Closing In on the Perfect
Code
Software Schools Evolve to
Help Students Compete
China hopes to nurture the next generation of IT leaders
and entrepreneurs and raise its profile as a global technology
player through the establishment of software colleges at 35
Chinese universities. One such institution, Peking
University's School of Software, is equipped with ...
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W3C Finalizes Internet
Voice Standards
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced the
finalization of two core components of the Speech Interface
Framework--VoiceXML 2.0 and the Speech Recognition Grammar
Specification (SRGS)--on March 16; the former will be used to
integrate Web-based development and content delivery with ...
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Congress Let Privacy
Programs Be Cut
Last year's termination of the Pentagon's Terrorism
Information Awareness (TIA) program was accompanied by the
quiet elimination of a pair of privacy tools designed to
partially satisfy critics. One such tool was designed for the
Genisys program, which analyzed government and commercial
records ...
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California Researchers' New
Center Will Study, Test Computer Viruses
A system that private firms and Internet monitors can use
to examine, study, and possibly counter computer viruses and
other forms of malware before they become a serious threat is
being developed by the University of California at Berkeley
and the University of Southern California with a ...
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Rough Ride for Robots, But
Humans Smiling
Although the desert may have defeated the robot vehicles
racing in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's
(DARPA) Grand Challenge on March 13, competitors and DARPA
officials said the project was ultimately successful. DARPA
director Anthony Tether reported that his agency has ...
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Patently
Unfair?
Critics are faulting the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
for allowing patents on Internet technologies and business
methods, a practice that allegedly enables a select few patent
holders to set terms for e-commerce, digital media, and even
the Web itself. The policy, based on the landmark ...
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Gunning for the U.S. in
Technology
America's technological superiority is threatened by a
confluence of offshore outsourcing and rising international
competitiveness in terms of research, entrepreneurship, and
innovation: Gartner estimates 500,000 U.S. technology jobs
will head overseas in 2004, while U.S. companies seem to ...
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GPS Technology Helps Blind
Find Way
A number of portable devices on the market or under
development are designed to help blind or visually impaired
users get around, often by employing location data pinpointed
by global-positioning-system (GPS) technology. Pulse Data
International's BrailleNote is a textbook-size ...
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Scientists Develop
Breakthrough Internet Protocol
University researchers have developed next-generation
network protocols that would utilize existing bandwidth much
more efficiently than the current transmission control
protocol (TCP), which was developed in the 1980s. The Stanford
Linear Accelerator Center recently compared six new ...
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Silicon Valley's Changing
Landscape
To compete in an increasingly global market, many companies
in Silicon Valley are outsourcing most of their operations
overseas, where they are done by people willing to work for
substantially less than their American counterparts. "The
character of the valley is changing pretty ...
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In E-Mail Warfare, the
Spammers Are Winning
In the arms race between spammers and anti-spam proponents,
the bad guys have the upper hand thanks to underhanded tactics
such as using computer worms to compromise vulnerable systems
and turn them into "zombies" for mass-mailing spam. Spamhaus
director Steve Linford predicts that spam will ...
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Memories Captured in a
Digital Shoebox
Memorabilia is undergoing a transition from the physical to
the digital world as new technologies give users the power to
preserve their memories in computer files rather than in
shoeboxes. First conceived of at the dawn of the computer age
by electronics pioneer Vannevar Bush, who envisioned a ...
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Optimistic IT Employments
Outlook
IT spending is perceivably increasing and buoying the IT
job market: A number of industry trends are influencing IT
employment opportunities, including businesses' willingness to
invest in new services infrastructure, offshore outsourcing,
security-related issues, and the emergence of new ...
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Can Social Networking Stop
Spam?
A new algorithm developed by UCLA professors P. Oscar
Boykin and Vwani Roychowdhury applies social networking
principles to spam filtering. "We routinely use our social
networks to judge the trustworthiness of outsiders...to decide
where to buy our next car, or where to find a good ...
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10-Gigabit Ethernet Comes
Alive
The two-year-old 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10-GigE) technology
is now reaching a much larger business market thanks to lower
prices and the prospect of a one-size-fits-all networking
solution that would reduce training costs and complexity.
There are no common applications that alone require the ...
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The End of
Passwords
Lavasoft vice president Michael Wood says the way that
passwords are currently used poses a danger to companies since
individuals could use keylogging spyware to record keystrokes
and so learn passwords. However, alternative user
authentication technologies such as smart cards have not ...
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Open Source Database
Improvements Grow
Open source databases are usually niche products, but
upcoming improvements are making the tools increasingly
important for a growing stable of industries, including
e-commerce applications, high-speed Web searching, content
management, data warehouse reporting, and Web portals. A
survey by ...
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Domain
Master
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
CEO Paul Twomey says that his organization must remained
focused on maintaining a single interoperable Internet while
meeting the needs of international constituents. ICANN is
responsible to governments, businesses, academics, ...
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Closing In on the Perfect
Code
With turbo codes, French researchers Claude Berrou and
Alain Glavieux put an end to over four decades of speculation
on whether data could indeed by conveyed at speeds up to
channel capacity virtually devoid of errors and with very low
transmitting power using the right error-correction codes, as
...
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