11/27/2007
It just got a little easier for developers using Microsoft's .NET Framework technology and SharePoint to integrate their .NET applications with IBM's Java-based portal technology. In a global reseller deal, IBM agreed to sell Mainsoft Corp.'s .NET Extensions solution with the IBM WebSphere Portal solution.
11/27/2007
Bryant University in Smithfield, RI is expanding its emergency notification system for students, staff, and faculty. The university has adapted its Campus Manager NAC solution to provide alerts to its campus population through the system's messaging capability. The NAC-based solution is a supplement to the university's existing notification system, which includes voice and e-mail alerts.
11/27/2007
San Francisco-based Coverity Inc. has expanded its static source-code analysis scanning solution. The solution now supports Java-based open source software (OSS) projects. Developers can check their OSS Java applications for free using Coverity's hosted solution. The solution scans applications and points out security and quality problems in the code without actually running the tested application.
11/26/2007
Denton, TX-based eInstruction today signed a definitive agreement to acquire Interwrite Learning. Both companies develop classroom technologies for K-12 and higher education environments, including whiteboards and student response systems and software. The combined company will go by the name of eInstruction.
11/26/2007
San Francisco-based GoldenGate Software is offering a new version of its database optimization solution. Version 9.5 adds improvements to the company's Transactional Data Management solution. It's typically used by enterprises that want high-availability data or disaster assurance protection. The solution also lets users move data across different databases in real time, according to company literature.
11/26/2007
Rutgers University will design and deploy a wireless network that will connect its Division of Public Safety's 14 patrol vehicles.
11/21/2007
The non-profit National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI) will award $25 million to 12 universities in the United States in an effort to boost the number of teachers with "enhanced math and science teaching skills." The grants will be awarded to universities whose teacher preparation programs are modeled after the UTeach program at the University of Texas at Austin--a program that has doubled the number of math and science majors being certified at the university.
11/21/2007
Network Access Control systems from maker Mirage Networks can now recognize and isolate the Storm Worm, and variants thereof. The Storm Worm incorporates infected computers into a global, distributed botnet estimated to range in size anywhere between 250,000 and 10 million infected computers.
11/20/2007
Continuing and professional education (CPE) sites are somewhat effective at helping students with their enrollment decisions, but they're lacking in some key functionality areas: content, search capabilities, and multimedia. In the second of its three-part series of research reports, "Optimizing School Web Sites as a Marketing and Recruitment Tool," education consultancy Eduventures found that prospective continuing education students in large part think these sites come up short in areas they consider crucial and made specific recommendations for the types of content that should be added to these sites to boost their effectiveness.
11/20/2007
University researchers in the United States and the U.K. have started collaborating with IBM to develop open-source software solutions aimed at bringing accessibility to older workers to "help them adapt to and remain productive in the changing workplace of the 21st century," according to information released late last week by IBM. The effort is part of IBM's Open Collaborative Research initiative, which creates partnerships with universities for the purpose of developing and releasing open-source tools to the public.
11/20/2007
Red Hat recently announced an agreement with Platform Computing to support high-performance computing (HPC) solutions. HPC is a form of distributed computing where multiple processors are linked together to act as a single system. This type of system uses an array of commercial-grade processors to create a system that has processing speeds comparable with today's fastest supercomputers.
11/19/2007
The nonprofit OASIS standards group has created a technical committee in support of the Service Data Objects (SDO) specification at OASIS. The SDO spec, which is a subset of the Service Component Architecture (SCA) spec, aims at simplifying data handling in service-oriented architectures (SOAs).
11/19/2007
This year's Oracle OpenWorld user conference, which wrapped up Nov. 15 in San Francisco, drew an estimated 43,000 attendees for five days of keynotes, technical sessions, vendor exhibits and rock 'n' roll.
11/19/2007
Check Point Software Technologies today rolled out new versions of its Unified Threat Management appliances and software. The updates expand the range of protection the systems offer for e-mail, including adding a second layer of virus/malware protection and adding enhancements to spam filtering.
11/16/2007
Responding to a soon-to-be released study revealing that as many as a half a million database servers aren't protected by firewalls, security experts contend the findings constitute a call to action for security pros and database administrators everywhere.
11/16/2007
Microsoft took the next step into the arena of high-performance computing (HPC) Nov. 13 when it announced the release of the first beta of Windows HPC Server 2008, the successor to Compute Cluster Server 2003.
11/15/2007
The Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) is expanding its e-learning activities by developing online and hybrid programs in health care. The move will help alleviate what the college described as a "backlog of potential students who previously were prevented from enrolling due to limited classroom space." The initiative includes new online nursing, paramedic, and medical lab technician programs.
11/15/2007
Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz gave attendees at the annual Oracle OpenWorld conference a look at his company's new virtualization management platform. First announced last September, the Sun xVM is built on the Xen open source hypervisor (the Sun xVM Server) and includes the xVM Ops Center virtualization management tool. The xVM supports Windows, Red Hat Linux, and Solaris as guest operating systems.
11/15/2007
George Washington University is deploying GW Alert, a system based on ActiveAccess from BIA Information Network, a private label campus security application installed on student, staff and faculty computers to alert students to campus safety events.
11/15/2007
Nortel has launched an initiative to use service-oriented architecture (SOA) technology to more flexibly support the communications needs of enterprises and organizations. A number of plans and ideas are associated with the initiative, which Nortel calls "Communications Enablement."
11/14/2007
Researchers in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a new Web-based technology that's designed to take recorded classroom lectures to the next level. The technology, developed by a team led by MIT's Regina Barzilay and James Glass, provides search functionality for classroom video recordings. At present, the prototype only works with MIT's online lectures made available to the public through the university's OpenCourseWare initiative, but it may be made available to other institutions in the future.
11/14/2007
With this week's launch of the StorageTek 5800, Sun is making its "Honeycomb" technology generally available to all customers.
11/14/2007
As part of a system-wide migration of administrative technologies, the University of Colorado (CU) is switching out its current student information system in favor of an Oracle solution and also adopting Oracle SOA Suite to build a service-oriented architecture in an effort to improve IT efficiency. According to CIBER Enterprise Solutions, which worked with Oracle Consulting on the project, this marks one of the first implementations of the Oracle SOA Suite in higher education.
11/13/2007
Carnegie Mellon University will become the first higher education institution to work with Yahoo!'s M45, a new project announced yesterday by the Internet firm designed to advance distributed computing research and software development. The program, which leverages the Apache Software Foundation's open-source Hadoop, will allow researchers to test software running on a Yahoo!-provided 4,000-processor supercomputer.
11/13/2007
Varnished wood. Rosin and bow strings. Well cared for reeds. These are the images that spring to mind when one thinks of classical music--a realm seemingly rooted in tradition and antiquity--but that's not the case at the Berklee College of Music.