Thanks to Elliot I was pointed at the BBC Consultation on their proposed on-demand service
Being a licence payer (who in the UK isn’t?) I thought I should put my twopeneth in – but in reading the supporting documents and the phrasing of the questions I became increasingly annoyed. I’m not sure what about this piece of Institutional Stupidity got me so riled up because to be honest right now we seem to be living in the age of Institutional Stupidity and I’d sort of promised myself to try and rise above it all for fear of negative psychological and physiological effects. There was something about the framing or the viewpoint of both the documents and the questions in the consultation that struck me as so ass backwards that I was forced to write rather long and probably quite patronising answers to each question. I’ll spare you the gory details but this is what I wrote for Q12 (which was for general / other comments)

I would like to point out that the apparent frame of reference for both the proposal from the Board and the amendments from the Trust seem to be anti-technology and overly restrictive. In particular;

• Both seem to ignore that fact that the current on-demand proposal places restrictions that aren’t present in any other form of technology (such as VCR, DVDR, or PVR).

• There seems to be an implicit assumption that whatever restrictions can be agreed can then be enforced in technology (presumably through some kind of DRM system). This is simply a technical fallacy.

• The proposals seem to ignore the fact that many BBC programmes are already available on-demand through various file sharing systems. While this activity is considered illegal the BBC on-demand system will not reach it’s real potential for success unless it provides compelling reasons not to use file-sharing and doesn’t annoy and disenfranchise it’s audience with petty and frustrating restrictions.

• That the only devices accessing this content will be desktop or laptop computers – setting back the technological world view about 5 years. By using a DRM and patent encumbered format and choosing to make the content available only through the iPlayer application, the BBC seemingly ignores the potentially huge audience of mobile phones, ipods, and various other PMP devices (personal media players).

• The BBC seems overly concerned with the effect an on-demand service might have on other commercial offerings or existing business models. Does the BBC worry about the potential damage the development of high quality drama series may have on the film industry or commercial drama production? Does the BBC purposefully cripple it’s productions by employing less qualified technical staff and selecting less talented actors, writers and directors in order to prevent itself from competing with other forms of commercial entertainment?

The effects of a new media or distribution technology are impossible to predict – how many times has the death of radio been predicted, from the rise of TV in the 60s and 70s to MTV and other music channels in the 80’s, internet radio in the 90s and ipod and mp3 in the early part of this century. Yet radio is still going, changed and adapted by these other new services but none the less still viable.

• In my opinion the main concern for the BBC should be the provision of a public service to the people who fund the service, i.e. UK TV licence and tax payers. I feel the majority of licence payers will feel that BBC created programmes are theirs to watch as and when and on whichever device they feel appropriate. Any on-demand service that wraps content in restrictions and DRM – which in their construction are anti-consumer – will simply lead licence payers to either stick with existing technology, which has no such restrictions, or force them to use file-sharing systems.

• In my opinion the BBC needs to go back to the drawing board and start with a clean slate in designing an on-demand service. Instead of letting the old 20th century world of broadcast and physical media distribution distort their view of an on-demand service, the Board and the Trust should instead think forward 10 years to a world of myriad devices, continuous high speed access to the internet, and a planet full of people making their own (unrestricted) entertainment. The challenge for the BBC is to think why anyone would want to access on-demand services from the BBC when the average person will be overwhelmed by the choice of media available to them.

A few things have been going on with GUADEC organisation. First off Bastien has been kicking butt sorting out the Sponsorship Brochure and bank account, and Thos has been minuting our meetings and attacking drupal, and Ross Burton has agreed to chair the papers committee. Also I’m pleased to announce the first four keynote speakers (the first four to accept our invitations that is)

• Robert Love of Linux Kernel and Project Utopia fame
• Ari Jaaksi of Nokia Open Source group fame
• Alex Graveley of Gimmie and Tomboy fame
• Jono Bacon of super metal dancing fame (and also some thing called Jokosher)

There will be more to come on the keynote front so stay tuned.

For those that are wondering, here is Birmingham City Council’s response to the recent near non-story – no doubt there is a little spin and damage control but basically confirms what I’d heard from some people I know: the project isn’t dead, the cost comparisons made weren’t fair, and that BCC is pressing ahead with more FOSS investigations and deployments.

However I still stand by my criticism – if the project had been communicating sensibly and openly with the outside world this would never have happened or at least never got to this level, and quite apart from any possible PR benefits the project would have benefited indirectly.

A few folks have been emailing or IM’ing me about the recent fuss around the Birmingham Library rollout (or lack thereof). I was in contact with the team at the beginning of the project and did help out a little with some training and other bits and bobs but I’m not in a position to comment directly about the project, other than to point out a couple of things that annoyed me about the press coverage.

Firstly all the stories are classic Vendor sports and war metaphors (as Doc would say). Unfortunately they always end up in apples and oranges comparisons. The library project isn’t just a choice of migrating to Linux on one hand and upgrading to XP on the other – the migration is Linux + OOo + Firefox + Thunderbird/Evolution (not sure what they opted for in the end) + … verses a operating system upgrade on the other hand (in fact I doubt it’s even that simple). All other things being equal and without knowing anything about the products involved it would seem likely that changing 5 or more things might cost more (regardless of acquisition costs) than an upgrade of a single component.

Secondly all the articles tend to have the inbuilt assumption that these are simple contained products that have no interdependency and are completely interchangeably equivalent – like the council is deciding whether to buy Bic or Pentel ballpoints. It would seem obvious to buy whichever one is cheaper. Let’s assume for a moment that the Council’s analysis is perfect and the Linux migration is more expensive than an XP upgrade – it’s still justifiable if what you’re getting is better by whatever metrics happen to be important; security, maintainability, usability, long term costs, viability, etc.

Anyway the only complaint I feel comfortable making about the project is that they (AFAIK) didn’t seem to have someone capable of or give permission for someone to engage with the relevant communities, or to put it bluntly they had no-one blogging about the project.

Stephen recently had a brilliant piece called Biggest Community Wins wherein he admits to a slight open-source bias but says the biggest factor in his choice for Redmonk IT is the size of the community around a product / project. I think there is a flip side corollary to that; success in large / complex open-source rollouts is dependent on getting directly involved in the relevant community / communities and telling the world what you’re doing. Something Stephen’s colleague James would call Declarative Living

We have seen that for many business a mental adjustment they have to make is getting used to the code being open – which sounds obvious until you suddenly realise you have to go on stage with no clothes on. You have to admit your mistakes from day one. This is one of the factors that makes successful open source projects successful – the all round transparency helps curb the bulls**t.

Exactly the same level of transparency would help all government projects (IT or otherwise). Help cut out the committee-ism and in the particular case of open-source roll-outs help engage directly with the community whose work you are using. It was in one of the Semasiology of Open Source trilogy (the first one I think) that r0ml made the point that the production of source code is only one part of the cost of enterprise IT – that more time and money was spent in requirements gathering and analysis. All this goes on in these type of projects but (AFAICT) it’s never shared, either on the fly via blogs, mailing list, bug reports, etc, or after the fact in some other form. Not just for the next poor project manager who has to do something similar elsewhere and can learn from your mistakes but because you never know; many eyeballs might make all project management bugs shallow.

The Government’s latest idea to provide a homage to George Orwell is to scan motorists fingerprints whenever they get stopped – apparently motorists are a bit too cagey when stopped. The problem with all of these kind of big brother plans that our Government(s) have introduced is that they are hardly ever symmetrical – it’s always about them checking on us and never the other way round. I’d be quite happy for this to be introduced if I could buy one of those scanners and get it hooked up to a database to confirm the identity of the officers when I get stopped – make sure they are who they say they are, don’t have any outstanding IPCC investigations, or a history of harassing motorists, etc.

 

Simon,

I realise you were probably joking but I wouldn’t show some, possibly reluctant, linux learners a terminal that is green text on a black background.

From my experience these are some of the typical fears the non-Unix people have when first approaching Linux;

• It will be complicated and hazadous to install dual boot with their windows system

• It will be like their stereotype of a Unix system – often this conjours up pictures of green on black terminals, cryptic commands, and lots of frustration

• Confusion about where they are in the system – they don’ t have a clear picture of the architecture of the system. Things like Bash, X, and Gnome are all weird (because on the systems they come from these things are all mushed together in one, so you don’t have to think about them).

To that end I use a (Ubuntu) live CD to start the course – this demos a safe, if slow, way to play with Linux without messing with your existing system. I leave the terminal with the default black text on white background – I noticed years ago people just seemed less fearful of it, perhaps unconciously fed by Hollywood (think Hackers, Matrix, etc), compared to the green on black / transparent that I used to use.

I also start with non-admin type things like, browse the web, browse file system, create a document. This shows that on a simple usage level this isn’t some cryptic ‘only the wizards can use it’ system; for example I had one person on the course who thought that the only way to create a simple doc was to use LaTeX or Troff, because they last time he’d looked at Unix, 10 years ago that’s all there was.

Finally I have my own architecture diagram which I’ve been using for years

At the bottom is the hardware, drawn as spikey and irregular, since all hardware is different; different CPU, different GPU, different network cards, etc. The job of the kernel is to smooth out this irregularity and provide a unified interface to the rest of the system (as far as I think about it, that is the job of a kernel on any operating system).

Above that is the command line or shell – now I’m slightly fudging things here but to help people understand I’d say that is what makes up a simple console based system. On top of that the layers of X, and a windows manager was all we had in Linux / Unix world until KDE and Gnome arrived. Of course these days the top layer (desktop) subsumes the window manager layer.

The key thing to point out is that the architecture is such is that each layer has multiple implementations (a blessing and a curse) – the kernel could be Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, etc, the shell could be Bash, Zsh, tcsh, etc, X Windows, could be Xorg, or one of the proprietary X servers, an the the final two layers have a huge diversity.

On our two day FastTrack, at the end of the second day, once I’ve people a little comfortable, I build up the GUI layer for them. So I start a new bare instance of X (Ctrl-Alt-F1 and login to a VT);


X :1


then Ctrl-Alt-F2 login and then start Firefox or Gedit


export DISPLAY=:1
firefox &
gedit &


Then Ctrl-Alt-F8 to the new X – this shows just a bare X with no window management. No window resize, minimize, or layering. Then I Ctrl-Alt-F2 and start a window manager


icewm


Ctrl-Alt-F8 and now shows what a simple window manager does. You can then Ctrl-Alt-F2 again, and then Ctrl-C the window manager, and then either start another wm (e.g. windowmaker) to show how different it could be (i.e. how all policy is in the window manager not X) or start a desktop session, e.g.


gnome-session


and then can see the full desktop (just don’t be logged in at VT7, as Gnome doesn’t like being logged in twice). People’s eyes really start to light up during this – either thinking of the possibilites, or just a whole new level of fear.

Feel free to re-use any of this (it’s all Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike) or push back if you think there’s a better way.

 

In response to my previous rant about trying a usb audio device on Ubuntu, Andy Bold left a helpful comment pointing me to polypaudio. However on Dapper I could not find this package and it appeared that it had been dropped from Dapper asthe project was dead (or at least that is why it was dropped from Debian)

However I’ve found that polypaudio has been brought back to life and from what I’ve read it looks like we should rip out esd and replace with polypaudio. Kudos to Cendio for funding some of the new developments which has seemed to kickstarted the project again.

Now to see if I can get it working (or hope that someone builds a Dapper package).

The motivator in all this, for me at least, is to be able to have my usb headset plugged in, allowing me to listen to tunes/podcasts in banshee and receive and make calls via ekiga / xten / gizmo / skype (for the time being I’m happy pausing the music myself until telepathy get’s sorted).

Just in case anyone was unsure, my friend and colleague Elliot Smith is one of the world experts in Weetabix. He’s also seeking Google Juice. Absolutely agree on the loose flakes hatred.

The thing I hate about Planet Advocacy is that my blog posts look considerably nicer than on my hastily (not)designed blog. Of course the nonsense I write reads just the same on both.

Thinking this made me realise that I haven’t actually looked the design of most of the sites in my blogroll because I read them in an aggregator – I use planet (with it’s own lack of nice design). It’s kind of wierd to go back and look at how they have or haven’t changed.

I wonder how this might change my perception of the content – I haven’t read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (yet – keen observers will notice him in my blogroll though) but I know one of the premises is that we all make our minds up about people, products, etc, in an instant, based on a number of factors including how we or the product look. So I wonder if and how people react differently to the same text or idea based on the design of the site delivering it.

Briklin’s law of making software guiltless, as inspired and explained by Dave Winer is brilliant

Software that rewards you for doing something one percent of the time will get used (email, word processing, SimCity) and software that punishes you for doing it only 99 percent of the time will not get used (calendars, PIMs, categorizing stuff, social bookmarks).

This sums up the problems I’ve always had with any kind of calendering system, whether a paper diary or organiser or PDA or calendaring app.