I'm pissed off... again! Useless regulator.

Well, everyone's favourite Canadian Regulator, or should I say deregulator, the CRTC, has decided on their foreign ownership decision for Globalive. The decision, was that Globalive/Wind Mobile does not meet Canadian ownership rules.

Globalive is a Canadian company that participated in an auction last year for wireless spectrum to provide new competition in Canada. They got lots of money from an Egyptian company called Orascom. Before they started preparing for their wireless services, Industry Canada approved Globalive and Orascom's joint venture. They managed to get spectrum in all provinces except for Quebec, where Quebecor (Videotron) beat their bid. Globalive's wireless service is known as Wind Mobile.

Windows 7 Starter has some ass-backward features

Yikes! I was looking around on Wikipedia looking at the Windows 7 page to see what features the starter edition has (or doesn't have). Someone wrote that you can't change the background, although I thought someone made it up, since anyone can edit wikipedia. So I looked on WinSuperSite and found a gallery with screenshots from Windows 7 Starter. Paul took a screenshot of where he'd click personalize on the desktop's context sensitive right-click menu and... there's no personalize option. So you can't change the desktop, and I guess you can't change the screensaver as well. Who at Microsoft thought that this is a good idea?

Now, can someone explain to me why netbooks are available with Windows XP Home, as well as Windows 7 Starter which costs about $20 more for less features? I'm having trouble understanding the concept. It seems to go against reasonable business logic.

At least it doesn't have that artificial 3 application limit anymore.

Win SuperSite gallery for Windows 7 Starter

Linux FAQ for newbies

I came across a great FAQ for new linux users. It covers many things that a new user would be confused about if they wanted to make the transition to linux or if they already have done so.

It's very lengthy and I haven't finished reading it yet, but for those who are interested in learning a bit about linux, I'd say it's worth taking the 30-45 minutes to read it.

Credit goes to Tux Radar and their magazine Linux Format for writing the FAQ, and to Tux Machines for linking to many linux articles, one of which was Tux Radar's FAQ.

Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) review coming up soon...

I'll be reviewing Ubuntu Karmic on Thursday or Friday after it is released. The launch date is Thurday, October 29th, 2009.

It's Windows 7 day!

Today, Microsoft launched their newest version of Windows called "Windows 7". I have no idea where the name came from since the internal version number is "NT 6.1" and it's not the 7th version of Windows.

EDIT: I was told by someone who works/worked for Microsoft that the version number is 6.1 because some (probably many) applications run a compatibility check on the OS version. Windows Vista is NT 6.0 which 6.1 is close enough to. The number 7 came from the 7th release of Windows NT (assuming you ignore Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP x64 being Windows NT 5.2).

Today's Apple updates

Today, Apple updated their.............

MacBooks (Not Pro), Mac Minis, iMacs, Mice, Apple Remote, Airport Extreme, and Time Capsule.

An interesting take on rejecting a EULA

I was reading the official Linux Mint blog where I noticed an interesting post. A Linux Mint user recently bought a Dell Studio laptop computer, but he didn't want to use Windows. As a side note, very few laptops can be bought without Windows, and even when you can buy one without it, the price comes out to almost the same price or more expensive than the same computer with Windows pre-installed.

This specific Linux Mint blog post describes in detail how to get a refund from the computer manufacturer by rejecting the Microsoft/Computer Manufacturer's (in this case it was Dell) End User License Agreement (EULA).

In short, he chose the new computer he wanted, but didn't turn on the computer when he got it. When you turn on a brand name computer for the first time, you must accept both the Microsoft and the manufacturer's EULA which are both shown to you. He then downloaded Linux Mint from his old computer and burned it onto a CD. Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, which means that there is lots of community support, and Ubuntu has very good out of the box compatibility. Linux Mint also includes support for Adobe Flash, DVD playback, and MP3 playback by default, which makes it a very good Live CD distribution. He ran the Live CD on his new computer to make sure that it runs well and that there aren't any compatibility problems. It turned out that there were a few problems, but a simple google search helped him solve the issue.

He sent off an email to Dell mentioning that he does not agree with the Dell and Microsoft Agreements. After an exchange of about 12 emails, he managed to get a refund of about $110 USD (£70). After receiving the money from Dell, he donated it to the Linux Mint project.

Harvard gives Canada a big old BURN...

... at least in terms of it's broadband. Harvard ran a study to rate broadband in different countries. Overall, Canada was 22nd out of 30, while USA placed at 13th. Canada ranked 16th on broadband adoption, 20th on speed and capacity, and 25th on price.

Read the CBC article here

Warning to Snow Leopard users!

If you are using Mac OS X v10.6 "Snow Leopard", don't run as a guest user, or better yet, disable it. There is a major bug that causes the primary user's home folder to be deleted when logging out of the guest user. If you are planning on upgrading to Snow Leopard, disable the guest user before you upgrade.

Funny Commercials

Wind Mobile is a new Canadian Wireless provider that will be launching their services soon. It will start in Calgary and Toronto sometime in early 2010. They just released 3 commercials which are pretty clever and do a good job of representing the current state of wireless in Canada.

Debian 5 "Lenny" Mini-Review (Installation)

A bit of background info about Debian. Debian is a distribution of Linux which is well known for being incredibly stable. It is community developed rather than being developed by a company (Like Ubuntu, SUSE, or Red Hat for example). Debian has a stable release approximately once every 2 years. It is available for 12 different CPU architectures(!). There are 3 branches of Debian. Stable is... just that, stable. Testing is the development version of their next upcoming stable release. Unstable has no "release" and is always being updated with packages currently under development. Ubuntu is based on Debian Unstable.

All of the codenames of their releases are named after characters from Toy Story. The current release (5.0) is codenamed "Lenny", the next release is codenamed "Squeeze", and Unstable is codenamed "Sid".

I installed Debian 5.0.3 in Virtualbox 3.0.6 . The double point releases only include security and stability updates and don't contain any new features. I decided to try out the xfce version, rather than the standard install CD which includes the GNOME Desktop Environment.