Acknowledging the relationship between Microsoft and the open source community has been contentious, a Microsoft official Thursday nonetheless emphasized the company's embrace of the open source paradigm, even if it was not necessarily for altruistic purposes.

The presentation by Microsoft's Stuart McKee, who holds the title of national technology officer for the United States, continued a pattern in recent years that has seen Microsoft publicly embracing the open source movement and even funding it.

"[Microsoft feels] strongly that Microsoft's success has been based on the fact that we can run a lot of diverse technologies on the Microsoft platform including open source," McKee said. Microsoft has had a "contentious" relationship with open source proponents but "things are really changing," he said.

McKee, who focuses on governmental customers for Microsoft, offered his perspectives in a keynote speech at the OSBC (Open Source Business Conference) in San Francisco.

Microsoft contributes to open source efforts, including sponsoring Linux, he said. Microsoft has contributed 20,000 lines of device driver code to the Linux kernel so Linux can run on Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization technology, noted Robert Duffner, Microsoft director of open source strategy, who also was present at OSBC.

"To be quite honest, it's not that we're altruistic, necessarily. Our key desire is to satisfy customers. We build software for a living -- that's what we do," McKee said. "And we understand profoundly that a diverse ecosystem is absolutely critical to satisfying the needs of customers and increasingly, that ecosystem does include open source."

Among other examples of Microsoft's embrace of open source cited by McKee included the Microsoft.web site for the Microsoft Web platform, which features 23 open source applications out of a total of 25 applications. Also, Apache software, the MySQL database, and PHP all run on Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud platform, McKee said.

Microsoft in recent years has been endorsing open source via efforts such as sponsoring the Apache Foundation. The Microsoft-backed CodePlex Foundation, meanwhile, was set up last year as an effort to enable collaboration between open source communities and software companies.

Prior to McKee's appearance, David Recordon, head of open source initiatives at Facebook, stressed the emphasis on open source software on the site.

"We rely on the Varnish project. Varnish is an incredible open source cache," Recordon said. Billions of requests are served through Varnish everyday around the world on Facebook, he said.

To boost PHP performance on the site, Facebook developed an open source technology, HipHop for PHP, which transforms PHP code into highly optimized C++, said Recordon.

Facebook also uses the open source Memcached distributed memory object caching system and the MySQL database, Recordon said. Memcached, he said, "is sort of like that magic pixie dust" for scalability.

"We really use MySQL as our data store," offering data integrity, decent backup tools and reliability, Recordon said.

Open Source software is free. It is free of cost to use, share or modify. It also guarantees essential freedoms for the people using it.

This software is widely used within the IT industry by professionals. It is the software behind most of what powers the Internet itself and runs for instance on around 80% of the worlds website servers. All of the major IT companies have become involved in this type of software in the past few years.

Open Source software is made not by a single company, but by a community of programmers. The process is completely transparent and open to all (including companies). This means more flexible, powerful and reliable software which can inter-operate easily.

The immediate cost savings and the long term sustainable industry opportunities are clear. A home grown industry of expertise in this field could be promoted by the government by for instance adopting free Open Source software within the public service. This would in turn stimulate SMEs in the IT arena to further develop the skills needed, stimulating training companies in this area. Companies developing Open Source software would also be able to export software services and expertise around Open Technologies. This all further strengthens the Open Source industry itself. The government insisting on Open Technologies would also guarantee long term stability as technology changes, because this type of software adheres to international standards for data-interchange and communication instead of trying to tie-in the users to one product.

How many software licenses are purchased by state bodies in Ireland? There is a free Open Source alternative to almost any major piece of software in use. Can we justify the purchase for instance of Office software when there is a free alternative. Can we justify the purchase of large email systems where the cost increases as the number of users increase, essentially placing a burden on success (more employees). Are you aware that a laptop can be securely encrypted very easily and quickly using a piece of Open Source software at no cost. When document formats, or software versions are unnecessarily made obsolete the cost to the state is simply immense.

As a quick example of the type of financial savings that can be made, consider a single area - schools. There are around 4000 primary and secondary schools in the country. If you assume an average of 15 computers in each, this would total 60,000 computers. If 100 euro is saved by using free software on each, 6 Million is saved in total. This is only one area and probably widely underestimates the number of computers in use. Add to this the entire public and semi-state sector.

A quick look on the govenments eTenders website shows around 140 tenders in the IT area with a single mention of Open Source. In fact, many of these tenders ask for a single product by name instead of outlining the requirements and allowing the professionals present the best solutions. For instance, there are many tenders for document management systems. By using cost-free software, that conforms to international standards and simply bringing in the expertise to configure and maintain the software the cost of these can be reduced drastically.

This proposal was made my Andrew Clarke on the Your Country, Your Call website. We here at altFIRE are big believers in open technologies, and have put our weight behind this proposal.

Would YOU agree? If so, you should register and support this proposal.

Vodafone is set to disconnect infrequently used accounts and take any unused credit on those phones.

The move is part of Ireland's largest mobile phone operator tightening up its terms and conditions. Vodafone has said it's changing its terms from next month in an effort to recycle old mobile phone numbers that are no longer in use.

Therefore, customers who don't top up their pre-paid mobile phone within eight months will have their accounts disconnected and will lose any remaining credit on their phones. They also risk losing their numbers if it isn't reactivated within six months.

Vodafone, in a statement, said there was a regulatory requirement to recycle the pool of mobile phone numbers. It said it chose an eight-month recycling rule as the “overwhelming majority” of customers whose accounts aren’t topped-up within that time frame become completely inactive, the Irish Independent reported.

However, Vodafone said, the company "is mindful of the concerns of the very small number of customers who may consciously omit to top up their accounts for a prolonged period of time for specific reasons.

"For this reason, there is a carefully considered step-by-step contact process before disconnection which involves texts sent to customers to remind them to top up to keep their account active," Vodafone added.

"In addition, customers have the opportunity to reinstate their number for six months after disconnection. Any customer whose account falls into disuse and is disconnected with remaining credit can contact us for reactivation at any time within that six-month time frame to be reinstated with their old balance completely intact."

Vodafone has outlined its process:

Following six months, no top up: A text is sent to the customer reminding them to top up within seven days in order to keep their account active. Following seven days, if there is no top up, the phone is deactivated, however, customers can still receive incoming calls.

Following 8 months, no top up: A text is sent to the customer informing them that the account will be disconnected if it is not topped up within seven days. If the account is disconnected because it was not topped up, the customer then has six months from the disconnection date in which time they can reactivate that number.

Following 14 months, the number is recycled and reissued.

The Arctic weather conditions gripping the country have resulted in Eircom having to clear 8,000 faults on its lines this week alone.

The incumbent telecoms operator said today that an additional 1,757 faults have been reported to it within the past 24 hours.

The current number of total faults stands at 5,134, Eircom said, adding that its technicians will work through the weekend to restore service to customers.

The telco said the hazardous weather, along with the fact that many secondary roads are currently impassable, is hindering its workers’ efforts in reaching outages.

The worst-affected areas include Kildare, Wicklow, Carlow and North Wexford, Eircom said.

"Eircom would like to assure all of our customers that we have put our full resources into restoring service as soon as possible and overcome the challenges posed by the severe weather conditions that are set to continue into next week," the company said.

Eircom customers can report faults either by logging onto the 'Log a Fault' section of the company’s website, or through its automated customer service line 1901.

O2 Ireland today launched a Twitter SMS service, the first Irish mobile carrier to do so.

Sending and receiving Twitter messages will cost the same as sending and receiving regular SMS text messages on the O2 network.

If you're an O2 customer, to begin, text START to 51210. Twitter has a handy list of commands that you can send the micro-blogging service from your phone to this number.

Apart from ON and OFF to toggle notifications, you can tweet, retweet, direct message, follow and even set your location, look at your stats and invite friends to the SMS service, too.

Twitter also launched a text-messaging service with 3 Indonesia, which has the extra option of using TwitPic via MMS. Other countries will get text-messaging service soon, says Twitter on its official blog.

Fibre and DSL provider Magnet has unveiled a new standalone 50Mbps package separate from phone and TV bundles for 50 euro a month.

Think about that guys - 50Mbps for 50 euro. That's a euro per sweet meg of broadband speed! The product was launched ahead of the launch of a 30Mbps Fibre Power broadband service on Monday by UPC.

Magnet CEO Mark Kellett said his company’s 50Mbps service is directly to the home and must not be confused with UPC’s service, which is fibre to the cabinet and delivered to the home by coaxial cable.

“Terms such as ‘fibre powered’ give the perception that customers are getting fibre all the way to their homes. In reality, UPC’s connection from the street cabinet to the home is not fibre but coaxial. This is not about a battle between true fibre and cable technologies. It’s about ensuring that a public already confused by broadband is not misled further.”

Magnet’s fibre service works by connecting homes directly with fibre without watering down the speed by using other cable types.

“Fibre is like a massive water main. With cable broadband your house connects to that main with its own smaller pipe. With our fibre service we’re bringing the water main right into your house, giving you the full tsunami of the internet as opposed to a trickle,” said Kellett.

Magnet Networks has also recently reduced the price of its other high-speed ADSL2+ service, with its 24Mbps package available for €29.99.

Magnet Force is uncontended so customers do not share their connection with other users.

“It is good to see that other broadband providers are pushing up their speeds as Irish customers are getting increasingly bandwidth hungry and the bar needs to continually be raised. However, if they really wish to push the envelope they should offer customers a service that delivers consistent speeds all day and not when everyone wishes to use it,” said Kellett.

The combined footprint of Magnet's’s service is more than 600,000 homes across Ireland.

The latest version of VirtualBox delivers some awesome new features, including support for live migration. Branched snapshots are also supported.

These migration capabilities reflect VirtualBox’s potential for ascending into the enterprise arena. Although VirtualBox is primarily intended for conventional desktop virtualization scenarios, its developers are adding enterprise features that reflect a growing potential for viability in the server space. This newly-added support for live migration - called “Teleportation” in the VirtualBox documentation - is an impressive example of this trend in the program’s development.

Live migration allows users to move virtualized guest environments from one physical computer to another while the guest environment is still running. Although this has somewhat limited value for desktop virtualization, it’s a critical feature in data centers where administrators want to be able to seamlessly move workloads between their servers in order to maximize utilization of their hardware resources while minimizing the disruption to ongoing operations.

Teleportation can currently only be invoked from the command line in VirtualBox 3.1. It also requires the user to manually set up identical VM configurations on the physical computers where the feature will be used. The disk image file for the virtualized environment that you want to teleport will have to be on a shared storage medium that is accessible on both computers. The documentation warns that moving a guest environment between computers with Intel and AMD CPUs is likely to result in failure.

So it looks like Twitter will not roll out a subscription model in Japan afterall. Many had seen this as a sign of things to come as Twitter explores ways to monetize its growing userbase. But not so says this press release as apparently it was all simply "misunderstood" by the press.

I believe there is a market for a premium Twitter account, especially for group/corporate customers with multiple users or even charging for verified accounts but it seems that, at least for now, Twitter won't be charging any of its users.

Twitter is going to start experimenting with paid premium accounts through its Japanese subsidiary, it seems.

Details are sketchy at this point, but Japanese media are reporting that Twitter is going to introduce a tiered payment model and aims to charge people to view tweets from certain premium Twitter accounts.

Twitter Japan, which is operated under supervision of Twitter investor Digital Garage, launched in April 2008 and boasted display ads right out the gate. At a conference earlier this week, Kenichi Sugi, COO of DG Mobile (a Digital Garage subsidiary), announced that Twitter would now add paid subscription options starting in January 2010, allowing account holders to charge audiences for access to their tweets, more text, images, links to their external websites and so on.

Billing would be done on a monthly basis for a price that ranges from 100 Yen (approx. 1.15 dollars) and 1000 Yen (which converts to roughly 11.5 dollars). Users will apparently be able to use their credit cards, have their mobile carrier include it in their invoices, or even purchase a prepaid ticket at a convenience store to pay for the premium service. Finally, Twitter will be taking a 30 percent cut on transaction fees.

The assumption is that this model would be fit for account holders who deliver real-time information, news and educational content, and tend to include original photographs, video images and audio in their tweets.

The idea isn't exactly brand new: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone mentioned earlier this year they were thinking of commercializing accounts as a way to get some revenue out of the popular service. But the surprising part is that people will actually be charged for access to premium accounts, rather than having holders pay for them. At least, in Japan.