Terry Calhoun, IT Trends Commentator
Society for College and University Planning (SCUP)
University of Michigan

Welcome to Your Weekly Paradigm Shift: Very Large "Free" Web E-Mail

This week I asked J'e St Sauver to give us his take on the implications of Google's Gmail for higher education institutions. He's done an excellent job of summarizing the pros and cons and suggesting some interesting twists to the implications.
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J'e St Sauver, Ph.D. (j'[email protected])

The folks at Google have turned their eye to free Web e-mail accounts, and in typical Google fashion, they're making quite a splash: each Gmail user gets a 1,000MB worth of disk space. To put that in perspective, if you're at a typical college or university, your university e-mail account probably has a quota of 50 to 100MB. Under some circumstances, a "mere" 50 to 100MB quota may be more than enough. For example, if you routinely download your e-mail to a PC using POP3, 50 to 100MB will probably be more than enough space to act as a buffer in the interval between downloads-you can do the bulk of your long term e-mail storage on your PC's large hard drive.
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Community-College Computer Systems At Risk, Audit Shows

Another continuation of a trend regarding interaction between auditors and IT staff, North Carolina authorities are pressing hard on poorly-secured community college computer systems to do better.
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E-Mail Down Since Memorial Day at Marshall University

Students who know how can have their e-mail redirected to an Outlook account, but most don't, so they're suffering as server problems with e-mail and calendaring plague Marshall U. (Registration required to read story)
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OSU to Pay Texas Tech $40,000

Oklahoma State University will pay Texas Tech a fee of $40K to license software mistakenly thought to have been open source.
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MSIE Loses One Percent Market Share Within a Month

This hardly dents MSIE's dominance, but the well-publicized security flaws could be pushing a trend that will shake up its market position.
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Geolocation - Another Privacy Worry

It takes a lot of work, but that's what we have computers for, right. By tracing data packets as they zip around the Internet and through routers, companies (and governments?) can marry zip codes with census data with *your* IP address? Gasp!
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Is Your Computer A Zombie?

Remember that old debate about whether to turn off your PC when you were using it, or not? Well, if you're a fan of SETI At Home and other similar distributed projects, you leave it on. But what if it becomes a zombie? Can you even tell?
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A PC Pioneer Decries the State of Computing

Alan Kay says: "The sad truth is that 20 years or so of commercialization have almost completely missed the point of what personal computing is about.
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"Cyber Corps" at Tulsa University

Tulsa University is one of 20 institutions offering Homeland Security-funded anti-cyberterrorism training, which comes with a $100k "full ride" for the students.
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The Rightness of Lightness

Some feel that the entire concept of a "laptop" computer is being warped by the preponderance of huge desktop replacement machines. (Registration required to read story)
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Mega Video Enables Virtual Window

Researchers at NASA and others have put together a camera and display system that captures and displays video at nearly human-visual-system resolution - 30 frames a second at 8.3M pixels.
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Bladen Community College Library Gets Federal Tech Grant

Bladen's Community College Library was awarded $11,565 from a federal Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grant by the State Library of North Carolina. According to the Bladen Journal, the federal LSTA funds will be used to upgrade computer workstations available for use by students, faculty and community patrons. A total of $4 million was awarded to libraries throughout North Carolina.
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