Industry Briefs
NEWS
SUN DEVELOPER CHANNEL G'ES LIVE.
Sun Microsystems recently ‘re-energized’
its focus on the developer community, and has announced that its
Sun
Developer Network Channel is live on the Net. The SDN Channel gives developers
access to Sun’s vast developer community (including the engineers at Sun)
for educational opportunities as well as free Java-related resources. The site
also features video interviews with Chris Melissinos, chief gaming officer at
Sun; Walter Hardy, president of
W.
Hardy Interactive; and other Sun executives and staff.
OODLES OF OODLES.
Launched this past fall,
Oodle
offers a search engine for local classifieds for colleges and universities, enabling
students to search over two million classified listings from popular Web sites
such as
Craigslist,
eBay,
and
Monster. In addition,
students can connect to classifieds from their local and campus newspapers.
HPCC SUPERCOMPUTING.
The College of Computing at
Georgia Tech has installed two
Dell
high-performance computing clusters (HPCC) at its campus. For projects that require
high processing power, the clusters can be joined to create a 192-node supercomputing
cluster capable of a theoretical maximum of 2.5 trillion floating-point operations
per second (TFLOPS), say Dell spokespeople. Georgia Tech researchers plan to use
the systems to study complex problems that include the simulation of aircraft
designs and design of computer chips.
DEFENDING THE NETWORK.
With more than 29,000 students, Northampton Community College
(PA) faces network security issues as do many other schools. The college chose
CounterPoint, a network-access-control solution from Mirage
Networks, to counteract the malicious attacks and threats to its network.
NCC selects a solution from Mirage Networks.
SECURING FILES.
A select few
Villanova University (PA) students recently participated
in a pilot program with
U-Vault,
an off-site data protection solution powered by
redBoomerang
from MCG Inc. With the U-Vault software, students can save schoolwork from their
computers, and be assured that their documents and data remain secure after the
software compresses and encrypts the data prior to sending it. The pilot will
expand throughout the 2005-2006 school year.
NEW HIGHER ED BIZ UNIT.
To serve the growing needs of higher ed institutions,
SunGard
has announced that effective Jan. 1, 2006, its SunGard BSR, SunGard Collegis,
and SunGard SCT business units are joining together to form SunGard Higher Education
Solutions. According to SunGard spokespeople, the formation of the new division
will better align the three significant assets that make up SunGard’s higher
education practice.
M&A, ETC.
ADDRESSING THE TECH GENDER GAP.
The
National Center for Women and
Information Technology and
Cisco
Systems have announced a partnership to help raise awareness of educational
and career opportunities for women in science, technology, math, and engineering—pointing
to research from the
Information
Technology Association of America that women now represent only about one
quarter of IT workers. Cisco reps will participate in NCWIT’s growing coalition
of more than 65 corporations, academic institutions, non-profit organizations,
and government agencies joined in a mission to achieve parity for women in the
workforce, say Cisco spokespeople.
