presidentialmatch.com

What’ll be really interesting is to see the further implications of Web-based login standards like Facebook Connect as they’re synced up to more desktop applications. Not that you’d really want to share all your Microsoft Word edits in your news feed or anything.

Basically, this means that if you’re a Mac user running the latest edition of its iLife package, which started shipping earlier this week, you can hook up your Facebook account for easy uploading right from iPhoto. If you use the iWeb site creation tool, you can set it up to post a message to your Facebook profile (and your friends’ news feeds) if you make some kind of edit. That’s pretty similar to what a number of Web-based blogging services have already set up using Facebook’s platform.

Now, this is kind of neat: Facebook Connect, the sprawling social network’s universal-login project, has started to come to desktop software. Namely, it’s been hooked up to the Apple photo-management software iPhoto, per a post on the company developer blog.

“We are excited that sharing your photos with the people you care about has become even easier with iLife ‘09, Apple’s new suite of applications that includes iPhoto ‘09,” the post by Facebook platform manager Dave Morin said. “Users of iPhoto ‘09 can easily share and tag photos from iPhoto directly to Facebook. With help from Facebook Connect, photo tags from iPhoto ‘09 can be added to Facebook and generate Facebook notifications. Additionally,
Mac users can update Facebook News Feed and alert friends anytime they update their websites using Apple’s iWeb ‘09 application.”

I haven’t actually checked it out yet, so I can’t provide a thumbs up or down, but the concept itself is pretty cool. Facebook rolled out its Facebook Connect product, which lets third-party sites (and now desktop apps, apparently) use Facebook usernames and passwords for user accounts, over the second half of last year. The reception, so far, has been generally positive.

Using CTRL+Tab to jump between open tabs now has graphic overlay, much like the
Windows Vista ALT+Tab program switcher. The Geode geolocator plug-in has been rolled into FF3.1. The Geode drop-down worked for me, but it wasn’t always able to find my location.

I found that several of my plug-ins were not compatible with the new tab switcher, so I just disabled all of them. Using a plug-in to force forward-compatibility in other plug-ins can lead to instability and crashes, arguably even more so because this is a beta. However, if you’re interested in getting the fastest version of Firefox that we’ve seen to date, Firefox 3.1 beta 1 is going to deliver the goods.

Mozilla fans can now play with the anticipated speedier JavaScript engine in the first beta for
Firefox 3.1, as well as explore improvements to the Smart Location Bar and a slick interface for hotkey tab switching. Now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users, the new JavaScript engine, called TraceMonkey, is not turned on by default.

To activate it, type “about:config” into the Smart Bar, then type “javascript.options.jit.content” into the filter. Double-click on the preference listed to change the boolean setting from “false” to “true.” Close the window and you should notice an immediate improvement to the JavaScript rendering speed.

The latest Firefox beta introduces a visual tab switcher and rolls in the Geode geolocator plug-in.

Two much-anticipated features did not make it into this beta. Private Browsing, Mozilla’s answer to Google Chrome’s Incognito, and enhanced session management features were not available in this beta.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Don’t take my word for it, though. Using the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark test, Firefox 3.1 beta 1 completed the test in 2787.6 milliseconds–about twice as fast as the current stable release, Firefox 3.0.3, which clocked in at 5446.6 ms.

You can now restrict searches in the Awesome Smart Bar using special characters such as “+” and “#”. These and other aspects of the character restrictions are customizable through about:config.

You can read the full list of changes here.

The e-mail irked a single faculty member, Katherine Gross, who teaches plant biology. Gross complained to the university administrators, who summoned Spencer to a mandatory meeting and informed her that she would face disciplinary charges.

Gross, the biology professor who complained, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

If MSU does not back down, FIRE has the option to file a First Amendment lawsuit in federal court. Federal law allows private parties to recover attorneys’ fees in a successful free speech case against a government or public university.

And that’s what FIRE thinks has gone wrong with MSU’s disciplinary prosecution of Spencer.

FIRE’s letter to MSU on November 26 calls on President Simon to halt the “erroneous prosecution of Kara Spencer, who has been under investigation for more than two months for her clearly protected expression. If e-mailing faculty members about common concerns is outside the parameters of acceptable speech at MSU, surely no member of the MSU community can feel safe contacting another about any relevant matter of concern. Is this truly the lesson that MSU wishes to teach to students who will soon be entering into civil society at large?”

“To date I have not received any notification from the judicial board regarding the case,” Spencer said on Thursday. “The board may take up to seven days to render a ruling, so at this point I am just waiting for their notification.”

(Credit:
MSU.edu)

If MSU were a private school, such strict limits would be a matter of its contract with students and faculty: objectionable and inconsistent with academic freedom, perhaps, but not necessarily illegal. But because MSU is a public school, it is legally obligated to provide students with due process rights and it must protect their free speech rights.

A formal letter listing Gross as a “possible witness” to the offense said that the e-mail violated university policies saying that students can use the network only for “authorized purposes.”

Adam Kissel, director of FIRE’s individual rights defense program, believes this is the first time he’s heard of antispam rules being applied this broadly on campus. “The rule should be: if it’s not disruptive, then you can do it,” he said.

“The question is: does bulk unsolicited e-mail count as inherently disruptive to the campus?” he said. “I would say no, it doesn’t, especially when the message is something that’s directly relevant to everything on campus.”

Kara Spencer’s encounter with MSU’s disciplinary apparatus started in September, when the student government member began discussing the shortened fall 2009 schedule with a small group of faculty members and administrators. She followed up by contacting 391 faculty members by e-mail, saying that professors should be aware of the “burden for class schedules and syllabi” the change would involve.

(Credit:
MSU.edu)

Plant biology professor Katherine Gross, reportedly the lone faculty member irked by the e-mail message about 2009 schedules

“Students on campus have been supportive,” Spencer told CNET News. So has the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, a nonpartisan group in Philadelphia that urged MSU President Lou Anna Simon to halt the disciplinary process in advance of a hearing that was scheduled to take place on Tuesday.

MSU’s bulk e-mail rules say that e-mailing more than a “small set of recipients”–with the maximum number set at 30 people–is verboten. In a statement on Friday, MSU said: “It is clear that this policy is content neutral and is a set of procedural requirements that apply to all bulk use of the e-mail system, as opposed to a policy that makes distinctions based on the content of particular e-mails. It is our belief that such a policy does not impose unlawful restrictions on free speech.” MSU declined to comment on specifics, citing privacy laws.

MSU President Lou Anna Simon, who rebuffed a request from a civil liberties group to throw out the case against the student leader.

Most schools encourage students to become active in campus politics. Not Michigan State University, which has filed disciplinary charges against a student leader who sent e-mail criticizing an abbreviated fall semester.

It didn’t work: The president rebuffed FIRE and the hearing took place as scheduled. A decision is expected soon.

Linux, in other words, still has a long way to go to reach full adoption and, importantly, the vendors that sell it have even further to go to effectively monetize its popularity.

commentary

Regardless, these are good problems to have in a recessed economy. I wouldn’t want to be selling proprietary, expensive Unix right now. Microsoft Windows offers a compelling value proposition in a fiscally prudent environment, but for those chief information officers interested in performance, Linux is going to win more competitive bids against Windows than it loses.

Despite its impressive rise, however, Linux still has a long, long way to go. While results of an IDC survey published this week found that 55 percent of the 300 IT executives surveyed already had Linux systems in use, a full 97 percent were running Windows.

Novell, which commissioned the IDC survey, stands to benefit, as do Red Hat and Canonical (Ubuntu). Indeed, unless the vendors royally screw up, each should benefit handsomely, as the planned adoption of Linux is significant, as IDC found:

Linux long ago became the “furniture” of open source: essential infrastructure to most of the Fortune 500 and somewhat mundane in its predictable, ever-increasing adoption.

While much of this Linux adoption will come at the expense of incumbent Unix vendors, I would suspect that an increasing percentage will cut into Windows, particularly in the server market but also for specialized desktop applications, like in the retail sector (63 percent of respondents in retail are looking to accelerate their Linux adoption).

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

For Red Hat, CentOS is likely its biggest competitor. For Novell, after Red Hat, I would imagine that Ubuntu is its biggest hurdle to monetizing Linux adoption. And for Canonical/Ubuntu? It is its own biggest enemy, when it comes to turning downloads into dollars, because it does such an effective job of encouraging downloads.

Regardless of the market, however, Linux stands to gain. But for Novell, Red Hat, and Canonical, I would argue that their biggest competitor, at least in the short term, isn’t Microsoft or any of the Unix vendors. No, their biggest competitor is unpaid Linux adoption.

Surprisingly, nearly 50 percent expect to accelerate adoption of Linux on the desktop, especially for basic office functions, technical workstation users, and higher education/K-12. Along with ZDNet’s Dana Blankenhorn, this is one that I’ll believe when i see it;
Nearly 50 percent stated that virtualization is accelerating their adoption of Linux. Eighty-eight percent of recipients plan to evaluate, deploy, or increase their use of virtualization software within Linux operating systems over the next 12 to 24 months.

IDC: Linux adoption in a global recession

More than 72 percent of those surveyed are either actively evaluating or have already decided to increase their adoption of Linux on the server in 2009, with more than 68 percent making the same claim for the desktop;
More than 40 percent of respondents say they plan to deploy additional workloads on Linux over the next 12 to 24 months, and 49 percent indicated that Linux will be their primary server platform within five years;
Perhaps because of the desire to go “all Linux,” only 22 percent of those surveyed identify “Interoperability” as a top-three consideration when choosing a server operating system. This could also help explain why Novell’s partnership with Microsoft may be stalling, as ChannelWeb recently wrote.

Interoperability is important, but it pales in importance when compared to performance and cost for most CIOs. When asked which factors would accelerate new deployments of Linux, only 24 percent cited greater interoperability with Windows;

Laws and policies governing the use of electronic health information vary widely by state, and even within states different agencies interpret the jumble of rules on the books differently, said experts from the Health Information Security and Privacy Collaboration, a multistate collaboration established by RTI International.

“While we appreciate that different states have different rules, we’re trying to find a way to streamline the process so patient treatment is not affected by delays in sharing information,” he said.

Before that can even happen, however, the states will have to work on merely documenting their current laws and policies that pertain to the privacy of health information.

“A whole industry could be created just to provide forms” for the process, he said. “This is insane.”

Creating such a network, however, is a dizzying prospect bogged down by conflicting state laws regarding privacy and patient consent, policymakers acknowledged Tuesday at a conference of the National Governors’ Association’s State Alliance for e-Health.

Mitchin said that digitizing health information creates more potential uses for the information and therefore more potential privacy hazards.

WASHINGTON–With the incentives provided in the recently signed stimulus package for the adoption of health information technology, lawmakers across the country are expecting to be able to improve their states’ health care by collaborating on a nationwide network of health data.

Governors Jim Douglas of Vermont and Phil Bredesen of Tennessee, at a conference in Washington, considered the challenge of creating a nationwide policy for sharing health IT information.

(Credit:
Stephanie Condon/ CNET Networks)

To overcome the privacy and consent challenges that exist, Mitchin told policymakers on Tuesday that the states should develop either an interstate compact or language for a uniform law states could adopt to share electronic health information, rather than wait for federal statutes.

Lawmakers and health care representatives also asked the HISPC to clarify why privacy issues were such a critical part of maintaining electronic health records.

“The laws can be scattered across state codes, and simply finding them can be a long process,” said Kelly Coyle, co-chair of another HISPC group.

“It seems to me there is a big concern about the digitization of data as separate, but if we have the right security measures, that data is no different from the data physically sitting in my office,” said Herb Conway, a physician who sits on the New Jersey state legislature. “Are we going to be designing laws that interfere with our ability to have interoperability?”

“The data today in electronic form is being used in ways it’s not being used in the manual process,” he said. “Do you, as a consumer, understand that data’s being sold for secondary uses? I’m not sure patients understand.”

“There must be another recommendation we can make other than to document chaos,” said Reed Tuckson, executive vice president and chief of medical affairs for UnitedHealth Group.

The HISPC is recommending that states clarify their positions on the terms for disclosing personal health information without patient consent, as well as what the terms should be for receiving patient consent. That information, the HISPC said, should be categorized based on the degree to which states require patient consent.

“At our very first meeting, we started talking about HIE (health information exchange), and we spent two and a half hours trying to decide if HIE is a noun or a verb,” said Bill Mitchin, co-chair of the HISPC interstate and intrastate consent policies collaborative. “The answer is both.”

If states are to have a chance at an interstate compact for sharing health information, they will have to agree to let the compact trump some other state laws, Mitchin said. For instance, he said, states must acknowledge their constitutions have a limited basis of purpose on the issue of health IT, even if certain provisions might appear to be applicable to the subject.

“If we could document our differences at different agency levels, that would provide us the foundation from which we could develop some consistent principles for moving forward,” Mitchin said.

State lawmakers and health care representatives at Tuesday’s conference balked at the HISPC’s seemingly slow-moving suggestions.

Indeed, members of the HISPC said, even their organization has had trouble interpreting the basic elements of the laws.

Presumably, that will include advice on how to make a buck with the daily drumbeat of financial news seemingly going from bad to worse.

But here’s to optimism: In its online promotional flyer for the SaaS Summit 2009, the organizers say the conference will focus “on the opportunities emerging from the depths of the current economic downturn for SaaS, Web, and cloud computing companies.”

So much for finding safe refuge from the storm. Even a conference targeted at the quasi-esoteric world of software as a service is finding it tough to fill up the seats these days.

A spokesman for the conference was not immediately available for comment.

In a note, conference sponsor OpSource said it had reduced the cost because it “believes so strongly in the value and industry energy that will be created by bringing together the SaaS, Web, and cloud communities at SaaS Summit 2009 that we are offering our own On-Demand Stimulus Package.”

Hardly a shocker, given the current economic climate. In fact, the granddaddy of them all, the Demo conference, also is feeling the pinch.

The SaaS Summit 2009 conference, slated to get underway next week in San Francisco, has chopped the price of its “full conference pass” to $495 from $1,195.

After relegating it to the hinterlands of its
Mac lineup for years, Apple might be finally ready to put the Mac Mini to sleep.

It would, however, eliminate the cheapest Mac from Apple’s arsenal, raising the starting price of (officially, at least) entering the Mac OS X universe to $999. Analysts have been a little worried that the Mac is expensive in the midst of this year’s economic turmoil, but consumers don’t seem to have noticed, given Apple’s market share gains of late.

Apple may have finally decided to kill the Mac Mini, according to a report.

The Mac Mini was an experiment in affordability and minimalism on Apple’s part back in 2005. The small desktop was initially a hit with critics and consumers, but as the world’s PC preferences tilted strongly in favor of notebooks over the last several years, Apple spent more time updating and promoting the MacBook and iMac all-in-one desktops than the cute little cube. And the Apple TV has fulfilled the desire of some for a small media server that fits snugly in an entertainment center, even though as designed it doesn’t have nearly the flexibility offered by a real computer like the Mac Mini.

(Credit:
CNET)

Rumors of the Mac Mini’s demise have circulated for at least a year. The Mini could desperately use a hardware boost, but Apple may have concluded that it’s simply not worth the effort at this point. The company has made it very clear that it considers mobile computing the future of its business, and the Mac Mini simply doesn’t work in that context.

That’s what Gizmodo thinks, having talked to two European retailers who say they can no longer order the $599 box from Apple. It’s possible Apple could be getting ready to simply update the internal hardware in the Mac Mini, which has languished for quite a while with outdated chips, but Gizmodo reports that the retailers have been told that this is the end of the line.