iTnews: AI news reader brings academia to the real world

As a freelance journalist at Haymarket Media:

When he found himself staring at a screenful of irrelevant headlines in search of the few news stories of interest, Artificial Intelligence enthusiast Alex North decided that it was time to delegate the task to a machine.

Thus was born tiinker, which was launched this week by North's start-up company, Deep Grey Labs, as an intelligent news aggregator that learns the interests of individual users and selects stories tailored to each individual.

"The amount of information available on the internet is growing so quickly it is impossible to keep up without a way to weed out the chaff, so to speak," said Oleg Sushkov, co-founder of Deep Grey Labs.

"tiinker came about because we saw a need for a good news filter due to the huge number of news articles and blogs being published every day - many more than any person could reasonable keep up with."

Targeted at the 'average' Internet user who reads news online, tiinker joins an array of online news aggregation tools such as Slashdot, Digg, and Google News.

But while these existing sites either employ a group of users or editors to choose the news stories that are centrally displayed, tiinker has been designed to use machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques to tailor news feeds to individual users' preferences.

"tiinker is aimed at people who want something to just work for them automatically, not people who want absolute control," North said.

"People who might usually visit the websites of a few newspapers and blogs can come to tiinker instead and have stories picked for them, and from a far wider range of sources than they could cover otherwise."

For the past year, tiinker has been a full-time venture for Sushkov and North, who are both recent graduates of the school of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales.

The intelligent news aggregator was one of three ideas that the pair thought up, with the aim of applying their academic knowledge in a real world product.

"There are a number of machine learning and AI [Artificial Intelligence] techniques in the backend, tuned and combined in a way we believe to be unique," North said. "Our studies in AI at uni were a good preparation for developing this - we knew what to try first and how to make it work well."

"Deep Grey Labs was started with a mission of applying research to making products and services for people," he said. "Too much research is locked away in academia, where no-one is interested in building a product out of it."

But while a bulk of Deep Grey Labs' development has been framed by Sushkov's and North's studies at the University of New South Wales, the start-up has received little financial and technical support from the university.

"Apart from casual tutoring work and the support of friends and colleagues, we've had little real support from the UNSW; IP [Intellectual property] rules make it very difficult for us to collaborate," North said.

So what's next for the boys at Deep Grey Labs?

"Hopefully making some money so we can eat," North said.

"If tiinker and Deep Grey Labs are successful we'd like to expand a little and take on another problem sometime."

"We're aiming to have a profitable business so that we can go on and apply AI and machine learning research to yet more services to help people."

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iTnews: Australian telcos champion Voice over Broadband for SMBs

As a freelance journalist at Haymarket Media:

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is not a new term. Touted as a low cost alternative to traditional telephony, VoIP has a major role in a new wave of converged network solutions that are pervading the telecommunications market.

But while consumers and large enterprises have adopted the technology to some degree, Australian small to medium businesses (SMBs) have traditionally been deterred by VoIP's reputation for poor call quality at the cheaper end of the spectrum, and the large set-up costs of premium, business-grade services.

With the new introduction of Voice over Broadband offerings from telecommunications behemoths AAPT and Optus, however, VoIP adoption by SMBs is set to take a new turn.

Telecommunications solutions for businesses have been tiptoeing towards Internet telephony for some time. Although the copper wire still dominates a majority of outbound phone calls, traditional IP PBX systems that rout intra-office calls via a Wide Area Network have been utilised by large enterprises since the turn of the century.

"If you're using an IP PBX, and you set up your system so that you can call another office at another location through the Wide Area Network, phone calls that you make within the office are technically VoIP," explained David Cannon, senior analyst of telecommunications at IDC.

Cannon mentioned IDC's global telecommunications network as an example of a typical IP PBX set-up. When calling a counterpart in IDC's New Zealand or Singapore offices, Cannon makes an internal VoIP phone call. Meanwhile, other outbound calls to non-IDC phone numbers are still routed through the PSTN copper line.

But the reign of the copper line may not be long lived, as Internet telephony marches beyond IP PBX, and towards complete VoIP offerings that encompass all outbound communications.

Internet-based VoIP services such as Skype are fulfilling an increasing portion of small businesses' telephony needs – as well as those of the casual workplace instant message addict. And now, with the support of the likes of AAPT and Optus, as well as ISPs like iiNet and Primus, Voice over Broadband technology is expanding VoIP's reach to the SMB market.

"Voice over Broadband is probably the most interesting subject matter at this point in time, in terms of VoIP for SMBs, because it’s actually being championed by Telstra's primary competitors, being providers of other network infrastructure," Cannon said.

Cannon highlighted Optus and AAPT as the primary providers of Voice over Broadband services in Australia. The first SMB-centric VoIP service was launched by AAPT in 2006; however, Cannon is of the opinion that Voice over Broadband has only really become a viable telecommunications option for SMBs in the past six months.

Like the services that came before it in the Internet telephony space, Voice over Broadband relies on its low operating cost to attract users. Current offerings of Australian service providers involve packaged Internet and phone line deals, which cut down on line rental.

Such Voice over Broadband packages are estimated to save businesses around $15 per line per month on access fees alone, not to mention the added convenience that consolidated suite voice and data connections provides.

"Historically, what's going on is that the price of local, national and international phone calls have gone down," Cannon said. "The only part of the telephony bill that isn't coming down is the access price.

"The fee that you pay for access of phone lines, whether it be PSTN or ISDN, is sitting around about $33 per month. With a broadband connection at 512 kbps plus, telcos can deliver multiple phone lines on top of that.

"That means that over that one broadband line, you can literally replace the PSDN or the ISDN access component, and at the same time, you can consolidate your VPN connection, and you can also consolidate your Internet connection, all through that one pipe."

Current offerings

AAPT's Business Connect boasts to be the first fully managed and customised VoIP solution developed especially for Australian medium enterprises.

Launched in July 2006, the service was recognised at the 2007 Australian Telecommunications Users Group Awards as one of the most innovative products in the communications sector.

"Business Connect demonstrates AAPT's success in expanding our existing capability as a telecommunications service provider to a complete ICT provider in the business market" said Gregg Roy, general manager of AAPT Business Solutions.

"It is an innovative, market-first VoIP solution for medium business that represents true convergence of Information Communications Technology," he said.

To entice SMBs to make the jump to Voice over Broadband, AAPT's Business Connect advertises no set up costs and a service that is compatible with existing analogue phone equipment.

Other benefits include: the ability to rout a single incoming call to multiple phones – for example, an office line, home phone, as well as a mobile number – which increases the contactability of sales staff; the ability to forward voicemail to e-mail inboxes; low per-minute call rates and free inter-office phone calls.

One adopter of AAPT's Voice over Broadband technology is Global Insight Market Research. The Queensland-based full-service market research firm makes an estimated 2,000 calls per month, so cost was no small consideration in the search for a telecommunications service provider.

"We were interested in moving from our traditional telecommunications infrastructure to something that could streamline our operations and provide advanced functionality not available in standard services," said Murray Dempsey, managing director of Global Insight Market Research in an AAPT Business Connect case study.

"The AAPT Business Connect solution offered us great call rates and volume discounts, halving our communications spend by allowing us to use a DSL connection for all our communication needs. We no longer need to maintain and pay for separate access for voice and data needs."

While Business Connect primarily targets medium-sized businesses, Optus has opened its arms to the entire SMB sector with its ipPhone service. Launched in June 2007, the service bundles 12 cent flat local and national calls with a variety of traditional telephony features including call transfer, call hold and call wait, as well as newer Internet telephony features like the ability to rout incoming calls to multiple lines.

Available to Optus Business DSL customers, ipPhone comes in two flavours - Optus ipPhone Premier and Optus ipPhone Express. The former offers superior call quality at $19.95 per month excluding the set up costs of a professional installation. The latter is priced at $12 per month and comes as a simple, plug and play service.

According to Optus' estimates in its IP Index 2005, almost one half of its IP customers already utilise a VoIP solution, and a further 17 per cent are evaluating or trialling VOIP technology. Optus expects VoIP adoption to yield between 30 and 50 per cent in cost savings for a typical organisation.

"Broadband penetration has really accelerated in the SMB market over recent years and as a result customers are now looking at how they can better utilise their communications infrastructure," said Paul Kitchin, managing director of Optus SMB.

"Optus recognises that SMBs want and need more than the traditional core telecommunication products of fixed, mobile and internet to complete daily business operations," he said.

Shove over, Telstra?

Despite the benefits touted by its champions, the uptake of Voice over Broadband technologies has been slow. IDC's Cannon estimates VoIP to occupy no more than 300,000 phone lines in a six million line market, representing a mere five per cent of Australian phone lines.

"It's not [a large uptake]," Cannon said, "but then again, because the big, competitive telcos have only launched these products in the last six months, in reality, it's [VoIP] got a long way to go."

One major hurdle that VoIP currently faces is its reputation for poor, unreliable audio quality. And indeed there have been VoIP service providers for which the popular opinion holds true.

As network infrastructure improves, however, so does the quality of Internet telephony. Using the business-grade broadband connections of today, which advertise 99.95 to 99.99 per cent availability uptime, Cannon expects the call quality degradation associated with VoIP services to be negligible.

Recent guidelines developed by the Communications Alliance to regulate the quality of VoIP services and Internet Protocol (IP) networks are also expected to increase the uptake of the new wave of converged voice and data offerings.

"I think that a phone call going astray here and there isn't that huge of an issue," he said. "I think that that happens regardless [of if a company is using VoIP or PSTN], and people can accept that.

"It's just that a majority of the time, the audio quality in particular needs to be clean. You can achieve that now, certainly with the business-grade broadband infrastructure that's out there."

So, should Telstra be kissing its landline monopoly farewell?

Cannon is doubtful. The quality of IP infrastructure is still not as good as the traditional PSTN, and as he points out, current champions of Voice over Broadband also have large shares of the traditional telephony market.

"I would say that it [VoIP] doesn't at this point in time pose a threat [to Telstra]. Anything that is a competitive service is threatening, but I wouldn't suggest that Telstra are about to lose market share as a result of this product – not at this point in time,"
he said.

"Going forward, maybe five years from now, perhaps," he said.

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Linux.com: Online library reaches million book milestone

As a freelance contributor to Linux.com:

An international venture called the Universal Library Project has made more than one million books freely available in digitized format. The joint project of researchers from China, India, Egypt, and the US has the eventual aim of digitizing all published works of man, freeing the availability of information from geographic and socioeconomic boundaries, providing a basis for technological advancement, and preserving published works against time and tide.

One and a half million books in more than 20 languages, including Chinese, English, Arabic, and various Indian languages, are now accessible via a single Web portal. The online library includes rare and out-of-print books from private and public collections around the world.

"There are plenty of books that are no longer in copyright, and that have long been forgotten, but which would be useful to scholars, students, and just the general population," says Michael Shamos, a copyright lawyer, computer science professor, and co-director of the project at the Carnegie Mellon University in the US.

"There is a tremendous amount of knowledge that we thought would be lost to mankind if we didn't start digitizing," he says.

The project believes digital books on the Internet should be free to read, instantly available, easily accessible, printable on-demand, translatable to any language, and readable to both humans and machines. Additionally, with the advent of low-cost technology like the One Laptop Per Child project's XO laptop and ebook readers, digitized books are expected to reduce the cost of learning by replacing the repetitive cost of books with a one-off computer purchase and freely downloadable information.

According to the researchers' estimates, the Universal Library collection currently represents a mere one percent of the approximately 100 million books to ever have been published. Shamos expects only half of the published books in existence to be found in physical libraries around the world, so the task of physically locating a rare book can be a tedious process.

"The only way you can obtain an out-of-print book is to find a library that has one, and either travel to that library, or obtain that book through an interlibrary loan," he says. "It's a very slow process, especially considering that without seeing the book, you might not know if there's anything interesting in it for you."

When the project was initiated in 2002, members expected other research and commercial projects to digitize only around 50,000 books. Google Book Search is one such project that was started since that time; in recent years, it has come under fire for alleged breaches of copyright. While Shamos expressed a high regard for Google's efforts and the publicity it has attracted to book digitization, he said the Universal Library Project had "similar but different" goals.

"We want to digitize all published works of man; I don't think that anybody at Google would ever say that's what their goal is," he says. "Their goal is to sell advertising, and one of the ways that they find to sell advertising is to create a Web site that has such rich content that people want to visit it all the time. I don't think that Google has any interest in putting Sanskrit works up on their Web site."

Like Google, the Universal Library Project faces issues in publishing copyrighted books online. As such, books currently under copyright are only available in part via the Web portal, while books that are not bound by copyright restrictions are fully and freely available online.

Citing a need for information to be freely available, Shamos expects these copyright restrictions to become less of an issue in time, as publishers adapt to the low-cost business model that digital books offer.

"Copyright is going to become less and less significant [because] through digitization, the cost of publishing is vanishingly small," he says. "As the cost of copying goes down, the value of works goes down, and the ability to make profit from them goes down.

"There is a difference in reading for pleasure and reading for information; what is going to happen, I think, is that copyright is going to end up focusing on works of entertainment and not works of information."
High numbers

The Universal Library Project is the brainchild of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, and has received $3.5 million in seed funding from the National Science Foundation. The project has also received in-kind contributions from the Zhejiang University in China and the Indian Institute of Science in India that have been valued at $10 million each, and has more recently forged a partnership with the Library at Alexandria in Egypt.

With more than 1,000 workers in about 50 scanning and digitization centres around the world, the Universal Library collection is growing at an estimated 7,000 books per day. There is a fair way to go before the project reaches its lofty book digitization goals; even so, the researchers have set their sights on eventually including content like music, artwork, lectures, and newspapers in the library.

"We believe that by having a universal library with all published works of man, and having multiple sites all around the world that house the entire content, it will be impossible to destroy these works," Shamos says.

"There can never again be a destruction of the library of Alexandria. There could be a destruction of the building, but there can't be a destruction of the works, and so this makes the creation of man impervious to changes in political regime, culture, Moirai."

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iTnews: Sun's petabyte datacentre in a box makes its Aussie debut

As a freelance journalist at Haymarket Media:

In a bid to tackle the array of data storage issues facing today's IT industry, Sun Microsystems has unveiled a prototype of an eco-friendly, mobile virtualised datacentre in Sydney Harbour this week.

Dubbed "Project Blackbox", each datacentre packs more than three petabytes of storage in a 20-foot shipping container. Sun's new offering is expected to allow customers to quickly and easily add datacentre capacity that can be moved as their circumstances change.

"Everybody's either out of space, power, or capacity; one of the three," declared Cheryl Martin, Sun's senior director of business development for Project Blackbox.

Boasting a processing speed of 4.5 teraflops, Project Blackbox is designed to house computational, storage and network infrastructure. Each datacentre can handle up to 700 CPUs, and supports a range of operating systems and third-party equipment.

All storage equipment is contained within a standard-sized 20 x 8 foot shipping container to add to the datacentres' mobility. For safety, the shipping containers are also fitted with GPS devices and reinforced with steel bars, and all equipment is mounted on earthquake-worthy shock absorption springs.

The datacentre can be deployed anywhere there is AC power, water and a network connection. When connected to a portable power supply, such as a generator, Project Blackbox can even operate on the move; a capability that is expected to benefit mobile operations in the military, oil and energy industries.

Instead of requiring air-conditioning, which can require large amounts of power, Project Blackbox uses a water-cooled heat exchanger and a series of fans to keep the temperature low within the shipping container. Sun estimates its cooling technique to be 40 percent more efficient than a traditional datacentre.

Project Blackbox was said to have been inspired by customer feedback that indicated a demand for convenience, flexibility, and eco-friendliness when increasing datacentre capacity.

Martin highlighted four target markets for the datacentre: companies looking to augment their current storage capacity; companies in need of temporary storage solutions; specialised industries such as the military, oil or gas; and large scale network services that are undergoing rapid expansion.

Since the U.S. launch of its first prototype in October 2006, Project Blackbox has been deployed by select customers, including the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in the U.S., and Russian telecommunications provider, Mobile Telesystems.

One datacentre has also been deployed in Sun's High Performance Computing grid in Menlo Park, U.S. Martin said Sun expects to use more of its new datacentres in-house as soon as there are more available.

Contrary to its name, Project Blackbox is usually shipped in a white shipping container, but Martin said the container can also take on custom paint jobs. She noted a particularly strong demand for datacentres with a camouflage veneer.

The datacentre will be available to Australian customers in March 2008, costing upwards of $700,000.

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iTnews: Aussie company comes under fire for probing scandalous poker site

As a freelance journalist at Haymarket Media:

The engagement of Australian consultancy Gaming Associates to investigate an alleged $7 million scandal has raised more questions about the integrity of Absolute Poker and its parent companies.

Gaming Associates was commissioned last month to conduct an audit into a suspected security breach that gave one player full view of the cards held by his opponents.

The audit comes several months after the scam was first uncovered by a group of players on the Two Plus Two online discussion boards. Current investigations have, as yet, failed to placate users of the popular U.S.-based forum.

"This proposed investigation makes us uneasy for a few reasons," said Mason Malmuth of Two Plus Two Publishing. "First, according to its press release, Absolute Poker is funding the investigation directly, with no third party involved to ensure objectivity.

"Finally, Two Plus Two believes that a report from Gaming Associates, an Australian company apparently dealing primarily with Antigua and Barbados companies, may not maintain the same weight and reliability as the international law firm retained by Two Plus Two."

Earlier this month, Two Plus Two Publishing was approached by an Absolute Poker representative, who wanted Two Plus Two to release a statement supporting Absolute Poker on its forums, Malmuth said.

Malmuth responded with a fraud investigation proposal in which Two Plus Two would act as an unbiased, non-profiting arbitrator between Absolute Poker and the investigators. The offer was declined.

"Two Plus Two is essentially the only entity that would be considered unbiased in this matter. So anything done with our name on it would have much credibility," Malmuth told ITnews.com.au.

"We felt this problem was bigger than Absolute and that by doing this investigation it would be good for the whole industry.

"Absolute Poker has now told us that they have no interest in our proposal. So I expect nothing will come from it," he said.

Gaming Associates' audit report is not expected until 7 December. In the meantime, however, the online poker community has been handing out its own version of Citizens' arrests.

Fingers have been pointed at Absolute Poker's co-founder, Scott Tom, and former Operations Director, Alan 'AJ' Green, and punishments range from degradingly edited images, to accusations of drug abuse, and even to what might be perceived as threats to Tom's family.

"Is this Scott's first wife and child," asks one discussion board user. "What's her name? Any previous wives and/or children? Any other weak spots besides father? Mother, siblings, other family members?"

"Does anyone know AJ's educational background," another post reads. "Where did he go to college? What were his majors and/or minors?"

Official statements released by Absolute Poker to its users seem to confirm allegations that an employee had been involved in the alleged security breach.

"Based upon our preliminary findings, it appears that the integrity of our poker system was compromised by a high-ranking trusted consultant employed by AP whose position gave him extraordinary access to certain security systems," writes Joe Norton, owner of Tokwiro Enterprises ENRG, which holds 100 per cent interest in Absolute Poker.

"We consider this security breach to be a horrendous and inexcusable offence," he said.

Absolute Poker is currently in the process of reimbursing players who were affected by the cheating account. It is yet to be seen if the scandal leaves a permanent scar on online poker, which requires a great deal of trust between players, their opponents, and gaming platforms.

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iTnews: Petascale computers: the next supercomputing wave

As a freelance journalist at Haymarket Media:

Supercomputing has come a long way in the past half-century. Far from CDC's single-operation scalar processors in the 1960s, present day terascale computers in development by companies like Intel boast up to 100 processor cores and the ability to perform one trillion operations per second.

Now, academics have turned their attention to petascale computers that are said to be capable of performing one quadrillion – that's one million billion – operations per second. Running at nearly ten times the speed of today's fastest supercomputers, petascale computing is expected to open the doors to solving global challenges such as environmental sustainability, disease prevention, and disaster recovery.

"Petascale Computing: Algorithms and Applications" was launched this month as the world's first published collection on petascale techniques for computational science and engineering. Edited by David A. Bader, associate professor of computing and executive director of high-performance computing at Georgia Tech, the book is geared towards generating new discussion about the future of computing.

To gain a little insight into petascale technologies, iTnews spoke with Bader about high performance computing and the future.

What is petascale computing?

Petascale Computing is the present state-of-the-art in High Performance Computing that leverages the most cutting edge large-scale resources to solve grand challenge problems in science and engineering.

What will be the primary use of petascale computers?

Science has withstood centuries of challenges by building upon the community's collective wisdom and knowledge through theory and experiment. However, in the past half-century, the research community has implicitly accepted a fundamental change to the scientific method.

In addition to theory and experiment, computation is often cited as the third pillar as a means for scientific discovery.

Computational science enables us to investigate phenomena where economics or constraints preclude experimentation, evaluate complex models and manage massive data volumes, model processes across interdisciplinary boundaries, and transform business and engineering practices.

How significant will the development of Petascale Computing be to the advancement of science and technology?

Increasingly, cyber-infrastructure is required to address our national and global priorities, such as sustainability of our natural environment by reducing our carbon footprint and by decreasing our dependencies on fossil fuels, improving human health and living conditions, understanding the mechanisms of life from molecules and systems to organisms and populations, preventing the spread of disease, predicting and tracking severe weather, recovering from natural and human-caused disasters, maintaining national security, and mastering nanotechnologies.

Several of our most fundamental intellectual questions also require computation, such as the formation of the universe, the evolution of life, and the properties of matter.

What are the challenges faced by Petascale Computing?

While petascale architectures certainly will be held as magnificent feats of engineering skill, the community anticipates an even harder challenge in scaling up algorithms and applications for these leadership-class supercomputing systems.

Several areas are important for this task: scalable algorithm design for massive concurrency, computational science and engineering applications, petascale tools, programming methodologies, performance analyses, and scientific visualisation.

High end simulation is a tool for computational science and engineering applications. To be useful tools for science, such simulations must be based on accurate mathematical descriptions of the processes and thus they begin with mathematical formulations, such as partial differential equations, integral equations, graph-theoretic, or combinatorial optimisation.

Because of the ever-growing complexity of scientific and engineering problems, computational needs continue to increase rapidly. But most of the currently available hardware, software, systems, and algorithms are primarily focused on business applications or smaller scale scientific and engineering problems, and cannot meet the high-end computing needs of cutting-edge scientific and engineering work.

This book ["Petascale Computing: Algorithms and Applications"] primarily addresses the concerns of petascale scientific applications, which are highly compute- and data-intensive, cannot be satisfied in today's typical cluster environment, and tax even the largest available supercomputer.

When can we expect petascale computers, and who from?

Realising that cyber infrastructure is essential to research innovation and competitiveness, several nations are now in [what has been called] a 'new arms race to build the world's mightiest computer'.

These petascale computers, expected around 2008 to 2012, will perform ten to the power of 15 operations per second, nearly an order of magnitude faster than today's speediest supercomputer.

In fact, several nations are in a worldwide race to deliver high-performance computing systems that can achieve 10 petaflops or more within the next five years. Several leading computing vendors, such as IBM, Cray, Dawning, NEC, Sun Microsystems, and others, are in a race to deploy petascale computing systems.

How do you think technology will progress in 2008 and beyond? What is likely to be the next set of challenges we will face?

We expect to see the first peak petascale systems in 2008, and sustained petascale systems soon thereafter. Many grand challenge investigations in computational science and engineering will be solved by these magnificent systems.

Already, discussions are taking place on the complex applications that will require the next generations of supercomputers: exascale systems that are 1000 times more capable than these petascale systems.

Certainly amazing technological innovations and application development will be necessary to make exascale computing a reality.

Yours is the first book on petascale techniques to ever have been published. What do you hope it will achieve?

My goal in developing this book was to inspire members of the high-performance computing community to solve computational grand challenges that will help our society, protect our environment, and improve our understanding in fundamental ways, all through the efficient use of petascale computing.

This is the premier book that captures the first wave of applications anticipated to run on these petascale computers. Already, international interest in this milestone book is very high, since it is the first book ever to discuss applications of petascale computing.

This book in petascale computing will be a resource for training these [future] generations of students and researchers in how to leverage state-of-the-art high performance computing systems to solve grand challenges of national and global priority, such as sustainability of our natural environment by reducing our carbon footprint and by decreasing our dependencies on fossil fuels, improving human health and living conditions, understanding the mechanisms of life from molecules and systems to organisms and populations, preventing the spread of disease, predicting and tracking severe weather, recovering from natural and human-caused disasters, maintaining national security, and mastering nanotechnologies.

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CW: Bringing open source to the education sector

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

Australian schools are subscribing to proprietary software - but the choice between proprietary and open source may have not been made on entirely equal ground, according to Kathryn Moyle, an Associate Professor who researches issues arising from integrating information and communication technologies into school education at the University of Canberra.

A self-proclaimed open source advocate for the education sector, Moyle has published a number of academic papers detailing the merits of open source from practical, pedagogical, sustainable, and political points of view.

Liz Tay speaks with Moyle, a former teacher who has also worked in the South Australian Department of Education and Children's Services, about the role of open source in the education sector, and how policy makers, teachers, students and parents might overcome what she calls the hegemony of proprietary software.

What sparked your interest in open source technologies?

My son. I was doing my PhD in between 1998 and 2002, and as part of the research that I was doing, I happened to come across the expected prices for the Microsoft licences for the school sector as a forward estimate, in the budget papers for the Victorian government. The amount of money surprised and shocked me.

I was talking to my son about it at the time, and he said, 'have you come across open source software?' and he kept pestering me about it. One thing led to another; I got interested, and actually included a section about open source software in my PhD thesis about digital technology policies in the school sector in Australia.

What role do you think open source technologies have in the education sector?

It has many roles. Basically, the backend of any IT infrastructure can run open source software; most schools that run a server off open source software can attest to the reliability of open source software at the backend.

But because I come at open source not from a technical point of view, but from an educator's point of view, I happen to think that when you're in school, you ought to learn how to use a range of software - we're not in the business in the school education sector of training people to use one piece of software.

Sure as eggs, the software that we train students to use in schools is not going to be the software that is either current or available to them once they leave school. For those students that don't have the money to be able to personally upgrade on a regular basis, proprietary software, I believe, is actually doing those students a disservice.

Should open source be introduced into schools as part of a broader range of software, or should it completely replace of proprietary software?

I'm not advocating a complete replacement, but I am advocating that it should be included into any teaching and learning that is about software. I think that proprietary software has a role. To suggest that we need to get rid of all proprietary software out of schools would be both politically impossible, and also unrealistic about what students are going to face.

I think there is a role for proprietary software, but I do think that we are doing our students a disservice if we don't expose them to learning about open source software; both in terms of its philosophical underpinnings and the communities of practice that sit behind the developing of open source software, but also from a straight user point of view that there are alternatives to proprietary software.

Should these alternatives be actively promoted at schools?

I'm not one that personally thinks that we need to promote open source software per se; I think that what we need to do is come at it from the point of view that there is a range of software out there, and understanding how it works and how it can be used is part of the challenge.

Obviously, open source software has a whole range of benefits that outweigh proprietary software in my mind, but as educators, we need to both be agnostic about the software we promote, and willing to teach the capabilities, benefits and risks of using open source software. Students will come to their own conclusions about which software they want to use for their own purposes.

What are some issues that open source adoption pose to policy makers?

A number of pieces of software -- particularly the Microsoft licenses -- have a lock-in to the education sector. In the school sector, the market is huge in the sense that there are two million odd students in the school sector in Australia. If we're looking at the licencing that the government school sector have, they feel, both in reality and in practice, that they can't pull out of those license agreements because the fall out - politically, as well as from parents, teachers and students -- would be too much to justify the pull out.

I used to work in South Australia with people looking at whole-of-government licence agreements. While I was in South Australia, the Democrats introduced into parliament a bill that suggested that open source software should be the default software unless a case could be made for purchasing a proprietary piece of software.

As a result of that being introduced into parliament, Microsoft had a lobby organisation, and it wrote to every politician in South Australia suggesting that this was not the way to go, and the world as we know it would fall apart if this approach to open source software was taken.

We need to be aware that the big proprietary software organisations, aren't big for no reason; they are politically savvy, and they are operational if their markets look like they are going to be challenged. I think that that's a hurdle for educators, particularly policy makers and politicians.

What other hurdles do open source technologies face before servicing the education sector?

Sometimes, parents and students are their own worst enemy; they feel that they need to be prepared for the world of work, which they believe to be a proprietary world. So they operate on the basis that they need to learn a piece of software.

I don't know if you've seen Office 2007; the interface is so different to Office 2000 that people are going to go berserk when they try to use it. People believe that things stay still and what they learn in school is going to hold them in stead when they go into the workforce -- which might be two, three, four years hence, or might be ten years hence if they go to university.

Often people will write into teaching documents that they have to learn a particular piece of software. We don't do that in home economics; we don't say you have to learn how to bake a cake with a particular brand of milk. What we're interested in is whether a student can bake a cake, or run a hundred metres, or whatever it is. We actually want to focus on what it is we want someone to learn -- to use a database, or to do a presentation - not PowerPoint, or Access, which are simply brand names.

What's currently being done to enable the adoption of open source in schools?

I wouldn't suggest that there is any overall grand strategy, but I think over time, the reality of open source software is eventually going to hit government school education -- if for no other reason, because of the cost.

People like me plug away, and there are a few champions around Australia who are keen to promote open source software in the education sector, but before any substantial changes are going to occur, there has to be leadership taken by policy makers, particularly within government departments, because they have the critical mass as well as the licence agreements that really need to be looked at carefully.

Unfortunately without having agencies that have control to bring about those changes, I'm afraid we're going to be tinkering around the edges a bit for the foreseeable future. That being said, it took one hundred years to get a national railway system in Australia, so getting open source software into schools might take us a little while as well.

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CW: How to maintain market pervasion - the SAP way

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

In a strategic move for dominance of the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) space, SAP has come up with a training program that it hopes will guarantee its market pervasion for years to come.

SAP's University Alliance Program (UAP) is a global endeavour aimed at integrating SAP software into undergraduate and postgraduate courses of study. Partner institutions are given access to SAP and its hosted solutions, vendor-provided course material, the occasional guest lecturer, and training courses for lecturers.

In return, SAP gains up to three thousand students every year from Australia alone, who each have hands-on SAP software experience as part of their business, accounting, information technology, or information systems degree.

Launched in Australia in 1997, the program currently boasts 12 local members, including: Queensland University of Technology; Victoria University; Macquarie University; the University of South Australia; and the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS).

According to John Lombard, SAP's Director of Consulting in Australia and New Zealand, the uptake of the program by partner institutions is a reflection of SAP's strength in the market. While SAP's course material hawks a predictably vendor-specific breadth of knowledge, Lombard expects this to benefit students going into the workforce, where he said SAP currently dominates about 70 percent of the ERP space.

"We see SAP as an industry standard now for ERP products," he said. "It's probably no different to when I was at uni; you learn a certain vendor's product, but if they have a large enough footprint, you've got a fairly good chance of finding a company that uses SAP."

But Bernhard Wieder, Associate Professor of Accounting Information Systems at UTS, has more of an agnostic view of the program.

"Our rationale really for using SAP solutions in our curriculum was primarily business educational reasons, not so much SAP software skills," Wieder said.

"Enterprise systems, irrespective of whether they are Oracle or SAP, are, to my mind, wonderful tools to teach students about integrated business processes," he said. "For example, we use them largely in accounting to show students how accounting works in an integrated system environment and really emphasize the practical nature of accounting."

Wieder cited results of informal graduate destination surveys he conducts regularly on his past students, that he said empirically proved that the SAP knowledge obtained through UTS's courses could also be transferred to other ERP systems.

"Interestingly, from a survey I did last year, I got quite a bit of feedback from students who say they work in an Oracle or PeopleSoft environment," he said. "They said they benefited a lot from what they have seen, because we try to emphasise the generic issues which are not that different in SAP and Oracle."

Still, about 20 percent of Wieder's students go on to complete extra-curricular bridging courses that provide them with vendor-specific SAP certifications. This is good news for SAP's Lombard, whose vision for the company encompasses not only education, but also new hires into SAP's consultancy division.

"We're always hiring," he said. "I'd love to get people with Oracle skills, and train them up in SAP too."

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CW: The interpersonal key to survival in Australian IT

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

A steady stream of IT work being outsourced to offshore developers may be a rising concern for some professionals, but according to SAP executive John Lombard, the Australian workforce has nothing to fear.

With about 40,000 staff employed in more than 50 countries worldwide, Australia seems but a drop in the ocean for business software vendor SAP. Predictably, most of SAP's development work is done in Germany, India and China. However, Australian culture and a penchant for research and development could contribute to an ongoing demand for what Lombard views as "more interesting" IT jobs to remain in-country.

"At the end of the day, some technical development work can be offshored, but we'll always have a need for human-to-human contact in Australia," said Lombard, the company's Director of Consulting in Australia and New Zealand.

"When I came out of university, I spent 5 years code cutting. Now, we're seeing graduates coming into more contact with business processes, and getting a broader perspective of business, early on in their careers," he said. "The sort of work we're seeing in Australia at the moment is all the juicy work, like business transformation."

"It's a great market from an IT perspective," Lombard said. "This is the industry to be in, and it's growing."

Current job openings at SAP certainly highlight a rise of more business-oriented positions. The company is currently on the hunt for 15 consultants in Australia, and a recent advertisement in the Australian Financial Review marks the first time it has advertised vacancies for consulting positions in Australia.

In fact, Lombard said, the company simply does not have any more of a need for the old stereotype of socially-inept technical specialists. Australian IT professionals should be equipped with a range of soft skills in order to thrive in today's job market, he said.

"I'm sure some companies view the pure technical aspect as a critical skill, but for a company like us, it's not just about the tech anymore," he said. "I don't have a job for anyone like that [with purely technical skills]."

"We want smart people who get good grades, but we also want people with good EQ [Emotional intelligence Quotient]," he said. "The most important part of our business is how we communicate with the customer."

Mandy Harris, senior Human Resources consultant of Sydney-based IT consultancy GLiNTECH, disagrees. Citing a nationwide shortage of skilled IT professionals, Harris expects a demand for technically adept staff to remain strong, especially in large, multi-departmental companies.

"There will always be a place for solid technical skills, and the skills crisis we are facing right now will ensure that this continues into the future," she said. "Large corporate companies will typically have layers between the business and the IT team, and this frees them up to focus on the technical skills over the soft skills."

Similarly, recruiter John McVicker, Managing Director of Best International Group, expects there to be no shortage of jobs for Australian IT professionals in the current market. However, noting that interpersonal ability is most vital in some IT roles, such as Business Analyst, Helpdesk Consultant or Project Manager, and less relevant in others, McVicker said that there has been a growing requirement for interpersonal skills in every IT Australian employee.

"There will always be the few handful of technically astute, though less socially inclined individuals, who by the nature of their work will always be essential," he said. "[However,] in my view, these types of people are becoming less employable in a modern business environment."

"While highly intelligent, genius-type individuals will always be in high demand, it's becoming clear that those who lack the social and communication skills, which are fast becoming a necessity in the industry, are being overlooked in favour of their offshore counterparts," he said.

While SAP's Lombard lamented a shortage of IT graduates entering the Australian industry, McVicker and Harris both criticized what could be an increasingly irrelevant tertiary education system.

"Tertiary education should, to a certain extent, prepare graduates for the actual requirements of working in the IT industry," McVicker said. "In my opinion, there has always been a 'disconnect' between what is taught in tertiary education and what is actually required in the workplace, especially in an industry that moves as quickly as IT."

"Regarding soft skills, there is nowhere near enough time, in my opinion, spent developing these basic life skills or even acknowledging their importance in tertiary education," he said.

A lack of simple life skills such as bank account management, a basic understanding of taxation, business communication, and presentation skills tops Harris' list of gripes with new graduates entering the workforce. These shortcomings are so common in recent graduates that employers have been forced to invest in graduate training programs that bridge the education-workforce divide, she said.

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CW: Talk your way to better pay

As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:

IT salaries have been on a steady incline during the past year. While analysts and industry groups tout a nationwide shortage of suitably skilled candidates, a resource boom and widespread uptake of technology is driving the job market up and up.

A winter 2007 Market Trends and Salaries Report by recruitment agency Ambition Technology boasts that salaries have grown ten per cent from May 2006. But women in IT still could be losing out on the monetary perks of a candidate-short market, according to the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA).

"Women employees across the Australian economy earn just 83 cents for every dollar their male counterpart earns," explained AIIA's Chief Executive Officer, Sheryle Moon, "so clearly, women can benefit from enhanced skills to enable them to negotiate salary packages and working conditions."

To address what it views as an issue that could be restricting women's job opportunities in IT, the AIIA has launched the "Set Up for Success" workshop series, designed to enable women to overcome barriers to negotiating suitable work arrangements in a male-dominated working environment.

Presenting at the AIIA workshop is Candy Tymson, business coach and author of the book "Gender Games: Doing Business with the Opposite Sex". Tymson attributed a bulk of women's workplace disadvantages to an overly modest "feminine" approach to business.

"Women ask me often, 'I am just as good as the men, I work just as hard as they do; why do they get promoted when I don't?'," Tymson said.

"One of the things that have come out of my research is that first of all, a majority of women frankly don't know how to promote themselves. Whereas men have typically been encouraged to boast more, stand up for themselves and tell people what they're capable of, women in the past have been told not to do that, or they'll look bossy."

Citing her own research, as well as scientific studies by the Myers-Briggs Foundation and psychologist Helena Cornelius, Tymson said that women have a genetic and cultural predisposition to build rapport in business.

The focus on interpersonal relationships could also mean that women are more wary of appearing like they are boasting, or looking bossy, Tymson said, so the challenge for women is to effectively promote themselves in a way that they are comfortable with, and that still comes across as feminine.

"Brain research is clearly showing major differences in the way male and female brains work," she said. "Typically, women focus on the relationship, and men focus on the information."

"Women are in a bit of a dilemma really, as to how to behave. What I find really works - and men have told me this too - is if the women treat the males as their peers, but don't try and prove that they're better than them," she said.

Unnecessary modesty could be detrimental to women's careers and remuneration, Tymson said. Instead of running themselves down with typically feminine phrases like "what do you think", Tymson suggests women take a more active role in negotiating their workplace agreements.

"The key with salaries, whether you're male or female, is that you need to demonstrate your value. Women often fail in promoting their value to the organisation, and let the organisation know what they're achieving," she said.

"If you don't ask, you don't get. I think a lot of it [negotiation] is making sure you know what your rights are, and standing up for yourself and asking for them."

One woman who has found negotiation invaluable in her career is Valerie Henson, a freelance Linux consultant who has previously held positions at IBM, and Intel's Open Source Technology Center.

In a LinuxChix presentation at linux.conf.au this year, Henson outlined salary surveys that found that on average, women in Western countries make 70 per cent of what men do. She attributed what she called the "gender pay gap" to a failure to negotiate.

While some women choose not to negotiate their salary packages for fear of losing an amazing job, invalid assumptions of industry standards, a low estimate of self-worth, and fear of ruining relationships in the workplace, Henson said, the difference between accepting an offer of $25,000 a year and negotiating up to $30,000 a year has been calculated to result in a lifetime difference in earnings of over $300,000.

Henson recalls her first experience with negotiation, which she said was both successful and unsuccessful. After receiving an offer letter with a salary which she found "just barely avoided being insultingly low", Henson mentioned a higher salary to the hiring manager. While her negotiations did cause the hiring manager to raise the offer, Henson said that an over-eager tone of voice could have prevented her from negotiating an even better deal.

"I ended up signing an offer letter for $US10,000 more than the original offer, but $US10,000 less than what I could have gotten if I were a better negotiator," she said. "The best part is that it was my dream job and a 50% raise, and I would have taken the job for less than they offered."

Tone of voice and background research are paramount to negotiating a better salary, Henson advises. But the first, most vital step to a better salary could be simply the confidence to ask for it.

"Typically we do find male candidates, particularly at the senior end of the market, tend to be a little more aggressive in their negotiations and in asking for what they want," said Andrew Cross, Managing Director of Ambition Technology, noting that while he "has no doubt" there remain salary differences between men and women in IT, gender differences were not a focus of Ambition's salary survey.

With significant development projects occurring in the Banking and Finance sectors driving a strong demand for skills such as Java, JSP and .NET, employers desperate for additional headcount are becoming increasingly aware of the cost of re-recruitment and re-hire, and as a result are better equipped to manage counter-offers and salary increases to retain staff, he said.

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