Norton 360

Post ImageI stopped running Symantec’s consumer products a long time ago. I like the corporate products, but their Norton packages were always too bloated or confusing I found. Or they wouldn’t behave as expected, or they’d interfere with something. Okay now that I think about it, there’s lots of reasons I don’t like the Norton software applications. And now, I have one more reason:

Symantec unveiled plans for its new software, then code-named Genesis, in February. The product is to rival Microsoft’s OneCare and Windows Vista security technology, and will integrate components of Symantec’s current security, PC optimization and backup products, the security company has said.

On Wednesday, Symantec announced that Genesis will be called Norton 360 and that the product is slated to ship by the end of March next year, a change from the original September due date.

Are you kidding me? What kind of a name is Norton 360? Nevermind that they already have SystemWorks, which does the same thing. I wasn’t initially that happy that Microsoft called their new Xbox the Xbox 360, but it grew on me. It’s a fairly unique name though don’t you think? Not exactly the kind of thing that can be appended to any old product. I mean, what does the “360” mean for Norton? Unless it means a complete turnaround in their software’s performance and effectiveness, I don’t like the name one bit. Maybe they think the “360” will make their software seem “cool”, like the Xbox. Maybe they forgot they sold security software, and that no matter how hard you try, it simply isn’t sexy or cool.

Well the release date has been pushed out quite far, so they still have time to change the name. Here’s to hoping!

Read: CNET News.com

Red Deer Trip Recap

Post ImageMy trip yesterday to Red Deer with Tom went very well! He is all registered now and ready to start classes in September. My many years of registering for classes and creating timetables came in handy as Tom was one of the first to be done registering. The only thing left to do now is find a place to live!

I had never been to Red Deer College before, so I learned a lot about it. Here are some thoughts on the college:

  • The college is not nearly as big as I thought it was, in terms of physical space. I can’t seem to find out how many students are registered at the college, but it can’t be that many.
  • They did have wireless networks all over the place, but you need a student username and password to access it, which didn’t surprise me.
  • There was apparently the largest number of students ever at the registration day for kinesiology yesterday. Most of them were female.
  • In fact, I have decided I am in the wrong program. There are a few girls in computing sciences, and a few guys that look like girls, but Tom’s program has a ratio of about 4-1 girls to guys, and they are all extremely attractive.
  • Speaking of computers, they do have a technology program at RDC, but it’s clearly not the focus. The computer labs and stuff were excluded from our tour, described only as “being in the basement and sort of dark.”
  • They need to fix the signs for public parking, as it was quite confusing to figure out where to go!
  • The campus itself is quite nice – lots of grass and trees outside. Inside there seems to be a mix of old and new.
  • Parking is WAY cheaper than the UofA. The daily maximum is only $6! We ended up not paying for parking though, which was fine by me.
  • Everyone we encountered was friendly and helpful.

I think Tom is excited to get started in the fall. Looks like he’ll be quite happy at RDC!

Off to Red Deer Tomorrow

Post ImageMy brother, Tom for those of you who don’t know him, is planning to go to Red Deer College next year, so I am his transportation tomorrow (bright and early!) for the open house event for prospective students. Thus, I’ll be in Red Deer most of the day. I don’t know much about the college, but it looks pretty good. Tom is planning on doing the university transfer program for the Bachelor of Kinesiology and Sport Studies degree, which sounds pretty interesting but way over my head! From the About page:

Red Deer College has one of the top athletics programs in Canada – the Kings and Queens have the best overall record at national competition of any college in the country. The Kings Volleyball team has been Canadian College Athletics Association champions for the past six years.

Sounds like the right place to be starting a degree in kinesiology and sports! Like just about every other post secondary institution in the province (at least that’s the way it seems), Red Deer College is currently in the midst of a multi-million dollar expansion, building a new Healthy Communities Complex.

I wonder if they’ll have accessible wireless for me to tap into? I doubt it, but it would be a nice surprise 🙂 I guess I could always track down a Starbucks…sigh…still such a long way to go to reach “wireless everywhere.”

Read: RDC

Notes for 5/28/2006

Yep, these weekly notes are many hours late – I got busy last night and totally forgot to post them.

  • I got this great link from Ylz. Turns out using a controller for games is more effective than mouse and keyboard after all!
  • Wondering why Windows Vista is late? Because there is still so much to do, as was made very clear in Chris Pirillo’s review of Beta 2.
  • Carolina beat Buffalo last night, which means they are leading the series 3-2 and are one step closer to taking on the Oilers for the Stanley Cup. I hope this series goes to Game 7 so that whoever wins is too tired to put up much of a fight in the last round 🙂
  • I’m going to Red Deer tomorrow with my brother for the Red Deer College open house (where he is planning to attend in the fall). Yay, road trip!
  • Did you hear the rumor that Microsoft wants to buy eBay? It’s not entirely unlikely – Microsoft wanted to make deals with all of Google’s competitors, and given the recent Yahoo/eBay deal, this would be a great way to hook up with the two largest. I say, get rid of MSN, focus on Windows Live, and partner with/buy the great stuff from Yahoo and eBay.
  • Sony’s Ken Kutaragi is an idiot, plain and simple.
  • Paramagnus is getting closer to a public test of Podcast Spot! We recently updated our product logo too.

Twenty Years of Burgernomics

Post ImageWay back in 1986, the editor of The Economist had the brilliant idea to invent a Big Mac index, as a “light-hearted introduction to exchange-rate theory.” I first learned of the index roughly three years ago when I took an international economics course, and I thought it was rather ingenious. This year marks the 20th anniversary, so The Economist is looking back on the index:

The Big Mac index is most useful for assessing the exchange rates of countries with similar incomes per head. Thus, among emerging markets, the yuan does indeed look undervalued, while the currencies of Brazil, Turkey, Hungary and the Czech Republic look overvalued. Economists would be unwise to exclude Big Macs from their diet, but Super Size servings would equally be a mistake.

According to the latest edition of the index (May 22), the cheapest place in the world to buy a Big Mac is in China, where it costs just $1.31 USD. The most expensive place is Norway, at $7.09 USD. Here in Canada, we’re only four cents more expensive than our American counterparts, at $3.14 USD.

The index was never intended to be a precise predictor of currency movements, simply a take-away guide to whether currencies are at their correct long-run level. Curiously, however, burgernomics has an impressive record in predicting exchange rates: currencies that show up as overvalued often tend to weaken in later years.

I wonder if it will continue to be as successful in the next twenty years. In any case, I am sure it will continue to be one of the more interesting indexes that economics has produced.

Read: The Economist

Oilers going for the cup!

Post ImageFor the first time since 1990, our beloved Edmonton Oilers are heading to the Stanley Cup finals against either Buffalo or Carolina. The Oilers took their third win in Anaheim tonight, by a one goal margin winning 2-1. The first period wasn’t great, but the second and third were fairly solid.

  • Roloson’s 12 wins are the most by an Oilers goalie since Bill Ranford won 16 in the 1990 playoffs.
  • The Ducks finished a combined 1-6-1 against Edmonton in the regular season and playoffs this season.
  • The Oilers killed off all but one of their 11 penalties in this game.
  • The Oilers are the lowest-seeded team to ever reach the finals.
  • Edmonton outscored Anaheim 16-13 in the series, but they outshot the Oilers 183-121.

For more on the game, check out EdmontonOilers.com and NHL.com.

Did I think the Oilers would make it this far? Certainly not at the beginning of the year, though as a fan there’s always that glimmer of hope and belief. Roloson was a major addition to our team. Most of the season I complained along with everyone else about our goaltending, so to be in the finals with a great goalie is a nice surprise. The team is playing really well at the moment, and will certainly make great use of the time off before the next series starts.

And let me just say, Carolina or Buffalo, it doesn’t matter. I really hope we don’t hear crap about them not being hockey towns or any of that. Any team who can make it to the finals fully deserves to be there.

Let’s bring home the cup boys!

Yahoo hearts PayPal

Post ImageIn a deal announced earlier today, Yahoo and eBay are teaming up around advertising, e-commerce, and search. Yahoo becomes the exclusive provider of graphical ads on eBay, and will also provide some text ads. They are going to make a co-branded toolbar, and they’ll work to make their respective VoIP apps work together (Yahoo Messenger and Skype). The biggest thing of all though, at least as far as I am concerned, is Yahoo’s adoption of PayPal:

Yahoo will make eBay’s PayPal service the exclusive third-party provider of its online wallet, allowing customers to pay for Yahoo services from bank accounts, credit cards or balances associated with their PayPal accounts. PayPal will also be integrated into product offerings for Yahoo merchants and publishers, including the Yahoo Publisher Network, Yahoo Search Marketing and Yahoo Merchant Solutions.

Yahoo using PayPal essentially removes any doubt that PayPal is the de facto payment service on the Internet. It will be very hard for Google to successfully introduce a competitor now. Two of the largest sites on the net in Yahoo and eBay, plus the millions of other smaller e-commerce sites all using PayPal is an enormous hurdle for any rival payment service. PayPal is the closest thing we have to a truly digital wallet. Incredibly smart move by Yahoo, and excellent outcome for eBay.

Read: CNET News.com

Canadian Podcasting Survey

Post ImageFound this item via Podcasting News this morning – there’s a new survey aimed at discovering what is happening with podcasting in Canada. I just took the survey, which was relatively quick and painless, so you should too.

Toronto-based Sequentia Communications and Caprica Interacitve Marketing Inc. have joined forces to launch this podcast listeners survey. All of the findings will be part of a whitepaper on Canadian podcasting habits and audience size, to be released in June 2006.

The goal of this survey and its findings are to better understand the growth of podcasting in Canada and how quickly Canadians are adopting this new form of technology.

Apparently the survey is only available until tomorrow, so you better hurry if you want to fill it out! At the end of the survey you can enter an email address to get a summary of the results.

Read: Take The Survey

NAIT to be Canada's largest tech school

Post ImageAccording to an article in today’s Edmonton Journal, it appears that the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology is planning to spend a ton of cash in an effort to become one of North America’s largest technical schools. The project sounds fairly ambitious:

A brand-new campus twice the size of the current main campus will be built somewhere in the south side, and the main campus in north-central Edmonton will be expanded to include a “student village” with residences and possibly an LRT station.

Over the next 25 to 30 years, NAIT’s other eight locations in the Edmonton area, such as Souch campus at Gateway Boulevard and 71st Avenue, will be consolidated into the two main sites.

The $750-million project will attempt to increase enrolment to 95,000 students from the 65,000 to help in easing Alberta’s “critical shortage of skilled workers.” One of the highlights is a new Centre for Health and Wellness, to be completed as early as 2009, that will include a fitness centre, aquatic facilities, and a health clinic.

I admit I was a little surprised when I first read the article, but I think it’s great that all of our educational institutions are expanding, and not just the University. This project probably wouldn’t have been possible a few years ago, when the south LRT extensions had not been approved – the south side campus is a reflection of the direction Edmonton’s growth is heading, and in fact has been heading for quite some time.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this project unfolds. It’s too bad they didn’t announce it a couple months ago, when they could have been featured in some of the Edmonton real-estate and growth publications!

Read: Edmonton Journal

REVIEW: Windows Media Player 11 Beta

Post ImageAs I mentioned a few days ago, I recently downloaded and installed the new Windows Media Player 11 beta to test it out. I use WMP almost all day, every day, so it’s an important application for me, and I’d say I am somewhat qualified to offer a review.

Let’s start with the bad shall we? Importing the 20,000 or so items from my WMP10 library took a very long time, so installation wasn’t incredibly quick. The installer also offered to setup a music store, so I chose Urge, the brand new MTV-sponsored service. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work outside of the United States (when will companies launch things for Canada and the US simultaneously, I mean seriously!). Missing from this beta are the visualizations that would not support full screen controls, thus my favorite (“Plenoptic Vox”) is nowhere to be found. Also missing is the ability to browse for a single file and add it to the library – the only ways to do this now are by monitoring folders, or playing a file and setting the player to automatically add played items. All of the auto-playlists I had in WMP 10 are gone, except the ones I had created manually, and they are now combined with normal playlists in the tree. Album art is everywhere in WMP11, but it seems to be quite slow at downloading it.

Some of those things are really annoying (such as not being able to add a single file) but they aren’t deal-breakers as far as I am concerned. And fortunately, the good is well, really good. I would upgrade to WMP11 for the new search capability alone – it is light years beyond previous versions! As soon as you start typing, WMP11 finds matching artists, songs, and albums (in the Music tab anyway) and displays them instantly. In WMP10, any search would take at least a minute to complete, it was brutal. Aside from the search, the new UI is absolutely beautiful. I love the layout, the colors, the graphics, all of it! The look of the player is a huge improvement over previous versions. The organization is better too – there is a really defined distinction between Music, Video, Pictures, Recorded TV, and Other. The most beautiful part of all: icons for albums, artists and songs, meaning you can display items in a details list, or with tiles. It looks great! I like the black mini-player on the taskbar too.

Here are some other things to note:

  • Synchronization with my Zen Touch worked flawlessly, and no settings were lost from WMP10. I really like the new Sync UI too, much more clear.
  • Using the player effectively really means using the search functionality. I find myself going to the tree on the left to find an artist, only to realize they aren’t listed there anymore! Once I get used to typing in the search box, I’ll probably find I navigate much more quickly than with the tree anyway.
  • I haven’t tested ripping or burning in the new version, but I would expect them to work very similarly to previous versions.
  • The visualizations seem really buggy on my three display setup. Sometimes they work fine full-screen, other times they jump to a different monitor, it’s very strange.
  • The player has crashed on me maybe three or four times so far. Sometimes it seems to slow up for a second or two, but it’s fairly solid for the most part.
  • I am not sure if WMP11 updated Windows Media Connect or not, because the service uses an insane amount of memory. Maybe I just didn’t notice it from before? WMP11 itself only uses about 25 MB when I have music playing with the window open, and even less when minimized.

Some people, notably Todd Cochrane, are upset that WMP11 does not contain any podcasting features. I don’t think it makes a big difference – podcasting is going to grow with or without Microsoft baking support into WMP. And I would argue that Todd would end up using something else anyway, as any podcasting support in WMP11 would probably be incredibly basic.

My verdict: wait for the final release. There’s still too many bugs in this beta for most people to use it, but I think WMP11 is going to be awesome. I’ve been using the beta nonstop for a few days now, and overall I am quite impressed. I’d love to see it on Windows Vista too, but that will have to wait for another day.

Read: WMP11 Beta