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Jeremy Dunham, Zipper Interactive’s new Senior Community Manager, introduced himself to the PlayStation Blog US community, and brought with him news…

The California State University, Fresno American Humanics (AH) Program was awarded a $25,000 grant that will be used to give its students hands-on experience in the Community Benefit Organization (CBO) sector…The project’s funding comes from a three-year grant from California Campus Compact, a national coalition of more than 1000 college and university presidents…

 The first batch of DLCs are head to Borderlands this month. “The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned” has just been dated for a November 24th release.The p…

Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of virtual currencies. They certainly have their place, but usually they’re just an obstacle between you and the object you want. Why do I have to buy points if points are just your version of dollars? There are exceptions: here in Seattle there are a couple alternate currencies being traded for goods and services which work on a different level from dollars — and GamersGate, the direct-download games site, appears to have something of a good deal in their blue coins.

Unlike in Mario 64 and other games, you can’t get an extra life by collecting 10 blue coins. That would be impossible. No, these are used for buying games, just like regular money, but it appears that you can earn them just by participating in the site. Writing reviews for games, answering questions in the “Game Tutor” program, and doing other stuff nets you a load of coins. They’re not worth a lot individually, but once you buy or review a few games (may I recommend X-COM?) and lurk on the forums for a bit, you should have enough to make a bargain purchase or two.

If you keep an eye on the offers page, you can also find games that give you lots of bonus coins, too — so if it’s between buying it there or on Steam or whatever, you might as well get the extra buck or two off.

Anyway, if you’re going to lurk on a gaming community, you might as well get paid for it, right? I couldn’t find a complete guide to how to get coins so I’ve put what they sent me here:

And no, I’m not on the payroll there! Just seems like a good deal.

A bunch of folks sent in stories about the decision by smaller, indie PC game developer RedLynx to put its own “pirated” game on BitTorrent the same day as it released the game. The one difference is that it removed one feature (a leaderboard, which the company describes as “the soul” of the game) from the “pirated” version, hoping that those who got the game that way would eventually agree to upgrade to the full version later. The company’s CEO explained:

“Piracy is here, so how can we take advantage of that? What we did actually, on day one, we put that game immediately on all the torrent networks ourselves…”

I’m of mixed opinions when it comes to disabling features in “free” versions, but it appears to be working for RedLynx. It’s certainly better than freaking out and complaining about “piracy.”

Of course, not everyone agrees that putting any content up was a good idea. Over at Escapist Magazine, they drag this guy over the coals for even admitting that piracy exists:

In my mind, posting even a gimped version of your game to pirate sites is counterproductive to attempting to earn money developing said games. Doing so implies that piracy is tolerable, which it isn’t. Plus, any traffic which the game may or may not generate to such torrent sites may facilitate users downloading other pirate games which legitimate companies did not leak.

Even if RedLynx made the unscrupulous decision to post their game to a torrent sites, why in the name of Jehovah would the CEO tell anyone about it? I see no advantage for that information to be made public and, conversely, there is a huge possibility for an industry-wide backlash.

This makes no sense at all to me. The CEO is correct. Piracy exists. Piracy of this game is going to happen either way. Figuring out ways to take advantage of it as a promotional tool is the smartest thing you could do. It’s not implying that piracy is “tolerable,” it’s saying that piracy is here, it’s not going away, and there are ways to take advantage of it. In many ways it’s the reverse of saying it’s “tolerable.” It’s saying that there are benefits to using it to your advantage. Apparently, the folks at Escapist think the proper business strategy is to put your head in the sand. Can’t see how that helps at all. As for questioning why he would tell people about it — again, that’s not so complex. By telling people about it, he again is getting a lot more attention for his game and doing so in a way that shows he respects users, rather than thinks that they’re all criminals. He trusts that some of those who play the pirated version will decide to upgrade to the full version. And why should he care if others in the industry don’t like it? His job, as CEO, is to get more people to pay for his game. If he’s found that this method works, what’s the problem?

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This is an interesting little futurist tease of a movie by MAYA that’s “a fast paced preview of a larger effort — I’m guessing where they fill in the gap at the end. The idea is that computing right now is at one of those thresholds where we can’t quite grasp the idea of the “next generation.”

Just as computing in the 60s and 70s was about mass calculation and interpretation of external data and experts foresaw little of what we have now, the future of computing involves such a low level of fundamental integration and a high number of nodes that it’s practically impossible for us to see how it will work. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, though.

[via LikeCool]

Tim Lee points us to an excellent discussion at The Abstract Factory blog for why software patents harm innovation (though, I’d argue that the reasoning set forth applies beyond just software patents). The writer, Cog, initially discusses the sort of story that’s all too common these days, about some friends of his who build a cool online service, with plenty of important details in the execution and the implementation that make it better and significantly more useful than whatever else is out there… only to find themselves sued by a patent holder, whose own technology includes none of the wonderfulness that makes Cog’s friends’ product so powerful. From there, he goes on:

One thing that I find extremely frustrating about many legal scholars and economists’ approach to patents it that they make two false assumptions. The first assumption is that transaction costs are acceptable, or can be made so with some modest reforms. The second assumption is that patent litigation is reasonably “precise”; i.e., if you don’t infringe on something then you’ll be able to build useful technology and bring it to market relatively unhindered. As my friend’s story shows, both of these assumptions are laughably false. I mean, just black-is-white, up-is-down, slavery-is-freedom, we-have-always-been-at-war-with-Eastasia false.

The end result is that our patent system encourages “land grab” behavior which could practically serve as the dictionary definition of rent-seeking. The closest analogy is a conquistador planting a flag on a random outcropping of rock at the tip of some peninsula, and then saying “I claim all this land for Spain”, and then the entire Western hemisphere allegedly becomes the property of the Spanish crown. This is a theory of property that’s light-years away from any Lockean notion of mixing your labor with the land or any Smithian notion of promoting economic efficiency. And yet it’s the state of the law for software patents. Your business plan can literally be to build a half-assed implementation of some straightforward idea (or, in the case of Intellectual Ventures, don’t build it at all), file a patent, and subsequently sue the pants off anybody who comes anywhere near the turf you’ve claimed. And if they do come near your turf, regardless of how much of their own sweat and blood they put into their independent invention, the legal system’s going go off under them like a land mine.

It is hard to think of a more effective mechanism for discouraging innovation in software. I mean, I suppose you could plant a plastic explosive rigged to a random number generator under the seats of every software developer, and that would be slightly worse.

The only thing I’d quibble with is the claim that this is the typical economists’ approach to patents. Plenty of very smart economists (including some Nobel Prize winners) agree that the patent system makes no sense. But, other than that, this is quite an accurate description of the problem and the underlying fallacies from those who think the system works. Cog also points out (as we have in the past) that it’s ridiculous to claim that the patent system serves a separate purpose in “disclosing” inventions such that everyone can learn from them:

At any software company with competent legal counsel, developers are instructed in the strongest possible terms never, ever to look at a patent, because the tiniest amount of documented influence could be used as ammunition in a lawsuit. The only time a sane software developer reads a patent is when your company’s lawyers specifically ask you to help them prove you’re not infringing on one. If you ever get wind that there’s a patent even vaguely related to your work, you stick your fingers in your ears and run in the other direction. In short, software patents facilitate “conversation” about as well as poison gas bombs do.

What he’s talking about is the fact that if you’re found to have willfully infringed on a patent, the damages suddenly get tripled. And, showing that you looked at the patent in question is often how patent holders will claim willful infringement. The system is designed such that whatever benefits there may be from “disclosure” have been completely wiped out due to willful infringement damages.

Oh yeah. As for Cog’s friends? They’re basically screwed:

Now, my friend and his partner have consulted multiple IP lawyers and they’ve said, “Yep, the law is probably on your side.” They have also said, “You’re still screwed.” The trial would take forever, the legal fees would be ruinous, and in the meantime nobody will invest in a company which has a litigation cloud hanging over it.

So, none of us ever get to see or use the software that they created. That’s the opposite of what the patent system is supposed to do.

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By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

The biggest change to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 was supposed to have been the introduction of something called Unified Communications — the introduction of a singular console for the handling of all forms of digital communication, wrapping voice mail, instant messaging, and e-mail into a single delivery system. History may yet vindicate UC as the product’s singular achievement.

But in the near term, administrators credit Exchange more for what it gives them than the world at large. In that light, the inclusion of PowerShell as not only the underlying language of the system but as its engine as well, changed everything for the admin. It may very well be why the product has surged to a two-thirds market share, by some estimates, over once formidable competition such as Lotus Notes.

So learning a lesson from history, the message from Microsoft with regard to Exchange Server 2010, which went on sale this morning, is about new levels of control. The idea that e-mail, or any kind of communication, once sent unto the vast Internet is out of the sender’s hands — like a paper sailboat launched from a river pier — is what the Exchange team has been working to combat. During a beta program which Microsoft says involved dozens of universities, signing up some ten million participants worldwide, the company has completed development of a browser-based endpoint for ES 2010-delivered e-mail that is not only more manageable than Outlook 2007, but that has beaten Outlook 2010 — the product it’s supposed to be derived from — to market by perhaps eight months.

What that means is, hopefully for a short time only, there will be a functionality gap between what the new Outlook Web App — hosted by ES 2010 — can deliver compared to what Outlook 2007 provides. If Julia White, Microsoft’s marketing director for Exchange, has anything to say about it, that gap will be shorter rather than longer, but it’s not unnoticed.

Microsoft Outlook Web App previews the textual contents of a voice mail. [Courtesy Microsoft Corp.]

White spoke with Betanews this afternoon from Berlin, where she had just completed a TechEd Europe demonstration along with Corporate Vice President Stephen Elop. “Obviously Outlook Web Apps comes with Exchange, so they can use that today; when Outlook 2010 comes out, they can use that,” said White, “and we are absolutely planning support for Outlook 2007 in the roadmap here. So it’s on the agenda, and we will actually be getting to it.”

Much of what Exchange 2010 will deliver absolutely depends on this upgrade to Outlook 2007, as you’ll see. We asked White for her take on what she would consider the top three enhancements to administrator functionality in ES 2010.

#3: Transport Protection Rules

Number three on this list is the Transport Protection Rules system, which we described earlier today. It enables the administrator to designate the extent to which the recipient of a message can utilize its contents, based upon rules that enable Exchange to analyze the content itself. “In the demo this morning, I set a Transport Protection Rule based on a keyword. But actually another aspect of that is, those rules can be set based on the sender, the recipient, or even contents of an attachment,” White told Betanews.

“Any of those things can be triggered; and having the ability to centrally decide what gets encrypted and what doesn’t, is a really powerful tool. With end users, it’s hard for them to keep up with corporate policy, pay attention to it, or know about it. So oftentimes it’s unintended, versus intended, when information isn’t protected. Having that essentially managed brings peace of mind, for the users as well as the IT pros.”

The ability to analyze an attachment takes place on a granular level, White told us. If a PowerPoint presentation, for example, were to contain the words “Microsoft Confidential,” that fact alone would trigger a rule that automatically encrypts the message outgoing, and that restricts the recipient from being able to pass it on.

#2: Role-Based Access Control

One of the least loved features of Exchange, or anything Microsoft has ever done, disappears in ES 2010: The Access Control List is a Registry-based system for designating which identified and authenticated user had permissions to control specific objects. It has often been a ridiculous concept that starts one off with the assumption that everyone has rights to everything, and that ACLs provide the exceptions.

Exchange Server 2010 replaces this entirely with a concept that is much more rooted in Active Directory. Now, the administrator starts off in a universe where nothing is allowed until groups of users are added into the pool of permissions. Those groups that are added in are called management role groups, with the concept being that a predefined set of roles exist (a concept made popular by Windows Server 2008), and that groups of users or individual users are delegated those roles.

This morning, Julia White demonstrated how Role-Based Access Control enabled an otherwise unprivileged user to search for e-mails through multiple mailboxes on the company’s behalf (in this case, Microsoft’s usual fictitious firm, Contoso). Her system was delegated a role that let her perform the search, without having to delegate other responsibilities and privileges of a much higher administrative order. “A compliance officer might get that level of capability,” White explained to us, “but a help desk might have the rights to increase mail box quota size. Maybe HR would be given the ability to update contact information on behalf of employees. Extending all the way down to end users, even that same roles-based administration capability — end users can now create and manage their own distribution groups within Exchange. That no longer requires a call to the IT pro…usually that’s a lot of overhead.”

Next: The best thing ever to happen to old e-mail…

#1: Integrated archiving

During the late 1980s and into the ’90s, Microsoft liked to centralize things, thinking that if everything were in one big pile — as Arlo Guthrie put it — that would beat two or more little ones. The System Registry is, and remains, one big pile. Another — which can stink just as bad — is the .PST file, the single personal folder file that is created on the client side by Outlook.

It is every Outlook user’s nightmare, especially since Office buries this file typically in a black hole within a hidden directory inside each user’s Documents folder. For individuals who receive hundreds of thousands of e-mails per year (I’m on that list, believe me), the archiving process has cost users many a weekend.

With Exchange Server 2010, Microsoft marketing director Julia White told Betanews today, is the ability to perform this process completely in the background. But in addition, the archived items remain indexed and available, still listed as part of “Personal Folder” but stored separately.

“Today, the vast majority of e-mail actually sits on the local hard drive on those .PST files,” White remarked.. The end users love it because they can file as much as they want in there, and they have access to it when they’re on their PC. But from an administrator’s perspective, they don’t like them because they’re very expensive to discover, they get lost, they get corrupted, it’s a liability and a lot of overhead for the IT organization.

“So with integrated archiving…it doesn’t have any change to the end user experience,” she continued. “That Personal Folder appears, but the archive shows up and it looks just the same, it’s another folder in your file directory, it looks like a secondary Inbox…The benefit is, it’s all sitting on Exchange, so it’s not going to get corrupted or lost. It’s very easy to discover — that time comes down dramatically. And as a user, you get access to it through Outlook Web App, [as opposed to] on the local hard drive.”

Here, White took the bold step of proclaiming OWA as superior to Outlook, in that users still get full access to their mail (albeit with transport restrictions), but without having to keep those multi-gigabyte .PST files locally:

“What got us into this in the beginning was when we talked to our Exchange customers as we were planning [ES] 2010, and we found out that 20% of Exchange mailboxes have an archive on them today, but over 60% said it was important to them. It’s scary, because there’s not a mailbox out there that shouldn’t be archived for one reason or another. What we heard from them was, 1) the cost and overhead of maintaining and managing another system — new tools to learn — was too expensive; and 2) the end-user experience. Oftentimes you have an archive today, you have to go to a different UI to retrieve the mail, or the performance is really poor on the archived mail. Because what they do is called ‘stubbing,’ which means they literally just leave a little bit of the e-mail in the Inbox, and the rest of it sits out on a third-party system. So the performance has to go bounce between multiple systems, so it’s very slow.

“If end users don’t adopt it, it doesn’t work,” White remarked. “So this clears the hurdle of both the end user experience as the IT pro cost and management perspective.”

That 70% cost savings claim

During this morning’s presentation at TechEd in Berlin, Microsoft CVP Stephen Elop made the staggering claim that within a group of 100 companies testing Exchange Server 2010 over the last year, some were able to cut their administrative costs over earlier versions of Exchange by as much as 70%.
As is Betanews’ custom (and as is the custom of Betanews readers who see anything in double-digits beside a percentile mark), we asked how that figure was obtained. For instance, we’ve seen companies in the past that said the expenditure to do something this year was X% lower than the expense to do something in the past, and that typically refers to the fact that memory or storage or processor power is just that much cheaper. That’s not really savings; that’s a factor of the economy.

So what is this 70% savings a factor of? “A big cost driver is storage,” responded White. “We know the storage aspect of e-mail, it’s a lot of information and it can get expensive. Traditionally, Exchange was deployed always on a storage-area network, which was fine back in the day when you had a 200 MB mailbox. Obviously, that’s not sufficing anymore, and 10 GB is becoming more of a standard. Supporting that kind of mailbox storage size on a SAN becomes cost-prohibitive.

“So what we’ve done in Exchange 2010 is two things: First, we dramatically improved performance, tenfold over Exchange 2003. When I say that, I mean the time it takes to read and write information to the disk. What that enables is world-class support of low-cost storage options — direct-attached storage, SATA, even in a JBoss configuration. So big, slow disks, you can run Exchange without any performance or reliability impact.” NEC Philips, for example, was able to increase its storage capacity by a factor of eight, while simultaneously reducing costs by a factor of four, White said; and Germany-based hosted service provider Elabs was able to reduce its storage costs by 70%.

Isn’t that saying that the expenditure this year is 70% or so less than the expenditure for a similar service in 2003? Yes, according to White, but that’s in terms of operating cost run-rate, which is figured according to time and not total investment, especially since companies don’t always purchase storage capacity all up-front.

Betanews also learned today that Microsoft’s SMB Windows Server bundles, Small Business Server 2008 and Essential Business Server 2008, will not be updated immediately with Exchange Server 2010. Those bundles may continue to be sold with Exchange Server 2007 for at least several more months down the road.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009

Friends,

It’s my pleasure to welcome you to the Partnerships blog, the blog of the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships!

President Obama established the Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships to connect the Federal government to local nonprofit organizations and community leaders – both faith-based and secular – that are serving individuals, families and communities in need.  We form partnerships between government and nonprofits on a range of issues, from public health to disaster response and everything in between, in order to better serve all Americans.

This blog will highlight the work of the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, along with the activity at Centers for Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships that we coordinate at several Federal agencies. 

But we don’t just want to focus on what government is doing.  We also want to highlight the efforts of local nonprofits in communities across the country.  So we’ll be spotlighting local organizations and leaders that are meeting community needs, in order to learn from their great work.

In the coming days, you can expect this blog to:

Provide more information about the day-to-day work of the White House Office and Centers at Federal agencies;
Highlight the latest work of the President’s Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships;
Point nonprofits to federal resources that can help them implement effective programs; and
Spotlight innovative local organizations that are strengthening our communities

I’m looking forward to using this blog to communicate important information to local organizations and community leaders.

And I’m even more excited about working with you to make an impact on our communities together, as the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships implements this important element of President Obama’s vision for our country.

Warmly,
Joshua DuBois

Joshua DuBois is the Director of the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships

Last Wednesday, the White House welcomed 120 middle and high school music students from all over the country to participate in four different engaging workshops.  From the Blue Room to the Map Room and the East Room to the Diplomatic Reception Room, beautiful music and instructors’ guiding voices echoed through the halls of this historic home.  Aspiring students plucked their bows and strummed the strings of their guitars, while picking up tips and queues from their instructors, renowned classical musicians Awadagin Pratt on the piano, Joshua Bell on violin, Sharon Isbin with classical guitar, and Alisa Weilerstein on cello.

Click here to see the photo gallery.

In her session, Ms. Weilerstein posed a question to her students. "How do we get someone excited about classical music?" she asked.  Bright young minds quickly offered up a number of ideas. "Use classical instruments to play modern pieces," said one young lady. "Play Classical music for people who’ve never heard it," said another. As the students listened to each other’s ideas, they also talked about the opportunities they had to discover magic through music; they discussed the importance of keeping music education in schools and communities, where all children would have an opportunity to discover these great art forms just like they did.

As the workshops concluded, everyone gathered in the historic East Room for a concert put on by their four instructors.  First Lady Michelle Obama made a special visit, and told the students that through music, "You’ll learn that if you believe in yourself and put in your best effort, that there’s nothing you can’t achieve; and those aren’t just lessons about music, these are really lessons about life."

It was a privilege to welcome so many young musicians living such talented and full lives on a beautiful fall day at the people’s house.  The White House is honored to share these experiences with all students. Check out all the video:

Classical guitarist Sharon Isbin performs Isaac Albeniz’s Asturias and Agustin Barrios Mangoré’s Waltz Op. 8, No. 4:

Click here to see the video.

Concert pianist Awadagin Pratt performs J.S. Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 582:

Click here to see the video.

Cellist Alisa Weilerstein performs Zoltán Kodály’s Sonata for Solo Cello, Op. 8 and III. Allegro molto vivace:

Click here to see the video.

Cellists Alisa Weilerstein and 8 year-old Sujari Britt perform Luigi Boccherini’s Sonata for Two Cellos in C Major, 1st movement: Allegro moderato:

Click here to see the video.

Cellist Alisa Weilerstein and 16 year-old percussionist Jason Yoder perform Camille Saint Saëns’ The Swan:

Click here to see the video.

Joshua Bell and Awadagin Pratt perform Maurice Ravel’s Tzigane:

Click here to see the video.

Joshua Bell and Sharon Isbin perform Niccolò Paganini’s Cantabile:

Click here to see the video.

Joshua Bell, Awadagin Pratt, and Alisa Weilerstein Perform Felix Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor, Op. 49 and the finale, Allegro assai appassionato:

Click here to see the video.

Kalpen Modi and James Schuelke are with the Office of Public Engagement