Welcome to engeniusBLOG

Rogers Wireless has developed a very poor reputation for customer service in Canada, where it is the largest wireless provider. They have also gained an unfortunate reputation for prices that are higher than the competition: competition that they have tried to keep as far away as possible with quite aggressive lobbying against wireless expansion. I currently have a couple of grumbles against Rogers which have not yet been sorted out. One is the exact opposite of that experienced by Ms. Gabriella Nagy from Toronto. Her wireless account with Rogers was in her own name, her maiden name. The family cable TV supplier was also Rogers, and that account was in her husband’s name. No problem so far. Unfortunately, Rogers decided (and how is unclear) that the wireless account and the cable TV account should be billed together when the husband decided to add home telephone and ADSL service to the cable TV account. There was probably a customer service bonus involved, allowing the company to get closer to that ma...

If you have been around the semiconductor industry long enough you will have seen numerous boom and bust years. Some of the lows have been due to recessions but a great deal more of them have been self-created by the industry. We seem to be in one of those years now. The world in general, and some countries more than most, have been through a major downturn. It would be easy to attribute the start of the whole process as being the reckless lending on real estate in the US: loans of 125% of property appraisal simply made no sense to anybody but the immediate profiteers of those loans, often also made to people who would not have been able to back up their statements of income. That ridiculous period was compounded by the greed of Wall Street in putting all those lousy loans together as sellable assets; getting credit ratings put on them that were totally unjustified; selling the packages to investors whose greed didn’t look, or want to look, into the detail; but all the time insuring those packages for ...

My first computer was an Apple IIe - which, in 1983, was eons superior to the only computer-like device operating in the company I was working for near Santa Barbara, California. That was an IBM word processor which was either mindless, or had a mind of its own, depending on your point of view. The IIe was in production for nearly eleven years – far longer than any other product to come out of Cupertino. It was hellaciously expensive (over $5000 if memory serves), had the most awful word processing program that anyone could ever have devised, and regularly blew a fuse when the NTSC video output socket shorted to ground because of mechanical imperfections. I completely forget what I did on that computer to justify the enormous expenditure, apart from starting a novel about the assassination of a president in a motel in Santa Barbara: a tome that was, quite rightly, condemned to the circular trash can in its floppy format. The 6502 processor with a 1.023 MHz clock seemed fast enough at the time, and wou...

You would have to be living on a desert island – hopefully with nice clean sand – to have missed the disaster that has hit the Gulf of Mexico in the last days. The story of the conflagration of the oil rig Deepwater Horizon with the tragic loss of eleven lives has been making the headlines around the world, and rightly so. The company leasing this very technologically-advanced rig, BP, has a reputation as being among the best of the oil exploration companies in caring for the environment. With more than two hundred thousand US gallons of light crude oil now known to be leaking from the sea bed, every day, the effects of the continuing outpouring will outpace the Exxon Valdez spill twenty-one years ago (March 24, 1989) when the tanker, en route from Valdez, Alaska, to Long Beach, California, ran aground on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound with the command chair occupied by the captain, who had been drinking. Only seventy thousand gallons of oil were released by the freighter the New Carissa...