A completely unskilled field worker starting up with Northwestel Cable would receive a starting wage of just over $19 per hour.
After a year of full-time schooling, a level 1 child care worker in Whitehorse would be lucky to receive $12 per hour.
What an interesting value system is at play in our society.
Was chatting with a guy at Northwestel tech support yesterday. Apparently, traffic shaping is used on the network from 6am to midnight every day. He recommended I not engage my BitTorrent client during those hours or my connectivity would be severely restricted. Interesting…
I woke up the other morning despising my mobile phone.
I’d been forced to spend some time without my HTC 5800 from Bell Mobility. In its stead I’d gone back to my old Palm Treo 650.
I only just picked up the HTC device last October, and I’d realized almost right away that I didn’t like it. I suppose I got suckered into its fancy slide-out keyboard. Of course, it’s far less bulkier than the Treo, and doesn’t have an antennae, so I recall that being a bonus.
Over time, however, I’ve grown to absolutely despise this device. Here’s why: Continue reading
9 years ago I purchased my very first Apple Airport base station. It was a revolutionary product: it provided wire-free internet browsing.
I hung it in a prominent location in my office. Its unusual flying saucer shape was very eye-catching. Clients always asked about it.
And then as I demonstrated wireless web browsing on my PowerBook, they would look at me as though I were some kind of witch doctor. This provided me all the voodoo license I needed to raise my consulting rates on the spot without explanation.
Of course, Wi-Fi is everywhere these days. Virtually every device, from handheld video game systems to cars, is Wi-Fi-enabled.
But the technology that supported my Airport base station in 1999, called 802.11b, pales in comparison to a new Wi-Fi standard, 802.11n, that’s crept onto the market over the last year or so.
But what’s the difference? And, more importantly, should you think about upgrading to the latest and greatest even if you’ve already got a Wi-Fi network in place at home?
802.11b was one of the first wireless networking standards to emerge from an organization called the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE.
“802.11” is a family of wireless networking technologies that’s more commonly referred to as Wi-Fi.
The letter that comes after 802.11 indicates a generation in the family.
Each Wi-Fi generation has primarily improved on its predecessor in three ways: speed, stability, and range.
For example, the theoretical top data rate you could get from my old b-grade Airport base station was 11 Mbit per second.
The current generation, 802.11n, can potentially transfer data at a rate as high as 300 Mbit per second. You’re more likely to get something like 74 Mbit per second in the real world, though.
That’s quite a difference, and it approaches the speeds that wired networks are capable of.
Another thing 802.11n has going for it is operating frequency.
It’s moved from the 2.4 GHz spectrum of its predecessors to the 5 GHz spectrum.
This means that it’s less susceptible to disruption from other electronics like cordless telephones, microwaves, and even fax machines.
(Quick sidebar: 802.11a, the orphan generation of the family, also used the 5 GHz spectrum. But way back in 1999 it was expensive to produce 5 GHz hardware components. So very few companies implementated this generation, despite the fact it was faster and more stable than 802.11b.)
One of the biggest bonuses in 802.11n is range.
Most people these days have b- and g-grade wireless routers. These devices have an indoor range of up to 35 metres — if you’re lucky. In fact, they’re pretty good at covering some of the house, but most people experience blind spots or have trouble when they need to connect wirelessly through a lot of walls.
802.11n effectively doubles the distance for indoor connectivity and improves the signal durability through walls and floors.
Clearly, 802.11n beats its older siblings as a quality Wi-Fi standard. It’s faster, more stable, and has great range.
In practical terms, though, that doesn’t really mean much.
After all, most people just use Wi-Fi as a wireless means of connecting to the internet in their homes or at a café.
And 802.11n is unlikely to make your experience with the internet any faster.
That’s because the bottleneck in your internet access is not your Wi-Fi network. It’s actually the connection itself to your internet provider.
Most high speed ADSL and cable internet connections offer a theoretical data access rate of anywhere from 2 to 6 Mbits per second. That’s less, even, than ye olde 802.11b.
So jumping on the 802.11n bandwagon won’t kick your BitTorrent sessions into high gear.
Of course, the exceptions to that statement are obvious. If you have your old 802.11b/g router buried in the basement and your Mac is way up on the third floor, then the improved signal range and more robust operating frequency of 802.11n may improve your access to the internet.
Another matter to look at when considering an upgrade is compatibility. Unless you have a device that’s 802.11n-capable, you won’t gain any benefit from an 802.11n router. You might have to upgrade some of the guts of your computer, or just buy a whole new unit.
For example, I have three computers, but only one contains a Wi-Fi card that can “talk” 802.11n. My 802.11n router communicates with the other two in the slower and less robust 802.11g tongue.
Really, 802.11n is all about improving your home network. If you have a number of n-grade computers and you transfer lots of big, fat files like movies around between them, then an upgrade to 802.11n will be bliss for you.
Otherwise, meh.
Gone are the days when you could fleece your clients just because you were the first kid on the block with wireless internet. Heck, every kid on my block’s got it now.
But that’s okay, because even after almost a decade, surfing the web without strings retains its je ne sais quoi.
Unfortunately, the new n-grade standard doesn’t improve too much on that.
Originally published in the Yukon News on Friday, March 19, 2008.
I was fortunate enough to have attended the New Media BC’s Fusion Forum in Vancouver last week. I was exposed at this conference to ground-level developments on both the creative and business sides of the fast-evolving new media industry.
I realize now that new media is our collective path to the future of information and entertainment consumption.
With annual gross revenues of over $2 billion in British Columbia, it’s already an industry that rivals logging.
And new media is experiencing explosive growth while most traditional industries are stagnant or shrinking.
But what is new media? And why is it so important to the future of not only our economy, but also our collective culture?
In a nutshell, new media is all about leveraging new and emerging technologies to re-imagine the way we experience and consume culture and its artifacts.
New media covers such disparate technology environments as gaming, web, and mobile, and it challenges us to adapt our cultural and economic imperatives to them.
For example, the 30-minute comedy sitcom has been a cultural staple for decades, but its star is on the wane. Yet, the sitcom clearly offers considerable benefits to viewers: where are those benefits going to be realized under the umbrella of new media?
On that point, it’s important to realize that new media isn’t about recasting traditional media in new formats. That was tried before, about a century ago, and it didn’t fly.
When Edison introduced the moving picture, producers’ first instincts were to just shoot traditional stage plays as though the camera were a member of the theatre audience. They viewed this as a way to cut costs and increase distribution: you’d only have to run the play once yet you could hold performances any number of times.
Clearly this didn’t fly.
Film was its own medium, the original “new media,” if you will. It demanded its own artistic and business models.
Over the past 100 or so years, film evolved on both levels. It’s now an established, even entrenched, staple of the world economy. As an artistic format, it’s arguably been fully developed.
The business and art of film was the direct response to a new technology that was developed during a period of intense innovation at the dawn of the 20th Century.
Thanks largely to the evolution of the digital platform, new media is the eye in a contemporary storm of innovation.
As a result, new media will reformat our cultural hard drive.
While it will not kill traditional forms of media, such as film, television, and newspapers, new media will significantly marginalize them. After all, even older forms of traditional media such as live theatre and spoken-word storytelling, were not completely obliterated by film.
We can expect to see a few significant cultural shifts as a result of new media.
The first will be the mobilization of experience.
As a result of both larger cultural shifts and technological innovation, we’ll be more likely to engage with new media messages “off-seat” and on our feet. This could occur on the sidewalk as we walk to work, or it could be in the kitchen as we rush together a meal.
Another shift will be in the format of the content we consume. First, it will become smaller and lighter. Second, it will become both more and less rich at the same time.
Nokia studied audience receptiveness to different forms of new media and found that, as far as mobile video content goes, the absolute optimal length of a clip is 2 minutes and 47 seconds.
So, really, the goal of the new media producer is to reinvent that half-hour sitcom I mentioned in such a way that an audience member can consume it in under three minutes.
But just because television and film have ruled the roost for the better part of 50 years doesn’t mean new media consumers expect a rich experience.
Because the future of entertainment and information is all about the “snack,” super-lightweight experiences can be even more valuable.
Finally, there will be an increase in the commercialized nature of the content we consume, but the perceptible qualities of those messages will be less overt.
A strong trend, particularly in new media productions like Bebo’s Kate Modern, is the evolution of product placement in entertainment media. Sponsorships and embedded branding are also on the rise.
Thankfully, the days of commercials are soon to be over.
On this point, new media has largely been driven by business interests to date, as traditional media companies search for a business model they can establish and profit from.
This is not unlike the early days of film, when Edison’s partners and investors sought mechanisms by which they could recoup their investments.
It’s important to note, however, that it took a strong artistic evolution to truly develop the business model by which film could become profitable.
It will be likewise with new media, and many in the arts community are beginning to express an interest in some of the projects coming out of the new media movement. Peter Jackson, for example, was heavily involved in the game adaptation of King Kong.
Of course, the more broadly implemented offspring of new media — the “new film,” so to speak — will only survive on their ability to define and establish a profitable business model. And, in a sense, this is the holy grail of the current new media movement: the ultimate business model.
Free content subsidized by advertising of some form leads the current way of thinking right now. But it’s very early in this evolutionary procedure and I don’t think we’ve seen the ultimate business solution just yet.
I’ve personally been dedicated to a new media project for about a year now and it’s very exciting to be part of a significant shift that will impact both world culture and the global economy.
These are early days in the evolution of new media, however, as we’re still largely constrained intellectually and economically by ties to television, film, and other traditional media. I look forward to the day we completely break free of our chains to the past and experience a new method of cultural consumption.
Only then may we fully understand why audiences fled theatres in fear of being flattened by the cinematic train on Edison’s first demo reel. What will we run in fear from?
Originally published in the Yukon News on Friday, February 29, 2008.
Earlier this week in Barcelona, the Mobile World Congress took place.
This is the single largest conference about cell phone and other mobile technologies in the world.
Technologies introduced here will cascade into the real world over the course of 2008.
The focus of this year’s event is on touch screen devices that are more like computers than phones, and the disrupting power of Google.
What’s more, this year’s congress represents the final nail in the coffin of CDMA, the equivalent of Betamax in the mobile telecommunications industry.
Somewhat ironically, probably the biggest trend at this year’s Mobile World Congress emerged last January at MacWorld.
That was when Apple introduced the iPhone, an elegant handheld computer that demonstrated to the mobile industry what a cell phone should be.
Technology leaders such as Nokia and Samsung were rocked into readjusting their approaches to mobile phones and the software on them.
And Motorola, once a leader with the popular RAZR, is now on the brink of folding their mobile phone business, due in no small part to the iPhone.
One of the major features of the iPhone is its fun and functional touch screen interface, and this is what virtually every handset maker is rushing to emulate, with mixed results.
As a result, touch screens are rampant in Barcelona this year.
Touch screen devices are designed to replace the buttons on your phone with a big screen that displays just the controls you need, when you need them.
The touch screen interface sounds simple in concept. But the difference between, say, Apple’s iPhone and HTC’s Touch demonstrate just how good and bad it can be in implementation.
Of course, there are some potential iPhone killers in Barcelona.
Garmin (yes, the GPS company) is set to release their Nüvifone later this year, and Nokia has juiced up their already lust-worthy N-series of handsets with a new awe-inspiring set of features.
Currently at risk of being an also-ran in the mobile phone business, Sony-Ericsson also announced a landmark new product, the Experia X1. This sexy-looking slider is destined to go State-side in the next few months.
A lot of talk in Barcelona surrounds some of the first public previews of Google’s new Android mobile operating system.
A mobile phone’s operating system provides it with its basic capabilities and offers us, as users, the “look and feel” that we interact with when we actually use a device.
The dominant mobile operating system, for example, is one hardly any North American has heard of: Symbian, which was shipped on over 77 million handsets last year. If you have a phone from Nokia, Sony Ericsson, or Samsung, you’re using Symbian.
More dominant in North America are RIM’s Blackberry, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, and Apple’s Mac OS X on the iPhone. But each of these hold a paltry portion of the market in comparison to Symbian.
So why would Google even bother to enter what, at first blush, is a market already controlled by a number of dominant players?
As usual, Google isn’t about status quo. Its Android is all about sea change.
Acquired three years ago in a private sale for an undisclosed sum, Android is Google’s wake up call to the mobile industry.
Android is the industry’s first step into what I call Relationship Technology. If you’re a regular reader of this column then you know that I consider RT the logical next step after Information Technology.
Most devices we use today, including computers and mobile handsets, are simply dumb conduits of stock information. RT, in the form of Google’s Android, is all about building a context around your current state of being.
Android maintains a constant awareness of where you are and what you’re doing so that any device it’s running on can constantly provide you with immediately relevant subject matter without any effort on your part.
By all reports from Barcelona, Android is in a very rough state.
There aren’t even any commercially-oriented handsets on show.
But when it hits the market later this year, Google’s Android will harken in a new era of mobile computing that will permanently change how we communicate — to a far greater extent than even the iPhone.
Finally, and this is of interest to many North Americans whose lives depend on the technology, this year’s Mobile World Congress is the swan song for CDMA.
CDMA is the telecommunications platform for two of Canada’s largest mobile service providers, Bell and Telus, and for a handful in the US, including Verizon. And simply put, it’s the Betamax of the industry.
The Mobile World Congress used to be all about GSM, CDMA’s arch-rival, and the dominant global platform by far.
This year, as almost an expression of pity, they let CDMA players into their show. It’s a cruel act of triumph, akin to Peter Pan forcing Captain Hook to announce he’s a codfish. A sort of, “In your face, CDMA.”
Because the simple fact is, none of the really cool technologies at the Mobile World Congress will ever meet a CDMA network. They’ll all be implemented for GSM-based networks around the world.
In short, Mobile World Congress 2008 is a wake up call to the North American mobile industry: time to upgrade, dude.
Alas, that day is likely far in the future. We’ll be stuck with afterthought handsets from tier-two technologies companies willing to service a withering platform for some time to come.
However, that’s what we have the internet for: to discover the wondrous technologies that are beyond our reach. We’ll just have to get used to wiping the saliva off our keyboards.
When it comes right down to it, the popular social web site Facebook has evolved into one of the single most annoying commercial constructs ever unleashed online.
Originally designed to be a place where friends and acquaintances could gather and socialize, it is now little more than a spam machine that is validated and powered by us and our friends.
Advertisers are fully aware that, because of its social base, Facebook users trust Facebook content, and thus also trust its integrated commercial messages.
As a result, most material you find on the web site now is friend-validated marketing mana.
It’s a disappointing outcome for a place that was once just about friendship and communication.
Nowadays it’s more about the forced integration of commercialism and consumerism into personal discourse.
And that’s how Facebook likes it, because advertising butters the company’s bread.
But really, how far can Facebook push this model of socially-driven advertising?
Imagine a world where all of the neighbours on your street can effortlessly duplicate the junk mail that arrives in their mailboxes and dump it in yours.
Imagine that your friends forward on calls from telemarketers to you.
This is Facebook now.
Back in the day (like, a year ago), Facebook was an excellent platform for social discourse.
It enabled you to inventory a lifetime of friends and engage with them in a relatively qualified fashion.
It was better than email because the communications network was closed and protected from spam.
It naturally bridged the communications gap between the web and your mobile phone so that you could maintain constant contact with your social circle.
Plus, it had an element of fun. There were games and silly little messaging applications that you could use to socialize and kill time. It was a cute little site that was fun and generally useful.
That “old” Facebook, the one that was really useful and interesting, is dead.
It all started one fateful day last May, when Facebook opened the site up to let anyone develop content.
A major investment blog at the time encouraged people to throw cash at the platform as a way to monetize Facebook’s then 20 million users.
That advice was taken to heart and by month’s end there were already 85 commercial applications available. There are now almost 14,000.
These applications are generally powered by advertising dollars, and much of their content is generally made up of commercial or consumer messages.
So to engage with Facebook applications is to play a willing role in the distribution of unsolicited advertising.
Then in October, having grown to 50 million users, Facebook extended their platform to mobile devices and brought their commercial partners with them.
At the same time, Microsoft bought less than 2% of the company for $240 million. And all of a sudden Facebook was worth $15 billion.
Suddenly, the pressure was on to prove that valuation.
Clearly not satisfied with pure ad revenues, the company decided to hawk its most valuable asset, it’s user base, to the highest bidder.
Last November, the company launched Beacon, a misguided marketing effort designed to bridge individual consumer habits with a sort of product verification system.
Under Beacon, if you bought something from a Facebook partner retailer, your purchase would be advertised to your friends.
In a way, it was an imposed word-of-mouth marketing methodology.
As Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg said when he announced Beacon: “A trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message.
A trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising.”
It’s true, but only when the broadcast is voluntary, deliberate, and personal. Beacon enforces the process in a seriously systematic fashion.
Rightfully, Facebook Beacon was immediately attacked as an invasion of privacy and a misuse of personal information.
Beacon was modified somewhat as a result, but it’s still an automated, uncontrolled information bridge between Facebook and e-tailers like Sony, Blockbuster, and Crest.
Facebook has evolved into an environment that misuses the trust we share with friends to endorse commercial messages we may not even be aware that we’re involved with.
It’s no longer a place to meet up and communicate. It’s now an environment where each of us is pimped out for commercial interests in a form of unpaid sponsorship.
At least in a pyramid scheme you get a cut of the action; Facebook doesn’t even say thank-you.
I’ve been asked this question so many times privately about Apple’s newest Mac operating system, that I figure it’s time I let it all hang out publicly.
I like Leopard. I like it a lot. It’s, quite simply, the most mature, refined, aesthetically pleasing and capable desktop computer operating system I’ve ever used.
And, yes (because I know this is what you’re wondering about — everybody else seems to, anyway), it mops the floor with Microsoft’s Windows Vista.
There’s simply no competition.
But the less said about Vista, the better. I don’t want to rub salt in Microsoft’s wounds.
Besides, I’d rather focus on the things that make Leopard truly great.
An important thing to understand about Leopard: it’s all about refinement.
Apple’s intention with Leopard is clearly not to revolutionize the desktop computer OS. Instead, the company seems intent on perfecting it.
With Leopard, it’s all about stability, performance, and the little details that can make a computer more intuitive and easier to use.
Leopard even has a sense of humour: networked Windows computers are represented by a monitor displaying the infamous Blue Screen of Death.
The best new utility in Leopard fills a glaring hole that exists in most computer systems to date: built-in data backup.
Leopard could have just featured a standard backup utility that you have to spend your life configuring and managing.
But Leopard’s better than that. Instead, Time Machine is a stylish and intuitive data backup environment that is actually fun to use.
To start protecting your data with Leopard, just plug an external hard drive into your Mac. Time Machine will automatically start backing up your entire hard drive every day, with no further effort on your part.
If you ever need to get anything back, use Time Machine to browse through a series of windows that cascade off into space. These represent your files over time. It’s a visually enthralling way to examine a history of your computing use.
When you find the file or folder you want to restore from a particular point in time, Time Machine brings it back to the present in a snap.
In terms of day-to-day use, Leopard’s best feature is Quick Look.
Receive an attachment with an email and you need to know what’s inside? In the olden days, you’d double click it and then wait for Word or Excel or whatever to open and show it to you. Not in Leopard.
Quick Look lets you view and browse inside a file without needing any other application. It can show you anything: Word or Excel files, PDFs, videos, photos, music, whatever.
Quick Look is available in Apple Mail or just on your Mac desktop.
It’s instantaneous and works with the click of the the spacebar on your keyboard.
It sounds so simple, but Quick Look is the one feature that has most dramatically improved my work flow and saved me massive time.
Then there’s Leopard and the web.
Competitive since the day of its release, the new Safari web browser in Leopard is, without a doubt, the best web browser in existence.
It’s fast. Like, it starts up in barely more than a second.
It’s fast. Like, it renders and displays complex pages instantly.
From my experience with Safari over the past month, it makes Firefox feel more like Embermutt.
And Internet Explorer? Well, like I said, I’m going easy on Microsoft in this column. ‘Nuff said.
But, again, like Leopard in general, Safari is really all about refinement.
Managing your bookmarks library in Safari has become easier and more intuitive.
While you’re browsing multiple web pages, you can drag and drop tabs to reorder them.
If you’re filling out a form on a web page and run out of visible space in a field, Safari lets you resize it.
But, really, what’s truly best about Leopard? It made my old MacBook faster.
Seriously.
Whatever Apple did to the basic functionality of Leopard, it makes my old laptop feel like a new machine.
This surprised me. Major software updates usually send hardware into anaphylactic shock. Not Leopard. It actually made my old Mac as fast as, well, a Leopard.
Interestingly, even as it’s become easier to use, faster, and more capable, Apple’s new Mac OS X has also become geekier under the hood.
Leopard receive an elite UNIX 03 rating from The Open Group, essentially certifying the operating system as “real” UNIX. The only other companies to receive this certification are Sun, HP, and IBM, for their super-high-end server operating systems.
Why should you care? Boasting rights, of course. Not many people can claim to be carrying an industrial-strength UNIX operating system with them to the café.
More to the point though, Leopard is not a closed, proprietary environment. It shares a common base with many other operating systems which makes it easier and less expensive to support and operate.
Of course, that also make Leopard a bit more vulnerable to viruses, as I’ve previously written.
I’ve mentioned just three of my favourite new features in Leopard. Apple claims there are 300. I haven’t found them all yet. But, even now, a month into using Leopard, they reveal themselves like easter eggs every day.
To answer the question of this column: should you upgrade to Leopard? I’d say yes. Without question.
Leopard is the pinnacle of the modern computer operating system. It’s elegant, intuitive, stable, and powerful. It’s feature-packed.
And what’s more, it’ll make your old machine new again.
Go for it. Come run fast with the pack.
Originally published in the Yukon News on Friday, November 30, 2007.
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