Joel Dehlin, the Chief Information Officer for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is going to join me in writing posts for this blog. So if you see posts by him, don’t worry, he hasn’t hacked in. Hence, I’ve temporarily renamed this blog ldsWebguys.
Before long, we’ll rebrand the blog was we expand it to share technology ideas with LDS parents and youth. Get ready for better things to come!
A Church trademark is its commitment to emergency preparedness, provident living and preparing for catastrophe. How well are the information systems prepared for an extended (2 week) Wasatch front power failure? Specifically, what is the recovery time objective for the MLS system in such a scenario?
I placed this comment elsewhere in your blog but perhaps it fits better here. My wife and I have noticed slow download speeds with LDS.org with an otherwise working Comcast internet connection. Over the past few months we have typically seen speeds as “slow” as 50KB/sec) where most of 2007 we enjoyed speeds that were 5X as fast. We enjoy downloading the video of conference talks and as silly as it sounds, are a bit bothered by the slow speeds. Before we went to complain to Comcast, we wondered if there was something occurring on LDS.orgs end (perhaps some sort of cap on speeds)?
The speeds are at their best in the early morning.
I am an assistant Branch Clerk here in England. While it is so good to be able to watch the General Conferences at chapel, or even over the net at home, there are a lot of older members who have no computer or internet connection, and are not able to spend the day at the chapel in order to watch the conferences.
I can download the sessions to my computer, and I have software which enables me to transfer the files to DVD files, and record the conference to DVD. I end up with a disk for each of the sessions, and it is high quality. Now, I am a bit concerned about if it is OK for us at chapel to loan the recordings to provide those who could not make it to chapel, an opportunity to see and hear for themselves the conference messages they have missed. I am a bit concerned about the reminder at the beginning of the sessions about the use of these recordings for some purposes without written consent being forbidden. I am not certain if that would apply in this case.
We find here that it is perhaps six to eight weeks before the recoded DVD’s become available, which seems a long while to wait, and although the talks are printed in the next month’s Ensign, it would be nice to be able to use the recordings so that they could have immediate access to the sight and sounds, and the music of the actual conference. Can you clarify if this is OK for me. I should mention that the Branch usually records the Conferences to a disk recorder to make them available, but the quality is very poor – the standard via download is far superior
Thanks for your help
Adrian McTiernan, Redcar Branch
I since contacted the Copyright Department, told them what I was planning, and that the disks would be planned to be available to those who were housebound or ill, or for some other reason would not be able to attend conference, or see it later, and have been given permission via email, to make copies available, with the provision that the full copyright symbol and notation appears on the disks, and the label on any boxes I provide for them. So, a happy outcome on this matter. I would expect that any other Branch or Ward would have a similar response if they took the trouble to contact the Department, but this seems to be an individual response, and has not been made Church Policy at this time
Adrian McTiernan
Adrian, glad this will work out for you. Larry