Computing the Cosmos
Supercomputer Seeks Comeback
The vector supercomputer is once again available in the United States after a long period of quiet, but industry observers say that cluster computing may soon close the gap on the ability to perform complex calculations. Vector computing suffered from the SGI acquisition of Cray in the mid ...
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Tech Workers Stay Put as Economy Perks Up
Voluntary turnover among technology workers continues to fall as just less than 9 percent of IT workers voluntarily left their jobs last year, according to a survey by Aon Consulting of 595 of the world's biggest tech firms. Aon also reports that 11.2 percent of the IT workforce was laid off ...
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A PC That Packs Real Power, and All Just for Me
Cheap desktop PCs and Linux-powered clusters seemingly put an end to the era of custom-designed workstations, such as those once hawked by Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, and Apollo Computer. But now a new firm called Orion Computers is hoping to revitalize the market for workstations ...
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Open-Source Community Skeptical About Microsoft's Sender ID License
Microsoft's Sender ID technology requires a license that is at odds with open-source software licenses, making it unlikely that the Internet Engineering Task Force's (IETF) email authentication standard will be successful as currently described. Sender ID is a fusion of Microsoft's ...
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Have E-Books Turned a Page?
Book publishers are starting to understand what consumers really expect from e-books, after stumbling for more than a decade. Sales continue to grow steadily; the Open eBook Forum says e-book sales totaled $3.23 million in the first quarter of 2004, up 28 percent from a year ago. Nevertheless, ...
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Japan Helps Drive Surge in Global Patent Applications
An increase in the number of international patents signals renewed interest in research and development and worldwide economic recovery, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Although the United States continues to lead with 17,278 international patent applications in ...
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Wi-Fi Goes Airborne
Earlier this year, Lufthansa Airlines began offering a new service from Boeing--broadband-speed wireless Internet connections while in the air. This month, wireless connection company iPass announced a partnership with Boeing's Connexion, and in roughly six months, corporate frequent fliers on ...
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Kids Still Shunning IT in Worrying Numbers
U.K. secondary students generally feel unenthused about IT, according to new General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) and other government schooling data. Just 1.1 percent of all secondary school students chose A-Level computing in the United Kingdom this year, even less than the ...
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Where the Fantastic Meets the Future
Bell Labs physical sciences vice president Cherry Murray says corporate research and development is more important than ever, and is becoming faster and more global in nature. Whereas the federal government used to fund two-thirds of research and development, business has now taken on the ...
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NSF Funds Database Gymnastics
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is funding a slew of database Web services projects that would enable local, state, and federal agencies to easily pull data from diverse database sources. Commercial database solutions do not provide for this type of cross-agency interoperability, so ...
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Mobile Java Gets More Juice
Nokia and Vodafone have agreed to work together in an open standards development initiative to make compatible the different devices of manufacturers that use Mobile Java. Device fragmentation has been a problem for Mobile Java, called Java2 Micro Edition, an open-standards set ...
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>From Factoids to Facts
Microsoft researcher Eric Brill is working on new Web searching technology that provides single-word answers to direct questions. The Ask MSR prototype basically distills information from the Web for users, and is a natural progression in Web search technology. Whereas AltaVista pioneered ...
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Survey Reveals What's Hot & What's Not: Top 10 Online Computer Science Degrees
Among the 10 most popular online graduate technology degrees, the top five are closely contested, says Vicky Phillips, CEO of GetEducated.com, which conducted the annual survey. The top five degrees are computer information systems, management of technology, management of information systems, ...
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Encryption Gets a Boost
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) re-energized the stodgy cryptography industry a few years ago when it began holding a global cryptography competition, inviting cryptographers to submit their best encryption algorithms. The competitions helped the agency develop the ...
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Mesh Networks: The PacketHop Initiative
The PacketHop system uses standards-based mobile mesh networking technology to guarantee compatible links to existing infrastructure, writes PacketHop chief technology officer Ambatipudi Sastry. PacketHop's value to homeland security and public safety was demonstrated this past February in a Golden ...
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Is Technology Adoption Quickening?
Personal computer integration took nearly a generation in wealthy countries, but the market remains largely untapped on the world stage, considering less than 10 percent of adults and teens across the globe have a PC. A variety of social acceptance issues slowed the integration of PCs ...
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Computing the Cosmos
The Virgo Consortium is an international group of scientists that intends to simulate the evolution of the universe on a supercomputer in order to tackle some of the most fundamental cosmological mysteries. The supercomputer recruited to model the universe is an 812-processor IBM Unix ...
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