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ACM TechNews
Volume 5, Number 586
Date: December 22, 2003
Top Stories for Monday, December 22, 2003:
http://www.acm.org/technews/current/homepage.html
"Offshore Jobs in Technology: Opportunity or a Threat?"
"Growth of the Internet May Take Nothing Short of a Revolution"
"Anti-Spam Law Just a Start, Panel Says"
"Little-Known Leaders Make Their Mark"
"Mother Nature Recruited for War on Cyber Terror"
"Software Shares Out Spare Processing Power"
"PDA Translates Speech"
"CERT/CC: Racing to Secure the Internet"
"Linux Revolution: Asian Countries Push Open Source"
"Building a Blueprint for Network Security"
"Sun Invites IBM, Cray to Collaborate on High-End Computer Language"
"Smaller, Lighter Power Adapters Take the Weight Off Laptops"
"Embedded Linux: The New Home-Grown RTOS"
"The Next 25 Years of IT"
"A Net of Control"
"Inventing a Better Patent Law"
"Intel's Tiny Hope for the Future"
"IT Planning: Cultivating Innovation and Value"
******************* News Stories ***********************
"Offshore Jobs in Technology: Opportunity or a Threat?"
The offshore outsourcing of U.S. jobs is seen by many as an inevitable
and unstoppable trend on the road to a globalized economy, but projections
from Forrester and other research firms about the volume of domestic jobs
destined to migrate overseas are less alarming than they may seem. ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1222m.html#item1
"Growth of the Internet May Take Nothing Short of a Revolution"
Upgrading the Internet so that 100 million U.S. households can access
it at 100 Mbps--over 100 times faster than most high-speed home connections
today--is the goal of the "100 by 100" consortium organized by four major
universities and other research centers with a $7.5 million National ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1222m.html#item2
"Anti-Spam Law Just a Start, Panel Says"
A panel of experts at Network World's "Spam Forum: The Future of Email"
agreed on Dec. 17 that the recently signed federal anti-spam law is a solid
first step, but legislation alone is unlikely to significantly curb the
glut of junk email clogging in-boxes. Eileen Harrington of the FTC's ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1222m.html#item3
"Little-Known Leaders Make Their Mark"
A number of influential technologists, creative thinkers, and deal-makers
move the machine of Silicon Valley forward away from the limelight:
Stanford University Cyberlaw Clinic executive director Jennifer Granick,
for example, recently scored a huge legal coup in getting the government to ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1222m.html#item4
"Mother Nature Recruited for War on Cyber Terror"
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is sponsoring research at Carnegie
Mellon University and the University of New Mexico with the goal of
bolstering network security by applying the principle of bio-diversity to
computer systems. The most successful diseases are those that attack a ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1222m.html#item5
"Software Shares Out Spare Processing Power"
SETI@home author David Anderson has developed a new system that will allow
several distributed projects to be run simultaneously on a single computer,
and enable users to apportion the amount of resources to be devoted to each
project. The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1222m.html#item6
"PDA Translates Speech"
A prototype two-way speech-to-speech translator of Arabic to English and
vice-versa that runs on a personal digital assistant has been developed by
researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Cepstral, Mobile Technologies,
and Multimodal Technologies, demonstrating that automatic translation via ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1222m.html#item7
"CERT/CC: Racing to Secure the Internet"
The CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University promotes
effective Internet security by employing a cadre of security experts to
consult, test product vulnerability, coordinate training courses, and take
on other roles in order to win the race between those dedicated to ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1222m.html#item8
"Linux Revolution: Asian Countries Push Open Source"
China's promotion of Linux open-source projects is setting the pace for
much of Asia, where announcements of collaborative, government-driven Linux
efforts have become a daily routine. The goal of these initiatives, the
latest being the Japan-China-Korea (JCK) partnership, is to build a ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1222m.html#item9
"Building a Blueprint for Network Security"
Paul Rubens outlines a roadmap for securing a corporate network, and
recommends that the patch management policy be evaluated first of all, as
Gartner Group estimates that about 30 percent of damage to networks is
attributable to tardy patching. The same study finds that 65 percent of ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1222m.html#item10
"Sun Invites IBM, Cray to Collaborate on High-End Computer Language"
Sun Microsystems wants to work with IBM and Cray on developing a low-level
computing language that would be used for the petascale-class computer
project, as well as for a broader group of scientific and technical
computers. Sun says the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency favors ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1222m.html#item11
"Smaller, Lighter Power Adapters Take the Weight Off Laptops"
Penn State researchers, in conjunction with Japan's Taiheiyo Cement and
Face Electronics of Virginia, have developed a piezoelectric power PC
adapter that is one-fourth the size of current adapters. Penn State
electrical engineer Kenji Uchino notes that these smaller, lighter adapters ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1222m.html#item12
"Embedded Linux: The New Home-Grown RTOS"
Tight budgets and shorter project schedules are encouraging companies to
adopt Linux as their embedded RTOS rather than build the operating system
from the ground up. Wind River Systems' Dave Fraser notes that the
challenges associated with developing more sophisticated software cancel ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1222m.html#item13
"The Next 25 Years of IT"
InfoWorld writers debate what IT advances may emerge in the next
quarter-century: Tom Yager contends that only a small part of the path
toward pervasive computing has been traversed thus far, but believes the
model of tomorrow's pervasive systems lies in wireless phones with ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1222m.html#item14
"A Net of Control"
The Internet will eventually become a tool of government and corporate
interests, used to enforce censorship, monitor the populace, and suppress
creative freedoms. Though the Internet continues to foster free _expression_
and allow unprecedented access to information now, updates to its technical ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1222m.html#item15
"Inventing a Better Patent Law"
A debate is raging in Europe about whether software patents should be
allowable: Those in favor argue that Europe risks damaging its global
competitiveness by not permitting such patents, while opponents counter
that innovation would be suppressed and small- and medium-sized businesses ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1222m.html#item16
"Intel's Tiny Hope for the Future"
Intel expects that its investments in UC Berkeley's smart dust project will
enable the chip giant to rule the high-volume sensor market, since the
technology is designed to support ad hoc networks of tiny wireless sensors
that, in their idealized form, can be deployed anywhere. The payoff of a ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1222m.html#item17
"IT Planning: Cultivating Innovation and Value"
When Nicolas Carr suggested in Harvard Business Review that IT has been
commoditized to the point where its value as a strategic differentiator is
practically nil, many opponents argued that IT can lead to competitive
advantage if enterprises can leverage collaboration and innovation to ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1222m.html#item18
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