OPINION

Stop Wasting Your Time Making Filing and Deleting Decisions!

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

It’s been five years and, boy has a lot changed! Remember the Y2K scare, when thousands of people spent millions of hours feverishly working to stave off informational and economic disaster? Old guys who hadn’t coded in decades were paid huge sums to code once again in arcane languages, in order to upgrade software that was set to fail when the 1900s turned into the 2000s.

I thought at the time that the problem illustrated a certain, sometimes misguided, parsimony among techie geeks; one that in the 1970s and 1980s was surely justified but lost some steam in the 1990s and at the time of the Y2K scare had actually become a problem. By “problem” I mean that for me, it’s been years now that so many other people think it’s okay to look at my desktop and scream, or to criticize my “filing” behaviors, even though they work.

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IT NEWS

Study: Blog Creation, Readership Jumped in 2004

Readership jumped from 17 percent of US adults to 27 percent; authorship only grew from 5 percent to 7 percent. And only about 5 percent of Americans use RSS readers. (USA Today)
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Defining Google

"What began as a school project is now worth about as much as Ford and General Motors combined, thanks to a stock that has roughly doubled in price since the company went public last August." (cbsnews.com)
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PSU Drops Old Way of Identifying Students

Penn State has dropped the use of social security numbers as student identifiers. Some returning students were miffed that they had to get new photos taken for their ID cards. (PennLive.com)

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College Recruiters Lure Students with New Online Tool

Video clips, blogs, interrupted chats . . . frustrated with potential students' lack of response to e-mails, recruiters are pushing their use of Internet technologies to recruit. (New York Times)
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Students Uncover Dozens of UNIX Software Flaws

Students at the University of Illinois at Chicago, working with professor Daniel Bernstein, claim to have discovered 44 different security flaws in UNIX applications. (CNET News.com)
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The Shadow Internet

"The upper reaches of the network are a "darknet," hidden behind layers of security. The sites use a "bounce" to hide their IP address, and members can log in only from trusted IP addresses already on file. Most transmissions between sites use heavy-duty encryption. Finally, they continually change the usernames and passwords required to log in. Estimates say this media darknet distributes more than half a million movies every day. It's also, by any reading of the law, a vast criminal enterprise engaged in wholesale copyright infringement." (Wired.com)
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Do Cell Phones Damage Your Brain?

All research aside (after having been discussed), if there really is a problem with cell phones damaging your brain, you'd think neurosurgeons would not be using them. (USA Today)
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Penn State Adds Secure Wireless to 15 Buildings

The installation in December now covers the bulk of the College of Engineering, with the rest of the work to be completed during the spring. (Penn State Live)
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Name Change to ANGEL Learning

CyberLearning Labs Inc., developer of ANGEL/LMS has announced that it has changed its company name to ANGEL Learning, effective immediately.
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RESOURCES

Series on Cyber Crimes

A four-part series "examining criminal activity on the Internet and efforts to stop it." (TimesHerald.com)

Part 1: Cyber Crime & Punishment: Nefarious Characters Roam the Wild Wild Web

Part 2: Hard Drives, Hard Facts

Part 3: ID Theft Showing Increase

Part 4: Guarding the Network Gates

Faculty Guide for Moving Teaching and Learning to the Web, 2nd Edition

This publication from the League for Innovation in the Community College has
just been updated and revised, five years after its initial publication.
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DEALS, CONTRACTS, AWARDS

CSU-Long Beach Expands Net with 5G Wireless

California State University at Long Beach recently hired 5G Wireless Solutions to build out its campus-wide area network, which will eventually stretch over 323 acres and reach 84 buildings. According to 5G, the network will hinge on only four major access points situated on building rooftops, as compared to the more than 500 access points posed by competing vendors.
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Netopia Equips UNH-IOL with High-Throughput WiFi Routers

Netopia has equipped the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) with high-throughput wireless routing. Donated broadband routers will power WAN connectivity for the laboratory’s 802.11g-compatible network. (Business Wire)
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