November 9th, 2009

Paperless students? Never going to happen

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 1:22 pm

Categories: Discussion, Environment, Gratuitous rant, Hardware, Mobile computing, Productivity, Skills development, University, e-Learning

Tags: Student, Netbook, Computer, Productivity, Netbooks, Nettops & MIDs, Hardware, Zack Whittaker

We live in an age where technology is rife. We cannot escape from mobile phones, computers, netbooks, projectors, e-readers and the rest of it. But students simply couldn’t go paperless. The chances are it’ll never happen, or at least if it does, when I am long gone, dead and buried.

The argument for going paperless is stronger than ever, with learners wanting less paper and more technology, and teachers wanting less paper to manage and deal with.

But this is schoolchildren we are talking about, not university students. Students in higher education relish using paper; allowing them to spread their thoughts across multiple pages and across multiple work surfaces.

The incentives are there; every time I print something off at university, because I need to use my university username and password to print, it records when I do so. But every print-out leaves me with a pop-up guilt trip reminding me of how much of a tree I’m destroying in the process.

Forget computer science students because they are a minority at most institutions. Of course they will be using their netbooks, Androids, smartphones and iPhones to tap away at during a programming lecture. But the rest of the students on campus are more than happy with scraps of paper, Post-it notes and lined paper with scribbles on. The rest of the campus doesn’t engage with technology on an everyday basis so they are not missing out in the first place.

For this, when writing up the notes later into electronic format, we can have a sense of satisfaction about screwing up the paper and chucking it away.

How would you write notes onto a PDF file? Yes, you could use a touchscreen computer, but handwriting recognition isn’t an exact science yet and a pad of paper and a Biro pen are far cheaper.

Taking books out of the library aren’t always possible. Sure, we could grab our Kindle and download the book but why should we when we are spending thousands of our respective currencies on library provisions? Some books are only available for an hour at a time, so instead of scanning them into a computer for later analysis, photocopying is a more sensible solution. Those who remember will know that I have proven this one long ago.

In realistic terms, the only computers students want to use is the one computer that they are using to write their essays on. Besides that, technology has yet to really have a major impact on the main brunt of our degree courses - the discussion seminar - where all you need is your mind and your mouth.

Me? Personally? Many can testify to this. I would be far happier with a handful of notes, scribbles and scraps than a netbook. Would you rather go paperless?

November 3rd, 2009

Google Wave: Has potential, but let loose too soon

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 4:12 am

Categories: Cloud computing, Google, Multimedia, Next-generation technology, Productivity, Skills development, Social networking, University, Weird and wonderful, e-Learning

Tags: Google Inc., Google Wave, E-mail, Corporate Communications, Online Communications, Marketing, Zack Whittaker

Google Wave has annoyed me so far. Because I am set in my ways and stubborn enough to brandish anything new, exciting and radical to my everyday routine as “a giant waste of my time”, I saw Wave as more of a challenge than anything else.

At the moment the only real factor it has in its favour is the real-time collaborative space, and of course I see this as a positive from a students’ perspective in a university enterprise arena. But besides that, it has very little substance. Sure it has the avatars, the ability to change the colour of certain items here and there, and it’ll give you a contacts list. Besides that? Mostly unfinished features and no obvious end-game.

One of my favourite features so far is the “Sign out” button in the top right hand corner. This has been particularly useful when pulling out my own hair, trying to work out what the hell is going on, and becoming confused as to what is being said.

Read the rest of this entry »

October 19th, 2009

Windows 7 puts Vista into perspective: Only a 'failure' in retrospect

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 4:53 am

Categories: Discussion, Events, Microsoft, Next-generation technology, Productivity, Security, Skills development, Windows 7

Tags: Operating System, Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Corp., Computer, Microsoft Windows 7, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Windows Vista (Longhorn), Operating Systems, Software, Zack Whittaker

For my 400th post on ZDNet, this is one mass response in reply to a barrage of emails I have had to suffer over the course of the last couple of weeks.

It seems as though I, and the just-over ten thousand students on my university campus, are not the only ones complaining even still about the abomination that their respective university IT department, hand in hand with the devil itself, Microsoft, have bestowed upon us: forced through product lifecycle periods to upgrade our campus to “the latest and greatest”. Feel free to detect any element of sarcasm in the last sentence.

Only short two weeks ago, I had high hopes for the upgrade. I genuinely thought that a new lease of life could be drawn through the lungs of Microsoft’. I was not only wrong, but overly optimistic.

For those who have been reading since day one, I started with a touch of empathy towards the then-new operating system. Over time, and predominantly over the course of Windows 7’s beta cycles, I became more attached to the lack of resource hogging, sluggishness and a general freshness which could only be rivalled by that of a gentle breeze on a summer’s day in the countryside.

But I did start off with a very good point. Vista back in the day was perfectly fine. Only in comparison to a better benchmark of Windows 7 do we start slating the former operating system. Something that widely popular blogger, Long Zheng, mentioned earlier on this morning on Twitter was this:

To begin, I start with the question as mentioned in the title. From there I hypothesise the potential failure of Windows 7 and look into the few people we can blame for the potentially epic failure of Microsoft’s next operating system.

Who do we blame for Vista, and Windows 7’s potential failure? –>

October 9th, 2009

Google's ongoing quest for home page simplicity

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 3:46 am

Categories: Google, Multimedia, Productivity, Research, Skills development

Tags: Google Inc., Home Page, Mice, Web Browsers, Hardware, Peripherals, Internet, Zack Whittaker

For those who aren’t in the know, the secret of Google’s success is the home page. This clever design almost one of a kind in that the home page was the only page. All you had was a search bar and a couple of options, but the speed in using the site was phenomenal.

More often than not, you double-click your browser on your desktop and begin typing your search term. Because after loading the site, you don’t need to click. Type in the term and hit the return key. All people do from the home page is search, with the odd exception here or there, but it is rare.

But since then, the home page has become a little cluttered. Google have opened up the floodgates to more services, more search sites, more business links and advanced options… perhaps not for long though.

The company seems to recognise its grass-roots in the simplicity of its home page and is regressing through a live experiment. By adding a bit of JavaScript code to the address bar of your browser once Google has loaded, it will display only the logo, the search bar and the buttons.

Hover over the page with your mouse and the rest of the options, links and services will display. But the beauty of this is that there is no inconvenience; those who search as soon as it loads don’t use the mouse so the simplistic look works.

Once Google has loaded, copy and paste this into the address bar, and hit return. Reload the page and you should see the simplistic view.

javascript:void(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=abac7a90f5a3784b:LD=en:
NR=10:TM=1254990196:LM=1254990236:S=uB6F4jDnMP_DuxtT;path=
/; domain=.google.com”);

To find the codes and more, the Blogoscoped pages and The Register have the details.

October 1st, 2009

FOWA 2009: Microsoft Surface 'proof of concept' actually pointless

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 3:49 am

Categories: Events, FOWA London 2009, Hardware, Microsoft, Multimedia, Next-generation technology, Skills development, University fun, e-Learning

Tags: Microsoft Surface, Device, Microsoft Corp., Education Authority, Projectors, Taxes, Hardware, Components, Financial Planning, Finance

The young whipper-snapper I spoke to, a computer science-studying university student at Nottingham Trent University, showed me a demonstration of the Surface table. I had seen it before and while I was initially impressed with the technology, we seemed to hit a defining moment when we both realised that the device was utterly useless.

The device itself is quite impressive, to the point where you gaze upon its innards and see the projector and the vast amount of cabling. But to be fair it is fairly simplistic for what I thought was a breakthrough device. For a camera, a few cables, a projector lamp and perhaps a few little bits and bobs here and there - as well as the outer casing which I believe was perspex - this device cannot justifiably cost $15,000.

This Microsoft intern, the student, like me yet nothing like me, seemed to be pushing his way desperately through the one-on-one talk we were having. He was showing me the feedback from the table and using interactive objects, which are essentially ordinary objects with a barcode on the underside. While I can see this as an interesting way to input data from an object to the device, it still has flaws and doesn’t work every time. It stumbles on things it doesn’t know or see properly

After a few interesting (and pushing) questions from myself, he threw in the educational factor on the defence. By claiming that schools can use the Surface device as a tool to engage with students, make and build applications and learn in the process, the Surface device is a perfect piece of kit for schools.

Wrong. As the same with universities and other educational establishments, if they can make it cheaper, then they will do. One of the games involved rearranging tiles with letters on to create a word. Local education authorities are not going to shell out the vast proportion of their IT budget on a single, damned glorified table which they could access the same learning process from using cut out card and pens.

When I told him this fact, he looked baffled and thrown away for a short time. His mind switched over to “PR Mode” and carried on discussing other points about the device. Nevertheless, after numerous blows to his ego and his knowledge and understanding, I saw in his eyes that he gave in to the journalistic pressure of an educational equal.

Not only did he admit that it was a mere proof of concept device, he couldn’t honestly pick a genuine use for the Surface table. Regardless of this, a number of hotels and big corporations in the US have bought one for their receptions and waiting areas. But it is not for the small businesses, the educational sector where it is the taxpayer’s money going into these “investments” or anyone else for that matter.

I could see the tears well up in this young gentleman’s eyes as he realised the Iron Curtain of Microsoft falling down around him. I did, however, try and recover from crippling this young man’s ego by telling him “the technology was impressive”. But that’s all I could really say without lying to him.

September 15th, 2009

IT support: Cut the jargon or find another job

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 7:49 am

Categories: Careers, Discussion, Gratuitous rant, Skills development, e-Learning

Tags: Job, DNS, Generation Y, Information Technology, SSL Certificate, SSL, Domain Name, Ssl/Tls, Domain Names, Authentication/Encryption

I had a phone call from an extended colleague working for a charity here in the UK. The website they have is throwing up SSL error messages due to the extended security in modern day browsers - Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3 are the best examples.

The domain name for the site stands, but the website is hosted by another company which has an SSL certificate for their own subdomain, which covers this charity’s website and every other website they host. When accessing the members-only part of the site, they are faced with an SSL certificate error, which is causing havoc with non-technical users and deterring them from using the site.

So from the charity’s domain name, hit the Login button and it throws an SSL error because the SSL certificate is issued to the hosting company’s subdomain, and not the charity’s domain name. It’s a domain name mismatch issue and quite common nowadays. Keeping up?

Their support response was to “advise your visitors to ignore this warning”. That threw me back quite some way. Is that really the best solution? Or perhaps installing another SSL certificate to accommodate the additional domain name would have been a better idea?

This colleague got in touch with me to ask for my advice after emailing back and forth for weeks, ladies and gentlemen. Weeks.

The first question she had asked was in fact spot on, “Can just purchase a certificate to cover our domain name?” Instead of giving her a valid response, they quite simply bounced around jargon and technical bull which would have made very little sense to someone outside of the IT community.

This happens every day, in every organisation, and this is what I truly hate - hate - about the computing industry. It’s the self-important, arrogant nonsense which IT professionals bounce around. They use language which confuses the lay person and causes them to feel inferior, when in fact they are the paying customer.

The reason people ask me for advice is because I don’t bounce around technical language, or when I absolutely must, I explain it in almost gratuitous detail so they actually learn from what I say. More often than not, they don’t just want an answer or a solution to the problem; they want to know what the problem was and learn from it.

One of my friends working for the Home Office didn’t go in for two days claiming she was ill, because she was too terrified to speak to the IT technician on call, because of the flurry of patronising and condescending comments she would have to endure as a result of not knowing something.

Another example was last year. I went to the IT support desk at the university with a friend whose laptop was playing up. I was hungover and tired, and didn’t have the energy. But I went for morale support because English wasn’t her first language. From memory, this is how it went:

IT support: “So what’s the problem?”
Friend: “The Internet won’t work. I plug it in and network doesn’t connect. I need to submit my work otherwise my marks will be zero.” [Bad English, I told you]
IT support: [sighed and rolled eyes] “Fine, open it up.”
[The laptop loaded and she put in her password]
IT support: “Well it’s clear to me that the DNS cache is clogged and needs to be refreshed, so I’ll open up a command prompt and flush out the DNS. I’ll resolve it and the IP configuration will automatically reset. If you [something, something] the DNS resolver will fail and the connectivity will cease.”

All good and well to me, as I understood roughly what was happening. For some reason, the DNS cache needed flushing out and the slate needed to be wiped clean. He did this in a matter of seconds and it was all good and well.

But the attitude he gave my friend - perhaps because of her lack of technical skill or the fact that she was did not speak in eloquent English tongue - he was clearly “attitudey” and made her feel like it was her who was in the wrong. Sometimes computers just screw up, and this was one of those occasions.

She left that office with a negative experience. But it was his fault, the spotty, rude and arrogant idiot who clearly shouldn’t be in a public facing job if he cannot grasp the concept of basic social skills.

So this is a plea to the IT community. For crying out loud, get a grip. Sure, you may hate your job and hate people asking you for advice when their computers or devices screw up. But you are a specialist in your field and are respected for knowing that knowledge.

So pull your finger out and learn some social skills, because I can tell you now, ladies and gentlemen, that the Generation Y will not put up with your attitudes. The Generation Y do not appreciate being patronised because we’re younger. The Generation Y will rip you to shreds.

Thoughts?

September 15th, 2009

Employment after college: Start off low, work your way up

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 6:13 am

Categories: Careers, Discussion, Events, Industry connections, Money, Skills development, Workplaces

Tags: Credit Card, Industry, Experience, Industry Connection, Sales Channel, Productivity, Financial Services, Strategy, Sales, Management

A question risen on the Guardian Money section asked:

“My daughter is off to university to study physics, but I’m concerned that she’s planning to do paid weekend (and possibly) evening work while there. We are not well off, so we can’t help out much, but I would prefer her to focus on her studies. What is the best paid work to combine with university studies? Or should she restrict earning money to her vacations?”

An interesting one which I have debated over many a minute of a frothing pint of English ale.

There is no doubt in my mind that I am one of the luckiest students in the country today. Not only do I earn a living working here online, or more specifically from my office at home, but I gain experience and industry connections and have the time to study also.

However the vast majority of students simply do not have the same luck as me.

What does annoy me to the root core of my being is when Daddy with a Range Rover and Mummy with the pony, give their child a credit card and any payments made are repaid by the parents. One student came to me (as a friend) in tears because, “Daddy cut off my credit card, and now I can’t go into town and buy clothes and have a good time”.

Had I not also been a welfare officer for the union, I probably would have slapped her and told her where to shove her sodding credit card.

So, you have a number of options. And considering this is a technology website, I’m somewhat limited to writing about the technology side of industry - but most are synonymous with other areas and industries.

Industry connections are important. A university-level education nowadays is worth diddly-squat. You can easily walk out of college with a first-class degree with honours in engineering or computer science. You can tell this to your office manager at your new job, and they’ll still tell you to make the coffee for everyone else.

During college, make the efforts to go to events, conferences and places where people within the industry you want to go into meet. Yes, they will be boring and most of the time you will question your own sanity at the boring tripe these people come out with. But making an appearance and a positive impression will do you well in the future.

But working in a local computer store - that is, if you are studying computer science - gives you the experience and the real-world scenarios that future employers want to see. Just because you have a piece of paper with your name on it doesn’t prepare you for what the real world throws at you.

How do you think medical students cope? They have years of lectures, seminars and medical training, but the only real-life experience they get is once they kill their first patient on their first day.

Not only do you get money for working but the experience is more valuable in the long run. It is important to remember that. Most jobs strive for previous experience which leads me to question as to how you gain this experience in the first place?

The answer is simple: by starting off low, and working in the crappiest of the crap, and working your way up.

If you want proof of this, do you remember where I used to work before getting this gig? Microsoft. You have to take some serious knocks in life to get to where you want.

September 9th, 2009

Real cash for virtual cash: FarmVille's business sense

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 6:03 am

Categories: Careers, Major breakthroughs, Money, Next-generation technology, Productivity, Skills development, Software development

Tags: Farm, FarmVille, Games, Personal Technology, Zack Whittaker

FarmVille has become of the most popular social game applications for Facebook for my generation, and the creators must be laughing in almost incomprehensible proportions at the millions they must be making.

The application is a simulation-based game that not only involves community spirit by other application users with gifts and extra tasks (which give the recipient farm coins to spend within their own game), but exploits the virtual cash (”farm coins”) based marketplace for real money.

See Screen Gallery: Real cash for virtual FarmVille cash

When a user accepts the game/application, you  are presented with a blank canvas with which you are expected to create a virtual farm. You can plant seeds and they grow over time, and when you harvest the produce you receive farm coins, which perpetuate further spending.

Like other simulation games, you build up to different levels and can purchase more and more items - decorations, animals, trees and produce of higher wealth which then give a more substantial return. It’s addictive and keeps you playing by offering the farm cash incentive.

I’ve been playing for only five days and the feedback received from the game in terms of farm cashflow, the experience level received and the number of neighbouring farms accepted (from other friends in my actual social network) all make the game quite addictive. It doesn’t take up much of my time and constantly offers further advancement to a better farm.

It’s pathetic that an online game has gripped me so much, but it’s truly fantastic. But what has impressed me more is the business side behind the scenes of the game itself.

If you tried hard enough, you could earn your farm coins and farm cash through buying and selling of produce and animals. This would take you through weeks of repetitive tasks. The urge to bypass this laborious process and inject your own, real money into the game to convert into farm cash and coins is constantly playing on my mind.

Until I did. I spent $160 (£97) in the course of one hour just so I could expand my farm and further my game.

The interesting side is the real money vs. virtual money system. While this isn’t a new concept, exploiting the popularity of the game and the exchange of real money for further tools, plants, crops and decorations would have no doubt gripped so many people - myself included.

The trick when generating games or applications such as these is the monetary remuneration. Nothing can be created for a truly free amount, therefore this system of money exchange has propelled Zynga, the creators of the game, into an entirely new dimension. The key fact here is that you don’t have to spend money to further your advancement in the game, but if you do then you have the opportunity to fast track.

The temptation to spend money to engage with this cultural phenomenon is constant, for myself at very least.

My point is that if you are a budding entrepreneur and struggling to consider ways of gaining financial reward from the software you create, something like this should be taken away with you to the next developer meeting.

Business software could work on a pay-as-you-use-a-feature process - such as Word which restricted areas of the application to only the very basic functions. By linking in your credit card and requiring the use of a feature - say a SmartArt feature once and once only - you pay a few cents to use the feature and as a result the overall price of the software would go down.

With this, every copy of the software would be suited to the person who may only use a small handful of features, each application would be customised for that particular person and piracy could also be nearly-eliminated.

Would this work? Could you see software going this way, or has Zynga got the nail on the head with their process? Comment away.

September 7th, 2009

Students exploit optical phenomenon to create 48-inch multi-touch surface

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 3:59 pm

Categories: Careers, Hardware, Major breakthroughs, Next-generation technology, Research, Skills development, University, Windows 7, diversITy, e-Learning

Tags: Multi-touch, Zack Whittaker

A group of engineering students at the University of Waterloo have recently completed building a 48″ multi-touch device, which could potentially rival the Microsoft Surface device, by exploiting an optical phenomenon.

The device is a massive multi-touch input and output screen, very similar in usage to a Microsoft Surface device but with a very different underlying technology. It was constructed during a fourth-year design project at the university. Running Windows 7, the first operating system to really utilise multi-touch technology, the input and feedback are impressive from the very start.

Although not an entirely new concept, the surface technology uses frustrated total internal reflection (FITR) where light reflects off the surface of an object such as prisms or fibre-optics. A real-life example would be to hold a glass of water and seeing the impression of your fingertips on the surface of the water.

In simpler terms of how FITR and indeed the device works, as described on their announcement post:

“If you shine light into the side of a sheet of acrylic, the light will be trapped inside due to total internal reflection. Now when you touch the surface, it ‘frustrates’ the light at that spot and so light escapes. You use a camera to capture this image and [through mathematics] figure out where the finger was pressed.”

Using FITR in this way isn’t new as was displayed by Jeff Han at the 2006 TED Conference in California. Multi-touch computing was being experimented upon in the 1980’s and since then, this concept isn’t the first FITR-based multi-touch device created.

What surprises me is the sighs and sounds of disbelief in the audience of the Jeff Han demonstration whereas now, we consider multi-touch technology as firmly embedded into our lives - the iPhone being a prime example.

But it’s still so damn cool.

What I am most proud of is the contributors to the blog where this is mentioned involve women in this engineering project.

Not only that, the university actively encourages participation of women in ‘non-traditional’ degree subjects, and clearly praises them when they are proud of the work and research they accomplish.

With female students clearly being as intelligent as they are to complete a project such as this, it again exposes the question of the glass ceiling in the IT industry. Even though I still believe the old boys network plays the major role in limiting women into success of higher paid jobs and those with greater responsibility, this will most definitely change when the old boys running the show either die or retire. Literally.

September 4th, 2009

If a flash drive infects a network, who's to blame?

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 3:47 am

Categories: Productivity, Research, Security, Skills development, University, Workplaces

Tags: Education, Network, Council, USB Flash Drive, Virus, Networking, Zack Whittaker

Ealing Council, the local authority for a number of London boroughs, was infected by a virus which crippled the vast majority of the council’s network.

The damage knocked out the housing department, the library service, telephone network and others, according to the BBC, as a result of plugging in an infected flash drive on a networked computer. But this raises a question of those who are still not yet fully IT literate.

If you plug in a flash memory drive and it infects a network, who is to blame - the user who doesn’t know any better, or the IT staff responsible for the network?

Bruce Hughes from CNET seems to think it is those responsible for the network and the company. I’m inclined to agree.

In British (and I suspect in American) law, ignorance is not a defence. You cannot get away with ploughing someone in your car, reversing and going over them again because, “you didn’t realise murder was a crime”. If the judge said, “you’d forget your head if it wasn’t screwed on, you little scamp. Go on, go free!”, I would seriously wonder about the state of the justice system.

But in cases such as these, a legal aspect could easily be thrown into the equation. A bill reaching over £500,000 ($817k) needs to be pinned somewhere, and whether or not legal action could be taken is yet to be decided. At the end of the day, it will be the taxpayer who pays the brunt of the cost.

Even though the Conficker virus never “really” activated or caused damage per se, the proof of how powerful a virus can be in this day and age still exists. It infected as far wide as the French Navy, the German Bundeswehr, the UK Ministry of Defence, the UK Houses of Parliament and more universities than you could shake a stick at.

It is my professional opinion and belief that standard university network security is greater than the average security of businesses and corporate networks. As public machines on campus are all or often in buildings where the doors are opened with your university smart card, access is still limited to those within the establishment.

Not only that, in comparison to a local council or district governance, universities are themselves councils and governors of the campus. Students live and breathe on the campuses and the work that goes on within the network keeps the world ticking over - literally. For the fact they are all inter-connected in one way or another, in the UK at least, to limit spread of malware they have to be secure.

But ultimately it comes down to education, education and education: the do’s and don’ts of computing security. You may not get booted out of university for accidentally offloading a payload of electronic sewage, but you can bet your arse in the real world - you could easily get fired.

So, if a user’s flash drive infects a network, who is to blame?