Here’s a perfect example of how comedy can quickly turn in to something profound, powerful, and courageous. As some of you know, last week the Swiss government voted to ban minarets. For the whole background of that story, read the entry here. Basically, it’s an architectural structure that are usually built on or near the Mosques. Switzerland only has four today with a population a little more than 4%.

Per norm for Today’s Show, they discuss it, sometimes they do a little of satire with just the actors and writers within the show itself. And then sometimes they go out and interview some relevant people. In this case, it was Switzerland’s UN Ambassador Peter Maure.

It starts a comedy act, but it quickly gets serious and as every Jew, Gypsy, and Homosexual knows, Switzerland’s (not to mention Sweden’s and Norway’s) neutrality on foreign policy has been historically full of warm pile of feces. I won’t get in to it too much here, but here’s the video and a quick transcript of when it really gets good.

OLIVER: How hard was it to remind neutral during World War II?

MAURER: Well, I think this is always a debate and I think we do make a clear distinction between our neutrality as an instrument of foreign policy and what we think as individuals and what the country thinks.

OLIVER: But then, the neutrality issue seems complicated. Now obviously, Hitler did some very bad things, we know that. How do you focus on the positive things to balance that out?

MAURER: It’s not a question of positive. It’s a question of our neutrality has always been a state-driven concept of not participating in war.

OLIVER: Was there not just a little voice of humanity inside you saying this is terrible, we should really do something about it?

MAURER: As a question of principle, it’s unadvisable for a country as small as ours to participate in war. Why should we?
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OLIVER: So: Easy to take a position on neutrality, hard to take a position on Hitler.

MAURER: We did take strong positions on Hitler and many other things. We didn’t participate in the war. That’s two different things.

OLIVER: [imitating Hitler] “Would it be possible for me to keep my gold here?” [Imitating the Swiss] “Ah, Adolf! Of course! Lovely to see you again. Come back in! What have you been up to? Actually, don’t tell me, I want to be able to say I don’t know.”

[uncomfortable pause]

OLIVER: Is this neutral anger, or real anger, Mr. Ambassador?

The facial expression on Maurer was priceless to me. The interview is what should be the real standard of confrontational, and yet professional, standards across of our media. I am just a bit chagrined that a comedy show is leading the way.

If you are like me, you work in Linux terminal 80% of the time. Whether it’s SSH, Telnet, or other protocols you are probably using something like Putty. I have done so for years as well, and have been OK with it. Along the way came Better Than Putty and while it was better in some aspects, I ended up going back to the original.

Along the way, and only recently, I’ve discovered Poderosa and I never looked back. It is cleaner, smoother, doesn’t clutter your desktop with multiple sessions — and across servers. It has all kinds of highlights that will keep you busy in discovering that everything you wanted in an emulator session. It’s also a very small memory signature on your client and has a Cygwin plugin if you like using that as well.

Easily reproduce sessions

Right clicking on the sessions tab gives you this menu option and you can easily rename, reproduce, or customize your sessions.

I end up using the options so much I’ve memorized the key strokes that reproduces my sessions.

There’s color coding of directories, files, files that have 777 permission settings, etc…Colors are done with ease. What I do is have a specific color schema to my production boxes, vs. backup servers, Development, and QA. This way, I have a subconscious warning from my brain that I am working on a prod box and that I can not do the same things I can on dev server.

Change Color Schemes quickly

Here’s one of the nifty things and the only reason I’ve liked Better Than Putty. Splitting your sessions across the same application and the way to do that is brilliant. Just mouse over to the center of your session and an arrow appears, just click again and voila. You can then drag other session’s tabs in to that area and you have a lovely split screen, whether it’s vertical or horizonal.

Yeah, I’ve left my IP in there but it’s a home cable’s PC. So all you hackers, don’t get happy.

Wanted to do a quick review, but it ended up being a bit more. I get CNET quick takes and reviews downloaded to my TiVo weekly. If there’s a breaking news about a product, I get it that same day.

This Friday’s show was about Bing bringing their 3D in to Bing Maps.

It was fascinating what features they have added and it piqued my interest in Bing in how fast it was when you zoom in and out and how quickly the map changes from map view to satellite view to bird’s eye view. Very impressive. Today I went for a spin and did a quick comparison between Google and Microsoft. There’s a slight difference in that Google Maps doesn’t have 3D modeling, neither does a regular Bing function. So for this, you have to download their 3D packages– Google Earth, and Microsoft’s Bing 3D Maps. Unfortunately, CNET didn’t mention this and if you watched their review, you would assume that it’s all part of the browser in bing.com. Not so! Once you download, I wanted to compare two of them side by side and I didn’t want to go to Manhattan, NY to compare. I think both products would try their best to get in applying their strengths to those areas or any other famous US spots. What I wanted to use was where I grew up: Kharkov, Ukraine.

Bing

You have to download their package, click on the icon after installation, and it brings up the application inside Internet Explorer (in my case, version 8). To quickly get to the area, I’ve typed in Kharkov, Ukraine and the globe spins and gets me to the center of the city.

Here’s where it gets tricky. The roads are not as clear as they are in Google overlay. And some of the roads are missing. For example, main road to the south of the city (Highway 18) is no where to be found. Thankfully, I know the vicinity of the area and I head south to find my house. It took about 5 minutes to do so due to the missing streets, unseen streets, and just that nasty tinted green — more on that later.

Here’s a screen-shot of  Bing’s layout:

It’s not bad, but it when you compare it with Google’s, well, let’s get to that now.

Google:

Same exercise as with MS Bing, download, search, and find. The maps are more crisp though and here’s a nice little caveat, there are people who are creating all kinds of plug-ins for Google Earth. In this instance, I could have downloaded metro, tramway, or trolleybus stations, which makes things a lot quicker to find, even in a city like Kharkov. For this example, I didn’t even go that far, I was able to see and find streets fast in about 20 seconds, I was at the same spot that it took me to find with Bing in 5 mins.

Here’s a screen-shot of Google’s layout.

For me, this was easier on the eye, even as it doesn’t look as crisp in the thumbnail. You need to click on it for the full image. See the difference? Back to that green tint. I am not sure why MS’s maps always have it, but they really need to re-think that or apply some form of shading that eliminates that green tint.

Under the hood, it was more bad news for Bing. Inside the IE 8 browser, Bing was taking up almost 600K of memory. While Google Earth was at tepid 220K. Why? Maybe Microsoft should have made it more of a stand-alone application? You still have to download it. How is that an advantage?

Memory Utilization for Bing and Google Earth

In summary, Bing adds a non-ajax technology that does add speed, they also do rotating much better than Google’s Earth. But when it comes down to actually using it, seeing it, I would go with Google Earth. Let me conclude with that I am still happy Microsoft is trying to compete. It not only gives us — the user — an option, it does light a fire under competition’s proverbial ass to get them to better their products.