Software in the New Millennium: A Virtual Roundtable
Internet2: 2004 and Beyond
The Internet2 network's backbone, Abilene, facilitates collaboration and remote education between member universities and researchers through its high-bandwidth, low-latency infrastructure, and Internet2 researchers are working on a hybrid optical packet infrastructure (HOPI) to expand the ...
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Nation's Voting Machines Tested in Secret
The three companies charged with certifying voting machines in the United States--SysTest Labs, Wyle Laboratories, and CIBER--do not publicly disclose their testing methodology, nor do they reveal any vulnerabilities they run across, despite concerns over the security and reliability of ...
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Concerns Mount Over Major Web Strike
A rash of assaults on primary Internet servers and the recent defeat of the MD5 and Shah Level 0 encryption algorithms are raising concerns among Internet operators that a convergence of political activism and hacking is taking place. Compounding these fears are warnings from security experts ...
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Fight Over Ultrawideband Standards Turns Into Tug of War
The IEEE is divided into two camps when it comes to ultrawideband (UWB) standardization, with major vendors such as Intel, Microsoft, and Texas Instruments set against Motorola and about 60 startup firms. Analysts say the drawn-out fight has delayed UWB rollout by about one year, though the ...
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Politicos Dig Deep for Your Data
Political parties and activist organizations are working to sway voters by licensing and mining consumer data collected by marketing firms in order to better understand voter preferences and more narrowly target campaigns. Gun ownership, vehicle type, financial records, and magazine subscriptions ...
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MEDai Wins Coveted KDD Cup for Predictive Modeling
ACM's special interest group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD) presented MEDai with the prestigious KDD Cup 2004 on Sunday, Aug. 22, 2004, during the SIGKDD Conference in Seattle, Wash. The Orlando-based company took first place for the second year in a row, ...
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Japan Designers Shoot for Supercomputer on a Chip
Japanese researchers have developed a computer chip that efficiently handles numerous small calculations performed on a limited data set. The MDGrape 3 chip currently performs at 230 gigaflops when running at 350 MHz, and is designed for a petaflop supercomputer that focuses on life sciences ...
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Selective Shutdown Protects Nets
Max Planck Institute researcher Adilson Motter has demonstrated that cascade failures triggered by assaults on large, central network nodes could be mitigated by shutting down peripheral nodes. The scientist has built a model showing that the scale of a cascade failure can be ...
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Putting People First in Tomorrow's Workplace
Dealing with the sociological implications of future workspaces revolutionized by emergent information and communications technologies was the goal of the Information Society Technologies program's e-Locus project, which examined nine successful European initiatives in order to develop ...
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NASA Engineers Free Robonaut With Wheels, Leg
The second iteration of NASA's robonaut series, Robonaut B, has been given greater mobility with the addition of a Segway-based robotic mobility platform and a "space leg" adapter that would enable the remote-controlled, wireless machine to move around in space by grappling the International ...
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Quantum Encryption Poised to Tighten Data Security
Doubts about the viability of quantum encryption have begun to surface over concerns that the technology appears to be following the same path as other encryption technologies: An allegedly impenetrable data security method migrates into the commercial space, only to be cracked by an attack its ...
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New Software Turns Family Albums and Home Movies Into Picasso Masterpieces
Dr. Peter Hall and Dr. John Collomosse from the University of Bath's Department of Computer Science have developed software that can take photographs and automatically transform them into cubist-style pictures reminiscent of Picasso. The software gives the computer an "aesthetic ...
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Military Swarm Study 'At the Edge of Chaos'
The Australian government's Defense Science and Technology Organization is working on software that replicates insect swarm behavior in order to develop teams of small, inexpensive, and disposable drone vehicles that use collective intelligence to carry out battlefield operations in hostile ...
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Can a Robot Save Hubble? More Scientists Think So
With the grounding of shuttle flights after the Columbia disaster, NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe had said the agency would scrap plans to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, and instead allow it to die when batteries and gyroscopes degrade completely. However, researchers at the Goddard Space ...
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ZigBee Takes It Easy
ZigBee networking technology is soon to be included in professional installation kits for light switches, thermostats, security controls, and other simple electronic controls in the home. The ZigBee Alliance plans to build off a modest base on the home-automation market before it launches ...
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By the Book
Undergraduate computer-science enrollments at U.S. universities are suffering a sharp decline, spurred by students' fears for job stability due to layoffs and offshore outsourcing, and by IT positions' loss of prestige and compensation due to the dot-com bust. Another factor in the enrollment ...
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6 Myths of IT
InfoWorld explores a half-dozen popular myths about IT, and determines that the foundations of all but one are factually unsound. The argument that server upgrades matter is a myth, by the simple observation that upgradability is unnecessary; backing up this claim is tier-one server ...
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Wi-Fi Plays Defense
Despite the ratification of the 802.11i standard for augmented wireless LAN (WLAN) security in June, WLANs still have a way to go before they are truly secure: The switch to 802.11i-enabled products and their adoption by IT organizations will not happen overnight, and the Wi-Fi Alliance is not ...
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Software in the New Millennium: A Virtual Roundtable
Predictions about the future of software development by a virtual roundtable of experts polled by IT Professional appear to support former Computer editor-in-chief Ted Lewis' conclusions in an earlier survey that there is a wide gulf between academia and industry, with the former group ...
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