Chameleon
Computing
Storage Limits? What
Storage Limits?
New technologies and upgrades are expected to dramatically
expand the storage capacity of hard drives in the coming
years; optimism for such storage breakthroughs ran high at a
March 25 meeting of the American Physical Society. For
example, Apple Computer's iPod mini digital music ...
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United Nations Ponders
Net's Future
A U.N. summit is discussing the need for greater
international involvement in Internet technical, social, and
economic issues, and much of the dissent is from developing
countries that say they have little or no say in how important
decisions about the Internet are made. U.N. Secretary General
...
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Think Tank: Offshoring Hits
High-End Workers
Offshore outsourcing is often blamed for the erosion of
U.S. call center and programming jobs, but a new study from
the Economic Policy Institute sees a similar overseas
migration of high-end software jobs. EPI's Josh Bivens
predicts that the real effect of this job exportation will not
be ...
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Interaction Technologies
Connect and Enhance Lives: CHI2004, April 24-29,
Vienna
Approximately 2,000 information technology professionals
from more than 35 countries are expected to attend CHI2004 in
Vienna, Austria, April 24-29. Sponsored by the Association for
Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer-Human
Interaction (ACM SIGCHI), the conference offers a ...
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Brain Waves Control Video
Game
Researchers at MIT Media Lab Europe in Dublin recently
demonstrated a thought-controlled video game system called
Mind Balance, whose potential applications include gaming as
well as brain-computer interfaces for handicapped users. The
demo involved a user wearing a wireless headset ...
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When Instant Messages Come
Bearing Malice
Instant messaging (IM) is the next big target for spammers
and hackers now that the number of people who use the
technology has grown significantly. Popularized by teenagers
during the late 1990s, IM has now spread to the business world
where people find it useful for quickly sharing files and ...
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Attaining New Goals in
Computer Vision
Information Society Technologies' EVENTS and VISIRE
projects involve computer-vision technologies that are
reportedly superior to existing commercial products. Project
coordinator Tomas Rodriguez at Eptron says that EVENTS
interpolates images and furnishes multi-view presentations of
...
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'FlashMob Supercomputer'
Readied for Mass Supercomputing
The creators of FlashMob Computing are working to bring
supercomputing capabilities to the average computer user. On
April 3, a mass supercomputer, comprised of an infinite number
of computers connected via a high-speed local-area network,
will be launched on the campus of the ...
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Virtual People Look
Realistically
Researchers at Ireland's Trinity College are enabling
virtual humans to gaze at objects with the same authenticity
of their real-world counterparts by imbuing them with a memory
system that can store information about people and objects a
virtual character has previously seen, explains ...
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To Save a Life or a Limb,
Gently Shake a Minefield
Conventional detectors are often unable to distinguish
buried plastic antipersonnel mines with a small amount of
metal from metal debris, but universities are developing new
detection systems that generate seismic waves to cause these
mines to vibrate in a unique way so they can be ...
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Foundation Showcases
Data-Sharing Network, Urges Action
Panelists from a forum at Stanford University featuring
members of the Markle Foundation Task Force on National
Security in the Information Age have suggested a homeland
security information network, database-driven, to let Homeland
Security Department officials share information across ...
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Programmers, Look to Video
Games
The University of Southern California plans to offer an
advanced program in video-game design with the help of a
multimillion-dollar donation from Electronic Arts. The
university's School of Cinema-Television will offer the
Electronic Arts Interactive Entertainment Program, which will
feature ...
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Why Internet Needs to
Break Down the Language Barriers
ICANN chief executive Paul Twomey says too much of the
Internet's content and addresses are written solely in
English, which constitutes a major obstacle to e-commerce and
communications. "We don't want the Internet fracturing into
language-based intranets when it is supporting billions of ...
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Six Barriers to Open
Source Adoption
The broad enterprise adoption of open source software faces
a number of hurdles outlined by Kleiner Perkins Caufield &
Byers partner and former Oracle executive Ray Lane at last
week's Open Source Business Conference 2004. The biggest
obstacle to acceptance is a paucity of formal support, ...
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ADT at SD West: Grady
Booch on Software
Rational Software co-founder, author, and IBM Software
Group principal architect Grady Booch highlighted his keynote
presentation at the recent Software Development West
conference with an overview of how software development's role
as a business process has changed over the years. "What ...
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Get Out of My
Namespace
The growth of the Internet and the spread of globalization
has thrown name ownership laws into confusion, as opportunists
register people's or institutions' names online in the hopes
of selling them back to the original owners, while people or
entities with names that are similar or ...
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New Speech Technologies
Making Noise
New speech technologies--VoiceXML 2.0 from the World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C) and Microsoft's Speech Server product
line--may be based on rival voice browser standards, but the
W3C's Dave Raggett postulates that these standards could
eventually be integrated into a hybrid specification. The ...
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Ballot Boxes Go High
Tech
Touch-screen machines were touted as the best solution to a
flawed voting system that led to the Florida debacle in the
last presidential election, but findings that touch-screen
systems are susceptible to hacking and issues with their lack
of a voter-verifiable paper trail have raised doubts ...
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Chameleon
Computing
Building a handheld device that can function as a cellular
phone, an MP3 player, a personal digital assistant, and
numerous other tools may become feasible through
reconfigurable computing, in which computer chips can be
rewired on the spur of the moment by hardware- or
software-based ...
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