Careers: With the already-stated termination data of December 31st, an InfoWorld reader writes in seeking advice from Bob Lewis. He’s one of the IT people being laid off and replaced with outsourcers, and management wants him to complete an application upgrade by year’s end. Problem is, the last one took two weeks of 100 work hours each, and then some. This time around, there’s no hope for a bonus, comp time, or any other reward. “I’m salaried, and I understand that sometimes I have to work more than forty hours in a week. But something is very off about this situation and I have no idea what to do other than buckle down and spend a few long, sleepless weeks.” Not so, Lewis answers in Outsourced during a death march. “You have an obligation to be professional about how you handle your current assignment. That obligation is to yourself, not to anyone else. You’ll feel better about yourself if you handle things professionally. You also have an obligation to yourself to look out for your own interests. Nobody else in this equation will do so.” The news beat: Verizon Wireless plans to open its network to outside devices, such as mobile handsets and applications, by the end of next year. Yahoo says that users will soon be able to run a structured search around specific items, which it hopes will make the Web easier to navigate. Tibco upgrades its Rendezvous messaging software with lower latency that, it claims, results in better performance for SOA or financial services environments. And Mozilla fixes a handful of security bugs in Firefox, including the widely-publicized problem in the way the browser processes files compressed in the .jar format.Columnist’s corner: In speaking with Andy Lippman, co-director of MIT’s Communications Future Program, Ephraim Schwartz found that, “what I enjoyed most about our conversation is Lippman’s ability to switch between the highly practical, applied science, to the way-out stuff such as telepresence and hyperconnectivity.” Hyperconnectivity, Lippman explains, will enable controlling of “stuff on Mars” or surgery from 3,000 miles away. The future of communications. Lippman, it just so happens, is currently on a year of sabbatical, spending that as a fellow at Nortel’s R&D group. And he’s seen engineering courses change considerably. “When I went to school, a lot of what you studied was how can you do something given certain constraints,” Lippman says. “Now students are asked to write a computer program where memory is free, disk space and processing cycles are unlimited … we can challenge students to stretch their minds.” Careers