Tag: Canada

Is Canada Becoming a Digital Ghetto?

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date November 27, 2008
2 Comments on Is Canada Becoming a Digital Ghetto?

Over at CBC’s Search Engine, Jesse Brown asks an important question: Is Canada Becoming a Digital Ghetto? I’m reproducing the article in its entirety below.

Here are three things that suck about being Canadian right now:

Last week the CRTC sided with Bell against a group of small Internet Service Providers who want to offer their customers unthrottled connections where what they download is their own business and not subject to interference.
In last week’s throne speech the Conservative government renewed their intention to “modernize” Canadian copyright law. Their effort to do so last session was Bill C-61, a woefully unbalanced and retrograde piece of legislation that led to the greatest citizen backlash to any proposed bill in recent memory. Yet there has been no indication from new Industry Minister Tony Clement that a much-needed public consultation will take place. The best he has offered is the possibility of a “slightly different” version of the bill.
Twitter has just announced that they are killing outbound SMS messaging in Canada due to exorbitant and constant rate hikes from Canadian cell providers (former Industry Minister Jim Prentice vowed to get tough on SMS price gouging, then backpedalled). Cell phone rates in Canada are among the highest in the world, and the result is that mobile penetration is pathetically low and that emerging new cultural platforms like Twitter are being hobbled.

This growing list of backwards policies is already creating a sense of digital isolation: Canadians can’t stream the videos Americans stream, download the files Americans download, remix the media Americans remix, or tweet the way Americans tweet.

With the election of Barack Obama, digital culture in the U.S. hit a tipping point, where a robust online public sphere proved itself capable of changing the world. Meanwhile, here in Canada we’re approaching our own tipping point, where a series of ignorances and capitulations threaten to turn our country into a digital ghetto.

[Thanks to Mark Relph for pointing me to this article.]

Tags "The Man", backwards-thinking, Bell Canada, Bill C-61, call to action, Canada, copyfight, copyright, government, mobile, packet shaping, policy, SMS, telcos, telecom, throttling, Twitter, wireless

Uncategorized

I’m Bringing Hexy Back (or: Programming Articles Will Return to Global Nerdy)

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date November 21, 2008

Disruption

A wrench jamming a machine Soon – probably in December – in addition to pointing you to interesting tech news articles and bits of geek culture, I will also be returning to writing development articles. And yes, that includes the long-on-hiatus Enumerating Enumerable series of articles cataloguing the methods in Ruby’s Enumerable module.

The past couple of months have been disruptive as all Hell, what with:

My getting laid off at the end of September
A mad dash of interviews in the first half of October
A whirlwind hiring at Microsoft
Flying down to L.A. and drinking from the firehose at PDC 2008

And now,

Working like mad to acclimate myself with a new employer — my first Fortune 500 company, and my first with over 200 employees!)
Readjusting to a new work style: working largely from home, with runs out into “the field” and the Mississauga and downtown Toronto offices
Re-acclimating myself with Microsoft development tools, which I haven’t used since early 2002

It’s been exciting and fun, but there are only so many hours in the day and so much energy one can muster to do things, which meant that the programming articles, which take a lot of work, testing and verifying, had to fall by the wayside. But they’re coming back soon.

Country First

Joey deVilla poses with a Mountie outside the Canadian Embassy in Washington, DC
Me and a Mountie at the Canadian Embassy
in Washington, DC in 2000,
a.k.a. the “experimenting with nutty hair colour” year.

“We hired you first and foremost for Canada,” said my boss, John Oxley, Director – Audience Marketing at Microsoft Canada, “and for Microsoft second.”

That means that while I’ll be writing a lot about Microsoft developer tools and technologies, my primary goal as Microsoft Developer Evangelist is to use my tech evangelism powers to encourage, assist, grow and cast a spotlight on the Canadian software industry. I get it; a healthy Canadian software ecosystem is good for all players, including “The Empire”.

If you’re a software developer in Canada, whether you’re writing enterprise software for a big corporation or a one-person shop operating out of your den, a full-time employee or a student in high school, or a Microsoft tech “true believer” or a hardcore Free Software/Open Source type, you are the person I’m trying to reach.

So if you’re a developer, watch this space – some meaty development articles are coming soon!