If you're searching for the silver lining to all the economic clouds you've seen hanging around lately, just read Matthew Nickasch's latest blog entry.

If you haven't seen it yet, check out Network World's Salary Calculator, which has been newly updated for 2009.

Plug in your data (which we don't keep) and get a personal estimate of how much you should be making in IT. Always a popular feature at Network World.

A think tank is suggesting that while the federal government is handing out cash, it might want to spread some around the IT industry.

Specifically, the group suggests that $30 billion would do the trick, creating or retaining a million jobs.

Too obvious? Twitter is being used to dupe twitterers into giving up their usernames and passwords.

Network World's Brad Reed has details.

A researcher is reporting that IE users were leaving the browser in favor of Firefox, Chrome and Safari last month, as part of a longer market-share slide that stretches back to at least the beginning of 2008.

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Anyone can make predictions, and just about everyone does. The beauty part is that no one really ever follows up to see if the predictions came true.

But if you're into predictions, here are a bunch made by people who claim to be smart enough to make them.

Investment firm Oppenheimer & Co. is saying that Juniper is going after Nortel's channel partners as Nortel weighs its options.

Nortel is reportedly considering bankruptcy as one of those options.

Oppenheimer says Juniper has the most to gain from Nortel's troubles. Jim Duffy has the full report.

Novell's BrainShare conference has been helping Novell users share brains for two decades, but the company canceled the upcoming March event and cited attendees' restricted travel budgets.

Novell sent a letter explaining its decision.

Siemens and its subsidiaries regularly bribed foreign officials, to the tune of $1.4 billion, according to the SEC.

Now, the company will have to pay another $1.6 billion in fines, penalties and return of profits.

Jim Duffy's analysis of Cisco's data center moves is much more complete, but one of the striking items he discusses is Cisco's internally developed blade server, which is slated to debut in 2009, according to sources.

Cisco has been branching out for some time, but the introduction of an actual blade server would be an industry-shattering move.

Forty years ago this week, Douglas Engelbart and his team gave a demo that at the time seemed revolutionary and today seems prophetic. Not only did it introduce the world to the mouse, but it also debuted hypertext links and on-screen text editing, and joined computing with videoconferencing, according to this story by the IDG News Service's Robert McMillan.

Nortel has been in trouble for a while, with some financial analysts looking at the picture and issuing dire warnings.

Now it appears that the company has hired lawyers to look at its options, which may include bankruptcy.

A report from the House Committee on Energy and Commerce takes FCC Chairman Kevin Martin to task, alleging that he manipulated data in his effort to allow the FCC to regulate cable TV companies.

Full details can be found here.

Today's layoff news comes from AT&T, which says it will let 12,000 workers go throughout 2009. That's a lot of people, yet it only represents 4% of AT&T's workforce.

Also sounding like a lot is the $600 million that AT&T will have to spend for severance payments to those workers.

Challenger, Gray & Christmas reports that U.S. companies cut more than 180,000 jobs last month.

To put it into perspective, it's a 61% increase over October and a 148% increase over the same month a year ago.

For many, this won't be a very happy holiday season.

Despite Apple commercials to the contrary, Apple computers can catch viruses, too. And now Apple is starting to recommend that users install anti-virus software.

Indian officials investigating last week's attacks in Mumbai claim that the terrorists used Google Earth to "learn their way around." But the information available on the attacked locations is also available via printed tourism maps, IDGNS reports.

If that's true, then we have yet another case of technology being vilified simply because it is new.

Microsoft released an emergency patch in October, and is now saying it sees increasing reports from users about a worm exploiting the vulnerability that was patched.

John Fontana has details.

Cisco is shutting down most of its operations for four days at the end of the year, as part of a larger effort to reduce costs, Cisco has confirmed.

Shutting down means saving payroll and facilities expenses, and Cisco is looking to stay ahead of deteriorating economic conditions.

Cisco has been a vocal opponent of so-called "patent trolls," companies that abuse the patent system to extort money from equipment manufacturers. IBM obtains more patents every year than just about anyone. The two companies have become the first members of a group formed by a startup that pledges to help get the patent system under control.