The New Face of the Silicon
Age
Intel Backs a
More-Efficient PC Power Supply
Intel is promoting a new power supply specification that
promises to cut power plant emissions, reduce U.S. energy
bills by $1 billion, and trim the annual electricity bill for
an average business PC by $17. PC power consumption could be
lowered by a third with the device, which could also ...
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Patents Raise Stakes in
Search Wars
IT vendors and Internet firms are arming themselves with
Web search patents in preparation for future battles over how
computer users find information. Last week, Yahoo! fired
opening salvos by dropping Google as its Web search provider,
though attorney David Jacobs says that one overt action ...
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Can Lessons From the Common
Cold Help Us Defeat Computer Viruses?
Researchers are observing the similarities between computer
viruses and biological viruses in the hopes that computer
systems could be fortified against malware in much the same
way the immune system guards the human body against disease
invaders. Like their real-world counterparts, ...
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Survival of the
Catchiest
Competition between antivirus firms to be the first to
alert the public to new computer viruses or worms can lead to
a bewildering profusion of names for the same bug, a situation
that has started to become irritating. The general industry
consensus is that the first person or company that finds ...
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The Curse of the Biometric
Future
Biometric security technology was discovered 10 years ago,
and has since promised security solutions but provided mainly
controversy. Rockefeller University professor Joseph Atick,
while studying human brain processes and sensory signals,
found facial dimensions formed a unique template that ...
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Inspiration From Nature's
Grand Design
Biomimetics, the science of using nature as an inspiration
for new technology, is valued not only as a way to find
offbeat solutions to problems, but as a much less expensive
approach than working from scratch. Evolution is a massive
trial and error experiment and anything you look at ...
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New Spam Filters Cut the
Noise
Several open-source spam filter developers recently
announced filtering techniques that are close to 100 percent
reliable in blocking incoming spam on a network, whereas many
expensive commercial filters are only 99 percent reliable, at
best. William Yerazunis claimed that his CRM114 spam filter
...
[read more]
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Conference Tutorials
Provide Ways to Connect, Interact and Shape Future at CHI2004,
24-29 April, Vienna, Austria
Approximately 2,000 IT professionals from more than 35
countries are expected to attend the CHI2004 gathering April
24-29 in Vienna, Austria. Sponsored by the Association for
Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer-Human
Interaction, CHI2004 will give ...
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A New Step in
Spintronics
University of Utah physicists report in Nature that they
have moved one step closer toward a new generation of
miniaturized electronic devices with the development of
electrical switches fashioned from organic semiconductors.
These "organic spin valves" marry elements of organic ...
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Relieving Peer-to-Peer
Pressure
Kazaa co-founder Niklas Zennstrom is launching a new
caching product that promises to relieve the onerous
peer-to-peer traffic problem at ISPs. Because peer-to-peer
protocols such as Kazaa's FastTrack and Morpheus' Gnutella are
horribly inefficient at minimizing traffic, ISPs are seeing at
...
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RFID Blocker Tags May
Soothe Privacy Fears
Anxiety that radio frequency identification (RFID)
technology might infringe on consumers' personal privacy could
be assuaged with a chip developed by RSA Laboratories that can
block the tracking of RFID-tagged goods or people by scanners.
Critics assert that ubiquitous RFID tagging ...
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Piercing the Fog With a
Tiny Chip
Electrical engineers at the California Institute of
Technology have integrated the basic elements of a radar
system in a silicon chip smaller than a penny that can be
mass-produced with cheap lithographic techniques, according to
associate professor of electrical engineering Ali Hajimiri,
...
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Barrier Free Access to the
Information Society
The European Commission (EC) is directing development and
adoption of technology that is accessible to everyone, said EC
member Erkki Liikanen in a speech to the Information Society
for deaf, hard-of-hearing, and speech-impaired people. Last
year saw a program specially devoted to ...
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Xerox PARC Veterans Picked
for Prestigious Draper Prize
The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has selected ACM
fellow Robert W. Taylor, Alan C. Kay, Butler W. Lampson and
Charles P. Thacker to receive the $500,000 Charles Stark
Draper Prize for pioneering contributions to PC technology
during their tenure at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center
(PARC). ...
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Congress to Review Tech
Agenda
Vying for Congress' attention this year is a number of
technology-related issues--cybersecurity, Internet taxation,
and spyware foremost among them. Bob Dix, majority staff
director for the House subcommittee on technology and
information policy, reports that industry representatives are
readying ...
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Copper Tops 10
Gigabits
The cost of 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology, which currently
only runs on fiber-optic cabling, could no longer be a barrier
for entry with the emergence of two standards that promise to
bring 10 Gigabit Ethernet speeds to copper cabling, although
both standards come with caveats. The ...
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Lean, Mean Green
Machines
Most computers in use today are characterized by low energy
efficiency, high power consumption, and high heat output, to
say nothing of the additional cost, noise, and consumption of
cooling systems. According to rough estimates, PCs worldwide
collectively guzzle 1.25 trillion ...
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The Web Within the
Web
The success of second-generation e-commerce depends on
making disparate databases--both old and new--accessible
across the Web, and Web service technologies are helping make
this vision a reality. So that Web services can be used to
construct networks of collaborating databases and services,
...
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The New Face of the
Silicon Age
American programmers' frustration at having their jobs
offshored to foreign workers willing to work for dramatically
less money--and being forced to train their foreign-born
replacements in some cases--has sparked a backlash against
outsourcing and raised fears that America's economic
leadership ...
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