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Additionally, this person will lead efforts to establish the development community. This will require initiative and creativity to identify and coordinate volunteer developers who are willing and able to contribute to Church software development initiatives.

This person has the exciting responsibility in leading the Church’s efforts to establish community software development efforts. The Community Development Program Manager will work with key stakeholders to identify opportunities to leverage community resources to design, develop and maintain software applications that can be made generally available. Success in these endeavors will greatly accelerate the development and proliferation of technology that can be used by church members and local leaders.

So, if I were you, given that you’ll be much happier if you code for open-source projects, as Jon Williams of Kaplan Test told the OSBC audience earlier this week, and you’ll be much better paid as an open-source developer, put down that C++ manual and start writing some open-source code. I’m happy to be tithed to pay you.

Technical Program Manager - Community Development

You bet it is. As just one example, I’m a genealogy enthusiast. Think of how cool it would be if genealogy worked upon open-source principles rather than the klugey, time-intensive way that it currently does? (I’m not just talking about the research side of it, but also the LDS Church’s old-fashioned database architecture it uses, i.e., a big Oracle server rather than clusters of MySQL servers. Stop wasting my tithing on Larry Ellison’s jets when Google et al. have demonstrated that clustered MySQL can spank Oracle.)

You may not want those missionaries knocking on your door, but you’ve got to admit that every religion needs at least one Linus Torvalds.

The person filling this position must be a self-starter, and willing and excited to pioneer the use of volunteer developers in the creation of Church software applications. The job will be challenging — but the potential impact is enormous.

All that said, the real news in this is that open source must be mainstream when it is being promoted from the, er, pulpit. If the LDS Church starts requesting open-source development expertise in its job openings, how long until your school district, fire department, etc. all start to ask for the same?

It does my heart good to see my church putting its tithing dollars to work in an inspired cause: open source. A friend just sent me a job posting on the LDS Church’s website calling for a Linus Torvalds-like figure to lead open-source development efforts for the LDS Church and its IT projects.

Open source has clearly gone mainstream when religions start requiring it on employment applications.

I’d hazard a guess that many already are. If they’re not, they soon will.

Go to the LDS Church’s employment site and type “open source” into the search box. You’ll find several requirements for open-source savvy engineers (including someone familiar with Hyperic - got something to tell me, Javier? Is my tithing paying for your
Wii addiction?), but this is the one that I find fascinating (and encouraging):

Description:

The Community Program Manager will work very closely with executive and senior leadership throughout the Church to identify opportunities suitable for community development. This person will also work with internal developers to identify, design and develop tools that can be leveraged by community developers. These tools may include APIs, Web Services, publishing or hosting platforms and documentation.

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

Indeed, the Aspire 7720 features a 1.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, and a 17-inch widescreen LCD. It also includes a dual-layer DVD burner, a Webcam, a 5-in-1 media card reader, and, well, just about everything else you’d find in a full-bore desktop. The only real letdown: an integrated graphics processor (Intel’s GMA X3100). Thus, this is not the machine for gaming.

Most desktop replacements (so named for having giant screens, full-size keyboards, and other desktop amenities) start at around $800-900, but Buy.com has the Acer Aspire 7720-6155 on sale for just $599.99 shipped. It’s a factory-refurbished model, but it’s also very nicely loaded.

(Credit:
Buy.com)

It’s also not the machine for travel: Although it weighs a manageable 7.4 pounds, the sucker’s downright huge. I haven’t reviewed the 7720 myself, but I did cover (and like) a kissing cousin, the 7520.

The paltry 90-day warranty is reason for pause, but otherwise you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better-equipped desktop replacement for the price. If you have any hands-on experience with the Aspire 7720, hit the Comments and speak your mind.

This deal makes sense. It makes sense for MySQL and it makes sense for Sun. It doesn’t necessarily make sense because it’s going to push a gazillion more Sun servers, despite some complaints that Sun keeps “forgetting that it’s a hardware company.” It makes sense because it enables Sun to renew its standing as the “dot” in “dot-com,” and helps to take MySQL beyond its dot-com beachhead into the Global 2000.

Because of this, it’s very, very good for open source. I’ve noted before that well over half of Alfresco’s customers both evaluate and deploy on MySQL, including for mission-critical applications. (We manage a slew of major websites that account for billions of dollars a year in business, among other things.) I’d be ecstatic to see the other half of our customers transitioning from proprietary databases to open-source and open standards databases.

The more interesting question is “where aren’t the synergies?” Wherever MySQL is deployed, whether the user is paying for software support or not, a server will be purchased, along with a storage device, networking infrastructure - and over time, support services on high value open platforms. Last I checked, we have products in almost all those categories.

Where are the revenue synergies?

In addition, the single biggest impediment to MySQL’s growth wasn’t the feature set of their technology - which is perfectly married to planetary scale in the on-line/web world. The biggest impediment was that some traditional enterprises wanted a Fortune 500 vendor (”someone in a Gartner magic quadrant”) to provide enterprise support. Good news, we can augment MySQL’s great service team with an extraordinary set of service professionals across the planet - and provide global mission critical support to the biggest businesses on earth.

Sun will help accelerate MySQL’s relevance for Global 2000 customers and, hence, for my customers. I’m a fan of this deal because it’s good for me, it’s good for SugarCRM, it’s good for MuleSource, etc. etc. etc. It’s good for the commercial open source ecosystem.

Jonathan’s post is a fascinating read. Here’s just one of the sections I found revealing, coming on the heels of his suggestion that there are no “cost synergies” in the deal (Sun isn’t going to save money by marrying salesforces, for example):

I was surprised that Sun could go from idea to acquisition on MySQL in just five weeks. What turns out to be more surprising, however, is that Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s CEO, had been talking with Marten Mickos of MySQL for over five years on precisely that topic, as Jonathan reveals on his blog. The real question, then, is why did it take so long?

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Jonathan doesn’t say, but the answer is clear: Marten wanted to build an IPO-able, independent MySQL. He eventually sold because it made sense (and, I suspect, because the prospect of living in the glare of Wall Street’s impatient eye was not looking as appealing as it once had, but that’s just Matt Asay personal conjecture).

And as always, drop me a line or follow me on Twitter!

In this episode, I discuss why the RIAA never made sense and its policies are the dumbest I’ve heard in a long time.

Thanks, Rambus.

This particular verdict was favorable to Rambus, but it wasn’t the final word, nor was it exceptionally important. CNET News.com didn’t even publish a news article about it, though Tom Krazit did write a pretty good blog post on the subject and it inspired a good post on intellectual property development from former Rambus exec Steve Tobak on his blog. Rambus has been involved in a great many lawsuits. Some of them work out in the company’s favor, some don’t, and I can’t begin to predict what’ll happen in the future.

I’ve written about Rambus many times, including this editorial for Microprocessor Report back in 2000. As I said there, I think Rambus should have disclosed what it was working on while it participated in the JEDEC standards organization.

But that’s more a statement of ethics than law. JEDEC didn’t require such disclosure at the time– it does now!– and other companies had allegedly done what Rambus did. Last week’s court decision held that Rambus acted within the law at JEDEC, reinforcing the company’s claims that it is owed licensing fees for its patents.

Second only to Moore’s Law as a source of story ideas for pundits in the computer industry, Rambus was back in the news again last week.

So I guess there are three things for which we should thank Rambus– developing advanced DRAM technology, causing us all to think about the role of intellectual property in our industry, and providing work for professional bloggers.

Time Warner Cable started experimenting with a similar program in March 2007 in Austin, Texas, and Columbus, Ohio. It struck deals with Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema to offer new releases on its VOD service in those markets the same day the movies are released on DVD.

Typically, there’s a lag time between when movies hit video rental stores and retail outlets on DVD and when they’re available by cable operators through video-on-demand. Studios make a lot of money from DVD sales and rentals, so they have resisted releasing new movies, especially big hits, on VOD at the same time they release it on DVD.

On Monday, Comcast announced that it would provide some Hollywood hit movies on its video-on-demand, or VOD, service the same day they’re offered on DVD. It also announced that some new television series will premiere on its VOD service at least one week before airing on regular TV.

But movie viewers seem to like the convenience of video-on-demand. Comcast, which is the largest cable operator in the country, said its subscribers select a VOD program more than 100 times per second. That amounts to roughly 275 million video-on-demand selections per month.

In an effort to appeal to subscribers who also want to own their movies, Cablevision Systems is taking a slightly different approach. Also on Monday, Cablevision launched a new service with Popcorn Home Entertainment that enables people to buy DVDs through the Cablevision VOD service and have them shipped to their home. With the purchase of the DVD, customers are also given immediate access to the movie via VOD.

Renting movies on DVD could soon be a thing of the past, as cable operators experiment with new ways to get movies and even TV shows to viewers quicker, using their video-on-demand platforms.

The Bungee Application Server will also be available community source licenses, and the company is considering FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) licenses.

See also: Bungee Labs mashing up old-school CRM with new-school Web 2.0

Bungee Labs is extending the hosting options for its Web application development environment, Bungee Connect. Today, developers using the Bungee Connect development environment can host their applications on Bungee’s multitenant grid in the U.S. and Europe or on Amazon EC2. Beginning in July in public beta, organizations will be able to deploy Bungee Connect applications via the new Bungee Application Server on their own hosting infrastructure.

Bungee Labs charges fees based on production deployment of Bungee-powered applications. The billing rate for Bungee Labs’ Grid or Amazon EC2 is $0.06 per user-session-hour rounded to the nearest second-per-user-session. For the public beta, no fees will be charged. The Bungee Application Server (with a VMware-based software appliance for managing and deploying applications across servers) for self-hosting applications starts at $500 per server, per month.

Bungee Labs, along with Coghead, Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, Joyent, Mosso, salesforce.com, NetSuite, Microsoft and others, is paving the way to platforms-as-a-service–hosted infrastructure for developing and delivering Web applications.

It’s a great idea, since most entertainment systems are unique in one way or another, and the manuals that come with AV gear rarely cover all the bases, not to mention that they’re written at varying levels of clarity. To remind you of that, the service also provides the PDF manuals for your products.

Monster would be a natural to buy this company, of course. But I hope it doesn’t. Come to think of it, CNET should buy it. Let me look into that.

Wirewize makes money by selling cables, currently through Circuit City. I give the service big props for not pushing those ridiculously overpriced Monster Cables, although I would still chafe at paying $45 for the 100 feet of speaker wire the system recommended to me. You can get the same wire at Radio Shack for $20, and probably for even less at a hardware store.

I did not find all my AV equipment listed in the Wirewize database, which did not surprise me since some of my gear is no longer sold, but I was surprised to find some manufacturers left out entirely. The site is still young, though.

Good idea alert: A newish site, Wirewize, tells you how to connect the gizmos in your home entertainment center. You tell it what you have, and it tells you which cables you need and then, very specifically, where to plug them.

It's like a custom manual for your particular home entertainment setup.

Bonus tip for the Wirewize team: Talk to Logitech. Both your service and Logitech’s popular Harmony remote controls require that the user enter the inventory of their AV gear. It’d be great if you could coordinate, for those people who have Harmonys and want to also use Wirewize.

Via: WayTooEarly. There’s also a video pitch on Center Networks.

I enjoy wiring things together and tinkering until everything works, but the consumer electronics challenges that I like working through would probably send most people back to Best Buy with their purchases. But even for CE geeks like me, there is good advice in Wirewize.

The company also has a paid support line. Smart.

Before the change, the malware is leveraging AutoRun (box in red) to confuse the user.

The AutoRun functionality has been blamed for malware that has infected USB thumb drives, leading to a temporary ban on their use at the U.S. Defense Department, and digital photo frames, among other storage types.

In the wake of the
Conficker worm spreading via removable storage devices among other methods, Microsoft said on Tuesday it is making a change to the way
Windows 7 handles USB drives.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Microsoft detailed additional security features in Windows 7 during the RSA security conference last week.

Fixed removable media, such as CDs and DVDs will still be able to use AutoRun. Also, some specialized “smart” USB flash drives such as those containing U3 software will still be able to appear as DVD drives, effectively allowing them to also use AutoRun, Microsoft cautioned.

So, if an infected USB drive is inserted on a machine then the AutoRun task will not be displayed, Microsoft said.

After the change, AutoRun will no longer automatically launch when most USB drives are attached, so the AutoPlay options are safe.

As a result of the change, most USB drives will not be able to automatically launch a program using a Windows feature known as AutoRun, Microsoft said in a post on its Security Research & Defense Blog.

The change will show up in the release candidate version of Windows 7 that is being released to developers this week and publicly on May 5.

Microsoft said it is planning on making the change available on Windows Vista and Windows XP, as well.

In February, Microsoft released an update for Windows AutoRun that allows people to selectively disable the AutoRun functionality for drives on a system or network to provide more security. The update addressed an issue that prevented the NoDriveTypeAutoRun registry key from functioning as expected. Disabling AutoRun functionality can help prevent the execution of arbitrary code when a removable storage device is used.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

It’s the cash that I find particularly surprising. Apple is swimming in cash, more than $20 billion of it. The company adds more than $1 billion in cash to its stockpile each quarter. Today we give Apple a free pass on its iTunes/iPod lock-in, which delivers much of the Apple profits, because we can still happily apply such adjectives as “cool” and “innovative” to Apple.

It won’t last. We’re a fickle lot. I can’t buy Apple’s hardware fast enough today. I’m guessing I’ll regret it tomorrow.

This is as true of Apple’s cash position, which BusinessWeek recently noted may soon surpass that of Microsoft’s, as it is of Apple’s product portfolio and business strategy.

It’s almost a truism that while Microsoft struggles to do anything right (in the media’s eyes), Apple can pretty much do no wrong.

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The U.S. Congress is fixated on taxing the oil and gas companies for their “windfall profits” today, while Apple’s profit margins as a percentage of sales are actually higher than Exxon’s and those of the other bogeymen of Congress.

There was a time that we said similar things about Microsoft and happily bought into the lock-in that we’d eventually come to mistrust and seek to escape. Few are saying this now of Microsoft. And its cash hoard of roughly $23.7 billion has simultaneously become a cause for envy and concern: what will the convicted monopolist do with that pile of money? Can it possibly be in our interest?

I suspect that even ardent Apple fans like myself will someday be asking similar questions of Apple. As we buy our way deeper into the Apple ecosystem by adding various pieces of Apple hardware to our homes and offices, Apple will eventually accelerate our dependence on its technology by adding more software offerings (e.g., MobileMe) that make it easier for us to keep this sea of hardware connected and productive.

At that point, we’ll start looking for a new savior and wonder when we allowed ourselves to become so dependent on Apple, just as we once asked of Microsoft. For the moment, I think the giddiness of having a real choice sends us from Microsoft to Apple, Google, and others.