SteveX Compiled

The Ottawa Citizen has a short article that gives a good summary of what’s going on with this current issue of the government voting to re-open a nuclear reactor that the folks responsible for nuclear safety in Canada shut down (for safety reasons).
The gist of it is that this is a small reactor whose purpose [...]

In case you weren’t aware, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is back (as “A Daily Show with Jon Stewart” - as Jon explains, it’s not The Daily Show without the full staff, it’s just A Daily Show), with Stewart writing his own material until the strike ends.  Same with the Colbert Report (now with [...]

There have been quite a few stories lately about “taser deaths”.  Basically, police say they’re using them correctly, Taser International says they’re non-letal, yet sometimes, people die after being tasered.
Often the stories that make the news as controversial are the ones where a taser is used on someone who is already restrained, basically to force [...]

You know how sometimes when you’re watching an action movie and you see a scene where it just looks like they used models?

To me, that photo looks like models. But it’s the real thing, the bridge collapse in Minneapolis. Maybe the movies got it right.

So Microsoft’s opponents are once again wielding the government against Microsoft in the EU.  In my opinion this is just a sleazy way of making both the EU and Microsoft waste a lot of time and money. 
Wasting Microsoft’s money is a reasonable goal for a competing company; but the EU should be smarter than to [...]

I find this news surprising:  88400 PS3’s were sold in Japan in 2 days. 
It’s surprising because there were 100,000 units available in Japan.  This means there are ~11600 unsold units in stores in Japan.
Did Sony not manage to sell out in their home turf on opening day?  That’d be a significant statement about the [...]

I live up in the frozen wasteland, the Great White North, Canada.  I can say “up” when referring to Canada because Google Analytics shows most people who read stuff here are in the US.  Most of you can just skip ahead to the next unread subscription, because I’m going to talk about the state of [...]

I live in Ottawa, and the City of Ottawa has been planning a light rail transit project for years. A ton of work has gone into buying the land, seeking bids, architecting bridges and roads, and so on.
But now there’s an election coming, and because it’s expensive, light rail is being dragged through the [...]

Here’s the reason, in a nutshell.  Intel is paying Skype to disable features when the user is not using an Intel CPU.
I’ve been looking at buying a new system, eyeing the prices of the new Dell XPS systems.  I’ve been doing more video processing lately, and my current system just takes too long. 
I’ve always [...]

Cisco is purchasing Scientific-Atlanta for $6.9 billion dollars.
This significant because Scientific Atlanta makes the set-top boxes that many cable providers use (including my local one, Rogers).  The battle for the living room is raging, and having an “in” like that is a serious advantage.
If Microsoft or Sony or Apple or anyone else are going to [...]