Closing In on the Perfect Code
Software Schools Evolve to Help Students Compete
China hopes to nurture the next generation of IT leaders and entrepreneurs and raise its profile as a global technology player through the establishment of software colleges at 35 Chinese universities. One such institution, Peking University's School of Software, is equipped with ...
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W3C Finalizes Internet Voice Standards
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced the finalization of two core components of the Speech Interface Framework--VoiceXML 2.0 and the Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS)--on March 16; the former will be used to integrate Web-based development and content delivery with ...
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Congress Let Privacy Programs Be Cut
Last year's termination of the Pentagon's Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) program was accompanied by the quiet elimination of a pair of privacy tools designed to partially satisfy critics. One such tool was designed for the Genisys program, which analyzed government and commercial records ...
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California Researchers' New Center Will Study, Test Computer Viruses
A system that private firms and Internet monitors can use to examine, study, and possibly counter computer viruses and other forms of malware before they become a serious threat is being developed by the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Southern California with a ...
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Rough Ride for Robots, But Humans Smiling
Although the desert may have defeated the robot vehicles racing in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Grand Challenge on March 13, competitors and DARPA officials said the project was ultimately successful. DARPA director Anthony Tether reported that his agency has ...
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Patently Unfair?
Critics are faulting the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for allowing patents on Internet technologies and business methods, a practice that allegedly enables a select few patent holders to set terms for e-commerce, digital media, and even the Web itself. The policy, based on the landmark ...
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Gunning for the U.S. in Technology
America's technological superiority is threatened by a confluence of offshore outsourcing and rising international competitiveness in terms of research, entrepreneurship, and innovation: Gartner estimates 500,000 U.S. technology jobs will head overseas in 2004, while U.S. companies seem to ...
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GPS Technology Helps Blind Find Way
A number of portable devices on the market or under development are designed to help blind or visually impaired users get around, often by employing location data pinpointed by global-positioning-system (GPS) technology. Pulse Data International's BrailleNote is a textbook-size ...
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Scientists Develop Breakthrough Internet Protocol
University researchers have developed next-generation network protocols that would utilize existing bandwidth much more efficiently than the current transmission control protocol (TCP), which was developed in the 1980s. The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center recently compared six new ...
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Silicon Valley's Changing Landscape
To compete in an increasingly global market, many companies in Silicon Valley are outsourcing most of their operations overseas, where they are done by people willing to work for substantially less than their American counterparts. "The character of the valley is changing pretty ...
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In E-Mail Warfare, the Spammers Are Winning
In the arms race between spammers and anti-spam proponents, the bad guys have the upper hand thanks to underhanded tactics such as using computer worms to compromise vulnerable systems and turn them into "zombies" for mass-mailing spam. Spamhaus director Steve Linford predicts that spam will ...
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Memories Captured in a Digital Shoebox
Memorabilia is undergoing a transition from the physical to the digital world as new technologies give users the power to preserve their memories in computer files rather than in shoeboxes. First conceived of at the dawn of the computer age by electronics pioneer Vannevar Bush, who envisioned a ...
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Optimistic IT Employments Outlook
IT spending is perceivably increasing and buoying the IT job market: A number of industry trends are influencing IT employment opportunities, including businesses' willingness to invest in new services infrastructure, offshore outsourcing, security-related issues, and the emergence of new ...
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Can Social Networking Stop Spam?
A new algorithm developed by UCLA professors P. Oscar Boykin and Vwani Roychowdhury applies social networking principles to spam filtering. "We routinely use our social networks to judge the trustworthiness of outsiders...to decide where to buy our next car, or where to find a good ...
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10-Gigabit Ethernet Comes Alive
The two-year-old 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10-GigE) technology is now reaching a much larger business market thanks to lower prices and the prospect of a one-size-fits-all networking solution that would reduce training costs and complexity. There are no common applications that alone require the ...
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The End of Passwords
Lavasoft vice president Michael Wood says the way that passwords are currently used poses a danger to companies since individuals could use keylogging spyware to record keystrokes and so learn passwords. However, alternative user authentication technologies such as smart cards have not ...
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Open Source Database Improvements Grow
Open source databases are usually niche products, but upcoming improvements are making the tools increasingly important for a growing stable of industries, including e-commerce applications, high-speed Web searching, content management, data warehouse reporting, and Web portals. A survey by ...
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Domain Master
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) CEO Paul Twomey says that his organization must remained focused on maintaining a single interoperable Internet while meeting the needs of international constituents. ICANN is responsible to governments, businesses, academics, ...
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Closing In on the Perfect Code
With turbo codes, French researchers Claude Berrou and Alain Glavieux put an end to over four decades of speculation on whether data could indeed by conveyed at speeds up to channel capacity virtually devoid of errors and with very low transmitting power using the right error-correction codes, as ...
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