Buggy Software and Missile Defense
"Google's Growth Helps Ignite Silicon Valley Hiring Frenzy"
In the 15 months since Google went public, the meteoric rise of its stock price driven by its innovative approach to technology has touched off a hiring binge in Silicon Valley that recalls the climate prior to the dot-com collapse. Google has a current target of hiring 10 employees a day, and has enlisted legions of recruiters to scour the software community ...
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"House Democrats Stake out High-Tech Ground"
In an effort to restore the nation's technological competitiveness, House Democrats have introduced a laundry list of measures to be carried out over several years, known as the Innovation Agenda, though there is the fear among industry leaders that the proposal could be scuttled by partisanship. The agenda calls for doubling the budget of the NSF, cultivating a skilled ...
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"Video Games Are Their Major, So Don't Call Them Slackers"
The study of video games is emerging as a mainstream academic pursuit, after long having been a minor niche discipline reserved for obscure vocational schools. The academic study of video games can either come in the form of programming and design, or as an examination of their symbolic significance to contemporary culture. While five years ago there were not ...
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"Record Rise in Overseas IT Workers"
The United Kingdom saw an influx of 22,000 foreign IT workers last year, 85 percent of whom were from India and many of whom were highly skilled. For its part, the United Kingdom outsources many lower-level IT jobs to India, but the flow of traffic goes both ways, notes Ann Swain, CEO of the Association of Technology Staffing Companies, the organization that ...
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"Animation Event as Montreal ACM SIGGRAPH"
This week's Montreal ACM SIGGRAPH animation event showcases the relevance of computer graphics to traditional forms of animation. Computer graphics as a field can succeed in tandem with conventional animation; indeed, their relationship is not so much competitive as symbiotic. Art is historically predicated on the convergence and fusion of media, and animation should be ...
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"College to Collaborate With Sun Microsystems"
Dartmouth University's Public Key Infrastructure Laboratory will develop an open-source certificate authority that runs on the open-source operating system of Sun Microsystems. The move is part of a larger collaborative effort that will have the PKI Laboratory continue work on hardware-based security, and have Sun donate equipment for a restructured graduate ...
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"Ohio Professor Receives National Computational Science Award"
Capital University's Ignatios Vakalis, a professor of mathematics and computer science, received the Undergraduate Computational Engineering and Sciences (UCES) award last week at the ACM- and IEEE-sponsored SC05 conference. The award credited Vakalis as an innovator and acknowledged the scope of his contributions to computer engineering and scientific ...
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"Root Servers: The Real Net Power"
RIPE, based in Amsterdam, manages one of the root servers that guide online traffic to top-level domains, and is the regional address registry for Europe, the Middle East, and Russia. Of the 13 organizations charged with a server, not all are located in the United States, making moot some of the concerns delegates from developing-world countries expressed at the ...
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"SDSU Professor Maps the Future"
When the San Diego area was ravaged by wildfires two years ago, San Diego State University professor Ming-Hsiang Tsou created online maps to display the locations and perimeters of the fires. Every six or seven hours Tsou updated the site, which received as many as 8,000 hits each day. Since then, Internet mapping has become a burgeoning industry, and SDSU is eager ...
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"Supercomputing Now Indispensable"
The blazing fast computational ability of today's supercomputers has become indispensable to scores of scientific applications, from climate modeling to simulating the conditions of the universe at the time of its creation. The fastest supercomputer today can perform at speeds roughly 150,000 times faster than a high-end consumer PC. Last fall, Jean-Bernard Minster and a ...
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"Self 2.0: Internet Users Put a Best Face Forward"
Tens of millions of Internet users shop, socialize, and communicate online through virtual personas or avatars that serve as representations of themselves. It is estimated that 90 percent of America Online instant messengers currently employ an avatar of some kind, while 7 million people visit Yahoo!'s avatar creation site a month. Avatars are for the most part ...
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"Putting the Napster Genie Back in the Bottle"
File-sharing service Grokster plans to introduce peer-to-peer technology by the end of the year that will monitor the file-trading of copyrighted works, and force the file-swapper to pay for a song or block the attempt to download the content directly on another computer. The technology that Grokster will use was been developed by Snocap, the new company of Shawn ...
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"His Goal Was to Make It Simple to Use and a Joy to Look at. He succeeded. The Result Was the iPod."
Apple's Jonathon Ive, the British-born designer credited with inventing the iPod and the iMac, attributes those designs to the collaboration of the manufacturing, software, hardware, and electronics teams. Through his inventions, Ive essentially reversed Apple's slumping fortunes single-handedly; today 30 million iPods have sold. Ive says that he ...
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"Blue Brain Power"
Researchers from Lausanne, Switzerland, have undertaken a project known as Blue Brain, using IBM's eServer Blue Gene to model the human brain. The project is analyzing the functions of the 10,000 neurons within a rat's neocortial columns (NCC), which are quite similar to those in the human brain. Each NCC is 0.5 mm in diameter and between 2 mm and 5 mm in height. ...
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"ITU Head Foresees Internet Balkanization"
International Telecommunications Union secretary-general Yoshio Utsumi hinted that the "nuclear option" mentioned prior to the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia could manifest itself over the next few years. "The Internet need not be the so-called one Internet controlled by one center, so regionalization is already getting started and I suspect in ...
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"Spies, Lies and Butterflies"
Applying chaos theory to the concealment of messages could give users of existing communications networks more peace of mind, according to a new study in Nature. Chaotic communications can be facilitated through a setup involving two synchronized lasers, in which a chaotic light beam emitted by one laser is used to transmit a message securely to the other. The beam is ...
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"Buggy Software and Missile Defense"
Software programmer Mark Halpern finds fault with the long-standing contention that an Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) defense system is unrealizable because the software required for such a system would be undependable. He argues that a software system can be highly reliable, provided some real-world experience is obtained in its use, and blames ...
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