Careers & Education

Going before your company

Shah

Worried about dealing with .doc, .xls and .ppt files? Probably not, but the people at OASIS think you should be. OASIS has been at work since 2002 building up an open alternative to proprietary office file formats under its OpenDocument Format initiative.

A young man sits in the arena stands with his parents, wearing a new suit, and hears a general manager call his name. Beaming, he hurries down from the stands to join the manager on the stage, and don the jersey of his new team.

VoIP is going Wi-Fi, extending its reach beyond traditional phone services and potentially putting an arrow in the heart of telcos. In December, Vonage announced its combo VoIP Wi-Fi phone, providing access to hot-spots.

A survey commissioned by Microsoft Canada in Mississauga, Ont., found that students are technology friendly. The survey found students also "misuse" technology quite a bit, with as many as 43 per cent admitting that they illegally download music.

The University of Alberta has emerged as the top Canadian team at the 30th Annual Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) world finals held Wednesday in San Antonio, Tex.

Games may be great fun to play, but developing them is no fun. There is a dark side to the gaming industry. Developers labour in the dungeons of major gaming corporations like the subterranean Morlocks in the sci-fi classic The Time Machine, working absurd overtime and enduring bad conditions to produce games for the Eloi-customers frolicking outside.