The revolution that wasn't

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?

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

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:

1. Where are their files kept ?

2. How does one access the budgeting software?

3. How does one access the student information system (web-based)?

4. 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

G.ho.st personal impressions

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.

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 )

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

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."

What weve done so far?

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

Bridging the Digital Divide in Depressed Areas in the Philippines

A Personal look at the Digital Divide.
By Roque Santos Morales

As far as the statistics of Education (particularly IT education) in areas outside of the Urbanized areas (primarily in the depressed areas), it appears that there is a dearth of information as to how there would be policies to address IT education.

Take for instance, Autonomous Region for Muslim Mindanao which does not only earmark for a small passing rate in the NEAT and NSAT exams compared to other regions.

In our school, I've noticed how technologically challenged are my students who come from ARMM areas in Mindanao.

Understanding that it is already a privilege to be functionally literate in these areas and this is a very big issue, imagine elementary and secondary students from public high schools not having access to information technology in the Philippines.

I salute the Open source people in Mindanao for doing their share in trying to popularize FLOSS in the southern part of the Philippines, but I believe that there should be a more bigger role to be played by fellow FLOSS advocates in Mindanao like doing a FLOSS project aimed at ARMM areas, like for instance piloting a primary and secondary school with implementing FLOSS. What I mean here is embarking on setting up a FLOSS laboratory in one targeted elementary and high school. At least from one end we would be able to actively show that Open source indeed can help in doing projects like bridging parts of the digital divide.