David Akin’s On The Hill

I was once told by some technicians at Atlantic Canada phone company Aliant that to get television signal over DSL, you needed about 6 megabits-per-second of bandwidth. At the time of this conversation, Aliant was testing out its Vibe home Internet service in some parts of Moncton, New Brunswick, which was pushing 30 megabits-per-second (Mbps) to selected homes.
Vibe was subsequently discontinued which I thought was a shame but I digress …
I thought of that 30 Mbps service and the fact that you need bandwidth headroom of about 6 Mbps for TV when Reuters moved the following item. It seems the world is about to get 802.11n, which will offer peak wireless bandwidth of better than a half-a-gigabyte second. I thought 802.11g, which maxes out over 50-megabytes-second would be plenty. But half-a-gigabyte? How would we fill up such a big pipe? Wow.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A group of technology companies including Texas Instruments Inc. , STMicroelectronics and Broadcom Corp. , on Thursday said they will propose a new wireless networking standard up to 10 times the speed of the current generation. [Reuters: Technology]

If you're following the discussion about blogging and journalism, you've probably noticed that one of the things people talk about is credibility. One of the ways mainstream news organizations try to enhance and preserve their credibility is by making it clear to readers and viewers who pays the bills. For my employers, the sale of advertising space in the paper and time on our network pays my salary and the operating costs of our news organization. I'm pretty sure most readers and viewers understand that and are able to factor in the way we make our money when they decide how credible we are.
In fact, journalists themselves 'follow the money' all the time when we try to report on the motives or character of an individual, business, or government group. We do that because we believe that when our readers and viewers know, for example, that a drug company is paying university researchers to assess the safety of their products, readers are better able to assess the independence and credibility of the resulting study when they know who paid the bills for that study.
That's why I think it important that bloggers who wish to challenge mainstream journalism or criticize should make some disclosures of their own in the interests of letting their readers assess the potential for bias or conflict.
So, in that spirit, starting today, I'm walking the walk and talking the talk. You'll notice a new section midway underneath the photos on the right-hand at the bottom on the left-hand side of this blog. It's titled: “Who pays for this blog?” and you should see it there or in another prominent spot on this blog all the time.
I know of no examples or templates for this sort of thing so I just wrote it up trying to explain in plain language how I come to have the resources to publish this blog. If you think there are other things I ought to disclose or if there's something in that disclaimer that's not clear, I'd love to hear about it.

Peter Blackmore

Wow. HP CEO Carly Fiorina lowers the boom on executives at her company in charge of server sales after disappointing quarterly results in that area. In Canada, HP has been holding its own against Dell and IBM when it comes to servers — the powerful computers most often bought by corporate customers to power intranets and Web sites. But it's no secret that HP (and Sun, for that matter) have been losing ground to IBM and Dell in the server market. Peter Blackmore, one of the highest-ranking Compaq executives to stick around after the HP acquired that company, walked the plank for lousy performance of the server group.
You can listen to a Webcast held today by Fiorina and other company executives and get more information relevant to HP investors.
The folks at ZDNet have a good summation of the executive shuffle.

Richard Outerbridge writes in on a list I subscribe to to say that the calculator that is part of Apple's latest operating system, Panther, produced wrong results. Here's his post to that list:

The flagship Calculator application that ships with Apple's Panther is so sick as to be shameful.
Two examples:

• From basic mode enter 12,000,000.
  Go to Convert->Area… Choose “From: Square Inch” and “To: Acre”. Press OK. The displayed result is zero (0). Press '='. The displayed result is 1.44. The correct answer is actually 1.91307009488827.

• Go to View->Advanced. Try “10000/(2^32)”. The displayed result is 454.5454545454546^32. Press '='. Nothing changes. The correct answer is actually 0.00000232830643.

This could be the first piece of software that someone (that is, Apple) could get sued for, disclaimers of fit-for-purpose,
blah, blah, blah, all to the side.
It's utterly unreliable, yet seemingly so simple, basic and user-friendly!
Apple should make a special out-of-band update to their Calculator, if only to avoid the embarrassment of a prospective Windows switcher finding he can't get a Macintosh to even do basic math correctly, let alone relying on it for doing any “serious” day-to-day work.

One of the great things about Apple's calculator is its conversion engine, a handy tool when you need to do some currency conversion or convert feet to kilometres. If the mistakes discovered by Outerbridge make you nervous, here's an alternative to Apple's tool. It's called ConvertIt. Haven't tried it yet, but it looks promising.

The International Olympic Committee is permitting broadcasters to beam video of the Athens Olympics to computers and mobile phones next week, the first time the games will be shown online. [Technology Review Feed v2.1]

Americans have bought more than 100 million songs at Apple's iTunes music store but here in Canada we're still waiting for Apple to work out deals with record companies so it can sell music here. PureTracks, a homegrown online music store that sells for those using Windows has been doing a great business.
In the meantime, while Apple seems to be neglecting Canada, the Danes are going their iTunes store.

Apple plans to unveil a Danish version of the iTunes Music Store in October, a few days ahead of Mic… [MacNN]

A colleague who knows a Canadian athlete writes to tell me that the athlete has been told there is no blogging once you're at the Olympics and staying in Olympic village. Apparently it's against the “media rules” there. Anyone have any more info on this? What are the rules? How are they enforced? What are the sanctions?

At the Federal Court of Canada, Canada's record industry failed miserably to convince a judge of its view of the world when it comes to sharing music files over the Internet. Privately, many lawyers who witnessed the proceedings said they were not surprised to see the judge hand the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) such a crushing legal defeat given the odd and under-prepared case CRIA presented to the court.
CRIA has appealed the Federal Court's decision to the Federal Court of Appeal.
Perhaps in an attempt to avoid a second legal rout on appeal, Canada's software publishers and movie and film distributors asked the Federal Court of Appeal if it could join in the proceedings and present its own arguments which, presumably, would support CRIA's case.
The Honourable Justice John Evans, however, said no, saying “the appelants [CRIA], respondents and intervener are well placed to argue [the merits of copyright law] and the proposed interveners are unlikely to bring a different perspective on them that will assist the Court.”
Obviously, Mr. Justice Evans didn't see CRIA in action in front of the Federal Court, where Justice Konrad von Finckenstein had to remind CRIA's lawyers that they could not stand in front of him and tell him what was going on; they were supposed to call witnesses and experts to explain the world to the court.

Patricia D'Souza, who edits This Magazine writes in with this clip from the Nunatsiaq News, which chronicles a worrisome development in Iqaluit:

August 6, 2004 – Nunatsiaq News
Nunavut Tourism fires web-logging staffer
Dismissal follows complaint from anonymous local resident
A Nunavut Tourism marketing officer was fired last month after a local resident complained about a web site she ran in her spare time.
Penny Cholmondeley, known on the Internet as “Polar Penny,” was surprised to learn on July 18 that she was being fired because of the online journal, or web log, she had kept since her arrival in Iqaluit in January.
The web log, or “blog,” was easily found by typing the words “Polar Penny”into a search engine, and often topped search engine lists generated by people looking up a local business in Iqaluit, or for photos of Frobisher Bay.
During the six months she lived in Iqaluit, Cholmondeley regularly updated the site with details about life in the North, including photographs, anecdotes, and what she thought were personal opinions, including food and restaurant reviews.
Cholmondeley was baffled when executive director Maureen Bundgaard said that she had received an anonymous complaint from someone in town, and that she had to let Cholmondeley go, just before the end of her six month probation period.
Without warning, and with no chance to amend or take down the site, Cholmondeley was fired from Nunavut Tourism at the height of Nunavut's tourist season.
When contacted this week, Bundgaard declined to comment on the dismissal.
Cholmondeley says she never intended to associate Nunavut Tourism with a web site she perceived as strictly personal. “I'm kind of stunned.”
But the problem was that the web site, all about Cholmondeley, clearly states the reason that Chomondeley came to the North – to work for Nunavut Tourism.
—snipped—
Cholmondeley started the web log years ago as a place where she could write about the events in her life. In fact, she used her blog as an example of her writing when she applied for the job with Nunavut Tourism, and had talked about the site at work.
The site was mainly intended as a diary for her friends and family, and to document “what it's like to move here from Edmonton or Vancouver,” where she lived before coming to Iqaluit.
“Ninety per cent of the hits to my site are from my mom,” she says.
But people who were looking on the Web for information about Iqaluit were also using Cholmondeley's site.
Cholmondeley voluntarily removed the site from the Internet at the request of her former employer, and is treating the experience as a lesson learned.
“I don't think people making web logs realize that they can get fired.”
On July 26, Cholmondeley caught a flight to Nanaimo, B.C. where she plans to look for a new job. In a few weeks, Polar Penny will become Pacific Penny.

[Read the full story]
Roland Tanglao has some comments on this item.

The day after spending nearly 12 hours listening to a lot of smart people try and situate blogging into some sort of journalism tradition, it was a refreshing to read a post today from Tyler Cowen, one half of the economist duo that write the blog Marginal Revolution. Cowen writes in praise of a new book by Adam Sisman which chronicles James Boswell's writing of the life of Samuel Johnson.
Cowen suggests — and I agree — that in describing Boswell, Sisman is describing the prototype of a form of writer which would not appear for another 200 years — the blogger.
Here is Sisman on Boswell, as quoted by Cowen:

Boswell's plain, direct prose was easy to read, and appealed to twentieth-century readers as [Samuel] Johnson's mannered, classical style never could. Moreover, Boswell's interest in himself, which seemed so peculiar to his contemporaries, was very much more acceptable two centuries later. Indeed, Boswell seemed to offer a unique combination: a writer who poured the contents of his mind freely into his journal, without either embarrassment or knowingness…

Later Sisman says Boswell, “also set new scholarly standards; his verification of every possible detail, which seemed so eccentric to his contemporaries, would become the norm. In doing what he did, he relied mainly on instinct, his sense of what would serve his purpose best.”
To which Cowen comments: “And like many bloggers, Boswell often got in trouble for writing up his private conversations with others.”