IT in Today’s Globe and Mail

The business section of the Globe and Mail today was something of a bonanza for pieces on information technology, and I thought that I’d pass the links along for those of our readers too busy to digest the (or that) morning paper.

First off, of course, is the story about the launch of Windows 7 in Canada. Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, showed up in Toronto to give a talk to a bunch of IT professionals, hoping to help them forget about the Vista disaster. The Globe has a whole section online with a dozen or so articles about Windows 7 from various viewpoints. Seems from one of the stories that six in ten companies will skip “upgrading” to 7. Any law firms out there taking the plunge?

Then there’s a story about the CRTC’s decision to permit the big ISPs to engage in traffic shaping (or “throttling” as it is sometimes known). The deal is that Bell and Rogers have to give you 30 days notice that they intend to “shape” your bandwidth. The long CRTC decision — Review of the Internet traffic management practices of Internet service providers — is available online. If I may poach from another news source here, in what is a Globe moment, I offer this quote from CRTC Chairman, Konrad von Finckenstein, and nominate it as one of those most likely to be a source of amusement and wonder in the not too distant future, akin to Ken Olsen’s famous 1977 statement that “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.” :

“I doubt you will ever have unlimited capacity that can accommodate everybody.”

Heading per saltum to page 10, we find a piece on Thoora, a Canadian internet startup. Thoora hopes to be a news aggregator that starts with the buzz and works back to the original story. There’s a beta site for you to try, and a FAQ to explain things.

And back to page 5 for another big story, this one about Google’s moves to blunt Bing’s advances, a story that the Globe doesn’t put online I suppose because its source is the Wall Street Journal, where it’s behind a paywall. One aspect of the story is the deals each of Microsoft and Google have struck with Twitter to better integrate that company’s data in their search results. In this vein Google has announced a new feature, Social Search, that doesn’t yet appear to be available. Another aspect, that interests me more, sees Google getting into the music sales business: stay tuned for next week’s formal announcement. A signal feature of this service will be the ability to stream a song for a much lower cost than you’d pay to purchase the MP3.

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