Representatives from 19 North American utility companies met in San Francisco on Thursday to explore ways of cutting IT energy consumption by offering rebates and other incentives.

The effort has been led by Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), which serves much of the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley, areas replete with technology companies and datacenters that have some of the greatest need to reduce energy consumption.

Thursday's meeting marked the first time utility representatives from across North America have met to discuss how to implement such incentive programs, which focus largely on datacenters but also include desktop PCs and other equipment.

Following a brief lull after the dot-com bubble, energy consumption at datacenters has been surging again, particularly at colocation facilities that provide capacity for other companies, said Mark Bramfitt, PG&E's principal program manager of customer energy efficiency.

He estimated the current total demand from data centers in the PG&E region is 400 to 500 megawatts at any given moment. That has increased by between 50 and 75 megawatts in just the past 18 months, he said, driven partly by new colocation facilities.

"We had tremendous growth in datacenter capacity in the dot-com boom that never got filled. I can tell you that that capacity is now full to the gills, and they are asking us for more power," he said.

The programs being developed use different techniques to encourage efficient power use, with utilities offering to cover as much as 70 percent of the cost for companies that meet program requirements.

Seattle City Light will launch a program in the coming weeks that rewards companies for installing network-based software that manages PC power consumption. Such products cost between $11 and $25 per PC, and Seattle City Light will contribute $8 per PC, said Greg Whiting, manager for energy conservation. Vendors offering such products include Verdiem and 1E. Companies that take part in the program should get a return on their investments within 18 months, according to Whiting.

BC Hydro, which serves British Columbia, hopes to introduce its first datacenter initiative in the coming months. It will offer to pay up to 60 percent of the cost of implementing virtualization software to consolidate servers, said David Rogers, an IT adviser at BC Hydro Power Smart.

Besides reining in escalating demand for power, the utility companies have a financial incentive to offer such programs. "Our goal is to avoid the capital cost of building new power plants," Whiting said. "Encouraging companies to conserve power makes more sense than for us to keep spending to add marginal capacity."

PG&E's program, launched in 2006, also rewards companies for using server virtualization. The company has 60 customers in the program and has made payments so far to seven companies, said Randall Cole, senior project manager for PG&E's server virtualization incentives.

The number of utilities offering such programs is still low, however. No more than a dozen utilities offer incentive programs for IT today, Bramfitt said, out of perhaps 200 utilities in North America. Other utilities at Thursday's meeting were from Southern California, the Pacific Northwest, Texas, and New York.

One challenge is that utility companies are not IT experts, so one goal of the meeting was to educate them about energy usage in datacenters. "One of the companies in our region is Microsoft, and they probably know 50 times more about the technology than we do," Whiting said.

PG&E also had some teething problems. Some customers complained at first that it was too hard to calculate how much energy they would save, and therefore how much of a rebate they would be entitled to, so PG&E greatly simplified the formula, Cole said.

Interest among customers is high, according to Rogers. "I've visited 50 datacenter customers, and there's tremendous support for this program," he said.

Paul McGuckin, a Gartner research vice president who spoke at the event, said companies are interested in the programs for financial reasons and because they are "really frightened" about running out of datacenter capacity. Concerns about the environment are rarely mentioned, except for public relations purposes, he said.

A report last year from the Environmental Protection Agency said datacenters account for 1.5 percent of the total energy consumed in the U.S. "This may not sound like a lot, but the escalation is truly frightening," McGuckin said.

Most datacenters are run very inefficiently, he said. Some easy ways to conserve energy are to consolidate industry-standard servers, turn servers off when they are not in use, raise the temperature of data centers and, when possible, use natural air for cooling.

Joe Skorupa, another Gartner vice president, said networking equipment is often ignored but accounts for perhaps 10 percent of datacenter power consumption. Customers should explore high-density switches offered by several vendors, he said.

He advised against Gigabit Ethernet to the desktop, which he said consumes more power than lower-capacity Ethernet and is not required by most users. And he urged people to think twice about fancy VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phones. "Eight-line color display VoIP phones suck up more power, and all anybody looks at is the last two numbers dialled," he said.

Programmers were urged to expand their horizons Thursday at TheServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas.

During a keynote presentation entitled, "Why the Next Five Years Will Be About Languages," Ted Neward, author of "Effective Enterprise Java," stressed new technologies, such as languages and DSLs (domain specific languages) for developers to try.

"We stand on the threshold of a renaissance in programming languages," Neward said.

He offered the following advice: Look at enhancements to languages, look at new languages being developed, and look to create new languages.

"Building your own DSL is much simpler than you might think, and it's worth it to spend a week, a weekend, some amount of time, even if it's off the clock, trying it out, playing with it." Neward said.

He also cited "a surge of interest in language as a concept." Neward listed new developments such as Microsoft's F# functional programming language; AspectJ, which provides aspect-oriented extensions to Java, and languages like Scala and Pizza.

"The language renaissance has already begun," Neward said.

Outside the Java world, Microsoft has more languages appearing on its Common Language Runtime, Neward said. "There's a ton of languages out there we can take advantage of," he said.

Neward also advised taking a look at new tools to meet such challenges as developing for multi-core chips.

Over the past 100 years I've been writing this column, readers have sent me several irate letters because they were enraged that I would dare to bring politics into a technically oriented publication. For those of you who feel this way, you might want to stop reading now.

Here's the thing about technology and politics: They are inseparable. You can't do things like you guys do at the scale you do with the huge amounts of money involved and pretend that the ugly realities of politics don't have profound implications.

Just consider H-1B visas , the Digital Millennium Copyright Act , the Sarbanes-Oxley Act , the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act , privacy policies, technology import/export restrictions, the CAN SPAM Act (for what it is worth).... It is a long list of stuff that affects you in one way or another, and it's all overtly political, or at the least has political spin.

And then there are the big social issues, such as the nonexistent national broadband policy and network neutrality, which have hugely complex political dimensions. These affect many of you guys because you are in the industries that are directly or indirectly involved, while the rest of us have our technology choices (or lack thereof) modified by those issues.

As an example of politicized technology let us consider the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). I have had more than a few opportunities to criticize this body over the last 1,000 years and for good reason: It obviously has an agenda, or rather several agendas, that are unarguably political and transcend the technical realm by moving into the role of censors, albeit, so far, censors with fairly limited scope.

This topic is on my mind because, finally, the Supreme Court is going to rule on the FCC's authority regarding "indecency" in the broadcast media.

In case you don't know the background to the FCC "broadcast decency" policy it is all comedian George Carlin 's fault. Here's the story: A Carlin monologue was broadcast over the radio on Oct. 30, 1973 and it featured seven "obscenities" (the famous "Seven Dirty Words").

Some guy who, in the company of his son, heard the broadcast and rather than switching it off, took offense at being subjected to these words and protested to the FCC. The FCC issued a "declaratory order" (in effect, a letter that says "Do it again and you'll be in trouble, buster"). The broadcaster got the order overturned by the Court of Appeals so the FCC, for what I can only assume were political reasons, appealed the appeal to the Supreme Court and won. Thus was born the legal framework for Janet Jackson to be fined almost 30 years later for her Super Bowl stunt.

At the heart of the issue is the concept of "obscenity," which is, of course, just a little tricky to define. It appears that the FCC goes by the weak definition of obscenity as something that offends the moral standards of the community. It seems the FFC's interpretation of standards is rooted in some decidedly Victorian ideas on what is and isn't "nice" and some amusingly Freudian perceptions of what constitutes sexuality (we'll come back to the latter issue in a moment).

After some "naughty" words were used in passing by some worthies at two award ceremonies broadcast by the Fox Network (in 2002 and 2003), the FCC found Fox guilty of indecency (in 2004) but didn't fine the company. The FCC has taken action many times over the last 30 years, but this time it went after Fox not for intentional indecency (think Howard Stern) but for "fleeting expletives."

Fox appealed the decision (in 2007) and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in New York decided the FCC's policy was "arbitrary and capricious" and that the FCC had "failed to articulate a reasoned basis for its change in policy." The appeals court noted that the policy raised First Amendment issues and told the FCC that the policy needs more work. Again, the FCC was miffed to be thwarted and appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed, at the urging of the Bush administration, to hear the case.

Kevin Martin, the FCC chairman, said that the appeals court had "put the commission in an untenable position" because the FCC's responsibility is to enforce indecency rules (which the commission crafted) but the appeals court judgment essentially prevents the commission from doing anything.

According to The Washington Post , the Bushies argued that "the lower court's ruling had left the FCC in an 'untenable' position between protecting children and protecting freedom of speech."

I guess I'm missing something here. In the land of the free and the home of the brave, have we become so delicate, so easily offended, so afraid of anything that could be considered "dirty" that we have to engage in these labyrinthine legal contortions to "protect children"? It's insane! Any child can sit in front of an Internet-connected computer and see prurient material at a level of detail and on a scale that we couldn't have even dreamt of when we were kids.

Fox has it in for the FCC over another recent matter: A $91,000 fine that the FCC levied for a scene in a show I've never heard of called Married in America. Apparently the episode contained a segment in a strip club in which key "details" were obscured using pixelation. Fox appealed and, in response, the FCC's denial of appeal wrote "The fact that isolated body parts were 'pixelated' did not obscure the overall graphic character of the depiction [and] despite the obscured nature of the nudity, it is unmistakable that the [characters] are participating in sexual activities and that sexual organs are being exposed." Fox filed a detailed rebuttal and refused to pay the fine.

Fox not unreasonably argues that what the FCC claims to be unmistakable would require that it was able to see what it claims to have seen. Due to the pixelation, it couldn't have actually seen anything so it was therefore assuming the characters were "participating in sexual activities and that sexual organs [were] being exposed." In other words, Fox is accusing the FCC collectively of having a dirty mind.

And weirdly a dirty mind it does seem to have. In January the FCC found 51 ABC stations guilty of indecency for an episode of NYPD Blue in which a woman's naked bottom was shown. The FCC ruled (and this is completely true) that the scene in question "depicts sexual organs and excretory organs -- specifically an adult woman's buttocks."

ABC attorneys argued (quite reasonably in my and most normal people's opinion) that buttocks do not constitute a sexual organ. The FCC countered: "We reject this argument which runs counter to both case law and common sense." Exactly how case law has a bearing on biological fact is not clear and why common sense apparently trumps logic is equally mysterious. It is this kind of twisted logic on the part of the FCC that makes the Supreme Court hearing so important.

The Supreme Court hearing is going to be crucial because, as Solicitor General Paul D. Clement wrote in his court brief, "The court of appeals appears to have put the FCC to a choice between allowing one free use of any expletive no matter how graphic or gratuitous, or else adopting a (likely unconstitutional) across-the-board prohibition against expletives."

Now why does this matter? It matters because "decency" in broadcast media is a political issue and allowing government-mandated control of ideas, even ideas you disagree with, should be abhorrent to every American who understands the Constitution.

And even more political pressure is being thrown at the indecency issue. Clear Channel , the dominant force in broadcast radio, is asking the FCC to force the merged Sirius/XM satellite radio service to obey the same rules as broadcast media, despite the glaringly obvious fact that satellite radio is not really broadcast media in the same sense as TV and terrestrial radio.

What is most troubling about Clear Channel's petition is that it is shamelessly based on a competitive argument -- that by Sirius/XM not having to obey the same constraints it can transmit more "edgy" content and Clear Channel will lose advertising revenue.

Mark my words, should the FCC prevail there will be lots of political pressure for satellite radio to be regulated and next will come satellite TV, cable TV, and right around the corner are the ISPs and your Internet connection. The Fox case is potentially the thin edge of a massive legal wedge that is all about censorship.

Now do you see why politics and technology are inseparable?

With the mobile industry looking toward WiMax and LTE (Long-Term Evolution) for faster data connections, LM Ericsson will demonstrate a system next week that could be an in-between step for many carriers around the world.

The Swedish telecommunications giant will use the CTIA Wireless trade show in Las Vegas to show off what it calls HSPA (High-Speed Packet Access) Evolution, the next step up in speed from HSUPA (High-Speed Uplink Packet Access). The network can deliver 42Mbps from each cellular base station, shared among individual users.

Two watershed technologies are coming for high-speed mobile data, in the form of WiMax and LTE, both of which leap ahead of 3G with a new technology, OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing Access). Both are also fully IP networks. The mobile form of WiMax is starting to emerge in commercial deployments, but LTE is not expected to be widely rolled out until 2010 or later.

HSPA Evolution brings forward two technologies that will be in LTE. It features MIMO (multiple-in, multiple-out) antenna technology with two antennas at both the transmitter and receiver, and uses the same modulation scheme as LTE, called 64 QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation). It's based on a formal standard, called HSPA+, from the governing body of HSPA. But how much it improves upon the existing HSUPA is open to debate.

Actual speeds for each user will depend on handsets and on the usual coverage factors, but an HSPA Evolution network should allow carriers to deliver twice the speed of the current HSUPA technology, said Jeanette Fridberg, director of marketing for radio access networks at Ericsson. The company expects to deliver its gear commercially by the end of this year, though handsets that take advantage of it probably won't arrive until a year from now, she said.

Yankee Group analyst Phil Marshall said the standard is overshadowed by the gains LTE will deliver.

"I don't think there's much place for HSPA+ in the market, other than for those service providers that hit significant capacity constraints in their radio networks within the next 18 months or so," Marshall said. The capital expenditure would be comparable to LTE if an operator's gear were more than six months old, and LTE delivers other benefits, such as lower latency, he said. Motorola does not plan to sell HSPA+ infrastructure, advising its customers go directly to LTE. The latest technology is like a point upgrade rather than a true next generation, according to Stephane Daeuble, global marketing manager for LTE at Motorola.

Ericsson's Fridberg said the move is just a software and antenna upgrade, even for older HSPA networks, and that its HSPA Evolution could benefit users for years while LTE networks are slowly rolled out.

Alcatel-Lucent is also embracing HSPA+. It won't demonstrate it at CTIA but is in talks with several customers and expects them to deploy the gear starting early next year, said Sandip Mukerjee, vice president of wireless portfolio and strategy. With the growing use of bandwidth-hungry services, especially video and rich social-networking applications, many mobile operators will face a bandwidth crunch soon, he said.

"Anybody who has deployed (earlier HSPA networks) should be looking seriously at this technology," Mukerjee said. "There is a continuing demand and associated willingness to pay for increased bandwidth." He declined to forecast how much more speed HSPA+ would deliver, but called it "an appreciable quality-of-experience leap" over current technologies.

Microsoft's brand power has been in sharp decline over the past four years, an indication the company is losing credibility and mindshare with U.S. business users, according to a recent study by market research firm CoreBrand.

According to the CoreBrand Power 100 2007 study , which polled about 12,000 U.S. business decision-makers, Microsoft dropped from number 12 in the ranking of the most powerful U.S. company brands in 2004 to number 59 last year. In 1996, the company ranked number 1 in brand power among 1,200 top companies in about 50 industries, said James Gregory, CEO of CoreBrand.

CoreBrand measures brand power using four criteria. It first rates the familiarity of a company's brand. Once a company has a certain level of familiarity, they are ranked according to three "attributes of favorability": overall reputation, perception of management, and investment potential, Gregory said. While Microsoft's brand is still eminently recognizable, the company is declining in all three favorable attributes, he said.

Gregory said that a decline in and of itself is not indicative that a company is losing its mindshare or reputation among customers. However, what's significant in Microsoft's case is that the decline has been consistent over a number of years and has plunged dramatically in a brief time.

"When you see something decline with increasing velocity, it's a concern," he said.

Among its peers in the category of Computers, Peripherals, and Computer Software, Microsoft is second to IBM in brand power, with Toshiba a close third, Gregory said. If Microsoft's downward trend continues, Toshiba could pass it in brand power next year, he said.

Gregory could only speculate as to why Microsoft's reputation has been declining because his firm does not ask people that specific question. He said the "underwhelming" response to Windows Vista might be one reason, and Apple's clever "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" advertising campaign -- which paints Windows in an unfavorable light -- may be another.

IBM suffered a "much faster and more severe" decline in brand power in the early 1990s, Gregory said, and it took them 10 years to rebuild the brand's reputation. To stage a similar turnaround, Microsoft must have a clearer vision of the direction in which the company is headed and put forth leaders that people can trust to articulate that vision, he said.

Microsoft, which has been diversifying its business beyond packaged software in the past several years, has struggled to articulate how the many facets of its business -- software, entertainment, and online among them -- show a cohesive business plan. The company has been trying to clarify at least one of those strategies -- its online advertising business -- with new services and a bid to purchase Yahoo. However, Gregory suggested it may take more than that to raise the perception of its brand.

OpenOffice.org 2.4, the latest version of the free productivity application suite, was released Thursday and is now available for download for a number of operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

An open-source project backed by Sun, OpenOffice.org is widely regarded as the leading competitor to Microsoft Office. It is also the most prominent software to support ODF (Open Document Format), a set of open standards that challenges Microsoft's proprietary Office file formats.

This release is mostly an incremental upgrade, however, and isn't likely to do much to heat up the competition in the productivity applications market. It incorporates mostly minor new features and bug fixes for each of the applications in the suite, including Writer, Calc, the Base personal database, and the Impress presentation software.

The real sparks won't start flying until the next major milestone for OpenOffice.org, version 3.0, scheduled to ship in September. That version is expected to bring long-awaited support for Microsoft's Office 2007 file formats, which will make it easier for current Office users to migrate to the alternative suite. In addition, it will bring support for ODF 1.2 and user interface improvements, among other features.

A version of OpenOffice.org ships with most desktop Linux distributions, and current Linux users may wish to wait for their distribution maintainer to offer a version of the 2.4 upgrade that has been specially tweaked for their flavor of Linux. Windows and Mac OS X users can download installers from the OpenOffice.org distribution site.

Most often after one of their peers is acquired by a larger competitor, business leaders at rival IT industry startups will harp on the notion that such a buyout kills the momentum and innovation ongoing at the company that has been purchased.

Such has been the case in the DLP (data loss prevention) space since de facto market leader Vontu was acquired by security giant Symantec in November 2007, but roughly 100 days after the deal was finalized, Joseph Ansanelli, the startup's founder and former CEO, claims that the post-buyout integration is moving forward just as he'd planned.

"Acquisitions of this kind are often hard to do, and if you look at the vast majority, most do not succeed -- but there are several key things that you need to get right to make it work, and we feel that we're doing a good job on those things," said Ansanelli, who now wears the title of vice president of DLP Solutions at Symantec.

The key to maintaining Vontu's growth while allowing Symantec to benefit from the technology it acquired -- beyond driving continued sales of the DLP vendor's existing products -- has been to stick to the roadmap agreed upon by the two firms during their deal making, he said.

Reporting directly to Symantec's chief operating officer, Enrique Salem, as part of a group solely focused on DLP, there has been no confusion that Vontu's skills would become lost in a sea of other technologies and companies acquired by Symantec, Ansanelli said.

By remaining true to its pre-acquisition promises not to alter Vontu's internal make-up or technological development plans, there has been none of the employee defection or organizational change that frequently occurs after such a transaction, the executive said.

And according to Symantec's latest survey of existing Vontu customers, he claims, those users interviewed were as satisfied with their level of support around its DLP technologies as they were before the merger.

Even more significant however, said Ansanelli, is the fact that Symantec remains committed to DLP as a major opportunity going forward, both as a standalone technology and as an element of its other security products.

"How we fit into the overall strategy for Symantec is really important, but I think if you look at the types of things [Symantec CEO] John Thompson has said, it's clear that we're a key to the company's long-term vision and that we fit very well into its plans," Ansanelli said. "When we were working on the [buyout] agreement, we talked a lot about the general strategy to integrate the company and made it one of the terms of the deal -- that's been a key to our success with this process."

The most immediate benefit to Vontu's business since the merger has been its ability to tap into Symantec's customer base and to leverage its 4,000-person strong worldwide sales team, he said, with open communication between the new business unit and the parent company serving to accelerate sales.

One of the reasons why Vontu workers haven't jumped ship is because they have seen the commitment of resources around sales, marketing, and development that the industry giant promised as part of its offer, the former CEO contends.

And while some industry watchers, notably Vontu competitors, have speculated that Symantec would "blow up" the startup's technology, and merely parcel it into a number of other products, Ansanelli said that the company remains every bit as committed to selling DLP as a standalone set of tools as it is hopeful of augmenting its other technologies.

"It all goes back to getting that agreement on strategy into the deal," Ansanelli said. "Symantec sees the Vontu Enforce Platform as its core for DLP, yet it also wants all of the different monitoring and prevention, and discovery and data protection we provide to integrate with as many other products as possible."

Over the next 100 days, the executive said that Symantec and Vontu will continue to work on those product innovations while trying to continue to expand sales of the startup's existing technologies.

Industry watchers said that it is too early to determine if the Symantec-Vontu marriage is successful but observed that things appear to be going well for the companies, thus far.

The security market leader is unlikely to alter Vontu's technology or marketing message dramatically as long as the existing products continue to sell, and there should be plenty of opportunities to offer both standalone DLP and a wide array of integrated products, said Rich Mogull, analyst with Securosis.

"The ball is in Symantec's court. It's still too early to say how it will work out, but they've kept the Vontu management team intact, which is a good sign," Mogull said. "I haven't seen anything to show that it isn't going well, but I still want to know where they will be in this process in 12 to 18 months' time."

Regarding the startup's technology, Mogull said that some elements of Vontu's DLP system will likely end up used more heavily in other Symantec products, but he said that the company will have an opportunity to market other pieces as individual tools.

"The sensor points like the desktop agent will likely become throwaways and simply be included in other products, but the core functions of building policies and managing workflow for violations will remain a standalone solution," the analyst said.

"It's important to remember that guys who deal with anti-virus alerts and firewalls policies are very different than types of workflow and violations that people deal with around DLP," said Mogull. "So, even if parts get integrated into other products, the core management product will be there for DLP and will be a good market opportunity."

The analyst said that the strongest remaining independent DLP vendors should have plenty of opportunities to generate revenue and seek potential buyouts, but he contends that Vontu was likely best suited to find a parent with Symantec's massive footprint.

"Anyone who gets the exit they want is lucky these days, but there are still a lot of opportunities in DLP. There will be more mergers and acquisitions, and some standalones that can survive," Mogull said. "But, to go it alone, they will have to grow to do more than DLP as we know it. The DLP of today will eventually go away, but there should be a lot of opportunities around content monitoring and protection."

The popular Spring Framework for Java development will be fitted with REST (Representational State Transfer) capabilities in an upgrade planned for later this year, the founder of the framework, Rod Johnson, said Thursday at TheServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas.

Also, Johnson predicted a changing middleware scene, with a decline in Java application servers. He also touted capabilities in the current release of Spring, Version 2.5, pertaining to capabilities such as annotations.

The planned 3.0 version of Spring, anticipated this August or September, "will have significant enhancements with respect to Web technologies," Johnson said. Current and previous versions of the open source framework have been downloaded about 5 million times.

"We're really seeing extensive interest and growth in REST, and it will have comprehensive support for RESTful Web services," said Johnson, who is CEO of SpringSource, a consulting firm that provides services to Spring users.

Also planned for Spring 3.0 is unification in the programming model between Spring Web Flow and Spring MVC (Model View Controller). "The benefit of that is we will have one single Web programming model from the simplest applications up to the most complex Web interactions," Johnson said.

In the middleware arena, Johnson anticipates big changes, including a downturn for Java application servers.

"I think we're basically seeing the decline of the traditional Java EE server," said Johnson. "If you look at the increased prevalence of lighter-weight solutions like [Apache] Tomcat, if you look at the fact that OSGi allows you to fundamentally structure applications and services in a different way, I think it's very clear that we're in for a period of profound change."

Johnson discussed features of version 2.5, including the greater use of annotations for configuration in the area of dependency injection and Spring MVC. Dependency injection is mechanism in which, instead of an object having to look up its environment to find services, the services are automatically supplied to it by a container environment.

"The fundamental goals of Spring 2.5 were to strengthen Spring's position as the de facto standard component model for enterprise Java," as well as build on simplicity and power and make it easier to use, Johnson said.

Spring 2.5 also leverages OSGi, in which JAR (Java Archive) files are OSGi bundles. "OSGi is the best possible modularization," said Johnson. Also, annotation-driven configuration is featured in version 2.5.

Annotations provide benefits such as reduction or elimination of external configuration but can have drawbacks such as the need to annotate classes, which is not ideal for legacy code, Johnson said.

Two choices are offered for annotation-driven dependency injection in Spring 2.5: @Autowired, a native Spring annotation syntax designed in late 2007, or the @resource model, based on Java Specification Request 250.

A conference attendee cited use of Spring.

"We use Spring for dependency injection," said Chris Porte, software engineer at WeddingChannel.com. The organization leverages the singleton approach in which an object is instantiated for the entire system, Porte said.

On Wednesday, keynote speaker Neal Ford of ThoughtWorks cited use of Domain-Specific Languages (DSL) as providing an additional level of abstraction in programming. Johnson concurred that they will grow in prominence.

"I think to some degree if you look at what Spring 2 did with introducing a kind of XML namespaces so you can define your own XML elements, it's almost a DSL," Johnson said. "I do think we will see increased use of them."

It may be the quickest $10,000 Charlie Miller ever earned.

He took the first of three laptop computers -- and a $10,000 cash prize -- Thursday after breaking into a MacBook Air at the CanSecWest security conference's PWN 2 OWN hacking contest.

Show organizers offered a Sony Vaio, Fujitsu U810, and the MacBook as prizes, saying that they could be won by anybody at the show who could find a way to hack into each of them and read the contents of a file on the system using a previously undisclosed "0day" attack.

Nobody was able to hack into the systems on the first day of the contest when contestants were only allowed to attack the computers over the network, but on Thursday, the rules were relaxed so that attackers could direct contest organizers using the computers to do things like visit Web sites or open e-mail messages.

Miller, best known as one of the researchers who first hacked Apple's iPhone last year, didn't take much time. Within 2 minutes, he directed the contest's organizers to visit a Web site that contained his exploit code, which then allowed him to seize control of the computer, as about 20 onlookers cheered him on.

He was the first contestant to attempt an attack on any of the systems.

Miller was quickly given a nondisclosure agreement to sign, and he's not allowed to discuss particulars of his bug until the contest's sponsor, TippingPoint, can notify the vendor.

Contest rules state that Miller could only take advantage of software that was preinstalled on the Mac, so the flaw he exploited must have been accessible by, or possibly inside, Apple's Safari browser.

Last year's contest winner, Dino Dai Zovi, exploited a vulnerability in QuickTime to take home the prize.

Dai Zovi, who congratulated Miller after his hack, didn't participate in this year's contest, saying it was time for someone else to win.

Thursday's announcement that Comcast and BitTorrent will work together to solve network management problems won praise from some quarters, including members of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, but some net neutrality advocates said the deal doesn't diminish the need for new government rules.

Comcast, the largest cable provider in the United States, announced it would work with peer-to-peer vendor BitTorrent on ways to better manage network traffic as many users trade high-bandwidth files. Comcast has come under fire for slowing some BitTorrent traffic; some consumer and digital rights groups have said Comcast's behavior, revealed in an Associated Press investigation last October, shows the need for Congress or the FCC to approve net neutrality rules.

The two companies said they will work together, and engage the broader Internet community, on new ways to manage network traffic during peak times. Comcast also said it will migrate to a network management technique that is protocol-agnostic by the end of the year.

FCC chairman Kevin Martin said he was pleased that Comcast has "reversed course and agreed that it is not a reasonable network management practice to arbitrarily block certain applications on its network."

Martin also praised Comcast for working with BitTorrent. But he expressed some reservations.

"I am concerned, though, that Comcast has not made clear when they will stop this discriminatory practice," he said in a statement. "It appears this practice will continue throughout the country until the end of the year and in some markets, even longer. While it may take time to implement its preferred new traffic management technique, it is not at all obvious why Comcast couldn't stop its current practice of arbitrarily blocking its broadband customers from using certain applications."

Martin called on Comcast to provide its broadband customers and the FCC with a date when it plans to stop slowing BitTorrent traffic.

FCC member Jonathan Adelstein, a Democrat, praised the agreement but said the FCC will need to see more details of the deal. He also urged the "broader Internet community" to engage in similar dialogue.

FCC member Robert McDowell, like Martin, a Republican, was more forthcoming with his praise. "Consumers will be the ultimate beneficiaries of this agreement," he said in a statement. "As I have said for a long time, it is precisely this kind of private sector solution that has been the bedrock of Internet governance since its inception. Today's announcement obviates the need for any further government intrusion into this matter."

Several consumer and digital rights groups disagreed with McDowell.

Comcast's agreement with BitTorrent has no bearing on net neutrality complaints now before the FCC, said Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, one of the groups calling for the FCC to pass net neutrality rules. Sohn called Comcast's agreement "irrelevant" to the complaints before the commission.

"The FCC has the responsibility to protect the rights of consumers against discriminatory network management practices," Sohn said in an e-mail. "Any future agreements in the private sector do not change that reality, particularly if the companies involved reach agreements that work specifically with some technologies or network companies and not with others. Any arrangements made now would not cover any future developments in blocking, throttling or filtering that any other companies may use."

Internet users still need strong net neutrality protections, added Nicholas Reville, executive director of the Participatory Culture Foundation, a nonprofit that distributes the open source BitTorrent application Miro.

"Comcast can see that public demands for net neutrality protections are growing -- this announcement is a transparent attempt to distract from that debate," Reville said in an e-mail. "The announcement from Comcast and BitTorrent Inc. has absolutely nothing to do with the need for net neutrality protections, and BitTorrent Inc. certainly does not speak for other torrent technology companies."

But Bret Swanson, a senior fellow at conservative think tank the Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF), called the agreement a "huge win for common sense and for a healthy, growing Internet."

"We at PFF have been arguing for years that the Internet is a fast-moving realm of changing technology and content," he wrote in a blog post. "We advised that Washington should not wade into this dynamic arena with static rules that are likely to be misguided, and sure to be outdated even before they go into effect."

A group of U.S. universities is blazing a new path in open source software. The members are building a set of enterprise applications -- the big, important, mission-critical ones that have long been the exclusive domain of software companies like Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft.

The first application is the Kuali Financial System, a financial management application designed from the outset for the specific requirements of colleges and universities. It's available under a variant of the Apache 2.0 license. Strikingly, the first deployment is a small school in Nairobi, Kenya: Strathmore University , which estimated that it cut deployment costs by more than half compared with using a commercial product.

The software project is being overseen by the Kuali Foundation , a nonprofit group that brings together academic institutions, grant funding and a small but growing list of commercial partners, all committed to an open-source software model for a suite of administrative applications. The name is a Malaysian word for "wok," a common but indispensable utensil in a Malay kitchen. The overall approach is similar to that of the Sakai Foundation , a higher education project focused on a learning management system.

Other Kuali projects are focusing on administering grant applications and awards (based on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Coeus software ), a student information system, and endowment management. The foundation creates a community around each project, with teams responsible for collaborative design and coding.

The reality of 'zero leverage'"The critical reason we're all doing this is the idea of controlling our own destiny," says John "Barry" Walsh, director of university information systems at Indiana University. "We're acutely aware that we're a quirky market," Walsh says. "We don't even want to pay wholesale [prices]. And when we buy your product, we're going to badger you to change every little thing."

Walsh is just as acutely aware that badgering doesn't do much good with big ERP software vendors. "Higher ed is one percent of Oracle's total global market," he says. "That is zero leverage."

Walsh's idea was to create an open-source alternative, basing it on a homegrown, modular, client-server financial system that Indiana developed in the mid-1990s, and was willing to contribute to open source. He mined his higher education contacts to find likeminded folks, including the National Association of College and University Business Officers and IBM . With a $2.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Kuali came into being .

The heart of the original Indiana financial system was a chart of accounts designed specifically for higher education, organized around a workflow engine and modular business processes, which could be changed easily as needed without affecting the rest of the application. The goal was to create a software application that would have "zero disruptive upgrades. You don't have to park the university for a year while you upgrade to version 9 or whatever," Walsh says.

A key change for Kuali was rewriting the code in Java and making use of Web services interfaces to decouple the various program modules and simplify integration.

The laborious tweak to the Apache licenseOne of the most laborious parts of this process was making a small change to the Apache license so universities with large and complex software patent portfolios could more easily contribute code to open-source efforts like Sakai and Kuali, according to Chris Coppola, president and CEO, rSmart Group, a software services company that specializes in open-source support for higher education.

The change emerged from a higher education international licensing summit in late 2006. As Coppola explained in a blog entry , the Apache license grants broad patent rights to users of the "outbound" open-source code. But some university contributors (the "inbound" code) with large and complex software patent portfolios couldn't agree to such a blanket license. The license modification in effect doesn't promise to adopters patent rights that the contributors can't give. It took almost a year of debate and negotiation for the Open Source Initiative to give its seal of approval, he says. The result is the Educational Community License 2.0, used by both Kuali and Sakai.

The open-source license is already yielding unexpected results. "A lot [of development] has started happening around the edges of Kuali Financials with the infrastructure components: People are implementing them and adding to them," Coppola says.

This work has been organized into a new project, Kuali Rice , which is creating a suite of middleware programs (workflow, messaging, identity management), interfaces and Web services around a service bus. With the Rice components, developers can more easily build and link applications as collections of modular, interconnected services.

Early adoptersThe initial release of Kuali Financial was in late 2006, with a more full-blooded release in November 2007. The adoption by Kenya's Swathmore University proved that Kuali could be scaled down to meet the needs of a very small institution, says John Robinson, chairman of rSmart Group, which worked closely with Swathmore. Release 3.0 is due out in December 2008 with modules for accounts receivable and capital assets, and a battery of enhancements.

For Colorado State University, which is phasing in Kuali Financials, it was just in time. CSU had started the long, complex process of updating its financial system, taking months to evaluate the needs of very diverse campuses and draft a request for proposals. But the RFP was shelved with the advent of Kuali. "Kuali offered functions and integration not available anywhere else," says Pat Burns, vice president for IT at the Fort Collins university.

CSU brought in the "Kuali appliance," a brainstorm by rSmart: The Kuali software is preloaded on a Linux server and comes with several days of rSmart consulting help. Schools plug in the server , load in their data, tailor the chart of accounts, and give it a trial run, seeing what fits and what doesn't. If they decided to adopt Kuali, they've already been started on the actual deployment.

"It was simple to implement, to get started and to enter information," CSU's Burns says. "It didn't have a lot of cumbersome complexity." Kuali is driving a major CSU project to refine, simplify, redesign and automate CSU's business processes around financial management and in future administration of research funds and projects.

One key change has been a cultural one: the awareness and fostering of a community around open enterprise applications. "One question we've been getting from our people attending the [regular] Kuali meetings is 'why have not been doing this before as a community,'" Burns says. "It's really a cultural difference. And most people are seeing that difference as a positive thing."