Episode 0003, 03/12/2007
Welcome to Course Technology's CourseCast of the Month, Episode 3, for March, 2007.
This is Ken Baldauf with more technology news and information targeted at college students.
This CourseCast is brought to you by Course Technology. Check out www.course.com for innovative textbooks and creative electronic learning solutions for higher education.
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Our first story is based on articles in Computerworld and Wired and is entitled,
A Zettabyte of Data by 2010
Technology research firm IDC released the results of a study this week that sought to determine the total amount of digital data that has been generated. The last such study was conducted by the University of California, Berkeley in 2003, which estimated the world's total amount of digital data at 5 exabytes. What's an exabyte? Well, you know that a mega is a million and a giga is a billion. After that, a tera is a trillion, and a peta is a quadrillion. A quintillion, or a billion billion is an exa; that's a 1 followed 18 zeros.
IDC has calculated that with all of our digital communications, data files, photos, videos, Web pages, music files, and the many copies of files that propagate across our networks, the current total is around 161 exabytes of digital data. That's 32 times as much data as four years ago, and equal to 3 million times the information in all the books ever written, according to IDC. Talk about an information overload!
It used to be that businesses were responsible for the majority of our data generation. But, today, an increasing amount of our data is being generated for personal use. It's easy to see why, considering the size and abundance of digital video, photo, and music files. IDC predicts that by 2010, we will approach a zettabyte of data. You guessed it, a zettabyte follows an exabyte and is equal to sextillion bytes. There aren't enough storage devices in existence today to handle that much data. But, with new storage technologies being developed every day, it shouldn't be too much for us to store in 2010. The challenge will be in managing, organizing, and securing that much data.
By the way...do you know what comes after a zettabyte? Look up zetta (Z-E-T-T-A) at wikipedia.com to find out.
A zettabyte by 2010: Corporate data grows fiftyfold in three years (Computerworld)
Tech Researchers Calculate Digital Info (Wired)
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Our next story is based on articles in the New York Times and many other publications.
Bill Gates Addresses the Senate on Education
Yes, Bill Gates was in the news this week, but not to promote Microsoft Vista, but as the sole witness before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. The committee is working to strengthen American competitiveness in the global economy.
Bill Gates warned Congress that the ability of the U.S. to "remain a technology powerhouse" in the global arena is in jeopardy unless serious adjustments are made to our education system. “The U.S. cannot maintain its economic leadership unless our work force consists of people who have the knowledge and skills needed to drive innovation,” Gates said. “We simply cannot sustain an economy based on innovation unless our citizens are educated in math, science and engineering,” he said.
Mr. Gates, and others, are concerned by the sharp decline in undergraduate enrollments in computer science. Gates said the U.S. "cannot possibly sustain an economy founded on technology preeminence" if it doesn't have enough workers in these areas.
According to the Computing Research Association, the number of new undergraduate students who declared computer science majors in 2006 was half of what it was in the fall of 2000. To make matters worse, federal funding for basic research, the kind on which computer science departments depend, has been cut nearly in half over the past seven years.
Mr. Gates recommended that Congress award research grants of $500,000 each annually "to 200 of the most outstanding early-career researchers." He also recommended the creation of a "National Coordination Office for Research Infrastructure" to manage a centralized research infrastructure fund of $500 million a year.
Watch a Video of Bill Gates' Testimony Here
Gates Voices Concerns about U.S. Education (NY Times)
Gates testifies about declining enrollments, research funding (Computerworld)
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Hybrid Hard Drives have caught the attention of several news services this week.
You’ve heard a lot about hybrid vehicles in recent years, but how about hybrid hard drives? Samsung has built a hybrid drive that combines the best of two worlds: the speed of flash memory and the capacity of hard drives. Samsung's new MH80 2.5-inch drive pairs 256 MBs of flash memory, with a traditional 160 GB hard drive. The new hybrid drive is claimed to offer five times the reliability of conventional hard disks while allowing the computer to boot twice as quickly. It also reduces power consumption by 70-90 percent to allow laptops to run about 30 minutes longer. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to pop open your notebook in lecture and start typing right away? And to have your notebook last through all of your daily classes without needing a charge? Hybrid hard drives will take us a big step closer to that reality.
Both Apple and LG are reported to have hybrid drive notebooks in the works for release later this year.
The hybrid race is on: Apple and LG plan flash laptops (Computerworld)
Apple may use flash memory for notebooks: analyst (Reuters)
LG's R400 hybrid hard drive laptop outed (Engadget)
Samsung's Hybrid Hard Drive (HHD) (Engadget)
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Our next story comes from Technology Review and is entitled...
Drive-by Pharming?
Most everyone knows about Phishing scams; the fraudulent e-mail that lures the unsuspecting to fake Web sites in an attempt to trick them into supplying private and valuable information to identity thieves. Fishing scams are so prevalent that enlightened users no longer trust any link sent to them through e-mail. They are also impacting e-commerce. At the Visa Security Summit this week, eBay chief, Meg Whitman, stated that phishers pose one of the biggest threats to the customer trust that has sustained the auction giant.
As companies work to put an end to Phishing, the next threat looms on the horizon: pharming. Like Phishing, pharming is spelled with a P-H. Pharming is even more dangerous than phishing in that routers or domain name servers are hacked and compromised to hijack users to phony Web sites. For example, you could type your bank's address into your browser, but when your request hits the compromised router, you’re sent to a phony site designed to steal your bank username and password.
Drive-by Pharming is a type of pharming that attacks home wireless routers. It takes advantage of the fact that most home users do not take the extra steps required to secure their wireless router. In this scheme, when a user visits a malicious Web site, an attacker is able to remotely change the DNS settings on the home wireless router and reroute requests for legitimate sites to bogus sites designed to steal login information.
In order to protect yourself from phishing and pharming, never click links sent to you through email, and make sure to change the password on your home wireless router.
eBay CEO: Phishers threaten user trust (C|net)
Millions Vulnerable to New Hack Attack (NewsFactor)
Rerouting the Router (Technology Review)
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We'll wrap up this CourseCast with three breif stories on two hot topics: online video and cell phone technologies.
Presidential Candidates flock on YouTube
Nine presidential hopefuls are using youtube to communicate their message to the public. View their vidoes yourself at www.youtube.com/youchoose.
U.S. presidential hopefuls flock to YouTube (Reuters)
Verizon Adds Live TV
This week Verizon wireless offers a new option to its cell phone customers: liveTV! The subscription-based service costs $15 per month and provides live and time-shifted programming from CBS Mobile, ESPN, Fox Mobile, NBC 2Go and NBC News 2Go, in addition to Viacom's MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon.
Verizon Adds Live TV to Mobile Offerings (ClickZ)
Verizon Flips the Switch on Mobile TV (NewsFactor)
The Google Phone?
A recent Job posting at Google suggests that Google may be thinking about entering the cell phone market. The Ad states that "Google is experimenting with a few wireless communications systems, including some completely novel concepts". It goes on to claim that the research is "aimed at nothing less than making the entire world's information accessible from anywhere for free." Sounds good to me!
Does Google have a mobile phone in the works? (Computerworld)
Google May Be Working on Mobile Phone (Yahoo! News)
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Well that's it for this month’s CourseCast. Links to this month's stories and many more news and information resources are provided at the CourseCast Web site accessible from www.course.com. Until next time have a great month and be sure to take advantage of the Power of Technology!