ICANN's Crisis of Legitimacy
Embedding Their Hopes In RFID
Hailed as a revolutionary technology for tracking inventories and individual items, radio frequency identification (RFID) is now facing tough economic realities and privacy concerns. Some deployments over the past decade have been unquestionably beneficial, such as the E-ZPass system that ...
[read more] to the top
Internet Ups Power Grid IQ
Most buildings are now wired into the Internet, which makes possible programmable buildings that dynamically adjust electric power consumption according to infrastructure, economic, and environmental conditions. A system developed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researchers could ...
[read more] to the top
Software Industry Seeking New Ways to Fight Piracy
The software industry has been attempting to counteract digital piracy through education and technological measures, but the results have been uneven. Business Software Alliance (BSA) VP Bob Kruger says program-sharing employees at small and midsize firms are chiefly ...
[read more] to the top
Spam-Sending PCs Could Be Kicked Offline
The Anti-Spam Technical Alliance, which counts Yahoo!, AOL, Earthlink, and Microsoft among its members, released a set of recommendations on June 22 for halting the proliferation of junk email. One of the recommendations calls for ISPs to cut email service for any users whose computers have been ...
[read more] to the top
Oxygen Burst
MIT's Project Oxygen is making progress on pairing computer technology with human needs: Launched in June 2000 by Laboratory of Computer Science director Michael Dertouzos, who died one year later, Project Oxygen has stayed on course with the original goal, according to current project ...
[read more] to the top
Apple Tapped for Defense Dept. Research Supercomputer
Apple Computer yesterday announced an agreement with Colsa, a U.S. military contractor, to build a $5.8 million, 1,566-microprocessor supercomputer capable of 25 TFLOPS for aero-thermodynamic simulation. The Multiple Advanced Computers for Hypersonic Research (MACH 5) will be employed by the ...
[read more] to the top
I.B.M. Decides to Market A Blue Streak of a Computer
IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer was originally designed for protein-folding research, and now variants of the computer cluster are being readied for nuclear weapons simulation and commercial applications. The fastest machine in the world is the NEC Earth Simulator in Japan, a massive and ...
[read more] to the top
Surfing In the Dark
Despite a federal mandate that disabled users must be able to access government Web sites and those of its suppliers, the percentage of inaccessible sites still outweighs the percentage of accessible sites. The World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative director, ...
[read more] to the top
Open Source as Weapon
Major software makers are jumping on the open source bandwagon, but not because sharing produces better code or more value for customers; companies are using open source tactics to reduce the value of their competitors' proprietary offerings while increasing the market for their own add-on ...
[read more] to the top
Printable Silicon for Ultrahigh Performance Flexible Electronic Systems
Using funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Energy Department, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have demonstrated a technique for fabricating mechanically flexible thin-film silicon transistors that yield ultrahigh performance. U ...
[read more] to the top
Memo to Steve Jobs: Give iPod Color!
Eric Hellweg writes that Apple Computer's iPod music player, despite its stylish design and easy-to-use controls, suffers from a major drawback that threatens the product's growth potential: An unappealing display with primitive, monochromatic font. If Apple wishes to sustain its leadership ...
[read more] to the top
When Will Wireless Hit WiMax Speeds?
Companies offering services that use DSL, cable modem, or leased lines have had little to fear from wireless broadband services, whose widescale implementation has been hindered by costs, a lack of interoperability due to proprietary systems, and complexity. But vendors and analysts think ...
[read more] to the top
A Confederacy of Smarts
Microsoft has assembled some of the best minds in computers within its research division, yet the relatively new unit has yet to prove itself by changing today's computing paradigm for the better. Despite its intellectual clout, Microsoft is seemingly reluctant to fundamentally ...
[read more] to the top
Location! Location! Location!
Automated Error Prevention (AEP) promises to make software quality better, teams more productive, development costs less expensive, and time to market/deployment shorter--and transfer the responsibility for finding construction errors from quality assurance (QA) to developers. AEP offers ...
[read more] to the top
Smart Sensors to Network the World
Integrating simple computers with sensors, batteries, and radio transceivers has given birth to minuscule "motes" that can self-organize into perceptive networks whose applications range from wildlife and ecosystem monitoring to factory maintenance to emergency management, ...
[read more] to the top
Proprietary to Open: Middleware Evolves
The importance of middleware to CIOs is growing significantly as the software makes the transition from proprietary schemes to open, flexible standards with the help of XML and Web services. More and more CIOs need to integrate increasingly dissimilar systems, and this has led to a ...
[read more] to the top
Fuzzy Logic and Neural Nets: Still Viable After All These Years?
The high profile of fuzzy logic and neural networks has waned because the systems failed to demonstrate a clear enough performance advantage over established approaches, and also because they do not integrate well with traditional logic-based thinking. Yet both fuzzy and neural techniques are ...
[read more] to the top
ICANN's Crisis of Legitimacy
As ICANN prepares for a legal battle over its shut-down of VeriSign's SiteFinder navigation service, the Internet overseer is facing criticism for being unclear and inconsistent in its regulatory policies. VeriSign has filed a breach of contract and antitrust suit against ICANN, which ...
[read more] to the top
To submit feedback about ACM TechNews, contact:
technews@xxxxxxxxxx
To unsubscribe from the ACM TechNews Early Alert Service:
Please send a separate email to listserv@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
with the line
signoff technews
in the body of your message.
Please note that replying directly to this message does not
automatically unsubscribe you from the TechNews list.
ACM may have a different email address on file for you,
so if you're unable to "unsubscribe" yourself, please direct
your request to: technews-request@xxxxxxx
We will remove your name from the TechNews list on
your behalf.
For help with technical problems, including problems with
leaving the list, please write to:
technews-request@xxxxxxx
to the top
© Copyright 2004 Information, Inc.
