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NovusEdge is demoing open-source energy management for “massive commercial buildings.” OpenRemote does open-source home automation, but this suggests the idea can take on a different scale.
Human resource professionals spend time and money tracking job applicants. Well, now they can save their money by using open-source applicant-tracking applications. People used to say open source could only commodify broad application markets. I don’t think this qualifies….
Or how about applying open-source principles to other markets? I’m an advisor to the Open Source Teaching Project, which lowers barriers to quality education by “open sourcing” course curricula and delivering it online.
While not new, it’s also impressive to see proprietary software vendors investing in open source. Five years ago, would you have expected Citrix to invest in open-source router company Vyatta’s $10 million Series C round of financing? Yes, it’s an attack on Cisco by Citrix, and so driven by healthy self-interest, as The VAR Guy writes, but that’s the point: the world is discovering plenty of self-interest in open source.

To wit, here are three “Who would have thought open source could do that?” announcements that recently hit my RSS reader:

commentary

Years ago I proclaimed open source would never be relevant in the application market. Now I work for an open-source applications company.

What are some of the more interesting applications you’ve seen for open source?

I’m sure open source is not good for something. I’m equally sure that deficiency won’t last. It never does.

Lesson? It’s generally not a good idea to underestimate open source’s potency.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Microsoft will issue fixes for five critical holes affecting Windows and a variety of other software on Patch Tuesday next week.

The critical holes, which could allow an attacker to remotely run code on a PC and take control of it, affect Windows 2000, Windows XP,
Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and 2008, Windows Client for the
Mac, Office 2000, XP and 2003,
Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting 2006, Visual Studio .NET 2003, Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2004 and 2006, and BizTalk Server 2002, according to a Microsoft security advisory released on Thursday.

Four additional vulnerabilities, rated “important,” affect Windows and Windows .NET Framework and could allow an attacker to remotely execute code, launch a denial-of-service attack or elevate system privileges, the company said.

Nissan on Monday said the Leaf, an electric sedan with a 100-mile range and a set of online features . will be available for sale next year.

Coda Automotive will introduce its China-manufactured sedan in California next fall. Other planned all-electric sedans include Mitsubishi’s iMiev and Detroit Electric namesake car.

The Think City: rearing to go.

It also has developed a business to sell its power train to third parties. The Japan Postal Service, in a deal initiated by battery supplier EnerDel, has signed on to test the power train in thousands of its vans.

“We’re the only one out with a fully integrated E.V. drive system,” Think’s CEO, Richard Canny, told The New York Times. “It’s an opportunity to get further volume and scale on the technology we already have. And it helps us get better pricing on components and further our development of E.V. drivetrain systems.”

Settling its debts and boosting its capital will allow Think to start producing its electric city
car by the end of year. If all goes as planned, the company hopes to start shipping the Think City, a highway-capable electric car with a 100-mile range, to European customers by the end the year, company spokesperson James Andrews said Tuesday. Already, 2,500 people have ordered cars.

Think, which plans to make a small all-electric car, expects to secure a fresh round of funding and emerge from bankruptcy next month, according to a company representative.

Norway-based Think is at the forefront of a wave of electric sedans that are expected to come to market in the next few years. Although the range is limited in on these electric cars, automakers expect it’s sufficient for consumers’ daily commuting needs.

The company is also looking at a handful of states in the U.S. where it would produce the Think City, which has a top speed of 65 miles per hour, for sale in the U.S. The Think City is a two-seater hatchback, but the company is also working on a four-seater big enough for two adults and two children, Andrews said.

(Credit:
Think Global)

Think, originally formed when Ford sold it to outside investors, hit financial problems in December and had to stop production. It has spent the last months rebuilding and expects to have a court date in August that should allow it to emerge from bankruptcy protection, Andrews said.

RealNetworks loses critical ruling in RealDVD case

Microsoft and Nokia said Wednesday that they are working together to bring Office to Nokia cell phones. Reporter Ina Fried talks about what the two rivals hope to gain by partnering up.

Also in this podcast: Federal judge bars Microsoft from selling Word; RealDVD software deemed copyright-infringing; and cell phone bills are highest in North America.

HP, Dr. Dre plan new ‘digital music ecosystem’

Microsoft unlikely to let Word injunction stand

Facebook launching Twitter-like ‘Lite’ site?

Microsoft, Nokia ink mobile Office deal

Microsoft-Nokia pact takes aim at RIM

North Americans pay more for cell phone service

Facebook tweaks its terms to address privacy

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Today’s stories:

Listen now:

GM floats auto concepts on virtual design studio

Here are some possible specifications that are based on what Qualcomm is proposing (since the Apple tablet is still only a rumor):

As one reader said responding to a post by CNET’s Rafe Needleman: “The Apple tablet isn’t a computer, any more than the iPhone is a computer. The tablet is a media player that’s also an information appliance. You have to judge these things by different criteria.”

I would buy it (and that’s not a shallow promise made only to buttress my argument), despite the fact I have never seriously considered a tablet in the past. Why? Simple: it’s functional. More specifically, it’s extremely functional as a secondary device–and its size and weight have a lot to do with this.

The Apple tablet, if it arrives, is an extension of a design that already has mass appeal–and does not require a leap of faith to believe it will succeed.

Less than 2 pounds
Under 20mm thick (0.8 inches)
All-day battery life
3G/4G mobile broadband
Wi-Fi, GPS
Robust 3D graphics, HD video
No waiting, instant-on

Think of it as a mobile Internet device. Or whatever you choose to call it. The point is that it’s designed around wireless connectivity and real portability. It’s very thin, very light, has a larger screen than an iPod, and, most importantly, comes with an inspired user interface.

The
Apple iPhone and
iPod are arguably small tablets–and consumers have demonstrated unmistakably that they love these devices. So, a larger, more versatile version of the iPod makes perfect sense.

And, as opposed to today’s Netbooks that are just downsized laptops, you could whip this device (8- to 10-inch screen size) out of your bag and it would be instantly accessible and have a screen big enough to do 90 percent of what you can do on your laptop.

(Credit:
Qualcomm)

Another reader posed an obvious but important question: “Will we be inspired?”

That said, let’s not limit this potential market to Apple. A company clever enough to design a compelling Google Chrome OS-based tablet, for example, will also succeed, if an Android-based tablet design doesn’t arrive first.

In short, I don’t need a smaller version (i.e., a Netbook) of something I already have. As a secondary device, it should be different than my primary laptop and provide a different kind of utility.

Qualcomm concept tablet based on Snapdragon chip

Semantics is one obstacle to understanding the potential appeal of a re-conceived tablet. Think of it this way: it’s not a tablet in the sense of the kludgy, thick, heavy, uninspired tablets of yore. Or even the ugly, thick, heavy convertible laptops available today.

There will be losers in the market, of course. PC makers who continue to sell bulky warmed-over laptops with a clumsy interface will be greeted with limited consumer acceptance–as in years past. The Apples of the world will succeed.

My prediction: 2010 will be the year of the re-conceived tablet.

And some not-so-small companies like Qualcomm and Intel are pushing tablet-like devices for their next-generation silicon. So this isn’t just Apple (if the Apple tablet rumors are indeed true).

And another comment, which basically crystallizes the points above and states my argument: “I see my iPhone as a mini tablet. Depending on the price, I would definitely consider buying a larger, easier to read/type device.”

BU student found liable in music file-swapping case

Also on Friday’s podcast: Microsoft announces family pack pricing for Windows 7, a grad student is found liable for swapping music files online, Google lobbies for laws on book copyrights, and we check in with reporter Daniel Terdiman’s now-finished yearly Road Trip feature.

Listen now:

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Wrapping up Road Trip 2009: A traveler’s post-mortem

Today’s stories:

Microsoft’s Bach on Zune, Natal, and Windows Mobile

Microsoft prices Windows 7 family pack

Google pushes for new law on orphan books

CNET News reporter Ina Fried got a chance to speak with Microsoft Entertainment division president Robbie Bach, and finds out more about the company’s vision for the Zune brand, including bringing it to the Xbox 360. Bach also talked about the latest project, Natal, and bringing the already-behind schedule Windows Mobile 7 to market next year.

The Environmental Protection Agency in 2007 estimated that data centers alone use about 1.5 percent of all electricity in the U.S. and are on a pace to double consumption in the coming years. With existing technologies, energy use could be cut by 25 percent, representing up to $4 billion in savings, the EPA found.

The data center where the class will be taught, which will be stocked with IBM servers, was funded by a $1.8 million Department of Labor grant.

(Credit:
Arch Rock)

Because of financial and environmental concerns, more data center operators are taking steps to cut energy use, such as consolidating server workloads and upgrading cooling systems. Companies such as IBM, HP, and IT consulting companies have practices in designing facilities to be more efficient.

Existing technologies like virtualization can improve data center efficiently significantly. Emerging technologies such as this wireless sensor promise better control over equipment and facilities.

The green IT degree from IBM and Metropolitan Community College covers technologies for consolidating computing work loads, including virtualization, as well as security and disaster recovery. The course work also addresses the nuts and bolts of building and managing a facility, such as cabling and monitoring.

Making data centers more energy efficient has been elevated to a college degree.

Starting in December, students will learn how to design and manage data centers to run efficiently in what IBM says is the first college degree in the subject. Classes will be offered online to remote students as well.

IBM on Wednesday said it has developed a two-year associates degree in “green data center management” in collaboration with the Metropolitan Community College in Omaha, Neb.

So if your company starts using Socialcast, don’t dismiss it. Not only is it a useful service (as I’ve written previously), but participating in it could help your career.

The enterprise microblogging service Socialcast is getting some interesting analytical functions. Unlike the data you can get from Bitly (the closest most people get to seeing real analytics on microblogging), Socialcast’s new Social Business Intelligence feature is designed to help the mucky-mucks in your company “understand the social dynamics or your organization,” not just see traffic patterns.

(Credit:
Socialcast)

If your company uses the Socialcast service for more than just occasional hobbyist microblogging–that is, if whoever hooked up your company with Socialcast also set up the important features the service offers, like integration into CRM, wikis, employee blogs, and other internal systems–then there could be a rich stream of social data coming from the product. Socialcast SBI can tap into this data to identify, in broad strokes, three main types of people in your company: the information “brokers,” the “connectors,” and the “peripheral players.” Even “active listening” is tracked, by watching posts that users flag with the “like” button.

SBI also means that someone could be watching what you do on the platform and that this information may play a part in how you are treated by your employer. Yes, it’s true: they could end up paying you more if you Twitter or do the equivalent on Socialcast.

The service doesn’t yet pick up connections in e-mail (Exchange servers, for example) or from PBX (phone) systems, but those data streams may be added in the future.

Socialcast lets you examine how your employees connect to others.

The point is to make sure that your company can leverage the tastemakers among their staff–people you can’t identify just by looking at an org chart. Another selling point: SBI helps make sure that when a person is about to leave the company, you know what you’re losing in terms of social connections that may be important to keeping particular projects running or clients happy. There’s an HR department term for this: “knowledge loss mitigation.”

Socialcast has both a free and paid service, and SBI is an additional fee on top of that: It’s $1,500 a year per seat for the people who get to see the analytics. Socialcast CEO Tim Young thinks that most companies, even those with more than the typical 240 users per installation, will buy one to three seats, so they can learn about their employees’ social connections.

(Credit: DevelopIQ)

A screenshot of the 7digital BlackBerry app.

After installing the free app, BlackBerry users will be able to buy and download more than 6 million songs from all four major labels and all the big independents, all in unprotected MP3 format. The app adapts automatically to the speed of the user’s connection–when connecting over a wireless data network, it will download a relatively low-quality version of the song. Then, when the user enters the range of a previously known Wi-Fi network, it will automatically–in the background–update the MP3 with a higher-quality version (320kbps in most cases).

Online music provider 7digital is bringing over-the-air music downloads to recent BlackBerry phones, such as the Storm, Bold, and Tour. The rumors have been circulating for several months now. On Tuesday the company is set to launch its application–developed by DevelopIQ–on the BlackBerry App World store, as well as on the 7digital Web site.

7digital is based in the U.K. and is fairly well known in Europe–it powers the download store for free streaming service Spotify, among other partnerships–but has been relatively obscure in the United States. That’s changing Tuesday as well: the company is launching its online music store in the U.S., bringing more competition to the likes of iTunes and Amazon. Standard pricing for songs and albums will be 77 cents and $7.77 respectively, which is a play on the company’s name (although variable pricing means that some popular material will cost more). The company also offers a free digital locker service, which backs up all your downloads in case you lose them.

Visual Studio 2010
So it’s good Microsoft is working on parallel programming aids within Visual Studio.

• The Microsoft Concurrency Runtime can provides a shared resource for scheduling tasks and allocating resources–and which works better on Windows 7.

“As an industry, we’re going to be working hard to make it work better and working with broad set of developers to target (multicore programming) without undue work,” DeVaan said. “Will these approaches really accomplish it? That’s an open question.”

(Credit:
Microsoft)

• The Task Parallel Library, which lets .Net programmers write more parallel code in familiar terms. For example, programmers are used to “for loops” that repeat a particular task a specific number of times; library lets each step of the loop happen simultaneously instead of sequentially.

• The Asynchronous Agents Library can permit separate threads of execution to pass messages among each other. That’s useful in cases where separate threads need to head off no-no conditions such as when

• Parallel Language Integrated Query (PLINQ) technology lets programmers perform some operations with data in parallel rather than sequentially.

Linear scaling means that doubling the number of processors means a doubling in performance–something rarely achieved in real-world computing. But what does 256 or even 64 processors have to do with a PC with four or eight cores? In short, updating the Windows plumbing to support bigger servers also helps work run more smoothly on smaller multicore machines, for example by ensuring data cached in memory is close on hand to the processor core that needs it, DeVaan said.

Jon DeVaan, head of Windows Core Operating System Division

Eventually, programmers will have to embrace parallel programming to be competitive, Garvin said. Parallel Studio helped bring the concepts to a much more mainstream audience, she said, and Evans Data’s spring 2009 global developer survey found 40 percent of programmers are working on multithreaded applications today and another 15 percent plan to in the next year.

The new Intel Core i7 processor for mobile computers has four cores and can run eight threads.

One key part of solving the PC’s multicore problems draws from the world of big iron, and Windows 7 can support much bigger iron–servers with as many as 256 processor cores compared with 64 for its predecessor. Now a few years into the multicore era, even today’s laptops are able to juggle as many tasks as reasonably powerful servers from just a few years ago. Intel’s new Core i7 “Clarksfield” processor for mobile computers has four cores that manage a total of eight separate “threads” of work.

“Microsoft has done surprisingly little until recently to help developers write parallel applications, except for their alliance with Intel to promote Parallel Studio,” an Intel collection of programming tools for parallel programming, Garvin said. “However, in the last year they’ve made some announcements and promises for Visual Studio 2010 about enhanced tools for parallel programming. It’s likely that the success of Parallel Studio has impressed upon them the importance of providing Windows developers with the tools they need to remain competitive going into the future when manycore will be the standard.”

• The Parallel Pattern Library is designed to make parallel programming easier for those using the C++ language.

“Parallel programming is complex, difficult and labor-intensive, for even the most skilled developers, which has led developers to avoid writing parallel programs, leaving many CPU cycles unused,” according to Steve Teixeira, Microsoft’s principal product unit manager of parallel computing. The company’s attempt to improve the situation comes not just in Visual Studio 2010 but also in another future product, version 4 of the company’s .Net Development Framework.

Microsoft knows none of this is truly easy, though. DeVaan wonders about cases when existing software is being parallelized–is each step in a parallel for loop really independent of the others? He sees “a lot of hand-waving” around the computing industry that glosses over the true difficulties.

Parallel programming tools
Among those features:

“People have been working on this for a long time. So far there haven’t been any magic bullets,” Devaan said. “The commercial reality is creating a lot more urgency now, so I think we’ll see a lot more approaches taken.”

(Credit:
Intel)

It’s a question we all face: with chips getting more processing cores instead of more gigahertz, is your next computer going to actually run your software faster?

Microsoft is one of the companies that feels the pressure to most acutely when it comes to putting those cores to work. Though it doesn’t pretend to have the problem licked, Microsoft does believe
Windows 7 provides a better foundation for using multicore systems than earlier versions of the operating system.

Unlocking multicore power is a point of competition, too: Apple’s newest version of
Mac OS X, Snow Leopard, adds a facility called Grand Central Dispatch to centralize management of all the various threads of programs as they run on a system.

Intel and Advanced Micro Devices bear responsibility, too, since they embraced multicore designs once heat problems put an end to the clock-frequency race, but Microsoft has much more clout in developer relations.

Windows 7 is due to ship October 22.

Multicore designs can help easily when people are running many separate programs or when running programs that are “embarrassingly parallel”–in other words, when a task has many naturally independent subtasks, such as rendering each of a video’s many frames. But many programs won’t easily make the jump to a parallel design when they’re set up as a single sequence of steps today.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

“An operating system is never going to be able to take an application that isn’t already parallel and make it so. Developers still need to multi-thread their apps,” said Evans Data analyst Janel Garvin.

“One dimension is support for a much larger number of processors and getting good linear scaling on that change from 64 to 256 processors,” said Jon DeVaan, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Windows Core Operating System Division. “There’s all kinds of depth in that change.”

It’s crucial that Microsoft help solve multicore issues. The company is responsible not just for the most widely used personal-computer operating system but also for the programming tools many use to create the software that runs on it. That’s why another broad attempt to ease multicore pains takes place within Visual Studio 2010, the upcoming version of Microsoft’s programming tools.