Postmodern Software Development
High-Tech Tension Over Illegal Uses
In March, the Supreme Court will hear the case of the Grokster file-trading service to determine whether the service has any liability for digital piracy committed by its users. The entertainment industry argues that this piracy is Grokster's key means of revenue, as evidenced by the service's ...
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OASIS Patent Policy Sparks Boycott
In response to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards' (OASIS) revised patent policy, which the organization has hyped as a compromise to make its system more accommodating of open-source software developers, leading open-source and ...
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Added Reliability for Safety-Critical Software
The IST-funded ATASDAS project has developed a toolkit for enhancing the reliability of safety-critical software. Project coordinator David Escorial of Spacebel says the tools identify the key software elements of the system architecture and facilitate analysis of software-hardware ...
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Software Gives Descriptive Directions
MIT researchers have developed software that automatically generates directions by modeling the geographical relationships between spaces and their functions, and incorporates landmarks into the directions as well. The Location Awareness Information Representation (Lair) software taps a ...
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Cornell Scientists Tackle 'Hard' Problems by Teaching Computers to Solve Tough Tasks the Human Way
Cornell University Intelligent Information Systems Institute director Carla Gomes and associate computer science professor Bart Selman have developed new methods for solving hard "combinatorial" computer problems, which were detailed on Feb. 21 at the annual meeting of the American Association for ...
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Computer Vulnerabilities Given Unified Rating System
A group of software and security companies that includes Microsoft, Qualys, Cisco Systems, and Symantec has developed the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) as part of their responsibilities to the Homeland Security Department's U.S. National Infrastructure Advisory Council. CVSS, which ...
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Health Industry Under Pressure to Computerize
Speaking at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference, national health information technology coordinator David Brailer told health industry officials and technology vendors that they faced a government mandate if they could not voluntarily agree on ...
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Two UO Professors Study Multi-Tasking, Computer Efficiency
University of Oregon professor Ulrich Mayr notes that multi-tasking leads to diminished productivity, and he and computer and information science assistant professor Anthony Hornof have researched the problem in detail. "As soon as the computer starts giving you tasks and you start accepting ...
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Virtual Reality in the Round
The Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Architecture and Software Technology (FIRST) will exhibit a cylindrical display system at the upcoming CeBIT 2005 event, showcasing a breakthrough in virtual reality technology. "When modeling virtual objects, designers, architects and engineers will no ...
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He Paved the Way for the PC Revolution
Douglas Engelbart, who is credited with the creation of PC workstations that directly birthed the computer mouse, video conferencing, email, and hyperlinks, has earned a place in the Silicon Valley Engineers Hall of Fame, into which he will be formally inducted on Feb. 23. In a recent ...
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Fight Over 'Forms' Clouds Future of Net Applications
A breakaway working group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is nearly finished with the Web Forms 2.0 specification and will soon submit the draft to the W3C membership, forcing discussion on the difficult issue of electronic forms. The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group ...
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California Researchers Collaborate With Perlegen Sciences on Map of Human Genetic Variation Across Populations
Detailed in the Feb. 18 issue of Science is a study carried out by researchers at Perlegen Sciences, the University of California San Diego's California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), and the UC Berkeley-affiliated International Computer Science ...
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Researchers Find Security Flaw in SHA-1 Algorithm
Chinese university researchers have discovered a technique that significantly improves the chances of cracking the data encryption algorithm SHA-1. SHA-1 (secure hash algorithm) is used by a wide range of companies and generates unique strings of values to both encrypt and ...
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Bridging the Digital Divide
MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte and colleagues want to create a $100 laptop that would provide computer and Internet access to schoolchildren in the developing world. Negroponte has extensive experience providing IT access to impoverished areas such as Costa Rica, ...
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U.N. to Control Use of Internet?
A panel created by the United Nations is addressing the issue of Internet governance ahead of the World Summit on the Information Society, which is slated to be held in Tunis in November. Cybercrime, spam, and other issues are on the panel's agenda. On Monday, members of the panel expressed hope ...
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New-Look Passports
The United States seeks to improve homeland security by mandating the distribution of biometric passports equipped with digital photos, digitized fingerprints, and iris scans, but concerns about privacy infringement, reliability and interoperability issues, and a rushed implementation raise ...
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New Way of Wireless
The latest iterations of the global system for mobile communications (GSM) and code division multiple access (CDMA) cellular networks deliver significant speed increases, while other wireless broadband offerings promise even higher throughput; but sorting through the morass of ...
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Postmodern Software Development
Robert Filman with the NASA/RIACS Ames Center draws parallels between the evolution of art and the evolution of software development, with object-oriented programming representing the computer science equivalent of modernism. He says the programming equivalent of postmodernism could ...
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