Wal-Mart goes green

Though I do hope Wal-Mart will follow through on this, I can't help but remember Wal-Mart's "Bring it home to the USA" campaign, with which the company wrapped itself in the flag and positioned itself as the place to shop in order to support domestic manufacturing jobs. You may notice that the company got over that -- and the numbers show that even when it advertised itself that way, it never actually delivered. My hope is that the economics of sustainable development truly make sense for the company, because otherwise Wal-Mart will jettison its green initative the same way it ditched its Buy American campaign.

Smut in The Star

I was shocked and appalled when I read Francine Kopun's column "Toronto family plays tourists in their own city." After all, it contained actual, unveiled references to bare buttocks and oral sex! Honestly, it ruined the entire paper for me today. Such columns should obviously have flourescent warnings ("WARNING! SMUT!") printed above them to shield the eyes of the innocent such as myself. After all, a newspaper should always cater to the most prudish, intolerant, and sheltered reader (such as myself), regardless of the subject matter or the intended audience.

Though I sympathise with the author's predicament at the Art Gallery of Ontario and at an (adult-only, nocturnal, big-city) comedy club, I say shame on her for dirtying my poor, chaste mind with such thoughts and images. But really, what did she expect to encounter in an evil, libidinous metropolis like Toronto, much less in such dens of iniquity as an art gallery (shameless libertines!) and a comedy club (humour is the devil's work)? Frankly, she was fortunate to escape with her honour and her life. However, she must be condemned for dragging the rest of us down with her. Shame!

Linux unwelcome in hotels

In three different hotels I've had the same problem using my Ubuntu laptop with the free internet service. I run into an old "reply from unexpected source" error. This is a side effect of how hotels implement redirection to their terms-of-service warning page from any URL. Unfortunately, they're incompetent spoofers. The ISP providing support is GuestDirect, telephone number 1-866-221-6440, and they supply internet service to La Quinta Inns.

When buildings collide

Google maps has satellite images that are cleverly stitched together. But due to parallax, sometimes those images don't quite line up exactly as they should. It would be fascinating to see the image stitching algorithm.

Google takes on payment processing

Analysts are billing it as a "paypal killer" but I think that's off the mark.

Being me, I have to search for an apt analogy: if this is a PayPal killer, then mammals were a coelecanth killer. Which is to say: I think Google has a bigger target in mind than Paypal, which is a small piece of the pie (which everyone hates anyhow). Instead they're taking on the banks, First Data, and (since the acquisition of Verus) Sage.

Let's see, add together Google Base, Google "office" (gmail, spreadsheets, etc), and now Google Checkout? That's starting to look like an ERP or NetSuite-type solution pretty fast.

And now, a cautionary tale:

In 1974, IBM created SNA (the Systems Network Architecture). They built something with the ultimate depth of (mainframe) functionality in preparation for the explosion they saw coming in computer networks. I picture the Big Bluers sitting around a conference table in Poughkeepsie, chainsmoking Pall Malls and saying, "by gilly, someday there could be as many as a thousand machines networked together! We must make sure we defend IBM's mainframe market share in that environment!"

SNA has disappeared from view. Sure, there must be a couple of SNA networks out there... coelecanths. TCP/IP and other smaller, more flexible network stacks were what carried us to where we are today. I once read that OSI (another dead network protocol stack) was a "mammal designed by a saurian committee."

When the climate changes species either mutate or become an evolutionary niche player. Reproduction doesn't cut it anymore.