Wall Street's collapse may be computer science's gain

The collapse of Wall Street may help make computer science and IT careers attractive to students who abandoned these fields in droves after the pop of the last big bubble, the dot-com bust of 2001.

William Dally, chairman of the computer science department at Stanford University, said that for the last several years, he has watched some students interested in technology go into banking and finance because those fields could be more lucrative.

"Many thought they could make more money in hedge funds," Dally said. He said students are returning to computer science because they like the field and not because it can necessarily make them rich.

John Gallaugher, associate professor of information systems in the Carroll School of Management at Boston College, said he's already seeing a shift in student interest.

"Students have commented to me and written on their course wikis that they're considering changing from finance [majors], both based on the appeal of IS and concern over availability of finance jobs" in the future, Gallaugher said.

After the dot-com bust, computer science enrollments began declining, reaching a low of 8,021 last year from 14,185 in 2003-2004, according to the Computing Research Association (CRA) in Washington, which tracks year-over-year enrollment and graduate trends at 170 Ph.D.-granting institutions.

"Current economic conditions seem to impact the choice that students make in the majors they choose -- that has been true for computer science," said Jay Vegso, a CRA analyst who studies computer science enrollment trends. "Students who are now choosing majors might be looking for safer alternatives," he said, and IT may be a safer alternative.

The dot-com era was a wonderful time to be young, computer-savvy and in search of stock-option riches. Wall Street poured billions of dollars into hundreds of companies that were making little or no money. For instance, Webvan Group Inc., a grocery delivery firm in Foster City, Calif., that was founded in 1997, had so much money that it bought a rival, HomeGrocer, in 2000 for $1.2 billion in stock. Webvan ended in Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2001.

If the dot-com meltdown wasn't enough, offshore outsourcing also scared away students from technology. In 2004, Carly Fiorina, then CEO of Hewlett-Packard Co., summed up the offshore trend this way: "There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore." Fiorina is now an adviser to Republican Sen. John McCain in his bid for the White House.

Today, companies are suffering from a shortage of technology professionals and baby boomer retirements will only add to the problem.

"The pipeline is inadequate for IT professionals," said Jerry Luftman, who is involved in academics and business as associate dean at the Stevens Institute of Technology's Howe School of Technology Management in Hoboken, N.J., and vice president for academic affairs at the Society for Information Management in Chicago.

The big difference between today and the heyday period of the late 1990s is the type of student that businesses need, Luftman said. Technical skills are still important, but businesses also want to hire students with management and industry training, strong communications abilities, marketing and negotiation skills, he said.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, IT jobs are among the fastest growing. On the top of the bureau's list of fast-growing career areas is network systems and data communications analysts, which it is forecasting will grow from 262,000 jobs in 2006 to 402,000 jobs by 2008, a 53% increase. Computer software engineers, applications, is expected to increase from 507,000 to 733,000 or 45%; while computer scientists and database administrators will rise from 542,000 to 742,000, a 37% increase.

Randal Bryant, dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said his school saw student applications drop to a low of 1,700 from a peak of 3,200 in 2001 at the end of the dot-com boom.

But the situation has been turning around in the past few years, with 2,300 applications coming in last year, he said.

Bryant said he expects that the troubles on Wall Street will likely influence some students to switch majors in the coming months from business to other fields, including computer science. He also urges caution to those students.

"I like to tell students that if you make your career choice that quickly based on what is hottest this month, you're going to be graduating in four years and that field may not be hot anymore," Bryant said. "I tell them to major in something they like and not what's a likely short-term fluctuation in the job market."

"Our peak at the dot-com [period] included people in computer science who had no particular aptitude in it, but they thought they'd get rich," he said.

Microsoft unveils new Visual Studio version

Microsoft Corp. today unveiled the next version of its Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE) and detailed new features of its Visual Studio Team System (VSTS).

Microsoft did not disclose a release date for the updated tool set, called Visual Studio 2010. However, the company did outline the major themes of the new release and described several new application life-cycle management (ALM) tools that will be part of VSTS 2010, which is code-named "Rosario."

The new version of the developer tool set updates Visual Studio 2008, which was made generally available in January of this year. Microsoft released the first service pack for Visual Studio 2008 last month.

Microsoft said it built Visual Studio 2010 to incorporate what the company called its five major themes -- democratized ALM, riding the next platform wave, delighting developers, breakthrough departmental apps and enabling emerging trends.

As part of the ALM focus for VSTS, Microsoft said it plans to break down the walls that now exist between different developer roles in the development life cycle, such as architects, developers and testers.

Dave Mendlen, Microsoft's director of developer marketing, said VSTS 2010 will also allow teams to configure and adopt any flavor of the Agile development process. In addition, the software is aimed at allowing both technical and nontechnical users to create and use models to work together and graphically define software functionality, the company added.

For example, Mendlen added, the new version of VSTS expands on the notion of a continuous build, which was first introduced in VS 2008 to reduce the chances that developers will "break the build" by checking in bad code. The new tool set has incorporated workflow into the continuous build effort so that an organization can customize development processes, added Cameron Skinner, product manager of VSTS.

For example, he said, a company can create diagrams that show source code that has been inspected against defined restraints, or rules a company sets up to determine if developers are following sound architectural principles. "If a rule is violated … that information is surfaced to you and you can act on it," Skinner said. "We're trying to take the architectural diagrams and get them living and breathing throughout the entire life cycle for the team."

Another new tool, called Architectural Explorer, allows architects to build a graphical model that shows relationships and dependencies of code. This type of model can more easily show developers why certain restrictions are in place and how changes they make may affect other aspects of development, Mendlen said. The new version will support both the Unified Modeling Language and Domain Specific Language.

VSTS 2010 also includes a significant focus on testing. For example, there are new features to eliminate bugs that can't be reproduced and features to ensure that all code changes are tested properly, Microsoft said.

The new version also includes a tool to help developers understand the impact of test cases related to the source code being modified. As a developer makes changes, a window appears that shows the tests that would be impacted by those changes.

Developers and testers often have an adversarial relationship because a tester will find a bug and throw it back to a developer who has to stop work, revert back to that version of the code and try to reproduce what the tester has found. Because it can be difficult for a developer to reproduce that bug, they sometimes dismiss its existence, Mendlen said. The new tool set will include what Microsoft calls "TiVo for debugging," or a way for a developer to see what Microsoft describes as a video of the tester discovering the bug.

"We're actually capturing what is happening during the test process -- the entire state of the machine," Mendlen added. "The developer can watch the video and ... running this tool will emulate the experience of debugging."

A debugging log will put the IDE into a debugging state as if the developer is running the application itself, but the developer actually will only be replaying the debugging log, he noted.

Microsoft also announced today that VSTS 2010 will combine the current development and database editions in VSTS 2008 into a unified VSTS Development and Database product.

Existing Microsoft software assurance customers who currently own Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition or Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition will receive several products starting Oct. 1. The tools, distributed without charge, include the following:

• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition
• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition
• Visual Studio 2005 Team System for Software Developers
• Visual Studio 2005 Team System for Database Professionals

Microsoft, Washington state to sue 'scareware' pushers

Microsoft and Washington state are cracking down on scammers who bombard computer users with fake warning messages in the hope of selling them useless software.

On Monday, the state's attorney general and lawyers from Microsoft's Internet Safety Enforcement team will announce several lawsuits against so-called "scareware" vendors, who are being charged under Washington's Computer Spyware Act.

The vendors targeted by the lawsuits are not being named until Monday, but the attorney general's office referred to them in a media alert sent out Friday as "aggressive marketers of scareware -- useless computer programs that bilk consumers by using pop-up ads to warn about nonexistent, yet urgent-sounding computer flaws."

This is not the first time Microsoft and Washington's attorney general have teamed up to fight scareware. In 2005, they jointly sued Secure Computer, a security software company they accused of using fake error messages to scare users into buying its Spyware Cleaner software. Secure Computer eventually paid $1 million to settle the charges.

Washington's attorney general has also brought lawsuits against companies such as Securelink Networks and High Falls Media, as well as the makers of a product called QuickShield, all of which were accused of marketing their products using deceptive techniques such as fake alert messages.

Fake alert messages can be effective. Earlier this week, researchers at North Carolina State University reported that computer users are highly likely to click on fake Windows error messages. In their study, nearly two-thirds of respondents clicked "OK" when presented with a phony Windows pop-up message.

The use of these fake messages is a growing problem on the Internet, said Katherine Tassi, Washington's assistant attorney general, in an interview earlier this week. Scammers are "getting more and more creative, and putting more and more effort into making them look like security messages," she said.

The most prevalent scareware program in circulation today is software called Antivirus XP 2008, according to Alex Eckelberry, president of Sunbelt Software. Often installed on a PC without proper notification, the software bombards victims with fake security warnings, trying to convince them to buy worthless programs that sometimes even harm their PCs

Federal grand jury meets on Palin hacking case

As a federal grand jury convened to hear testimony about the hack of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's e-mail account, the lawyer representing the college student suspected of accessing Palin's messages called his client "a decent and intelligent young man" in a statement issued to the media today.

"The Kernell family wants to do the right thing, and they want what is best for their son," said Wade Davies, a partner in the Knoxville, Tenn., firm of Ritchie, Dillard & Davies PC, in the statement. "We are confident that the truth will emerge as we go through the process. David is a decent and intelligent young man, and I look forward to assisting him during this difficult period."

Meanwhile, a Chattanooga, Tenn., newspaper reported today that a grand jury had convened at the federal court there, but had not filed any indictments.

The Chattanooga Times Free Press said the grand jury met this morning, when the three roommates of David Kernell, 20, of Knoxville, appeared. The session ended without an indictment, said the paper, whose Web site was offline as of 3 p.m. Eastern time.

Kernell, a student at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, was originally linked to last week's hack of Palin's Yahoo Mail account by self-appointed sleuths on blogs and message boards after someone identified only as "Rubico" posted a message claiming to have accessed Palin's mail. Others subsequently connected the Rubico handle to the e-mail address "rubico10@yahoo.com," which was in turn linked to Kernell.

Yesterday, the webmaster of a Georgia-based proxy service confirmed that his server logs showed the intruder used an IP address belonging to an Illinois Internet service provider that serves the Knoxville apartment complex where Kernell lives.

Early Sunday, FBI agents searched Kernell's apartment and served his roommates with subpoenas to appear at the Chattanooga grand jury.

Kernell is the son of Mike Kernell, a longtime Democratic state representative from Memphis.

Amazon's developer cloud service stumbles

Amazon.com Inc.'s hosted Simple Queue Service (SQS) has encountered performance problems this month that have prompted users to question its overall stability and its viability for commercial applications.

The latest incident occurred on Monday, when SQS experienced increased error rates for about 35 minutes after an overloaded router triggered increased packet loss, according to Amazon's Service Health Dashboard for its Amazon Web Services cloud computing offerings.

Between Sept. 9 and 11, increased error rates also rocked SQS, and although Amazon restored the service's stability, the company didn't fully diagnose and fix the problem until Sept. 18.

"The specific change we rolled out is in the way we handle garbage collection in the back-end message nodes. With the removal of this root cause, the Amazon SQS issues of Sept. 9 to 11 have been addressed," Amazon wrote in the service dashboard on Sept. 19, referring to a system upgrade it had performed the day before.

In addition, SQS spit out an assortment of errors over several days in late August and early September, a situation that Amazon resolved on Sept. 4, according to postings from SQS users and Amazon representatives in this thread in the service's official discussion forum.

Since last week, some SQS users have been sounding off on another thread titled "SQS is way too unreliable, what's going on?"

"This is nowhere near the kind of reliability I need from a service that I'm using as part of a production app. Can we get some sort of statement on what's going on? Without some kind of assurance that this will be resolved very soon, I can't continue to use it," an SQS user identified as Paul Dowman wrote last week.

Amazon didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Amazon's S3 cloud-based storage service reported outages earlier this year, in February and again in July.

SQS is one of the hosted services that Amazon.com provides to developers via its Amazon Web Services (AWS) suite of generic computing, payment, billing, fulfillment and Web-search services. SQS is a hosted queue for storing messages that are in transit between computers. Developers can use it to move data among distributed components of their applications, according to the company.

AWS is part of a popular trend toward cloud-computing offerings in which vendors provide applications and IT infrastructure services via the Internet from their own data centers.

Cloud-based services and software offer customers an alternative to installing hardware and software on their own premises. In theory, following this cloud model can reduce hardware provisioning costs for clients and free them from maintenance responsibilities.

However, a major objection to cloud computing is the performance and availability of the services. If something fails in the vendor's data center, there is little for customers to do but sit and wait for a solution while fielding end-user complaints.

Microsoft leads effort to solve photo metadata problem

Have you ever been vexed to find that the titles, keywords or ratings you painstakingly entered to organize your digital photo collection disappear when you move them from one software (or service) to another?

Or were you puzzled when the data created when you originally took the photo, such as the exposure, date/time or GPS location end up garbled or missing?

That's not surprising, according to Josh Weisberg, director of Microsoft Corp.'s rich media group. Despite prior standardization efforts, interoperability of photo metadata remains dismal.

"There are several existing standards, but they aren't talking to each other," he said.

Those efforts have failed, he said, because they have been led by vendors in one link of the digital photography chain -- camera manufacturers, or photo software makers -- that didn't consider the needs of other parties.

As a result, there are six different standards for storing something seemingly as simple as photo captions, he said.

Microsoft is leading an effort to fix this by creating a single specification that will, it is hoped, eventually unify all of the existing standards out there.

Announced today at the Photokina trade show in Cologne, Germany, the Metadata Working Group has six corporate members, all leading players in their respective areas of imaging, including Adobe Systems Inc., Apple Inc., Canon Inc., Sony Corp., Nokia and Microsoft.

So far, the group, led by Weisberg, has put out guidelines on how to treat eight key metadata fields. The guidelines are aimed at makers of cameras and cameraphones, software vendors, and Web services and search engines such as Flickr and Google.

They include fields for keywords, descriptions, date and time, location (with different fields for where the photographer was and where the subject was), orientation (i.e. is the photo meant to be displayed vertically or horizontally), rating, copyright and creator.

The guidelines also ask device and software makers to ensure that no metadata is ever deleted without explicitly asking the user, Weisberg said.

The specifications do not create new standards, but build on top of existing ones such as Adobe's XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) or Exif (Exchangeable Image File).

In other areas, such as office documents, the trend is to use human-readable XML formats such as Office Open XML (OOXML) and OpenDocument Format (ODF), and not to store metadata in hard-coded fields but to embed it -- albeit invisibly -- along with the text or data.

Why not similarly embed these data fields in free-flowing XML and require software and services and search engines to figure out how to pull it out?

While that may work for "ad hoc" data such as captions or tags, Weisberg said that approach isn't up to snuff for highly technical, mathematical data such as GPS coordinates, altitude readings or compass headings. It would create more work for developers, who "would need to write a bunch of code to interpret that data," he said.

Standardizing the metadata doesn't mean that photographers will need to use all of the fields. Photographers may want to omit geographical tags, especially of children's photos, for privacy reasons.

There are no fees or royalties for vendors that want to ensure their products adhere to the specification, Weisberg said. Adhering to the standard is voluntary for any vendor, he explained, noting that attempting to force vendors to cooperate, even if it would be good for consumers, would likely trigger antitrust concerns.

But "there's no licensing cost and not a dramatic amount of engineering work. What's the downside of supporting it?" he asked, although he admitted that it will likely be several years before products supporting the guidelines begin to appear.

There's other work to be done. Only eight fields have been standardized. The Metadata Working Group could eventually rule on hundreds of them.

These guidelines today only apply to digital photos in the JPEG, TIFF and Adobe Photoshop PSD file formats. They do not yet apply to Raw, the format of choice for pro photographers, and, increasingly, advanced amateur photographers. The problem there, Weisberg said, is that there are multiple Raw formats, rather than a single industry one.

The group would like to someday take its specification to a standards body, such as ISO, but it has no timetable for doing so, he said.

Also, some key players haven't joined the Metadata Working Group. Both Yahoo Inc., which owns Flickr, and Google Inc. were invited, but they declined to join, Weisberg said.

Mozilla reacts to rivals with plans to beef up Firefox 3.1

Mozilla Corp. will try to squeeze more into Firefox 3.1, in part as a reaction to rival browsers from Microsoft and Google, the company's chief engineer said today.

"Looking at where we are and the competitive browser landscape, we felt we would be doing a better job if we had another four to five weeks," said Mike Shaver, Mozilla's interim vice president of engineering.

Shaver wasn't sure what impact, if any, the additional work would have on Firefox 3.1's final release date, which Mozilla had targeted as late 2008 or early 2009. "It's too early to know what affect it will have," he said. "But that [late 2008/early 2009 time frame] is still what we're looking at."

In a lengthy post to the Mozilla.dev.planning message forum last week, Shaver spelled out what Mozilla hopes to do. There, he listed several features that would benefit from "one more 'feature cycle' " of development, including TraceMonkey, the browser's revamped JavaScript engine, and a privacy mode that was only recently slated for Firefox 3.1.

In an interview today, Shaver said the move was in part due to faster-than-expected progress on some features, such as extending TraceMonkey's capabilities into other areas of the Firefox code. "We saw we could apply those [TraceMonkey] techniques to performance in other areas, like [Document Object Model]. We think if we could bang on this a little longer, we would get more out of this," he said.

The desire to push TraceMonkey development wasn't a reaction to Chrome, the beta browser Google Inc. released two weeks ago. "That's not a reactive thing, it's just the next logical step," Shaver said, noting that Mozilla started work on TraceMonkey more than two months before Google announced Chrome.

But Shaver acknowledged that some of the extra work Mozilla would like to put into Firefox 3.1 is being prompted by competitive pressure. "We're not blind to the competitive landscape," he said. "We're watching other browsers as much as they're watching us."

He cited Mozilla's plans for a Firefox privacy mode as an example. Both Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer 8, currently in beta, and Google's Chrome have tools that limit or eliminate what those browsers record during their travels.

"There's a difference between when just one browser has a feature and when it's in several," said Shaver. "There are user expectations."

Among the features of a Firefox privacy mode that Shaver would like to squeeze into 3.1 is one that would let users wipe surfing traces retroactively. "It would be nice if you could pretend these last two hours didn't happen," he said.

Other changes that may land in Firefox 3.1 between its first and second betas, said Shaver, include improvements to the location bar -- which Mozilla dubs the "Awesome Bar" -- and detachable tabs, a feature Chrome also sports that lets users drag tabs from a browser to the desktop to open a new window.

"In some ways, we get a free move" with the opportunity to look at rivals like IE8 and Chrome, study how they implement a feature and watch the reactions from users, said Shaver.

Currently in Alpha 2, Firefox 3.1 is scheduled to go "code freeze" at the end of this month, with a tentative ship in four weeks or so, said Shaver. "We're in good shape for mid-October to the third week," he said today.

Firefox 3.1 can be downloaded in its present form from Mozilla's site in versions for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Microsoft issues wrong update for Exchange 2007

Microsoft Corp. last week confirmed that it inadvertently released a pre-release version of an Exchange Server 2007 update that could push servers into an endless series of crashes.

The Update Rollup 4 for Exchange Server 2007 released to users via Microsoft Update and Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), Microsoft's two most popular update mechanisms, was a preliminary version, the company acknowledged.

"For a brief period of time on 9/9, a pre-release version of Update Rollup 4 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 was inadvertently made available to Microsoft Update, the Microsoft Update Catalog and WSUS servers for download," an unidentified Microsoft employee said in a post to the official Exchange blog.

Once Microsoft discovered its error, it pulled Update Rollup 4 -- a collection of previously disclosed bug fixes -- from the update services but warned those who had already installed it that it could cause problems. "An issue exists with this pre-release version of the Rollup 4 with regard to the Exchange Web Service (EWS) that creates the potential for a continuous crashing cycle," the blog post continued.

Some users reported that they were unable to back up their Exchange servers after installing the rollup during its window of availability, while others had more dire stories to tell. "It bricked one of my 'just about to go live' servers (services wouldn't start, can't uninstall). Spent today building another one," said Alex Britton, in a message posted to the Exchange support forum. "Serves me right for not disabling the recommended auto-update auto install."

Microsoft recommended that users who had installed Update Rollup 4 uninstall it and then install the previous incarnation, Update Rollup 3.

That wasn't always easy, however, as a Microsoft Exchange engineer acknowledged in a comment added to the blog post. "I want to point out that there is an uninstall case that we just uncovered that people may hit," said Scott Roberts, a member of the Exchange team. After uninstalling Update Rollup 4, Roberts said, EWS is unable to read a configuration file; administrators must open the configuration file and manually edit it to replace instances of an incorrect path name.

Later in the comment thread, however, Roberts told a user to simply install Update Rollup 3 atop the faulty Version 4.

Microsoft did not provide a timetable for issuing a working edition of Update Rollup 4, although Roberts said that from this point forward, such updates would be released on the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month. Next Tuesday, Sept. 23, is the fourth Tuesday of this month.

The whole episode left a bad taste in some users' mouths. "I am sorry but this is absolutely unacceptable," said a user identified as "Andy" in the first comment added to the Exchange blog post. "If a pre-release patch can get into Microsoft Update, you leave me no choice but to disable Automatic Updates."

"We apologize for any inconvenience and are working to make sure this does not happen again," Microsoft said in the Exchange blog.

This isn't the first snafu in Microsoft's update services. In June and July, the company had to fix two bugs in other patching mechanisms, including WSUS and the higher-end System Center Configuration Manager 2007, that had kept administrators from pushing patches to end users' PCs.