The Great Robot
Race
Lingering Job Insecurity of
Silicon Valley
Programmers and software engineers had no trouble moving
from job opportunity to job opportunity during the technology
boom of the 1990s, but despite promises that an economic
recovery has begun and increased demand for workers is on the
horizon, tech professionals left in the lurch by the ...
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Robotic Race Gets Off to
Rocky Start
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is
offering $1 million to the team that creates an autonomous
vehicle that can successfully navigate over 200 miles of rough
desert terrain in 10 hours without human assistance. More than
20 teams will compete in this race, ...
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External Forces Chip Away
at Internet's Overseer
The International Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers (ICANN) is still under pressure to clarify its mandate
and open itself up to international interests. The recent
tri-annual meeting in Rome and United Nations' International
Telecommunications Union workshops in Geneva ...
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Trouble on Silicon Valley's
Doorstep
Former Oracle President Ray Lane, now a general partner
with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, thinks Silicon
Valley has reached a turning point as the software industry
begins a "tectonic shift" to a business model where renovation
rather than innovation is the chief priority. He explains ...
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Will PHP Live Up to Its
Billing?
Slated for availability in May 2004 is PHP 5, an update to
the popular PHP open-source scripting language, whose promised
upgrades include better native XML support, embedded SQL
database capabilities, and an improved object-oriented
programming approach. Zend Technology co-founder and Zend ...
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Talking Up a Good
Game
Being able to communicate fluently with locals in foreign
lands is a very valuable skill for soldiers engaged in
peace-keeping and "nation-building" operations, and computer
science professor Lewis Johnson of the University of Southern
California's Center for Advanced Research in Technology for
...
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Programmers So Far
Underwhelmed by JSF
Programmers have thus far responded less than
enthusiastically to JavaServer Faces (JSF), a standard for
building Web applications at the presentation level, which was
approved by the Java Community Process. JSF would provide
developers with a standard kit of application programming ...
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North American IPv6 Task
Force Kicks Off Next Phase of Moonv6
The second phase of testing on the Moonv6 multi-vendor IPv6
network was launched on March 7, according to an announcement
by the IPv6 Forum's North American IPv6 Task Force (NAv6TF).
The goal of Moonv6 phase II is to continue to justify the
deployment of Internet Protocol version 6 for the ...
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IT's Final
Frontier
IT vendors and service providers are looking for new
opportunities with NASA now that President Bush committed to
reinvigorating the space program. After the loss of the space
shuttle Columbia, IT companies were uncertain about the
government's future plans--but with a new infusion of $1
billion ...
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Robo
Doc
Honda's Asimo robot, whose crowd-pleasing abilities include
dancing and climbing stairs while moving quietly and fluently,
is a milestone along the road toward a truly domestic robot,
contends roboticist and artificial intelligence expert Prof.
Edgar Korner, who heads Honda's European Research ...
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Navy Researcher Has Novel
Security Visualization Technique
A researcher at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey,
Calif., has applied techniques from the field of
thermodynamics to characterize data traffic on computer
networks, and says the concepts about visualizing network
activity should make it easier to fend off security attacks.
David ...
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Digital Rights Management:
Fixing Wrongs?
The first line of defense against digital content piracy
employed by technology and entertainment companies is digital
rights management (DRM), and signs indicate that the
technology is gaining acceptance among consumers.
Hewlett-Packard recently announced that it has joined ...
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XMPP Transports Presence
Data
Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) allows
for easy exchange of presence data among IM systems and
enterprise software applications, writes Jabber chief
architect Joe Hildebrand. The XML streaming protocol recently
won IETF approval and already has thousands of deployments due
to ...
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Big
Apple
Virginia Tech researchers are following up the successful
construction of their System X supercomputer by developing the
infrastructure for a Terascale Computing Facility. Using 1,100
commercially available Apple G5 systems with dual IBM PowerPC
970 processors, the researchers put together ...
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The Garden Where Perfect
Software Grows
Peter Bentley of University College London's Digital
Biology Group believes software will become more reliable,
error-proof, and virus-resistant through biologically-inspired
evolution and adaptation, a change that will make programmers
more like gardeners. Genetic programming seemed to offer ...
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The Myths of Open
Source
The growing popularity of open-source software solutions
among CIOs helps to dispel some of the myths surrounding the
technology. Many companies claim that, contrary to the
mythological view, the price advantage of open source is not
its most attractive feature: The real impetus for adopting ...
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Future of News
Delivery
Dennis McLeod of the University of Southern California's
Annenberg School for Communication in Los Angeles believes the
near future will witness the emergence of a revolution in news
representation and delivery thanks to new information
technologies and integrated media systems. He is currently ...
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Face-off: Are Anti-Spam
Appliances Better Than Software?
Mirapoint senior manager Tim Chiu argues that anti-spam
appliances are a more effective and inclusive solution for
blocking spam than software: He contends that appliances need
significantly less continuous management than software, and
offer quicker return on investment and a low ongoing total ...
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The Great Robot
Race
On March 13, some 20 teams will compete to see whose
autonomous vehicle can navigate a 250-mile off-road course
from Barstow, Calif., to Las Vegas, with the team whose
vehicle first reaches Sin City within 10 hours receiving a $1
million prize, courtesy of the Defense Advanced Research ...
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