Sorry that I haven’t been writing more often, school has been swamping me. However, I thought it a good idea to lift my nose from the grindstone (hehehe) to say that I have been accepted to the Arthur Kroeger College of Public Affairs and Policy Management at Carleton University in Ottawa! This was a tied first choice with the University of King’s College in Halifax. Carleton won’t let me defer (I’m considering deferral so I don’t have to work during university) but said that I’d likely be accepted again. UKC will let me defer one year. Now the clock is ticking, Halifax!
So for those of you who don’t know or follow my twitter feed, my aunt is a IT Pro Advisor at Microsoft Canada. You may also know that my opinion of Microsoft hasn’t been the highest (as expressed often in this blog).
The purpose of my visit was to ask successful people how they got to where they are in their field, which holds my interest. The people were incredibly kind and interesting and really let me pick their brains. Continue reading
Just a few days ago, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper got the support of Canada’s New Democratic Party during a crucial vote for the 40th Parliament’s survival and that of his minority government and staved off the defeat of his government in the House of Commons as promised by the opposition Liberals.
Not only does Harper get by with a little help from Jack Layton’s NDP, but apparently also with Yo-yo Ma.
Harper did a surprise performance during a Yo-yo Ma concert at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa tonight, playing piano and singing the Beatle’s “With A Little Help From My Friends”. Ma backed him on the cello. The crowd went wild.
Here’s a bit of video. It was started well into the song, but it’s the only one I can find. Mr. Prime Minister is on the piano and lead vocals in the centre.
(EDIT: This has been replaced with the official video from the Prime Minister’s Office)
Let the parodies about Minority Government and the song ensue!
If the whole Prime Minister/Calgary-Southwest MP/Conservative Party Leader gig doesn’t work out he definitely has a future singing.
Sorry for not posting in a while. I’ve been working alot and school has been hectic. I have not abandoned you, however! I will be posting soonish with my impressions of Ubuntu 9.10 Beta (which is out now: www.ubuntu.com)
I can’t honestly say I’m surprised, but I can say I’m dismayed as I’ve heard good things about Bing…
However, Microsoft has been found to be skewing results in it’s Bing Decision Engine, which now provides search for Yahoo as well and provides 20% of the search market.
In the examples given, a search for “Why is Windows so expensive?” turned up results for asking why Macs are so expensive. Similarly, when asked if Microsoft is evil, it would link to articles where Google was portrayed as evil. Google queries – including asking if Google was evil – did their job and returned appropriate results.
Microsoft has cleaned up these certain examples, but what worries me is Microsoft’s tampering with the results which may be as of yet unnoticed. Could they hide a PR faux-pas? Could they hide news of more bugs?
I had been tempted to try Bing as I’ve heard some good things about it (mostly “It’s better than Live Search”, but I’d have to give it a fair shake before knocking it) but this has trampled this temptation. Too bad Microsoft.
Extreme economic problems require extreme solutions, and Wells Fargo Bank has come up with a good one. They have decided to sue themselves. Wells Fargo holds the first and second mortgages on a condominium that is going into foreclosure. As holder of the first, they are suing all other lien holders, including the holder of the second, which is Wells Fargo. It gets better. The company has hired a lawyer to defend itself against its own lawsuit. The defense lawyer even filed this answer to the complaint, “Defendant admits that it is the owner and holder of a mortgage encumbering the subject real property. All other allegations of the complaint are denied.” On the website The Consumer Warning Network, Angie Moreschi wrote: “We’ve apparently reached the perfect storm for complete and utter idiocy by some banks trying to foreclose on homes.”
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I think that really speaks for itself.
In other news, the Guinness Book of World Records has levied a Cease and Desist against Failblog.org’s particular usage of a negative entry on the Guinness Book of World Records website. Basically, it says that the record for the most people killed in a terrorist attack belongs to the attacks on the USA that occured on 11/9/01. However, due to an oversight on part of the maintainer or CMS, on the side there is something featured on every other page that is completely inappropriate: Break This Record. Now, you might laugh, but this is really horrible. I mean, this is something you do not want people to try to beat, same with any other of the violence-related posts.
I pretty much agree with the response. Yes, this is bad PR. So fix it (and I believe they have). People who look at it will realize that it was done automagically and that no one would actually be that… insensitive, silly, incompetent… to post that by hand. In order to save your reputation on the Internet you just gave a publically published C&D to one of the internet’s most popular sites. Good job.
Now, this is not against vegetarians – I’m friends with a few – but rather, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and some funny campaigns.
From the UrbanDictionary:
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. A group founded in 1980 with over 800,000 current members worldwide. They are the most successful registered radical organization in existence. Similar to the Nazi party, and religious extremists, they believe in fascism and use violence and propaganda as their vehicles to achieve their goal. They have a tax exempt status, and collect nearly $30,000,000.00 yearly.
PETA seeks “total animal liberation.” This means no meat, no milk, no zoos, no circuses, no wool, no leather, no hunting, no fishing, and no pets (not even seeing-eye dogs). PETA is also against all medical research that requires the use of animals (including AIDS research).
They do in fact operate kills shelters and have killed over 10,000 healthy house pets. They are against animals as pets.
They support violence if it is for achieving their goal. They use their collected money to pay legal fees for members charged with felonies.
While the first and last I just find funny in the way they’re marketed, I take issue with the attacks against the Canadian Seal Hunt. The Seal Hunt in North Quebec, Newfoundland & Labrador, and Nunavut is neccesary for survival in the Canadian North and provides an extremely important boost to the economies of those provinces and territories. I look at this organization and I just see people who are grasping on to the fact that the seals are cuddly and cute, ignoring the fact that they damage the at-risk-of-depletion North Atlantic cod stocks. Furthermore, it’s a violation of the Olympic Charter, which forbids the politicization of the Games (hahahaha… HAHAHAHAHAHA that works well).
“Save the Sea Kittens” is convenient revisionist biology. Nothing really needs to be explained here since it’s incredibly obvious that this idea is the silliest of the silly. People *need* to eat fish; there are millions, billions I’m sure, of people who live in areas where the only natural food source is fish (try growing something on Newfoundland,the “Rock that God gave to Cain” or the Greek Isles and Mainland, which even hundreds of years BCE couldn’t support populations anywhere near that of a modern village). This has all led me to think that PETA is not just silly but dangerous in the lengths it goes to in securing its self-destructive goals.
Just a final note on logic: Humans are a member of the Animal Kingdom, ergo in the biological sense we are animals. Animals can eat other animals, they do so naturally and must do so to survive. If we are animals, shouldn’t we be able to do the same?
Google, the big little company we all know and love, has decided that a logical extension of their vision for Google Chrome is the Chrome Operating System. While the original Chrome was marketed as being similar to an OS in how it handled the web, Google decided that the desktop OS is built for an age where people are tied to desktop applications. Google says that ChromeOS will be a lightweight, fast-to-boot-fast-to-run OS that focuses on getting people to the web. While aimed at netbooks, it will also be available for desktops and laptops (so presumably not a Moblin-like interface).
While it will be Linux-based (like Android but seperate), ChromeOS will build many things from the ground up. Now, I probably won’t wind up using ChromeOS (this is purely speculatory with no screenshots or anything) as I like the full-fledged Desktop OS provided by Ubuntu, but because the project is open source and builds on open source projects there will be a lot of new material coming in to the FLOSS ecosystem which will inevitably be picked up by the mainstream Linuxes.
I incorrectly reported on Twitter (based on a misunderstanding of Gizmodo) that it would be able to run Windows and OS X apps. As far as I can tell, there won’t be apps per say but rather web-based applications which can be run on any operating system from any modern browser. This, needless to say, makes more sense, though I am dissappointed because geting Win/Mac compatibility in an open source project would mean Win/Mac compatibility for the Linux universe.
So yes, I’m excited. Can’t wait to see where this goes. I am a fan of Chrome as a browser (if it only did Flash it’d be my default on Linux – it’s alpha is great) and I’m sure Google will do a great job on ChromeOS
CNet has discovered that Microsoft has taken to changing the default search engines of some Windows users with the Google Toolbar. It’s not like it’s anything new (Microsoft also slipped in an almost-impossible-to-remove-without-breaking-everything Firefox add-on without permission), but it’s disturbing nonetheless. What is perhaps more disturbing is that people take this lying down. When a company is able to step into your computer, change a personal setting for its own benefit, and barely anyone notices, isn’t there a problem? Are people letting their digital rights fall by the wayside?
People ask me why I don’t use Windows. I have all sorts of answers from Open Source to this prime example of Microsoft’s lack of respect for its consumers. Then I ask them why they use Windows. They usually didn’t know there was anything else than Windows or OS X. It’s this illusion of duopoly that keeps Microsoft in business. In what way is Windows more advanced than, say, Linux? It’s not. It’s insecure, runs an ancient file system, doesn’t even have theme support, has a bloated compositor, the list goes on. Microsoft relies on the perception of duopoly and that software only works on Windows to keep the consumer afraid of switching, and that’s really sad because a company like Microsoft surely could be innovative in its OS products. It’s shown that it can be with their Office and gaming divisions (Whether it suffers from Microsoft’s usual launch problems or not, Natal is certainly ambitious). Bring that to the OS and stop scaring people. In the console race Microsoft is not the big dog and so we see them being more innovative, but Microsoft has let innovation fall by the wayside and instead of improving their products has stooped to fear and false advertising.
Aaaand it’s 12:15 in the morning and I need to sleep. Sorry about posting so late, I won’t miss tommorow.
The GNOME Desktop, one of (the?) most popular desktop environment for users of Linux (and my personal favourite – kind of forgot to post that I got fed up with KDE’s many little flaws shortly after proclaiming that I had been Konverted), is due to go to version 3.0 in early 2010 (currently scheduled for the 28th of April 2010). Currently developing GNOME 2.27, GNOME 3 would come where GNOME 2.30 would go.
Now, there has been a lot of talk about how the new GNOME is going to look and act. The official plan suggests hiding the File System, because after all “having to deal with a filesystem in their daily work is not what makes users happy — on the contrary, they generally just want to access their documents and not to browse their hard disk” and many more.
Now Stephano has picked up this tidbit – a mockup of GNOME 3:
The user – via his submission on the gnome-look.org website – says that the GTK theme (what draws the coloured window borders and buttons) isn’t important but how the windows act is.
Fine-tuned bits like how applications of the same type share the same colour and a window – when maximized – takes up the entire screen but contains the system tray (wifi, logged on user, any apps running in the tray) will make this really great for netbooks and touchscreen interfaces.
Just a sneek-peak of what’s coming tommorow: Firefox 3.5 will be pushed out to the while and I’ll be there to show you the new features, dramatically speed up your browser, and stop you from whiddling away your time on sites like these when you should be working!
After work yesterday I nipped over to the local library and picked up two books. One was a book on computer security. The other – the one I was actually looking for – was three Renaissance masterpieces: The Prince by Machiavelli (my main read), Utopia by Thomas More (which will be read though I did not seek it out), and The Courtier by Baldassare Castiglione (which I have no intention of reading as I have no use for instructions on how exactly to be a courtier, as those training to be courtiers may find themselves short of job prospects). The problem is that the books are in inaccesible languages: The Prince was written in Italian but the version in the book (printed in 1953) contains the original Middle English translation… from 1640. Surely there must be more modern translations of one of the finest works in European political philosophy. Utopia is in its original Middle English – from 1516 – as well. Middle English, as I have started to find, is verily liberal with thine spellings.
Now I’ll be able to be a snob and say that I’ve read both Utopia and The Prince in their original English versions for no reason having to do with academia (in which, of course, the originals are valuable). Goodness knows I’ve been searching for The Prince for quite some time and this one was the first copy I found at the library that wasn’t AWOL.
But shouldn’t undisputed classics of European literature be available to the public in the vernacular? Shouldn’t the man on the street be able to read these books without having to trawl through an archaic language? Shouldn’t we encourage people to read these great works, and if so shouldn’t they be applicable? I saw a copy in the library that was a transcription of the principles of The Prince to business (business is now the new principality, as politicians could hardly get away with what Machiavelli suggests).
We should have copies that are relevant to the modern world. At the outset, Machiavelli asserts that there are only two basic types of government: “Republique” and the Monarchy (which contains, of course, Oligarchy, Aristocracy, and the type of federal monarchy observed in the Holy Roman Empire). We exist today in a world that is much more sophisticated: Communists fall in to neither of these catagories. Neither do Constitutional Monarchies – which are governed by the people AND the monarch with various mixes of power (for example, Canada leans more towards the Republic despite the rather powerful monarchy because the monarch in question is in England but nations such as Thailand have a much more assertive monarch). Each of these have their own sophistication.
Would we see a personalized version of Machiavelli’s philosophy – a philosophy that prides shrewdness, manipulation, and deciet as a means to an end – as immoral? Certainly I think we need to compromize (which Machiavelli asserts must not be done in order to assert strength and independence). Moreover, who do we see today that uses a Machiavellian philosophy in their own lives or in the running of their countries? You probably know someone who is pushy, someone who knows *exactly* what they want and how to get it. Would we see it as an affront to an open society or a way to cut the fat from a civilization obsessed with political correctness and unoffendedness (yes. I made that up. So sue me)?
At any rate, I look forward to reading these two books over the summer and perhaps adopting some of the ideologies within… MUHAHAHAHA
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