Bolstering U.S.
Supercomputing
Senate Moves Toward New
Data Security Rules
Security breach and data safeguard legislation was a key
issue on Capitol Hill yesterday, as three distinct
congressional committees mulled over similar proposals. The
Senate's Commerce Committee unanimously accepted Sen. Gordon
Smith's (R-Ore.) bill to give the FTC the authority to develop
... ...
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SIGGRAPH 2005: Light
Clouds, Camera Arrays and Speedier
Rendering
Four research papers to be presented at SIGGRAPH 2005 were
written or co-written by researchers from UCSD computer
science professor Henrik Wann Jensen's Computer Graphics Lab
at the Jacobs School of Engineering, with Jensen himself
contributing to three of the papers. One paper details ... ...
[read more]
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Revenge of the
Nerds--Again
Search companies' meteoric ascendance in the tech domain is
reflected in the defection of top software engineers to Google
and Yahoo!. Recent hiring coups at Google include former
Microsoft researcher Kai-Fu Lee and former eBay advanced
technology research director Louis Monier, while new ... ...
[read more]
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GAO to Study National Plan
to Recycle Computers
The increasing volume of used electronics will be harmful
to human health and the environment unless properly managed,
John Stephenson of the Government Accountability Office (GAO)
told a Senate panel on July 26; he cited EPA estimates that
less than 6 million computers out of roughly 50 ... ...
[read more]
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Rapid Results Without a
Rugby Scrum
As many companies are increasingly fed up with traditional
software development methods, Scrum has become an appealing
alternative; Scrum is a method of developing software where
the project is broken down into small pieces divided among
autonomous teams, that each yield a discernable ... ...
[read more]
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Fingernails Store
Data
Japanese scientists have demonstrated that data can be
written into and read from a human fingernail through the use
of a laser. Dot patterns were written into a fingernail by
striking it with a laser that ionized molecules and caused a
miniature explosion that decomposed the keratin ... ...
[read more]
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Pittsburgh Unveils Big Ben
the Supercomputer
The Cray XT3 supercomputer, also known as Big Ben, is now
online at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), where it
will support nationwide scientific research as part of the
National Science Foundation's TeraGrid. Big Ben consists of
2,090 AMD Opteron processors with a general peak ... ...
[read more]
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'Shadow Walker' Pushes
Envelope for Stealth Rootkits
HBGary director of engineering Jamie Butler and University
of Central Florida Ph.D. student Sherri Sparks disclosed a new
method for concealing malware with their demonstration of the
Shadow Walker stealth rootkit at the Black Hat Briefings
conference. Analysts say such research is very ... ...
[read more]
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Not Playing to
Women
The video game industry needs more female programmers if it
wants to expand its appeal beyond its core audience of men;
IDC analyst Schelley Olhava says 70 percent of console game
players are male, but female players could comprise a
lucrative market--if their views were considered by the gaming
... ...
[read more]
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The Unity of
Linux
Despite the inclination of some to see it as a competitor
to Unix, Linux actually carries the Unix flag, and counts as
just one of several variants of the open source method that
stands in opposition to the Windows model, according to IT
consulting industry veteran and author Paul Murphy. Unix ...
...
[read more]
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GILS Could Soon Get the
Boot
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
is considering commercial alternatives, such as Google and
Yahoo!, to replace its 10-year-old Global Information Locator
Service (GILS) standard that indexes electronic information
available to the public. Despite federal mandate to ... ...
[read more]
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U.N. Internet Summit Draws
Rights Groups' Fire
The United Nations' International Telecommunications Union
(ITU) is being criticized by several rights organizations,
including the Freedom to Publish, International Publishers
Association, and Reporters Without Borders, for its decision
to hold the second part of its World Summit on ... ...
[read more]
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Really Open
Source
Efforts to make college course materials freely available
on the Web, such as MIT's OpenCourseWare and Rice's Connexions
programs, are reshaping the way educational content is
distributed. Connexions founder Richard Baraniuk, a professor
of electrical and computer engineering at Rice, says ... ...
[read more]
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Big Problems? Call Out the
Big Iron
Australia's leading supercomputers are being used for
academic as well as commercial ventures, while new hardware
investments are helping the country regain its status as a
major supercomputing center. The most powerful Australian
supercomputer is housed at the Australian Partnership for ...
...
[read more]
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Creepy Crawlies to Explore
Other Worlds
Many scientists believe the next step in the evolution of
unmanned space exploration is biomimetics, in which nature
serves as the inspiration for more robust and versatile robot
probes. Roger Quinn of Case Western Reserve University's
Biologically Inspired Robotics Laboratory has ... ...
[read more]
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Whose Work Is It,
Anyway?
The Copyright Office is holding a series of hearings this
week concerning whether copyright law should be amended to
permit scholars, artists, historians, and others to use
"orphan works"--copyrighted content whose creators cannot be
identified--more liberally. Various proposals for the ... ...
[read more]
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The 100-Year Archive
Dilemma
To address the costs of storing an ever-growing body of
data, and to comply with federal regulations demanding that
more content be stored for a longer time, companies are in
search of new methods for long-term digital storage.
Currently, transferring the information from one medium to
another is the ... ...
[read more]
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Technology Roadmap:
Trusted Computing Architectures
The computer industry is hyping the Trusted Platform Module
(TPM) as an important defense against malware, one that allows
users to check that their PCs have not been infected and
enables networks to confirm the identity and status of remote
machines. The TPM is a PKI chip featuring a ... ...
[read more]
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Bolstering U.S.
Supercomputing
Current government policies and spending levels will not
adequately provide the supercomputing resources needed to
bolster U.S. defense and national security, write Susan
Graham, Marc Snir, and Cynthia Patterson, who all participated
on the National Research Council committee that produced the
... ...
[read more]
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