Dr Albert van Aardt of Northern Polytechnic clarified that OSS is not necessarily Open Standard, free of charge or Linux related.  OSS is not freeware or shareware.  Many people would feel unrest on hearing these “what’s not” definitions and to question how accessible OSS for schools is.  Albert brought out GPL as one example of licences that govern the use of OSS.  There are many similar licences but GPL is the most widely adopted.  GPL (General Public Licence) allows us to use OSS free of charge inclusive of accessing and modifying the source and binary codes for one’s own purposes.  If we decide to offer the modified software version to the public for use, we must offer the modified codes as well.  Many commercial companies have done that, and they charge customers for their service for installing, training and ongoing support.  School pays for the intangibles such as expertise and labour but not for tangibles as a shrink wrapped product.  This licensing scheme is certainly more favourable than commercial ones such as from Microsoft or Oracle.  Interestingly, some OSS has been created to work in Windows environment.  Schools can use Open Office, for example, in lieu of Microsoft Office as a Windows application.  Albert proceeded to group OSS into good, bad and ugly. Open Office is good, along with Firefox (Internet browser), Apache (web browser), PostgreSQL (database), and GIMP (drawing tool) etc.  Various Linux distributions are bad because they make the OOS scenery unnecessarily complicated.  MySQL is bad because it does not work with numerical precision and is only good for supporting visuals.  Ugly refers to effects more than products such as the ugly Triglyceride in our blood attempting to neutralise the good works of High Density Lipoprotein (HDL).  The lack of backward compatibility and existence of circular dependencies of some OSS are ugly!  Please go to the web forum for continuing discussions- www.compucon.co.nz.

The quick answer is “nothing” if you ask a security system installer and “may be” if you ask an information system service provider.  Would someone say “yes” with absolute confidence?  In order to appraise the validity of the confidence expressed by the yet to turn up someone, we shall review why the first 2 parties gave us different or hesitative answers.

Traditionally security system installers are electricians or have a cabling background.  They obtain their skills through hands-on experience and some of them have reliably performed for many years.  Some are smart enough to catch up with advancement of technologies and are capable of installing IPVS (Internet Protocol based Video Surveillance) systems.  However, this does not mean that they are capable of integrating an IPVS into an information system network. This is because security system installation is a different trade to IT as a discipline.  It is possible to learn IT but this will be a steep learning curve.

IT people are mostly involved in installing computers, hardware, software, applications, storage, backup, data networks, Internet connections, and in maintaining the host of services for customers.  The scope is in fact very large.  Technologies advance fast at this stage.  Most IT practitioners do not really have time to catch up all advancements not to mention learning something called video surveillance outside the large traditional IT scope.

By now, we understand that the issue is in integrating IPVS to IT and not the other way round.  In practice, engineering is the key for integration.  Integration can surely be done if we have the essential background experience and if we have engineering skills to make things work.  By design, CNZ is such a new player.  CNZ will assist security system installers and IT practitioners to step into this brand new engineering integration bandwagon over time.

In a medium to large size company, physical security is in the portfolio of the admin manager whereas IT would be assigned to a dedicated IT manager or one with good knowledge of data systems.  These companies have 2 types of internal resources and have called on 2 types of external resources for 2 systems.  With integration, these companies can reduce internal resources as well as external.  This is from a cost point of view only and they will acquire more benefits from a functional point of view too.  A senior manager will get access to information such as the state of the warehouse or production line any time he wants to for instance. The increase of productivity, operational efficiency and strategic information flow is limited to imagination and will surely lead to higher competitiveness of the company.  Would you agree with the This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ?

We discussed about how businesses can benefit from IP technologies in the last issue.  This issue provides an update on how much we can reap or how far we are from reaping the benefits of IP.  IP stands for Internet Protocol.  We will learn that the availability of Internet connections with high bandwidth is limiting our benefits and the government has announced a plan to resolve the bottleneck that stops the progress of the country.  One source indicates that we will get Internet connections to homes and offices with a bandwidth as high as 100Mbps.  The following 2 paragraphs are largely summarized from reports published by New Zealand Computerworld.

A lacklustre broadband infrastructure has led New Zealand to once again rate well below average in another global survey of our digital proficiency.  New Zealand ranked 16th out of 25 innovation driven economies on the scorecard.  The US topped the list while Australia came 8th and Poland was last.  This Connectivity Scorecard was published by the London Business School and an US-based consulting firm.  It is on the infrastructure component where New Zealand seems to have faltered.  The study found consumer infrastructure was the country’s weak point.  Meanwhile, our PC penetration is average but we have a relatively good distribution of secure servers. This showed New Zealand had a strong e-commerce infrastructure.

Communications minister Steven Joyce admits that government will be “walking a bit of a tightrope” in spending $1.5 billion on a national broadband network.  A two-level structure is contemplated, with a Crown Fibre Investment Company putting money into as many as 25 Local Fibre Companies as joint ventures with the private sector. The network will initially be formed around 25 largest towns to put broadband into 75% of the population in 10 years.  As for the proposition that fibre to the home will simply make us a nation of entertainment junkies, Joyce points to the practical business applications, from mapping products through commercial software-as-a service to the huge potential of tele-working all demanding increasing bandwidth.

In the meantime, we are still able to reap a lot of benefits from using the Internet for a host of productivity activities such as emailing, web browsing, online commerce, searching, etc.  The data format has to be largely text and graphics with small windows for videos due to our existing poor bandwidth.  We will have to wait a couple of years before we can deploy IP video surveillance or video conferencing over the Internet cost-effectively.  Streaming videos from one megapixel camera requires well over 3Mbps of bandwidth.

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