Describing the Elephant: The
Different Faces of IT as Service
FSF Looking to Raise
$500,000 for GPL 3 Evangelizing
Free Software Foundation (FSF) executive director Peter
Brown said yesterday that his organization has received its
first funding to raise awareness of and stimulate interest in
the next version of the General Public License, GPL Version 3.
Brown noted in an interview that FSF ...
[read more]
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Report Attacks Europe's
Poor Record in Information Technology
A new report from Indepen Consultants in Britain attributes
the last 10 years' economic erosion in Europe to policies that
constrain the productive employment of information and
communications technology. The report finds that ICT
contributed nearly three times as much to annual growth in
U.S. ...
[read more]
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'Six Degrees of Separation'
Theory Explained in New Algorithm by UMass Amherst
Researchers
University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers have
developed an algorithm that helps explain the sociological
underpinnings of the "six degrees of separation" theory, and
which could be applied to ad-hoc wireless networks,
peer-to-peer file sharing networks, the World Wide Web, and
other ...
[read more]
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Pushing Girls Toward
Science
A report from the National Science Foundation estimates
that in 2001, 35% of the students enrolled in undergraduate
physics, computer science, and math classes and 16% of those
enrolled in undergraduate engineering classes were female.
Meanwhile, women comprised less than 10% ...
[read more]
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Bug Hunters, Software Firms
in Uneasy Alliance
The "responsible disclosure" of security flaws can be a
contentious issue between software firms and security
researchers. Researchers who do not comply with Microsoft's
disclosure guidelines and publicly expose a bug in detail
before it is fixed can get into trouble, but independent
security ...
[read more]
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Tiny Sensors Run Forever
(Almost)
Several technologies for transmitting information
wirelessly over unlicensed radio spectrum are targeting
consumers, but supporters of the ZigBee specification say the
technology is better than rivals such as radio frequency
identification (RFID) and Wi-Fi in certain instances thanks to
...
[read more]
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Unions Step Up Organizing
of IT Workers, Outsourcing Fight
The growing trend of offshoring and a generally gloomy
perception of the IT labor market has unions increasingly
aiming their organizing efforts at technology professionals. A
union-supported survey identified a "growing pessimism" in the
IT landscape, citing the export of jobs overseas and the ...
[read more]
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Man Against
Machine
University of Texas at Austin researchers Uli Grasemann and
Risto Miikkulainen applied a genetic algorithm to the
development of a program that can digitally enhance images of
fingerprints better than the FBI's WSQ fingerprint image
compression program, according to the National Science ...
[read more]
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PCs Could Make In-Dash
Splash
Touch-screen computers are expected to be incorporated into
next-generation cars as PC enthusiasts penetrate the market.
Damien Stolarz, author of Car PC Hacks," says interest in car
PCs is growing thanks to the affordability of computers. He
adds that "the market is educated enough" ...
[read more]
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Sending Out an SOS: HPCC
Rescue Coming
The annual SOS Forum is designed to encourage multinational
collaboration on investigations into new avenues of
high-performance cluster computing (HPCC). The most recent SOS
Forum focused on how supercomputers will nurture future
scientific breakthroughs, with particular emphasis on the ...
[read more]
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Chaos to Rule Internet in
2010
Swinburne University of Technology professor Trevor Barr
presented the Smart Internet 2010 report on Sept. 1, which
predicted that in five years the Internet will be thrown into
anarchy by the unchecked proliferation of malware, spam, and
fraudulent email. The report, which came out of ...
[read more]
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A World of IT
Opportunities
After big declines in the technology industry early in the
decade, the demand for IT professionals is on the rise again.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a lower rate of
unemployment among IT workers than the rate for the general
economy, while a Robert Half report has found that 14% ...
[read more]
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Tech 'Computer Boot Camp'
May Be First of Its Kind
The New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology is
launching a novel program for its freshmen to teach them how
to build a PC from scratch. The program is modeled after a
graduate course astrophysics professor David Westpfahl has
been teaching since 1997, and the components for constructing
...
[read more]
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Fiber-Optic Research Net
Gains Steam
National Lambdarail (NLR) is a nationwide fiber-optic
network oriented toward advanced network technology research,
one that offers more dedicated capacity than other networks;
this is accomplished through the use of dense wavelength
division multiplexing that delivers as many as 40 simultaneous
...
[read more]
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United States Facing Cyber
Security Crisis, Experts Tell Capitol Hill
Briefing
Experts such as MIT professor F. Thomson Leighton and
Purdue University professor Eugene Spafford painted a bleak
picture of U.S. cybersecurity at the July 26 Forum on
Cybersecurity on Capitol Hill. Leighton, a senior member of
the recently disbanded President's Information Technology ...
[read more]
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On the Frontier of
Search
The search engines of the future will be modeled more on
sophisticated patterns of human thought than impersonal
statistics and algorithms; smarter, more customized searches
will produce results based on an individual's preferences and
interests, rendering obsolete today's methods ...
[read more]
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Not the Internet You
Know
To address the growing need for fast networks capable of
transmitting vast amounts of information in the scientific
community, networking researchers are working to create a
faster offshoot of the existing Internet2 limited to academic
applications. The project, Hybrid Optical and Packet ...
[read more]
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GIS
Unshackled
The emergence of open source GIS tools and public Web
Mapping Service (WMS)/Web Feature Service (WFS) data resources
will provide a strong foundation upon which flexible,
specialized Web interfaces to GIS functionality can be built.
Open source database projects particularly ...
[read more]
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Describing the Elephant:
The Different Faces of IT as Service
The enterprise IT environment's transition to distributed,
low-cost, and frequently heterogeneous collections of servers
has fragmented the architecture into segregated silos, and
reintegration must take place so that the new environment can
support the advantages of vertical decoupling ...
[read more]
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