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ACM TechNews - Wednesday, October 15, 2003
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ACM TechNews
Volume 5, Number 558
Date: October 15, 2003
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Top Stories for Wednesday, October 15, 2003:
http://www.acm.org/technews/current/homepage.html
"H-1B Visa Cuts Might Not Have Big Effect in U.S."
"Casting a Wider, Deeper Net"
"Mac Supercomputer: Fast, Cheap"
"The Future of Talking Computers"
"The Web: Indispensable But Not Impervious"
"Lawmakers Hammer on Spam"
"Electronic Gadgets, Endlessly Seductive But Soon Discarded"
"Breathing Life Into Messy Sketches"
"All the President's Votes?"
"Unfolding the Field of Computational Origami"
"Computer Center Sets Trans-Atlantic Speed Record for Data Transfer"
"Fighting to Preserve Old Programs"
"To Whom May I Direct Your Free Call?"
"Technology to Make You Go 'Wow'"
"Securing the Portals of Cyber Space"
"Grids Extend Reach"
"Ready When You Are"
"Joy After Sun"
"Promise and Peril of the 21st Century"
******************* News Stories ***********************
"H-1B Visa Cuts Might Not Have Big Effect in U.S."
Forrester Research's John McCarthy does not think the October
reduction of the yearly H-1B visa cap from 195,000 to 65,000 will
have a significant impact on offshore service companies in the
short term, given the number of H-1Bs that have already been ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1015w.html#item1
"Casting a Wider, Deeper Net"
At a recent MIT conference on emerging technologies, Intel
research director David Tennenhouse described how two new
networking technologies may revolutionize how people use the
Internet. Intel is backing PlanetLab, an Internet overlay ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1015w.html#item2
"Mac Supercomputer: Fast, Cheap"
A $5.2 million Virginia Tech supercomputer comprised of 1,100
dual-processor Power Mac G5s could earn the ranking of the second
most powerful supercomputer in the world, if its final score on
the Linpack Benchmark fulfills expectations. Preliminary numbers ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1015w.html#item3
"The Future of Talking Computers"
Current speech technology systems are highly expensive and marked
by limited usability because of a restricted vocabulary, but
researchers are optimistic that the technology will make
significant strides relatively soon. One such researcher is ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1015w.html#item4
"The Web: Indispensable But Not Impervious"
Experts say the reliability and security of the Internet are
interdependent. Gomez CTO Paul Leroux roughly equates the
current state of Internet technology to the "third or fourth
generation of telephones" today, and adds that reliability ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1015w.html#item5
"Lawmakers Hammer on Spam"
The spam problem has inspired a raft of antispam proposals, but
most of the half-dozen spam control bills currently making the
rounds in Congress legitimize junk email, according to Spamcon
Foundation executive director Andrew Barrett. "Frankly, they ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1015w.html#item6
"Electronic Gadgets, Endlessly Seductive But Soon Discarded"
"Barely used" or "new in box" electronic products are becoming
more commonplace in retail outlets as consumers learn that such
gadgets do not make life easier or more fun, as many purport to
do. "Part of the problem of the electronics industry is that ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1015w.html#item7
"Breathing Life Into Messy Sketches"
MIT researchers expect to have a computer program capable of
rendering rough sketches into smooth, contextually correct
diagrams within three years, a breakthrough that promises to
revolutionize design and the use of tablet PCs. "We have shown ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1015w.html#item8
"All the President's Votes?"
The deployment of electronic voting systems in U.S. states is
proceeding despite warnings and documented evidence that the
systems are unreliable, buggy, and vulnerable to tampering.
Worse still, these machines provide no printed audit trail and ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1015w.html#item9
"Unfolding the Field of Computational Origami"
Computational origami is being used as a tool to design better
products and better works of art--and, it is ultimately hoped,
better computers. The director of a German engineering firm
recently used TreeMaker, a computational origami program created ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1015w.html#item10
"Computer Center Sets Trans-Atlantic Speed Record for Data Transfer"
The University of Illinois at Chicago's National Center for Data
Mining (NCDM) and Laboratory for Advanced Computing successfully
transferred approximately 1.4 TB of astronomy data from Chicago
to Amsterdam at 6.8 Gbps during an Oct. 10 demonstration. The ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1015w.html#item11
"Fighting to Preserve Old Programs"
Brewster Kahle, founder of the nonprofit Internet Archive, is
concerned that historians and students will lose vital cultural
material if old software is not preserved, especially since the
media it is stored on degrades rapidly without proper ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1015w.html#item12
"To Whom May I Direct Your Free Call?"
Kazaa inventors Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis have again
joined with the small team of Estonian programmers with whom they
first created the infamous music-sharing software to take on the
telecommunications industry; by routing phone calls over the same ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1015w.html#item13
"Technology to Make You Go 'Wow'"
Design expert Don Norman of the Nielsen Norman Group believes
that the "wow factor" is just as critical a component of
technology design as functionality, a view advocated in his
forthcoming book, "Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1015w.html#item14
"Securing the Portals of Cyber Space"
Information warfare expert Dorothy Denning addressed the
vulnerability of technology during a speech at the Naval Academy
Sept. 30. Denning, a professor in the department of defense
analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1015w.html#item15
"Grids Extend Reach"
Grid computing applications are taking hold in more organizations
as a relatively inexpensive alternative to supercomputers:
Switzerland-based drug company Novartis, for example, has 2,700
PCs running grid computing software, and uses the otherwise ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1015w.html#item16
"Ready When You Are"
Gigabit Ethernet is gaining in popularity despite doubts as to
its usefulness now: Early adopters are deploying Gigabit
Ethernet connections and backbones in preparation for the future,
or selectively where there is need. Importantly, more than half ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1015w.html#item17
"Joy After Sun"
Computer guru and Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy explains
that he resigned as Sun's chief scientist out of a need to pursue
new concepts, and says a lack of enthusiasm to go in new
directions is the reason why Microsoft and other software ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1015w.html#item18
"Promise and Peril of the 21st Century"
Ray Kurzweil, author of "The Rise of Intelligent Machines,"
writes that technological advancement has always yielded benefits
and perils, and calls for the formulation of strategies to
maximize the advantages of emerging technologies such as genetic ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1015w.html#item19
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