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FORMAL SCHOOLING VS YOU: PART III

What do you hope to get out of formal schooling? More specifically, what do you hope to get from higher education? Is it a lucrative career? A well-rounded personality? The ability to converse with almost anyone about almost any topic? Acceptance in certain social circles? The chance to meet people who can help you succeed?

Whatever your goal, it’s entirely possible to meet it without spending years in a stifling classroom environment, and without piling up tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

High school students are told, over and over again, that a good career is impossible without a college degree. But is this true? Most often, the time spent in pursuit of a degree would otherwise be spent in the labor force, in travel, or in business ventures. Whether they succeed or not, these pursuits are learning opportunities. After a few years of them, assuming we’ve put forth reasonable effort, we are likely to have contacts, referrals, and experience producing products or services of real value. These traits are often valued more highly by employers than college degrees.

Even if we don’t learn much through formal schooling, the degree is a necessary credential, isn’t it? Don’t the best jobs require degrees? This may have been true for many years. When college graduates were rare, degrees may have indicated unusual merit. With millions of baccalaureates flooding the job market every year, though, the degree means less than it once did. The degree is a much less reliable signal of experience, knowledge, or effort than it once was. Many employers, therefore, are looking for other measures of career fitness. A LinkedIn profile and five minute Google search may reveals more about an applicant’s communication ability, work ethic, and commitment to completion of tasks than a degree will.

At the very least, some would say, the formal schooling environment offers effective networking. This is questionable, though. College students typically spend most of their time with people of roughly the same age. Most of the student’s acquaintances are studying the same subjects, and are doing the same things with their time. Almost nobody the student knows is active in business or the labor market. His social network is too narrow to benefit him very much. If he wants to cultivate contacts that will help him find employment, the college environment is the wrong place for it.

Whatever you hope to get from higher education, the formal school setting might not be the best place for it. If you look for them, you are likely to find other ways of meeting your goals. And these other ways are likely to cost much less- in time and money.

(To get the most out of informal learning, you need a reliable broadband connection. Talk to us. We can help.)

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Sling TV’s Multiple-Stream TV Service

Dish Network launched Sling TV, its dedicated streaming video platform, early last year. It was a revolutionary idea for the often-complacent pay TV industry. A satellite system operator was offering a semi-independent internet video streaming service. The customer would not need the customary contract, would not have to sign a long-term commitment, and would not have to schedule an installation. The customer would not need a satellite dish or a dedicated TV set-top box.

Sling TV could be streamed to a wide variety of devices. These include Mac and PC computers, iOS and Android tablets and phones, almost every dedicated video streamer, and several gaming consoles. There are very electronic devices Sling TV will not support.

In other respects, Sling TV would resemble a conventional cable or satellite TV service. It would carry multiple channels in its core package, including major commercial broadcast stations. The basic channel package would be much smaller than the typical pay TV package, though, and would cost much less.

If there was any major drawback with Sling TV, it’s that it was limited to one stream per household. On Wednesday, April 13, Dish addressed the matter with a new ‘multi-stream’ service (now in beta tests).  The customer will be able to stream it to up to three devices at a time. At its launch, the multi-stream selection in the basic package was limited to a few FOX networks: Fox Sports, FX, and National Geographic. Optional premium channels available in multiple streams include A&E, AMC, EPIX, HBO, Scripps, Turner, and Univision.

The channel selection available for multiple streams is likely to expand over time. Dish Network is negotiating with content providers, and expects to offer a far more channel options within a few months.

The basic twenty-three channel Sling TV package sells for just $20.00 per month. Several optional ‘Extra’ programming packages are available for $5.00 per month each.

One average, TV bills for Sling TV customers are about half the size of cable bills.

(For any internet video streaming service, you need a good broadband connection. Talk to us. We can help.)

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IS TECHNOLOGY ACCELERATING?

It may seem to you that the pace of technological development is moving faster than your ability to keep up. Are you just imagining this?

According to some of the world’s leading experts in technology, it’s not all in your head. Our tools and industrial processes are changing at an ever faster and faster rate. Ten years ago, you didn’t own a smart phone. Video services on mobile devices were unheard of.  Thirty years ago, very few people owned personal computers, and digital information was nearly the exclusive possession of government and business elites. Today, you carry the entire store of the world’s knowledge in your hand.

According to Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near, the pace of technical innovation really is gathering speed. You may have heard of Moore’s Law. It’s named after Gordon Moore, who said in 1965 that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double every two years. So far, his prediction has proven to be accurate.

Kurzweil says that Moore’s Law applies to more than computer circuits. The same principle, he says, applies to technology development in general. For example, DNA sequence data has increased about ten million times since 1982, bandwidth in the internet backbone has grown by about 10 billion times since 1985, and the performance-to-price ratio for wireless devices has increased by nearly a million times since 1990. There are many more examples. A wide range of technologies increase capability by millions, even billions, of times, in just a few decades and at dramatically lower prices.

Kurzweil calls technical development an evolutionary process. As in biology, ‘natural selection’ means that advantageous development is passed on to our technological ‘offspring’. Not having to start from zero, we build on what’s been done. Our tools, like living organisms, become increasingly complex and increasingly capable. As Kurzweil put it: “Evolution applies positive feedback. The more capable methods resulting from one stage of evolutionary progress are used to create the next stage.”

Technology follows the iron law of accelerating returns. Each generation stands on the achievements of its forebears. Each generation adds its own improvements, enabling the next generation of even greater achievement.

(To get the most out of technology, you need the right information tools. Talk to us. We can help.)

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SOCIAL MEDIA AND PRIVACY

If you spend much time online, your privacy is unsafe unless you take steps to protect it. What may be even more dismaying is that the rules governing online privacy are inconsistent. They inhibit only a few of the worst potential violators, leaving others free to vacuum up as much of your personal data as their technologies allow.

Last week, the Federal Communications Commission unwittingly underscored this inconsistency. Tom Wheeler, the FCC Chairman, announced a proposal for imposing strict new privacy rules on internet service providers.  From the consumer’s point of view, the proposal was a huge step forward, as ISPs would have to protect personal information, report breaches, and obtain consumer consent for personal data collection. Consumers would have to ‘opt in’ to allow collection of personal information. The new regulations would make it more difficult to use consumer data for targeted advertising.

Unfortunately, the new rules would exempt Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other browsers and social media. The American Civil Liberties Union expressed disappointment with the proposed new rules, and other consumer groups gave them only qualified endorsement. Some ISPs panned the proposal. AT&T, for example, called it discriminatory. The telecom giant objected that broadband providers would be held to stricter standards than other online companies.

Since the FCC won’t do much to protect you, you have to protect yourself when using social media. Consider using an ad blocker. Carefully review the privacy policy of any social website you visit.

You need to be vigilant to guard your privacy on any social medium. Some websites change privacy settings frequently, without notifying users. Facebook is especially notorious for this.

If you find that your privacy settings have been changed without your consent, change them back. Then send a complaint to the site administrators. This will not guarantee that the site’s policies will change, but it may help. If enough users complain, administrators may finally pay attention.

Above all else, remain alert. The best safeguard for your privacy is your own common sense.

(For the internet service that meets your needs, talk to us.)

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THE THIRD GREAT LEAP

Are we on the verge of the third great technological leap in human history? Some economists and inventors say we are.

The First Great Leap, about 7, 000 years ago, was the development of agriculture. The hunter-gatherer societies that had existed until then were small, unstable, and at the mercy of the elements. People had to move frequently to follow game.

With agriculture, the human race developed a degree of control over nature. In planting and harvesting crops, we could build up food surpluses. The surpluses became a foundation for credit and trade. In domesticating animals, we had predictable supplies of meat, hides, milk, eggs, and wool. With predictable food supplies, permanent dwellings became practical, and man built the first cities. As trade accelerated, we built up further surpluses, which encouraged greater division of labor and some leisure time. This fostered sophisticated religion, philosophy, entertainment, scientific inquiry, and the arts.

The Second Great Leap, the Industrial Revolution, occurred about 200 years ago. Man’s output would no longer be limited to the product of his own muscles or the muscles of his livestock. With the invention of reliable steam engines, then electrical power, man could multiply his productivity many times beyond what was possible with muscle power alone.

The Industrial Revolution multiplied wealth for the masses. An ordinary citizen in America or Western Europe now enjoys comfort, leisure, and mobility that were unavailable even to royalty two centuries ago.

The Third Great Leap is the information revolution. We are on the cusp of it now. Computer technology has come a long way in the last forty years, but still is primitive compared to what it soon will be. The internet, scarcely dreamed of a generation ago, is still in its infancy.

The third leap is the use of information for more than training and education. We are about to use encoded information routinely to manipulate physical reality. With a VR headset and a control console, someone in Spain controls an earth mover in Sweden. A surgeon operates on a patient remotely, with robots cutting more precisely than his hand. A factory manager in Phoenix controls production in Tucson, with no staff on site in the Tucson factory. He can monitor and address any problems in real time.

Some of the most important emerging technologies include virtual reality, 3D printing, gene editing, and the ‘internet of things’. Sensors will be nearly everywhere. If we want, we can have nearly constant feedback about nearly everything in our environment.

Some experts believe the Third Great Leap will multiply average productivity more than fifty times within a few decades. If this happens, nearly all of us will be much richer. We could easily pay off the national debt. We would have cheap and abundant energy. We could solve problems that seem intractable now.

We cannot know now exactly how the Third Great Leap will affect us. We can make only the vaguest of guesses. It will, no doubt, bring us many new problems as well as opportunities. At any rate, we can be sure that our lives will be very different.

(To get the HughesNet data service that’s right for you, talk to us.)

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IMMORTAL INFORMATION

Can information be immortal?  Scientists at the University of Southampton (UK) say it can be.

For most of us, this claim would sound preposterous. We know that any medium we write or draw on, or encode our data on, will be destroyed over time. Heat, humidity, and chemical breakdown will rot paper. Clay tablets crumble. Stone breaks, and is eroded by the elements. Ferrous metals will rust. Celluloid melts under high heat, and decomposes as the chemicals that form it break down. The substances that form our DVDs and hard drives may last longer, but they too are subject to the relentless process of decay.

Finding a truly permanent data storage medium has been one of the great quests of the Information Age. A few weeks ago, scientists at the University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Center demonstrated just such a medium. It is by far the most permanent and versatile data storage and retrieval method yet.

The new storage medium is a nanostructured glass disc made of fused quartz. A femtosecond laser writes the data onto the disc. The US ORC team calls its new data-writing method “five-dimensional”, based on the three position dimensions, plus orientation and size.

Each disc, slightly larger than a U.S. quarter, can hold 360 terabytes of data. It will last for 13.8 billion years, approximately the age of the universe, at 374 degrees Fahrenheit. At room temperature, it will be nearly immortal. The molecular structure of the disc will remain stable at up to 1832 degrees F.

Reading the disc requires shining a light through it, then measuring the resulting data with an optical microscope and a polarizing filter. Experiments in 2013 proved the feasibility of this method with a 300 kilobyte file. The method has been refined since then, and now can accommodate files more than a million times larger.

It is possible now to record the entire history of civilization, without concern about limits in storage capacity, or decay of the storage medium. The Southampton ORC gave UNESCO an immortal ‘5D’ disc with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Christian Bible (KJV), the Magna Carta Libertate, Newton’s Opticks, and other important historical documents have been stored on ‘5D’ discs.

Does this mean the story of your life will be immortal? It might. Be careful how you live. Your cat videos, your social media posts, your financial records, and your behavior at bars may be preserved for future generations to puzzle over.

It isn’t just glory that could live forever. Embarrassment could, too.

(Do you have enough bandwidth for your data needs? Talk to us. We can find the plan that works best for you.)

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PASSWORD MANAGERS

You know the drill for logging in to your computer. You have to enter a password. You also need passwords for your internet service, for specific websites, and for online commerce.

The use of passwords for online security comes with certain drawbacks. If your password is easy to remember, it may also be easy for a hacker to guess it. If your password is more complex, a combination of letters and numbers, you’re more likely to forget it, and you could be locked out of your computer. If you have several passwords, you’re almost certain to forget one sooner or later.

Some people use password managers, installed browser plug-ins that track all of the passwords the user needs for all different online functions. If you have the plug-in and you log in to a secure site, it offers to save your password and any other credentials. You need to enter the information only once. With every subsequent visit, the password manager offers to fill in the information automatically. If you have saved multiple logins for a particular site, the password manager will show you multiple login options. Most password managers display a toolbar menu with a list of saved login credentials, so you can visit any saved site and log in automatically.

If you need to change a password, or you need login credentials for a new site but don’t want to think of a new password, most password managers will generate and save new passwords automatically.

Most password managers will also fill in personal data on internet forms: name, address, phone number, e-mail address, etc. This could save you considerable time.

Most password managers are free. The better ones cost between $12.00 and $39.95. You don’t have to shell out a lot of money for a superior product, though. One of the top-rated password managers, Lastpass 4.0 Premium, costs just $12.00.

If you want your online activity to be secure, but don’t want to remember multiple passwords, consider installing a password manager. And for the best internet service, talk to us.

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Magnavox HDD DVR and DVD Recorder w/ Digital Tuner

DVRs For Cord Cutters

Many consumers, exasperated with the high fees and poor customer service common to cable TV subscriptions, have become ‘cord cutters’. They’ve ditched the subscription model. With millions of people using mobile devices for nearly all communications, and with internet video streaming becoming more practical, the cord cutting trend is now irreversible.

Though cord cutting saves money, it comes with drawbacks. Free over-the-air TV is limited to live broadcasts: little other than local news, sports, and award shows. An over-the-air (OTA) DVR can help expand expand your viewing options. Most DVRs have been dedicated boxes available only with cable or satellite TV subscriptions. In the last three years, though, several manufacturers have built OTA DVRs that don’t require subscriptions: TiVo, Tablo, SiliconDust, and Channel Master, among others.

The Channel Master DVR is among the best of them. It sports dual tuners, so you can watch one show while recording another, and its on-screen electronic programming guide is free.  TiVo, probably the best OTA DVR on the market in features and function, requires an annual $150.00 service fee in addition to its $300.00 purchase price.

The most surprising new entries into the OTA DVR market are by Magnavox. Once one of the dominant electronics brands, Magnavox has been a minor player in the industry for the last two decades.

In last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, though, Magnavox unveiled three new DVR models. Each one has at least two tuners and 1 TB of storage capacity; one has six tuners and 3 TB. All are due for release in the last quarter of 2016. Each has  a free on-screen EPG. Each has a built-in WiFi router, so you can stream live or recorded video to iOS or Android devices. Magnavox says its DVRs will also download content for viewing offline, and one model will burn video into an integrated DVD recorder.

(For streaming video, you need the right internet service. To find the one that works best for you, talk to us. It takes just one phone call.)

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STREAMING SERVICES: VIDEO & MUSIC

One advantage of having a HughesNet broadband connection is access to video and music streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Sling TV, Spotify, and Pandora. Such services stream content to you directly via the web. Most of them don’t require a cable or satellite TV subscription, nor installation of any proprietary equipment. Most are compatible with iOS and Android tablets and smartphones, XBox One and Playstation Vue gaming consoles, Mac and PC computers, and Chromecast, Roku, and Apple TV streaming devices.

Most such services are very inexpensive. Pandora and Spotify, two of the leading web music services, charge nothing for their basic service tiers. The only catch is that your music will be interrupted occasionally by commercials. To skip the ads, you’ll pay a nominal monthly fee: $4.99 for Pandora, $9.99 for Spotify.

Video streaming services are not free, but they don’t cost much. Hulu, which carries a wide variety of TV shows and movies, charges $7.99 per month for video streaming with “limited commercials”. For an additional $4.00 per month. you can get the commercial-free version. Netflix, the most popular streaming video service, carries a huge library of TV shows and movies. The basic Netflix service, at $7.99 per month, will stream to just one device, and is available only in standard definition. For $9.99 per month, you can get an HD-capable version for up to two devices. For $11.99 per month, you can get it in Ultra HD on up to four devices. Most of Amazon Prime Video’s content is free with a $99.00 annual membership, which includes free shipping for most items sold in Amazon’s online store.

Sling TV, launched by Dish Network in early 2015, is an interesting addition to the streaming video market. Sling TV differs from most other streaming services in offering live TV. The basic 23-channel package costs just $20.00 per month. Several movie and sports packages can be added to the core package for just $5.00 per month each. For about $50.00 to $60.00 per month, about half the cost of a standard cable or satellite TV subscription, you could get a combined live TV, sports, and premium movie channel bundle. You would have a very complete TV service, and if you don’t require a huge number of channels, you can save a substantial sum of money. Unlike the standard Dish Network service, Sling TV doesn’t require a satellite dish or a long term contract.

These are just a few of the internet video and music streaming services available. For a wide variety of convenient and low-cost entertainment options, you should look into it.

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TV EVERYWHERE

With your HughesNet service, you’ll have expanded options for TV viewing. With the ability to stream video via the internet, you are not limited to the programming choices or bundles offered by cable and satellite TV systems.

TV Everywhere is an industry term for streaming video services that don’t require conventional cable boxes or satellite dishes. It’s also known as authenticated streaming or authenticated video-on-demand. For most such services, you won’t need to have any equipment installed, and for some, you won’t have to sign any long term contracts. Access to programming is through an authentication code you enter on your device.

The pay TV industry developed TV Everywhere to answer the competitive challenge posed by streaming services such as Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime Video.

TV Everywhere offers flexibility in viewing platforms. Most TVE applications are compatible with iOS and Android smartphones and tablets, Mac and PC computers, Roku, PlayStation, XBox One, Apple TV, and Chromecast devices.

Most TVE services are additions to conventional cable or satellite TV subscriptions. Last February, though, Dish Network launched Sling TV, an independent web-streaming-only platform. Sling TV customers don’t have to sign any long term contracts, can pay on a month-to-month basis, and don’t need Dish Network dishes or receivers. Most programming packages are light on the wallet. The core Sling TV package of 23 channels costs just $20.00 per month.

Since then, some cable system operators are considering offering similar products. Comcast and Verizon have tested separate streaming apps in some markets. Use of these apps does not require the standard cable TV subscription, though Comcast’s streaming service is available only to its broadband subscribers.

As a rule, streaming video services cost much less than cable or satellite TV subscriptions. This is mainly because their channel bundles are usually much smaller. You will need to research TVE providers, though, to be sure you save money- and that you’re getting the channels you want.

(For access to TV Everywhere or other internet services, talk to us.)