Bell proposes end to ‘unlimited internet’

If there’s one that I hate about Canada is how some companies there try to take advantage of the regulatory environment and the nation’s social net. They believe this net applies to large corporations, but in reality, these should only be considered under the gravest conditions, as they should be self-sufficient. After all they’re private businesses and are not public. The technique usually involves a sappy story about not being able to stay afloat, because of current economic conditions, and how it’s necessary to give leeway. Sacrifices may come in the way of wage cuts, benefits, and/or demand public financial support, and as will be outlined below, also come as a costly –to the customer– billing system.

Jack White Sells Out with Alicia Keys?

I never really liked Run DMC’s remake, if that’s what you can call it, of Aerosmith’s hit “Walk this Way”. Depending on how you look at it, it may not have been a remake as much as a legitimate new creative product. I doubt the latter, as the guitar riff is unmistakably Aerosmith, and for it to be a legit new product, entire and easily recognizable portions of a “song” –if you can refer to rap as “song”– can’t be mirrored in other songs. It can be reminiscent, but not a copy paste scenario.

Setting aside issues of legitimate authorship and musical taste, the remake did have some good effects. It salvaged Aerosmith’s butts, whose career was on its way to being relegated as a “goodies oldies bar band” –whose prospects were probably only seedy truck stops and corresponding bars.

Also in the process, Run DMC introduced good ol’ rock and roll to kids that probably had never seen, heard, and probably hadn’t conceptualized an electric guitar. They also introduced rap to rhythmicly challenged white folks. This might be called a market cross-over ploy.

On the part of Run DMC, I’m not sure if this was a thought out market plan. This might be giving them too much credit. If anything, they got people that would have never bothered to listen to rap to do so –if only to satisfy (morbid?) curiosity.

Having said that, as I’m sit here listening to the White Stripes singer Jack White perform a duet with a R&B female singer named Alicia Keys, I wonder about this obvious marketing ploy. I usually hate these marketing tactics, finding them cheap, predicable, even morally decadent.

Collanos Standalone Phone dead, & “Expropriated” into Workplace

Feb 14, 09 UPDATE: Peter Helfenstein has confirmed that a stand alone is in production. Read the comments section for details.

What irks me about big business is how they sometimes take GPL software, sometimes created by non-profit communities (let’s call it community software), and incorporate it into their product without regard for where the software originated and that community’s sensibilities and social contract.

This is what I feel has happened with the Collanos Phone, a product that I once believed to be a viable GPL replacement for Skype (I even recommended it to others) and the successor to WengoPhone. In fact, I think Collanos Phone was based on much of the same code as was WengoPhone, although the Collanos forum¹¹¹¹¹¹ is vague about the exact providence stating, “Collanos Phone is based on many pre-existing open-source components and governed under the General Public License (GPL)”. True, Wengo might not qualify as a “software community” but I understand the code upon which WengoPhone was based was and continues to be community driven (ie., the libgaim library from Pidgin, previously known as Gaim).

If you haven’t clued in yet, Collanos has effectively cancelled the stand alone Collanos Phone. The download page now only mentions, “Collanos Workplace … now includes Collanos Phone”. The first of this that should have sounded bells off is a Dec. 16, 08 email I received from Peter Helfenstein and Franco Dal Molin mentioning the extension of Workplace’s capability to that of video and audio based telephony. It didn’t mention the killing off of the softphone project, but that’s public relations for you. You can “read into” this change-over on Helfenstein’s blog entry from January 28, 09 entitled “Team – It’s Time to Talk²²²²²²“.

Is David Grohl playing for the Mexican band Café Tacuba?!

Chilean cable t.v. is endlessly looping Café Tacuba’s latest music video. It’s by way of this that I came to ask myself, “Is it just me or does David Grohl from the Foo Fighters look like Emmanuel del Real from Café Tacuba?”.

Emmanuel del Real or David Grohl?

America, the Grim Reaper

Considering the worldwide impact of the failing American economy due to the Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac scandals, I thought this pic is representative.

America, The Grim Reaper

On the deregulation of business and the ‘08 world-wide economic crisis

On the matter of the source of the recent economic downfall, for which the States is largely culpable, I don’t understand why the mechanics of the situation aren’t talked about. There’s been a lot of talk, but most has done little to clarify the source of the problem. True, I think some of it is complex and has more than one source. Certainly, there is more to it than just Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, and the US (although they are the catalyst). To add to the world-wide problem, the ING bank has recently received a monetary bail out from the Dutch government –to the tune of a whopping 13.4 billion! ING points the finger to the US, and insists that they continue to have a healthy business.

But let’s talk basics. As I understand it, some economic problems are due to overzealous and unethical lending of money past its reasonable point of “lendability”. Due to loosening government regulations –a sign of the cozy relationship between government and business– practices of this sort occur.

If you were a bank, you wouldn’t want to overstretch your ability to payback investors/or bank clients. You couldn’t loan much more than what you have, and certainly shouldn’t loan more than you’re statistically able to give back to the client at any one time –which works out to about 20% if I recall. Lending more than feasible is not only greedy, but stupid and is a disservice to customers –and the world in general because it eventually affects everyone.

Nationalization of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae not pinko?

Every once in a while I hear comments from Americans and even their politicians about how pink Canada is, considering that Canada has publicly funded social net programs such as, a national health care system, welfare, (un)employment insurance, and other social programs.

Stark, the only international Chilean blogger?

I was browsing the net when I came across a reddit listing of popular bloggers for 2007. Among them, were three Chilean bloggers, these being Leo Prieto, Rodrigo Vera, and José Ignacio Stark. Listed were the world’s supposed sexiest bloggers, –yes, I know you’re thinking “What a productive endeavour reddit!” (Reddit is owned by Wired.)

I quote, “José Ignacio Stark is one of the skinnest and sexiest chilean bloggers. He is the only chilean who has blogged inernationally”. (Yes, I know “international” is misspelled, and so is “Chilean”. That’s verbatim.)

Oh, please! While I don’t pretend to be one of the sexiest bloggers out there, I’m Chilean by birth, been living in Chile for the last two years, and been blogging in English (THE international language) for just as long! In contrast, Stark writes in Spanish. As for skinniness and sexiness, I’m probably just as thin as Stark and beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I don’t have a black and white nude picture¹ of myself sitting on grass and typing away on a laptop covering my genitals as does Stark.

US has it out for brit hacker

I can’t get over at how stupid the case is of the American government against Gary McKinnon. This British citizen is accused of hacking into secure US Air and Army forces computers, and causing millions of dollars in damage after crashing networks, all the while hacking from his girlfriend’s home.

Journalism/Literature degree vs. a college journalism education

During a graduate class in methodology, I recall my professor Dr. Willie Braun saying that our literature degrees weren’t worth anything unless we produced some kind of tangible product that benefited society. (At least, this is “how I remember it”.) Of course, he was referring to journalism. He even booked a (Edmonton Sun? or Edmonton Journal?) newspaper writer to give us a class presentation, although she never showed up.

Why did Dr. Braun bring up journalism? Well, we had to hand in tiny articles, summaries or abstracts, that were more akin to journalism articles than our minimum 14 page argumentative MLA essays. Now a lit. degree does not make a journalist, then again a journalism degree doesn’t guarantee substance in any area of knowledge –just that you can “try” to effectively communicate and water concepts down to a high school and elementary reading levels. I’m intrigued by this, in how one explains complex concepts in a simple and precise manner, without butchering those concepts or patronizing readers.

Wikipedia Now a Teaching Tool –Wow

Deborah Jones writes, “Once shunned by academics, Wikipedia now a teaching tool“.
I’m not sure what Ms. Jones refers to when she mentions that Wikipedia was shunned by academia. I remember my philosophy prof Wesley Cooper at the U of A giving his ok on it.

Regardless of consistent quality, I’ve always used Wikipedia as a starting point, meaning that I mainly looked it up to find source material. In this way, I used it just like any other encyclopaedia. I honestly can’t see how an university paper could be written any other way, other than going to the sources. A good university student writing an essay can’t be content with only citing one encyclopaedia, even Britannica at that. If this were the case, this would show a lack of research, specifically depth, and interest on the part of the student.

As for Britannica, it has had its own problems. I recall one embarrassing article that contained hearsay. This article lasted many years before it was fixed.

Klara Knapek Passes Away

I’ve never done this before, but I wanted to write a little something on a late high school girl with which I went to school. My friend Cec Latorre notified me that Klara passed away. We both went to school with her at O’Leary high school in Edmonton, Alberta. I don’t clearly remember Klara Knapek, but I feel it necessary to bring attention to her untimely death.

Klara died falling off a cliff that ended in 30 metre drop onto a boulder field in a sleeping bag. Snowmobilers were unable to revive her. We can hope that she didn’t suffer. She was 33 years old.

Native Alpha OS X Port of OpenOffice.org is Out!

Good news for OpenOffice.org (OO) fans that presently use Apple OS X.  You can now get a native OS X port.  No, I’m not referring to NeoOffice.

BloodSpell

BloodSpell, a full length movie down with a gamer’s video engine. Read about about it at nwn.bioware.com.

There’s been criticism on the engine used because it’s rather dated, and thus, does not render impressive video quality. I must concur. However, this film is illustrative of the decentralization of the entertainment industries, and that’s exciting. Traditionally, because of the prohibitive costs involved in production and distribution, the music and movie industry establishments have had a monopoly. That’s changing.

Djvu on OS X

Dec 24, 2007 Update: 
Since last month, there has been an official OS X port of the DjVuLibre project located at Sourceforge.  It has “find all occurrences of a search string”, thumbnail, and outline viewing capabilities. Upon testing, the print to .ps does not seem to create a readable .ps file –or OS X fails to convert it to .pdf (OS X’s default viewing format)– but exporting straight to .pdf (command+E on OS X) overcomes this issue. Exporting to various other common formats –such as .tiff and .jpg– is also possible.

Heads up!

In certain circles I was used to move in, .pdf was considered “the” universal document format, that and .eps or just .ps, but .pdf was considered a cleaned up .ps –anyway.

There’s now a “new” format on the turf. How’s it different from .pdf? Well, .pdf doesn’t optimally do graphics –just text–, while

Linux has New MultiMediaCard Support

Liquidat reports, “Pierre Ossman, the MultiMediaCard (MMC) subsystem maintainer, announced the new related patches for the Linux kernel almost two weeks ago. He described the patchset as “probably … one of the biggest ones for the MMC layer so far” and highlighted the SDIO and SPI support as the major improvements.“

Sure, it sounds great but how long before a renovation wreaks havoc on users? I recall an issue where implementation of USB scanners caused such confusion because on my beloved Debian that scanners could only be accessed as “su”, and doing that invoked warnings. This occurred because people on the kernel side of things decided to change the infrastructure. And you know what? Nobody seemed to know what was happening, except the good old folks that were doing the renovating, and their documentation was useless –at least to the non-developer Gnu-Linux user sort. Yes, I read the documentation, and it was cryptic, decentralised, and seemed incomplete and contradictory.

MacBook Pros Run AMD!!!

I remember writing a review of an iBook some years ago. Honestly, the thing was a lemon and because of this I opted out of even pondering on buying another Apple computer. I liked PPC processors (RISC based) but since these were and still are on a downward spiral for desktop use (the opposite is true for game stations), I reasoned that my next investment would be an AMD –only somewhat RISC-like. Even so, AMD too was on a downward spiral considering that they were behind Intel in laptop suited processor design a few years ago … what with Intel’s _Centrino_ and all.

When I found my iBook doing a system-wide breakdown halfway through an university gig, I went against my previous conviction and again considered purchasing another Mac –a MacBook Pro running a late 2006, 2.6 GHz Intel Core Duo model. This, not for my previous experience (obviously) but for the default reliable UNIX OS, hoping that Apple had learned from previous mass production related quality problems (as with my old iBook). Well, its performs like a champ. To my chagrin, it feels incredibly fast compared to its PPC predecessors. It seems that Apple has also learned from its barrage of Airport Extreme emails concerning Libre hardware support, and their fiasco in choosing Broadcom on their iBooks (maybe not, as the new Santa Rosa uses a NVidia video card). On my MacBook Pro, both Airport Extreme (an Atheros card) and iSight have Libre software support. I had an over-heating problem early on and got the entire motherboard replaced. It doesn’t come close to getting hot anymore and I didn’t have to lather it with “heat gel”, as some Mac enthusiasts claimed when this issue came to air. I’ve tried a friend’s Mac Book (without “Pro”) and find it not nearly as responsive (it intermittently lags noticeably).

Jewish Nazis? What will they Think of Next?

Can there be actually be something such as a Jewish Nazi?

I’ve been asking myself this question as BBC runs news clips regarding violent youths that participated in beatings (called “boot f*cks” in Canada) against others benefiting from the same right of return from which they themselves benefited.

These youths are of Russian extraction. They live in Israel due to what is called, “the right/law of return”. This allows anyone that claims to be Jewish to install themselves with funding in Israel (about $60 000 US dollars in hand). This has always been controversial, and in the eyes of some –such as Orthodox Jews– many that return are not Jews. Why are they not Jewish? Well, it’s a matter of acculturation or lack thereof (in addition to outdated ideas of Halakha), and these youths taking up after racist Skin Heads cannot illustrate this point any better.

Linux Loses Con Kolivas

There is quite a lot of noise about Con Kolivas, and his recent quiting Linux kernel development. Kolivas made enormous contributions in the way of improving desktop usability and responsiveness, drawing attention to this increasingly coalescing factor when few people were paying attention, presumably something of which Torvalds’ himself was not aware.

Con Kolivas’ quiting explains various issues with Linux these days. First, that Linux is primarily optimized for the uses of those that fund its continued development to the detriment of common desktop users (think IBM, they’ve invested millions of dollars into Linux –last I read– and have a lucrative server business based on Gnu-Linux). Meaning, that the continued development of the Linux kernel has been toward the server end and not the desktop user. That is to say, the Linux kernel does not meet ordinary desktop user needs. This is extraordinary. After all, Linux was initially an end user product, as Torvalds envisioned it to meet his university student needs — AFAIK these were not of the server kind in nature. Thus, Linux has lost it’s original vision of meeting the needs of the ordinary user, graphical in nature –albeit– nowadays.

What does this mean? Well, simply that Linux for the desktop is slow. Kolivas points out that given the processor speed increases, desktop responsiveness should be excellent. I can attest, it’s not, although he seems to allow a lack of hardware innovation to explain some of the discrepancy.

SCO = Losers, as if Anyone Doubted it

Well, it seems to be the buzz around the tech related blogs is that SCO lost against Novell. Novell retains the rights to UNIX. Apparently what SCO bought (from Novell) was a license to sub-license UNIX. Personally I thought the Open Group owned UNIX but this is part of the debate because Novell, that owned The Open Group (then known as the X/Open Company), sold it to SCO. It now seems apparent the the rights to UNIX source code didn’t transfer over.

For those that don’t know, SCO –can be described nothing short of a “stupid ogre” of a company that– claimed its code had been robbed but (AFAIK) never came up with this code to prove the point. They intimidated other companies into forking over millions of dollars to avoid being sued for (re)distributing GNU-Linux, despite that they themselves made their GNU-Linux based distro publicly available. This is the sort of logic — or lack thereof– for which SCO is known. This threat of litigation was not limited to companies but also consumers, as this is what caused Sun to contribute 10 million dollars into SCO. I can sum SCO up in one word, “idiots”!

Suiterunner has Landed

The next generation SeaMonkey has landed! “On 29th May 2007, Robert landed the patch that saw “suiterunner” [this version of SeaMonkey] become active on the trunk. This means that developers can now fully focus their attention on the toolkit based SeaMonkey rather than having to additionally maintain the old xpfe based SeaMonkey.

We can now work towards a 2.0 release with a much more supportable code base.

Nightly builds are available for testing, note however that at this stage they are recommended for testing only.”

Why is this a big deal?

On MySpace’s Popularity

My Space has grown so much over the last few years, but I really don’t understand the big deal regarding it. Even the private sector attempts to cash in on the blog’s popularity, but –as far as I’ve seen– their attempts seem too humorous to be taken seriously.

Production Sharing Agreements Legalized in Iraq

While watching BBC today (July 15, 2007), I learned that Production Sharing Agreements (PSAs) are now legalized in Iraq, despite their being illegal in most neighbouring states. And if only 10 or 12 local oil producers join, that up to the tune of 200 billions of dollars are going to be lost. Imagine the cost savings to western oil companies that purchase the product.

Microsoft Tries to Block GPL 3

Seems that at least one of Microsoft’s reasons for entering agreements with Gnu-Linux companies such as Novell comes to light. … Leverage against the adoption of GPL 3. (GPL 3 has has finally been released and is available.)

Canadian Cattle Industry Sues Government

The cattle industry is serious business in Canada (and the States). You don’t want to mess around with them. I mean they comport themselves more like spoiled children than a legitimate industry, pushing people around for making their anti-meat views known. If the cattle industry are children, then the accommodating parents are the government, as will become apparent. As I recall, the Canadian industry took issue with k.d. Lang for making her vegetarian views publicly known in a television ad (The “Meat Stinks” campaign); I believe the issue was alleged lost profits due to the supposed “smear campaign”. I recall Oprah also was accused of negatively affecting profits, by the industry’s American counter-part. Well, the Montreal Gazette reported that the Quebec cattle industry is taking the Canadian government to court for mishandling the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) outbreaks (something about gross negligence). Considering that it is scientifically proven that the outbreak is due to the recycling of body parts as feed, and that it’s the Canadian cattle industry that practised this, not the Canadian government, who’s fault is it that Canadian sales plumited?

“Free” as in “Liberty” Wireless Support

If recently found this article titled, The Battle for Wireless Network Drivers by Jem Matzan, on the state of wireless support on the part of manufacturers towards Free (GPL’d or BSD’d) operating systems.

It describes the process of reverse engineering and the difficulties involved with the development of firmware, lobbying for documentation and/or the freedom to redistribute firmware, and source code. It also describes the insistence of some manufacturers on license agreements (such as NDAs [non-disclosure agreements]).

In an unexpected fashion, the article ultimately identifies a lack of communication between developers contributing to the lack of wireless support, with