Am I the only one who shuddered at the return of the "turbo" button?

I keep seeing the ads for the Intel (r) Core (c) i(tm)7(tm) (sorry to any lawyers if I messed up the r's and c's there) processors with the "turbo boost" feature.

Did you know my IBM PC XT clone had this too?

Does anyone at Intel remember why few 286 and even fewer 386 boards (PC Chips 386SX boards excepted) even bothered still including pins for the "turbo button"? (Yes, I know it's something you click on on your task bar these days - after all, we all need some more mouse-induced inefficiency)

Because everyone left them pressed. All the time.

Look - the rest of the hardware still consumes the same amount of power, so there is no reason whatsoever to wait longer (and let your equipment run longer, burning more electricity) for any given task to finish.

Lastly, your Core i7 processor, sold to you at 2.8 GHz, is actually a 3.47 GHz processor when it's "turbo boosted." So which one did you pay for? I suspect, the 3.47 GHz part. Why not just call it that, and have the processor scale back its CPU speed to save power like all the other modern processors do?

You guys are killing me!

Another Reason I left Canada: Bill C-61

Canada currently imposes a "fine" on all digital and analog media purchased, ostensibly to compensate artists for copyright infringement you'll do with that media. If you use your CDs for a more legitimate purpose than fair use, you paid the fine anyways.

Obviously, you're guilty, proof being irrelevant. This is akin to gasoline having a surcharge added for the speeding ticket you're expected to get.

This has backfired on the music industry. If you're on the side that states that the sales have fallen because the music industry hasn't made all much worth listening to in recent years, rather than piracy, you'll applaud this: Canada's RIAA arm got a serious smackdown about two years ago when the defendant successfully argued that no further damages were due because the fine for the crime had already been paid. That meant that because of the media reimbursement/fine/tax, copying music and video had basically been legalized.

Of course, copyright holders could not let this stand, and so had their henchmen in parliament propose a draconian addition, currently called bill C-61. Hon. Minister of Industry Bill Prentice deserves to lose his seat for this. Here is the summary - you'll note similarities with the US DMCA:

• Circumvention of encryption, no matter how trivial (like xor 81), is now a federal offence (called a felony in the US)
• $500 fine (not clear if it's a minimum or a maximum) for each copyright violation (so a Youtube posting will average $20,000)
• Unlocking of cellphones counts as circumvention of encryption (even if a provider locks your personal cell phone)

The issue, as always, is the fine print, usually skipped by the press. Critics who watch out for this sort of thing argue that the search and seizure rights granted by the bill and others on the books it refers to effectively make Canada a police state, like it isn't already (ask me about September 2003 at Vancouver International Airport one day).

Protests are cropping up all over the place, according to the CBC.

What's really missing from the debate are the following points:

• The new bill would empower distributors, who are the copyright owners (artists surrender this to get distributed), so it does not help artists, and thus does not help creativity.
• Security through Obscurity would also take over the Canadian technology market - it's okay for your bank to use XOR 81 encryption, since it's "illegal to circumvent." Tell that to your ID thief in Russia, and see if he cares. He's thankful his life was made easier.
• Security companies, those that nudge vendors to make their software more secure, now face legal penalties like they do in the United States. Point out another flaw in Internet Explorer, go to jail. There. Microsoft's happy.

Feel safer already?

The point is, the criminals on the networks don't care about this, and they are outside the reach of Canadian law. But the folks whom you trust to keep the people with your information honest will see jail if they tell the people with your information that they're not being responsible.

Good work, Canada!

PowerPoint(tm): The New Documentation Standard

Well, finally something work related.

So what did I miss? Apparently everyone dumped Visio (tm) and other technical drawing products, and replaced them with PowerPoint. Four years ago I lamented the same thing with a PowerPoint presentation being considered a "Product Plan."

Architecture Consultant: "We need a state diagram and a sequence diagram."

Developer: "Here it is."

AC: "That's a Power Point! The arrows don't line up, and there are no dotted connectors!"

Manager: (Manager overrides) "It's great!"

AC: "It actually does not show how anything interrelates, and how it relates to the software components."

Manager: "Well, you had better be able to fix out outage with this."


Yet, all this focus, and meetings have gotten longer, and the elevator pitch is a lost art.

What gives?

Happy Voting Day, and uh, Apple censors everybody.

First off, I hope you voted. For someone that will defend your rights and freedoms, and not take them away "in order to protect you."

On the digital freedom front, Apple not only manages your digital rights for you (meaning you have none, kind of like having emergencies managed, and oxymoron and a federal agency) and has been super busy removing or blocking access to people complaining on its forums about problems with Mac OS X "Leopard". Especially popular ones, such as ones linked to by enthusiast sites like Tom's Hardware Guide.

Remember that some article noted anecdotally that liberals were more likely to use Macs than anyone else? I guess that's kind of like shutting off conservative talk radio in the name of "equal access."

I don't care for the conservative side of the argument either - so I just don't listen, and act to change my radio station instead of complaining. I know, this "responsibility thing" again, it's easier to blame your (usually someone else's of course) radio for putting conservative babble on, kind of like those "assault weapons" that go around on their own killing people.

Other people complaining about Apple:

Wikia
eMac

And my Google search for the lazy. Clicking on the news header is also educational.