. I'd say he's still
right. Certainly, you don't need a chip running at 2 gigahertz to do
most computing tasks.
If you're buying a PC, I say skimp on the processor speed but spend as
much as you can on memory — try to get a a gigabyte or more — and
perhaps spend a little extra on a better video card so your screen will
draw images and multimedia stuff faster.
In fact, if it's multimedia that you're interested in, Apple's products seem to do a much
better job when it comes to content creation and content display.

The Chicago Tribune reports that federal prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation of monies received by Conrad Black and David Radler while they were running Hollinger International Inc. of Toronto.
Investigators are trying to determine whether the two engaged “in the pilfering of corporate assets,” the unidentified source told the Trib's reporters.
Black and Radler are the guys I used to work for. They were the controlling shareholders behind Southam Inc. when I worked for The Hamilton Spectator and, later, they were the ones behind the National Post, where I was part of the inaugural staff.

A photo blog is part of this blog. I've dubbed it 'B-roll” and you can access it by clicking on that title in the category area to the left of this message. Over the last couple of days, though, I've been fiddling with setting up a new category and trying to see if I could restrict access to that category to a set of predefined users. In fiddling about with that process, I ended up trashing all the photos in the “b-roll” Blog. I'll be slowly re-building that over the next few days.

The nominees for National Newspaper Awards were announced yesterday. The Globe and the Mail and The Toronto Star lead the way with 13 and 12 nominations respectively.
No doubt there's a story in the paper that landed on your doorstep this morning but here's a the press release from the Canadian Newspaper Association with a list of all the nominees.
The winners will be announced in Vancouver on June 5.

There's something wrong with some 60-gigabyte Hitachi hard drives that shipped with IBM ThinkPads recently. IBM has posted an upgrade that fixes this problem and, to make sure the importance of this update is not lost on any users, IBM is describing the upgrade as mandatory.

My friend Mark Evans has a blog (Thanks to Michael OCC for pointing this out). Mark writes about telecom and other technology issues for the National Post. We've been on opposite sides of the so-called Toronto newspaper wars since their inception. I was at the Post when it launched and he was one of tech reporters at the Globe. Mark took a break from reporting after the Globe to try his hand at a software start-up. How did that go? Well, put it this way: He's back to writing and he's rich with experience. But while he was out doing the start-up, I joined the Globe. Mark is now over at the Post.
Mark's a smart guy and his blog looks promising.

This is the first time I've seen this argument advanced

More audiences are turning to the Web for news. However, the Web isn't producing the profits needed to underwrite news gathering, which may lead to a decline in journalism quality, says a new media study. 

Here's an excerpt from the story:

The increased competition, especially in new media, has meant that the bulk of investment spending has been on distribution platforms rather than news gathering. In fact, tighter markets and slipping margins have led to cost cutting and a lowering of the number of people collecting and preparing the news.

There is a direct link to lower standards. This is exacerbated by the rise of cable news channels where increasingly, programming consists of the raw elements of news. For instance, vision from journalists embedded with US forces in Iraq went direct to air on cable channels without editing or contextual interpretation, lessening the role of journalists as gatekeepers over what is fact and what is propaganda, and eliminating the need for editors to package the news into segments for use in bulletins.

If there is a continuing decline in the roles and standards of journalism, profound social impacts will flow from that. When we had less choice, and a tighter control over journalistic standards and ethics, there was a greater common public understanding of news and the media operated more like a public town square for the exchange of views and information.”

 

 

Following up on yesterday's post/wish list for the Lexus luxury SUV that is powered by a hybrid gas/electric engine, General Motors Canada announced today that it is the first to market in Canada with a truck that uses a hybrid engine. GM is putting a hybrid engine into its Chevrolet Silverado and its GMC Sierra full-size pickup trucks. The products will only be available to its fleet customers right now but should be consumer showrooms by the end of the year.

I posted a new photo to Broll.

The poor old International Telecommunications Union toils away without getting much press in the mainstream media even though some of the stuff they come up with is just downright neat and would be great fodder for all kids of feature reporting. Today, the ITU reports on a workshop it held to assess the social impacts of mobile telephones. I did not realize, for one thing, that the number of mobile telephone subscribers worldwide was greater than the total number of fixed-line users around the world. At the end of 2002, there were 1.35 billion mobile phone users compared to 1.2 billion fixed line phone users.

At this workshop, experts from different countries talked about how mobile telephony was re-shaping social conventions and the way people interacted with each other. For instance:

• In Germany, young men who do not use SMS to reaffirm their love for their partners soon find themselves lonely.
• In Sweden, mobile gamers (“Botfighters”) track and “kill” other users nearby via SMS. When riding the Stockholm subway, SMS can also alert a small group of “fare-jumpers” to the presence of ticket collectors.
• In the Republic of Korea, downloading anti-mosquito ring tones helps to making camping a more pleasant experience while traffic alerts delivered to in-car navigation systems help Koreans to arrive at the camps-sites in good time