I just spent about an hour listening to Clay Shirky, a New York University "Internet Thinker", talk about what is happening to the newspaper industry as it struggles with the online world and the changes to its market.

My morning newspapers of the past have shrunk to a single one because their individual sizes did not add up to what one used to be - so we cut back to one and find more news on the web instead. With the crop of new e-book readers being shown this week in Las Vegas at the I may find one that will satisfy both my wife and myself for sitting at the breakfast table - then we'll cancel the last remaining one.

The problem Clay Shirky talks about is not the fact that the newspapers are dieing - but that the whole industry is fragmenting and we, the consumers who purchased the newspapers in the past, have to work harder to find our reliable sources of "commercial, long-range" journalism (as opposed to opinionism which is so rampant on the web, this blog being not much different).

Without the money generated from the newspaper's captive advertising market - where the advertisers paid because there was no alternative - there simply isn't any incentive, let alone money, for the types of journalism that exposed things like the Watergate affair or the Catholic church covering up pedophilia in their numbers. So the question is - who is going to replace the newspapers in doing "accountability journalism"? How are they going to be funded? Will the exposure-style of journalism die?

Yesterday I took a short drive from my home in Pitt Meadows, across the new Pitt River Bridge, to the marina just downstream on the Port Coquitlam side of the river. I was lucky enough to get there just as one of the residents was coming up the dock and he kindly let me go to the end of the warf to take a series of pictures of the dismantling of the oldest of the pair of swing-bridges that the new bridge replaces.

I've stitched them together to make a single shot that shows the whole bridge in huge detail.

I've been working from home for most of the past 40 years. Some of the businesses I've worked with have had "real" offices - and sometimes I've spent much of my time for months on end going to those offices, but I've always maintained a home office where I've done work.

I've hired people without meeting them face-to-face - and worked with some of them without ever meeting them. Some of my customers do much of their business from their home - and there are major benefits to them because of this; not the least of which is some tax advantages as my good friend, David Ingram, will tell you.

The business world is finally getting to understand that this is a viable way of running businesses. A study recently done by Emergent Research shows just how much impact we home-based businesses(Business Week) have on the economy.

The facilities now available to web retailers that track how you got to their site allow all manner of "interesting" things to be done once you get there.

A case in point is this article noting that at least one online seller actually charges a premium if you find their site via the Bing "Cashback" facility. Now I personally have not used this facility, in fact I do very little of my purchasing online for a variety of reasons but that's another matter, however the article presents the case very well. If you read the article you'll find that the author used the Bing Cahsback facility to find a reseller for a camera - then went to the site following the link. The price quoted in the Bing listing is the one that was shown on the web site when he pulled up the link. He then opened up the same page (presumably by copying and pasting the URL in the address bar) using a DIFFERENT web browser and the price shown was lower by almost $50 (US$43.84 to be exact but we're in Canada and the difference would have been close to CDN$50)

January 18, 2004 - http://www.drmwatch.com/drmtech/article.php/3294391 article that summarizes DRM in 2003.

December 5, 2003 - I've been following (for many reasons) the battle between SCO and what seems like the rest of the software world, at least to me. Watching this battle (and it can be classified only as a battle, not simply a law suit) I came to the realization that I was witnessing a revolution again.

One of the major problems I and others see in the large-scale use of DRM is the potential loss of public access to the copyright materials at the end of the copyright period. You might think that the loss of (for example) all the images of Mickey Mouse, to future generations would be not all that significant, but you would be wrong. You must take the problem to its logical conclusion; that of every aspect of humanity's history for the period starting now, potentially not being available to coming generations for some technical reason. The impact would be literally devastating.

This problem is not limited solely to DRM, it also is a problem with proprietary data formats in general. I have a number of DAT (4mm digital audio tape) tapes we used in the mid 90s for backup of our ISP's computers that we can't read now.

Today - July 11, 2009 - I'm sitting in front of 5 monitors of various sizes hooked to an AMD quad-core Phenom system with 8 Gigs of RAM and well in excess of 2 Terabytes of local disk. Networked to the system are several other systems from older 2GHz Intel machines to Core-2 systems with another 20+ Terabytes of disk. All run various flavours of Linux - from an older Red Hat 9 system to the latest Fedora Core 11 (FC-10 on the main desktop at the moment)

I believe in the "paperless" office - and believe that the only way to achieve this is if the computer screen real estate is at least as large as the physical desk real estate. Otherwise you find yourself printing out things just so you can refer to them while working on your computer desktop. The one and only printer in the house (an old Lexmark) is in another room and seldom sees use. A box of paper lasts me a couple of years.

On this system I have 3 dual-head video cards and room for a 4th. I have one spare port (5 used out of the 6 available at the moment) and will likely not use it until I put the 4th card in - at which time I'd go to a 4-wide by 2 high setup with all identical monitors. I don't expect to do this for some time - the current setup works just fine.

I do have a couple of laptops - one of which (Compaq Presario) still runs the Windows XP that came with it, although it also has Cygwin (open source software that runs on Windows) on it. The other (an older Toshiba) I just updated to FC-11. Aside from customer machines that find their way to my hardware table, there are no other Windows machines in the house. I do however have VMware with various flavours of Windows available as virtual machines. These are mostly for diagnosing friend and customer problems and for the odd time when Open Office just can't make sense of a Microsoft Office document of some kind.

I still make use of one of the old IBM keyboards. I have a couple of the Lexmark ones around too - but I'll have to start looking for a replacement at some point if another accident with wine happens :)

Over the past several weeks David Ingram and I have been putting a new online video program together. David is a veteran radio and TV host as well as being "The Taxman" - hero to those who live and work across borders such as the Canada/US one but including many of the free world's borders in any combination.

I've been on David's shows in the past. In this one we touch on all manner of topics from the Internet to grouse hunting with David Hancock; with whom I've been associated almost as long as with David Ingram.

Read on and enjoy the interview