The People Own Ideas!
Bush Dissolves IT Advisory Group
The President's IT Advisory Committee (PITAC), a congressionally mandated committee established in 1997 by President Clinton to provide guidance on various IT policies, has been shut down by President Bush. The latest executive order for PITAC expired on June 1, and no new members have been ...
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Election Auditing Is an End-to-End Procedure
Electronic voting machines are becoming more accurate, as the most significant drops from 2000 to 2004 in the residual vote rate, which measures uncounted votes, occurred in states that rely on electronic methods of ballot casting. Due to lackluster record-keeping, though, ...
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An Army of Soulless 1's and 0's
By luring Internet users with an enticing offer just one click away, hackers are seizing control of thousands of computers that they can then deploy to attack other Web sites or crack security codes. These computers, known as zombies, are compromised when their user takes the bait and clicks ...
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Net Guru Predicts Another 10 'Wild' Years
The future of the Web demands a class of politicians sufficiently well-versed in technology to introduce intelligent, forward-thinking legislation, according to David Farber, computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Fearful that the Web could come to generate ...
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Pentagon Creating Student Database
The Department of Defense on Wednesday started working with BeNow, a private marketing company, to formulate a database of high-school students between the ages of 16 and 18 to assist the military in locating possible recruits in a period of falling enlistment in certain branches. The ...
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Quantum Computer Springs a Leak
Physicists from Leiden University in the Netherlands have demonstrated the limits of quantum computing designed around ever-smaller quantum bits, or qubits, in which stored information is manipulated. Qubits involved in computation must be isolated from their environment since any outside ...
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Supercomputers Tackle More Everyday Tasks
Supercomputers are gaining practical applications and becoming widely used, from the manufacturing of consumer products such as potato chips to facilitating graphics animation. As prices drop and systems gain speed, advanced computer systems are no longer relevant only to government, many ...
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Better PC Security Years Away
The immediate future of secure computing will more closely resemble a mainframe than a PC, until an enhanced operating system and better hardware are developed. In the meantime, researchers are working on technologies to improve PC security, such as the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), which ...
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Sun Tries Sharing Java Again; Still Not Open Source
At next week's JavaOne conference in San Francisco, Sun Microsystems will discuss plans for GlassFish, a project that provides a window to the code under its Java Research License (JRL), though it stops well short of offering open-source access. Part of the company's "share" campaign, ...
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Is IT Unfriendly to Women?
Women, comprising 20 percent of the IT labor force but more than 50 percent of the overall workforce, face significant barriers from the IT industry. The Department of Labor Women's Bureau reports that women earn just 9 percent of the bachelor's degrees related to engineering and fewer than 28 ...
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When Computers Play Games, Artificial Intelligence Is the Key to Victory
The achievement of better general game playing (GGP) is the subject of an article by Stanford computer science professor Michael Geneserith appearing in this summer's AI Magazine. "Programs that think better should be able to win more games," said Geneserith, who believes games that think for ...
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A Wireless World, Bound to Sockets
Tech companies are focusing more on preserving and prolonging battery life as consumers accumulate gadgets such as handhelds, cell phones, iPods, laptops, and digital cameras. For consumers who have embraced the wireless world, recharging such devices has become a troublesome issue. A ...
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New Version of Linux Kernel Released
A new version of the Linux kernel has been released for the first time since Linus Torvalds changed systems for managing the kernel source code, which has slowed the pace of development. Version 2.6.12 of the Linux kernel, which comes more than three months after version 2.6.11, offers ...
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File Systems That Fly
As more and more supercomputers are cobbled together from inexpensive, off-the-shelf PCs, disk drives, Ethernet cables, and Linux, the latest developments in file-system software for these clusters will alter how companies purchase storage and bridge the gap between the immobility of ...
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Large Users Hope for Broader Adoption of Usability Standard
A three-year-old usability standard should gain greater acceptance in the business community when it is approved by the International Standards Organization. The standard, called the Common Industry Format for Usability Test Reports (CIF), is expected to gain steam once it is adopted ...
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Humanistic Approaches for Digital-Media Studies
The absence of a universal standard for evaluating the effectiveness of technical applications in the humanities leaves designers unsure of how to best improve their digital projects, such as online newspapers and interactive museum exhibits. In developing a curriculum for teaching ...
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Lift Off at Last?
The 2005 InfoWorld Compensation Survey reveals that although company performance, salaries, bonuses, job opportunities, and spending in the information technology sector are all improving, dissatisfaction and uncertainty about the industry is also on the rise. More IT workers have ...
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The People Own Ideas!
Stanford Law School law professor and author Lawrence Lessig writes that Brazil and other nations are pushing a movement to erect a "free-culture" economy atop a platform of free software. He draws a parallel between the free-software and free-culture movements by noting that their genesis ...
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