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On Friday Norton released it’s Kids’ Top 100 Searches of 2009. Predictably, Facebook and YouTube were among the top 3. What I found a little unsettling, was that the #4 and #5 most searched for terms were “sex” and “porn”.

Now, I know that teens will be curious about those subjects and that’s normal.  If you scroll to the bottom of the Norton page, it lists the searches by age categories. “Porn”, was the fourth most popular search performed by kids 7 and under! That has me worried if parents know what their kids are doing while they’re online, and if they know how to enable “Parental Controls” for when their children are online.

The CBC published an article yesterday about a mother in British Columbia, who’s Rogers account was charged 0.15$ per incoming text message. Although her contract states that all text messages are free, Rogers, implemented the charge on incoming text messages in July of this year.

According to the article “Her 16-year-old daughter sent and received close to 6,000 texts in one month — that’s 200 per day — to and from those numbers.” Let me do some quick math on that… 200 times 0.15… carry the 1…   $30.00 ?!?!?!

That’s just for one of her 3 kids, and not including her own incoming texts. As much as Canadian wireless companies are spending on advertising and making off their clients. You would think that they would inform their customers about upcoming changes to plans. A little fair warning would give people time to adjust their texting habits. While the additional charges are still ridiculous, being up front about them would show some respect for their clients, and go a long way in my eyes for being a company that operates ethically.

You can read the full CBC article here

I came across an interesting blog article here. Although it states that current phones aren’t capable of those speeds and that the only way to connect to those networks is through a laptop’s wireless, it’s only a matter of time before the technology is adopted and widespread. While it’s easier to implement something like this in smaller countries like Norway and Sweden, it will eventually find it’s way to North America. Imagine being able to work from anywhere on your laptop, without having to worry about trying to find an open wireless network. The potential for business productivity is astounding.

Some of us spend our spare time watching tv, reading, surfing the internet. Some others, like myself, spend a lot of our spare time playing video games. I personally only play games on the computer. I don’t have any consoles (XBox, Playstation, etc…). Heck, I don’t even own a TV. Wether you want to want to belive it or not, games have become a huge, and one of the fastest growing parts of the software industry. In 2007, there was an estimated 800 million regular gamers worldwide, and some $31.6 billion spent by consumers on games (surpassing music sales by the way). That’s a hefty amount.

Some of you may think that games are predominantly played by teenagers and children, but the real truth is that the majority of gamers are 35 years old. The ESA (Entertainment Software Association) has some surprizing facts on it’s website that may shock you. http://www.theesa.com/

Now, if you’re  in that minority that’s not playing…
… what the heck are you doing when you’re online?

For the past few months I’ve been monitoring peoples reactions to Google’s announcement that they will be releasing an operating system next year, “Chrome OS”. Partnered with some of the industry’s heavyweights such as Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba. This is not an endeavor they are taking lightly.

According to their blog, here.
“Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems.” . Now as far as I know, that’s most of the world’s population, that owns a computer built in the last 10 – 15 years.

This OS is reportedly to be optimized for the cloud. With the convergence of their other projects, and people’s changing views on what “cloud computing” is. It may possibly put them at the forefront of (what I belive is going to be) the next OS race.

The world is going mobile and Apple and Google are looking like the two big heavy weights in the battle. Microsoft, as always, may be keeping things under wraps for now, and may end up being a surprize contender. But, as it stands, they have only really poked at it. This late in the game, Microsoft is at a significant disadvantage. If they are depending on the release of Windows 7 to carry them through, till they get their market research in order, it may be too late. At this point they are relying on people not giving up their conventional desktops and laptops in lieu of net books, iPhones, and Internet connected smartphones.

Chrome OS, combined with the more open version of Android may pose a serious threat to Microsoft’s offerings. Add in Apple’s, making their moblie platform open for development, we may see a major shift in the market.

Just food for thought…

Well, I guess Microsoft fall guilty of piracy (of sorts).

“Canadian company i4i has won a patent infringement lawsuit against Microsoft Corp. that will see the major software maker pay the Toronto, ON-based firm $200 million.”

The full artile is here.

You may notice a banner on the right side of the page. It links to a site called “freerice”. Through sponsors, everytime you get a question right, they donate 10 grains of rice.
“Here is how it works. When you play the game, sponsor banners appear on the bottom of your screen. The money generated by these banners is then used to buy the rice. So by playing, you generate the money that pays for the rice donated to hungry people.”
I think this is a great example of how online advertizing can work for somethig other than selling something for personal gain.

Sorry people, I would have posted an update on the Linux Laptop Project, but this sytem decided it wanted the evening off. Hardware glitch with the raid controller that in actuality only and hour and a half to fix. But, it was enough to throw a monkey wrench into my evening. I kind of lost all momentum when the system decided it didn’t want anything to do with one of the hard drives.

Luckily Candice Jarrett was on her ustream tonight. Great singer/songwriter/musician. Candice Jarrett’s Website Great artist that’s down to earth, and doing it on her own. Relaxing music to work to. Kept me from getting ticked off when my own stuff doesn’t work properly.

So, I managed to (temporarily) correct the problem by swapping the hard drives to channels 2 & 3 instead of the 0 & 1 that they were on, and running a repair install of windows twice. Apparently this is a known problem with the particular chipset my motherboard has. I shall investigate further.

So while I was repairing Windows on this sytem, the Laptop Linux Project continued on. I ended up installing Fedora on the laptop, but due to the issues with this sytem, that’s as far as I got. Just the install. No updates, no configuration, nothing. I’ll post an update once I’ve had time to play with the install.