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Want to make more money as an enterprise application developer? You're in luck--if you know open source.

According to a recent report from Bluewolf Consulting, enterprises increasingly deploy open-source software, and look to specialized application development on top of it, to drive business value:

The rise of open-source software in application development puts developers with a specialization in those technologies in a position to ask for a 30 (percent) or 40 percent pay increase, Kirven says. "We've gotten more requests from our permanent-placement division for open-source developers in the last six months than in the last five or six years combined," he says. "It's not as easy as getting free software; someone has to get it up and running. LAMP is everywhere now--these types of technologies no one heard of 18 months ago are all the sudden becoming a hot commodity."

Indeed. Not only does open source bring developers more money, but it also apparently brings them more satisfaction.

Jon Williams, chief technology officer of test preparation company Kaplan, made it very clear in an Infoworld podcast I recorded a month ago that open source is one of his best retention tools.

Let people do interesting work, and they stick around. Make them mindlessly monitor that Windows machine, and they'll bolt.

Update: It is also worth reading about how open source drives enterprise innovation.

You probably know about the "hidden" administrator account in Windows XP. It's the only account on XP systems on which no other accounts have been created.

Until you add a new account, you zip right to the desktop when you boot the OS, with no stop at the Welcome screen. Once you set up one or more new accounts, the default administrator disappears, though you can bring it back in both XP Home and Pro. (More on this below.)

Vista ships with this account disabled, which is not such a bad thing because every user on the PC should have his or her own custom account, even if "every" translates to "one."

Still, this back-up administrator account can come in handy if you encounter some problems logging into or otherwise using Vista. To enable it, right-click the Command Prompt on the Start menu (it is likely listed under Accessories), choose Run as administrator, type net user administrator /active:yes, and press Enter. You should see a message stating that the command completed successfully. Type exit and press Enter again to close the Command Prompt window.

Enable Windows Vista's backup administrator account from the Command Prompt.

When you restart Windows, you'll see a new account labeled simply "Administrator." The first time you log into this account, Windows will tell you that it's preparing the desktop before the system's default desktop appears. Click Start > Control Panel > User Accounts and Family Controls > Change your Windows password > Create a password for your account, enter your password twice, add a hint (if you wish), and click Create password. (If you use Control Panel's classic view, the settings to create a password are in the User Accounts applet.)

To disable this administrator account, follow the steps above to return to the Command Prompt in administrator mode, type net user administrator /active:no, press Enter, type exit, and press Enter again.

Give XP's hidden administrator account a password
This administrator account is a well-documented security risk in Windows XP because by default it doesn't have a password, which means anyone can log into your system via this account, change the passwords for all the other accounts, and perform other mischief. To give the account a password in XP Home, restart the PC, press F8 before Windows loads, select Safe Mode, and press Enter.

The only selection will likely be Microsoft Windows XP. With this option highlighted, press Enter again. You'll see a Welcome screen with an account labeled Administrator. Click this account, choose Yes at the warning, open the User Accounts applet in Control Panel, click the Administrator account again, choose Create a password, enter the new password twice, enter a hint (if you wish), and click Create Password. You may also be asked if you wish to make this account's files private. Make your selection and click Finish.

There's a much simpler way to make this administrator account visible on the Welcome screen in XP Pro: Open the Tweak UI Powertoy, click Logon in the left pane, check Show "Administrator" on Welcome screen in the Settings window on the right, and click OK. Note that you'll still have to log into this account and follow the steps above to add a password for it.

Select the Logon option and check this option to add the hidden Administrator account to the Welcome screen in XP Pro.

Tomorrow: Your options for moving Excel data to a Word document.

The government will spend $26 million on high-end computers to cut costs and standardize systems among the three U.S. labs charged with ensuring the safety and reliability of the nation's aging nuclear stockpile.

The Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) awarded the multimillion-dollar contract to Milpitas, Calif.-based Appro to supply Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories with 438 teraflop high-performance computing clusters based on the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor. To date, each of these labs had used its own combination of computer systems, which were not always compatible with the others.

(Credit: Appro)

"This is the first time NNSA has awarded a single contract for all three laboratories," agency official Martin Schoenbauer in a press release. "Combining the contract for each of the three laboratories not only saves money, but continues to move NNSA towards a smaller more efficient nuclear weapons complex."

The new equipment will provide crunch power to NNSA's Stockpile Stewardship program, under which the labs perform advanced nuclear weapons simulations meant to replace underground testing and extend the life of existing weapons. The computers are expected to be deployed in eight Linux clusters across the "tri-Lab" sites starting later this year.

The Appro systems are composed of modular, scalable units that can be rapidly configured "Lego-style" into clusters of varying sizes and computing power, according to NNSA. Each unit represents about 20 trillion floating-point operations per second (teraflops) of computing power and feature the latest Mellanox Technologies ConnectX IB 20 GB/s dual-port InfiniBand adapters and ConnectX EN dual port 10 Gigabit Ethernet NICs for storage connectivity.

The government relies increasingly on science and technology to extend the life of existing warheads, given the untenability of continuing the Cold War practice of replacing weapons every 15 to 20 years, NNSA's Thomas P. D'Agostino told the House Armed Services Committee (PDF). This was the genesis of the science-based Stockpile Stewardship program whose major focus is predicting the effect of changes in an aging stockpile, he said.

There has been no mention of hooking up the other sites that constitute the nation's nuclear weapons research and production base, namely the Nevada Test Site, Savannah River Site, Pantex Plant and Kansas City Plant. The video below shows what an underground test looks like.

A soon-to-expire ban on Internet access taxes must be made permanent by Congress, two cabinet-level Bush administration officials urged Wednesday.

In a joint statement, U.S. Department of Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez and Treasury Department Secretary Henry Paulson said the "vast potential economic and social benefits of electronic commerce" depend on immortalizing an almost decade-old moratorium on Internet access taxes and discriminatory e-commerce taxes.

Commerce Secretary Gutierrez

"Preventing the taxation of Internet access will help sustain an environment for innovation, ensure that consumers continue to have affordable access to the Internet, especially high-speed Internet, and strengthen the foundations of electronic commerce as a vital and growing part of our economy," they said.

The officials' statement is likely geared toward lighting a fire under a U.S. Senate committee scheduled to vote Thursday on a bill that would merely extend the tax ban for four more years, as opposed to making it everlasting. President Bush in the past has also advocated for the tax halt.

Treasury Secretary Paulson

If the moratorium is allowed to expire on November 1, states would be allowed to levy taxes on digital subscriber line, cable modem, wireless and even BlackBerry-type data services. They would also be free to charge different tax rates for goods sold on the Internet and goods sold offline. It's unclear how many states would have immediate plans to enact such laws, though, if the ban lapses.

Because none of the pending permanent tax ban bills has been called up for a vote in the Senate Commerce Committee on Thursday, a temporary extension appears more likely. That approach represents a compromise of sorts with state and local officials who have balked at the idea of never having the opportunity to revisit the potential for Internet access taxes as a revenue source. (Some states are still allowed to levy such fees because of "grandfather" provisions in existing law.)

Both Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), who leads that Senate panel, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who exercises ultimate control over the Senate's voting schedule, have pledged to renew the ban, but neither has gone so far as to call for making it permanent--in contrast to some of their Republican colleagues on the chamber's High Tech Task Force.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 10:16 a.m. PDT.

WASHINGTON--A group of state prosecutors led by California on Tuesday told a federal judge that they plan to file a request that Microsoft antitrust oversight be extended until 2012.

Right now, most portions of the settlement reached with the Bush administration and state prosecutors in 2002 are set to expire November 12. Those provisions primarily deal with "middleware," or applications that sit on top of the operating system. One section relating to server protocol licensing has already been extended until 2009.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said she wasn't immediately prepared to rule on the California group's request or to reach conclusions about the consent decree's effectiveness over the past five years. U.S. Department of Justice and Microsoft attorneys told her they weren't immediately prepared to comment because they both heard about the proposal last week.

Microsoft attorney Rick Rule did say that it was "premature" to talk about extending the server protocol licensing a second time so long before its 2009 expiration date.

The California group's request, which is expected to be described in more detail in a written court filing by October 15, was hardly unexpected. A few weeks ago, that group of plaintiffs--which also includes Connecticut, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Massachusetts and the District of Columbia--filed a report with the court that argued the agreement reached with the government has been largely ineffective in accomplishing its stated goals. They also suggested that a 10-year term, which they characterized as "standard" practice, for the consent decree would be preferable to the existing five-year life span, particularly since Microsoft only recently released Windows Vista.

"The key product markets here are still entirely dominated by Microsoft," Stephen Houck, the attorney representing California, told the judge on Tuesday. He argued that because Redmond's "market power remains undiminished" in the PC operating system and Web browser markets, "there's no guarantee that emerging technologies" will be protected unless the oversight period is extended.

Rule indicated it was curious that the California group was simultaneously decrying the effectiveness of the consent decree while calling for its extension. "We think the picture of the computer industry is much rosier," he told Kollar-Kotelly. "We think the decree has done its job."

"Obviously we'll continue to monitor matters," Justice Department attorney Aaron Hoag said, adding Vista has undergone testing by a technical committee that all parties agree has played a key role in enforcing the settlement.

Kollar-Kotelly, for her part, said she was "prepared to listen" to whether the oversight period should be lengthened but reminded the plaintiffs to consider what she called the "narrow" framework of previous court findings. Namely, Microsoft was never found to have illegally "obtained" a monopoly in the Intel-based operating system market, she said--rather, it was found to have maintained one by unlawful means. And the goal of the antitrust settlement was not to reduce the company's market share but to "improve" users' opportunities to get access to competing middleware, she added.

"If there are going to be requests to extend (the consent decree)," she said Tuesday, "it would have to be for an identifiable purpose the court would have to consider."

Much has been made of an El Paso Times interview last week in which Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell acknowledged the "private sector" has assisted in the president's so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program. Some opponents of the phone-call-and-email-snooping regime promptly pounced on the remarks, suggesting they implicate telephone companies like AT&T and Verizon, which have been accused in numerous lawsuits of consumer privacy violations and illicit cooperation with the Bush administration.

"Now if you play out the suits at the value they're claimed, it would bankrupt these companies," McConnell told the paper, according to a transcript. He didn't, however, mention any firms by name.

Excerpt from the Justice Department's August 29 brief in Verizon/MCI case

Arguably revelatory statements like those have prompted new questions about the Bush administration's ability to continue evoking the "state secrets" privilege in the various cases against the telcos, which are currently pending before U.S District Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco federal court.

The McConnell interview may play a role in Walker's courtroom on Thursday afternoon, when he's scheduled to hear arguments about dismissal of a set of now-consolidated class action suits against Verizon and then-separate MCI. Those companies have been accused of operating a content surveillance "dragnet" and of turning over subscriber records to the NSA without a warrant. (Verizon, for its part, has publicly denied providing such information to the spy agency.)

Attorneys for the plaintiffs in those suits recently submitted the McConnell transcript for the court record, in an attempt to blunt the government's contentions that proceeding with the case will endanger national security by exposing state secrets.

Not so, the Bush administration countered in a Wednesday court filing seen by CNET News.com. The Justice Department attorneys argue McConnell's statements did nothing to change the fact that it hasn't ever confirmed any of the activities alleged by the class action plaintiffs--and has, in fact, denied the existence of any sort of "dragnet." The arguments made by the class action plaintiffs rest on nothing but "speculation," the attorneys wrote. In the Justice Department's view, litigating the case would still require exposing how the program actually does work--which, it says, would in turn endanger national security.

Verizon declined to comment, but its attorneys have also argued in recent court filings that the state secrets privilege must apply. Walker, for his part, has so far declined to grant that immunity in a related high-profile case against AT&T, and a federal appeals court panel recently indicated unwillingness to side with the government on that front.

Update: Click here for CNET News.com's coverage of Thursday's court arguments about dismissal of this case.