FLOSS WORLD EDUCATION

Foss And Education, a presentation delivered on Software freedom Day 2011

2011-09-18T16:02:00.000-07:00

Foss And Education, a presentation delivered on Software freedom Day 2011
PUP Quezon City

Introducing the Wiki Concept

2011-08-17T16:57:00.000-07:00

There are lots of online collaboration tools and document management systems. Wikis, however, remain a simple way of creating large, shared information repositories.

DokuWiki to be specific, but it’s more the idea and use of wikis in general .

Regular readers will know that I’m the first to jump up in support of Wikipedia (as long as it’s tempered by a critical eye and thoughtful users). And I’ve used wikis more generally, whether in class or in various jobs for document management and collaboration.Hosted wikis like those offered by Wikispaces, wikis embedded in tools like Moodle, and have stood up small wikis for special projects. All good stuff.

More recently, though, personally I’ve turned to scribd.com, Google Sites and Google Docs to manage most of my documentation needs. Used together, they make for a pretty robust solution that lends itself to collaboration.

Sure, Google Docs and Sites could handle this, but this felt like a job for a wiki.Classes that require collaboration on an extensive document or that will be used for longer-term reference or guidance (as this particular set of documents will also be). Needs wiki.

Having a look at the open source DokuWiki, for a few reasons.

It’s free
It’s incredibly simple to set up. All you need is FTP access (with write privileges) to a single folder on a web server. The DokuWiki folder and subfolders get copied to the server and the rest of the install happens via an install.php file that is accessible via any browser.
It’s fully text-based; there are no databases to install or access and files are stored as text making them readable outside the wiki and easily transported to other wiki instances.
It’s incredibly fast.
It’s very well-documented.
It’s customizable with templates and easily installed plugins.
The default installation uses a wiki markup syntax, but a WYSIWYG editor can be installed for novice users.
It takes a while to get the hang of creating namespaces (essentially directories) and pages for people used to a non-wiki interface, but once understood becomes quite simple for all users to extend the wiki and clearly organize files.
It has basic authentication, roles, and access control lists built in, but can easily be connected to a database or LDAP server for more sophisticated authentication needs
It scales very easily.

DokuWiki isn’t perfect, of course. Without a bit of thought, the paths that it displays to each document can be cumbersome and navigation isn’t as intuitive as it should be. However, in the brief time that it took me to set it up and have people (even those new to wikis) working together and building our documents, I was able to ensure pretty immediate utility. We can refine later; the goal was to start collaborating fast on a space that could live and be used by a growing group for months to come and we achieved that goal in a day.

Taking a Look at some educational tools available combining use with gmail:

2011-08-17T15:07:00.000-07:00

Taking a Look at some educational tools available combining use with gmail:

Exchange 2010 - When combined with a Microsoft Desktop, the eCAL, and the extreme discounts afforded to education, there simply was no better combination.

Zimbra - Close second, but to get something that competed with Exchange you had to go with Zimbra Pro (I think it was called Enterprise before VMware purchased it). But the education discounts were not very good to be perfectly honest and the collaboration part would have cost just as much as our end to end Microsoft platform.

Google - Tied with Microsoft Live@EDU. I have a love/hate relationship with Google. They are becoming the new Microsoft from 15 years ago which is dissappointing. I like their tools, but increasingly to get the full google experience you need all things google which essentially means Chrome. I feel like shortly they will start making things only work on ChromeOS or Android forcing people to move away from Microsoft and Apple. The two biggest issues we had though was the poor integration with Active Directory (and the moving "student data" into the cloud), and at the time we were doing the evaluation google had experienced several large scale public outages.

Microsoft Live@EDU - Essentially this reduced to hosted exchange. We might actually still move out students into this in some sort of co-hosted (staff in house, students in the cloud) model, but there was no significant cost savings. There still isn't much cost savings to move out students to the cloud because administration would still be the same, and only a tiny incremental portion of hardware would be saved.

One must as a rule in the Tech department to get Chrome out as as standard, or at least a dual standard. There are now active directory extensions so it can be managed almost as well as IE8/9, and with a competent tech group there are not many applications that must run in IE (some activeX sites still require it). There is little reason to not run two browsers *if* you can educate your end users. Right now we run Firefox and IE, but we are about to stop supporting Firefox and swap it with Chrome. Our education push happens later this fall.

As for using IE with gmail, We have not found any problems at all. Disabling compatibility view pretty much resolves any issues at all, and make sure your flash and java are current is all that should be required. I have found that some VLC plugins have recently been causing me grief with Chrome indirectly causing Flash to crash, but I don't quite understand why. I can repeat this with tools like uStream on demand,,, removing VLC resolves it.

Finally, people should considered the actual Gmail tips? They have some pretty good stuff on there, not to mention the icons for the ninja make people smile every time. :)

https://mail.google.com/mail/help/tips.html

Something else:

Has anyone looked at Karoshi Linux, Moodle or Joomla recently?

Karoshi Linux (now the Linux Schools Project) http://www.linuxgfx.co.uk/demo.html has been around for quite a while, comes with a rather full & integrated suite of features, driven by LDAP, with a Samba PDC to support Windows clients, It sports Moodle, Joomla and standard e-mail. Moodle has all manner of integration modules written for it. Is this not groupware-ish enough for a stand-alone school, or even a small school district?

Now, I'm curious what features Exchange and Zimbra provide that add value to the process flow of an edu organization besides the functional equivalent of email & scheduling. Are the needs pretty basic, or is it the drive for customization that leads bigger schools to big packages with big support?

Also.... at what scale is this discussion? If we're talking an entire school district, then Microsoft pretty much has the school district market sewn up with their discounting & the typical IT budgets of a municipal school district.

For smaller- to-mid-sized individual, independent schools, it used to not be cost effecting to become a Microsoft shop (w/ the lack of per-seat discounts afforded the district-scale organizations). MS changed their site & district pricing to accommodate smaller districts and/or independent schools.
There's so much that could and should be done, but the sad state of primary & secondary education IT is stuck in a short-sighted quagmire. The small schools can't afford the help to drive innovation, the bigger schools just throw money at the problem.

LibreOffice Release Out

2011-05-20T07:02:00.000-07:00

The Document Foundation’s LibreOffice, the OpenOffice office suite fork, is on a winning streak. No sooner than Ubuntu lets the world know that LibreOffice is its office suite of choice, than the next day the first full, shipping version of the program, LibreOffice 3.3, is released.

LibreOffice 3.3 includes numerous new features when compared to its OpenOffice parent. To my mind, the most important of these for modern office workers is that it has much better import and export tools for Microsoft Office 2007 and above OpenXML formats. Love them or hate them–I hate them myself–more and more businesses are using these formats and being able to work with them is becoming a business-critical feature. In addition, LibreOffice can also now import Adobe PDF, Microsoft Works, and Lotus Word Pro documents and has better WordPerfect document import facilities.

Screenshots: New features from LibreOffice 3.3

According to The Document Foundation, “LibreOffice 3.3 also incorporates all the new features of OpenOffice.org 3.3, such as new custom properties handling; embedding of standard PDF fonts in PDF documents; new Liberation Narrow font; increased document protection in Writer and Calc; auto decimals digits for ‘General’ format in Calc; 1 million rows in a spreadsheet; new options for CSV import in Calc; insert drawing objects in Charts; hierarchical axis labels for Charts; improved slide layout handling in Impress; new easier to use print interface; more options for Changing case; and colored sheet Tabs in Calc.”

The Document Foundation also states that it will add new features faster than OpenOffice because its “community of developers has been able to build their own and independent process, and stand on their feet in a very short time (in relation to the size of the code and the ambitions of the project).” Indeed, this in part why the fork happened. Regardless of how one sees Oracle’s management of Sun’s former open-source projects, OpenOffice was long known for being very slow to update compared to more agile open-source projects.

As Michael Meeks, Novell Distinguished Engineer and Document Foundation community member told me, “The growth and output of this community, in just a short period of time, underscores the need for and importance of a truly open project dedicated to creating the best office suite available–period. Now that we have gotten started we only expect the project to pick up steam and there is still plenty of work to do for everyone from developers to artists to translators. With new contributors joining every day, LibreOffice will continue to deliver the innovative features and functionality that users want. ”

Looking ahead, Caolan McNamara, Red Hat’s Desktop Engineer in charge of OpenOffice.org and now LibreOffice, said in a statement, “We are excited: this is our very first stable release, and therefore we are eager to get user feedback, which will be integrated immediately in the code and released very soon. After February, we will be moving to a real time based, predictable, transparent and public release schedule, according to the desire of the Engineering Steering Committee and the requests of the users”. For further details, see the LibreOffice development roadmap.

LibreOffice 3.3 is now available for both direct and BitTorrent downloads. There are versions for Windows; 32 and 64-bits RPM package Linux distributions, such as Red Hat and Novell; 32 and 64-bit DEB package Linux distributions such as Debian and Ubuntu; and both PowerPC and Intel Macs.

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Sabily : Looking at a Muslim-oriented Linux Distribution of Linux:

2011-04-25T21:01:00.000-07:00

Sabily is an operating system, like MS Windows or Mac OS X. Without an operating system, a computer is unusable, and Windows is not the only OS available!

As Sabily is free,and already includes all software one needs in one's everyday tasks, and its customized specifically for Muslims. And though one doesnt buy licensed Windows (as is the case most of the time in the Philippines,One should not use pirated copies because then it means supporting Microsoft by adding to the impression it's the only OS available.

Where is Sabily Based?
Its dervied from the Ubuntu operating system as a groundwork. Ubuntu is a GNU/Linux distribution whose goal is to provide an easy-to-use, up-to-date, stable and free system, also for companies. Sabily customizes Ubuntu by removing, modifying and adding software, and also customizes the graphic design to make a system adapted to Muslims.

There might be a question as to if there is company like Microsoft which develops Sabily?
Since it was built by a community of voluntaries coming from all over the world (France, Tunisia, Egypt, Indonesia etc.). The maintenance of this software depends on this community, but one can as well participate, as a developer, a graphic designer, a tester or if simply just to share ideas.

What are the main features of Sabily?
The main software are: Zekr and Mus-haf Othman (Quran study tools), Minbar and Firefox-praytimes (prayer times applications), Monajat (application that popups prayers every predetermined time), Hijra (islamic calendar) and WebStrict (parental control tool). Arabic language is also well supported. And of course the graphic design is also customized (see screenshots).

What other software are included in Sabily?
OpenOffice (word processor, spreasheet, presentation), Firefox (web browser), Pidgin (instant messaging), F-spot (photos management), Gimp (image manipulation program) and other multimedia software (video/audio). All of this in included in the "small" version of Sabily, but the "full" version contains dozens of other software! (educational software, tools and entire Quran recitations.

One simply has to download the ISO file and to burn it on a DVD, then to start your computer from the DVD. You will have the choice to test or to install the system. In a first time it is advised to test it because it is safe for the computer, nothing will be written on the hard disk. Sabilycan be even tested directly from Windows, by using a Virtual Box image.

It used to be called Ubuntu Muslim Edition but the name was later changed perhaps due to the feedback of some of its users.

Here are some of the features available on its 10.04 series (following the standard *buntu release system:

F-Spot replaces the GIMP
PiTiVi video editor added
GNOME 2.30
New themes: Ambiance and Radiance
New wallpaper
Linux kernel 2.6.32
New nVidia hardware driver
Gwibber social media application
Faster boot time, with a different look and feel on the bootsplash screen
Ubuntu One adds contacts and bookmark sharing
Ubuntu One music store integrated into Rhythmbox
Ubuntu Software Center 2.0

For those who aren’t familiar with them, Zekr and Thawab are Quranic study tools. The parental controls use Gnome Nanny to filter the web, email, etc. Based on what I saw of it, Gnome Nanny looked like a reasonably good parental filter. Muslim parents will have to be the final judge of whether or not it’s really enough to make the Internet safe for Muslim children.

It stumbles a bit though when it doesn’t always provide native language translations of some of the Arabic content.

Since it’s based on Ubuntu, Sabily is fine for beginner, intermediate or advanced Linux users.

For Muslims who have computers and have children around, one definitely give Sabily a download.

Summary Table:

Name of distribution:	Ubuntu Muslim Edition (Sabily) 10.04
Web Site:	http://www.sabily.org
Price:	Free
Pros:	Excellent selection of software, including some very useful Islamic applications. Beautiful selection of screensavers, as well as attractive Islamic wallpaper.
Cons:	Leans too heavily on the Arabic language and doesn’t always provide English translations in applications for those who don’t read or speak Arabic.
Suitable For:	Beginner, intermediate or advanced users.
Summary:	Sabily 10.04 is a fine update for anyone looking for a Muslim version of Ubuntu. It takes all of Ubuntu 10.04′s new features and gives them an Islamic flavor.
Rating:	Above average

Google for Education

2010-08-28T08:25:00.000-07:00

Using Google as an educational tool.

Students, teachers and staff can share ideas more quickly and get things done more effectively when they have access to the same powerful communication and sharing tools. Google Applications provides email, sharable online calendars, instant messaging tools and even a dedicated websites to faculty, students and staff for free. There's no hardware or software to install or maintain, since everything is delivered through a standard web browser -- anytime, from anyplace.

We have tested this with our students in AABC, as part of the classes conducted by the faculty is online, they are allowed to use the tools of their choice, skype, yahoo messenger or Google. And with the google package, we were able to maximize learning and introduce our students

You can mix and match from the following services for your entire school :

Gmail - Offer email to your faculty, students and staff with 2 gigabytes of storage per account, search tools to help them find information fast, and instant messaging built right into the browser (chat can easily be disabled for the whole school if you don't want students to be able to IM with their accounts). One good thing nowadays is that Gmail has both video and talk capabilities.

Google Talk - Teachers and students can call or send instant messages to their contacts for free -- anytime, anywhere in the world. Imagine the possibilities for people collaborating on projects from different locations.

Google Calendar - Everyone can organize their schedules and share events, meetings and entire calendars with others. You can even publish the school calendar on your website to let families know about events like back-to-school nights, homecoming and vacation days.

Google Docs - Students and teachers can create documents, spreadsheets and presentations and then collaborate with each other in real-time right inside a web browser window.

Google Sites - Create a class site and edit it the same way you'd edit a document -- no technical expertise required. Your site can bring together all the information you want to share with your colleagues and students, including docs, calendars, photos, videos and attachments.

Blogger-Teaching the use of blogs to enhance their communication skills also is another way of allowing them to express themselves.

With schools who are looking into new productivity tools to enhance classroom learning and participation, using google as a part of your tools in enhancing classroom instruction can be both a transformative and learning experience.

Increase the school years? Or increase the quality of education?

2010-08-09T17:56:00.001-07:00

Increase the school years? Or increase the quality of education?

Headlines burst out saying that the current education secretary was proposing adding to more years to Basic Education meaning 12 years. Among the reasons stated were the following: 1. additional enhancements in skill sets for employment, preparing them for college (academically), and making our students globally competitive.

Laudable if the government has enough resources to begin with considering the public knowledge that the government budget was siphoned by the previous administration (according to the present president). For an educator sitting at the helm of Government and the agency tasked to formulate and oversee guidelines in implementation of educating the hope of tomorrow; that's a big job.

But it seems that the present education secretary has been sitting in an ivory tower to start talking about immediate curriculum revisions, adding another year; and wasting the time of curriculum developers in order to make a wishlist of the best educational system he can dream of.

In the 80's we were sitting in a class of 20, in the 90's in a class of 40, now i guess a class of 60-70 is an average class in public schools. Add to this fewer classrooms, fewer teachers, books, chairs and even classroom time. More time is spent on the average by every kid on DOTA than the class room. Gone are the days when one goes to school for 8 hours a day.

The education secretary should've considered all of this before jumping the gun on the wrong issue to be addressed. Considering that our curriculum is defective; how can one see the proposed remedies and solutions if one does not answer the basic question of adequacy. The basic adequeties such as classrooms,armchairs, books,teachers and classroom time.

Activists have been critical of previous administrations for lack of attention to education on the basics that we have previously mentioned has been on the banner stories whenever the opening of classes would come in; and would always be the rallying cry of every youth leader marching the streets.

The emergence of a so-called people's mandate who was elected for president meant he would be selecting the best minds to make the first steps towards recovery and healing of this nation.

Would that decision mean that we will have better equipped public schools? Or an error that would make the parents and students suffer for 12 years?

The answer lies before your eyes.

10 reasons why your kids should be using Linux

2010-07-30T22:47:00.000-07:00

As It professionals and Educators, we speak mostly of the professional aspects of our jobs. The problem is, when we go home and, in many cases, our IT work continues. Part of it involves keeping our children’s computers running and running well. Sometimes, that job can be a bigger challenge than the task of keeping the adults in our business up and running.

But why put yourself through this when you can install Linux on a machine for your child/teen and avoid the headaches? article , are 10 good reasons why you should do just this. In the end, you can decide for yourself whether they’re reason enough to migrate those young users away from other operating systems

1: Viruses/malware

This reason is always at the top of our list. We all know kids are prone to opening and installing things they shouldn’t. Because you can’t watch your children 100 percent of the time, you can’t know where they’re getting those applications or attachments from. You can make sure those machines have antivirus and anti-spyware, but why even take the chance? When your kids are using the Linux operating system, this concern becomes moot.

2: Security

This can be summed up easily. If you don’t give your children the root password, they can’t run with root privileges. Of course, you hit a little snag when using a distribution like Ubuntu. For any sudo-based operating system, you will need to edit the /etc/sudoers file to give your young users the privileges they need.

3: Cost effectiveness

Let’s say you have a younger user who is getting a hand-me-down machine that needs an OS reinstall. If you don’t have that copy of Windows around, you’re stuck purchasing a new copy. This can also be applied to any number of applications you might have to pay for. Avoid these costs altogether by handing that child the same machine running Linux. You won’t have pay for the OS license or any application that child might need or want. On top of that, they’ll have the Add/Remove Software tool ,where they can hunt around and find just about anything they would need… all on their own! You can also run a modern distribution on much less hardware than you will need for Vista or Windows 7.

4: Age-specific tools

Did you know there are distributions/software groups designed specifically for young adults and children? There is Sugar, geared for K-6, Edubuntu, for ages 3-18,LinuxKidX, for ages 2-15, Foresight Kids, for ages 3-12, and many others. These age-specific tools are well suited for the group they target with graphics and language tuned for the age range. And some of the distributions geared specifically for younger kids lock the operating system down tightly so that only certain tasks can be run.

5: Netbooks

Little kids make great netbook users. They have smaller hands and fingers that can handle a cramped keyboard, and they can easily sit with a small machine in their lap. And the Linux operating system is ideally suited to run on netbooks. You can install either a full-blown OS or a netbook-specific OS, along with whatever software you need on the netbook, making it an excellent choice for the younger audiences.

6: Agile learners

If you put a Linux-based machine in front of a young user, you won’t hear complaints like, “Why can’t it run Quicken!” or “I need my custom payroll app to run on this!” Most kids will master the Linux operating system quickly (and adroitly), with a minimal learning curve. Young minds adapt so well, your kids won’t have any trouble adjusting to any differences. You could probably sit a child down with a Gentoo box running CDE or AfterStep and he or she would have it figured out in less time than it took you to explain what Linux means.

7: Staying in step

I know this one will bring out the ire in many readers. I’m not saying any operating system is used more than any other. But Linux is used worldwide. Many countries as a whole have adopted Linux. The future of Linux is very bright — and it seems to be getting brighter. So why not give your children a head start on what could possibly be the future of the PC? This also applies for those fledgling IT pros out there. If Windows is so user friendly, kids spending most of their time on Linux should have no problem grasping Windows. In fact, I would argue that it will enhance the child’s ability to fully grasp the operating system and how the PC really works.

8: Learning opportunities

Open source emboldens education. It practically screams, “Open me up and learn!” What better way to help youngsters learn than by giving them the ability to do just that? With really curious children, the desire to learn is extraordinary — so why lock them down with closed source software? When a child is exposed to open source software and an open source operating system, the educational opportunities are limitless.

9: A lesson in community

This one might seem a bit of a stretch… but I am an idealist, so I hope you’ll go with it. Teaching children the value of open source software helps them understand community. Although your young users aren’t likely to open up the source code of the applications they’re using, in today’s constantly evolving, community-driven world, they need every advantage they can get as they grow up. Having a sound understanding of open source will help them to understand, at an early age, what it means to really work with and for a team. Using Linux at such an early age also indirectly teaches children the benefit of volunteering — something many of us need to learn more about.

10: Content filtering

Linux has numerous ways to handle content filtering for your young users. FromDansGuardian to SquidGuard to the manual editing of the /etc/hosts file, you can filter content in Linux far more granularly than you can in Windows — and just as easily. Add to this the ability to lock down what your young user can and can’t do (without having to add third-party software), and Linux quickly becomes a safe computing environment for your child.

How to sell clients on Linux

2010-07-17T20:33:00.000-07:00

By Jack Wallen

(Jack Wallen shares tips on how to pitch Linux to clients. He also explains how convincing a client to go with Linux can have long-term benefits for your consultancy )

This article pas taken from TECH Republic. Something Foss Advocates should consider

In such a Windows-centric world, pitching Linux to clients who are not tech savvy is not as hard as you might think — you just have to know the product and know where (and how) the product fits into the client’s infrastructure. Here are some examples.

A client (an SMB with 25-50 users) comes to you with the following needs:

Desktop for each user
Networking infrastructure
Server for email
Server for Web
Server for storage

The client states up-front that keeping the price as low as possible is key. Although this client may not be a cash cow for you, you know they are connected to a plethora of other possible clients, so you want to do as much for them as you can. Here’s how you can break this down to save them money, keep their systems up and running (with little maintenance), and ensure they refer you to their peers.

Desktops: You will want to keep these machines on Windows; you don’t want to add Linux into the mix in such a way that will confuse the client’s employees.
Networking infrastructure: This could be a grab bag of any hardware you want.
Servers: You could go the Windows SBS route, but then you will have to deal with CALS and maintenance, which will raise the cost. Instead, this is where you can deploy Linux. You can either run all three systems on one machine (using a LAMP server with the inclusion of Postfix for email, ClamAV for antivirus, and rsync for storage). That server machine is going to run like a champ, costing the owner next to nothing in maintenance fees. So the client will save the cost of the OS and the CALS, as well as the cost of maintenance calls to effectively keep the server up and running.

However, let’s say that you have a client who shows an interest in Linux as a desktop environment, but he is concerned about that one application he must use that only has a Windows version. The client likes the idea of the stability and reliability of Linux, so he wants his employees using that desktop, but there is still that one application. What do you do? Virtual machines. This is a selling point that many consultants overlook. With the help of VirtualBox, your clients can run (with only the cost of the Windows license) that one application within a virtual instance of Windows on top of a Linux OS. To sell this approach, you should outline the following benefits:

The stability and reliability of the Linux OS.
Running the Windows application in a virtual machine means that, should something get corrupted (or break in any way) within the Windows virtual machine, the user can simply close that instance and open a previously saved, working, state.
The virtual machine could be served up from the Linux server so that any user would have access. This doesn’t mean everyone can be running the same image at once, but it would make deploying an image easy (e.g., copy the image from one virtual machine to another).

Let clients try Linux

If a client wants to play around with Linux to see if it will fit their needs, a really good approach is to give the client a Live CD of a distribution and tell them to boot it up. The Live instance will not change their current OS, and they could get easily get an idea if Linux will work. You can take this one step further by rolling your own Live CD (with a tool such as SUSE Studio) and adding your branding to the desktop, as well as to applications you think the client will want and/or need.

See long-term benefits

There are so many ways to sell Linux to your clients. The biggest selling point is the reliability of the operating system. Will you make a lot of money using Linux? Not directly. But the customers you satisfy will keep coming back and send new clients your way.

Related TechRepublic resources

Ubuntu? Personal and non-Geeky?

2010-06-04T21:02:00.000-07:00

‘We positioned Ubuntu as a version of Linux that was personal and non-technical’
Mark Shuttleworth, Founder, Canonical and Ubuntu Linux on why he thinks Ubuntu will succeed on the desktop, where other equally famed competitors have failed
Having earned the distinction of becoming the first African to take a flight into space, Mark Shuttleworth undertook a voyage into another unchartered territory. He started the Ubuntu Linux project, with a goal to creating a high-quality desktop and server OS. ‘Ubuntu’—named after an African word which means ‘humanity to others’—has since then become the most popular GNU/Linux distribution. Ubuntu Linux has been positioned as a platform for the masses rather than being confined to the specialists.
Mark Shuttleworth, Founder, Canonical and Ubuntu Linux shared his thoughts with Srikanth RP on the increasing significance of open source, the roadmap for the cloud and why he thinks Ubuntu will succeed on the desktop, where other equally famed competitors have failed.
From an era when open source faced a lot of antagonism, now even competitors are opening up their code. How do you see this shift in terms of the future of IT?
I have no doubt in my mind that open source represents the future of the software industry. This can be clearly seen from the number of customer engagements involving Linux, and from the backing of huge companies such as IBM and Oracle. Even Microsoft today has backed away from its earlier rigid stance. The driver is clearly the success of open source. Today, end-user companies are skeptical of those companies that suggest that open source does not encourage innovation.

Unlike other Linux distributions, Ubuntu has managed to achieve a significant presence on the desktop. What have you done differently?
While Linux as a community has done extremely well in the server and data center space, the real challenge lies in taking Linux to the desktop. When we started the Ubuntu project, we quickly realized that distribution only plays a limited role in the success of the platform.
We focused on substantially improving the experience of the Linux desktop by making it more visually appealing and easy to use. We positioned Ubuntu as a version of Linux that was personal and non-technical. In a way, we have been pioneers in bringing the benefits of Linux to a larger audience. The results—as tracked by independent websites—show that Ubuntu has been steadily increasing in popularity over the past five years.
While Ubuntu is one of the most successful products in the desktop Linux space, it still has a long way to go before it can even think of upsetting the apple cart of a dominant vendor such as Microsoft. Why do you think Ubuntu will succeed (in the long run) where other equally strong competitors have failed?
With our platform, we believe we have significant opportunities to play on the server, cloud and the desktop space. By putting the user at the heart of our design, we have significantly enhanced the user experience.
For example, we have taken initiatives such as the innovative ‘100 Paper Cuts’ initiative organized with the Ubuntu Community which allowed users to nominate minor annoyances that impacted their enjoyment of the platform.
Till date, over 50 fixes have been committed. Industry leaders such as Dell have partnered with us to put Ubuntu on some of their desktop and laptop models. And evidence suggests that the percentage of users that do not replace Ubuntu on the device is growing. This is a time of great change in the IT industry, and we believe that we are in a
position to surprise established players.
How is Ubuntu performing on the cloud landscape?
On Amazon EC2—which is the dominant public cloud offering—Ubuntu is the Number One base OS for organizations building workloads to deploy in the cloud. With our enterprise cloud offering the same APIs as Amazon EC2, you can build your applications to run on either platform.
This means that applications that run on your private cloud can be seamlessly put into the public Amazon cloud, and vice versa. You can even configure the system to ensure that overloaded applications on a private cloud can expand to use resources from the public cloud. We are focused on simplifying user experience—be it the
desktop or the cloud.

Google Chrome Market Share Surges, Apple's Safari Dead In Water, Microsoft's IE Drowning Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-chrome-mark

2010-06-01T22:45:00.000-07:00

April browser share numbers from Net Applications show a continuation from the same story we've seen over the last two years:

Google's Chrome and Firefox are gaining lots of share
Apple's Safari is gaining a tiny bit of share
Microsoft's Internet Explorer is falling out of bed

The IE losses and Firefox gains are an old story. Microsoft shows no signs of staunching the bleed.

The more important story here is potentially that Google's Chrome is gaining share much faster than Apple's Safari. This highlights the power of Google's "open source" software model, as compared to Apple's integrated hardware-software combo. The software versus hardware/software model, of course, is what doomed Apple in its first battle to the near-death (against Microsoft). So it's worth watching this one closely.

Here are the numbers from Net Applications. Check out that steady Chrome gain. Check out how paltry the Safari gains have been despite the proliferation of Apple devices. (Click for larger)

Google Apps Still A Tiny Business -- Only $50 Million A Year -- But Microsoft Should Be In Major Panic Mode Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com

2010-06-01T22:43:00.000-07:00

Thus far, Microsoft (MSFT) is doing a good job of holding off Google Apps (GOOG).

The demand for Office 2010 appears to be strong, and most companies that spoke to Nick Wingfield of the WSJ for an article about the Apps-Office 2010 clash said they never seriously considered using Google.

But they did use Google as a threat to negotiate a better deal from Microsoft, which is the first sign of trouble.

And the second sign of trouble is that Google Apps now have 50 million users.

True, only 1 million of these are paying users. Many of the paying users, moreover, probably pay less than Google's asking price of $50 a year. So this is still a tiny business for Google -- less than $50 million a year on a base of $25 billion.

But the size of the revenue contribution to Google should come as no solace to Microsoft. In fact, the cheaper and easier Google Apps are to use, the more of a problem they'll be for Microsoft over the long haul. And the widespread adoption suggests that they're quite convenient and easy to use.

Disruptive technologies, Clayton Christensen fans will recall, gain their foothold by being adopted by the low end of the market, where they are not as good as the market leader but are cheaper, more convenient, and "good enough." And Google Apps certainly fit that description for many early users.

Image: SAI

Google Apps, in other words, still look like a classic disruptive technology. And in their path is a massive Microsoft cash cow, one that accounts for more than half of Microsoft's profit.

Over time, like other disruptive technologies, Google Apps will get better. As they do, they'll migrate up from the low end of the market toward the middle. Microsoft, meanwhile, will try to protect its most profitable business by adding ever more features to Office. Eventually (already?) the number of features will overshoot the needs of the middle of the market. And as long as Google Apps have become good enough to meet the mid-market's needs, Google will start to gain major share.

So don't take the puny size of Google's App business and the fact that big companies aren't seriously considering Apps as an alternative as a sign that Microsoft is safe. Microsoft isn't safe. Microsoft is very exposed.

Here goes Google OS...watch out

2009-07-08T22:06:00.000-07:00

Google's operating system aims to tempt people away from Windows

So at long last Google is making its move. Promising a lightweight but fast operating system - Chrome OS - the internet search company is poised to strike at the heart of Microsoft's software empire.

The Windows operating system is Microsoft's cash cow, powering about 90% of the world's personal computers, and as a result accounting for the majority of its profits.

The benefits are wider, though. Every Windows desktop comes with an invitation (and at times the imperative) to use other Microsoft software and services.

This, in turn, hobbles Google's ambition of organising all the world's information, and making money on the back of it.

After all, most people's computer experience is bogged down with frustration - from the time it takes to start a computer, to software conflicts, and worries about viruses and malware (or for Apple Macs the cost of buying a computer).

Clash of business models

Soon those people who are spending more of their time in the company of Google rather than Microsoft will have the opportunity to use the Chrome OS for all their computing needs

Rory Cellan-Jones

BBC's technology correspondent

Read Rory's thoughts in full

Google promises to change all that by stripping desktop computing to its basics. Your PC won't have to do the heavy lifting, applications will run in your browser instead, powered by Google's huge server farms.

It comes down to a clash of business models. Microsoft earns money by charging customers a one-off fee for its operating system, probably $20 for its old Windows XP software, and a rumoured $150 for Windows Vista and the forthcoming Windows 7, which is due to go on sale this autumn.

Google is unlikely to charge for Chrome OS. The company wants you to get online fast, have a whale of a time... and use as many Google services as you can: from search to email, social networking to photo sharing, word processing, to watching films on YouTube.

It is yet another incarnation of the company's "Google everywhere" strategy.

Google, the software firm

Chrome OS also shows what you can achieve when you sit on a huge cash pile, attract some of the world's best software engineers and - most importantly - start with a blank slate.

Google has a track record. Not that long ago the firm announced that it was developing an operating system for smartphones, dubbed Android (which is distinct from Chrome OS).

Microsoft executives that I spoke to back then were dismissive, arguing that Google was underestimating the complexity of such a venture. But already Android is in many ways a more accomplished piece of software than version 6.1 of Microsoft's Windows Mobile.

Google is helped by the fact that unlike Microsoft it has no need to worry about compatibility with legacy software.

That, however, could also be the Achilles heel of Chrome OS.

Consumers who want to buy a Chrome OS computer will have to start with a blank slate as well. Any software that they hold near and dear is unlikely to be compatible with the new system.

And they have to limit their ambitions. If you play computer games, do heavy-duty video or picture editing, or need any kind of specialised software, then you'll return to the shelves heaving with Microsoft powered PCs or Apple Macs.

Timing is everything

As you make your buying decision, you will have this niggling worry that one day, maybe, you will need to use some software that simply can't run in your browser. The advertising campaigns of both Apple and Microsoft will have a great time stoking these worries.

Google's announcement comes at an interesting time. Microsoft is poised to launch its new operating system Windows 7. Unlike its predecessor Vista, Windows 7 is proven to be a good fit for ultraportable netbooks, currently the fastest growing segment of the PC market.

So Chrome OS, due in mid-2010, may come either at just the right time, as the economy recovers and consumers go shopping again, or it may come too late, with Windows 7 already firmly hogging the market.

Chrome impact

In the end, Google's strike may not cut deep into enemy territory.

Chrome, the web browser, is still stuck at a tiny market share of 1.2%. Android is available on just two or three phones, not enough to really make an impact.

Google Apps - productivity software to handle spreadsheets and word documents - has just come out of its "beta" test phase, but look around you and you will find most people still using Microsoft Office.

The one field where Chrome OS may make a difference is the market for the open source Linux operating system. Chrome OS will use bits of the Linux kernel, the link between the computer hardware and the Chrome browser running on it.

Google is bound to make Chrome OS much more user-friendly than most "distros" or versions of Linux available right now. Instead of slaying Microsoft, Chrome OS might corner the segment of the consumer space that might have been Linux's.

No doubt, Google's charge with Chrome OS will needle Microsoft. But we won't know for years whether it will deliver a mere pinprick, or is the fine point of the dagger at the heart of Microsoft.

How does one Roll out Linux in any Organization or Entity?

2009-05-25T21:01:00.000-07:00

When We ask people how do they plan to implement a Linux migration or roll out plan , we see a variety of diverse answer sometimes one conflicting the other... but then again there is always a need for a standardized system or process that should be viewed as the best practices to be shared in the community.

Internetnews. com cites a recent report that discloses it’s findings on just this question. An IBM-sponsored survey of 1,275 IT professionals around the world asked for feedback on their experiences making the switch to Linux in their organizations. (You can see the summary and download the free report from Freeform Dynamics here.) Here are the key findings:

Desktop Linux adoption is primarily driven by cost reduction
But deployment is currently limited, and challenges to further adoption frequently exist
Selective deployment based on objective targeting will yield the highest ROI and acceptance
Linux desktop roll out is easier than expected for properly targeted end-user groups
A focus on usability reflects a maturing of thinking

The report locates potential pitfalls in a proper lack of planning and finds that users are most resistant when the idea is pitched that they have to “compromise” (in other words, give up some applications that won’t run on Linux) in order to move to Linux. However, it is noted that some must-have applications for users could be virtualized on Citrix to solve that problem.

Were you aware of, or included in this survey? If you’ve rolled out Linux to your users or just a targeted set of users, how did it go? If you’re thinking about such a transition, you might find some tips in the report that will help you plot a path.

Feel free to comment

Why should IT companies hire you a guide for budding service contractors

2009-05-25T02:41:00.000-07:00

With an increase of people in the job market, there’s more competition for independent contractor gigs. Get tips on how to make prospective clients know that hiring you will help their bottom line.This is a prospective guide to budding entrepreneurs.

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When the Information technology trend first began and pushed programming back in the late ’70s, the demand for people who could code was so high that if you knew how to spell GOTO you could find a job. The industry has gone through a lot of cycles since then. In the current phase, hiring of full-time developers has fallen off dramatically, which could be good news for independent contractors. We’re easy to hire and easier to fire than traditional employees. Also, we typically don’t enjoy employee benefits or get paid for time spent on social networks or World of Warcraft.

However, as more regular employees lose their jobs without many prospects for new ones, the pool of available contractors may expand as well. Now the advantages of hiring an independent don’t necessarily work to your personal advantage — especially if former employees are available at a lower rate. How do you make the case that prospects should hire you instead?

Money, money, money

Do you try to represent yourself as the Rolls Royce option? The best consultant that money can buy? The L’Oreal of consultants — because they’re worth it? I don’t think so. Prestige comes at a price that fewer companies are willing to pay for these days. In this economy, it comes down to the bottom line: What is your net effect on profitability (short- and long-term), and how does that compare to their other options?

How can you save them money? How can you make them money? Answer these questions convincingly, and the engagement is as good as yours. Here are a few ways to do that:

Expertise. You know what you’re doing, you won’t have to be trained, and you’ve already made the mistakes that others would encounter. So even though you may charge more per hour, you aren’t going to need nearly as many hours. Besides that, your implementation will be more maintainable than something cobbled together by a first-time, saving them money for years to come. So if you have experience in the specific technologies involved, talk that up.
Results. All the knowledge and experience in the world doesn’t stack up to being able to get the job done. Offer examples of past clients whom you were able to help. Be ready to go into the details (as far as you’re allowed under any non-disclosure) to show how your contributions made a difference to their bottom line that far exceeded what you cost them, or what most anyone else could have done.
Personality. “Hey, I thought we were talking about money,” I hear you cry. We are; if you’re a condescending jerk, you’ll bring the whole team’s productivity to a grinding halt. Show that you’re not only friendly and self-deprecating but also that you’re willing to learn from others and give them credit where due, and that you know a thing or two about team-building. A good team player brings out the best in everyone else to get things done — and thus make money.
Soft sell. The worst thing you can do is to reek of desperation. If you’re really as good as you say you are, you’ve got plenty of opportunities, and you’re shopping your clients as much as they’re shopping you. I prefer the soft sell: “Here’s what I’ve got to offer — if it works for both of us, great!” If you sell too hard, they’ll be more likely to doubt some of your claims. Go light on adjectives and adverbs; say what you’ve done, not how gloriously you did it. Let them know you’re all about business.

If you can confidently demonstrate that you will save or make more money than any of their other options, then the objection “we can’t afford you right now” goes out the window. Instead, prospective clients can’t afford not to hire you.

YouTube increasingly less of an option in schools

2009-05-22T05:29:00.000-07:00

I generally haven’t been inclined to block YouTube in schools.

Despite the countless videos of kids skateboarding, extraordinary amounts of educational content are there for the taking. Like Filipiniana...folk dances.. science materials and even political and soiological topics...

Unfortunately, it looks as though the junk is quickly on its way to overwhelming the good. However theres an uncomfortable trend lately like what Ars Technica is reporting on the so-called carpet-bombing effort to fill YouTube with pornography:

Today, May 20, has been deemed “Porn Day” by denizens of 4chan and eBaum’s World, with an organized group of users from the sites uploading video clips of explicit, adult content en masse in an attempt to overwhelm the search results. In actuality, it appears that content was prematurely uploaded on the afternoon of the 19th. YouTube has already taken some steps to fight back, but it’s disturbingly easy to find stuff you really don’t want to see, and the uploaders are changing tactics.
On the local level... terrible scandalous videos of movie personalities and political personalities have also mushroomed... thus showing much of a lesser moral fibre in display.....

What this means is that we need to train our teachers and provide them with easy tools to deliver appropriate content to their students. No more, “Hey kids, put together a PowerPoint presentation and feel free to search for some resources on YouTube.” YouTube does make it incredibly easy to embed video on the web and now has tools for excluding those “related videos,” which are all too often a source of said junk.

Therefore, we need to train our teachers to place videos on their own websites or blogs or, better yet, use a site like Fliggo to really isolate useful video content from the rest of YouTube. How many of your teachers know how to embed a YouTube video in a blog? There’s no need to throw out the baby with the bath water in terms of online video, but there is a real need for increased vigilance and helping teachers find new ways to clearly direct instruction around useful video.

Another good thing to consider is to teach Netiquette (net Ethics) to students so that they would be able to appreciate the whole ambit of the net as well as clinging to even a small semblance of respect and ethics for the privacy of others and the better interest of the Public and learning

Microsoft, Linux Foundation issue joint letter opposing proposed software-licensing principles

2009-05-20T05:29:00.000-07:00

Truth can, indeed, be stranger than fiction — as is evidenced by a May 14 letter on software-licensing policies that was signed by both Microsoft and Linux Foundation officials.

The letter, which the two sent to to the American Law Institute (ALI), was designed to “express our shared concerns with the group’s draft Principles of the Law of Software Contracts,” according to a blog post by Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel.

(Yes, that same Horacio Gutierrez who is known for claiming free and open-source software violated 235 of Microsoft’s patents.)

According to Gutierrez’s latest blog post, while Microsoft and the Linux Foundation have been almost always on opposite sides of the software-licensing fence, they both agree that the ALI Principles — designed to provide guidance to judges and others charged with interpreting software-licensing agreements — could do more harm than good. Gutierrez blogged:

“While the Principles reflect a lot of hard work and thought by the ALI, Microsoft and the Linux Foundation believe that certain provisions do not reflect existing law and could disrupt the well-functioning software market for businesses and consumers, as well as create uncertainty for software developers.

“We have asked the ALI to allow more time for comment from interested parties reflecting the wide range of software developers and users.”

The joint letter to the ALI specifically highlights the policy body’s call for a non-disclaimable “implied warranty of no material hidden defects” as being onerous to both Microsoft and the Linux Foundation. (The Linux Foundation has been objecting to this proposed implied warranty and its possible negative effect on free and open-source software since at least August 2008.) Microsoft and the Linux Foundation both are advocating that by making this warranty disclaimable, vendors will be more willing and able to offer customers their applications and services under a variety of software-licensing models. (That’s my best attempt at explaining this; I’m sure folks more conversant with legal language will be able to chime in as to exactly what the pair want….)

Update: Linux Foundation chief Jim Zemlin explains the warranty issue in a May 18 blog post this way: “The principles outlined by the ALI interfere with the natural operation of open source licenses and commercial licenses as well by creating implied warranties that could result in a tremendous amount of unnecessary litigation, which would undermine the sharing of technology.”

Raymond Nimmer, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center and co-director of the Houston Intellectual Property and Information Law Institute, wrote a strong critique of the ALI draft principles, where he also objected to the proposed implied warranty

Nimmer blogged on May 11: “(I)f the (implied warranty) ‘principle’ were followed, the software industry would be subject to a rule that does not apply to any other industry. Why discriminate against one of our few burgeoning industries?”

The ALI’s annual meeting — where the final vote by memebers on the proposed draft of the Principles is expected — takes place this week.

Looking at the Quezon City Scholarship Fair 2009

2009-05-18T03:28:00.001-07:00

We were invited to join the Quezon City City Scholarship Fair 2009. I actually was supposed to attend an "Education Nation Conference" at the University of The Philippines where my good friend Gene Morada of G.ho.st was attending.

We started at around 7 am for the flag raining ceremony and awarding of scholarship vouchers. We were looking at the different schools that were also offering their scholarships and course offerrings.

I noticed that when I saw the different schools actually followed suit. When we opened our course offerings in Multimedia applications and Computer Graphics Design in 2006, everybody barely understood and saw the significance of these courses. We actually pioneered Multimedia and Graphic Design Courses in the TESDA even before other schools and TESDA were offerring and promulgating Training regulations in these specializations in the Philippines. This was because we saw the significance of these courses in the ICT industry. We were also the ones who openly advocated putting and using FOSS in TESDA courses in order to popularize FOSS. So it was quite safe to say.. that other schools like AMA, STI, Informatics merely followed where we pioneered.

The scholarship fair was a showcase for the different schools and TEKBOK Providers....

It was also an opportunity for G.ho.st to showcase its versatility to other schools especially the bagong henerasyon foundation which had satellite training centers in the different community areas in Quezon City.

Explaining the value of cloud computing for indigent students, Trainors from Bagong henerasyon were welcoming the idea and looked forward to having a demonstration of the product to their community computer learning centers

Do Online Word Processors work?

2009-05-16T05:34:00.000-07:00

A friend from IOSN Mam Yolynn Medina shared me an online article , "The case for Online Word Procesors by Dustin Wax ". Naturally Id always take a look at any article shared... and see if its worth commenting or reading.

This one I like... Its written by a person who uses for his daily activities. Imagining just a browser and there you go... you can transfer from PC to PC anywhere you go. This is the beauty of cloud computing. Personally I agree with Dustin on the choices he had recommended, Google Docs (not that I am Google Fan), Zoho Apps and adobe(something I don use). This actually presents the best justification for educational collaboration, where teachers can actually check the written articles and projects prepared on Gdocs and Zoho shared with them, and be edited, collaborated, shared and commented upon.

I agree with Dustin that this is a perfect example of how online word processors can be used for educational purposes. This application can also be found in G.ho.st a visrtual web based OS that has web based applications for cloud computing, an online web based office suite that handles communications and other office work. G.Ho.st also is best for schools since if you have a web based desktop that is accessible anywhere there is a connection (internet).. there is an online word processor that you can sue to prepare your projects, term papers and articles.

Indeed Online word procesors can even help minimize paper consumption... one of the best practices in education thats worth sharing with other educators.

The Teacher is the curriculum

2009-05-15T04:57:00.000-07:00

Telling Teachers they are they are the curriculum

I have recently attended a teachers seminar-workshop held by the Computer Professionals Union today at the University of the Philippines at Balay kalinaw.

Its good to be at UP once again....savouring the breeze, the shady trees and of course Khas food haus with the traditional beef briani for lunch with Gene Morada of G.ho.st.

The Theme of the workshop ws “Workshop on the trends and developments in Science and Mathematics”. When I arrived, a listened to inputs by various succes stories on how they used ICT as a tool in enhancing teaching in math and science.

Most of the questions on the open forum was actually centered on either the lack of support from LGU's or supervisors. I however noticed several things.... the teachers paradigm and mindsets were still the repository thing. Meaning they had to grasp it on hand and serve it on spoons to their students.

Of course part of what the previous speakers were telling them that there were options available to them, they just need to look for them.

The same questions and tone of clarifications were going on.

Of course, Gener was next to talk. ICT tools and web 2.0. Gene explained the use of the web to education and the need to use the web to enhance the interest of students and the usage of social networking sites. Also he introduced the value of cloud computing thru G.HO.ST which is actually the best tool for students who dont have their own PC's.

I actually was supposed to talk about school experiences using ICT. Something like best practices. But I felt that I need to tell them something. So I asked them to affirm the following:

The teacher is the curriculum

I am the curriculum

I am a teacher

I will empower my students

I am empowered

I dont know if indeed they felt their statements. I thought them that in order to be empowered they must be able to learn the tools in order to help students. Students nowadays learn more through collaboration than spoonfeeding. It is by introduing collaborative tools like Google services like Blogger, picassa google groups,as well as other web based tools. The concept is that we allow the students to be able to share and ciritique their peers objectively would enhance not only their skills but their responsibility as well.

I hope that the teachers realize that unless they learn that it is only by self-empowerment they can enhance their level of teaching and not on relying on what their supervisors, principals can tell them or what DEPED or TESDA or CHED can tell them.... They can do better because they know what their students need.... thus that is the very key to empowerment and enhancement of education at the very grassroots level. That is the message that they should understand in that seminar.Tools are there....they must be empowered to use these tools as a way to empower themselves and their students.........

FTC investigates Google and Apple

2009-05-07T01:49:00.000-07:00

Google and Apple are learning that while it is important to keep friends close, sometimes the Federal Trade Commission may want to know just how close those friends really are.

According to The New York Times, the FTC has opened an investigation to determine whether or not there are antitrust concerns over the two companies' close relationship. Specifically, the potential problems arise from the fact that both Google and Apple share two directors, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, and Arthur Levinson, former CEO of Genetech.

The Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 specifically prohibits the presence of two companies sharing board members when those companies compete. The act is aimed at ensuring that competition between the two companies would be decreased.

The Times reports that the provision against "interlocking directorates," or Section 8 of the Act, is not enforced regularly. Still, as both technology companies continue to expand their reach the FTC has apparently decided that an investigation is warranted—even if the provision is rarely invoked.

In the case of Apple and Google, concerns are likely being raised over the fact that both companies have been making strong pushes into the mobile device market with the iPhone and G1, respectively. In addition, both of the companies compete in the Web browser space, with Apple offering Safari and Google offering Chrome.

Beyond the mobile device and Web browser market, there are other areas where the two companies overlap in a competitive sense. Apple's iTunes and Google's YouTube both distribute video and media on the Web.

Android, Google's mobile device operating system, is in the process of being developed into an OS for netbooks. Apple, of course, has long been a systems maker that loads machines with its own operating system.

The key for Apple and Google to come away from this probe relatively unscathed may center on whether or not the two companies can prove that their competition overlap is minimal. The Clayton Act stipulates that interlocking directorates are not problematic so long as the total revenue overlap between the companies is less than 2 percent, according to the Times.

OS Migration this year

2009-05-04T05:11:00.000-07:00

A survey reveals that 84 percent of IT pros don’t have plans to upgrade to Windows 7 in the next year and half of respondents are considering alternatives, but it pays to parse a few nuances.

Andrew Nusca has the details on the survey, which was conducted by Dimension Research and commissioned by KACE, a systems management appliance company. The survey (Techmeme) had 1,142 respondents and 99 percent of them had Windows installed at their companies.

The spin here is that it’s somehow bad that most IT professionals won’t jump to Windows 7 in the next year. However, Windows 7 is still in beta and hasn’t been released yet. Of course, 84 percent won’t upgrade to Windows 7 in a 12 month time frame. If you go April to April and Windows 7 is launched in October-ish that means IT pros would have just six months to make the leap. In the OS upgrade world that speed just doesn’t happen.

Cast in that light, this chart below looks pretty impressive to me.

So within two years 59 percent of IT pros will upgrade to Windows 7. The good news: That’s some pent up demand. The bad news: Vista is the reason there’s pent up demand.

But what really caught my eye is the secondary headline about Windows alternatives.

The headline: 50 percent of IT pros are considering a move from Windows. Operative word: Considering. You’d be dumb not to consider a move. In fact, I’d argue that the other half of IT pros aren’t doing their job: You should always assess alternatives.

Of the 50 percent considering a move away from Windows 14 percent are actively making a jump. That’s up from 11 percent in 2008 and 9 percent in 2007. Your choice: Determine whether the money quote here should be:

Of 50 percent of folks considering a move from Windows, 36 percent stayed.
Of 50 percent of folks considering a move from Windows, 14 percent are bolting. Alternative OSes gaining steam.

The truth is probably in the middle.

And another nuance to ponder. Apple’s OS X is the most likely platform to replace Vista or Windows 7 with 27 percent eyeing the Mac platform. The rub: That percentage is down from 29 percent in 2008.

Perhaps the headline should be that Vista, Windows 7 and OS X are in decline—for Ubuntu.

Check out the chart:

In any case there’s a lot of fun with numbers that can be played with this survey.

CHS students trained with FOSS as alternatives

2009-05-02T02:32:00.001-07:00

Engaging Students with FOSS.

TESDA has recently given 50 scholarship slots in computer hardware servicing NC II to our school, the Asian Academy of Business and Computers. This was part of the 175 recently given slots of Pangulong Gloria Scholarships courtesy of TESDA.

Previously, we held an assessemnt on PC operations NC II around October of last year, we used open office and mozzila firefox as part of the test pakage for our students. Most of them (90 %) had passed the assessment and were declared “competent” (TESDA uses the term COMPETENT instead of passing).

Last Month (April) we also held assessments for our students in Computer Hardware servicing NC II every weekend. 94% (67 students) were declared competent in this category.

Currently our 2 classes of Computer Hardware servicing NC II are being trained to be both familiar with proprietary and FOSS software.

Touching on the merits of FOSS,most students were surprised how come LINUX and other FOSS Operating systems never have viruses.

Running on their third to fourth week, most students are still having their doubts as to the workability of linux. Perhaps after they have done installing and maintaing the computers they will have as projects.. they may realize that indeed Linux and other FOSS products are good technical alternatives to proprietary software.

Our trainors, linux Guru Brian De Vivar and hardware guy John Lopez are both doing their stuff in training these students to learn to use better alternatives like Ubuntu Linux and Mandriva Linux.

Unlike other Computer Hardware servicing students from other schools, our graduates will be both familiar with proprietary and FOSS.

Should you rip or should you not?

2009-05-01T22:00:00.000-07:00

Is backing up a DVD fair use or piracy?

SHOULD people who have bought DVDs legally be allowed to make digital copies of them for their own use? Any reasonable person would say yes. In copyright terms, that ought to be considered “fair use”. The law, however, presently says otherwise.

In America the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 considers it fair use for people to record copyrighted radio broadcasts for personal use. But the act says nothing about making digital recordings; and ripping copyrighted music tracks off CDs and storing them on iPods has now become an everyday occurrence. Apple would be in serious difficulty if people were prevented from transferring their own CDs to their iPods. Indeed, the software Apple gives away to iPod customers is designed to let them do just that. Yet it is probably illegal.

Shutterstock

One reason cited by people who believe they are entitled to make copies of any copyrighted material is security. A backup copy is needed, they say, in case a rare or favourite DVD is attacked by “disc rot” or gets badly scratched.

They are being disingenuous. Optical discs are not indestructible, but they are remarkably robust. Certainly, the adhesive used to bond the layers within the platter can lift, causing the aluminium data-layer below to become oxidised and patchy. But the solution is simple: keep all optical discs out of direct sunlight.

Meanwhile dust, fingerprints and even scratches can usually be removed by wiping the polycarbonate disc with a polyester cloth dipped in dilute washing-up liquid, and then rinsing with rubbing alcohol or methylated spirits.

Just remember to wipe the disc radially—from the centre to the edge. Wiping with a circular motion—parallel to the direction the data are laid down—can create microscopic blemishes over the Hamming error-correction codes. The picture can then become jerky or freeze as the video player stumbles across the patch of corrupted data.

In an act of desperation, your correspondent once used toothpaste to rub out deep gouges on a Laser Disc. The unplayable disc was restored to life, and subsequently replayed many times with never so much as a flicker.

The polymer coating of a Blu-ray Disc makes it even more durable than a DVD. Though little more than half a millimetre thick, it can withstand a surprising amount of abuse. It even stands up to a screwdriver attack.

Another excuse used by those who would copy DVDs is convenience—to have copies of favourite films on a laptop while away from home. Maybe, but your correspondent thinks it is easier to take the original discs with him. A better case can be made for copying DVDs onto a dedicated home-server, especially if it is hooked up to a wide-screen television using a secure cable.

Copying DVDs for such purposes may make life easier, but it is almost always against the law. With every DVD sold in America, both the packaging and the introduction to the video itself clearly state that unauthorised reproduction, distribution or exhibition is illegal. To be more specific, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 makes it a crime to circumvent measures that control access to the copyrighted material.

Unfortunately, the copyright protection on DVDs is so pathetic that it positively invites piracy. The encryption method known as Content Scrambling System (CSS) was first cracked in 1999 by Jon Johansen, a Norwegian programmer. In a few short lines of elegant code he called DeCSS, Mr Johansen showed the world how utterly useless the encryption was. Ever since, free software tools with names like HandBrake, DVDFab and DVD Shrink have circulated the web for copying the contents of DVDs onto hard-drives and recordable discs.

The one way you can legally copy a DVD, at least for the moment, is to buy one of the $10,000 home-server and player combos beloved by Hollywood moguls and made by a Silicon Valley firm called Kaleidescape.

A Kaleidescape server works by ripping the tracks off an owner’s collection of CDs and DVDs and storing them on the digital jukebox’s huge hard-drive. The digital content is then encrypted and fed to various screens and speakers around the home by a secure cable.

Ironically, Kaleidescape was sued several years ago by the film industry’s friends in the DVD Content Control Association for breaching its CSS licence. In its defence, Kaleidescape claimed that content distributed this way was even safer than it was on the original DVDs. The judge not only agreed, but could find no breach of the CSS licence either. The Content Control Association is appealing against the ruling.

RealNetworks, a digital media company that pioneered much of the technology for streaming music and video from the web, has pinned its defence in court this week on the Kaleidescape ruling. Last October a group of Hollywood studios sued the Seattle firm for the way RealDVD, a $30 software program, makes copying DVDs to a PC’s hard-drive a simple one-click affair, busting the CSS digital-rights-management system wide open and encouraging flagrant piracy in the process.

Not true, claims the company. RealDVD keeps the encryption intact as it copies everything—CSS included—to a PC’s hard-drive, and then wraps the lot up in an iTunes form of digital rights management. Lawyers for the firm have framed the debate in terms of fair use, as the software not only maintains the CSS encryption but also locks the copies of the DVD onto the receiving PC’s hard-drive for the owner’s private use.

But why, might our reasonable person ask, would RealNetworks go out of its way to provoke the Hollywood studios, who rely on DVD sales for most of their revenue these days? It is not as though a $30 program, sold in direct competition with a dozen well-established freebies from the internet, is going to make any significant difference to the media company’s sagging bottom line.

The answer can only be that RealNetworks has far bigger fish to fry than mere backup software for DVDs. Under questioning in court this week, the company was forced to reveal its long-term plans for the technology.

It seems that RealNetworks wants to turn its handiwork, code-named Facet, into a “TiVo for DVDs”—and do for video what MP3 players have done for audio. Apparently, the company has contracts with set-top-box makers in Asia awaiting the go-ahead. If the San Francisco court rules in its favour, RealNetworks could have its $300 version of the formidably expensive Kaleidescape jukebox out by next Christmas.

There is just one problem: the federal judge hearing the present case is Marilyn Hall Patel, who ruled against Napster in 2001—and put a stop, albeit briefly, to peer-to-peer sharing of MP3 music files over the internet

The revolution that wasn't

2009-04-30T02:01:00.000-07:00

DVRs were supposed to undermine television. They have done the opposite

TEN years ago this week a black box was demonstrated at a broadcasters’ convention in Las Vegas. TiVo’s digital video recorder (DVR) was expensive: the cheapest model cost $499. But it was hailed as revolutionary. It was much more flexible and easier to programme than a videocassette recorder. It allowed people to record and play back at the same time, so they could start watching a programme 20 minutes after it had started and fast-forward through all the advertisements. Experts forecast a severe, perhaps fatal, blow to advertising-supported television.

“For quite a few years people thought it was going to mean the demise of the television business,” says Alan Wurtzel, president of research at NBC, an American broadcast network. Yet DVRs turn out to have done little damage. Indeed, DVRs (also known as personal video recorders, or PVRs) may even have protected television and made it more conservative.

On one point the Cassandras were correct. As prices fell and cable and satellite firms began to bundle DVRs with other services, their popularity soared. According to Nielsen, a media-research outfit, 29% of American homes now have one. The boxes are in a higher proportion of the households advertisers most care about. Jack Wakshlag of Turner Broadcasting, a cable company, calculates that DVR-owning households earn about $20,000 more than average. Yet those households do not use them nearly as much as one might expect. Families with DVRs seem to spend 15-20% of their viewing time watching pre-recorded shows, and skip only about half of all advertisements. This means only about 5% of television is time-shifted and less than 3% of all advertisements are skipped. Mitigating that loss, people with DVRs watch more television.

Just because technology enables people to do something does not mean they will, particularly when it comes to a medium as indolence-inducing as television. And people have become lazier. Early adopters of DVRs used them a lot—not surprisingly, since they paid so much for them. Later adopters use them much less (about two-thirds less, according to a recent study). David Poltrack, head of research and planning at CBS, another broadcast network, reckons the networks have already felt most of the DVR’s effects.

Advertisers and television networks have pushed back even against this puny threat. They have developed relatively static advertisements that get a message across even at high speed. They put snippets of programming in the middle of ad breaks. One trick, described by Todd Juenger of TiVo as “closer to a silver bullet”, is to run advertisements that resemble programmes—in some cases featuring stars from the show people are trying to watch.

Far from being revolutionary, in some ways DVR has made television more stable. With the exception of live events it is broadly true that the most popular programmes are recorded the most. Mr Wakshlag describes it as “a hit-saving machine”. Broadcast television receives a bigger boost from DVR playback than cable television. The device has made it harder to introduce a new television programme, particularly at 10pm when people are likely to be playing back shows they recorded at 8pm or 9pm.

One reason television executives have calmed down about DVRs is that they have something else to worry about. Hulu and other video-streaming websites, which are becoming more popular, give a great deal of control to consumers and are thought to pose a threat to advertising-supported television. Does that sound familiar?

No more yahoos for Geocities

2009-04-26T01:28:00.000-07:00

Yahoo pulls the plug on GeoCities

Yahoo paid $3.57bn for GeoCities in 1999

Yahoo is to close its personal web hosting site GeoCities later this year.

In a statement, the firm says it will no longer be accepting new customers and will focus on helping "customers build new relationships online".

Yahoo bought GeoCities for $3.57bn at the height of the dotcom boom in 1999.

At its peak, GeoCities boasted millions of active accounts, but it has since fallen out of fashion, with users migrating to social networking sites.

Yahoo says that existing GeoCities accounts will remain live for now, although it stresses that users should start looking for alternative sites.

"You don't need to change your service today, but we encourage anyone interested in a full-featured web-hosting plan to consider upgrading to our award-winning Yahoo! Web Hosting service," the firm said in an online post.

The closure of GeoCities spells the end of Yahoo's free hosting, although other services - such as e-mail accounts - remain unaffected.

Rupert Goodwins, editor of the ZDNet website, said the closure of GeoCities was the end of an era.

"I think GeoCities was the first proof that you could have something really popular and still not make any money on the internet.

"It was a fascinating experiment in the pre-industrial era of the internet, but after the initial exuberance on what the web could do, it turned out to be more complicated than just giving them free hosting.

"You need to give users tools to actually do things and make things simple, one of the reasons sites like Facebook and MySpace are so popular," he said.

A Modest Proposal For empowering Communities

2009-04-25T20:45:00.000-07:00

Government PC's ensnared by BOTNETS

2009-04-22T01:20:00.000-07:00

PCs inside a botnet can be forced to carry out instructions

Almost two million PCs globally, including machines inside UK and US government departments, have been taken over by malicious hackers.

Security experts Finjan traced the giant network of remotely-controlled PCs, called a botnet, back to a gang of cyber criminals in the Ukraine.

Several PCs inside six UK government bodies were compromised by the botnet.

Finjan has contacted the Metropolitan Police with details of the government PCs and it is now investigating.

A spokesman for the Cabinet Office, which is charged with setting standards for the use of information technology across government, said it would not comment on specific attacks "for security reasons".

When we look at a similar network last year they were in the hundreds of thousands. Now were looking at mega-size botnets.

Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technology officer for Finjan

"It is Government policy neither to confirm nor deny if an individual organisation has been the subject of an attack nor to speculate on the origins or success of such attacks."

He added: "We constantly monitor new and existing risks and work to minimise their impact by alerting departments and giving them advice and guidance on dealing with the threat."

How does a botnet work?

It is the second time in a year that PCs inside government departments have been hacked to form part of a botnet.

On this occasion, the machines were infected with software which allowed them to be taken over and enslaved in the botnet due to vulnerabilities in web browsers.

At the mercy

Once a machine has been compromised, it can be instructed to download further software, which puts the machine at the mercy of malicious hackers.

STAYING SAFE ONLINE

Use anti-spyware and anti-virus programs

On at least a weekly basis update anti-virus and spyware products

Install a firewall and make sure it is switched on

Make sure updates to your operating system are installed

Take time to educate yourself and family about the risks

Monitor your computer and stay alert to threats

Hi-tech crime: A glossary

The compromised PCs are capable of reading e-mail addresses, copying files, recording keystrokes, sending spam and capturing screen shots.

Once a single machine inside a corporate network has been made part of the botnet it puts other machines on the network at risk.

The Cabinet Office would not give details of what the compromised machines had been instructed to do, nor the names of the different government departments that had been infiltrated.

The cyber criminals, who have not been caught, were selling access to the compromised machines, thought to be mainly PCs inside companies, on a hackers' forum in Russia.

One thousand machines were being sold at a time for between $50 and $100.

Finjan reports that the botnet is under the control of six criminals who are able to remotely control the infected machines.

Different organisations

Almost half of the infected machines were in the US. Six percent of the botnet, about 114,000 machines from 52 different organisations, were from the UK, among them a single PC inside the BBC's network.

Many of the infected machines will have been caught by routine information security policies at firms, as it was in the case of the BBC, but Finjan says many of the botnet PCs are still active.

We are aware of this botnet and are taking appropriate action

Metropolitan Police spokeswoman

More than 70 different national government agencies from around the world were caught up in the malicious network.

Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technology officer for Finjan, told BBC News: "When we looked at the network domain names to see where the [compromised PCs] come from we were surprised to see many government networks, including UK government computers.

"Obviously we reported it and they have now dealt with it. There were six UK agencies with at least one computer in each department that was running the bot.

"I'm not at liberty to name the actual agencies - but this isn't a unique story to the UK, they were running in many other non-UK, government bodies too."

Government bodies

A number of different government bodies are responsible for IT security and deployment across the UK.

They include the Central Sponsor for Information Assurance, the National Technical Authority for Information Assurance, and the the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI), the government body which is part of the British Security Service and responsible for providing security advice to organisations that make up critical services in the UK.

All of the infected machines were Windows-based PCs and the vulnerability was targeting security holes in Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Mr Ben-Itzhak said: "What is unique is the number the size of the network. When we look at a similar network last year they were in the hundreds of thousands. Now were looking at mega-size botnets."

In contact

A spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Police said: "This is an ongoing investigation. We are aware of this botnet and are taking appropriate action."

Large botnets can be used to co-ordinate attacks to knock parts of the network, or specific websites, offline, called a Distributed Denial of Service attack.

Last year, the CPNI told a Cabinet Office-commissioned independent review that stopping such attacks was difficult.

It said: "The attacks are relatively low in sophistication, but have been highly effective due to the large number of compromised machines involved.

"It is difficult to defend against a sophisticated Distributed Denial of Service attack without impacting legitimate business use."

The CPNI recommended that the best defence against these attacks was appropriate monitoring of the network.

Additional reporting by Daniel Emery.

Portable Ubuntu Linux

2009-04-20T23:37:00.000-07:00

Want a Portable ubuntu on top of Windows?
By Adrian Kingsley Hughes

I like finding risk-free ways to try out Linux distros because I can show them to folks who are curious about Linux but not yet ready to throw the Windows discs into the trash can. One way to try Linux while keeping your Windows installation intact is to use Portable Ubuntu.

Check out the Portable Ubuntu gallery

Portable Ubuntu is a great idea. It’s a stand-alone 440MB package that you download to your PC (Windows only, no Mac flavor) and extract onto your PC or portable flash drive so you can take the OS with you when you’re on the move (you need 2GB of space for the extracted files). To get the ball rolling you then fire up Portable Ubuntu via the Command Prompt (under Vista and Windows 7 this needs to have admin privileges). However, if you’re expecting to see a full Linux desktop you’re out of luck. What you get is a nifty toolbar that looks and feels like Ubuntu’s own launcher.

From here you can launch all your favorite Linux applications, and these run as though they are Windows-based apps.

Portable Ubuntu is really nice and well thought out. Not only are all changes you make to the Linux distro saved automatically, but you can add and remove Linux programs to suit your needs.

Note: To make changes to the OS you need the root password, which in this case has been set to 123456 (you might want to change that).

Portable Ubuntu is a great bit of kit for those wanting a portable OS solution or wanting to try out Ubuntu. For Linux newbies it’s a good way to take Ubuntu for a test drive without having to commit an entire PC to the project

Adrian is a technology journalist and author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology. He also runs a popular blog called The PC Doctor.

Use of Resumes in a Web 2.0 world

2009-04-07T22:39:00.000-07:00

By the time kids leave high school or college, they should be able to write a resume, right? It won’t be a long one as they obviously have pretty limited employment experience. However, they should be able to sell themselves to post-secondary educational institutions and potential employers. While the traditional 1-page paper resume is hardly dead as a snapshot of a potential employee/student,It sure would help if people have an online pressence that would mark and represent their professional potential.

This is 2009: what can you bring to your employer or to your professors/instructors in terms of modern skill? Obviously, the idea of selling yourself on one piece of paper means that you have to be quite compelling in a short space. Yet it hardly provides a picture of a modern young person.

Nowadays, HR department people or even potential employers will check MySpace and Facebook profiles before hiring candidates. Why not, in addition to keeping one’s social networking profiles clean (please stop posting those killer bong hits, kids), provide an employer with a full digital portfolio? Don’t make them dig up your Twitter or Friendfeed; provide them in a clear, well-organized, online format. Make it a blog, or a wiki, a full-blown website, or a video site. Make it compelling, interesting, and to the point. Make the link prominent on that paper resume you provide in an interview or letter of interest (or on your college application, for that matter).

Guidance and career counselors, take note: this is 2009. It’s no longer about helping kids get into college or find a job: it’s about helping students build a brand and sell themselves in a very different world than the world into which most of us were born.

Is Linux only for the poor? Posted by Christopher Dawson

2009-03-26T00:11:00.000-07:00

Last week, I followed a conversation on an OpenSuse Education newsletter to which I subscribe. I didn’t have time to join in, but it did get me thinking about open source in education more broadly. Regular readers will know that my school district has made serious strides in the last couple of years, particularly as it relates to technology. However, those same regular readers will also know that the community is hurting like many other aging mill towns and that I frequently at least explore open source solutions as money savers.

For now, most open source use is among students. All of the elementary schools use Open Office; we don’t have any Office licenses in place with the exception of a couple secretarial power users who are able to exploit some of the advanced features in Office 2007. Students throughout the district use Open Office at home, saving themselves the trouble of using Works if it came preinstalled on their computers or to avoid buying Office. I hand out CDs and USB keys to students with dialup access loaded with OO.org 3.

An increasing number of students and teachers have turned to Linux as they try to eek out a bit of extra life on their computers or decide that they don’t like whatever version of Vista came preinstalled on computers they recently purchased. I’m happy, along with a couple of my techs, to help people get up an running with Linux. However, we haven’t yet rolled out Linux formally in our schools. The only time we had a full Linux lab was when we had absolutely no technology funding in my second year teaching and I let my students build a lab from old donated computers.

Which leads me to the point of this post? If you have money in your district, is there any reason to use Linux? The original conversation I mentioned earlier was started by an IT staffer at an exclusive, well-funded private school. They were a Windows shop and saw no incentive to change. Licensing costs were a non-issue. Even we still largely use Windows and OS X, despite my fondness for Linux. We’ve been granted the funding to do so in the last couple of years and my primary goal has been instructional integration of computing, rather than worrying about training for a Linux rollout.

We’re hunkering down now budget-wise for a tough couple of years. While we have solid technology in place, new acquisitions will be very carefully scrutinized for cost and benefit; there are very few pennies to spare. Saving $50 per computer on OS licensing just might be the difference between funding a project and needing to wait for 1-2 years.

So again, is Linux only useful in a recession or in South American countries trying to get as many computers into the hands of rural schoolchildren as they can?

Cost will certainly give people a reason to switch, but I don’t think a crappy economy or poverty in a developing country is the only reason to use Linux and open source software. I won’t even get into the argument of exposing kids to a variety of computing environments. I think the biggest reason to use Linux (aside from potential cost savings if you can develop some in-house *nix expertise) is simply the giant body of software that is freely available.

The OpenSUSE Education project is a great example. Desktop software included with this project ranges from computer science applications for kids to the R statistical programming interface. Server software ranges from OpenSIS to Joomla.

Whether your school has money or not, there is incredible value in the open source community. Perhaps most important, though, is that word “community.” We can talk all we want about global economies, but allowing students and staff to be part of and participate in a community that drives the way we use technology is an incredible opportunity. Keep in mind that there is plenty of open source value for Windows users; we don’t all have to switch to Linux to reap the benefits of FOSS.

Pangulong Gloria Scholarships

2009-03-18T19:12:00.000-07:00

The Technical Education Skills Development Authority (TESDA ) Quezon City District office has recently awarded 1,000 Pangulong Gloria Scholarships to poor yet deserving students in its first pilot tsting of the PGS scholarships to selected schools/TEK Bok Providers (TBP).
According to NCR Regional Director Mitch Tangonan, this is on;ly the first batch of PGS scholaers, more will be following as the government plans to increase Training for work scholarships in order that students will have more access to sure jobs and employable skills after completion of their trainings.

Among the schools that were able to be part of the pilot implementation of the PGS was the Asian Academy of Business and Computer of which 100 students were awarded scholarships in the following fields:

Computer hardware servicing NC II : 25 slots
Programming NC IV: 25 slots
Visual Graphics NC III: 25 slots
Book Keeping NC III : 25 slots

There are other schools also co-implementing the program. For more details, you may check www.tesdaqc.wordpress.com for more details.

Ning CEO on how start-ups can hit the ground running

2009-03-07T00:47:00.000-08:00

Competitive advantages with cloud computing

At the TechCrunch Cloud Computing Roundtable in Mountain View, Calif., Gina Bianchini, CEO of Ning, says that cloud computing can give start-ups an edge by allowing them to focus on the application their business is producing, and then gives them far wider distribution--through sites like Facebook--than was available just a few years ago. Amitabh Srivastava, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Windows Azure group, adds that the cloud eliminates hardware headaches, an important consideration for start-ups that may not even have funding yet. Moderator: Erick Schonfeld, co-editor TechCrunch

Microsoft bounty for worm creator

2009-02-15T20:34:00.000-08:00

Microsoft bounty for worm creator

A reward of $250,000 (£172,000) has been offered by Microsoft to find who is behind the Downadup/Conficker virus.

Since it started circulating in October 2008 the Conficker worm has managed to infect millions of computers worldwide.

Microsoft is offering the cash reward because it views the Conficker worm as a criminal attack.

"People who write this malware have to be held accountable," George Stathakopulos, of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group was reportedly heard saying.

He said that the company was "will not sit back and let this kind of activity go unchecked".

"Our message is very clear - whoever wrote this caused significant pain to our customers and we are sending a message that we will do everything we can to help with your arrest," said Mr Stathakopulos.

Arbor Networks said as many as 12 million computers could be affected globally by Conficker/Downadup since it began prowling the web looking for vulnerable machines to infect in October.

The Conficker worm is a self-replicating program that takes advantage of networks or computers that have not kept up to date with Windows security patches.

It can infect machines via a net connection or by hiding on USB memory drives used to ferry data from one computer to another. Once in a computer it digs deep, setting up defences that make it hard to extract.

The worm can also spread via USB flash drives.

The worm stealths through networks by guessing usernames and passwords. Security specialists recommend hardening passwords by mixing in numbers, punctuation marks and capital letters.

The virus reports in to its creators for updates by visiting a web domain. It generates the name of the domain itself using a complicated code which security firms have cracked to track the growth of the worm and block its progress.

Malware such as Downadup can be triggered to steal data or turn control of infected computers over to malicious hackers which pool them into larger armies of so-called botnets.

These networks of compromised machines can be used to send spam, as dead drops for stolen or pirated data and to launch attacks on other machines.

Although Downadup is widespread its creators havent activated its payload to steal data or launch other attacks.

It has caused costly headaches for network administrators dealing with users locked out of their accounts when the worm correctly guesses a password.

While Microsoft says it does not know the intention of the worm's creator, it wants to ensure it does not wreak any more havoc.

Experts say users should have up-to-date anti-virus software and install Microsoft's MS08-067 patch - also known as KB958644.

Microsoft has also partnered with security companies, domain name providers, academia, internet companies such as AOL and others on a co-ordinated global response to the worm.

Millions of computers have been hit by Conficker

Also included is the US Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security.

"The best way to defeat potential botnets like Conficker/Downadup is by the security and Domain Name System communities working together," said Greg Rattray, chief internet security adviser at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann).

"Icann represents a community that's all about co-ordinating those kinds of efforts to keep the internet globally secure and stable."

In 2003 Microsoft created its reward programme with $5m (£3.4m) in funding to help law enforcement agencies bring computer virus and worm authors to justice.

This reward for help in tracking the creators of Downadup is the first time in four years that the company has put up some cash in response to a worm outbreak.

Microsoft hopes its bounty has started the countdown to finding its creator

"We have not seen this type of worm or one of its class since 2004," said Mr Stathakopulos.

In 2005 Microsoft paid out $250,000 (£171,000) to two individuals who helped identify the creator of the notorious Sasser worm. The author was arrested and sentenced by the German authorities.

Rewards of $250,000 were offered over three other major computer worm threats known as Blaster, MyDoom and Sobig worms.

Those perpetrators have never been caught.

Textbooks in E-books?

2009-02-10T21:42:00.000-08:00

Is there a current need for textbooks in schools?

Normally the trend would be in school is to require courses taken to have textbooks, and each teacher would always have his perrenial bias towards recommending his won favourite textbook, be it authored by him or his favourite college pprofessor. .In buying technology textbooks as time passes by specially in IT they tend to be outdated by the time you receive them and because we have this great thing called the Internet filled with technology information.

Not so long ago, it took a fair amount of work, though to assemble a whole semester’s or year’s worth of coursework from web materials. Obviously, supplemental materials abounded, but textbooks certainly do help with a curriculum and keeping students on track from day to day. And as a school administrator for a school with students from class CD and e groups, I would always look for affordable alternatives, knowing that the web is full of them, it only would take you a specially dedicated researcher to find these things on the net. We were all set for introductory web classes and office productivity, but more advanced web goodies and programming were certainly not in our book closet.

It didn’t take much of our time to do Googling, that we came over to see that there are full textbooks and curricula were now available for free to cover every topic I had in mind. The idea of Open Textbooks is a fairly new one, following in the same vein as Open Source Software. Some of them, like Wikibooks, are works in progress. Others are robust teaching tools, like those found on opentextbook.org:

Introduction to Programming Using Java
How to Think Like a Computer Scientist (this comes in 4 different versions, each specific to an implementation language)

The Canadian site Free Learning is also a treasure trove of information and is searchable as well. This is more of a meta-database, pointing to a variety of open text resources.

This doesn’t even take into account initiatives like MIT’s OpenCourseWare. Two introductory computer science courses (including notes, presentations, source code, and other supplemental materials) are available here, along with countless courses appropriate for high school and independent study. Courses particularly appropriate for high school are even broken out on this site

We’re certainly nowhere near a time when we can dispense with purchased, traditional textbooks, especially in core subjects that often need to be aligned with local, state, or federal standards. However, I have no doubt that I can give teachers everything they need to teach a wide variety of courses in technology without spending a dime.

We just have to be wise enough and have the temerity to search within the available set of freee resources in our reach.

Windows 7 to Ubuntu... will it get wiped out by M$

2009-02-08T21:31:00.000-08:00

Reacting that Windows 7 will wipe out Ubuntu.

There were recent comments from ZDNET people that there are people from MS who said that Microsoft 7 will wipe out Ubuntu.

However,Dana Blankenhorn of ZDNET says other wise, she gives the following reasons in her blog:

"Not exactly. Not even approximately.

First let’s understand what 7’s target is. It’s not so much desktop Linux as a particular Linux distro — Ubuntu — that targets the desktop.

Some of these reasons are technological, others social. But the biggest reason is a business reason:

Ubuntu has an entrepreneur at the helm. Microsoft beat IBM because it had Bill Gates up against a bunch of suits. Now Microsoft is a bunch of suits and Ubuntu has Mark Shuttleworth.
Ubuntu has more server compatibility. Linux continues to beat Windows on the server, and servers (in the form of clouds) are becoming dominant over clients.
Ubuntu’s friends will not desert it. HP and Dell have gotten a taste of freedom from Microsoft tyranny. They won’t give that up easily. They will continue seeking product line niches where Ubuntu can succeed.
The Netbook will continue to evolve. The “no moving parts” PC is still at Version 1.0. There is a niche for a cheap, profitable “online machine” that can be used in Airports, hotel rooms and sandy deserts.
Applications will come. It’s true there are more Windows apps than Linux, by a logarithmic factor. But many are being ported, and the developed world will create many more.
Windows is losing the mobility wars. Linux is playing well, Apple is winning big, RIM is hanging in. Where’s Windows? PCs are servers to mobile clients. The clients will tire of waiting.
The open source model. Software development has become like the old Steve Jackson game Ogre, and Microsoft’s the Ogre. Ubuntu and other open source pieces are small, but there are a lot of them, and they can work together. Or as Kermit said in The Muppet Movie “who are your friends, Doc?”

This does not mean that Microsoft will cease to be a desktop player, that Ubuntu is going to take over. Far from it. Ubuntu will retain enough interest to stay in the game, that’s all it needs to do.

Ubuntu is doing fine with its present market share. How much more can it get over the next year? Perhaps just a little. I suspect this will be a year when desktop Linux consolidates around Ubuntu, so some gain is nearly assured.

Microsoft will also not disappear under the open source onslaught, just as IBM did not disappear under the weight of Microsoft. But it will change.

It will be fun to watch how it changes, and when. It has yet to see the need, but when Ubuntu fails to fall under the weight of Windows 7 perhaps it will."

dana is one of the resident bloggers of ZDNET

Having Good Functional Running Old PC's

2009-02-04T04:46:00.000-08:00

A lot of us have old PCs stuck in the corners of classrooms, machines we just can’t afford to replace and whose owners just can’t do without. At the same time, a lot of us are acquiring netbooks and inexpensive hardware instead of investing in the latest and greatest “Vista-capable” computers. Normally for FOSS people like me its a YEHEY think to put in Linux in those running Boxes.

Some people have issues however if indeed there appears to be a need to install Xubuntu on a 7-year old computer when it’s running just fine on Windows 98 or Windows 2000? From a security point of view , there are risks in running these dated operating systems, however,what matters to us is just to keep people who are using these computers functional (since they have grown used to it, considering that many people in these spaces are creatures of habit). Perhaps the machines are only used for word processing or accessing specific applications with minimal Internet access (if a computer only hits your student information system and sits behind an adequate firewall, chances of a breach are pretty low).

There are time that Students or even your teachers bought netbooks for themselves and had XP Home installed, no matter how many times you suggested they buy the Linux model. To that end, there is some very lightweight software available to maximize the utility of aging machines or low-end netbooks (and it runs on Windows!).Chris Dawson and Tech Radar featured a cool roundup of ultra-light applications for aging PCs. We will highlight some of the apps that would be most appropriate for educational settings:

Word Processing - AbiWord 2.6
Boasting most of the same functionality as Microsoft Word 2003, AbiWord is free and light on its feet. Needing only a paltry 16MB of RAM, it runs on Windows 2000 upwards. You can grab an earlier version for Windows 98 if your machine is really wrinkly. [Also a great choice on Linux; it isn't a full office suite, but it's a very fast word processor]
Graphics - IrFanView 4.23
Forget about Photoshop and even its open source rival The GIMP - IrfanView’s the photo editor to choose on underpowered platforms. With support stretching back to Windows 95 it opens and saves dozens of image formats, with batch editing, cropping resizing and other basic photo manipulation tools built in.
Coding - NoteTab Light
Looking for a seriously lightweight coding tool? NoteTab Light does the job. A text editor that’s optimised for working with HTML and CSS, it has features like code snippets, HTML tidying and auto-correction. It’ll run happily on Windows 98 upwards - Windows 95 too if you use the help file patch.
Video - VLC Media Player
Judging media players is difficult as they’re only ever as fast and reliable as the data you try to squeeze through them. VLC Media Player is portable. though, has a small footprint and - though it will struggle to play full HD video on older systems - it’s perfect for DVDs and MP3s on Pentium class computers. [This will take care of all of your video needs on Linux machines and Macs, too, regardless of file type]
PDF Reader - Sumatra PDF
PDFs have become the industry alternative to printed documentation - but Acrobat Reader, Adobe’s free tool for opening PDFs, is something of a resource hog. Enter Sumatra PDF - nimble on its feet and stripped of bells and whistles, it’s a fast loading alternative to Adobe’s offering. [Think Preview on a Mac]
Instant Messaging - Pidgin
Multiple messaging clients scoff your system resources, so switching to a single, universal IM tool makes sense. Pidgin does the job well, with support for AIM, Google Talk, Yahoo!, MSN and more. [I'd only recommend this one on those netbooks, by the way; IM is just too risky on older machines]

So in the view of using old machines and making people be functional. Keep these tips on hand and God Bless

Cloud Computing in School with Google Docs.

2009-01-23T19:25:00.000-08:00

In short, pretty well. Google Docs has gotten faster and more robust and served brilliantly for any school's word processing needs. Wherever possible that the average K-12 student could live within their browser quite happily. With Google Docs (my online suite of choice because I’ve really bought into the Google ecosystem, but Zoho provides great tools as well), presentations, spreadsheets, and documents are utterly simple to produce. Despite the changes to Google’s marketing and sales of their Apps suite, their educational version of Google Apps for your domain remains free.

Blogger (and countless other tools) make it easy to produce documents online and share them as needed; Google Docs provides great sharing and collaboration tools as well.

Googlegroups also is good because it allows collaboration between teacher and student. An editions to the work would be highlighted and any desire to return to the original version of the document can be made by the author of the text.

This proves critical when a student has to prepare or edit a document that he has but is unsure of the LAN ecology in which he is using. To assure that his documents will not be virus infested, using an online document application wherein his file is uploaded, he is able to simultaneoulsy prepare the text, email it to share/collaborate with a etacher and simultaneoulsy in real time see the comments and remarks made by his teacher on the paper. A real help for the teacher who may be mobile.

Gdocs is also a remarkable tool as it allows the teacher to create an online exam in Google forms. After creating the exam he may simply email the form to his students and who will answer and send the form back to the teacher who may maximize the results.

Google Docs, thus is one of the applications that uses cloud computing and is very advantegous to the educational sector.

One of the things im thinking of giving consideration (although majority of my students come from class CD and E families) is having an internet access point for WIFI notebooks. Some of my students, especially from the short term courses that I offer, accidentally bring in their notebooks from work. It would assist them in having online portfolios for their multimedia, visual graphics and animation classes. So what does this mean for students and teachers using cheap netbooks? It means that even for schools who turn to netbooks as an inexpensive way to get more computers into students’ hands, some dedicated facilities for more sophisticated computing are important. It also means that a bit of flash storage, whether an SD card or USB drive, could allow some multimedia files to be handled client-side or moved between dedicated PCs and the netbooks.

In the end I am hoping that I would be able to create more opportunities that would have students from class B and C families coming in and bring notebooks as one of their tools in school.

What should we do with those computers lying on our desks: a question for every School Manager on the Primary, Secondary and even on the Tertiary Leve

2009-01-06T02:13:00.000-08:00

BusinessWeek ran a great article recently focusing on one school in San Francisco that was rethinking exactly what computers in schools meant. As the article quite aptly pointed out,

“Schools are enthusiastic about the technology’s promise, but short of the money and trained faculty to extract many of its benefits…In many schools, PCs have failed to aid students’ learning or improve test scores, or equip them with the analysis and communications skills that today’s workplace demands, according to studies. The problems include a reliance on paper lesson plans that don’t factor in technology, and inadequate teacher training and technical support.”

Most of us realize how easy it is to throw computers into a school to meet requirements of various regulatory types and call this 21st Century Learning. Actually using these effectively in the classroom is another matter entirely.

“If you’re just sprinkling the technology on top of the curriculum, it’s not as compelling,” says. Intel’s [Eileen Lento, a government and education strategist]. “Then you just have some expensive pencils.”…Other times, school boards buy computers to prove their technical savvy to politicians and parents, without thinking through how kids will actually use the machines. “

If we aren’t giving kids anything more than glorified typewriters or web skills that extend beyond Google and Wikipedia, then we certainly aren’t going to help them be competitive in a technology- and information-driven world. Rather, as is clear from the article, it’s time for some very serious thought on the part of educators as to just what purpose computers in a classroom will serve.

Ironically despite the Fact that the Philippines is a BPO (meaning Business Process Outsourcing) country, most of its Public primary and secondary schools do not use Computers for class room instruction.

Although there are only selected public (meaning state owned )primary schools that has computers for classroom instructions there must be efforts on using focused computer applications to identify students’ strengths and weaknesses in math and literacy and use the data from these applications to modify instruction. The particular applications we’ve chosen also automatically provide some differentiated instruction for students who don’t require a more serious intervention.

At the secondary level, we’re still defining curriculum around the technology. At the moment, students are becoming adept at research online and most have solid skills with productivity apps, but we still have a long ways to go genuinely integrating the tools and training teachers to build technology-driven lessons instead of merely having kids type their papers.

In college, only those who are specializing in ICT are trained with computers, most other specializations end up with students using Google or wikipedia for “research”, for the lack of the term. More than ever today, instruction with the use of computers must be utilized to ensure that students problem solving skills be more enhanced in today's competitive world, and not just to use html to design and code more designs onto one's Facebook or Friendster page.

We still aren’t having students use collaboration tools or access enough primary sources online. We still don’t have enough students actually finding and communicating with human contacts who can provide them with interesting, relevant, and useful information. Our students taking Spanish aren’t talking over Skype or Gmail voice/video with kids in Spain or Mexico, or our students taking Arabic cant even communicate with somebody in the Middle East or Malaysia. You get the picture. We have many ways to go. Those who have ideas can feel free to email the author or even write articles or blogs about them.

(Blogger's note:I've read and was inspired and borrowed Chris Dawsons article with “what to do with computers in the schools” and set the scene in the Philippine setting to see the trends in ICT education in the Philippines. )

Looking from the hourglass.....

2009-01-04T18:49:00.000-08:00

missives from a midset

I was looking at all of the people rushing to get their shopping list filled up in preparation for a long break... christmas break as they would say. It was a very long year.... The school had accomplished a lot of things deemed unimaginable by ordinary standards by we made it and yet... we still missed the target we set for ourselves.

We were able to prepare new courses to be offered in school and apply them in TESDA, as well as get some (not all of our teachers accredited as Trainors/assessors in TESDA), although we had filed and applied formally for several courses in TESDA both as courses and as assessment centers for such courses, we still have to wait for formalities and ministerial processes to take place.

As a school that has tried to cater to class C,D and E families, we were quite in dire straights considering that indeed in a global recession that strongly influences an already problematic national economy... tuition fee not being payed on time also means delayed payments on our operatinal expenses.....From a managers point of view, we have to improvise and ensure that indeed we can sustain the expenses of the school through alternative means .

We had foreseen these events in advance... and we prepared a little for this. As advocates of Free and Open Source Software as well as EDTECH, we tried to find ways on how to earn while advocating.

We stumbled upon creating a computer literacy module that aimed to train seafaring cadets in Desktop applications as well as training them to become Captain's aide and on-board secretary in a shipboard environment... we called this C-Office (short for Shipboard Office Productivity Suite) which aims to equip Navigation and Engine Cadets with Conputer literacy skills as well as Office Management Skills, soft skills that is required for global seafarers. This program was made a part of the official training program of one of the premier maritine agencies, POBAR Maritime LTD, this course was the brainchild of Capt Leo Mirante, MM, the manager of this company and DR Joel S. Garcia, president of the school. Thus although initially three Shipping manning agencies took part among them POBAR and OSM, it was POBAR that eventually adopted the program as an integral part of their manpower development program. Instead of wholly teaching MS Office , Adobe Reader for PDF and Internet explorer for web browsing.... we taught them the Linux desktop system, the Open Office system and document viewer/foxit reader for document preparation and mozilla firefox for browsing, we have shown that Linux alternatives exist for usage in office productivity.

We also initiated trainings fr Blender 3d animation as a tool for 3d animation.We are also looking into creating courses for PhP MySQL for web administrators and developers as well as for Java, C++ and other FOSS programming languages.....

Although we may not yet received approval for the other courses and programs... we are hoping that the backlogs and leftover targets we have left for 2008 can be finished before the end of January 2009.

wish us luck.

An IT Program on Philippine Free TV

2009-01-04T18:47:00.000-08:00

Looking at Convergence

Ive recently seen a very interesting program in Information technology. The name of the Show is Convergence at NET-25. I liked the format of the show. Except that it does not cover FOSS/Open Souce/LINUX material. One can view its programs every evening at 8 pm at channel 25 on your free TV but you can also watch it online at www.net-25.com/convergence. They have live video streaming.

Ive seen that indeed they cover much topics like new trends in Information Technology, they even cover topics such as WEB 2.0, social networking, Updates in software and hardware development, Gaming and electronic gadgets as well as multimedia solutions.

Convergence as a whole answers to a lot of things that normally a person needs with IT....in short a must for every person who uses information technology.

Il be watching their shows and be commenting on their content once in a while.

Will inlcusion of WINE make the Ubuntu flavour better?

2008-12-16T21:58:00.000-08:00

One of the keepers of the Ubuntu software respositories (called MOTUs, or Masters of the Universe) has proposed a mainstream inclusion of Wine with Ubuntu. For any of you unfamiliar with Wine, it is a body of software that allows Linux users to run a variety of Windows applications. WineHQ summarizes:

Wine is a translation layer (a program loader) capable of running Windows applications on Linux and other POSIX compatible operating systems. Windows programs running in Wine act as native programs would, running without the performance or memory usage penalties of an emulator, with a similar look and feel to other applications on your desktop.

Wine allows applications ranging from Accelerated Reader to Examview to Logger Pro to run on a Linux box. A complete list of Windows educational applications enabled with Wine is available here.

Obviously, making Wine easily-accessible to Linux users would bring down a significant barrier to its adoption.

According to Neowin.net,

This does not mean the Wine would be installed by default but instead that, on clicking an executable file, the user would be prompted if they want to install Wine. An automatic install would follow, similar to what is already done for codecs in Ubuntu.

The proposed inclusion of Wine certainly makes sense for Ubuntu, largely considered the mainstream Windows alternative of choice (next to OS X). It also means that users of netbooks won’t necessarily have to run Windows XP Home to access educational applications. Instead, as Wine continues to mature and see increased adoption and integration with Ubuntu, Linux netbooks become far more realistic. So, in fact, do DIY labs, saving licensing fees on operating systems, even if the fees can’t be saved on some proprietary software used in your school system.

Microsoft revising 'us vs. them' attitude toward open source

2008-12-14T22:27:00.000-08:00

Microsoft is changing its previous "us vs. them" attitude toward open-source software.

Elizabeth Montalbano (IDG News Service) 10/12/2008 09:36:00

When Microsoft completed its acquisition of San Francisco-based startup Powerset in July, it acquired more than just search-engine technology. In the HBase component of Powerset's product, Microsoft also acquired open-source code that is actively being redistributed back into the Apache Software Foundation's Hadoop project.

The scenario of having open-source technology in a product is a first for Microsoft, which to date has had only proprietary technology in its software, said Robert Duffner, a senior director in Microsoft's Platform Strategy Group.

Letting the acquired technology exist as it is, and letting the former Powerset employees continue to contribute code to Hadoop, represents a shift in mindset and strategy at the company to be more friendly toward open-source technology and realize that "innovation occurs across a wide variety of technologies," he said.

In addition to the Powerset code, Microsoft also for the first time in 2008 began contributing other code to open-source projects. In July, Microsoft began providing code to a PHP project called ADOdb. PHP is an open-source, freely available scripting language that developers widely use for Web development.

Duffner's group, under the direction of Microsoft Senior Director Sam Ramji, is driving this movement to not only accept open-source software as a technology with which Microsoft's software has to interoperate effectively, but also to see it as beneficial to both Microsoft's own business goals and the industry as a whole.

Having long positioned Windows and other proprietary software against open source as "us versus them," Microsoft is now trying to convince customers that the two technologies are not mutually exclusive and in fact can even be complementary at times.

Part of the duty of the Platform Strategy Group, formed a little over a year ago, is also to reverse the message of Microsoft's previous and infamous "Get the Facts" campaign, which aggressively tried to show customers the value proposition of deploying a Windows environment instead of Linux.

This new attitude also is a far cry from the Microsoft of only a year-and-a-half ago, when CEO Steve Ballmer claimed that Linux violates 235 patents Microsoft holds and said the company was considering seeking patent royalties from open-source distributors.

"It's been quite a while since we've heard very much saber-rattling [from Microsoft] on open source," said Jay Lyman, open-source analyst with The 451 Group. "It's indicative that there is true change going on over there."

However, even members of the Platform Strategy Group team admit that turning the entire Microsoft ship to accept this new attitude is no easy task, and it's a process that is still evolving across the company.

"There are some groups within Microsoft [where] it's taking longer for the message to filter down," said Peter Galli, senior open-source community manager of the Platform Strategy Group.

Microsoft hired Galli, a former journalist who covered both Microsoft and Linux, several months ago as a "change agent" to help spread the new open-source message across the company, Duffner said.

An example of how old habits die hard came just last week, when Microsoft's public relations team posted a case study on its PressPass Web site highlighting how a U.K. company called Speedy Hire expects to save US$1.48 million in five years after switching from Linux to Windows. The interview, which Microsoft's public relations team pointed out to journalists through an e-mail campaign, had no apparent news value and seemed out of context, as the Speedy Hire case study was a year old.

Blatant open-source bashing like this is what the Platform Strategy Group is trying to change, Galli said.

However, Microsoft still believes that running a Windows Server environment has a better total cost of ownership than a Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment, something that many customers still don't quite understand because some still believe open source means free of charge.

This message is especially important during the current recession in the U.S., when many companies are looking to cut costs, Duffner said.

He stressed that Microsoft by no means wants to promote the use of open-source software to its customers, and still thinks its own software is superior. However, embracing open source is about giving customers and developers the chance to make their own decisions about which software to buy, and making sure both Microsoft and open-source software can be part of the same buying decision, Duffner said.

The 451 Group's Lyman concurred that Microsoft's interest in open source is "its own self-interest." "They want open source on Windows to be just as good as open source on Linux," he said.

Lyman added that it "makes sense" for Microsoft to differentiate between attacking other vendors like Red Hat and attacking open source as an ideology, which is what the company has done in the past and which has proven to be a battle that it can't win.

Google dumps Firefox from download bundle, swaps in Chrome

2008-12-14T22:20:00.000-08:00

Mozilla's browser now an optional download with Chrome out of beta

Gregg Keizer 15/12/2008 08:15:00

Google Friday replaced Mozilla's Firefox with its own Chrome as the default browser in the English version of Google Pack, the search company's application bundle for Windows.

On Thursday Google dropped the "beta" label from Chrome, the browser it introduced three months ago, and issued the first production version for Windows XP and Vista.

Google Pack is a one-download collection of Google-made and third-party applications that includes Google Desktop, Google Earth, Picasa, Adobe Reader and Norton Security Scan.

Firefox remains on the list, but is not selected for download as part of Google Pack by default. Instead, the box beside it is left unchecked. That's a change from Thursday, according to an earlier version of Google Pack's download page cached by Google itself, which shows Firefox as the bundle's only browser.

Non-English versions of Google Pack, however, continue to offer Firefox, including the German- and French-language editions. Chrome is available in localized versions for about 40 different languages, German and French among them.

Mozilla has had a lucrative relationship with Google over the years. In 2007, for example, 88 percent of Mozilla's revenues , to the tune of about US$60 million, came from its deal with Google. The search company pays Mozilla for assigning it as the default search engine in Firefox, and for click-throughs on ads placed on the ensuing search results pages.

Mozilla renewed the deal with Google in August when the two inked a three-year contract that ends in November 2011.

Thursday, before Google swapped Chrome for Firefox, Mozilla's CEO welcomed the rival to the market.

"It's great to see them get to 1.0 and will mean more choices for users," said Mozilla chief executive John Lilly, in an e-mailed statement. Lilly also took the opportunity to plug his company's own browser. "Firefox 3 use has grown quickly over the last few months and we're excited to release 3.1 early next year ... competition is clearly creating better browsers than ever."

Mozilla did not immediately reply to questions Friday, including whether Lilly's take of Thursday still holds now that Google has dropped Firefox from the default download bundle.

What Does It take to switch to desktop Linux in Schools?

2008-12-03T04:11:00.000-08:00

As a school Administrator, I always try to find ways to economize in a lot of things but not sacrificing quality, I came across my favourite Zdnet Blogger Christopher Dawson on “Just what does it take to switch to desktop Linux “ and I saw that indeed the article was worth reading and commenting. According to dawson the following are the parameters needed to be considered when considering on wWhat is required to switch teachers to Linux on his desktop?

Here’s Christopher Dawson's initial list.

Know how to access Windows shares on the network
Have a rudimentary understanding of the file system to ensure that he could copy, paste, and otherwise move around his files, including how to make backups
Understand how to save documents in PDF, ODF, and Office formats
Understand the differences in interface between OpenOffice and Office 2003 (the current system used in the superintendent’s office)

These are all free. In addition to these, Dawson also includes the following issues for users:

Where are their files kept ?
How does one access the budgeting software?
How does one access the student information system (web-based)?
How do one communicate (email and chat systems are currently web-based)?

Here are some additional important considerations. None of these seem to be deal breakers, but they certainly need to be part of a well-planned and successful conversion if schools at elementary and high school grades are to decide to head down that road:

Printing: Does all of the printers users access have Linux drivers? Although there is a trend of keeping files digitized and lessening the usage of paper to help the environment, the superintendents,administrator's and registrar’s office, perhaps more than any other administrative unit, must produce printed documents.
Backup: With Windows machines, one can redirect desktops and user folders to a regularly backed-up server; Vista does a particularly nice (if slow) job of dealing with offline file synchronization. There are plenty of ways to handle this in Linux, but as far as I know, there isn’t anything quite as slick as either group policies in Windows for the redirects or the similar functionality enabled in OS X server .
Replacing group policy and domain/enterprise levels of control in general: as noted above, while AD may have its share of issues, it makes pushing updates, enforcing policies, etc., really easy. Anyone have a good “Linux administration for dummies” link that covers good ways to handle policy for workstations across a network?
Remote access: There are plenty of remote access solutions that will work quite well with Linux, but any existing infrastructure needs to be tested for compatibility.
Complex Excel files: Compatibility between OpenOffice 3 and Microsoft Office is generally quite good. However, since the super’s office also handles budget administration, there are most likely some fairly complicated spreadsheets floating around. A period of testing should certainly go on with OO.org, but a more important consideration may actually be the impact on productivity for budget admins who are extremely proficient in Excel.
“Extracurricular crap”: (something like what the regular Joe's use to “enhance their productivity by making them relaxed) “Check out any extra curricular software they may have, iTunes, Skype, etc. Yes these are silly but if users are pissed off you took away music they’ll be more likely to resist and sabotage.” another power user comments that : “In my experience it’s not the mainstream applications that prevent a switch but rather the myriad of smaller programs which have no OSS replacements. Be sure to identify and factor these programs into any migration strategy.”

With these things in mind, I'd like to acknowledge the immense help accorded by Sir Chris to us non-techie school managers. Hope that his advice would also work well for you.

His full length article can be accessed at:

http://education.zdnet.com/?p=1976&tag=nl.e539 and

http://education.zdnet.com/?p=1977

Why I get more and more convinced that I should convince people to use Ubuntu

2008-11-26T04:40:00.000-08:00

I have just read the column of my favourite Tech Blogger Christopher Dawson from Zdnet and seeing that there are similarities in some of his experiences I decided to do a rewrite of similar experiences

Everybody knows the typical patch Tuesday cycle of our favourite OS. Every week, more and more bits of malware seem to be making their way past commercial anti-virus, firewall anti-virus, and ISP anti-virus software. New patches and downloads abound, and as a result, both my Tech guy and me personally had to re-image several computers in the last 2 weeks due to massive infestations.

This is to say nothing of the home computers that I get advices and requests (I feel like getting one of those ThinkGeek T-shirts that tells people, “No, I won’t fix your computer.”)
It has occurred to me that yes, I’m well aware that if Linux or Mac had greater marketshare, then they would be far more vulnerable to malware attacks. That being said, right now, none of the computers that I and my personal academic and office staff use (two desktops, one laptop and one file server all run on Ubuntu) have had even a blip of malware. My students who have switched over to Linux? No problems. Teachers with Linux Boxes at home? No worries. Not a single issue. You don’t notice people reimaging their MacBooks because of a trojan.

There are plenty of reasons why people love to use Windows PCs. Games, proprietary Windows-only software, generally low acquisition costs; the usual arguments apply.
However, it appears that the Tech people have to regularly turn more of their attention to ensuring that my Windows PCs stay malware free and as I observe my *buntu computers hum along happily, I’m struggling to see a good reason to stick with the Windows platform.(except of course that a lot of industry applications in multimedia and visual graphics are run on Windows based platforms; although open source solutions are already mature and also in use, not a lot of professionals use them ).

Although We don’t play games,we are into developing people to do gaming development; and were hoping that eventually we could remodel and move our curriculum away from teaching specific applications and focusing on computing concepts, and I’m tired of intrusive, moderately effective anti-malware software.

Eventually, as we go towards full utilization of open source in pur classrooms; we hope that we can find rationalizations for other tech needs.
We're hoping to eventually rely on thin clients as my tech people eventually gets the feel of an LTSP , and I simply don’t need high end kit at this level, so I can perhaps fiddle out with either a *buntu flavour that goes well on an LTSP rig. That leaves me with some other non-Mac flavor of Linux. Solaris is looking mighty nice as a virtualization platform and LTSP/Kiwi/Edubuntu and the like just might be mature enough to meet my needs at that point.

As an educational administrator, there are indeed too many options open , though, to keep dealing with the hassles of Windows.as of the moment it would be wise not making any decisions just yet; I have plenty of time to give this serious consideration. Who knows, maybe the popular OS will be really awesome one of these days . But Il be relaxed knowing that because I finally have my AD tweaked just the way I like it I can always say that Using linux is the best thing next to a MAC.

Using Google Docs

2008-10-23T03:31:00.000-07:00

G.ho.st visits AABC

2008-10-21T21:25:00.000-07:00

As anybody would say... it a dream for every person to have his own computer. However not everybody can purchase one.

Yesterday, October 21, G.Ho.st visited Asian Academy of Business and computers and delivered a walk in lecture/seminar on Virtual computing by using G.ho.st as your own virtual desktop.

browser based and basing on the concept, "No virus, Flash drive free ready to use desktops anywhere, anytime"; G.ho.st caught the attention and interest of our students. both from the second year and first year technical students.

The mere idea that you have a ready desktop anywhere itrigues and challenged the students, who ended up eventually asking in the open forum what apps they could use and how to sign up.

Although the seminar room was jampacked and filled to the max; students really appreciated the lecture given by Gener Luis Morada, country representative of G.ho.st and actually requested that in time, perhaps Gene can demonstrate the other utility tools of g.ho.st.

After the walk in seminar, I had a discussion with Gene and Bryan, our linux teacher about the possibility if G.ho.st can have web-based programming apps that we can use for instruction purposes as well as the possibility of collaboration in educational projects. Also commenting on the need for hardware, I asked if G.host would eventually have lighter versions that would enable p2 and p3 desktops to run g.ho.st and help a lot of public and private schools in the country.

You can see the pictures below:

G.ho.st personal impressions

2008-10-13T19:48:00.000-07:00

I've recently tried G.ho.st, a new virtual PC/Operating system thats web based. You can open it from a browser and youll have lots of features that you will definitely like.

Imagine having your own virtual PC online that you can use and utilize, whose hard disk space increases as you invite others to join you in using G.ho.st.

I recently was visited by Gene Morada, the Philippine representative of G.ho.st and he introduced me to its features, I like the idea of Cloud computing specially when majority of my students com from class CD and E families, imagine what huge amount of storage space my students can have as well as a virtual desktop PC. Im a google fan, dedicated somewhat, but seiing its features, I feel like combining the usage of Google and G.ho.st and see how big my online virtual desktop space can get.

Ive arranged with our IT guy Sir Bryan to have Gene have a seminar on G.ho.st here in school for our students, and i feel like we have a lot of projects and collaboration to do eventually later.

Eventually i hope that G.ho.st would sponsor educational collaborational tools on their desktop so that we can use them to teach programming to our students.

to know more about G.host please click here

For a view of the screen shots of the G.ho.st OS plse click here.

Is OpenOffice good enough?

2008-10-11T04:41:00.000-07:00

Yes.

OK, obviously there’s more to this story than my tongue-in-cheek answer. This came up after one of our supercool, power user secretaries (who is an Office 2003/2007 wiz) ran a training session for the other secretaries in the district. The other secretaries are largely using OpenOffice (NeoOffice, actually, since OO.org for OS X still isn’t where it needs to be). It’s also worth noting that these secretaries have quite a spectrum of abilities from quite proficient to looking for the “any key.”

The training session actually centered on our student information system, but touched on OpenOffice as a tool for manipulating data extracted from the SIS. Whether it was for a mail merge or simply easy sorting and reporting of various fields, Excel (and OpenOffice Calc) is a necessary tool in most secretaries’ bag of tricks.

My uber-secretary leading the training had only recently begun using OpenOffice and really prefers the slick, polished interface of Office 2007 (and the utter simplicity of mail merges and labels that OpenOffice just can’t match). She raised the question of whether OpenOffice could fully meet the needs of a secretary or if it lacked the automation tools that they need to maximize productivity.

The other secretaries largely consider OO “fine.” They don’t love it, they don’t hate it, but they appreciate that I was able to buy an extra computer for what I saved in licensing costs among the secretarial and nursing staff. Of course, they simply aren’t as proficient as the secretary I had doing the training.

So there it is: Is OpenOffice good enough?

I still stick with my original answer: yes, it is. For the vast majority of users (students, teachers, and administrators, especially), OpenOffice is more than good enough. The price is certainly right, too.

Even for the most savvy power users, OpenOffice will suffice. However, secretaries, as we all know, run our schools. Anything we can do to keep them happy and make them as productive as possible should probably be a high priority for us. For some of them, Microsoft Office (especially its latest iteration which actually is a very nice piece of software) just might be worth the licensing if it meets their needs better.

“People with strong numerical and problem-solving skills seem to be appreciated by employers”

2008-10-11T04:40:00.000-07:00

Do ya think? That was a key point in a BBC News article on the overall high ranking of US and UK universities worldwide. While the usual suspects (Harvard, Yale, Cambridge, and Oxford, in that order) scored at the top of the “Times Higher Education QS list,” an increasing number of technically-oriented universities are climbing the rankings quickly.

The explanation according to the researchers?

Ben Sowter, from QS, says there is a “reasonably strong trend” of technology-based institutions moving up the world rankings.

Thirteen of those in the top 100 were strong on technology, he said…”People with strong numerical and problem-solving skills seem to be appreciated by employers.”

Such institutions seemed to be becoming more important in many regions of the world, he said.

Now see, I wouldn’t have expected that with the explosion of technology in China and India and a global market dominated by the likes of Intel, Microsoft, and Google. Good thing we have people looking into this.

One interesting point the article made, however, was the relatively minimal funding for UK universities versus their American and, more recently, Chinese counterparts:

“Harvard alone has an endowment that is about the same size as the total annual income for the whole of the UK university sector.”…”As a result of huge investment in higher education and science in recent years, China already looks set to overtake the UK very soon in terms of total research publications, and its universities have been steadily climbing up international league tables.”

Google is your friend

2008-10-08T04:55:00.000-07:00

I know there are those among us who lack my love for all things Google. Sure, it shows our kids ads, keeps track of the searches coming out of our buildings, displays naughty thumbnails that only the best of content filters can block, most kids don’t look beyond the first three hits (two of which are usually sponsored), etc., etc.

Sure, that’s all true, but Google is a lot more than search. I don’t think I’m off base in saying that Google provides the largest, free set of Web 2.0 tools available to the general public, meaning that our users can access them at home or school and generally across platforms (including Linux in most cases). One of our after-school programs is taking digital pictures of various flora and fauna out in the woods, uploading the pictures into Picasa, capturing the location at which the pictures were taken using a GPS, and then “geotagging” that location in Google Earth.

This says nothing of Google Docs, Blogger, Knol, Sites, calendaring, SketchUp, and more. As much as kids like Facebook, it’s important to understand the real value of Web 2.0 technologies for social, academic, and professional collaboration. I maintain that kids will get more out of blogging about a field trip and being able to add thoughts and comments to their peers’ blogs than they would by writing an essay about the field trip.

Want to create an online photo album or website about the field trip? How about take a survey that dumps data in a Google spreadsheet about kids’ favorite parts of the field trip? Create an online presentation and then interact live with digital pen pals while they watch the presentation? All possible for free with Google.

Don’t kill Google because of some naughty 1″x1″ pictures. Let the teachers be responsible for enforcing school policy and turn on Safe Search. Instead, use Google for everything it offers beyond a pretty fine search engine.

Putting Blender on the drawing table

2008-10-07T17:52:00.000-07:00

Recently... we had started joint project with GMA kapuso Foundation to train 50 out of school youths in Visual Graphics and 3d animation .

Of course one of the aims of that project was to make available open source tools and show that indeed they are ready for the market.

Another very important reason we felt was that we wanted to prove that we can turn a person with zero knowledge in computer and graphics into a functional person ready for employment. And what more better opportunity it was to offer people a fighting chance to get employment as a graphics artist.

And offerring a scholarship for 50 people who needed it most was what our partner GMA kapuso foundation felt could better serve a higher purpose and empower a lot of our constituents.

One significant thing was.. we were already previously offering blender both as part of our regular Graphics and design as well as Multimedia Application curricular instruction. Thus, our lead animation instructor, Sir Dennis Jorolan...was already experienced with dealing with the proprietary and open source tools in 3d animation. being an open source advocate himself... he welcomed the idea.

We wanted very much to put GIMP, as well as KINO, Jahshaka, DIA as well as other opne source tools on the drawing board as well; as our graphics people were very much into the idea... we are hoping that after our first batch of KASI (Kapuso-AABC Scholarship Initiative) scholars; we could prove that indeed open source tools are as good as proprietary tools.

Of course, one cannot but acknowledge the foresight of the foundations executive director, Sir Nonie dela Fuente who also encouraged and welcomed the idea.

So, to the soon to be scholars, to the men and women behind the project.... good luck.....

The cloud finally comes to education

2008-10-07T01:25:00.000-07:00

Cloud computing is one of those great buzzwords in IT that, so far, has meant very little to the average Ed Tech customer. We all have a pretty good idea what it means: lots of computers somewhere (we don’t actually care where) doing lots of processing to deliver services to our desktops via the Internet. On the other hand, with the maturation of virtualization technology, the idea of virtual desktops and virtual servers is certainly rearing its head in education as we try to cut energy costs, ease management, and consolidate resources.

SIMtone Corporation has now brought these two ideas together and, although business applications abound, is piloting educational applications of virtual desktop PCs delivered to students via the cloud. Partnering with Frank Porter Graham Elementary School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, SIMtone is using its cloud computing technologies to go beyond thin client computing and deliver state-of-the-art educational content designed by the US Fund for Unicef to pilot the idea of virtual computers in the cloud for students and staff.

According to their press release,

[the school] will use SIMtone’s Universal Cloud Computing products to provide approximately 600 students and faculty with “PCs in the Cloud” usable everywhere without a computer…The pilot is being launched during the current fall 2008 semester. SIMtone has also identified other schools and institutions to expand the Education Thunder Program on a national and global scale.

The so-called Education Thunder Program “aims to help close the digital divide and provide access to full PCs in the cloud to the estimated five billion people who cannot afford it, without requiring them to own a computer.” While this is certainly ambitious, to say the least, it is also conceivable that cloud computing just might provide some highly affordable ways to deliver educational content and easily (and remotely) managed PC functionality to emerging markets.

While students/schools won’t necessarily need to purchase new dedicated computers for use with this technology, some sort of presentation hardware will be necessary for the virtual PC to be displayed to the student. However, any computer, netbook, nettop, thin client, MID, or, potentially, even a smartphone with a high-speed connection can provide a student with access to their PC in the cloud. Thus, no matter how old the computer (or how “thin” the device), as long as it can run graphical Linux with Firefox, can access a virtual PC via SIMtone’s “WebSNAP” portal. Similarly, slightly newer machines running Windows XP (or even Vista) can use terminal emulator software (called SoftSNAP) to access the Virtual PC.

Although costs are still up in the air at this time, SIMtone also provides a desktop thin client and an Asus Eee-based notebook (called a SNAPbook) for easy access to the cloud. These devices do not have an operating system or any internal processing; prices can be expected to be quite low. SIMtone will be shipping me a SNAPbook shortly for review (including a test account on one of their virtual PCs), but a first look at their products can be had here.

Here is where netbooks and MIDs are really headed, folks: anytime, anywhere access to your PC. The exciting piece of this for ed tech, though, is the ability to deliver huge amounts of educational content on extremely cheap hardware, limited only by the penetration of broadband. Stay tuned for a review of the device and service. Click here for the full press release.

The rise and rise of the YouTube generation, and how adults can help

2008-10-05T21:57:00.000-07:00

Blogs and online diaries should be part of school curriculum, says thinktank

Bobbie Johnson, technology correspondent
The Guardian,
Monday October 6 2008
Article history

When Alex Day started keeping a video diary on YouTube, he wasn't sure how it would turn out. The teenager, from Hornchurch in Essex, admits that he was just looking for some frank feedback on his funny stories and songs.

"I was making a video podcast to entertain family and friends - just a little comedy series," he said. Eighteen months on, 19-year-old Day, known by his nickname Nerimon, boasts more than 30,000 subscribers and is one of Britain's most popular YouTubers.

Armed with cheap video cameras and the internet, a generation of youngsters are growing up very publicly with online videos - and being failed by adults who are not paying proper attention to this new medium.

That claim is made in a research paper published today by the thinktank Demos. The study, Video Republic, examines the rise of the YouTube generation and considers how their enthusiasm and skills can be encouraged.

"It's now as normal for teenagers to write a blog as it is to write a diary - that's a massive shift," said Celia Hannon, a researcher with Demos and the lead author of the report.

"Youngsters are working out their relationship to the outside world and forging an identity."

The report makes recommendations to help adults cope with the changing online environment, and calls particularly on schools to help youngsters understand the long-term implications of living their lives in a semi-public way.

"Schools, universities and businesses should prepare young people for an era where CVs may well be obsolete, enabling them to manage their online reputation," says the report. "This generation of young people are guineapigs ... we need an educational response that extends beyond the focus of safety, towards broader questions of privacy and intellectual property."

It also suggests that creating video blogs and online diaries should be part of the school curriculum, used by schools in the same way that they organise museum trips or extra art classes.

Statistics show that the influence of online video is growing. Ten hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute of the day, and not all of it is karate-kicking chimps and dogs on skateboards. Figures from earlier this year suggest Britons are watching more than 3.6bn videos online each month - a rise of 56% from last year. YouTube, which is owned by internet giant Google, dominates the market with 20 million viewers in Britain, while the BBC trails a distant second with fewer than 6.5 million online viewers.

Mainstream broadcasters are recognising the shift in consumption: the American cable broadcaster HBO recently launched a new show, Hooking Up, featuring a swath of popular YouTube stars. Although many web surfers have scoffed at what they see as a cynical attempt to cash in, the move exemplifies how the adult world is trying to reach out to video-friendly youth.

The report also says that politicians can use online video as a way to engage with youngsters, who can sometimes be seen as apathetic and unreachable. But Hannon said such a strategy would only succeed if they were prepared to approach the internet on its own terms.

"The government is pouring vast amounts of money into this, because they feel young people should be making themselves heard," she said. "But people can see through it - bloggers say it feels contrived."

Instead, she offered the example of the US presidential candidate Barack Obama, who has seen intense interest from young voters after he encouraged them to exercise their creative urges online, instead of simply dictating his ideas to them. "Obama is the first 'YouTube politician' because he gets that you can't control it. His campaign team get that it's about the enthusiasm."

For Alex Day, there are no plans to give up any time soon. "Thirty thousand, one hundred people watch me now and it'd be very unfair of me to suddenly stop and say 'just go watch someone else'," he said. "It's a lot of people so I'll always feel a commitment to putting out things they'll enjoy, in some form or another."

Nomads at last

2008-09-26T22:27:00.000-07:00

MOBILITY

Nomads at last

Wireless communication is changing the way people work, live, love and relate to places—and each other, says Andreas Kluth (interviewed here)

Illustration by Bell Mellor

AT THE Nomad Café in Oakland, California, Tia Katrina Canlas, a law student at the nearby university in Berkeley, places her double Americano next to her mobile phone and iPod, opens her MacBook laptop computer and logs on to the café's wireless internet connection to study for her class on the legal treatment of sexual orientation. She is a regular here but doesn't usually bring cash, so her credit-card statement reads “Nomad, Nomad, Nomad, Nomad”. That says it all, she thinks. Permanently connected, she communicates by text, photo, video or voice throughout the day with her friends and family, and does her “work stuff” at the same time. She roams around town, but often alights at oases that cater to nomads.

Christopher Waters, the owner, opened the Nomad Café in 2003, just as Wi-Fi “hotspots” were mushrooming all around town. His idea was to provide a watering-hole for “techno-Bedouins” such as himself, he says. Since Bedouins, whether in Arabian deserts or American suburbs, are inherently tribal and social creatures, he understood from the outset that a good oasis has to do more than provide Wi-Fi; it must also become a new—or very old—kind of gathering place. He thought of calling his café the “Gypsy Spirit Mission”, which also captures the theme of mobility, but settled for the simpler Nomad.

As a word, vision and goal, modern urban nomadism has had the mixed blessing of a premature debut. In the 1960s and 70s Herbert Marshall McLuhan, the most influential media and communications theorist ever, pictured nomads zipping around at great speed, using facilities on the road and all but dispensing with their homes. In the 1980s Jacques Attali, a French economist who was advising president François Mitterrand at the time, used the term to predict an age when rich and uprooted elites would jet around the world in search of fun and opportunity, and poor but equally uprooted workers would migrate in search of a living. In the 1990s Tsugio Makimoto and David Manners jointly wrote the first book with “digital nomad” in the title, adding the bewildering possibilities of the latest gadgets to the vision.

But all of those early depictions and predictions of nomadism arguably missed the point. The mobile lifestyles currently taking shape around the world are nothing like those described in the old books. For this the authors cannot be blamed, since the underlying technologies of genuine and everyday nomadism did not exist even as recently as a decade ago. Mobile phones were already widespread, but they were used almost exclusively for voice calls and were fiendishly hard to connect to the internet and even to computers. Laptop computers and personal digital assistants (PDAs) needed fiddly cables to get online, and even then did so at a snail's pace. Reading and sending e-mail on a mobile phone—not to mention synchronising it across several gadgets and computers to create one “virtual” in-box—was unheard of. People took photos using film. There was no Wi-Fi. In short, there were gadgets, but precious little “connectivity”.

Astronauts and hermit crabs

Without that missing piece, several misunderstandings took hold that now require correcting. One had to do with all those gadgets. The old mental picture of a nomad invariably had him—mostly him, at that time—lugging lots of them. Since these machines, large and small, were portable, people assumed that they also made their owners mobile. Not so. The proper metaphor for somebody who carries portable but unwieldy and cumbersome infrastructure is that of an astronaut rather than a nomad, says Paul Saffo, a trend-watcher in Silicon Valley. Astronauts must bring what they need, including oxygen, because they cannot rely on their environment to provide it. They are both defined and limited by their gear and supplies.

Around the turn of the century, as some astronauts, typically executive road warriors, got smarter about packing light, says Mr Saffo, they graduated to an intermediate stage, becoming hermit crabs. These are crustaceans that survive by dragging around a cast-off mollusc shell for protection and shelter. In the metaphorical sense, the shell might be a “carry-on” bag on wheels, stuffed full of cables, discs, dongles, batteries, plugs and paper documents (just in case of disc failure). These hermit crabs strike fear into the hearts of seated airline passengers whenever they board, because their shells invariably bang into innocent shins all the way to their seat. They carry less than astronauts—and are thus more mobile—but are still quite heavily laden with gear, mostly as a safeguard against disasters.

Urban nomads have started appearing only in the past few years. Like their antecedents in the desert, they are defined not by what they carry but by what they leave behind, knowing that the environment will provide it. Thus, Bedouins do not carry their own water, because they know where the oases are. Modern nomads carry almost no paper because they access their documents on their laptop computers, mobile phones or online. Increasingly, they don't even bring laptops. Many engineers at Google, the leading internet company and a magnet for nomads, travel with only a BlackBerry, iPhone or other “smart phone”. If ever the need arises for a large keyboard and some earnest typing, they sit down in front of the nearest available computer anywhere in the world, open its web browser and access all their documents online.

Another big misunderstanding of previous decades was to confuse nomadism with migration or travel. As the costs of (stationary) telecommunications plummeted, it became fascinating to contemplate “the death of distance” (the title of a book written by Frances Cairncross, then on the staff of The Economist). And since the early mobile phones were aimed largely at business executives, it was assumed that nomadism was about corporate travel in particular. And indeed many nomads are frequent flyers, for example, which is why airlines such as JetBlue, American Airlines and Continental Airlines are now introducing in-flight Wi-Fi. But although nomadism and travel can coincide, they need not.

Humans have always migrated and travelled, without necessarily living nomadic lives. The nomadism now emerging is different from, and involves much more than, merely making journeys. A modern nomad is as likely to be a teenager in Oslo, Tokyo or suburban America as a jet-setting chief executive. He or she may never have left his or her city, stepped into an aeroplane or changed address. Indeed, how far he moves is completely irrelevant. Even if an urban nomad confines himself to a small perimeter, he nonetheless has a new and surprisingly different relationship to time, to place and to other people. “Permanent connectivity, not motion, is the critical thing,” says Manuel Castells, a sociologist at the Annenberg School for Communication, a part of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

This is why a new breed of observers is now joining the ever-present futurists and gadget geeks in studying the consequences of this technology. Sociologists in particular are trying to figure out how mobile communications are changing interactions between people. Nomadism, most believe, tends to bring people who are already close, such as family members, even closer. But it may do so at the expense of their attentiveness towards strangers encountered physically (rather than virtually) in daily life. That has implications for society at large.

Anthropologists and psychologists are investigating how mobile and virtual interaction spices up or challenges physical and offline chemistry, and whether it makes young people in particular more autonomous or more dependent. Architects, property developers and urban planners are changing their thinking about buildings and cities to accommodate the new habits of the nomads that dwell in them. Activists are trying to piggyback on the ubiquity of nomadic tools to improve the world, even as they worry about the same tools in the hands of the malicious. Linguists are chronicling how nomadic communication changes language itself, and thus thought.

Beyond technology

This special report, in presupposing that a wireless world will soon be upon us, will explore these ramifications of mobile technology, rather than the technologies themselves or their business models. But it is worth making clear that technology underlies all of the changes in today's nomadic societies, so that its march will accelerate them. Wireless data connections, in particular, seem to be getting better all the time. Cellular networks will become faster and more reliable. Short-range Wi-Fi hotspots are popping up in ever more places. And a new generation of wireless technologies is already poised to take over. Regulators have grasped that the airwaves are now among society's most important assets. America, for instance, has just auctioned off a chunk of spectrum with new rules that require the owner to allow any kind of device and software to run on the resulting network.

Devices, too, are on a steep trajectory. Just as Sony's Walkman once planted the notion that music can be mobile, the BlackBerry by Research In Motion (RIM), a Canadian firm, has since 1999 made e-mail on the go seem normal. And just as the personal-computer era entered the mainstream only in the 1980s with Apple's commercialisation of the “graphical user interface”, the mobile era arguably began only last summer when the same firm launched the iPhone, with its radically new and user-friendly touch interface. As a result, Google, for instance, has received 50 times more web-search requests from iPhones this year than from any other mobile handset.

Cumulatively, all of these changes amount to a historic merger, at long last, of two technologies that have already proved revolutionary in their own right. The mobile phone has changed the world by becoming ubiquitous in rich and poor countries alike. The internet has mostly touched rich countries, and rich people in poor countries, but has already changed the way people shop, bank, listen to music, read news and socialise. Now the mobile phone is on course to replace the PC as the primary device for getting online. According to the International Telecommunication Union, 3.3 billion people, more than half the world's population, now subscribe to a mobile-phone service (see chart 1), so the internet at last looks set to change the whole world.

To people in early-adopter countries such as South Korea and Japan this will come as no surprise. (Five of the ten bestselling novels in Japan last year were written on mobile phones.) Nor will it come as a shock to people in their teens and twenties elsewhere who have never known life without text messages; or to itinerant salesmen and executives who have for years been glued to their BlackBerries day and night. By contrast, many older people will strain to recognise themselves in the behaviour patterns described in this report, and indeed may never adopt them. But the lesson of history is that what the geeks and early adopters do today, the rest of us will probably end up doing tomorrow or the day after. It is the pioneers that set the direction; the mainstream will follow in time.

The most wonderful thing about mobile technology today is that consumers can increasingly forget about how it works and simply take advantage of it. As Ms Canlas sips her Americano and dives into her e-mail in-box at the Nomad Café, she gives no thought to the specifications and standards that make her connection possible. It is the human connections that now take over. Since humans, as Sigmund Freud put it, must arbeiten und lieben, work and love, in order to find fulfilment, this report will start off by examining how they will work.

(taken from The Economist print edition

Apr 10th 2008 )

Open source telephony new star at TV producer. Open technology competes in proprietary PABX world

2008-09-18T02:13:00.000-07:00

Open source telephony new star at TV producer

Open technology competes in proprietary PABX world

FremantleMedia's IT manager, Alan Fear

When TV production company FremantleMedia Australia had an opportunity to move to IP telephony during an office refurbishment, the open source Asterisk proved itself to offer everything required and more for the 150-plus handset deployment.

The company used a Samsung PABX for about four years and a replacement was driven by a merger, the refurbishment of an existing building, and a need for more handsets.

FremantleMedia's IT manager Alan Fear, said with IP telephony being "the buzzword", the team decided to evaluate the options.

"I knew about Asterisk and it seemed like an attractive proposition, but to give the organization a feeling of comfort we needed to get commercial support, especially as it is open source software," Fear said.

After searching the Internet Fear found local Asterisk integrator Digital Armour Corporation, which helped set up a 50-handset pilot.

"It was a little bit rocky to start with as it was a hardware issue," Fear said. "We were using a Digium card and the firmware was a bit funny, but once we got on top of that it was all okay."

When the refurbishment was complete, the Asterisk system was moved to the main office in an "easy migration" and now more than 150 extensions are available for the 120 staff.

The IP desk phones are mostly Linksys SPA942 four-line phones. During the testing phase FremantleMedia looked at units from Snom, Polycom and Cisco, and while "they all worked" Linksys was chosen as it was "good looking, functional, and easy to use".

"The previous system being proprietary gave us no scope to do anything other than what Samsung provided us so there was a distinct limitation," Fear said. "One of the biggest advantages of Asterisk is we can customize it to our needs with scripting on the server or by rethinking how you use the system. Take the integration of faxes, for example. You can do this with any PABX, but you need to bolt on another server. With Asterisk we can use 10 in-dial lines to deliver faxes electronically. That saved us about 30K by using Hylafax as our fax server."

Another in-house application of Asterisk is speed dialing to and from the security company, which Fear said was an easy way ensure direct communication.

"We now have an operator console on reception, that is a big plus for the receptionist," Fear said. "It's extremely reliable and a very good system."

Regarding cost, Fear said Asterisk cost about 50 percent of an equivalent system. The company looked at Mytel, and upgrading Samsung to IP and even with buying all new handsets it was still cheaper.

"On running costs we have saved money as we previously used an external conferencing company, but now use Asterisk's conferencing facility," he said.

The conference service was costing upwards of $1000 per month.

With voice and data on separate LANs, FremantleMedia has not had to purchase anything proprietary as the system comprises a HP DL380 box with 2GB of RAM, SAS disks running the Trixbox 2.2 distribution with FreePBX, and Linksys 24-port PoE switches.

"This means we can easily replicate our environment," Fear said.

The company bought 10 G.729 licences, but it is not using it as calls are not being placed over the Internet. External calls are serviced with Optus over the PSTN.

Asterisk also delivers voice messages to e-mail and redirects support calls to the OTRS helpdesk application.

"With the old PABX we were under maintenance and at the beck and call of Samsung, now we have absolute control over the same thing," Fear said.

Digital Armour CEO Maria Padisetti said FremantleMedia is a perfect example of how any business, big or small, can benefit from open source technology.

"FremantleMedia is a highly efficiency-driven business and if it can use Asterisk to its advantage with a proven time record of system performance, maybe it's time more companies evaluate this alternative for their businesses as well," Padisetti said.

Now playing: DVD movies, Windows audio files on Ubuntu Linux

2008-09-18T01:46:00.000-07:00

Now playing: DVD movies, Windows audio files on Ubuntu Linux

Users can now find the audio codecs, media player app to watch DVDs on Ubuntu machines

Todd R. Weiss 16/09/2008 08:21:00

Life just got easier for users of the downloadable or boxed retail versions of the Ubuntu Linux 8.04 operating system who want easy and cheap ways of adding DVD playback and improved audio capabilities to their machines.

Inexpensive add-on applications are now available for purchase in the Ubuntu online store that will provide audio codecs and a DVD player to expand the multimedia capabilities of the 4-year-old Linux operating system.

Previously, users of the freely downloaded or boxed versions of the Ubuntu Linux 8.04 could run into compatibility troubles while trying to play DVD movies or some types of audio tracks on their computers.

That was because many DVD player applications and audio codec files are proprietary, fee-based and owned by the vendors that created them, making them impossible to include for free in Ubuntu products.

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu Linux, said it has reached deals with two software vendors, Cyberlink and Fluendo, to sell their DVD player and audio codec applications directly to consumers through the online store. The products are already installed under previous licensing agreements for many laptop and desktop computers that are sold pre-loaded with Ubuntu Linux from hardware vendors, according to Ubuntu.

"It is important to us that no matter how you choose to access Ubuntu, pre-installed or as a free download, that you can have a similarly rich experience," wrote Gerry Carr, Canonical's marketing manager, in a blog entry. "The vast majority of our current users will have installed Ubuntu themselves. These users should also be allowed legal DVD and media playback and so we have built a way of letting them do this."

Carr said in an interview that some open-source projects that have tried to tackle the missing codec and DVD player issues, but that such reuse of the codecs is not necessarily legal.

"They've found a technical workaround, but it hasn't been legally verified," he said. "This is a way to use your Ubuntu Linux distro and legally playback your music and DVDs. At some point, somebody's got to pay these codec providers" to use their products.

The complications of trying to find, install and maintain the proper audio codecs for Linux operating systems like Ubuntu has long been one of the main consumer complaints about Linux operating systems. In many cases, it can be discouraging to deal with the not-so-easy-to-configure audio capabilities, especially when compared to Microsoft's Windows and Apple's Macintosh computer operating systems.

The Cyberlink PowerDVD software sells for US$49.95 in the Ubuntu store and allows users to play commercial DVDs on the latest Version 8.04 of Ubuntu Linux. OpenGL driver support for graphics hardware is also required.

From Fluendo, two audio codec applications are available in the store. The basic Windows Media and MP3 Playback Pack provides plug-ins for the most common Windows Media formats, including Windows Media Audio Decoder (Windows Media 7, 8, 9, 10, Pro, Lossless and Speech), Windows Media Video Decoder (Windows Media 7, 8, 9 and VC1), Windows Media MMS Protocol Support, Windows Media ASF Demuxer and MP3 Audio Decoder. It retails in the store for around US$25.

Also available is the Fluendo Complete Playback Pack, which adds a wider assortment of needed codecs for more file compatibility. The Complete Playback Pack retails for US$39.95.

Ubuntu has been selling boxed versions of its Linux operating system in Best Buy stores since July.

The new Ubuntu store offerings will allow users to eliminate audio and movie compatibility problems on their computers with single-click installation procedures, Carr said. "This has been a problem for consumers in the past," he said. "With this, you can play anything... with no restrictions at all."

This scenario doesn't mean that Ubuntu is looking to find ways to make consumers pay to use Ubuntu, Carr added. "We're never going to make you pay for anything that is fundanmental to the operating system. "You do need this to play DVDs. You do need this to play certain types of audio. We are not diametrically opposed to anyone selling software" to add on for Ubuntu users. "We will be adding additional software to that store as we can. It's entirely optional. It's building that ecosystem."

Tips on saving paper (Taken from BNET)

2008-09-18T00:38:00.000-07:00

Everyone could use less paper in their lives. It’s good for the environment, easier on your filing system, and just plain cheaper. Here are three ways you can cut down on the amount of printing you do and paper you consume:

Get a duplexing printer The oldest trick in the book is printing on both sides of a sheet of paper, which effectively halves your overall output. But actually doing so is a hassle (which side goes up? which end goes in first?) unless you have a duplexing printer. Monochrome lasers like the Lexmark E250d ($199), Brother HL-5250DN ($249), and HP P2015d ($399) can output doubled-sided documents — something to consider the next time you’re shopping for a printer.
Print to PDF Instead of printing and faxing (or mailing) a document, “print” a PDF and e-mail it instead. In the past we’ve explored many ways to turn documents into PDFs; check ‘em out if you’re not sure how to proceed. Then check out Unclutterer’s clever tip on another type of document you should always print to PDF.
Sign documents electronically When a document needs your signature, that usually means printing it out, signing it, and then returning it to sender. To save paper, start by digitizing your signature, then adding it to your PDFs. Alternately, check out EchoSign, which takes the hassle out of signing documents digitally.

Any paper-saving tips of your own to share?

http://blogs.bnet.com/businesstips/?p=1425

EU scrutinizes Google-Yahoo deal

2008-09-18T00:20:00.000-07:00

September 16th, 2008

EU scrutinizes Google-Yahoo deal

By Richard Koman

More trouble for Google’s advertising deal with Yahoo: The European Union is launching an antitrust “inquiry” into the deal, even though it only applies to Yahoo’s search in North America. If the inquiry proves fruitful, the EU Competition Commission could escalate it into an “investigation.”

How is this even the EU’s concern? The commission says it is because the companies do business in Europe, according to the BBC. The U.S. Justice Department is also investigating.

But the EU investigation could prove more troubling that the Justice Dept’s work since “EU antitrust regulations have traditionally proven more strict than American ones,” the BBC notes.

The companies were hoping to avoid EU scrutiny by limiting the deal to the US and Canada but he who lives by the Internet dies by the Internet.

“It’s not the same as if this happened with two shoe manufacturers,” Juan Delgado, a research fellow at Bruegel, said. “In this case, you’re talking about advertising on the Internet, and it’s difficult to assess who’s going to be affected.”

Meanwhile, the World Association of Newspapers issued a scathing statement opposing the deal:

[T]he deal will force newspapers to become even more dependent on Google than they are today. By handing Google control of up to 90% of paid search and content advertising, Google will exert tremendous power over both newspapers’ ability to reach readers and their ability to generate online advertising revenue. Perhaps never in the history of newspaper publishing has a single, commercial entity threatened to exert this much control over the destiny of the press.

While newspapers rely on Google for a significant portion of their online advertising revenues, we rely even more on the robustness of Google’s competitors to place constraints on its power. The Google-Yahoo deal would spell the end of this competition, thereby further weakening the viability and economic independence of the world’s newspapers.

(As a law school graduate and technology writer, Richard Koman brings a unique perspective to the blog's intersection of law, government and technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.)

Google gets cozy with an uneasy friend

2008-09-13T00:47:00.000-07:00

Google employees, in blue T-shirts, at the Chicago office of the advertising agency Leo Burnett. (Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times)

Google gets cozy with an uneasy friend

By Stephanie Clifford
Published: September 2008

On a July day in Chicago, Google employees swarmed a conference room at the advertising agency Leo Burnett, carrying in couches and beanbag chairs to create a lounge. They gave away candy and showed off Google's advertising technology. Throughout the day, they emphasized a single message: Google is a friend to ad agencies.

No, really.

Advertisers are grappling with the idea of Google, which spent many of its early years avoiding — and infuriating — advertising agencies, now shifting to embrace them.

During the last year, Google has built a 40-person group that is charged with courting agencies, trying to persuade them that their clients should buy ads on Google sites and use the search engine's tools. The Google team — like any ad team — is visiting agencies to show off the company's products, like video ads on YouTube and display ads from DoubleClick. Its representatives are even making regular visits to ad agencies, soliciting suggestions and fielding questions.

"We understand that maybe we haven't been the best partner over the years," said Erin Clift, the director of agency relations at Google.

Google could avoid ad agencies when it sold only search advertising, where it is dominant. But now that it has a wider set of products in more areas — including social media and virtual reality — it finds that it must work harder to drum up business, particularly because of the lingering hard feelings.

Google is "definitely a must-buy in search, but in other things it's not a must-buy," said Jeff Ratner, managing partner and digital director at MindShare North America. "As they start moving more into ad networks and other mediums, they need the agency to help make it a reality."

The most visible part of the new Google strategy is an event called Campus@, which started up in the spring. So far the Campus@ team, which has a core of six employees, has held six events, including one for Leo Burnett, which is part of the Publicis Groupe.

"We essentially take Google — our people, our products, our food, our tchotchkes — roll into the lobbies and give people the chance to interact with Google," Clift said. The events are "a fantastic way to ingratiate ourselves," she said.

Despite all the happy talk, there is still a good deal of skepticism. As Google begins trying to sell television, radio and print advertising and creates tools for buying and planning media campaigns, some advertising executives and academics say that the company is working with the agencies in order to eventually displace them.

Peter Fader, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, sees the Google approach as part of a master plan to get its corporate hooks into more of the agencies' business.

"If Google were to just set up a shingle and say 'Google ad agency,' the traditional agencies will find a way to keep them out of clients' offices," Professor Fader said.

Instead, he said, "they're almost like a virus, going to work their way into specific agencies and replace the DNA of those agencies with a more analytic orientation while trying to maintain some of the client relationships."

Penry Price, Google's vice president for advertising sales for North America, dismissed this view, saying Google had no desire to replace agencies or to take their clients.

"I don't see how we would be able to actually provide a better customer experience to an individual client than an agency can today," he said. "There's no way we could actually line up behind one customer and offer the services and information that an agency can today."

Agencies are not so sure, and they are having mixed reactions to Google's overtures. Some welcome the company enthusiastically. Others say they are unimpressed with Google's products outside of search and nervous about the company's intent.

"I think they're great at pushing and pulling together what suits their agenda," said Peter Gardiner, the chief media officer at the ad agency Deutsch. "I would not necessarily put them on the same level as other media companies in terms of their partnering attitude."

A lot of the mistrust stems from Google's having built a sales force of several hundred people who court large advertisers. While many of Google's sales to small advertisers are automated, the bigger clients get personal attention.

This prompts accusations from ad agencies that Google is courting their clients behind their backs. Agency executives are traditionally the people who decide where their clients should spend their marketing dollars, and while most media companies and technology providers must go through an agency to get onto the client's radar, Google — with its cool-kid aura — had an easy time obtaining meetings directly with clients.

But Google also knows it needs the cooperation of the advertisers' agencies. As Price put it, "we saw that if we had higher hopes and aspirations of getting larger budgets and being a part of these larger marketers' decisions, a lot of decision-making was done at the agencies."

The balance of power is not entirely clear. Google and the agencies behave a bit like "frenemies": as much as the agencies might like to ignore Google, they cannot (indeed, the WPP Group's chief executive, Martin Sorrell, called Google a frenemy, which he later amended to a "froe").

The perks of Google's power are on display at the Campus@ events. When Google visits agencies, it typically brings in a gelato cart or a coffee bar. It has even built a replica of Google's office kitchens. It offers free food and prizes of iPod Touches.

At Leo Burnett's headquarters, there were about 20 Google employees, almost all of them young, bright-eyed and peppy. They wore royal blue Campus@ T-shirts, some of the women with loose cotton skirts and flip-flops and the men with khakis or jeans.

Lisa Green, a senior agency-relations manager who was explaining a Google analytical product, told members of the Leo Burnett staff, "It's very natural, as a human, to hear something and want more information, and Google just makes that easier."

The Leo Burnett executives sounded appreciative. Speaking about the Google people, John Condon, chief creative officer of Leo Burnett America, told his employees, "You've got some of the best and brightest people in the industry here. Don't hold anything back. Milk 'em."

The dialogue was indeed two-way. For instance, in June, Google introduced a tool called Ad Planner that shows media buyers sites their likely audiences might visit, based on criteria like demographics. Google previewed Ad Planner with some agency executives and is now seeking more feedback. (The day the product was announced, the share price of a competitor, comScore, dropped 22.5 percent.)

Ad Planner is one element of a bigger product called a media dashboard that Google is working on. It would offer media planners a data-rich screen that would tell them where all the ads for a campaign were running, how they were doing and how much they had cost.

Some agency executives are excited about what Google has to offer. "You can see them as a threat, and we don't at all," said Ashley Vinson, an executive at the agency DDB, which recently held a Campus@ event. "It's a complete opportunity. It's like working with a world-class director or production company."

Rob Norman, the chief executive of GroupM Interaction, a large media-buying firm, said he had some problems with Google but did not feel particularly threatened by it.

"I think there still may be at least one human media planner left, other than the one that pulls the handle on the Google machine," he said.

2008-09-06T04:11:00.000-07:00

Google Chrome: the first true Web 2.0 browser

Computerworld takes an in-depth look at Google's new browser.

Preston Gralla (Computerworld (US)) 04/09/2008 07:50:00

Google's just-released Chrome takes the same approach to browser design that Google takes to its home page -- stripped-down, fast and functional, with very few bells and whistles.

That's both the good news and the bad news about this browser. Those who like a no-frills approach to their Web experience, and who want the content of Web sites front and center, will welcome it. But those who want a more fully-featured interface with extras will prefer either Internet Explorer or Firefox.

That being said, keep in mind that this is a first beta, and Google may well introduce new features in future versions. For example, this beta does not have a true bookmarks manager, but it would be quite surprising if one didn't show up in future betas.

In fact, there's a very long list of features this browser doesn't have. There's no built-in RSS reader, as there is in Internet Explorer, or that's available as an add-on for Firefox. You won't find a good bookmarks manager, such as you'll find in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. There are no add-ons as you'll find in Firefox. Be warned -- the list of what's not there can go on for quite some time.

That was all by design, though, and it's why Google calls this browser Chrome. The frame of a browser is called its chrome, and Google set out to reduce the browser to just the "chrome." In a comic book that gives technical background about the browser, Google explains its design philosophy this way: "We don't want to interrupt anything the user is trying to do. If you can just ignore the browser, we've done a good job."

If that was the goal, Google has succeeded. Chrome has so little interface, the content area of the browser is larger than with other browsers -- it almost feels like full-screen mode. Nothing gets in the way of the content of the browser window itself. In the same way that Google puts search front and center on its home page, this browser puts content first.

Designed for consumers or enterprises?

A great deal of what makes Chrome different from other browsers is not what you see, but what you don't see. Chrome appears to be designed in great part to run AJAX and Web 2.0 applications. It's the only browser that has been built from the ground up for a world in which the browser is a front end to Web-based applications and services like those that Google provides, and like those that are used increasingly by businesses.

To that end, Google has made dramatic changes under the hood. Google has chosen the open-source WebKit as its rendering engine, and it built its own JavaScript virtual machine called V8 for running JavaScript faster, with more stability, and more securely. Each tab in Chrome runs as its own separate process, so if one tab is busy or bogged down, it won't affect the performance in other tabs. Google claims that designing a browser this way will also cut down on memory bloat.

Also important is that Chrome comes equipped with Google Gears, which is a kind of glue that ties together Web-based applications and your own hard disk.

The effect of all this should be -- says Google -- a browser able to run Web-based applications with the same speed, interactivity, and stability as client-based applications. This means that Chrome may be aimed as much or more at Microsoft Office than it is at Internet Explorer. By providing a superior platform for running its Web-based applications, Google is giving itself a chance to supplant Office with Google Docs.

Seen in that way, the ultimate success of Chrome may be measured more by how many enterprises switch from Office to Google Docs than by how many consumers switch from Internet Explorer to Chrome.

A look at the interface

All that being said, Chrome is, above all, a browser, and nothing would make Google happier than if the entire world switched to it. So the company has given a great deal of thought into rethinking the entire browser interface.

The Chrome interface looks different than any other browser you've seen. Tabs sit above the address bar instead of beneath it. There's no menu, no title bar, and very few icons. In fact, there's not even a home page icon; look for it in vain. By default it's turned off -- to get one, you have to click the Tools icon, then choose Options --> Basics and check the box next to "Show Home button on the toolbar." Overall, it's as stripped-down a browser interface as you'll find.

To get to most browser functions and options, you use menus that drop down from two icons at the right-most portion of the browser -- a page icon and a tools icon. But even there, this browser is stripped-down. For example, the Options menu is where you often find many hidden features, buried beneath multiple tabs. In Chrome, the Options menu (found under the Tools icon) offers only three tabs, none of which includes an overload of choices. You'll mainly find basics such as whether to display the home page icon, where to store your downloads, and so on.

The Address Bar -- what Google calls the Omnibox -- is one of Chrome's nicer features. It doubles as a search bar: Type in your search terms, and it uses the search engine of your choice to do a search. When you instead type in a URL, it works much like the Address Bar in Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3, and lists suggested Web pages as you type, which it gathers from previously visited sites and your bookmarks, as well as making suggestions of its own, based on Web site popularity.

When you visit a site, the Address Bar, as with Internet Explorer 8, highlights the domain (such as www.computerworld.com), while the rest of the URL is lighter, so that it's easy for you to know at a glance on which domain you are currently, even if you're visiting a long URL.

A different type of tab

As with any modern browser, Chrome offers tabbed browsing. In some basic ways, the way it handles tabs is superior to Internet Explorer and Firefox, but in other ways, it's not as sophisticated.

The biggest break with other browsers is that each tab in Chrome is, in essence, its own browser. That's why the tabs are above the Address bar, rather than below it. You can detach any tab by dragging it away from the browser, and it becomes a separate browser window. You can combine separate browser instances into a unified one by dragging it back again, but you have to be careful to drag the tab itself back, rather than trying to drag the whole window, or it won't work.

Because each tab is in essence its own browser, if that tab crashes, it should not crash the entire browser. Microsoft makes the same claim for Internet Explorer 8. I haven't had any tabs crash on me yet in Chrome, so can't verify if this tab-crash feature works.

When you open a new tab, it opens just to the right of the tab from which you've opened it, so to a certain extent Chrome keeps related tabs together. You can drag tabs from place to place within the tab bar, and when they you do that, they slide in place in a smooth animation.

But Chrome doesn't group and color-code tabs like Internet Explorer 8 does. And it doesn't offer right-click options for handling groups of tabs -- for example, in IE8, you can close and duplicate entire tab groups. You can't do that in Chrome. However, Chrome does offer a variety of right-click options for handling tabs, such as closing all the tabs except for your current tab, and closing all tabs to the right of your current tab.

A particularly useful feature is what appears when you open a new tab. Rather than opening to a blank page or your home page, it opens to a page that lists your nine most visited Web pages with a thumbnail for each, a recent bookmark list, recently closed tabs and a search box that lets you search through the history of sites you've visited. Internet Explorer 8 offers a similar feature.

Chrome lacks some very important and basic tab-handling features that other browsers have. When you close Firefox, for example, it asks whether you want to save your tabs, so that you can reopen them all automatically the next time you launch your browser. Chrome has no such feature. Worse yet, it doesn't even ask if you really want to close your browser, so you may find yourself losing entire browsing sessions.

Chrome also doesn't have a feature that will restore previous sessions. You can restore previous tabs by opening a new tab page -- there's a "Recently closed tabs" listing below the "Recent bookmarks" listing on that page. If you've closed several tabs and you only want to reopen one of them, Chrome's way is useful -- you can go right to the tab you want. But it's not as convenient as right-clicking and choosing "Undo Close Tab," you can't re-open more than one at a time, and if you've closed your browser, the entire list goes away.

These are significant shortcomings, and one hopes that Google will add these features in future Chrome versions.

Privacy and security

Chrome has all the security features you'd expect in a modern browser, including a pop-up blocker and anti-phishing tool. As with other browsers, when you visit a site Chrome considers a phishing attack, you'll get a warning screen.

It blocks popups as well. When it does, a subtle notice appears at the bottom of your screen, telling you that a popup was blocked. If for some reason you want to see the popup, click the notice, and the popup appears.

Chrome also has what it calls Incognito mode, in which all traces of your browsing session disappear when you close that window. Cookies, temporary Internet files, browsing history, and so on go away when you close the session. You get there by pressing Ctrl-Shift-N, or choosing "New incognito window" from the Page icon's menu. This mode is the same as Internet Explorer 8's InPrivate Browsing. Think of both of them as porn mode.

Google also says that Chrome increases security in another way, by essentially running each tab in an individual sandbox. The sandbox is closed off from the rest of your PC, Google claims. It can't write to your hard drive, or read files from certain areas of your PC such as your Desktop. Google claims this will help eliminate malware infections.

Application windows: Building a browser for Web 2.0

If you need any evidence that Chrome has been built for AJAX and for applications delivered via the Web, look no further than what Google calls application windows. An application window is a special Chrome mode designed for Web-based applications such as Gmail, Google Calendar, and any other Web-based application.

Create a desktop shortcut to an application window by running the Web-based application, clicking Chrome's Page icon and choosing "Create application shortcuts..." That creates a shortcut on your Desktop, Start menu, or Quick Launch bar to the application. Double-click the icon, and the Web-based application runs in a browser window with no browser controls -- no tabs, buttons, address bar, etc. All you see is the application itself, although there is a small drop-down menu in the header that offers various browser functions such as back, forward, print, and duplicate. Right-clicking also gets you to functions such as back and forward.

In this way, you could have your desktop full of shortcuts to all of your Web-based applications -- word processing, spreadsheets, CRM, and so on. When they run, they appear to be an application running on your PC.

This feature still needs a bit of fine-tuning, because different Web-based applications work differently in it. In Gmail, for example, when you click a mail message, it opens directly inside the application window, which is how you expect it to work. But in Google Docs when you click on a document, the new document instead opens in a new browser instance, complete with the normal browser interface.

A lot of nifty extras

Buried beneath Chrome's bare-bones exterior are hidden some very nice extras, many of them for self-described nerds and techies. One of the niftier features is the Task Manager, an applet similar to Windows' Task Manager. It shows each separate process being used by Chrome, and displays memory use for each, as well as the CPU use each takes up. And it also shows which are currently accessing the Internet or network, and the current access speed.

If you want to free up RAM or CPU, click any process, click "End process" and voila, the process is gone. It's a great tool that offers sometimes surprising information. For example, it showed me that a Shockwave Flash plug-in took up 31MB of RAM, and quite a bit of my CPU, even though I wasn't watching any Flash videos or content. I used the Task Manager to shut it down and freed up both RAM and CPU usage.

There's even more to the Task Manager. Click "Stats for nerds" at the bottom of the window, and a tab opens with even more statistics. It's geek heaven.

Another hidden extra is a kind of search accelerator that lets you quickly search through many popular sites without having to visit them. Type the first letter of the site you want to visit -- such as "a" for Amazon -- into the address bar, then hit the Tab key, and you can then immediately add a search term and search that site.

For this feature to work, you'll have to have done a search on that site previously. So if you want to get it working, go to a popular site and do a search. After that, searching that site is a cinch.

In fact, the way that Chrome handles search is far more intelligent than any competing browser. When you do a search on a site, that site is immediately added to your search engine list. At any point, you can make that search engine your default, or you can do a fast search with the Tab key shortcut. And you can remove any search engines by using the Search Engines options screen.

Chrome handles downloads in a straightforward, helpful manner. Download a file, and when it completes downloading, you'll see a small icon for the download and the file name on the bottom left of the screen -- what Google calls a Download Bar. Click a down arrow, and you can open the file, and open the folder containing the file.

You can also go to your own personal downloads page that lists every one of your downloads, including details such as the location where it was downloaded from, the file name, and date you downloaded it. This page also functions as a download manager. While a download is in progress, you can go to the page, and pause and resume downloads.

There is one drawback to downloading in Chrome, though: It doesn't appear to integrate with your virus-scanner, as does Firefox.

Spend enough time with Chrome, and you'll find even more extras. For example, click a portion of a Web page, select Inspect Element, and you'll launch a window that shows you the HTML coding for that element, as well as the resources the page element uses.

Keep in mind that this is a beta and clearly has some bugs. Ironically, on one page I visited, it was unable to display an embedded Google Map, while Firefox had no problem displaying the map.

The bottom line

Although Chrome is a beta, it feels quite stable; after spending many hours with it and browsing to numerous sites, it didn't crash once. So you can download it without much worry about its stability.

Enterprise IT departments would do well to download Chrome now, particularly if they run or plan to run any Web-based applications. Chrome may well become a primary platform for running these applications, and it would be worthwhile to begin testing now.

Even consumers should consider downloading the browser now, because it represents a new way of browsing the Web. Chrome may be off-putting at first to some because of its bare-bones interface. But give yourself time with it. Gradually, the simplicity grows on you, and you may begin to find yourself using some of its niftier, less-obvious features, such as the search shortcuts.

That being said, the browser still has some significant shortcomings. It needs a true bookmarks manager, and it should offer a right-click option to restore closed tabs. Expect the next iteration of the browser to be more fully featured; don't be surprised, for example, to see a true bookmarks manager.

So try out this beta today, and get set for what will come tomorrow.

For other pics please click the following link:

http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id;155298895;img;9447;ssid;1

What weve done so far?

2008-09-04T02:28:00.000-07:00

Foss in AABC has a long way to go.

From starting in Open Office, mozilla firefox, GIMP, Blender and Foxit, AABC has gone quite some distance in trying to go .

Since we've installed Linux on our classrooms,faculty room and administrative offices Ubuntu (versions 6.10,7.04 and 8.04) and Ubuntustudio (multimedia room). And so far our students are adjusting relatively well.

We were quite lucky that we have open source buffs in our IT department. Sir Dennis Jorolan, our animation guru and Sir Brian de Vivar , our PhPMySQL guru.

Our teachers also have been undergoing in house trainings in open office, Google Docs (for document collaboration among students and faculty , Blogger (for faculty who would post lectures and advnace assignments). Though blogging among teachers still has to be reminded (of which takes time).

Were still trying to master Open base and hopefully well also be able to implement that. weve been actively trying to put FOSSpective into our students.

Among the significant things we think we were able to do outside of our regular students was our short courses among them the introduction of Blender as a 3d animation tool, introducing Open source tools in our COffice Shipboard office productivity course for seafarers and our webdesign courses.

This is just the start of our journey. We hope to do more

2008-08-22T22:24:00.000-07:00

Torvalds: Fed up with the 'security circus'

Creator of the Linux kernel explains why he finds security people to be so anathema

Ellen Messmer (Network World) 15/08/2008 10:25:00

Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, says he's fed up with what he sees as a "security circus" surrounding software vulnerabilities and how they're hyped by security people.

Torvalds explained his position in an e-mail exchange with Network World this week. He also expanded on critical comments he made last month that caused a stir in the IT industry.

Last month Torvalds stated in an online posting that "one reason I refuse to bother with the whole security circus is that I think it glorifies -- and thus encourages -- the wrong behavior. It makes 'heroes' out of security people, as if the people who don't just fix normal bugs aren't as important. In fact, all the boring normal bugs are way more important, just because there's a lot more of them."

Never one to mince words, Torvalds also lobbed a verbal charge at the OpenBSD community: "I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them."

This week Torvalds -- who says the only person involved in the OpenBSD community with whom he talked to about the "monkeys" barb found it funny -- acknowledges others probably found it offensive.

Via e-mail, he also explains why he finds security people to be so anathema.

Too often, so-called "security" is split into two camps: one that believes in nondisclosure of problems by hiding knowledge until a bug is fixed, and one that "revels in exposing vendor security holes because they see that as just another proof that the vendors are corrupt and crap, which admittedly mostly are," Torvalds states.

Torvalds went on to say he views both camps as "crazy."

"Both camps are whoring themselves out for their own reasons, and both camps point fingers at each other as a way to cement their own reason for existence," Torvalds asserts. He says a lot of activity in both camps stems from public-relations posturing.

He says neither camp is absolutely right in any event, and that a middle course, based on fixing things as early as possible without a lot of hype, is preferable.

"You need to fix things early, and that requires a certain level of disclosure for the developers," Torvalds states, adding, "You also don't need to make a big production out of it."

Torvalds also says he doesn't care for labeling updates and changes to Linux as a security fix in a security advisory.

"What does the whole security labeling give you? Except for more fodder for either of the PR camps that I obviously think are both idiots pushing for their own agenda?" Torvalds says. "It just perpetrates that whole false mind-set" and is a waste of resources, he says.

It's better to avoid sticking solely to either "full and immediate disclosure" or ignoring bugs that might embarrass vendors, he points out. "Any situation that allows the vendor to sit on the bug for weeks or months is unacceptable, as is any situation that makes it harder for people who find problems to talk to technical people."

Torvalds says he's skeptical about the value of synchronized releases among vendors that favor the idea of an embargo of software vulnerability information until a fix from a vendor is ready.

That process discourages thinking about design changes to make it harder to have security bugs, Torvalds says. "So, the whole 'embargoes are good' mentality is just corruption from the vendors," he states. "But on the other hand, disclosure should not be the goal."

"I don't believe in either camp," Torvalds concludes. What he does favor is to "have a model where security is easier to do in the first place -- that is, the Unix model -- but make it easy for people to report bugs with no embargo, but privately."

He says the Linux kernel security list "is private" in the sense that "we don't need to leak things out further" to get some software issue fixed. He says the process allows, though doesn't encourage, a five-day embargo, and "even then, I will forward it to technical people on an 'as needed' basis, because even that embargo secrecy is not some insane absolute thing."

source: http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id;743009998;pp;2

Ubuntu sponsor joins Linux Foundation

2008-08-22T22:18:00.000-07:00

Ubuntu sponsor joins Linux Foundation
Paul Krill (InfoWorld) 19/08/2008 03:23:00

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has joined the Linux Foundation, the foundation said Monday.

Canonical is an important new member, the organization said. "They have rallied the cause of cross-industry, cross-community collaboration for years," said Jim Zemlin, foundation executive director, in a statement released by the foundation.

Canonical also supports open source projects such as Bazaar, for revision control; the Storm object-relational mapper, and the Upstart start-up manager.

"The Linux Foundation occupies a critical, non-commercial function in the use and popularization of Linux around the world. We've always seen the Linux Foundation's value and are pleased to now become an official member and support its activities. We look forward to working with them to continue the march of Linux in all areas of computing," said Matt Zimmerman, Ubuntu program manager and CTO at Canonical, also in a statement supplied by the foundation.

The Linux Foundation serves as a nonprofit consortium fostering the growth of Linux. It sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds.

taken from:
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php?id=836564227&eid=-219

A look at the new tablet Classmate PC

2008-08-22T22:05:00.000-07:00

FOSS Films a requirement in IT education

2008-08-14T04:29:00.000-07:00

I recently realized the value utilizing film as a way of popularizing open source, recently we hired a new teacher Mr. Brian De Vivar, another Open source advocate and Ubuntu buff.

When he had to accept another training session in C-office (shipboard office productivity suite for seafarers) which conflicted with his computer fundamentals class, i subbed in his class period. and trying to introduce the concept of open source, I let the students watch "Codebreakers" a documentary of the Free software movement.

I soon realized that it raised a lot of questions from our students. (we have been using open source for quite some time now and Open office/gimp/blender being some of our mainstays).

when the film viewwing was over i gave them time to write reaction paper which was never submitted in time. This also gave Mr. De Vivar time to watch the movie and another one "revolution OS". he later required his students to watch this other film and other students as well.

so our present crop of IT students realized that indeed, theres a new and big world out there with open source.

and so our journey to FOSS continues.

for those who havent seen the movie....

watch them!!!!

Software bugtraps

2008-03-17T02:13:00.000-07:00

Software bugtraps

Software that makes software better

From The Economist print edition(Mar 6th 2008)

Computing: Programmers are using a variety of software tools to help them produce better code and keep bugs at bay

MODERN civilisation depends on software, so it needs to be as reliable as possible. But software is produced by humans, who are fallible. The programs they create are prone to crashes, bugs and security holes. What can be done? A good way to make more reliable software may, oddly enough, be to use even more software. Programmers are increasingly calling upon bug-squashing tools for help at various stages in the software-development process. Some of these tools help programmers to work together more effectively. Other tools scrutinise the resulting software, or its underlying source code, for problems. And still others help project managers put numbers on code quality, programmer productivity, and the cost-effectiveness of fixing particular bugs, so they can decide which bugs ought to be fixed first.

Things are improving, insists Daniel Sabbah, who started programming over 30 years ago and is now general manager of IBM's Rational Software unit, which makes software-development tools. Such tools “really have gotten much better over the years,” he says, though their impact is difficult for ordinary users to see, in contrast with the far more obvious improvements in hardware performance, network speeds and storage capacity. Unlike whizzy new hardware, which is quickly adopted by manufacturers, new programming tools and techniques can take several years to percolate through the software industry, he says.

Not everyone agrees with Dr Sabbah's rosy view. Even if the tools are better, the number of bugs in newly written code has remained constant at around five per “function point”, or feature, says Capers Jones of Software Productivity Research, a specialist consultancy. Worse, says Mr Jones, only about 85% of these bugs are eliminated before software is put into use. Dr Sabbah responds that such numbers do not show whether software is effective—bug-free code that does not do something useful, or does it two years too late, is not much help to a business, he says. And broader metrics suggest that things are, indeed, improving: the Standish Group, a consultancy that produces a biennial “CHAOS Report” on the state of software development, found that 35% of software projects started in 2006 were completed on time, on budget and did what they were supposed to, up from 16% in 1994; the proportion that failed outright fell from 31% to 19%.
Software as a social science

According to Jim Johnson, the chairman of the Standish Group, most of this improvement is the result of better project management, including the use of new tools and techniques that help programmers work together. Indeed, there are those who argue that computer science is really a social science. Jonathan Pincus, an expert on software reliability who recently left Microsoft Research to become an independent consultant, has observed that “the key issues [in programming] relate to people and the way they communicate and organise themselves.” Grady Booch of IBM Rational once tracked 50 developers for 24 hours, and found that only 30% of their time was spent coding—the rest was spent talking to other members of their team.

Programmers generally work together using a software platform called an “integrated development environment”, which keeps track of different pieces of code and assembles them when required into a complete program, or “build”, for testing. But many firms no longer have all their programmers and testers in the same place, or even in the same country. So it has become necessary to add features to programmer tools to allow coders to communicate with each other, request design changes, report problems and so on.

This field was pioneered by CollabNet, with the launch in 1999 of Subversion, a collaborative platform for programmers which now has more than 2.5m users. Subversion integrates with existing programming tools, including IBM's Eclipse, and offers features such as project-management features, discussion threads and support for quality-assurance engineers.

In 2007 IBM announced a similar effort called Jazz, which (as the name implies) is intended to foster creativity and collaboration among programmers. The idea is to provide a standardised way for existing programming tools to handle change requests, project updates and scheduling details for a particular project, not just code. As well as improving communication between far-flung programmers, centralising this information could also allow managers to track a project's progress more precisely.

High-level improvements in project management, and in the distribution and testing of new versions of a particular piece of software, are a useful, top-down way to improve the quality of software. But just as important are the low-level tools that scrutinise the actual code to look for bugs, conflicts, security holes and other potential problems. Such tools, which are now proliferating, can be divided into two main types: dynamic-analysis tools, which examine software as it runs to work out where breakdowns happen, and static-analysis tools, which look at code without actually running it to look for fundamental flaws.

Analyse this

To use a mechanical analogy, dynamic analysis is like watching a machine in operation, whereas static analysis is like poring over its blueprints. “Dynamic-analysis tools say, ‘Well, you've got a problem on something over here,'” says David Grantges, a technical manager of application security at Verizon Business, a unit of the American telecoms giant. “Static-analysis tools say, ‘You've got a problem on line 123.'” The two types are complementary, and Verizon, like most firms, uses both, he says.

Static analysis, being more difficult, is the younger of the two disciplines. In recent years several start-ups, including Klocwork, Fortify and Ounce Labs, have entered the field. Static analysis is best done as close as possible to the programmer, because the earlier a bug can be identified, the cheaper it is to fix. (An industry rule of thumb is that a bug which costs $1 to fix on the programmer's desktop costs $100 to fix once it is incorporated into a build, and thousands of dollars if it is identified only after the software has been deployed in the field.)

In February Klocwork released Insight, a new version of its static-analysis tool that can run on a programmer's desktop every time code is submitted for a build. The advantage of this approach, says Gwyn Fisher, Klocwork's technology chief, is that programmers do not need to wait for a build in order to test their code. And when a whole team uses Insight, it can spot potential conflicts between code written by different programmers. Brian Chess, Fortify's chief scientist, says such tools can also spot mistakes that programmers are known to make routinely, such as allowing “buffer overflows” and “SQL injection”, both of which can open up security holes.

Dynamic analysis involves running a chunk of code with a variety of test inputs to see if it performs as expected, and to make sure it does not do anything undesirable such as crashing, going into an endless loop or demanding more and more memory as it runs. This process can be automated to a certain extent, but guidance from the programmer or tester, in the form of test scripts, is usually required.

Both static and dynamic analysis have been around for a while, but encouraging more programmers to use them is not always easy. It is especially hard to spread these tools beyond large companies, which have the staff to support them. Veracode, a firm based in Burlington, Massachusetts, thinks the answer is to offer code testing as an online service. Chris Wysopal, the firm's co-founder and technology chief, says that his company's tool will broaden the market for software testing by giving smaller companies “a blood test” to check their code. At the moment, he says, “we're where network security was in 1995, when some people didn't even have a firewall.”
A question of priorities

Another approach is to integrate testing tools more closely with existing programming tools. If testing tools do not fit neatly into a company's existing way of doing things, developers will not use them, notes Alberto Savoia at Agitar Software, the maker of a tool called Agitator which automatically produces test scripts for use in dynamic analysis. Seth Hallem, the co-founder of Coverity, which makes a static-analysis tool, expects greater integration between programming and testing tools in future.

But analysis tools that spot potential problems, useful though they are, can in turn cause new problems. John Viega of McAfee, a big security-software firm, used to run a start-up that sold a static-analysis tool called CodeAssure (which is now owned by Fortify). He says he did not realise how daunting such tools were to use until he tried selling them. “People would use our tool and find out that they had many reliability problems and many potential security problems, but the cost of researching and fixing them all was astronomical, so they would give up,” he says.

Not all bugs are worth fixing—but how can programmers decide which ones to concentrate on? Jack Danahy, technology chief of Ounce Labs, says the expertise required is the software equivalent of interpreting an MRI image. But his company is doing its best to automate the process, with a static-analysis tool that spots problems and estimates the risk associated with each one.

A similar risk-analysis approach is also being applied to software on a larger scale, through efforts to develop metrics for code quality and programmer productivity. Atlassian, an Australian developer of software tools, last year released Bamboo, which tracks trends in code over time, such as the number of bugs found. Veracode's analysis service has a code-scoring tool that gives grades to code. And Mr Savoia has developed a system to assess the quality of software written in Java, which he has jokingly named “change, risk, analysis and predictions”, or CRAP. His software plug-in, which determines the “crappiness” of a particular piece of code, has been downloaded by hundreds of programmers. Given that programmers are paid a total of half a trillion dollars a year, Mr Savoia estimates, the industry needs better tools to assess the quality of their work.

To this end, America's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is doing its best to create the software equivalent of the “generally accepted accounting principles” used in the financial world. Its Software Assurance Metrics and Tool Evaluation (SAMATE) project is intended to offer companies a way to quantify how much better their code will be if they adopt particular tools and programming languages.

Paul Black of NIST says its first report, on static-analysis tools, should be available in April. The purpose of the research is “to get away from the feeling that ‘all software has bugs’ and say ‘it will cost this much time and this much money to make software of this kind of quality’,” he says. Rather than trying to stamp out bugs altogether, in short, the future of “software that makes software better” may lie in working out where the pesticide can be most cost-effectively applied.