Computers for all

An academic committee at the University of California at Berkeley has proposed an initiative to provide a “vanilla” personal computer platform for all faculty and graduate-student instructors.

The initiative, proposed by UC Berkeley’s Academic Senate Committee on Computing and Communications (COMP) is aimed at ensuring all faculty and teaching staff have adequate computers, network access and help-desk support to do their jobs, rather than rely on this stuff being paid for out of research grants, according to an article on the UC Berkeley News Web site.

The article says some departments try to lower the high cost of tech support by relying on tech-savvy students but sometimes this strategy backfires because of the lack of expertise or up-to-date tools. This strategy could also leave the university open to security attacks. According to the article, the campus sustained more than 71 million security threats to the network, counting viruses, worms, and targeted hacking attempts, during the past 12 months.