Michael Fenton, a May graduate of the University of Florida Hough Graduate School of Business in Gainesville, expected to learn about job openings from career services but quickly realized that the school's on-campus recruiting and other connections for jobs for its accelerated class may not be enough to get him hired.

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For Maria, that meant writing up a proposal for an accelerated math class, roping in 31 other students to take part, and then literally begging the principal to find the funding.

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Believe it or not, it was back in 2006 that the chipmaker first started talking about its "new class of x86 processors" and the idea of an Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) -- a chip that would combine a CPU and a fairly powerful ATI GPU onto the same die.

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The surge was accelerated by the financial crisis and mortgage meltdown, which put many lower-middle class families out of their homes, economists have said.

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The 2013 predictions include a particular focus on cloud federation, an accelerated adoption of cloud stacks, and greater control over cloud resources through what they describe as enterprise-class features.

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