The Challenge of the
Decade
Call of the Wild for
BIOS
A free BIOS movement is forming in order to break open the
information monopoly of existing BIOS-writing firms such as
Dell and specialty BIOS companies. Free Software Foundation
(FSF) President Richard Stallman wants to provide an
alternative to closed BIOS, but says PC makers and ...
[read more]
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Your Are What You Listen
To: Users of Digital Music Sharing System Judge Others by
Their Playlists
Music sharing technologies show tremendous potential in
fostering community feelings, according to a study by
human-computer interface researchers at the Georgia Institute
of Technology and the Palo Alto Research Center. The study
focused on co-workers at a midsized U.S. company that shared
music ...
[read more]
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Dialogue Systems Juggles
Topics
A joint venture between Stanford University and Edinburgh
University has yielded the Conversational Interface
Architecture, a dialogue management system designed to improve
verbal human-computer communications by giving computers the
ability to recognize conversational context and anticipate ...
[read more]
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IT Employment on
Upswing
Unemployment among IT professionals has fallen at a faster
rate than employment in general, according to an analysis of
recently released Bureau of Labor Statistics data by
InformationWeek. The annualized rate for out-of-work IT
workers was 3.7 percent for the four quarters that ended ...
[read more]
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HPCC Brings 'Supercomputing
to the Masses'
Intel senior fellow Steve Pawlowski will be the keynote
speaker at this month's High Performance Computing and
Communications Conference (HPCC), where he will discuss
supercomputing's future direction, trends in processor
performance, how software will exploit increasing cores, the
...
[read more]
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Net Aids Access to
Sensitive ID Data
Despite talk in Congress about regulating large data
brokers, a simple Web search will turn up a dozen smaller
operations where identity thieves could easily obtain Social
Security numbers. Sites such as www.secret-info.com and
www.Iinfosearch.com offer Social Security numbers and other
sensitive ...
[read more]
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OSI Tackles License
'Explosion'
Open Source Initiative (OSI) President Emeritus Eric S.
Raymond says the OSI board of directors is planning an April 6
meeting with stakeholders at the Open Source Business
Conference to restrain the surge of open source licenses, many
of them tailored for specific corporations. The OSI has ...
[read more]
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Degrees of
Change
Schools in Australia have long eschewed business skills in
favor of technology training for students in IT programs, but
that has started to change as CIOs demand more IT staffers
with such skills, concurrent with declines in IT program
enrollments spurred by fewer job prospects for ...
[read more]
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Demonstrating Secure
Wireless Personal Access Networks
The IST-funded PACWOMAN project sought to address
scalability, mobility, reconfigurability, security, and
quality of service challenges that limited the viability of
wireless personal area networks (WPANs). PACWOMAN's strategy
was to deliver cheap and secure wireless access to users with
100 ...
[read more]
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Top Court Mulls P2P
'Pushers'
Several Supreme Court justices debating whether
peer-to-peer (P2P) file-swapping networks should be legally
liable for copyright infringement committed by users appear
interested in reaching a compromise that concentrates on
networks that induce such infringement. Patent law defines ...
[read more]
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Grid Computing Can Allow
Security Threats
At Ziff Davis Media's Enterprise Solutions Virtual
Tradeshow on March 30, a panel of security experts discussed
the security risks inherent in large-scale grid computing
implementations. Panelists cited best practices as critical
for keeping information transmitted over corporate grid
systems ...
[read more]
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Reading Is Key to IT
Innovation
Parasoft CEO Adam Kolawa warns that many U.S. researchers
and scientists are operating in ignorance of their peers'
latest work, and this practice is endangering America's global
competitiveness in science and technology. Reading up on
colleagues' research can prevent the unnecessary reinvention
...
[read more]
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Carnegie Mellon's
Collaborative Research Is Driving Force Behind Revolutionary
New Tool for Writing Software Codes
Professor Jose M.F. Moura of Carnegie Mellon University's
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering reports that
his team has developed "SPIRAL" software that automatically
produces code for signal-processing applications that could
boost the speed of computer operations while ...
[read more]
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Fast NASA Action Begets
World's Largest Linux Supercomputer
The U.S. government's Return to Flight initiative to
correct the mistakes that caused the destruction of the space
shuttle Columbia over two years ago prompted the rapid
installation of a 10,240-processor supercomputer, named after
the ill-fated spacecraft. The project also dovetailed with ...
[read more]
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The Evolving mSpace
Platform: Leveraging the Semantic Web on the Trail of the
Memex
University of Southampton researchers posit that the
Semantic Web could potentially bring the Web closer to Vanevar
Bush's vision of the mime, a machine that stores all digital
information and that can support knowledge construction by
supporting a person's assembly of associative connections ...
[read more]
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Sounding the Alarm as Big
Brother Goes Digital
Barry Steinhardt with the ACLU's Technology and Liberty
Program warns that the deployment of digital and
radio-frequency (RF) technologies may actually increase rather
than decrease society's vulnerability. "We're developing the
infrastructure for the surveillance society without, at the
...
[read more]
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Moving IT
Forward
Members of eWeek's Corporate Partner Advisory Board agree
that enterprise IT departments are beginning to shake off the
malaise of downsizing and damage control and adopt a more
positive IT investment outlook. AT&T Global Networking
Technology Services' Glenn Evans says his company seeks ...
[read more]
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Grand Challenge, Take 2:
DARPA Doubles Prize Money in Mojave Desert Robot
Race
The Defense Department has mandated that one-third of the
U.S. Army's ground vehicles be autonomous and unmanned by 2015
so that battlefield casualties can be reduced. Stimulating the
development of robot vehicle technologies to fulfill this
mandate is the goal of the Defense Advanced ...
[read more]
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The Challenge of the
Decade
As university libraries move toward digitizing their entire
collections, digital rights management (DRM) is a key issue
that requires planning input from library officials, IT
specialists, faculty, students, and even members of the
general public, writes Society for College and University
Planning ...
[read more]
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