David Akin

A new blogger and a neat hotel room

Blogger, whose services I use to publish this blog, has completely updated things and added new features. I can now publish an RSS feed through Blogger. That's cool. I was trying to figure out if Moveable Type would work with hosting provider and my provider had said that some others had tried unsuccessfully to get MT to work. I wanted to move to MT primarly for RSS feeds and for the Trackback option. But if Blogger has RSS, I'll likely hang here.

Now: I'm finding out about all this as I connect to the network via my in-room high-speed connection in the Best Western hotel in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. I'd be paying $10 or $15 a day for this service in any business hotel in a bigger city but here, in my $100-a-nite roadside motel, high-speed access is all part of the deal!! (You also get some free bowling in the alley next door and access to the hotel's pool and it's 5 1/2 storey water slide but that's another story.)

If you're looking over this blog and some formatting strikes you as odd or something doesn't make sense let me know. The Blogger folks are warning that some stuff may look a little odd.

Digital Divide, Part 2

My Globe story on the new digital divide in Canada:

Girls in Canada's high schools are less confident on computers and the Internet than boys and use them less, says a study that describes a new kind of digital divide in Canadian society.

The new digital divide, says the study released yesterday by Statistics Canada, is not about access to computers and the Internet -- that gap has all but disappeared, it says -- but about a gender gap when it comes to attitudes and opportunities in a knowledge-based economy that relies heavily on a computer-literate work force.

"The gap is important because it might perpetuate the male advantage in the workplace," said Dianne Looker, a sociology professor at Acadia University in Wolfville, N.S. "The males are still more likely to get jobs and more likely to get good jobs. If the predictions are correct -- that one needs skills and needs a diversity of skills -- then the boys are being positioned better."

Admin: Web site up then down

My hosting provider suffered a cracker attack yesterday and the only workaround was to pull their server off-line, wipe the drive clean, and re-install their OS. Seems to be up and working fine so far today . . .

And if you like that, there's a bridge in Brooklyn . . .

Air Canada is Canada's flagship airline and it's in a heap of trouble. The airline has been operating under court-ordered bankruptcy protection for than a month or so now. It has re-negotiated deals with its nine unions although there's a good chance that one of its pilots union may vote against the deal union executive brokered, something which could put the whole operation into bankruptcy. Through all this, the stock is still trading and is one of the most active issues on the Toronto Stock Exchange!!
But that's not all.
A few weeks ago, Air Canada put out a press release, in which it said "it is highly likely that a substantial portion of the company's unsecured debt will be converted to new equity and that there will not be any meaningful recovery to existing equity of the Company." In other words, here is a company operating under bankruptcy protection actually warning shareholders that the shares they hold were pretty much worthless and nothing was going to change that.
Didn't matter. Stock keeps going up and down.
Today, the stock closed up -- that's right, up -- six per cent on news that GE, who owns Air Canada's 100 biggest planes, wants the planes back unless it gets a new deal with the new airline. That news came out shortly after the main pilots union said it was halting the voting on the deal to save the airline because it was upset with an arbitrator's ruling in a labour dispute over seniority.
Just to recap then: Air Canada's pilots could drive the company under and GE wants to take back 100 of Air Canada's planes. That was good enough that somebody phoned up their broker with a "buy" order.
I still don't get this capitalism thing.

It keeps on growing, and growing, and growing . . .

From the Web site Light Reading:

Internet traffic growth is still growing, according to a report released earlier this week by researchers at the University of Minnesota. ...Andrew Odlyzko, director of the Digital Technology Center at the University of Minnesota, who authored the report, says Internet traffic is steadily growing about 70 percent to 150 percent per year. On a conference call yesterday to discuss the results, he said traffic growth slowed moderately over the last couple of years, but it had mostly remained constant for the past five years.

Andrew Odlyzko, incidentally, is one of my favourite experts for the simple reason that he almost always has something original and useful to say. Andrew was the first, so far as I know, to point out that UUNet (later to be folded into Worldcom) was telling a big fat fib when it once said that Internet traffic on its own networks was doubling every few months. Odlyzko said -- and proved -- that it just couldn't be so. Sadly, no one listened and entire business plans were built to fail. The folks at AT&T and Sprint were among those who should have listened. They saw all these reports from UUNet/Worldcom that traffic was doubling every month and yet they saw no evidence of such growth on their own backbones. Rather than assume that Worldcom was lying -- which it was and which Odlyzko proved -- AT&T and Sprint's top executives thought it was because their own sales staff were incompetent and/or they weren't spent enough building new networks.
So AT&T and Sprint started rolling out these monstrous capital budgets and then when other telco concerns saw what they were doing, they jumped in and jacked up the capital spending. Nortel, Lucent and the rest enjoyed the best couple of years of their existence before, as we all know, the house of cards built on the myth of Internet traffic growing every couple of months came crashing down.
Now, Odlyzko says Internet traffic is still growing at a heckuva annual clip . . .

Digital divide

Schools appear to play a vital role in bridging a "digital divide" between rural and urban high school students in terms of access to computers and frequency of their use, according to one of the first research papers done under the new Data Research Centre program.
The study was released today by Statistics Canada, a federal government agency.
   However, the same is apparently not the case when it comes to two other forms of digital divide: the gap between male and female students, and the gap between students whose parents have low levels of education and those whose parents are highly educated. Female students, in particular, tend to report lower levels of computer skills competency.
The full study is here.