David Akin’s On The Hill

The Bank of Canada raised its overnight rate by 1/4 of a percentage point to 2.25 per cent. The rate hike was widely expected and likely marks the beginning of a cycle of tightening, in which the key benchmark rate could rise to close to 4 per cent over the next year or so. That's still cheap money, but the generational lows we've seen are likely at an end, according to economists who know a lot about this stuff.

Computer chips are plenty fast enough, right? I remember Walt Mossberg writing a couple of years ago in the Wall Street Journal that for most consumers a chip running at 500 Mhz ought to be fast enough for average home use — e-mail, word processing, home accounting, and Web surfing. Of course, no one makes chips that slow anymore. Everything's over 1 Ghz, and clocking sometimes north of 3 Ghz. (I'm talking Wintel-based products, here, of course).
But it's pretty clear that consumers are not going to shell out big bucks for the fastest processor. In fact, among the varoius DIY super-geek sites where people talk about building your own PC, the budget for the processor is always the first to get trimmed in favour of beefing up the budget for video cards, RAM, fast storage, a bigger, better display, optical drives, and so on.
So, it's not surprising then that the world's biggest chipmaker, Intel, is easing itself out of the speed race and focusing on getting its Pentium and Centrino chipsets to do more. As I report in today's Globe and Mail, Intel executives laid out a product road map yesterday that includes dual-core processors and next-generation broadband wireless capability that features WiMax:

Chip maker Intel Corp. has announced plans to improve its flagship products in ways that could redefine the role of a microprocessor in a computer and help the company stay ahead of its competitors.

Now, if you're really into this processor stuff and want to know how many transistors Intel's new chips will have and how much Level 3 cache will be available, you want to read the report from the guys at Tom's:

… The Montecito processor on the stage carried 1.72 billion transistors and 2×12 MByte of L3 cache for a total of 26.5 MByte of cache memory …. The chip will feature parallelism capabilities on a instruction and thread level. Compared to the current 130nm Itanium 2 chip, Montecito will post a performance increase of about 25 percent in enterprise environments, Intel said .. [Read the full report].

The northernmost valley holes at Glen Abbey

The golf course nearest where I live is the host of this year's Canadian Open championship. Driving to work yesterday, I stopped to take this pic and another in the photo gallery part of this blog of the course's so-called “valley holes”, a beautiful five-hole stretch that girdles Sixteeen Mile Creek. Competing for this year's championship will be the world's number one golf. That would be Vijay Singh, who displaced Tiger Woods from that top spot yesterday. Tiger held the ranking for a remarkable 264 weeks.

Aladdin Systems Inc. of Watsonville, Calif., the makers of the popular
Stuffit file compression and extraction utility and other handy software
titles, will change its name to Allume Systems.
Aladdin Systems says it was forced to change the name of the company after a
trademark dispute with Aladdin Knowledge
Systems of Arlington Heights, Ill., a maker of digital security
products.
Aladdin Systems' has a new Web site at www.allume.com where anyone trying to
access the old site, www.aladdinsys.com, will be re-directed.

August was a pretty good month for traffic at this blog, with more than 30,000 unique visits.
Traffic was way up because of two posts, one on problems with Apple's calculator and another on blogging at the Olympics. A post about some problems with the calculator built into Apple's latest operating system was viewed by nearly one-third of all visitors to this blog.
A post about a ban on blogging at the Olympics was number two — with about 7 per cent of all visitors poking around there. That post, incidentally, was “Boinged Boinged” and while a link from Cory's terrific blog certainly helped boost traffic over here, I was surpised to see that it was nothing like the tsunami you get when you're Slashdotted.

So here they are, for your review, the most popular articles and photos, in order of popularity, at this blog for the month of August, with their original posting date.

1. [What they said] Apple calculator a bad joke 8-10-2004 
2. No blogging from Olympic village (?)  8-8-2004 
3. Who pays for this blog? Some disclaimers 8-13-2004 
4. Journalism ethics: Toronto police shoot a hostage taker. What do you show on TV?  8-26-2004
5. Participatory journalism — mid-day report 8-3-2004
6. How to spell Internet and Web   8-16-2004 
7. HMCS Haida 6-25-2004 
8. Finally!! Airport Extreme and my LinkSys router are talking!  12-13-2003
9. Sealing    6-14-2004
10. Sheila Copps on the job 6-25-20

The Pew Internet and American Life Project is reporting that better than four of every ten Americans who use the Internet or 53 million people regularly use an instant messaging application. In fact one quarter of that group say they IM more than they use e-mail, a statistic I find remarkable.
The new report from the Pew Center also says that instant messaging is especially popular among younger adults and technology enthusiasts. That's the part of the survey I find less remarkable, in the sense that you or I could likely have predicted that outcome.

Newspaper barons Lord Conrad Black and his long-time associate David Radler led a “kleptocracy” at Hollinger International Inc., says a 400-page report prepared by an independent committee of directors of that company. The report was filed yesterday with a court in Illinois and made public today through the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Black and his colleagues are accused of pilfering more than $400-million (U.S.) or more than 95 per cent of all profits earned at Hollinger International over a period of several years.
Black, through his holding company Ravelston (see below) says the claims are “exaggerated” and further:
“”The report is full of so many factual and tainting misrepresentations and inaccuracies that it is not practical to address them in their entirety here.  These issues will ultimately be resolved in courts of justice where the facts and the evidence will exonerate the men and women who are being attacked in this report.” (I can find no link yet to the full release but this graf is essentially the nut of it).
My colleagues at The Globe and Mail have started the coverage online and there is more from my CTV colleagues.
The things you need to know for this story:
Conrad Black has the controlling interest in Ravelston, a privately-held Canadian firm.
Ravelston is the controlling shareholder of Hollinger Inc., a Toronto-based holding company.
Hollinger Inc. is the controlling shareholder of Hollinger International Inc., the Chicago-based company which once owned the Daily Telegraph and now owns the Jerusalem Post, the Chicago Sun-Times and other papers.
CTV, incidentally, has commissioned a movie about Black..

Apple took the wraps off its latest, greatest innovation this morning, a new iMac that compresses the all-in-one form factor of the first-generation iMacs into a machine that is basically a thick flat-screen display. More cool product design. The design team, incidentally, behind the new iMac are the same folks who came up with the iPod.
Apple Canada is selling these things right away (we're still waiting in Canada to be able to use the iTunes music store). Apple Canada says a 17-inch display with a 1.6 gigahertz G5 processor will start at $1,799 while the 20-inch 1.8 GHz machine will be $2,499. More from Reuters here:

PARIS — Apple Computer unveiled, after a
two-month delay, its new iMac desktop computer on Tuesday which
integrates disk drives and processors into a flat display less
than two inches thick. [Read the rest of the story]

Statistics Canada tracks just about anything that can be counted so I shouldn't be surprised to learn this morning that it maintains the Computer and Peripherals Price Index or CPPI in Statscan-speak.
The federal agency just released the latest index for June and, it turns out, computers continue to get cheaper in Canada, particularly in the consumer market.
“[Prices of] Consumer computers, representing computer brands and models normally purchased by consumers and small businesses, were down 5.3%. Desktops fell by 6.1% and portables by 4.6%,” Statscan said.
Prices for monitors and printers remained largely unchanged from May, Statscan said.

Police in New York City have commandeered the Fuji Blimp to keep an eye on the Republican National Convention. But that's not all. The police will have some very high-resolution cameras able to read the phone numbers in your little black book, should you hold it skyward.
Is this right? Jock Gill doesn't think so, and, in a post to a listserv I'm on, he asks all the right questions about this kind of activity:

If this is domestic spying, who is authorized to do it and who is prohibited?If this is domestic spying, who is authorized to do it and who is prohibited?
What does such a surveillance blimp say about [U.S.] constitutional rights to freely assemble without restraint or intimidation and [U.S.] rights to free speech?
Who gets to see the pictures taken? Will they be subject to FOIA? Will they be archived in secret? What is their fate and should we be concerned?
What recourse do we have?

Jock's post on that mailing list prompted this reply from Reuben Helper, who says in his post he works in sports broadcasting and has some knowledge of what's on board the FujiBlimp:

During a broadcast the During a broadcast the blimp uses an image stabilizing Canon 100x lens mounted on a gyroscopic stabilization platform. The magnification and resolution are quite superb. I'm sure the NYPD and Co. have other goodies on board, though the blimp cabin doesn't have a whole lot of extra space for gear.