Professor Geek

Here is an interesting blog post by Serguei Beloussiv wherein he states the obvious: Virtualization might be the straw that breaks software licensing’s back. It gave me a lot of food for thought. Let me explain. Since the inception of the software industry shortly after the PC revolution began, licensing has typically been permission to install the software on a single machine. There are several factors currently working against that as a business model:

1. Most basic features (the ones that the vast majority of users need) don’t improve when software is upgraded. Instead, additional, high-end, features are added. The more mature a package becomes, the less significant the changes from one version to another. Since software companies rely on you upgrading periodically, the maturing of software means less revenue for them.
2. Many software companies are now looking at that revenue stream differently and are beginning to charge for “support” and “maintenance.” Some are even changing the model and charging annual fees for the software instead of allowing a license with an infinite time frame attached to it. In actuality, that isn’t a new model. In the days before PCs, most software (IBM was the big vendor … if you had one of their mainframes you pretty much had to get the software for it from them) was licensed annually and included support. There was no model like the one that came about with PCs (one-time licensing fee, good forever). The result of this changing model is that software prices are rising. Vendors are looking at maintenance as a way to keep the cash flowing so that they can invest in further development.
3. Virtualization has come along, particularly in the server arena. If you are using a software license that is aimed at a single machine, but you can now have 10 or 11 virtual machines running on that single physical machine, does that mean you can install that software on every one of those virtual machines? Probably. That’s one reason why the licensing models are changing. Soon you will see that the license doesn’t refer to a physical machine, but a virtual machine. If you want to run 10 virtual machines, all with different configurations of Windows 2003 Server, you will need 10 licenses instead of one.

How are customers going to react to all this? Will people keep paying these rising prices while not getting any appreciable value added? Will open-source become a much more viable alternative for software? Only time will tell, but it’s something to keep our eye on.

For the past few months I have become involved in some social networking sites like Digg, Flickr, and Del.icio.us. They’re all good, but I really like Digg. I check it several times a day to see what’s happening and I have been able to digg some wonderful websites. I highly recommend it to anyone who is always on the lookout for interesting stuff on the web. I occupy myself mostly in the tech categories, but there is something for everyone on Digg. Now, between my RSS feeds, Digg, and the other sites, I feel like it is possible to keep up with things without spending inordinate amounts of time checking on websites. As a long-time RSS proponent I am also pleased to see how many sites like Digg are allowing you to customize your experience and use an RSS feed to let you know what is happening.

My thanks to the Download Squad for bringing this to my attention. Here is a page at Techtree.com that outlines a number of ways that you can eliminate services that are running in the background and sucking up resources. Windows services are flexible and easy to configure (you can set them to automatically run, manually run, or be disabled, for example), easy to view. However, what is not intuitive is what the various services do and which ones you can safely turn off. This is where the list shines because it tells you which ones might be totally useless to you in your environment AND can be safely shut down without causing you system or network problems.

A caution: Be sure to read about each item before shutting it down. Only shut down those that don’t have any effect on your system. Still, clearing out a handful of these processes will undoubtedly speed up your system by making more memory available for other applications.

I read a most interesting post on CNET news today regarding the self-organizing nature of Wikipedia. It seems that when you let anyone contribute, there are bound to arise certain disputes over facts. Since one man’s fact is another man’s opinion, it has come to the point, apparently, at Wikipedia, that loose organization has developed a need for arbiters. If you look at a scenario like the TV show Lost, for example, one of the first things that would need to arise would be some sort of court system to handle disputes between individuals. That is exactly what is happening at Wikipedia. Some people are posting “facts” that others consider to be “opinions.” That leads to the need for arbitration, judgment, and a quasi judicial system.

Why is anyone surprised at this? Throughout human history this has been the case and, after all, Wikipedia is nothing more than a miniature society that started out with a common goal and very few rules. I would say that this is only the tip of the iceburg. As anyone who has put together an open source project will tell you, structure and hierarchy are necessary to get the job done. Wikipedia is no different.

Are you aware of the pending legislation that involves net neutrality? In essence, if the large telecoms get their way, they will be able to set up a premium path over the Internet. Any content provider that wants good service will need to pay a special fee. Of course, that fee will be passed on, ultimately, to the consumer. That could be in the form of pay-per-view content, increased ISP fees, or other creative ideas. The bottom line will be more cost for using the Internet or less free content, or both. This will have a negative impact on practically everyone except, of course, for the telcos. The problem is that they heavily fund congressional campaigns, so right now the legislation is going in favor of the telcos.

If you want to make a difference, log onto savetheinternet.com and send a letter to your representatives in Congress. If we can get to a million messages (we’re more than halfway there) we can make a difference.

According to a recent survey outlined in CNET News, many, if not most, higher educational institutions are not practicing basic tenets of good security with their websites. Why is this happening? I think it is the general naivete of the academy for things technical. It has been my experience that administrators often want to jump on a technological bandwagon without doing adequate preparation, investigation, or development. They want to throw things at the wall to see what sticks. If incoming freshmen are Internet-savvy, then let’s put lots of stuff on the Internet for them, including applications, ability to purchase memorabilia, books, and pay tuition, and register for classes. In the business world, we wouldn’t last 5 minutes if we compromised our customers’ private data, and yet this is (apparently, according to the article) the norm in higher education.

The Web is a great tool, and it is certain that students are increasingly familiar, and comfortable, with it. But it’s not a toy. It is a serious tool that can have grave repurcussions if used incorrectly. It would behoove us to learn to use the tool properly before employing it.

I spent most of the morning today replacing a bad hard drive. I came home from a night class last night and found my computer in a half-booted state. Every attempt at reboot would fail, including safe mode. Furthermore, the hard drive light would not go out. The hard drive had worked itself to death.

This morning I bought a new drive, replacing my old 60 gb drive with a new 120 mb model. The total time it took me to take out the old drive, put in the new one, and have my computer exactly where I left off yesterday was about 2 hours. How did I do it?

I set up my desktop machines with two internal hard drives. The primary drive is my main workhorse. But I keep a second drive for backup purposes. I run a copy of Norton Ghost that is automatically set to back up once a week and then do daily incremental backups. It is automated, happens at 2 in the morning, and writes drive images to my backup drive. When my primary drive failed, I simply had to replace it with the new one and then follow this procedure:

1. Boot to the Maxtor CD that came with my hard drive to partition and format the drive (NTFS). This could also be done with your original Windows CD.
2. Boot my computer with the Norton Ghost boot CD
3. Point Norton Ghost to the backup image on my backup drive
4. Wait about an hour while Norton Ghost restored the image to my new hard drive (automatically increasing the drive size to accomodate my new, larger drive)
5. Reboot and pick up where I left off. I only lost a couple of things (what had been done since the last backup) but they were minimal

The moral of the story? Good backup procedures (using excellent software like Norton Ghost) pay large dividends when you have a problem.

Not too long ago, RSS was a tool of web geeks, who were the only ones that really understood what it did. We (I number myself among the geeks) realized early what the potential for RSS could be. A survey a year or so ago showed that only 5% of web users had ever heard of RSS and even fewer used it. If that survey were to be repeated today (maybe it has been, and I just haven’t heard about it), I am sure the number would be significantly higher.

I read today that Microsoft has hired a former Technorati guru to move their RSS initiatives forward, including some Web 2.0 stuff and integration into their future products. Additionally, we are seeing some new business models emerging around RSS that are figuring out ways to make money using RSS. RSS is a simple idea, but one that can have a signficant impact as we move toward increased social networking on the web.

Here’s a great (and free) piece of software. SiteAdvisor is a plugin (it works with Internet Explorer or Firefox) that works with your Google searches and checks the results against its own database. If the database shows that the site is safe, a green check mark will appear next to the listing in the Google search results. Other markings will show up for less secure sites. If you move the mouse pointer over the check, it will tell you what it knows about the site. It is a small application (only about 400K), so it downloads and installs quickly. If you are trying to stay secure and have often wondered how safe some of the sites you see on your Google search results really are, then you need this software. I’ve been using if for a couple of days and have been very pleased with it.

I was interviewed today by a reporter from The Chronicle of Higher Education regarding the use of laptops in the classroom. The article the reporter is writing was in response to a University of Memphis law professor who banned the use of laptops in her classroom. While I can see her point, as they are often annoying and misused by students, I think that good classroom management can make them a useful tool for students.

Since, like all technologies, the laptop in the classroom can be both useful, and an enhancement to the student experience, as well as a major annoyance that is misused by the student, it would be advantageous to support the positive usage while minimizing most of the negatives. In general, here are some of the reasons why faculty don’t like laptops in the classroom:

1. The faculty perception is that they can be used for some sort of cheating
2. They are a distraction from the subject matter being discussed in class
3. They are used for entertainment and not legitimate educationa purposes
4. They allow students to form poor study habits, including the inability to take good notes
5. They can be noisy and disruptive to the class
6. Since not all students have laptops in class, it creates an information gap of sorts between the “haves” and the “have nots”

Obviously, not all of these objections have foundation in any given situation, but I have experienced most all of them at one time or another. There are things both students and teachers can do to make the experience of having a laptop in class good for all:

1. Students can use the laptop for the purposes of the class only and not for idle distraction
2. Faculty can take advantage of the laptops and have students find things and share them with the rest of the class
3. Students can make an extra effort not to be disruptive with loud typing or having other students look at their screen
4. Faculty can monitor laptop activity by roaming around the room and looking at screens
5. Faculty can engage students to the point where there is no need for students to seek entertainment from their laptops
6. Faculty can allow students to use laptops at appropriate times, and disallow their use at other times

The use of laptops in the classroom can be positive for all with the proper amount of cooperation and commitment.