Does I.T. Still Attract the Best and the
Brightest?
NewsFactor Network (12/22/06) Ortiz Jr., Sixto
In response to the question of whether IT is once again luring the top
minds after a long slump, Challenger, Gray, and Christmas CEO John
Challenger answers that the IT job market is "mixed," noting that a third
quarter rise in tech-sector job cuts is indicative "that companies are
downgrading their outlook for the current year." Robert Half Technology
executive director Katherine Spencer Lee has a more positive outlook,
citing market growth driven by slight but notable pay raises. Hot areas in
the IT marketplace named by Challenger and Spencer Lee include information
security, software applications development, project management, Web
development, and data warehousing; enthusiasm is waning for database
administration, help/support desk staff, and other routine functions that
can be easily offshored, according to Challenger. "It's interesting that
IT workers are concerned about their jobs being outsourced while, at the
same time, managers are concerned about finding enough quality talent,"
observes Spencer Lee, who says professionals capable of combining business
savvy with IT knowledge will snap up the jobs that stay at home. To
achieve success in the current IT job marketplace, prospective IT pros must
realize that they can never stop learning and improving their skills, and
that they must be flexible and diverse in their abilities. "Before your
skills become obsolete, you want to be able to transform yourself into the
'next version' of worker that will be in demand," explains Challenger.
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Multicore Faces a Long Road
EE Times (12/28/06) Merritt, Rick
Not only did the electronics industry gain an understanding of the
significance of multicore technology in 2006, but it realized just how much
work is yet to be done. Multicore CPUs and embedded multicore systems
arrived in 2006, and the number of cores on a die took the place of
megahertz as the metric for microprocessors, all of which led to the
acceptance by software developers "that programming as they knew it is not
going to be the same any more--they will be doing parallel programming
going forward," according to parallel processing pioneer and MIT professor
of electrical engineering and computer science Anant Agarwal. Computer
scientists must address the lack of "algorithms, languages, compilers, and
expertise" that faces parallel computing, says Microsoft Research manager
of programming and tools Jim Larus, as well as "a lot of practical issues,
like developing better support for multithreading, synchronization,
debugging, and error detection." Larus also points out that a better
understanding is needed of just how people want to use parallel
programming. While some in the industry want to create automated tools to
transfer legacy code to multicore, parallel programming languages will be
needed, since work must get down to the algorithm level. No fundamental
methods for parallel programming have been established, and researchers
have found that no single technique for parallel programming is universally
applicable, but possibilities are being explored, such as lightweight
software transaction. The Multicore Association (MCA) has been formed to
address the many problems facing the field, and the Embedded Microprocessor
Benchmark Consortium (EMBC) has begun developing a standard suite of tests
to evaluate the performance of multicore processors.
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UC Tech Funding Proposed
Sacramento Bee (CA) (12/28/06) Benson, Clara
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has added $95 million to his state
budget proposal for technology research initiatives at several University
of California universities, administrations officials announced on
Wednesday. Schwarzenegger wants to make the state "number one in
everything," says his communications director Adam Mendelsohn, who adds,
"California is poised to be the leader in nanotechnology and ... green
technology." Most of the research produced by these initiatives would be
open source; some of the money would go to partnerships and private
concerns attempting to create marketable products, but UC officials said no
tax dollars would be spent on this proprietary research. "This is about
two things," said executive vice president for university affairs Bruce
Darling. "Building the kind of research and human capital pool that will
sustain California well into the future, and making sure those innovations
and technologies are translated into the marketplace." The Helios Project,
which conducts research on sustainable energy, would get $30 million
according to the Governor's plan, a BP project to create an alternative
energy research institute would get $40 million, the California Center for
Science and Innovation, a partnership between the university and private
companies, would get $19.8 million, and the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and UC San Diego
would receive $5 to help them compete for a $200 million federal grant for
the construction of a Petascale computer, which would be the world's
fastest.
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Takahashi: 10 Tech Trends of 2007
San Jose Mercury News (CA) (12/25/06) Takahashi, Dean
Staff members at the San Jose Mercury News gathered to make predictions of
technology trends to emerge in 2007, some of which are simply continuations
of predictions for 2006. Users will continue to have increasing control
over technology and content, thanks to user-dependent technologies such as
Digg, YouTube, Wikipedia, and the iPod. Applications such as games, social
networks, rich media, and even GPS, will be designed specifically for cell
phones, leading to their increased use as a multimedia tool. Microsoft's
Vista will provide enhanced reliability, security, and compatibility, but
since most business will wait for bugs to be worked out, it will not be
ubiquitous for a few more years. Nintendo's Wii and DS have introduced a
new audience to gaming, and the rising popularity and availability of
"casual" games could make them a much bigger part of our lives. Privacy
will decrease as a result of government spying, more records being kept
online and on unsecured computers, and users of social networks divulging
more personal information. Solar energy will be utilized more than ever,
although entrepreneurs may not reach their goal of making solar thin-film
technology available to the average consumer. IPTV will bring the
potential of accessing hundreds of movies and TV shows on demand, and other
movie downloading services will contribute to unprecedented availability.
LED technology is entering the home, and many other venues, via LED bulbs
that fit into traditional sockets, produce the same light as traditional
bulbs, use far less energy than even fluorescent bulbs, and outlast both.
As cell phones become equipped with GPS chips as a result of a federal
requirement, locating others will become possible, and searches could be
conducted based on a user's current location.
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Computer Warming a Privacy Risk
Wired News (12/29/06) Norton, Quinn
Cambridge University researcher Steven J. Murdoch has found a method for
bypassing online anonymity systems by analyzing a computer's temperature
over the Internet. The technique utilizes the phenomenon called "clock
skew," where precise clocks in computers drift away from the correct time
at varying rates, depending on heat. Every crystal has a unique clock
skew, Murdoch says. A UCLA Ph.D. student displayed the ability to use
clock skew to identify computers on the Internet through charting the
timestamps of a machine's traffic, but this technique can get at best 64
fingerprints: a thousand computers connected in a network would contain 16
with identical clock skews. Murdoch became the first person to
successfully carry out an anonymity attack online. He attacked Onion
Router, or "Tor," a privacy system that allows users anonymous Internet
access. He established a Tor network at Cambridge to try out his method.
Murdoch says that in order to get the IP address of a hidden server on a
Tor network, an attacker would request something complicated from the
server, causing it to warm up, resulting in clock skew. The attacker then
looks at computers he thinks may be the Tor server, searching for a change
in skew over a few hours. He has found his match when he locates a
computer with the specific change in its timestamps. Murdoch admits that
it's not the ideal attack, but " it's a guide to what could be done in the
future."
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Real Robots
Toronto Star (12/26/06) Gerson, Jen
A World Robotics Survey predicts that there will be four million robots in
service by the end of 2007, and experts expect functional robots to be on
the market within a decade, but robots are still far from being able to
seamlessly interact with humans. Honda's ASIMO robot is able to recognize
and react to human faces and postures, shake hands, climb stairs, and run.
Stephen Keeney, one of the ASIMO project leaders, says, "We need a robot
that can truly be useful in our world;" the goal behind the project is to
produce robots that can provide aid to those confined to a bed or chair.
Maria Bualat, leader of the NASA Ames Research Center's intelligent
robotics group, says that while today's robots show progress, much more
research is needed. She says, "You can tell it to go to an X and Y
co-ordinate on a map and it will understand. But ask it to `go to my left'
and it won't." Rather than making people adapt to robots, she wants to
create robots that can operate in the unpredictable human world: "Getting
the robots to gauge intent is still a bit of a leap. The robot has to be
able to gauge where the human is, and to understand what we want it to do
next." Robots that look exactly like humans are being designed for tasks
that require interaction with humans, as they are thought to be better
received by people, although the idea of the "uncanny valley" states that
once they become life-like to a certain point, they will make people
uneasy. Roboticist David Hanson is an outspoken advocate of making robots
resemble humans as much as possible, as the Baby Boomer generation is on
the verge of needing nursing care. He predicts that, "The computational
and software capabilities (of robots) are going to be beyond human
capability by 2025." Hanson views giving robots human faces as taking the
invaluable step of "planting the seeds in technology of compassion and
wisdom."
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Yahoo Research Goes Beyond Computing to Social
Science
IDG News Service (12/28/06) Ribeiro, John
Yahoo Research has established a microeconomics department to look into
how the company's products can deliver maximum value in addressing the
needs of users, advertisers, and the company itself. Ethnographers,
cognitive psychologists, and sociologists have been hired to develop media
formats that will lead to the establishment of online communities. This
interest in social communities has led to work on middleware technology
specially suited for social networking, as the relational databases that
were previously used for this purpose are better suited for business
applications. Another aim is to achieve task-centric searching that is not
keyword-based; instead it would analyze free text descriptions given by
users in order to provide more helpful results. Yahoo head of research
Prabhakar Raghavan says, "We have to get much smarter to understand and
define the user's intent and deliver to that intent." A Yahoo research lab
is being established in India, which will employ both computer scientists
and staff trained in humanities-related disciplines such as economists and
sociologists.
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New Program by UMass Amherst Computer Scientist Prevents
Crashes and Hacker Attacks
University of Massachusetts Amherst (12/26/06)
A new program, named DieHard, has been developed by University of
Massachusetts Amherst computer scientist Emery Berger and Microsoft
researcher Ben Zorn to remedy problems caused by programming that doesn't
make proper use of the large amount of memory on today's computers. While
running, programs request chunks of memory space to store items such as
images, but often items will be assigned a space that is already occupied,
or space that is not large enough, causing overflows into other spaces.
The result of these mistakes can be a crash, or worse. "Ironically,
crashing is the best thing that can happen," says Berger. "An overflow
also can make your computer exploitable by hackers." Another danger is
that the location that a password is given can be the same for every
version of a given program, allowing a hacker who has overwritten a
password to find this address on all existing versions. To prevent these
dangers, DieHard distributes groups of memory, assigns random addresses to
items during each session, launches several versions of a program being run
in case one starts to crash, and detects the probability that a certain bug
has affected a user. Berger blames the current problems on programmers who
are too worried about speed and efficiency, at the expense of security.
"Today we have way more memory and more computer power than we need," he
says. "We want to use that to make systems more reliable and safer,
without compromising speed." Free versions of DieHard are available for
non-commercial use for both Linux and Windows.
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Google's Open Source Airbag
InternetNews.com (12/27/06) Kerner, Sean Michael
Google is in the later stages of developing Airbag, a set of client and
server components that can identify the cause of an application crash. The
open source project contains client-side libraries that generate dumps and
help send them to a crash server. A server-side library looks at the crash
dumps and transforms them into information that can be used for debugging.
Components can be taken from the project's Subversion (SVN) source control
code repository. A tarball, a compressed archive of application files, is
planned for release once Google feels the product is ready for the public.
Google Software engineer Mark Mentovai says, "Because our project is so
developer-centric, we don't feel compelled to provide a tarball too
soon--the portion of our target audience that's comfortable with using
in-development software is most likely also comfortable with source control
systems like Subversion." Multi-form capability, among other things, is
expected to be included in a Airbag 1.0 release. "For 1.0, we imagine that
we'll be stable on all of our target platforms--Mac ppc, Mac x86, Windows
x86, and Linux x86," Mentovai noted. Although there's no formal roadmap
for the project, Mentovai says the informal mission statement "is to
provide a set of crash reporting libraries that can be integrated into a
large project, namely, Firefox." Mozilla has been discussing the
possibility of incorporating Airbag into a new crash reporting system.
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Cybercrooks Deliver Trouble
Washington Post (12/27/06) P. D1; Krebs, Brian
A record-breaking rise in spam and more sophisticated cyberattacks were
noted this year by computer security experts, who only expect worse things
next year. "Criminals have gone from trying to hit as many machines as
possible to focusing on techniques that allow them to remain undetected on
infected machines longer," says Symantec's Vincent Weafer, while Postini
estimates that over 90 percent of all email sent online in October was
spam; computers controlled by cybercrooks, or "bots," are responsible for
relaying a great volume of junk email. "We're getting an unprecedented
amount of calls from people whose email systems are melting down under this
onslaught," says Postini's Daniel Druker. Beyond Security's Gadi Evron
reckons that at any given time there are 3 million to 4 million compromised
computers actively relaying spam, while millions more are used to launch
distributed denial-of-service attacks. In addition, he believes organized
criminals will net about $2 billion in 2006 via "phishing" scams. Experts
are also signaling that online crime is becoming a full-time venue for
many, as evidenced by a movement of online criminal activity from nights
and weekends to weekdays. Furthermore, experts are seeing an increase in
the sophistication of techniques cybercriminals are using to dodge
anti-fraud initiatives. Attacks that exploited flaws in software
applications that operate on top of operating systems were also a notable
development this year, as were increasing numbers of zero-day software
vulnerabilities.
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NEH, Google Boost Internet Coding Project
UC Berkeley News (12/20/06) Maclay, Kathleen
Almost $300,000 in new funding from the National Endowment for the
Humanities and from Google will allow a UC Berkeley project to continue
work that is allowing users of native scripts to use the Internet. The
Script Encoding Initiative (SEI) began four years ago and has encoded over
20 writing systems. The initiative plans to tackle eight scripts in 2007,
and a similar number in 2008. Worldwide, there are over 80 writing systems
not yet in the international character-encoding standard Unicode, half of
which are used in languages spoken by linguistic minorities across the
globe. These people must use nonstandard fonts that make Internet use
extremely difficult, if possible at all. Deborah Anderson, a researcher in
UC Berkeley's Linguistics Department and head of the SEI, says, "For
scholars working with obsolete computing technologies, valuable data is
destined for the electronic dustbin unless they are updated to modern
computing standards. However, with these scripts in Unicode, accurate
searching across the Web will be possible, and materials will be saved in a
standardized format that will remain accessible for many years to come."
The project aims to establish fonts for modern scripts that can be quickly
utilized, as well as to discern the local conventions of each language,
such as standard date, time, and currency formats, allowing the creation of
software that is specific to a given tongue and the places it is used.
Experts predict that given the slow pace of encoding, over 40 scripts will
still not be coded in 10 years.
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UI, Berkeley Teams Test Program for Sharing Virtual
Stage
News-Gazette (12/26/06) Kline, Greg
Researchers at the University of Illinois and the University of
California, Berkeley have created Tele-Immersive Environments for EVEryone
(TEEVE), an immersive 3D video-conferencing system that allows users to
interact with 3D, rendered versions of each other in a virtual space.
TEEVE was used in a 40-minute dance performance in which two groups of
dancers located across the country from each other collaborated using big
screens at two different locations, and smaller screens connected via
Webcast. TEEVE data is collected by filming action and then breaking down
its individual elements, such as eye movements. In combination with
technology that allows this information to be coded and searched
automatically, the 3D view produced by the system could represent a
breakthrough in the field, and could be applied to gaming, physical
therapy, and limitless other uses. There are still improvements to be
made, but the dance demonstration shows the researchers' success in
bringing together consumer products such as cameras and PCs with techniques
developed by computer scientists that include efficiently transferring
large amounts of video data across a network.
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Crowd Wisdom vs. Google's Genius
BusinessWeek (12/27/06) Holahan, Catherine
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, believes the same "wisdom of crowds"
philosophy that has accounted for the success of Wikipedia can be applied
to a search engine. The proposed search engine, Wikiasari, would present
users with a list of sites turned up by their search, using technology
similar to Google's, but Wikiasari would then allow them to re-rank the
results in order of usefulness. Servers would then record these new
results as well as the original query, applying them to future searches.
Wales does not downplay the importance of algorithms in the search process,
but insists that they need the help that only human intelligence can
provide in order to be as efficient as possible. Wikiasari will be based
on Apache open-source Web search software, and Wales will make the code
publicly available. He does not expect Wikiasari to be an immediate
Google-killer, as Wikipedia took approximately three years to grow into a
truly useful tool. The version released in 2007 will serve as "starting
point for people to play with," Wales says. While Wikipedia has always
been a nonprofit, Wikiasari will be for-profit, but Wales points to the
success of Red Hat as proof that contributors will not be alienated by
being asked to help a company make money: "It's all about free licensing
and sharing your work with others. [Contributors] don't care about people
making money; they care about people taking their work and locking it up."
The idea of using human intelligence in a search tool is not a new one:
StumbleUpon allows users to see which sites have been rated favorably by
users of other search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or eventually
Wikiasari.
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Grid Computing Moves From Research to Industry
Cordis News Service (12/21/06)
The 3rd "GRIDS@WORK" event was held in Sophia Antipolis, France, from Nov.
27 to Dec. 1, hosting over 200 delegates from 25 countries who discussed
industrial requirements concerning the implementation of grids as the
driving force behind tomorrow's "network-of-networks." The event was put
together by ETSI, INRIA, the European Network of Excellence CoreGRID, and
ECRIM, who led the event. The central theme of the GRIDS@WORK week was how
grids will be central to the creation of jobs and commercial products that
target the enterprise market, promoting grid sharing initiatives that will
establish a service-oriented infrastructure for business, industry, and
society that is similar to a utility. Franco Accordino of the European
Commission said, "Now we are in an evolutionary phase where industrial
partnerships have been established to exploit the economic potential of the
grid beyond research labs." The ETSI GRID Technical Committee has taken up
the task of setting formal standards for Europe and testing specifications
for grid interoperability. Many involved predict that Europe's
advancements in the use of grids will serve as a "lighthouse" for the rest
of the world. ECRIM's Bruno Le Dantec, head of CoreGRID's Administrative
and Financial Coordination, said, "Through the organization of such an
event, our Network of Excellence is advancing further towards sustainable
integration by involving industrial stakeholders in defining strategies to
achieve economic impact, becoming the European-wide research laboratory in
distributed grid, peer-to-peer, and service-oriented technologies."
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Brazil Makes Strides in Software
OhmyNews International (12/22/06) Rix, Antonio Carlos
Brazil is experiencing significant growth in its international software
trade, and hopes to continue increasing its global standing in the field.
Not only are many Brazilian software companies exporting, but multinational
companies are investing in the nation: IBM has opened development offices
in there, and Dell, Motorola, and Hewlett-Packard, among others, have R&D
facilities in Brazil, according to Eduardo Victor, director of a Brazilian
software company specializing in foreign trade operations. Victor also
points out that Brazil produces world-class banking software, which, along
with outsourcing, is the country's leading software export. He suggests an
engineering exchange program that would benefit Brazil, other participating
nations, and the engineers themselves; he is currently looking for people
interested in the program. Victor and co-worker Menotti Franceschini say
that Brazil has many universities with quality software engineering and
telecommunication departments. They say the country is also full of "good
professionals" and has "a stable economy now, and very competitive
costs."
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Lessons for the Mentor
CIO Australia (12/11/06) Kunkel, Barbara
Barbara Kunkel, CIO of a national law firm and member of the CIO Executive
Council, understands the need to help young people interested in IT develop
their potential, and has created a summer university internship program to
provide much-needed resources to her department, while helping young women
get a foothold in IT. She lists five lessons she has learned from her work
with the interns: Assignments given to interns must be clearly connected
to the overall work environment and objectives so interns are constantly
reminded that their work makes a difference; teams are preferable to
working alone for interns; interns will get more out of their work if they
are challenged to think creatively; communication is a top priority, as
young people respond to feedback; and a social environment in the work
experience is extremely important. Kunkel used these concepts to sculpt a
"work curriculum," similar to that of a college course. By linking
assignments with objectives, she could see the interns' confidence and
creativity flourishing, despite their being intimidated by the scope of the
task set in front of them. Each week Kunkel met with interns to talk about
expectations. Kunkel also demanded communication from the interns in the
form of a weekly email, discussing their current assignment, as well as
emails introducing themselves to the entire IT department. She claims her
experience proves that effective mentoring is an undeniable way to nurture
talent, calling it "one of the highlights of my career."
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Making the Move to Multicore
SD Times (12/15/06)No. 164, P. 22; Morgan, Lisa L.
Designers of embedded and enterprise systems are interested in multicore
architectures, which offer less power consumption and heat dissipation
because multicore processors function at lower frequencies than unicore
processors. Other advantages of a multicore architecture include faster
speed, parallelism, and lower hardware and cooling costs. Most RTOS
vendors support both Asymmetric Multiprocessing (AMP) and Symmetric
Multiprocessing (SMP), while some blend the best features of AMP and SMP in
a third mode known as Bound Multiprocessing (BMP). SMP's chief advantage
is higher processing power than unicore processors, and small-scale
embedded systems in need of a performance upgrade are best suited for SMP,
according to Green Hills Software CTO David Kleidermacher. On the other
hand, Wind River Systems CTO Tomas Evensen says SMP's ability to control
all cores with just one operating system is ideal for larger enterprise
systems, and he expects more AMP systems to penetrate the embedded domain
because of their suitability for dedicated tasks. AMP allows the
dedication of OSes, tasks, and peripheral usage to a single core on an
as-needed basis, which some say simplifies the move from unicore to
multicore designs in terms of debugging. BMP, meanwhile, can facilitate
control of all cores by one OS while simultaneously enabling the dedication
of tasks or resources to specific cores, which reduces overhead and boosts
performance. Evensen says the mode varies for each application.
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Old File Formats Battle Extinction Threat
Techworld (12/19/06) Mellor, Chris
Several national libraries, research institutes, and IBM and Microsoft
have formed Preservation and Long-tern Access through NETworked Solutions
(PLANETS), with European Union financial support, to prevent a threatened
vanishing of electronic document file formats that have fallen out of use.
If the problem is not addressed soon, documents written in old applications
will no longer be readable. Adam Farquhar, head of e-architecture at the
British Library, which is leading the PLANETS Project, says, "As past and
current computer hardware and software becomes obsolete, digital
information reliant on this technology becomes increasingly hard to find,
view, search and re-use. There is a growing consensus on the need to act
now to avoid a gaping hole in our cultural and scientific record." PLANETS
estimates that out of the 100 million documents produced in the EU each
year that are worth saving, 2 million are in formats that are at risk of
being lost, which means that millions of Euros worth of information is at
risk. The IBM concept of a Universal Virtual Computer is being considered
by PLANETS. The UVC is based on a paper by Raymond Lorie of IBM's Almaden
Research Center, which states that "an application program written today
would generate a data file, which is archived for the future. In order for
the file to be understood at a later date, a program P would also be
archived, which can decode the data and present it to the client in an
understandable form. Program P would be written for a UVC machine. ... In
the future, the UVC Interpreter interprets the UVC instructions that
emulate the old instructions; that emulation essentially produces an
equivalent of the old machine, which then executes the original application
code. The execution yields the same results as the original program." The
UVC offers a platform independent layer that would assure that the programs
developed for it would run anytime, past or future.
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Work-Life Balance
Economist (12/19/06) Vol. 381, No. 8509, P. 97
Many organizations are coming to the realization that some Internet-based
services created by the consumer technology industry are more capable of
meeting their needs than those developed by their own IT departments.
Employees have been using services such as Google Mail and Skype for some
time, often against company regulations; but now these services for which
no training is needed are being condoned and even promoted for their
superior usefulness. A huge company such as Google is far more capable of
making improvements on its Web-based software than an in-house IT staff,
explains Arizona State head of IT Adrian Sannier, who has begun allowing
students to take their "asu.edu" addresses to Gmail. He compares the
advantage offered by Google's software to "receiving technology from an
advanced civilization." Students can share calendars and coursework using
the online word processing and spreadsheet tools offered by Google, and the
only cost for the school is for support. Security is also an incentive to
defer to Google, despite fears of placing data in the hands of another
party: Sannier says he would only be able to have a staff of 30 dedicated
to security, while "Google has an army; all of their business fails if they
are unable to preserve security and privacy." A bundle known as "Google
Apps for Your Domain," which includes a calendar and instant messaging, is
currently in the beta-test stage, but Google enterprise division boss Dave
Girouard claims that "tens of thousands" of organizations have expressed
interest in replacing some of their current software systems with the
suite. Though many companies will probably keep "mission critical"
software in-house for the time being, some experts point out that many
security threats are simply a result of traditional software firms being
afraid of losing business.
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