The Challenge of the Decade
Call of the Wild for BIOS
A free BIOS movement is forming in order to break open the information monopoly of existing BIOS-writing firms such as Dell and specialty BIOS companies. Free Software Foundation (FSF) President Richard Stallman wants to provide an alternative to closed BIOS, but says PC makers and ...
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Your Are What You Listen To: Users of Digital Music Sharing System Judge Others by Their Playlists
Music sharing technologies show tremendous potential in fostering community feelings, according to a study by human-computer interface researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Palo Alto Research Center. The study focused on co-workers at a midsized U.S. company that shared music ...
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Dialogue Systems Juggles Topics
A joint venture between Stanford University and Edinburgh University has yielded the Conversational Interface Architecture, a dialogue management system designed to improve verbal human-computer communications by giving computers the ability to recognize conversational context and anticipate ...
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IT Employment on Upswing
Unemployment among IT professionals has fallen at a faster rate than employment in general, according to an analysis of recently released Bureau of Labor Statistics data by InformationWeek. The annualized rate for out-of-work IT workers was 3.7 percent for the four quarters that ended ...
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HPCC Brings 'Supercomputing to the Masses'
Intel senior fellow Steve Pawlowski will be the keynote speaker at this month's High Performance Computing and Communications Conference (HPCC), where he will discuss supercomputing's future direction, trends in processor performance, how software will exploit increasing cores, the ...
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Net Aids Access to Sensitive ID Data
Despite talk in Congress about regulating large data brokers, a simple Web search will turn up a dozen smaller operations where identity thieves could easily obtain Social Security numbers. Sites such as www.secret-info.com and www.Iinfosearch.com offer Social Security numbers and other sensitive ...
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OSI Tackles License 'Explosion'
Open Source Initiative (OSI) President Emeritus Eric S. Raymond says the OSI board of directors is planning an April 6 meeting with stakeholders at the Open Source Business Conference to restrain the surge of open source licenses, many of them tailored for specific corporations. The OSI has ...
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Degrees of Change
Schools in Australia have long eschewed business skills in favor of technology training for students in IT programs, but that has started to change as CIOs demand more IT staffers with such skills, concurrent with declines in IT program enrollments spurred by fewer job prospects for ...
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Demonstrating Secure Wireless Personal Access Networks
The IST-funded PACWOMAN project sought to address scalability, mobility, reconfigurability, security, and quality of service challenges that limited the viability of wireless personal area networks (WPANs). PACWOMAN's strategy was to deliver cheap and secure wireless access to users with 100 ...
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Top Court Mulls P2P 'Pushers'
Several Supreme Court justices debating whether peer-to-peer (P2P) file-swapping networks should be legally liable for copyright infringement committed by users appear interested in reaching a compromise that concentrates on networks that induce such infringement. Patent law defines ...
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Grid Computing Can Allow Security Threats
At Ziff Davis Media's Enterprise Solutions Virtual Tradeshow on March 30, a panel of security experts discussed the security risks inherent in large-scale grid computing implementations. Panelists cited best practices as critical for keeping information transmitted over corporate grid systems ...
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Reading Is Key to IT Innovation
Parasoft CEO Adam Kolawa warns that many U.S. researchers and scientists are operating in ignorance of their peers' latest work, and this practice is endangering America's global competitiveness in science and technology. Reading up on colleagues' research can prevent the unnecessary reinvention ...
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Carnegie Mellon's Collaborative Research Is Driving Force Behind Revolutionary New Tool for Writing Software Codes
Professor Jose M.F. Moura of Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering reports that his team has developed "SPIRAL" software that automatically produces code for signal-processing applications that could boost the speed of computer operations while ...
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Fast NASA Action Begets World's Largest Linux Supercomputer
The U.S. government's Return to Flight initiative to correct the mistakes that caused the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia over two years ago prompted the rapid installation of a 10,240-processor supercomputer, named after the ill-fated spacecraft. The project also dovetailed with ...
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The Evolving mSpace Platform: Leveraging the Semantic Web on the Trail of the Memex
University of Southampton researchers posit that the Semantic Web could potentially bring the Web closer to Vanevar Bush's vision of the mime, a machine that stores all digital information and that can support knowledge construction by supporting a person's assembly of associative connections ...
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Sounding the Alarm as Big Brother Goes Digital
Barry Steinhardt with the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program warns that the deployment of digital and radio-frequency (RF) technologies may actually increase rather than decrease society's vulnerability. "We're developing the infrastructure for the surveillance society without, at the ...
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Moving IT Forward
Members of eWeek's Corporate Partner Advisory Board agree that enterprise IT departments are beginning to shake off the malaise of downsizing and damage control and adopt a more positive IT investment outlook. AT&T Global Networking Technology Services' Glenn Evans says his company seeks ...
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Grand Challenge, Take 2: DARPA Doubles Prize Money in Mojave Desert Robot Race
The Defense Department has mandated that one-third of the U.S. Army's ground vehicles be autonomous and unmanned by 2015 so that battlefield casualties can be reduced. Stimulating the development of robot vehicle technologies to fulfill this mandate is the goal of the Defense Advanced ...
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The Challenge of the Decade
As university libraries move toward digitizing their entire collections, digital rights management (DRM) is a key issue that requires planning input from library officials, IT specialists, faculty, students, and even members of the general public, writes Society for College and University Planning ...
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