Category: Technology

This was news to me when I ran across it today (tip of the toque to Civitatensis ) and it may be news to so here it is: The whiz kids at the The Prime Minister’s Office are proving once again that – gulp — they don’t need us mainstream media types! The PMO has its own YouTube account and has been busy putting up video of various Stephen Harper speeches. It looks like the YouTube user “PMOCPM” (Age: 47) has been active for about a month.

Conservative communications folks have, for a long time, been posting video of Harper at the party’s Web site and at the PM’s government Web site.

 

I’ve been using BlogJet 1.6.2 to post to this blog and others whenever I’m working on my Windows XP machine. It’s a reliable, stable, if bare-bones product. On my Mac, I’ve been using Ecto. It’s got some features that are different from BlogJet. I’ve been waiting for a stable new release of both apps that allowed me to post here and to my other blog. BlogJet 2.0, out today, apparently has that feature. Anyone given BlogJet 2.0 a whirl yet?

I’m downloading and installing it now so, if all works out well, this will be my last post using BlogJet 1.x.

 

 

For my money, the best consumer technology writer is (and has been for a very long time) David Pogue, now found mostly in the pages and Web home of The New York Times. In a recent post, he complains about the viscious tenor of online discourse at forums like this one:

…. the kneejerk “everyone else is an idiot” tenor is poisoning the potential the Internet once had. People used to dream of a global village, where maybe we can work out our differences, where direct communication might make us realize that we have a lot in common after all, no matter where we live or what our beliefs.

But instead of finding common ground, we're finding new ways to spit on the other guy, to push them away. The Internet is making it easier to attack, not to embrace.

Maybe as the Internet becomes as predominant as air, somebody will realize that online behavior isn't just an afterthought. Maybe, along with HTML and how to gauge a Web site's credibility, schools and colleges will one day realize that there's something else to teach about the Internet: Civility 101.

Hear! Hear!

The federal government began interviewing candidates this week to replace Charles Dalfen as the chair of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). There are, industry sources tell me, five candidates who are getting a look-see from the Privy Council Office. The early favourite was (and probably still is) former broadcast executive Fern Belisle but we are now hearing that former telecom executive George Addy is the favourite of top officials at the Privy Council Office. Others who are getting an interview include Mulroney-era cabinet minister and former CBC supremo Perrin Beatty, CRTC executive director for broadcasting and telecommunications Leonard Katz, and former Lucent Canada CEO and current dean of the Ivey School of Business at UWO Carole Stephenson.

The next chair of the federal agency is expected to be an “agent of change” at the CRTC. Industry Minister Maxime Bernier recently issued a rare rebuke to the commission, overturning a decision the commission had made about regulating voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone services. The CRTC wanted to regulate incumbent telcos like Bell and Telus but Bernier wants the market to determine pricing and availability for all the players. Bernier and others in the government will want to see the CRTC tread more lightly in the future, relying as often as it can on market forces. This was one of the main recommendations of the Telecommunications Policy Review Panel.

The showdown between Belisle and Addy is an interesting one if only because it pits the preferred candidate of the Prime Minister and his cabinet — Belisle — against the candidate — Addy — that is being backed by Kevin Lynch, the Clerk of the Privy Council. The broadcasting and telecom industry is also keen to see how this plays out. In Ottawa, cablecos, telcos, and broadcasters had generally agreed that Belisle would be a good compromise pick that wouldn’t necessarily line up with any one particular group. Belisle once worked at Corus and had earlier served on the commission when Mulroney was in charge. He looked after the broadcasting part of the commission’s work with a competency that seemed to be unique during Keith Spicer’s topsy-turvy reign as chair.

The cable companies — mostly Shaw and Rogers — would be nervous about Addy taking the job because until he joined the Toronto law firm of Davies Ward Phillips and Wineberg in 2002, he was the executive vice-president at Telus Corp., the nation’s second largest telecommunications firm.

 

 

The folks at Greenpeace ranked Apple Computer Inc. 11th out of 14 in its “Guide to Greener Electronics” and decided to rent a booth at a recent Mac World show in London, England to shame Apple into polishing its environmental record. Mac Worlds are trade shows for the Apple Mac ecosystem. I once covered one in San Francisco. It was pretty cool so far as trade shows go. I suppose Greenpeace, too, thought this would be a cool place to hang out and try and move the green dial at Apple. Wrong. Greenpeace got turfed, it says, for being a little critical of Apple:

“Now here's the rich part. The exhibition hall may have kicked Greenpeace out, but Mac Expo is FULL of people campaigning for a greener apple.  They're called Apple Customers. To date, more than 155,000 people have visited the Green my Apple site.  Over 1000 blogs are linking to it.  12,000 Apple fans have written to Steve Jobs asking him to change Apple's ways.”

How good is Wikipedia? Well, a professor at a college in Buffalo, NY tried to test Wikipedia’s credibility by deliberately inserting some false information into the online encyclopedia, including a fictitious account of a Canadian politician done in by a sex and drugs scandal. To do this he used a false name (Dr. al-Halawi) and false credentials. Did he succeed? For about three hours before he was caught. Here’s a story from the Chronicle of Higher Education on Dr. Alexander Halavais’ experiment:

Some of the errata he inserted — like a claim that Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, had made Syracuse, N.Y., his home for four years — seemed entirely credible. Some — like an Oscar for film editing that Mr. Halavais awarded to The Rescuers Down Under, an animated Disney film — were more obviously false, and easier to fact-check. And others were downright odd: In an obscure article on a short-lived political party in New Brunswick, Canada, the professor wrote of a politician felled by “a very public scandal relating to an official Party event at which cocaine and prostitutes were made available.”
Mr. Halavais expected some of his fabrications to languish online for some time. Like many academics, he was skeptical about a mob-edited publication that called itself an authoritative encyclopedia. But less than three hours after he posted them, all of his false facts had been deleted, thanks to the vigilance of Wikipedia editors who regularly check a page on the Web site that displays recently updated entries. On Dr. al-Halawi's “user talk” page, one Wikipedian pleaded with him to “refrain from writing nonsense articles and falsifying information.”
Mr. Halavais realized that the jig was up.

Read the full story at: The Chronicle: 10/27/2006: Can Wikipedia Ever Make the Grade?.

Apple and Dell have recently put out recalls for laptop computer batteries made by Sony Corp. On a discussion list I subscribe to, lister Simon Higgs speculates on the number-crunching that took place at corporate HQ for both companies.  (All dollar figures here are in US$):

From: Simon Higgs
Date: August 25, 2006 3:32:05 AM EDT

Recalls never happen without a sound business case for them. It's a risk management strategy. The manufacturer weighs the risk of lawsuits (or similarly damaging events) versus the actual cost of the recall. Whichever is the cheaper route for the manufacturer is the route chosen.

6 million laptop batteries have a retail cost of around $774,000,000 (based on 13″ Macbook battery at $129). Assuming a manufacturing cost of $15 each, this is about $90,000,000. Whatever the real reasons, it's cheaper to pay nearly $100,000,000 in recalls than it is to preserve the status quo and only make payouts on the quiet.

My guess, and this is only a guess, is that this was prompted by the recent ban of laptops in carry-on luggage on aircraft. With a laptop in the cabin, if it's battery caught fire, there would be humans (and fire extinguishers) nearby to put out the fire. With laptops being carried in baggage, the risk of 20 (using Lauren's figure) in 6 million batteries catching fire becomes only 1 in 300,000.

Given that there are about 30,000 commercial flights per day in the US (and about 5,000 airborne at any given moment), it's not too far fetched to assume that eventually an unattended battery fire will bring down a commercial airliner. Or two. That's the risk that exceeds $100,000,000 and was what prompted (I think) the recall.

Simon