Open-Source Users Find Rewards in Collaborative Development
Want to Increase Retention of Your Female Students?
National Science Foundation-funded research conducted by a team of four University of California, Santa Cruz professors and one Fort Lewis College professor suggests that pair programming in introductory programming courses can aid the retention of female students in computer science ...
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Innovation: The Next Big Thing
A 2004 Grand Challenges conference yielded seven computing milestones that U.K. researchers would strive to realize in the next several decades, and these milestones were recently disclosed in the British Computer Society's Grand Challenges in Computing Research report. The milestones include ...
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Schneier: Secure Tokens Won't Stop Phishing
Strict government regulation is more important for e-commerce security than technology solutions, says Counterpane Internet Security founder Bruce Schneier in an interview. Schneier's article in the April issue of Communications of the ACM argued that two-factor authentication and other ...
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Key Open-Source Programming Tool Due for Overhaul
The widely used GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) will receive new optimization capabilities that should boost performance of open-source software compiled using the tool, including Linux, Firefox, OpenOffice.org, and Apache. GCC 4.0 will add new optimization technologies that enable the compiler to not ...
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Crack in Computer Security Code Raises Red Flag
A flaw in a "hash function" technique for encrypting online data has been uncovered by a team of Chinese researchers at Shandong University, and this has raised alarms in the computer security industry because it casts doubt on the so-called impenetrability of hash function-based cryptography. The ...
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Creative Commons Is Rewriting Rules of Copyright
Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig's Creative Commons licensing scheme, which permits authors and artists to distribute their works online while retaining "some rights reserved" rather than "all rights reserved," has gained a substantial advocacy base. Lessig is concerned ...
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Programming Wizards Offer Advice at Developers Confab
This week's Software Development Expo is an event where programmers can pick each other's brains on effective strategies for developing quality code, and selecting methodologies that work for developers and their team has been an overarching theme. Ronin International consultant Scott Ambler ...
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Local Research Team Works Alongside Homeland Security
Ten schools, including the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, are involved in the Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection (I3P) consortium's two-year, $8.5 million program to identify security flaws in the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems that help ...
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Looking at Open Source Software Through Arabeyes
A group of Arabic-speaking volunteers is working to create open source tools that will make computing more accessible to hundreds of millions of people who use Arabic lettering; the Arabeyes project aims to establish itself as the nexus of Arabization efforts, which previously have been ...
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Open-Source Movement Now In Hands of Hired Guns
Corporate programmers have for the most part supplanted volunteer programmers as developers of core open-source software. IBM committed $1 billion to the development and promotion of the open-source Linux operating system four years ago, and has since made over 500 software patents and 30 ...
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Sign Language
Pennsylvania State University scientists are working on a computer that allows people to pull together disparate pieces of data using gestures, voice input, cognitive engineering, natural language technology, and geographic information systems (GIS) into a coherent whole in order to ...
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Video Games--A Girl Thing?
Sony Online Entertainment senior game designer Sheri Graner Ray is a crusader for increasing women's presence in the video game developer and game player communities, and was honored with the International Game Developers Association's Community Contribution award at last week's Game ...
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Electrical Engineer Receives $400,000 to Evaluate Maximum Capacity of Wireless Networks
The National Science Foundation has awarded a $400,000 Early Career Development grant to University of Texas at Austin electrical engineer and Wireless Networking and Communications Group professor Sriram Vishwanath, who will use the money to determine the maximum capacity of wireless ...
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Experts Look to Digital IDs to Boost Net Security
Experts at the CeBIT computer trade show in Germany said digital IDs, enabled by multi-factor authentication, would help boost flagging consumer confidence in e-commerce. Currently, rampant identity theft, spyware infections, and other cyberthreats are even causing some companies to scale ...
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IETF Leaders Urge Detente With Rivals
At a plenary session of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), recently appointed chairman Brian Carpenter promised better outreach to competing standards bodies such as the World Wide Web Consortium and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), arguing that such cooperation ...
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Outsourcing Innovation
Western companies are outsourcing product research and development to overseas centers, a trend underscored by an increasingly homogeneous feeling among CEOs that more innovation is critical, but that current R&D investments are not delivering sufficient returns. This is causing ...
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Managing Next-Generation IT Infrastructure
The complexity of today's IT infrastructures can be traced back to a build-to-order mindset that is traditional in most IT organizations, where the typical IT infrastructure is custom made for each organization, write McKinsey & Co.'s James M. Kaplan, Markus Loffler, and Roger P. Roberts. As ...
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U.S. High-Tech Economy Slipping
The Task Force on the Future of American Innovation, which counts industrial, scientific, and academic groups among its members, released a set of benchmarks last month to convince Capitol Hill that "the U.S. government is falling behind in its commitment to basic physical sciences ...
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Open-Source Users Find Rewards in Collaborative Development
Collaborative open-source software development is attractive to corporate IT groups--particularly those in the financial community--as a vehicle for developing cleaner code and more innovative applications. However, open-source experts caution that protective measures must be incorporated ...
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