Month: July 2004

As I cover Apple Computer for the Globe and Mail, I hang around lots of Mac and Apple rumour and news sites. One of the things that the enthusiasts at those sites have been hopeful for is that Apple takes the success it has had with the iPod and makes a video version, that is, a tiny, beautiful portable digital video player.
Well, too bad for Apple, but there's already one out there. It's called the Archos AV 400 (or AV 420). I'd love to try one. The reviewer at Tom's took one out for a spin and it sounds sweet.

The iPod and the iPod Mini. Photo courtesy of Apple

Apple said today it's super-popular iPod mini will start shipping internationally — that means Canada — on July 24. Apple Canada said it will sell here for $349 and come in a choice of silver, gold, pink, blue or green. Apple literally sold out of the Mini in the U.S. market and, as a result, had to push back the launch of the product in other markets. It was to have been available in Canada in March.

The June 21 issue of BusinessWeek takes a look at Ronald Reagan's economic record. You probably noticed, as I did, that when Reagan died, there was a great amount of content in newspapers and on television that, had one not lived through the era, would have you believe that he was the greatest leader ever to lead a country.
I was still in high school when Reagan first came to power in the U.S. and he was there during most of my time at the University of Guelph. I did not think he was the greatest leader ever although 20 years ago, my opinion was probably shaped more by what peer group though than any rational examination of public policy. My peer group, for the record, did not think much of Reagan.
So now to BusinessWeek. The article says Reagan's “polices helped spur the 1980s boom and were integral to the high-tech revolution. But the poor paid a price.”
And here are BusinessWeek's numbers, presented in a chart, “How Reagan's Economic Record Stacks Up” I have re-arranged their presentation.

	GDP AAGR	Consumer Prices AAGR	Productivity AAGR	Wages AAGR	Unemployment Rate Average	Poverty rate Total Change
1	Clinton: 3.6 %	Bush II: 2.0 %	Bush II: 4.5%	Clinton: 0.8%	Clinton:5.2%	Clinton: -3.1%
2	Reagan: 3.4 %	Clinton: 2.6 %	Bush I: 2.1%	Bush II: 0.8%	Bush II: 5.8 %	Reagan: -0.9%
3	Carter: 3.4 %	Reagan: 4.1%	Nixon/Ford: 2.1 %	Nixon/Ford: 0.3%	Nixon/Ford: 5.8%	Nixon/Ford: -0.4%
4	Bush II: 2.7%	Bush I: 4.1 %	Clinton: 1.9%	Reagan: -0.2%	Bush I: 6.3%	Carter: 1.9%
5	Nixon/Ford: 2.7 %	Nixon/Ford: 6.5%	Reagan: 1.5%	Bush I: -0.8%	Carter: 6.5%	Bush I: 2.0
6	Bush I: 1.9 %	Carter: 10.4%	Carter: 0.9%	Carter: -2.1%	Reagan: 7.5%*	Bush II: NA

	Stock Prices AAGR	Business Investment Avg as Share of GDP	Federal Employment AAGR	Federal Receipts Avg as share of GDP	Federal outlays Avg as share of GDP	Budget Deficit Avg as share of GDP
1	Clinton: 11.2 %	Carter: 12.4%	Clinton: -1.4%	Bush II: 16.7%	Clinton: 19.6%	Clinton: 0.1 %
2	Bush I: 6.7%	Reagan: 12.1%	Bush I: -0.6%	Bush I: 17.7%	Bush II: 19.8%	Nixon/Ford: 2.1%
3	Reagan: 6.0 %	Clinton: 11.4%	Bush II: -0.5%	Nixon/Ford: 17.8%	Nixon/Ford:19.9%	Carter: 2.4%
4	Carter: -3.4%	Bush II: 10.6%	Nixon/Ford: -0.2%	Reagan: 18.0%	Carter: 21.2%	Bush II: 3.2%
5	Bush II: -5.7%	Nixon/Ford: 10.6%	Carter: 0.8%	Carter: 18.8%	Bush I: 21.9%	Bush I: 4.3%
6	Nixon/Ford: -6.0%	Bush I: 10.4%	Reagan: 0.9%	Clinton: 19.4%	Reagan: 22.3%	Reagan: 4.3%

Reagan had the highest unemployment rate of any postware President.

AAGR stands for Average Annual Growth Rate.

Bill Clinton's record looks pretty good in this light. By these broad measures
— measures that are reasonable symptoms, if you will, of the effect a national
government is having on an economy — Clinton looks to be one of the best-ever
post-war presidents. Clinton's numbers here are better than Reagan's in every
category save two: Federal receipts and business investment.

According to the stats collected on this blog's servers, there more than 15,000 unique visitors to this blog in June (not including those reading the XML / RSS feed) and there were more than 25,000 page views. Is that good? Beats me but it sure sounds impressive.
Here are the most popular entries to this blog for June:

1. Finally!! Airport Extreme and my LinkSys router are talking! (Posted 12-13-2003)
2. Help! My Macs cannot see my external CD-RW (Posted 6-9-2004)
3. The Royal Bank's big software glitch (Posted 6-9-2004)
4. Where would you eat in Vancouver? (Posted 5-4-2004)
5. Google by the numbers (Posted 5-5-2004)
6. Sondheim's Assassins and The Manchurian Candidate (Posted 5-2-2004)
7. Canada best for access among world's largest economies (Posted 11-24-2003)
8. McGill looks at media influence on the 2004 Canadian federal election (Posted 5-29-2004)
9. How to read difficult books (Posted 6-16-2004)
10. CTV and The Globe in Vancouver (Posted 5-26-2004)

Some of those entries were also top of the charts in May. (You can review May's most popular entries )

Statistics Canada reports today that Canada's private radio station operators posted record profits in 2003. Air times sales were $1.2-billion.

This stellar performance for “the granddad of electronic media” comes even as Internet use and music downloads continues to swell.

Statscan said the radio stations did it primarly by watching their own costs. The costs to operate private radio stations rose 3.7 per cent while revenues rose 8.4 percent compared to 2002.

In fact, in the last six years, the profit margins of private radio have eclipsed the profit margins of television stations!

Daniel Kleman thought he had a good thing going. He would use a WHOIS directory to find the names and addresses of .ca holders (I happen to be one, holding the rights to davidakin.ca) and then send along what appeared to be an invoice from The Internet Registry of Canada. Kleman was actually soliciting money to have the .ca domain holders changer registrars.
But the IROC invoice was more devious than that. It looked just like an official federal government document, complete with the little half-flag and the use of all the same fonts that Ottawa uses in its official communications.
Well, Industry Canada was not amused, and this week, it fined Kleman and his business $40,000 and put them on a 5-year probation.
Industry Canada's Competition Bureau said, Kleman's pitch, “was designed to mislead recipients into believing that they were existing customers of IROC's domain name registration service. The mail piece also gave the general impression of being an invoice mailed on behalf of a department or agency of the Government of Canada in charge of the registration of Internet domain names.”

The federal anti-spam task force wants your opinion about spam.
Someone named nschwarz has, at this writing, dominated the discussion forums, accounting for 11 of the 12 posts to these discussion areas. Of course, it's early yet, and nschwarz seems to know what he's talking about.

A U.S. federal appeals court says there is no protection of privacy for e-mail as it passes through an ISP's servers.
“This is one of the worst and most dangerous court decisions ever to appear relating to the Internet,” says Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility.
Here's the first two grafs from a Washington Post story on the subject:

A company that provides e-mail service has the right to copy and read any message bound for its customers, a federal appeals court panel has ruled in a decision that could expand e-mail monitoring by businesses and the government.A company that provides e-mail service has the right to copy and read any message bound for its customers, a federal appeals court panel has ruled in a decision that could expand e-mail monitoring by businesses and the government.
The 2-to-1 decision by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit in Massachusetts alarmed privacy advocates, who said it torpedoes any notion that e-mail enjoys the same protections as telephone conversations, or letters when they are sorted by mail carriers.

Weinstein continues: “It is impossible to overstate the potential significance of this astoundingly poor decision.”

Sometime in the evening of Friday July 2, every Blogware blog I know
of, including my own, fell off the Web, so far as I can tell. And yet,
friends in the U.S. say their Blogware blogs are working fine. One
correspondent suggested there was a connectivity issue with ATT Canada.
Whatever it is, it's now Saturday monring July 3 and I can't see my
blog, Accordion Guy's blog, Ross Rader's
blog, and some other sites. I'm connecting to the Net from home
through the Cogeco cable.
You can help me get a sense of what this problem is by sending me some e-mail and letting me
know where you are and what time you were reading this. Thanks for the
help.
[This was posted using the helpful Blogware moblog function]

[A press release received
today says:] “A team of researchers from the Intelligent Robotics
Laboratory at the University Jaume I (UJI) in Castellón, Spain, has
created the first automat capable of performing the tasks usually
carried out by a library clerk. The robot uses speech-recognition to
identify the book that is being requested, then determines its
location, goes to the shelf, picks it up and takes it to wherever it is
instructed to do so.”
That's pretty cool.