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ACM TechNews - Wednesday, April 6, 2005



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ACM TechNews
April 6, 2005

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HEADLINES AT A GLANCE:

  • Call of the Wild for BIOS
  • Your Are What You Listen To: Users of Digital Music Sharing System Judge Others by Their Playlists
  • Dialogue Systems Juggles Topics
  • IT Employment on Upswing
  • HPCC Brings 'Supercomputing to the Masses'
  • Net Aids Access to Sensitive ID Data
  • OSI Tackles License 'Explosion'
  • Degrees of Change
  • Demonstrating Secure Wireless Personal Access Networks
  • Top Court Mulls P2P 'Pushers'
  • Grid Computing Can Allow Security Threats
  • Reading Is Key to IT Innovation
  • Carnegie Mellon's Collaborative Research Is Driving Force Behind Revolutionary New Tool for Writing Software Codes
  • Fast NASA Action Begets World's Largest Linux Supercomputer
  • The Evolving mSpace Platform: Leveraging the Semantic Web on the Trail of the Memex
  • Sounding the Alarm as Big Brother Goes Digital
  • Moving IT Forward
  • Grand Challenge, Take 2: DARPA Doubles Prize Money in Mojave Desert Robot Race
  • 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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


    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 ...

    [read more]      to the top


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