Chameleon Computing
Storage Limits? What Storage Limits?
New technologies and upgrades are expected to dramatically expand the storage capacity of hard drives in the coming years; optimism for such storage breakthroughs ran high at a March 25 meeting of the American Physical Society. For example, Apple Computer's iPod mini digital music ...
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United Nations Ponders Net's Future
A U.N. summit is discussing the need for greater international involvement in Internet technical, social, and economic issues, and much of the dissent is from developing countries that say they have little or no say in how important decisions about the Internet are made. U.N. Secretary General ...
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Think Tank: Offshoring Hits High-End Workers
Offshore outsourcing is often blamed for the erosion of U.S. call center and programming jobs, but a new study from the Economic Policy Institute sees a similar overseas migration of high-end software jobs. EPI's Josh Bivens predicts that the real effect of this job exportation will not be ...
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Interaction Technologies Connect and Enhance Lives: CHI2004, April 24-29, Vienna
Approximately 2,000 information technology professionals from more than 35 countries are expected to attend CHI2004 in Vienna, Austria, April 24-29. Sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI), the conference offers a ...
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Brain Waves Control Video Game
Researchers at MIT Media Lab Europe in Dublin recently demonstrated a thought-controlled video game system called Mind Balance, whose potential applications include gaming as well as brain-computer interfaces for handicapped users. The demo involved a user wearing a wireless headset ...
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When Instant Messages Come Bearing Malice
Instant messaging (IM) is the next big target for spammers and hackers now that the number of people who use the technology has grown significantly. Popularized by teenagers during the late 1990s, IM has now spread to the business world where people find it useful for quickly sharing files and ...
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Attaining New Goals in Computer Vision
Information Society Technologies' EVENTS and VISIRE projects involve computer-vision technologies that are reportedly superior to existing commercial products. Project coordinator Tomas Rodriguez at Eptron says that EVENTS interpolates images and furnishes multi-view presentations of ...
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'FlashMob Supercomputer' Readied for Mass Supercomputing
The creators of FlashMob Computing are working to bring supercomputing capabilities to the average computer user. On April 3, a mass supercomputer, comprised of an infinite number of computers connected via a high-speed local-area network, will be launched on the campus of the ...
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Virtual People Look Realistically
Researchers at Ireland's Trinity College are enabling virtual humans to gaze at objects with the same authenticity of their real-world counterparts by imbuing them with a memory system that can store information about people and objects a virtual character has previously seen, explains ...
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To Save a Life or a Limb, Gently Shake a Minefield
Conventional detectors are often unable to distinguish buried plastic antipersonnel mines with a small amount of metal from metal debris, but universities are developing new detection systems that generate seismic waves to cause these mines to vibrate in a unique way so they can be ...
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Foundation Showcases Data-Sharing Network, Urges Action
Panelists from a forum at Stanford University featuring members of the Markle Foundation Task Force on National Security in the Information Age have suggested a homeland security information network, database-driven, to let Homeland Security Department officials share information across ...
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Programmers, Look to Video Games
The University of Southern California plans to offer an advanced program in video-game design with the help of a multimillion-dollar donation from Electronic Arts. The university's School of Cinema-Television will offer the Electronic Arts Interactive Entertainment Program, which will feature ...
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Why Internet Needs to Break Down the Language Barriers
ICANN chief executive Paul Twomey says too much of the Internet's content and addresses are written solely in English, which constitutes a major obstacle to e-commerce and communications. "We don't want the Internet fracturing into language-based intranets when it is supporting billions of ...
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Six Barriers to Open Source Adoption
The broad enterprise adoption of open source software faces a number of hurdles outlined by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner and former Oracle executive Ray Lane at last week's Open Source Business Conference 2004. The biggest obstacle to acceptance is a paucity of formal support, ...
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ADT at SD West: Grady Booch on Software
Rational Software co-founder, author, and IBM Software Group principal architect Grady Booch highlighted his keynote presentation at the recent Software Development West conference with an overview of how software development's role as a business process has changed over the years. "What ...
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Get Out of My Namespace
The growth of the Internet and the spread of globalization has thrown name ownership laws into confusion, as opportunists register people's or institutions' names online in the hopes of selling them back to the original owners, while people or entities with names that are similar or ...
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New Speech Technologies Making Noise
New speech technologies--VoiceXML 2.0 from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Microsoft's Speech Server product line--may be based on rival voice browser standards, but the W3C's Dave Raggett postulates that these standards could eventually be integrated into a hybrid specification. The ...
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Ballot Boxes Go High Tech
Touch-screen machines were touted as the best solution to a flawed voting system that led to the Florida debacle in the last presidential election, but findings that touch-screen systems are susceptible to hacking and issues with their lack of a voter-verifiable paper trail have raised doubts ...
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Chameleon Computing
Building a handheld device that can function as a cellular phone, an MP3 player, a personal digital assistant, and numerous other tools may become feasible through reconfigurable computing, in which computer chips can be rewired on the spur of the moment by hardware- or software-based ...
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