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I could not really believe that news when I heard about it this morning. I was even more shocked when I learned the details of the story. Malcom Watson, convicted sex offender towards a 15 years old student was exhiled here, in Canada. The judge Frank Clarka gave him the choice between one year in prison or three years in Canada. It’s true that in old times being exiled was the worst of shame.

But when you have two countries that are highly similar in lifestyle, you send him BACK to his family; wife and three kids that were already living up there! In other words his only loss is the job as a teacher he had, but he would of lost anyway since he’s a sex offender. Is Canada considered some kind of 5th world country where this man will live miserably for the next three years? Does he leave everything behind in shame of his actions? No he doesn’t!

Considering those facts, how can you put one year of prison and three years of “freedom” in Canada side by side. I’m outraged and I hope the Immigration department looks into this and invalidates this judgment, we don’t have to take him, imaging if we did the same thing and sent out our criminals to the US. Tell me what you think about this and explain the logic behind this if you consider it to be any. I’d like to read your comments on the subject (where ever you are in the world).

Source: U.S. teacher exiled to Canada after sexual abuse conviction

I guess I never paid attention but this software has been out for some time. It lets you watch TV over the Internet. In other words you stream different stations that are captured by individuals or by the broadcaster themselves. The TVU Player uses P2P technology to spread the bandwidth. The key word to remember is that it’s FREE. If you are living in the United States you probably already get all the main stations over the air, but in Canada or around the world we would have to pay local providers for these channels (FOX, NBC, ABC, CBS). Many take it for granted but when you think that you have access to channels like the Cartoon Network it’s value becomes increased.

Additional interest comes from the fact that foreign language viewers will be pleased to know that there are Asian and French channels available. Paired with many music video channels, Animal Planet and HBO to name a few. Sports fans get their share with a few ESPN and NHL Center Ice (broadcasters here can charge around $150 for it!). Sadly there are a few down sides to this great system, since it relies on P2P to share the data amongst viewers if there are not many people watching a station it will reduce it’s quality and in some cases the picture became unviewable combined with distorted sound. The channels are broadcasted with no alterations, this means you see advertising just like on regular TV. This way the content holder increase their viewers and they stay happy because the advertisement they care so much about is still there. There is no reason to pay monthly fees mostly for a infrastucture and profit to a third party when the Internet could be used as low cost medium (bandwith use mostly on the user side).
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, than what about streaming video? It’s more like a thousand books. Just try it out and tell me what you think of it. If you live in a house of plenty and all the TVs are busy… well you just turned your computer in an aditionnal TV WITHOUT a TV Tuner card. The TVUPlayer 2.2 can be taken from Download.com [here]. Their official website: www.tvunetworks.com

Ordinary people discovering extraordinary abilities. Heroes is a new show presented by NBC that is just what the title says. Strange that I discovered the show only on it’s third week but I’m amazed by how easily I got hook by it. If you like the comic book genre, love super hero story but would like to see them struggle that is the best way; right there.

We’ve had the X-Men, the Superman, the Spiderman, the Batman and the Fantastic Four. It’s hard to point exactly to witch existing comic it would relate but I think they are doing a good job to create a new dimension in which they can play. The series stats off with different people across the globe that start noticing their special abilities, one can fly, one can heal herself (super fast; à la Wolverine). Others can paint the future, read peoples mind and stop time.

Many of those individuals have to struggle with life as any human being should but are slowly alienated by their powers. Destiny seems to draw them together in New York and the murder of a scientist that was trying to prove this evolution theory adds to the drama of the show. You can’t have good guys if you don’t have bad ones; this is why we get a psycho-serial-killer that can move objects with his mind (telekinesis) such as blades, tables, chairs and stake you to a wall. You also need a catastrophic event; such as a vision of the future of New York being destroyed by a nuclear weapon. Finally but not least; there has to be some organization that will take advantage of the Heroes power for their own means and always seem a step ahead.

This is a beautiful settings for those extraordinary characters to live in and try to survive. They must unite to accomplish their destiny and it’s probably to save the world. The show airs Monday nights at 9 PM on both NBC and Global. Don’t you miss it, I sure won’t!

Official Website: www.nbc.com/Heroes/

I have been testing the next version of Microsoft’s operating system for a few months now and here is my review. I’ve been through five different build from pre-Beta, Beta, RC1, 5627 and now RC2. I went from a non-functional operating system from one that I can use on a daily basis (with a few bugs still).

I can hardly believe how come it took so long for Microsoft to develop a new OS considering that since Windows 95 they were releasing something almost every two years. I would consider Windows Vista RC2 (build 5744) to be almost ready for release; what really needs to be worked on are the third party software we rely on to do whatever we use the computer for. I have a lot of media on my hard drive. If I consider music and videos compressed by various codecs support for these need to be adopted quickly. On earlier builds I could not even play mp3 or videos without using Winamp. All those bugs aside are now corrected. I believe Windows Vista to be one serious OS. They look out for the security of their users by integrating tools such as Anti-Spyware, Firewall, Anti-Phising and permission management for running software. It is doubtful that this new version of Windows will be void of attacks because as anything becomes popular it will be attacked even more.

Key features of Windows Vista

The tester license I’ve been given gives me access to Windows Vista Ultimate witch has all the features the OS has to offer. We can highlight the next version of Internet Explorer ( IE7+) and Windows Media Player 11. Those are available to Windows XP users under beta. Nice add-ons include Windows Media Center and Speech Recognition. You can litteraly tell your computer what to do and what to write down. I takes some time to use to but that feature will develop nicely.

If I look at the performance of my system I am running a Pentium 4 2.4GHz, with 1791 MB of RAM, a 250 GB hard drive with an ATI Radeon 9550 256 MB video card. As you might already know Microsoft as released a tool that let’s you evaluate your PC for the Vista experience. My score was 3.3, set by the lowest score of the list because of my graphics card. I let myself impressed by the Aero interface. It’s not full transparency (that I find confusing) but a gentle glass look to all your windows. I could set the color theme and most applications I use were compatible with the Aero Glass theme.

I tend to use a lot of Beta (pre-released) software along side Vista, I got to test Office 2007 at the same time but will not review it now. I will focus on the few features I like. The Gadget sidebar is quite useful; I get to see a sleek calendar, the weather, a few RSS feeds, my pictures and a currency converter. Are those features essential ? Of course not, just like Aero this is Eye Candy. What gets my worried is that right now I use Google Desktop Search and Opera to provide my widgets/gadgets and if Windows gets it’s community to create all the appropriate items there will be no need for third party software.

We’ll have to wait for January for a complete version with a better compatibility with existing programs and a few months before you get everything up and running like you’d like it. Screenshots are via My Opera Albums!

The giant, Google is set to enlarge it’s market share on everything. They bought Writely a few months back, and YouTube more recently. You may like it or not, but Google Office is a reality that is in reach. By “Office” I mean a suite of products that both students, companies or any individuals can use to create a work oriented to manage and share information. It should include, using Microsoft’s long known Office, an email client, an advanced text editor, a calendar planner, a spreadsheet tool and one to create presentations. Now here is what is already there and what’s missing.

Gmail / Google Mail
This is one of their first tools I fell in love with. It’s obvious that at the time, giving a 1GB storage was eye-poping, but I’ve grown to love all those different features that brought me to adopt Gmail. Google Mail, as know in the UK allows you to send and receive emails, manage contacts and chat via their integrated Google Talk. You can sort your messages using labels. Gmail has it all except one thing, the ability to download POP from an other account. You can easily send mail as a different address through a verification process. However, if your alternate address doesn’t support mail forwarding you’re stuck on having to check your emails overthere. I know Yahoo lets you do this so it’s just a question of adding it willingly.

Google Calendar
A recent addition that appeared a few months ago. Nothing too special about this besides the fact is that it’s AJAX features makes it dynamic. Google Calendar let’s you handle different calendars and lets you share it’s content privately or over their database. You can set email or SMS reminders.

Google Docs & Spreadsheet
It was first Google Spreadsheet, but after their acquisition of Writely they finally integrated it to their design layout. The combined system lets you collaborate on a document. You can import and export in various formats witch include Microsoft Office and OpenOffice. You can write, edit, style, add formulas. The current limitations are located with the integration of images or graphics generated from tables. But all the basics are there and you can manage your documents easily. Both the star system and label/tag system is present.

Google Page Creator
Their page creator is the closest tool I found to resemble and way to create and share presentations. I agree it’s based on being a web page but their templates could easily be adapted to take the form of a presentation.

There are obviously sevral other tools that compensate for some missing features; think about Google Reader for RSS feed management or Google Groups.

Now this might look as a promo for Google but it really isn’t. I do use their tools to some extent even if they rarely are compatible with Opera on first try (they take their time to adopt standards) but this post is in reaction to their denial (last year) of creating an Office Suite. They are on the track already, all they need is to go with an offline version that would be handled by a version of Firefox that would be bundled with a “Google Toolbar” with access to all their tools and features. I would not mind an offline version that syncs with their servers and then can be editable on a different station. So as long as their service agreement terms allow me to keep all copyrights and whatever I write with any of their tools I would gladly give it a shot. All their tools could be financed by some Adsense.

Now if you were hoping on a free alternative to Microsoft Office I recommend OpenOffice.org (see previous post) or ZoHo an online tool that shows off similar features and might even be ahead of what Google currently has to offer. I love competition, it makes everyone works harder and bring new features and power to the consumers. Besides I love when it’s free, so take some time to google (web search) some key words included in this post. Now what do you all think of this ? Would you trust Google to send you targeted advertisement while keeping your privacy? Or do you believe Google should of stayed in the business of search engine.

I loved the first movie, enjoyed the second one but what about the third? The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift was released on DVD recently and here is my review.

This movie is seriously different from the previous ones. Tokyo Drift takes place outside USA and brings a complete new cast. Since it’s not to be considered a sequel (except from a small cameo role) this movie could of been named totally differently. As usual, the cars are slick, look way cool and obviously the “booth babes” that come with them are sexy. Unlike it’s predecessors this movie has little substance; there is no plot! I mean it’s so slim compared to what we could experience before. The themes of treason, love and honor are barely touched. The movie is really light and is not to be taken seriously. I did notice that they did not use a lot of CG elements and there was not as much focus on the cars themselves. I felt alienated by the soundtrack; where is the theme song?! I guess the first movie had such and impact on me.
To sum up the story: This kid living in the US always ends up in trouble because of car races. After moving from town to town many times with his mother she got enough and decided to send him over to Japan, Tokyo where their divorced father lives. You take the bad boy out of town and he’s up to the same tricks again. He makes new friends within the Drift Racing underground and of course some enemies. If I say more I’ll spoil what fun is left but I consider it as a good rental for a lazy Friday.