Bolstering U.S. Supercomputing
Senate Moves Toward New Data Security Rules
Security breach and data safeguard legislation was a key issue on Capitol Hill yesterday, as three distinct congressional committees mulled over similar proposals. The Senate's Commerce Committee unanimously accepted Sen. Gordon Smith's (R-Ore.) bill to give the FTC the authority to develop ... ...
[read more] to the top
SIGGRAPH 2005: Light Clouds, Camera Arrays and Speedier Rendering
Four research papers to be presented at SIGGRAPH 2005 were written or co-written by researchers from UCSD computer science professor Henrik Wann Jensen's Computer Graphics Lab at the Jacobs School of Engineering, with Jensen himself contributing to three of the papers. One paper details ... ...
[read more] to the top
Revenge of the Nerds--Again
Search companies' meteoric ascendance in the tech domain is reflected in the defection of top software engineers to Google and Yahoo!. Recent hiring coups at Google include former Microsoft researcher Kai-Fu Lee and former eBay advanced technology research director Louis Monier, while new ... ...
[read more] to the top
GAO to Study National Plan to Recycle Computers
The increasing volume of used electronics will be harmful to human health and the environment unless properly managed, John Stephenson of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) told a Senate panel on July 26; he cited EPA estimates that less than 6 million computers out of roughly 50 ... ...
[read more] to the top
Rapid Results Without a Rugby Scrum
As many companies are increasingly fed up with traditional software development methods, Scrum has become an appealing alternative; Scrum is a method of developing software where the project is broken down into small pieces divided among autonomous teams, that each yield a discernable ... ...
[read more] to the top
Fingernails Store Data
Japanese scientists have demonstrated that data can be written into and read from a human fingernail through the use of a laser. Dot patterns were written into a fingernail by striking it with a laser that ionized molecules and caused a miniature explosion that decomposed the keratin ... ...
[read more] to the top
Pittsburgh Unveils Big Ben the Supercomputer
The Cray XT3 supercomputer, also known as Big Ben, is now online at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), where it will support nationwide scientific research as part of the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid. Big Ben consists of 2,090 AMD Opteron processors with a general peak ... ...
[read more] to the top
'Shadow Walker' Pushes Envelope for Stealth Rootkits
HBGary director of engineering Jamie Butler and University of Central Florida Ph.D. student Sherri Sparks disclosed a new method for concealing malware with their demonstration of the Shadow Walker stealth rootkit at the Black Hat Briefings conference. Analysts say such research is very ... ...
[read more] to the top
Not Playing to Women
The video game industry needs more female programmers if it wants to expand its appeal beyond its core audience of men; IDC analyst Schelley Olhava says 70 percent of console game players are male, but female players could comprise a lucrative market--if their views were considered by the gaming ... ...
[read more] to the top
The Unity of Linux
Despite the inclination of some to see it as a competitor to Unix, Linux actually carries the Unix flag, and counts as just one of several variants of the open source method that stands in opposition to the Windows model, according to IT consulting industry veteran and author Paul Murphy. Unix ... ...
[read more] to the top
GILS Could Soon Get the Boot
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is considering commercial alternatives, such as Google and Yahoo!, to replace its 10-year-old Global Information Locator Service (GILS) standard that indexes electronic information available to the public. Despite federal mandate to ... ...
[read more] to the top
U.N. Internet Summit Draws Rights Groups' Fire
The United Nations' International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is being criticized by several rights organizations, including the Freedom to Publish, International Publishers Association, and Reporters Without Borders, for its decision to hold the second part of its World Summit on ... ...
[read more] to the top
Really Open Source
Efforts to make college course materials freely available on the Web, such as MIT's OpenCourseWare and Rice's Connexions programs, are reshaping the way educational content is distributed. Connexions founder Richard Baraniuk, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice, says ... ...
[read more] to the top
Big Problems? Call Out the Big Iron
Australia's leading supercomputers are being used for academic as well as commercial ventures, while new hardware investments are helping the country regain its status as a major supercomputing center. The most powerful Australian supercomputer is housed at the Australian Partnership for ... ...
[read more] to the top
Creepy Crawlies to Explore Other Worlds
Many scientists believe the next step in the evolution of unmanned space exploration is biomimetics, in which nature serves as the inspiration for more robust and versatile robot probes. Roger Quinn of Case Western Reserve University's Biologically Inspired Robotics Laboratory has ... ...
[read more] to the top
Whose Work Is It, Anyway?
The Copyright Office is holding a series of hearings this week concerning whether copyright law should be amended to permit scholars, artists, historians, and others to use "orphan works"--copyrighted content whose creators cannot be identified--more liberally. Various proposals for the ... ...
[read more] to the top
The 100-Year Archive Dilemma
To address the costs of storing an ever-growing body of data, and to comply with federal regulations demanding that more content be stored for a longer time, companies are in search of new methods for long-term digital storage. Currently, transferring the information from one medium to another is the ... ...
[read more] to the top
Technology Roadmap: Trusted Computing Architectures
The computer industry is hyping the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) as an important defense against malware, one that allows users to check that their PCs have not been infected and enables networks to confirm the identity and status of remote machines. The TPM is a PKI chip featuring a ... ...
[read more] to the top
Bolstering U.S. Supercomputing
Current government policies and spending levels will not adequately provide the supercomputing resources needed to bolster U.S. defense and national security, write Susan Graham, Marc Snir, and Cynthia Patterson, who all participated on the National Research Council committee that produced the ... ...
[read more] to the top
To submit feedback about ACM TechNews, contact:
technews@xxxxxxxxxx
To unsubscribe from the ACM TechNews Early Alert Service:
Please send a separate email to listserv@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
with the line
signoff technews
in the body of your message.
Please note that replying directly to this message does not
automatically unsubscribe you from the TechNews list.
ACM may have a different email address on file for you,
so if you're unable to "unsubscribe" yourself, please direct
your request to: technews-request@xxxxxxx
We will remove your name from the TechNews list on
your behalf.
For help with technical problems, including problems with
leaving the list, please write to:
technews-request@xxxxxxx
to the top