Tag Archives: Technology

Canadian’s Election Will Be on Twitter

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It will also be illegal for any citizen, journalist or not, to tweet or blog or post something on a Facebook wall about the election results, until all the polls are shut.

Ordinary citizens aren’t immune. In 2000, Elections Canada brought charges against a Vancouver blogger and software designer named Paul Bryan after he dared to publish election results from Atlantic Canada on his small-audience blog. Bryan was fined $1,000. He fought the case all the way to the Supreme Court on constitutional grounds, with major media outlets from across the country joining his battle. It did no good. In 2007, by a vote of 5-4, the court upheld Bryan’s conviction, and Section 329.

The four minority judges were passionate in their dissent.

By Paula Simons in “Ban on Twitter, Facebook election-night posts draconian“, April 20, 2011

This election will be tweeted. I’m hopeful that Elections Canada will act appropriately, by not acting. Then the newly elected government can fix these laws.

ebooks are Fiction

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Buying ebooks is an incredibly frustrating experience!

No wonder the publishing industry is so hurting.

Most books are not even available as ebooks, and even when they are it is likely only in the United States of America, or at least that is the case for any book not on the New York Times Best Sellers List, which the majority of are fiction.

Here is a table of all the books I’ve bought from Amazon in the last 1.5 years for my Kindles:

Summary:

  • I’ve bought 15 books.
  • None of them are available in Canada at Amazon.ca!
  • It cost me more to buy these books as ebooks than it costs in the USA for dead tree version of the books!
  • Canadians pay more for dead tree books.

If I didn’t have a US address, then I would have bought zero books! Seth Godin’s Poke the Box isn’t even available on Kindle in Canada and it’s published by Amazon’s The Domino Project!

If you have information on the cost or availability of these books in other only stores or other countries, I’d love if you would share that data with me.

I find it incredibly frustrating how many books I go to purchase where an ebook either doesn’t exist or costs more than what a dead tree version costs. It makes no sense!

Screenshot of The Leap for sale on Amazon.com

Rick Smith's The Leap costs 3 times more for the digital version

If I included all the books that I have not purchased the picture is even a lot grimmer. I end up borrowing from the local library the non-fiction or older books that I’m interested in — unfortunately many of them lately — rather than feel like a fool.

Screenshot of The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton on Amazon.co.uk

The UK is the only country where Consolations of Philosophy is only available on Kindle

Something has got to change. It doesn’t matter how beautiful the devices are (kindle3, ipad2) if you can’t get what you want to read.

I will close saying that one publisher is doing it well. If the Pragmatic Bookshelf has a book on a software topic I’m interested in, I will purchase it from them even if other tech publishers have a better rated book on the topic. The Pragmatic Bookshelf is the only ebook store that I know of that works.

Inertial Measurement Units

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Happily, a few decades from now a GPS signal might not be required at all for many things. If atomic clocks get cheaper, then they could be built into everything that needs accurate time. And eventually you’ll be able to navigate without any external signals, thanks to devices called “inertial measurement units”, which track your movements from a known start point. Today, these IMUs use gyroscopes to measure orientation, plus accelerometers to tell how fast it is accelerating. Using this information, plus time, the acceleration is converted into speed and distance to reveal relative location.
David Hambling’s NewScientist article “GPS chaos: How a $30 box can jam your life“

I bet it’s a lot sooner than “a few decades”.

The article was a real eye opener for me on our dependency on GPS, and how fragile the technology is.

Kindle’s Vision vs Execution

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Our strategy with the ebookstore is ‘buy once, read everywhere.’ If you want to read on your iPhone, if you want to read on your BlackBerry. We want people to be able to read their books anywhere they want to read them. That’s the PC, that’s the Macintosh. It’s the iPad, it’s the iPhone. It’s the Kindle. So you have this whole multitude of devices and whatever’s most convenient for you at the moment.
JP Mangalindan, “Jeff Bezos’s mission: Compelling small publishers to think big“, CNNMoney Fortune, June 29, 2010

I also enjoyed Bezos update in the article on cloud computing and the utility model reality..

I love my Kindle 2, and what Amazon.com has done for publishing!

Here though, “read their books anywhere they want to read them”, there is a disconnect between vision and execution. The Amazon Kindle experience on the Mac has a strong unpleasant odor.

Privacy, Our Expectations Need to Change

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“But our expectations need to change, too – especially our view of what constitutes a compromising or embarrassing digital trail. Maybe this high degree of openness will lead, not to a lot of red-faced adults in 10-20 years, but a lot less hypocrisy much sooner.”

Rob Cottingham, “CBC News – Consumer Life – Teens too open online: privacy watchdog“, Oct 8th, 2009

Misplaced Faith in the Power of Inventions

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By Alejandro Mufarrege

By Alejandro Mufarrege (Claudio.Ar on Flickr)

From “Why our ‘amazing’ science fiction future fizzled” by John Blake (emphasis mine):

Even then [19th-century], people had a misplaced faith in the power of inventions to make life easier, Corn [Joseph Corn, co-author of "Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future] says.

For example, the typical 19th-century American city was crowded and smelly. The problem was horses. They created traffic jams, filled the streets with their droppings and, when they died, their carcasses.

But around the turn of the 20th century, Americans were predicting that another miraculous invention would deliver them from the burden of the horse and hurried urban life — the automobile, Corn says.

“There were a lot of predictions associated with early automobiles,” Corn says. “They would help eliminate congestion in the city and the messy, unsanitary streets of the city.”

Corn says Americans’ faith in the power of technology to reshape the future is due in part to their history. Americans have never accepted a radical political transformation that would change their future. They prefer technology, not radical politics, to propel social change.

“Technology has been seen by many Americans as a way to get a better tomorrow without having to deal with revolutionary change,” Corn says.

As someone who is always looking to hack my world to solve my problems and to increase my productivity and comfort, the above gives me something to ponder.

Happy Birthday GNU!

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The GNU Project is 25 years young! And Richard Stallman and crew are working as hard as ever. Thank you!

The GNU Project is most famous for it’s versions of UNIX utilities and the GPL family of licenses. But whatever you think of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation‘s hard-line approaches and politics, everyone has benefited from their work. Every computerized device, if it doesn’t run GNU software, likely contains software that was influenced by the GNU project or software released under a GPL license. And the GNU Project’s influence extends beyond software to most areas where technology meets freedom.

Thanks again GNU!