Glen White

When you add up this week's top Google news, it paints a picture of a gargantuan, but immature, effort to make the Web faster. It released an experimental replacement for HTTP known as "SPDY." Plus rumors are swirling that Chrome OS will be seen next week at last. Google open sourced "Go" its experimental programming language that combines the speed of scripting languages with the speed and safety of compiled languages.

Baking an Add-On App: Google Web Toolkit, Data APIs and App EngineWhere To Get Assistance on Android App Development Here are a few more details:  Google Go is a newly announced programming language created by Google and released as an open source project. But it's an experimental language for all that. Some experts say that Go's syntax is friendly and easy like Python or Ruby on Rails while remaining familiar enough to those who know C-based languages. And it's a less-than-easy task to build a following for a new language. SPDY, pronounced "SPeeDY", is an another experiment.

Google needs to commit to Go for the long term, work hard at championing and strengthening it until other developers have some reason to take on the learning curve to work with it. SPDY would replace the HTTP protocol with a new application-layer protocol for transporting content over the web. It hasn't completely scrapped HTTP, but it's not a mere extension either. It's inventors say it is designed to minimize "latency through features such as multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression," according to the blog post announcing it. The protocol still uses HTTP headers, but it overrides other parts of the protocol, such as connection management and data transfer formats.

For starters, browser would need to support it. At least one thing stands in SPDY's way: Microsoft. While Google can do that with Chrome and still has lots of financial sway with Mozilla, how would Google would convince the mighty Microsoft to add it to Internet Explorer? There's another little issue, too. And IE is still the preferred browser for corporations and most Windows users.

Google is one company, a for-profit vendor at that. So says blog site TechCrunch citing unnamed sources. For SPDY, or any alternative to HTTP, to go anywhere it would need to be under the guidance of the standards organization that oversees the Internet, the IETF.  Word has it, too, that the much hyped, but as yet to be delivered, Chrome OS is about to be seen next week. Chrome OS, like the Chrome browser, is Google's attempt to make the Web faster, in this case by creating an operating system geared for cloud computing and taking much of the application the burden off the client. But the road to turn any of these efforts, much less all of them, into winners is long and cannot be conquered alone.

Google may have big plans for a faster Internet. Follow Julie Bort on Twitter.

Security certifications are the most sought-after area of specialty among information technology professionals, according to a new study from Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA). (Check out CSO's certification directory to see certification options.) The survey of more than 1,500 IT workers found that 37 percent intend to pursue a security certification over the next five years. The results are included in the CompTIA study 'IT Training and Certification: Insights and Opportunities.' "Given the growing reach of security, with threats becoming more pervasive and dangerous and with no business or industry immune to those threats, it makes sense that many IT professionals view this as a must-have for career advancement," said Terry Erdle, senior vice president, skills certifications, CompTIA. The results fall in line with a survey conducted by the same organization earlier this year that found more companies are requiring IT security certification. Another 18 percent of IT workers said they will seek ethical hacking certifications during the same time period, while 13 percent identified forensics as their next certification target.

In that research, the number of organizations where IT security certification is required has increased by half and is continuing to grow; 32 percent of employees were required to have certifications in 2008, compared to 20 percent in 2006. Other technology areas where survey respondents said they will seek new certifications over the next five years include green IT, healthcare IT, mobile and software-as-a-service. Eighty-eight percent of certification holders indicated they pursue a certification to enhance their resume. Economic advancement and personal growth are key drivers for seeking IT certifications, the CompTIA study also reveals. An identical 88 percent said personal growth is a major or minor reason in their decision to pursue a certification.

VMware's Site Recovery Manager is now supporting vSphere, eliminating one of the obstacles preventing customers from upgrading to the latest version of VMware's virtualization platform. VMware on Monday released SRM version 4, with support for vSphere and other upgrades including a "many-to-one failover [that] protects multiple production sites with automated failover into a single, shared recovery site." Because Site Recovery Manager did not immediately support vSphere, numerous customers have delayed upgrades from 3.5, acknowledges Jon Bock, product marketing manager for VMware's server business unit. vSphere 4, the successor to ESX Server 3.5, was unveiled in April but until now did not work with Site Recovery Manager, VMware's software for recovering virtual machines in case of disaster.

Now that SRM supports vSphere, adoption should accelerate, he said. "vSphere was a significant change that we had to update the add-on products for. But the months-long delay is similar to delays often seen between the release of a new operating system and add-on products, he said. "A customer who has important production applications on ESX 3.5 is probably not going to upgrade to vSphere 4 the day after it's released," Bock said. In a perfect world, we'd love to have all the new releases of products released on the same day as the platform," Bock said. vSphere is still not supported by VMware View, the vendor's desktop virtualization software. Lifecycle Manager just gained compatibility with vSphere in a new release a few weeks ago. VMware View will be compatible with vSphere in its next release, expected in 2010, according to a VMware spokeswoman.

In addition to support for vSphere, Site Recovery Manager now supports NFS storage, along with Fibre Channel and iSCSI, which were already supported. "We have a lot of interest in NFS from customers looking at using that in important applications," Bock says. VMware provides an integration module to partners, and most of the major storage companies have made their products compatible with Site Recovery Manager. SRM works by integrating tightly with storage array-based replication. Shared recovery sites, the other new feature, could be useful for companies with multiple branch offices, Bock said. The new version of SRM is available now and costs $1,750 per processor.

Overall, the new release is "focused on expanding the use cases for Site Recovery Manager," he said. SRM was first released in June 2008 and has been purchased by more than 2,000 customers, Bock says. Virtualization offers inherent advantages when it comes to disaster recovery, since it eliminates the need to recover the actual physical server an application was running on, Bock notes. That's still a small portion of VMware's 150,000 customers overall. Some customers have been using SRM not for disaster recovery but to move applications from one site to another when they are switching data centers, he said. SRM support for vSphere was a highly anticipated feature, says ITIC analyst Laura DiDio. "Disaster recovery and backup are in every customer's top five checklist of things you must have," she says.

Still, disaster recovery is the main purpose for the software. Follow Jon Brodkin on Twitter

Former Advanced Micro Devices CEO Hector Ruiz allegedly shared confidential information with a Wall Street trader connected to an insider-trading scandal, according to a news report on Tuesday. The AMD executive wasn't named in the court filing, but the Wall Street Journal said in a news report on Tuesday that it was Ruiz, citing unnamed sources. A criminal case filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Oct. 16 alleged that an AMD executive shared confidential information about the company's reorganization in 2008 with a Wall Street executive, Danielle Chiesi. Chiesi works for the hedge fund New Castle Funds.

The SEC filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The SEC last week charged six individuals, including Wall Street and technology company executives, with involvement in an insider-trading scandal scheme that the agency said netted millions of U.S. dollars in illicit profits. Ruiz was AMD's CEO until July of last year, after which he was replaced by Dirk Meyer. Ruiz is now the chairman of GlobalFoundries, AMD's manufacturing spinoff. However, he continued as the company's chairman until he stepped down in March. AMD earlier this year spun off manufacturing assets to form GlobalFoundries in a joint venture with Advanced Technology Investment Company, which is owned by the Abu Dhabi government.

The executives charged included Robert Moffat, senior vice president and executive in IBM's systems and technology group, and Rajiv Goel, who is Intel treasury's managing director of investments. Ruiz is the latest in a list of technology executives who have allegedly shared information with the traders in the case. Intel and IBM have placed those executives on leave. McKinsey's Kumar was also charged with sharing information about AMD's reorganization in the case. Other individuals charged by the SEC include Raj Rajaratnam, a portfolio manager with hedge fund Galleon Group; Anil Kumar, a director at McKinsey; and Mark Kurland of New Castle Funds. Kumar allegedly tipped off Rajaratnam about pending transactions involving AMD and two Abu Dhabi-based "sovereign entities," the SEC said.

AMD has had multiple transactions involving the Abu Dhabi government in recent years. Rajaratnam then made trades on Galleon's behalf based on the insider information. In 2007, the Abu Dhabi government's Mubadala Development Company paid US$622 million to acquire an 8.1 percent stake in AMD. GlobalFoundries declined to comment on the report, saying the allegations predated the launch of the company. AMD did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

India's largest outsourcer, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), reported on Friday a fall in revenue, but growth in profit, in U.S. dollar terms for the quarter ended Sept. 30, indicating that the outsourcing market is still difficult. Spending in some sectors like manufacturing, telecommunications and IT is recovering very slowly, said N. Chandrasekaran, the company's CEO and managing director at a webcast press briefing in Mumbai. "Don't expect a sudden bounce back in growth rates," Chandrasekaran said. The company said that there is an improvement in market conditions, but cautioned that discretionary spending on IT and related services is still tight. TCS' revenue for the quarter was US$1.54 billion, down by 2.3 percent from a year earlier in dollar terms.

The company was able to improve margins, despite pressure on billing rates for services, by moving more work offshore to India, improved utilization of staff and a continuous cost cutting program, Chandrasekaran said. Revenue grew higher by 6.9 percent in Indian rupees mainly because of currency fluctuations. As a result, profit in the quarter, at $336 million, was up 8 percent in U.S. dollars from a year earlier, and 29.2 percent in rupee terms. Infosys' revenue for the fiscal year ended March 31 is forecast to be in the range of $4.6 billion to $4.62 billion, down by 1.0 percent to 1.3 percent from a year ago. Infosys Technologies, India's second largest outsourcer, reported earlier this month a decline in revenue and profit in U.S. dollar terms for the quarter, but the results were better than was forecast by the company in July.

The decline is however smaller than the 3.1 percent to 4.6 percent decline the company forecast in July. TCS added 320 staff during the quarter. TCS does not provide guidance for the quarters ahead. The company said it would be adding 8,000 staff in this quarter, to prepare for an anticipated recovery. It added 30 clients in the quarter.

Cisco this week enhanced its IPv6 offerings for its carrier core and edge routers in an effort to ease the eventual migration from IPv4. The Carrier-Grade IP Version 6 Solution line includes a new hardware module for Cisco's CRS-1 router, and software for that system as well as for the ASR 9000 edge router. By 2015, there will be 15 billion IP endpoints on the Internet. Cisco also unveiled professional services offerings to assist customers in the transition from IPv4 to IPv6. The evolution of the Internet Cisco says there are 700 days left until the last block of IPv4 addresses are allocated.

The IPv6 enhancements rolled out this week are intended to provide a bridge from IPv4 to full IPv6 network while at the same time preserving existing IPv4 addresses to ease the migration. IPv6 has 340 undecillion unique addresses - or more than 50 billion billion billion - for each person on earth, more than enough to continue to support the demand for IP addresses, Cisco says. IPv4 has a finite set of unique addresses, numbering approximately 4 billion, which is rapidly depleting due to the growth of Internet-connected devices and smart devices. However, the protocols of IPv4 and IPv6 are not directly compatible, so migrating a network from IPv4 to IPv6 requires preservation of IPv4 while orchestrating a gradual and prudent transition to IPv6. This has been a chief reason why the industry has been procrastinating on this migration even though IPv6 was developed a decade ago. It's probably something to take seriously two to five years from now but (carriers) have to start to prepare." With that, Cisco unveiled the Carrier-Grade Services Engine for the CRS-1. Deployed deep in the core of service provider's network, this module supports large-scale, high-throughput network-address translation (NAT). At the edge, Cisco rolled out Carrier-Grade IPv6 Solution for its ASR series routers. But with IPv4 addresses facing imminent depletion, the time may have come to accelerate the adoption of IPv6. "I do think we've reached the point where we should be concerned about it," says Glen Hunt, an analyst at Current Analysis. "The biggets problem might be that we've been crying wolf about IPv6 and defining ways to get around attacking the problem.

This is software that helps enable NAT at the edge of a network for smaller or distributed IP networks. These are professional services designed to make the transition to IPv6 smooth and reduce the risk to network operations. The software is intended to first tunnel IPv6 addresses through IPv4; and then perform the inverse function as IPv6 addresses outnumber IPv4. Lastly, Cisco is offering services for the Carrier-Grade IPv6 Solution implementation. The services include initial planning and IPv6 readiness assessment to design and implementation. All products will be available in early 2010. Cisco did not disclose pricing.

Nemetschek North America released the 2010 versions of its Vectorworks line of design software. Building on the integration of the Parasolid 3D modeling core in version 2009, the 2010 edition adds bi-directional associativity features and an intuitive, 3-D modeling environment that features unified views and easy-to-use 3-D snapping for accurate modeling. Tuesday's announcement includes new versions of Designer, Architect, Landmark, Spotlight, Machine Design, Fundamentals, and Renderworks. Vectorworks 2010 also extends Nemetschek's relationship with Siemens PLM Software by integrating the D-Cubed 2D Dimensional Constraint Manager (2D DCM) into the software.

The major improvement in version 1.1 is the addition of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, including support for ten different languages. The VectorWorks Web site lists all of the more than 80 new features in the new 2010 version as well pricing information.-Jackie Dove OCR technology added in Prizmo update Creaceed on Tuesday announced Prizmo 1.1, an update to its image-processing application that allows people to scan documents using a digital camera. Users can save the resulting file in a number of formats, including PDF, RTF, and text, and the contents are indexable by Spotlight. An Intel Mac or PowerMac G5 with at least 64MB of VRAM is required, with 128MB of VRAM recommended. Prizmo 1.1 requires Mac OS X 10.5.8 or later, and is compatible with Mac OS X Snow Leopard. A license for Prizmo costs $40.-Dan Moren Wolfram announces webMathematica 3 Wolfram Research updated webMathematica, adding new performance and development capabilities for its technology for adding dynamic content to the Web. webMathematica 3 integrates both Mathematica 6 and 7 with the latest Web server technology, making the tool ideal for creating Web sites where users compute and visualize the results directly in their browsers.

Pricing information for webMathematica 3 is available by contacting Wolfram.-Philip Michaels Black Ink update offers bug fixes Black Ink 1.1.7, the latest version of Red Sweater Software's crossword puzzle-solving application, was released on Thursday. Other changes in webMathematica 3 include expression language and custom tags that provide a more concise way to call to Mathematica from Web pages; a queuing system that executes long-running or asynchronous computation jobs; support for Wolfram Workbench; a new configurable logging system for tracking different types of errors; the ability for users to write REST and SOAP Web services; and improvements to the kernel monitor and kernel interaction. The update fixes problems with getting puzzles from the Chronicle of Higher Education, removes the now defunct Sydney Morning Herald source, and fixes a number of bugs, including one that could cause downloads to stop working until the app was relaunched. Black Ink requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later and costs $25 for a license.-DM There are also a number of improvements to multi-character answer support.