In an effort to stay more connected to Canadian IT news and expand the breadth of the information I filter through, I signed up, several months ago, to ITBusiness‘ newsletter. I appreciate the coverage of Canadian topics (and choose to ignore the fact that most articles center around Ontario and ignore half the country), and believe that it provides a great perspective on the Industry. This week, there have been several articles that I would love to comment on in depth, but will have to pass on links and quick comments due to time constraints.

Accenture’s CTO gets his Web 2.0 on - Some of the points touched on in this article are amazing. Accenture is obviously not insignificant, and Donald Rippert, as CTO of the company, obviously has a major role with the company. The article touches on several different aspects of the Internet that could and should be adopted into the corporate world. For me personally, I also find it interesting that Rippert values the habits of his 13 year old son (something I hope to comment on further in another article).

Canfor clearcuts its server fleet - Similar to the theory in an article I wrote about S3, Canfor Corp is in the midst of a hardware consolidation project that will take them down from 83 machines to less than a dozen, save the company $100,000 a year, and one of many companies that is finding advantages in virtualization.

Wanted: 89,000 IT employees - This clip from the article says it best: Employers want more well-rounded employees with soft skills and a flair for marketing the products they work on, and real-world experience. While these university graduates are in short supply, there is also a dearth of IT grads. With the Industry not only expanding in size but in scope as well, the consumer and/or average user is the one who will likely suffer from any shortage in IT employees. The article suggests that the number of graduates per year is about half or less than a third of the number of new jobs per year.

I get a great assortment of forwards, some new, some old, and some that I probably wish I’d never seen before and will spend WAY too much money discussing with my therapist, but we won’t go there. However, one of the frequent ones we all probably receive are little helpful tips, like margarine isn’t good for you. A response was quickly sent out to the mass-email with a simple message of ‘You can’t believe everything you read’ and the link: http://www.snopes.com/food/warnings/butter.asp. Definitely check out the link. I love the Internet, but it does create an avenue for misinformation and this addresses the idea of online identities and what sources you can trust from a different perspective…

Read along below:

The difference between butter and margarine?

Both have the same amount of calories, butter is slightly higher in saturated fats at 8 grams compared to 5 grams. Eating margarine can increase heart disease in women by 53% over eating the same amount of butter according to a recent Harvard Medical Study.

Eating butter increases the absorption of many other nutrients in other foods, butter has many nutitional benefits where margarine has a few only because they are added! Butter tastes much better than margarine and can enhance the flavors of other foods. Butter has been around for centuries where margarine has been around for less than 100 years.

Now for Margarine, very high in trans fatty acids triple risk of Coronary Heart Disease, Increases total and LDL (This is bad Cholesterol), Lowers HDL cholesterol and this is the good one, Increases the risk of cancers by up to five fold, lowers quality of breast milk, decreases immune response, and decreases insulin response.

And here is the most disturbing fact……

Margarine is but one molecule from being PLASTIC….. (This fact alone was enough to have me avoiding margarine for life and anything else that is hydrogenated, this means hydrogen is added changing the molecular structure of the food.)

You can try this for yourself, purchase a tub of margarine and leave it in your garage or shaded area, within a couple of days you will note a couple of things, no flies, not even those pesky fruit flies will go near it, (that should tell you something) it does not rot, smell differently… Because it has no nutritional value, nothing will grow on it, even those teeny weeny microorganisms will not find a home to grow… Why?

Because it is nearly plastic. Would you melt your Tupperware and spread that on your toast?

The continuing competition between Google and Microsoft has led both companies to make several drastic moves. Google made a huge effort to secure exclusive rights to the MySpace search, and to counter, Microsoft’s contract with Facebook for the equivalent rights is suggested to have been written at a loss to the software giant. Microsoft releases Office 2007 and will look to further include online aspects in subsequent releases of the popular suite of applications, and on the heels of that release is Google’s Small Business Apps. Most recently, Google paid 10 times the reported annual revenue for DoubleClick, quite a generous offer, but was mostly trying to prevent Microsoft from acquiring the company. If battling Google on those two issues wasn’t enough, Microsoft is also trying to take on Adobe’s (formerly Macromedia) Flash with their Silverlight release (more info here), and the common user, by terminating reseller shipments of XP by 2008. I’m not necessarily saying that people have to switch to Vista, but the comments on that last-linked article don’t make complete sense to me; anyone who is using a machine that runs Windows 9x software should be looking to make an upgrade to their hardware regardless, and there will be a huge surplus of machines from people who have upgraded that can be purchased used for a reasonable price.

It was only a matter of time before something like this popped up for TechCrunch. I’m sure there have been all sorts of different negative responses and probably even some nasty threats to Michael Arrington, either on TechCrunch or his personal blog, CrunchNotes, but reading over the lawsuit by Shannon Terry, Rivals.com, on TechCrunch, it has definitely been taken to that next level. I’m sure there are all sorts of arguments that can be made by both parties. TechCrunch articles obviously carry a lot of weight in the industry, and there are a lot of harsh comments posted by readers. But that’s hardly grounds for a lawsuit, and I think this says it best:

 I am still not prepared to respond directly to the letter below. However, I do want to reach out directly to Shannon Terry and say this: I offer you the opportunity to to respond in writing to my initial post and refute any fact or opinion that is stated in that post. I will publish your unedited response here on TechCrunch, giving it full and equal publicity to the original post. In fact, I’ll leave it up on the top of page one for a full 24 hours, and you can choose the day you would like it published. It will remain permanently on TechCrunch and will have a distinct URL. It can be any length you feel is appropriate, and you can link to whatever supporting documents you like. (11:42 pm PST 4/13/08)

Although I’d be interested in reading a response, I don’t think anyone in Terry’s position ever win in these situations. However, I probably would have said the same thing about that lawsuit.

In an effort to avoid repeating the previous, postless week, which could have easily started off by pointing out the April Fool’s fun had by Michael Arrington and Google (I refuse to link to them now!), I thought a nice way to start out this week would be to provide some interesting stories that have come across my screen today. Computerworld has quickly become one of my more enjoyable sites to visit, and although I don’t enjoy the email that I recently subscribed to, I do find great articles on the site almost daily. From the 500 laptops that the IRS has lost or had stolen in the last three years to their coverage of events in the blogosphere, I find the site provides a nice overview of the industry that appeals to me, and enough job-related information that I can justify visiting the site as often as I do.

Heading the list of interesting stories today would have to be The 21 Biggest Technology Flops, but hot on its heels is this article comparing Smart Phones. Personally, I’m be more interested in finding out about Smart Users, but I’m sure that oxymoron falls somewhere between ‘the male intellect’ and ‘a free lunch’ in the category of things we’re unlikely to come across.