Eternal Bits
Senators Promise 'Brain
Drain' Bill
U.S. Senators plan to present legislation to replenish the
ranks of America's science and engineering graduates, which
many agree are essential to maintaining the country's
leadership in global innovation. "New ideas, the development
of new technologies and innovation will lead to a better ...
[read more]
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HP Drops 4 Research Groups
in Downsizing
Four research groups at HP Labs will be dropped as part of
Hewlett-Packard's latest downsizing effort, one of which was
headed by renowned computing pioneer Alan Kay. Kay won the
ACM's A.M. Turing Award and the National Academy of
Engineering Charles Stark Draper Prize, ...
[read more]
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Europe Moving in R&D
Slow Lane
Europe's science and technology R&D investment is
paltry compared to America and Asian countries, according to
the latest statistics, and EU research commissioner Janez
Potocnik warned at a recent media conference that "Europe will
lose the opportunity to become a leading global ...
[read more]
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Watching the Future
Unfold
Researchers at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign have developed the Land-use Evolution and
Impact Assessment Model (LEAM), a computer simulation that
enables urban planners, government officials, citizens, and
other interested parties to visualize and measure the likely
...
[read more]
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Driven to Distraction by
Technology
Digital communications technologies designed to boost
worker efficiency--email, instant messaging, and so on--are
having the opposite effect with the constant interruptions
they present. A Hewlett-Packard study estimates that 62
percent of British adults have an email addiction, ...
[read more]
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IEEE Starts Hammering Out
Mesh Network Standard
Fifteen proposals for a wireless mesh network standard are
being submitted to the IEEE 802.11s working group this week,
and Nortel Networks' Bilel Jamoussi says that number will be
pared down to a single draft perhaps as soon as May 2006. Mesh
networks allow multiple access points to carry one ...
[read more]
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Sun Plans to Make All Its
Software Free
Sun Microsystems President Jonathan Schwartz announced at
the AlwaysOn conference on July 21 that his company intends to
ultimately make all of its software freely available as a
community-building strategy. Schwartz estimated that 2 million
licenses for the open-source version of Sun's ...
[read more]
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U.S. Universities, Industry
in Win-Win Agreement With India to Improve Engineering
Education
American universities have entered into a partnership with
Indian institutions to improve science and engineering
education in India via a new satellite e-learning network. UC
San Diego, UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell University,
Case Western Reserve University, and the State ...
[read more]
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Bots Now Battle Humans for
Poker Supremacy
Interest in poker-playing computer programs is rising, as
is alarm among gamers, gaming companies, and programmers
concerned that poker bots could become a new tool for deceit
and cheating in the increasingly high-stakes arena of online
poker. The fact that even the most advanced poker bots can ...
[read more]
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Web Services Specs Meet
Open Source
The licensing agreements Microsoft, IBM, and the Apache
Software Foundation will reach concerning WS-Security
specifications could have far-reaching implications for the
more general future of Web services applications in the
open-source framework. Of the three options the Organization
for the ...
[read more]
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Information Security With
Colin Percival
Simon Fraser University visiting researcher Colin Percival
described his research on information security in a recent
interview, which deals with the security threat posed by
hyperthreading. He demonstrated how this technique can be used
to exploit vulnerabilities in a system by a hacker ...
[read more]
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What's the Next Big Thing
on the Web? It May Be a Small, Simple
Thing--Microformats
If information presented on the Web could be understood by
people as well as computers, it would spawn new forms of doing
business and transform the Web into a massive, searchable, and
reconfigurable database. Embedding such meaning within Web
pages is a formidable challenge that could be ...
[read more]
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Call for Homeland Security
Cybersecurity Improvements
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not
have recovery plans in case of a widespread Internet attack,
Government Accountability Office IT management director David
Powner said yesterday, speaking before the Senate Homeland
Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Powner told ...
[read more]
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Standards Activists Target
Scripts
The DOM Scripting Task Force launched by the Web Standards
Project (WaSP) on July 18 is tasked with encouraging
compliance with the World Wide Web Consortium's Document
Object Model (DOM) and similar Web standards, and with setting
up scripting guidelines. The group's JavaScript manifesto ...
[read more]
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Fighting a Broadband
Battle
Kevin Martin, the recently appointed chairman of the FCC,
claims that his top priority will be to bring high-speed
Internet access to the entire country. To achieve that end, he
has maintained that telephone and cable companies should be
under no obligation to share their lines with ...
[read more]
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The Trout Will Have to
Wait: Barrett's Busy
In a recent interview, outgoing Intel CEO Craig Barrett
outlined his vision for Intel's future and reflected on its
past. He describes the stewardships of Robert Noyce and Gordon
Moore as having been an era of critical advancement, where the
fundamental research that occurred paved ...
[read more]
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Linux Goes
Global
Linux is acquiring an international reach because it makes
practical sense in many instances: Linux's growing popularity
in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere stems from its ability to lower
IT costs and improve system performance. European Linux
adopters cite the open-source operating ...
[read more]
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Business's Digital Black
Cloud
The development of faster computer chips is enabling
chipmakers to release increasingly powerful hardware at
competitive prices, thereby disrupting the traditional
business model of the business-software industry. To keep
licensing costs down, companies that rely on enterprise
software to ...
[read more]
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Eternal
Bits
Preserving digital information in the face of impermanent
data formats and storage media is a formidable challenge
complicated by technical as well as legal factors. Researchers
at the MIT Libraries are focusing on the long-term maintenance
and sharing of digital content with DSpace, a digital ...
[read more]
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