It was the launch of the Toronto Greenhouse business forum, hosted at the Steam Whistle Brewery. I’ve walked past the brewery about one million times but never been inside, and it is classy.
Then I met my new pal, Veyko:
march 31 2009
He’s a veteran IT guy whose brain moves so fast I had trouble keeping up. Highlights of what I learned include:
– Canada and France pay the highest cel phone rates in the world
– this will end this summer when two big competitors arrive in country and competition ensues
– Google has mapped out the growth of the internet via Gmail email because remember when it was “invite only” for a couple years? That created a giant trackable pyramid
– I won’t be affected by the virus that’s rumored to come tomorrow because I’m on a Mac
– there will be a new spectrum opened up soon (it used to be for TVs) that will provide obscenely fast access to the internet everywhere . This is called the ‘White Space’, Google really wants it, read more here.
Then it became almost like a conspiricacy theory class:
Veyko: Okay now, why was Windows able to take over the world?
Me: Ha, I got this one! Because they are secretly backed by the US government, who have a vested interest in having access to every desktop there is using their hidden key, the NSA_KEY.
Veyko: There’s more.
So there is something called a kernel embedded in all Windows Operating Systems (Apple does not have a kernel in their OS). Anything your computer does runs into the kernel on one side and comes out the other. A programmer, no matter how skilled, can never ever open the kernel, access, affect or shut down the kernel. No one knows what happens inside the kernel. Maybe I should not be talking about this kernel…
And then he told me on my trip I must stop in Moose Factory , a northern city in Ontario where it’s so quiet I’ll be looking around confused, wondering where all the sounds went. It’s also the oldest settlement in Ontario (1673), the second location of “The Hudson Bay Company”, and is on Factory Island. These names, I’m loving them.
