Study: DVD burning on the rise in UK and USA

Bernhard Warner/Times Online


Getting a DVD-R version of a film or TV show to play on an ordinary DVD player may seem like it requires a degree in computer engineering, but this doesn't seem to be stopping many of you. According to a new survey by tech consultancy Futuresource Consulting, one in three American and British consumers said they have burned a DVD within the past six months. This tally is up from just over a quarter a year ago.

Not surprisingly, Hollywood blockbusters are a favourite rip-and-burn with copying of rented new releases a regular ploy. The UK stands out too for its copying habits. More Britons are burning TV shows in 2008 than they did in 2007 (a jump from 42 per cent to 61 per cent of respondents admit to as much). No doubt the several-season lag Britons must endure before American series are aired is proving too long a wait. And how are they doing it? The most common form of ripping a title is either to use a DVD player to copy to a DVD recorder, or using a computer software application for burning DVDs.

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Book review: Karatzogianni, A. (2006) The Politics of Cyberconflict

By Andrew Robinson

In The Politics of Cyberconflict, Athina Karatzogianni’s central thesis is that the possibilities offered by internet technologies are used differently by different kinds of social movements, depending on how easily they take to the network form. Socio-political movements such as peace, pro-democracy, anti-capitalist, ecological, and single-issue groups take enthusiastically to the new media, constructing networks of activism which themselves operate rhizomatically. In contrast, ethno-religious movements such as American and Chinese nationalists, political Islamists, and Israeli and Palestinian hackers are trapped within a differential model of identity which precludes the adoption of network forms, and instead end up deploying new technologies in ways compatible with their identity-structure, imitating models of hierarchical political organisation and warfare. They also make use of the new technologies, but are constrained by their ideological structures, and therefore use them in a more instrumental way. As Karatzogianni notes, “The structure of the internet is ideal for network groups … However, in ethnoreligious cyberconflicts … this network form is not always evident. This is why there is a dual modality of cyberconflict: one rhizomatic and one hierarchical” (88). The empirical sections of the book use the distinction to categorise a range of different instances of online activity, effectively demonstrating in practice the importance of the distinction.

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India most affected by US economic slowdown

By Swati Prasad, ZDNet Asia

When the United States sneezes, the world catches a cold--so the adage goes. That could prove particularly true for India's IT and IT-enabled services (IT-ITES) industry, where the United States accounts for the largest share--at over 50 percent--of the Indian software and outsourcing market.

"The U.S. slowdown will impact the smaller IT-ITES firms more," Hari Rajagopalachari, executive director at PricewaterhouseCoopers India, told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail interview. In fact, he added, it may lead to increased consolidation in the small and midsize industry segment.

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IBM denies re-entering PC market with Russian deal

By Peter Judge/ZDNet UK


IBM has said it is not getting back into the PC market, despite selling "Microsoft-free" PCs running Linux and OpenOffice in Eastern Europe.

"We're not getting back into the PC business," said an IBM spokesman, after the company announced deals with system integrators in two Eastern European countries last week.

It is IBM's intention to sell the so-called "Open Referent" systems, based on Red Hat Linux and the company's own Lotus Symphony software, which uses the open source OpenOffice productivity software, in Eastern Europe.

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People power transforms the web in next online revolution

By: Charles Leadbetter/The Observer, March 9 2008

n July 2004, US cinema advertisements for Halo 2, the science fiction computer game, briefly carried the address for a website - ilovebees.com - which appeared to belong to a beekeeper who had mysteriously disappeared. Her honey-based recipes had been replaced by an apparently random list of numbers. Over four months 600,000 people joined in solving the mystery of what the numbers meant. What unfolded was a striking display of 'We Think': structured, mass collaborative creativity and intelligence.

People set up blogs and bulletin boards, websites and instant message groups. One 4,000-strong group, the Beekeepers, became the community's core, and discovered that the numbers were 210 sets of global positioning co-ordinates around the world and at each there was a public payphone.

The game's designers at 42 Entertainment in Los Angeles set the players a series of complex tasks and on the final day started calling 1,000 payphones on the East Coast of America. Whoever answered had to provide five words of intimate information, such as the name of their first girlfriend. The caller would then call another phone within the hour and expect to be told the five words. In the last of 12 challenges that day, the players had just 15 seconds to get the five words. They never once failed.

If ingenious games designers can inspire thousands of people to collaborate to solve a puzzle, could we do something similar to tackle global warming, keep communities safe, provide support for the elderly, help disaster victims, lend and borrow money, conduct political and policy debates, teach and learn, design and make physical products?

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Microsoft's Chief Exec says Gates's company is thinking green

Microsoft has become environment friendly?

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer says it is but a US IT services company, Softchoice, disagrees. In a survey by Softchoice of 113,000 desktops from over 400 US organisations, 50 percent of the machines wouldn't be able to meet the basic Vista requirements. This being the case, Tony Roberts, chief executive of Computer Aid International, warned that Vista could lead to a glut of unwanted PCs entering the waste stream as users are forced to upgrade their hardware.

Roberts continued that as many as 10 million PCs may be discarded in the next two years as they are replaced by Vista-compatible hardware.

Meanwhile, the UK's Green Party has also criticised Vista for requiring "more expensive and energy-hungry hardware, passing the cost on to consumers and the environment".

Speaking for the Green Party, Derek Wall stated that: Vista requires more expensive and energy-hungry hardware, passing the cost on to consumers and the environment... This will also further exclude the poor from the latest technology, and impose burdensome costs on small and medium businesses who will be forced to enter another expensive upgrade cycle.

As earlier stated by the British Computer Society, "PCs contain many toxic components, so if they end up in a landfill we are creating a real problem for the future. It can be really easy to pass on the old machine to be reused, and if it's beyond use, to recycle it."

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Microsoft to Open Source: You Win

Microsoft finally admitted defeat to the open source community. This, in a way, is in compliance with the pressures from the European Union. As a result, according to the Web Worker Daily, "Microsoft will be releasing today at MSDN.com over 30,000 pages of API and communication protocol developer information on its major products: Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Exchange Server 2007; with more info coming by June on Windows Vista (including the .NET Framework), Office 2007 and Office SharePoint 2007."

For more of the report, read here or here.

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Internet surpasses magazines for ad spending

THE ASAHI SHIMBUN

The Internet surpassed magazines in terms of advertising expenditures in Japan in 2007, and now trails only television and newspapers as the media choice for ads, according to a report.

The report, compiled by advertising giant Dentsu Inc., said Wednesday that Internet ad expenditures soared 24.4 percent from 2006 to 600.3 billion yen, while the total expenditures edged up 1.1 percent to 7.0191 trillion yen.

The total for the four other major media--television, newspapers, magazines and radio--fell 2.6 percent to 3.5699 trillion yen in 2007.

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The Top 50 Proprietary Programs that Drive You Crazy — and Their Open Source Alternatives

By Jimmy Atkinson


Not every proprietary program can drive a person crazy, right? Some, like Norton Ghost, are superb tools for anyone to use. But, the fact that these tools are proprietary can drive open source fanatics up a wall. It’s not the price of the software that makes the real difference (although it’s a reason to migrate from one software to another for many people); it’s the idea that proprietary software comes with boundaries that keeps the user experience confined to…well, being the user. That’s enough to drive any developer crazy.

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