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Degunk your PC

I'm not even sure degunk is a word but if you've got a PC that's 'gunked', you know what this means. The good people over at tech publisher O'Reilly have a great little 12-step program set up to degunk your Windows-based PC.

Top 12 Ways to Degunk Your PC by Joli Ballew — Your PC, with its 80GB hard drive and 512MB of RAM, runs way too slow. Why? It's gunked up with pictures, movies, music, and attachments you've saved; you've saved stuff to the wrong places; and you have apps installed that you don't use. If you want to clean up your PC, and get it running as fast as it should, follow Joli Ballew and Jeff Duntemann's 12-step program for degunking your PC. Joli and Jeff are the authors of the bestselling Degunking Windows book, from Paraglyph Press.

From Zero to Synomos: The latest startup from the Hills

Montreal's Hammie Hill and his two sons Austin and Hamnett are heading off with another start-up.
The Hills first hit the spotlight during the dot-com boom in the late 1990s. After becoming millionaires when they sold off an Internet service provider business they started up while Austin and Hamnett were in high school, the Hills went on to found Zero Knowledge Systems (ZKS) Inc. In its first incarnation, ZKS was going to build privacy software for consumers.
Because the Hills — and Austin, in particular — were media-savvy and media-friendly, ZKS got a lot of ink (including lots penned by yours truly). Austin even testified before the U.S. Congress on privacy issues. The mindshare they created from that press and political coverage, the line of business they were in, and the general market enthusiasm of the day helped ZKS win more than $50-million (U.S.) in venture capital financing — tops at the time for a Canadian software startup.
But consumers didn't seem to be much interested in buying privacy-protection software and, to the Hill's credit, they recognized that fact, and tried to re-tool the company into a business that would provide other businesses — banks, ISPs and the like — with privacy consulting and software tools. They hired an outsider – Tamas Hevizi — as CEO. This re-focusing helped ZKS weather the dot-com bust although not without scads of layoffs.
Now the Hills are doing something else.
What was the enterprise privacy unit of ZKS has been spun out into a new company called Synomos Inc. It will be a wholly-owned subsidiary of ZKS. Hammie is to be chairman; Austin is to be CEO and president. Hamnett, meanwhile, has replaced Hevizi as ZKS' president and CEO.

Making a buck at Wi-Fi

The New York Times' Matt Richtel takes a good luck at the really important issue of making money with high-speed wireless Internet access.

Where Entrepreneurs Go and the Internet Is Free:
…”It's going to be hard for commercial carriers to make a profit,” said Dewayne Hendricks, the chief executive of Dandin Group, a wireless Internet service provider based in Silicon Valley, who serves as technical adviser to the Federal Communications Commission on wireless Internet issues.”…

The situation Matt describes in the U.S. market is much the same in Canada. There are some small start-ups — Spotnik Mobile, for example, or BoldStreet — and some of the large telcos — Bell and Telus — are also trying out the whole Wi-Fi thing. I don't think anyone is getting rich just yet but all the entrepreneurs in the space that I've talked to are hopeful.

The bust killed IT job growth in Canada

Canadian information technology companies hired almost no new employees during the industry bust of 2001, according to the first-ever Survey of Information Technology Occupations done by Statistics Canada.

Four of five IT firms in Canada did not hire any new employees in the six months prior to the period the survey was done in late 2002. Just 16 per cent of Canadian companies involved in computer systems design hired a single employee and only 4 per cent hired four or more new employees.

At the peak of the high-tech boom in the first quarter of 2001, there were 650,000 employees in Canada's computer and telecommunications industry. A year later, employment in the same sector had dropped to 586,000 and the unemployment rate among IT workers had jumped from 3.9 per cent to 6.6 per cent.

 

Lilies and an Iris?

The first of the Hyperion daylilies out front started to open. Looks like a good crop this year. Lots of flower stalks are up each with multiple buds forming on them. Had to stake them, though. One already blew over.
And it looks like that giant plant is an iris. A yellow flower bloomed on it this morning. I'm still not sure I know how it got there but there you go.
Also: Received the dahlias and phlox in the mail yesterday from Veseys.
The rhododendrons in the front garden appear to have produced their last flowers. The Catawba still has three big pink blossoms on it but the Williams looks done. It produced three blooms at the bottom of the plant. Both plants seem to be producing lots of new foliage which, I assume, is a good thing.

Dell's Kevin Rollins: Is a $40-million paycheque too much?

[From my Globe and Mail story today:] In his last year as the No. 2 man at the world's No. 1 computer maker, Kevin Rollins' pay packet was just under $40-million (U.S.).
Most of that came in the form of Dell Inc. stock options that Mr. Rollins cashed in during 2003. He exercised 1.17 million options for a realized value of $35.94-million.
Some say a pay packet of nearly $40-million is too much.
“On the face of it, I deem that to be excessive,” Thomas Caldwell, chairman of Caldwell Securities Ltd. of Toronto, said yesterday. “We're getting to the level that people have a sense of entitlement.”
But Mr. Rollins dismisses such suggestions.
“They've all vested a long time ago,” he said, referring to the options he exercised. “I'm just taking some off the table. I have a financial need, whether charitable or for donations. But the vast portion of my net worth is still tied up in Dell.” He still holds more than nine million Dell shares . . .
[…Read the full story…]

Instant messaging: I'm going with iChat

As a reporter, I feel duty bound to try use everyone's applications as much as possible but I've decided that when it comes to instant messaging, I'm going to favour one product over the other. The winner, if you will, is iChat from Apple. You'll be able to find me on iChat at jdavidakin@mac.com . AIM and ICQ users should be able to see me there as iChat is compatible with America Online's instant messaging protocols (I may be misinformed on this. If so — let me know. )
I'm going to try have iChat up and running just about any time I'm in front of a computer. I will also likely have Yahoo's Instant Messenger where my handle is davidakin2372. I'm pegging it as my number two IM client. Finally, if you're nuts to chat on it and don't have anything else installed, send me e-mail and Ill fire up MSN Messenger. Otherwise my presence on MSN Messenger — where I log in as dakin@ctv.ca — will be intermittent.
I make these choices not necessarily to recommend one client over the other but I find MSN Messenger drops the network connection too frequently to be useful. Moreover, if I'm using a portable, as I often am, I may lose a network connection as I move about. iChat automatically logs you back in. Yahoo and MSN do not.
There are some other interface and useability issues that make me prefer iChat to the others.
What I don't like about the whole kit and kaboodle is that these software vendors cannot agree on one standard to make their IM and chat networks compatible. Can't we all just get along so that it matters not what IM client I choose? Please?
One of the things I like about both iChat and Yahoo is the ability to set up custom status messages. You may be able to do that with MSN Messenger by editing your public profile but to edit your public profile, I have to fire up a Web browser and log in to MSN's Passport site. Personally, I've never found the whole Passport idea to be much use. Some may have but I'm not one of them. If I want to change profiles or any other preferences for my IM environment, I'd rather just do it within the application and not have to launch another application to do it.
So there you have it: Love to add you to my buddy list on iChat or Yahoo Messenger but you're going to have to be a real special buddy to get me to fire up MSN Messenger.

Spam costs us $10 billion (U.S.) a year, says ITU

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) says the annual loss in
productivity because of spam totals $10-billion a year in Europe and the
U.S. alone. The Government of Canada has put together a task force to study
the spam problem here and recommend some things government and industry can
do to reduce spam. Now, the ITU is organizing its own anti-spam summit to be
held July 7 to 9 in Geneva. The ITU has a
press release on this summit out today.

Transhumanists put their faith in technology

Humanity is on its way out. Post-humanity–technologically enhanced and perhaps even immortal–is coming.
The stuff of science fiction is creed to transhumanists, a diverse group of technological optimists who advocate the transformation of Homo sapiens into a new species, one “better than human.”
Transhumanists see our era of rapid technological advance as the transitional phase between our human past and post-human future. Cochlear implants, artificial joints, genetic engineering, mood-altering and memory-enhancing drugs–all are preludes to an era when people will routinely enhance their brains, improve their bodies and perhaps live forever . . .
[Chicago Tribune Published May 28, 2004