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ACM TechNews - Wednesday, October 29, 2003



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ACM TechNews
Volume 5, Number 564
Date: October 29, 2003

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Top Stories for Wednesday, October 29, 2003:
http://www.acm.org/technews/current/homepage.html

"Stored Data Doubles in Three Years"
"Group Lobbies for Domain Buyers' Privacy"
"Xerox Claims Chip Innovation"
"E-Vote Protest Gains Momentum"
"Scottish Universities Plan Speckled Computing Net"
"UB Researchers Hope to Find the Key to Tiny Electronics"
"Linux and the Consumer Electronics Industry"
"Artificial Intelligence Pioneer Ponders Differences Between
 Computers and Humans"
"Full-Featured PC Fits in Pocket"
"Queries Guide Web Crawlers"
"As Silicon Valley Reboots, the Geeks Take Charge"
"Hollywood to the Computer Industry: We Don't Need No Stinking
 Napsters!"
"The Next Wave"
"Patchy Years Ahead for Software Users"
"The Decentralization Imperative"
"'Net Security Gets Root-Level Boost"
"The Future of Software Bugs"
"No Need to Shut Down, Just Pull the Plug..."
"Server Consolidation Using Performance Modeling"

******************* News Stories ***********************

"Stored Data Doubles in Three Years"
A study headed by professors Peter Lyman and Hal Varian of the
School of Information Management and Systems at the University of
California at Berkeley finds that the amount of new stored
information has increased 100 percent in the past three years to ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1029w.html#item1

"Group Lobbies for Domain Buyers' Privacy"
The ACM joined a coalition of groups from around the world,
including the American Library Association, the Australian Council
for Civil Liberties, Electronic Frontier Finland, the U.K. Foundation
for Information Policy Research, in drafting a letter to ICANN ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1029w.html#item2

"Xerox Claims Chip Innovation"
Xerox researchers have announced a simple, inexpensive method to
print out microchips, a breakthrough that could allow the company
to enter the lucrative electronic display market and clear the
way for flexible screens and perhaps ubiquitous electronics.  At ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1029w.html#item3

"E-Vote Protest Gains Momentum"
When Diebold Election Systems demanded that a student at
Swarthmore College take down controversial memos posted
online on the grounds that they violated the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act, fellow students launched a campaign of civil  ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1029w.html#item4

"Scottish Universities Plan Speckled Computing Net"
Developing a distributed asynchronous network of self-powered
nodes about a cubic millimeter in size is the goal of five
Scottish universities that received a $2.1 million grant from the
Scottish Higher Education Funding Council on Oct. 1 to get the ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1029w.html#item5

"UB Researchers Hope to Find the Key to Tiny Electronics"
University of Buffalo Electronics Packaging Lab researchers are
doing critical work in the field of electronics, figuring out how
to overcome the packaging bottleneck that prevents computer chips
from becoming even more useful and powerful.  Although chips ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1029w.html#item6

"Linux and the Consumer Electronics Industry"
The CE Linux Forum (CELF), which currently consists of more than
75 companies, supports products for the consumer electronics
industry based on the Linux open-source operating system.  The
forum is designed to be a place where member companies such as ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1029w.html#item7

"Artificial Intelligence Pioneer Ponders Differences Between
 Computers and Humans"
Nils Nilsson, Kumagai Professor of Engineering, Emeritus, of
Stanford University, maintains that fundamental distinctions will
always exist between human beings and computers, but predicts
that the divide between their intellectual and even creative ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1029w.html#item8

"Full-Featured PC Fits in Pocket"
Antelope Technologies plans to debut a pocket-sized device that
functions as both a fully-featured PC and a handheld computer in
early November.  The core unit, which Antelope touts as the first
modular computer in the world, can slide into a docking station ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1029w.html#item9

"Queries Guide Web Crawlers"
Contraco Consulting and Software, T-Online International, and
Germany's Siegen University have collaborated on an algorithm
that improves Internet search results by taking into account the
specific objects of people's searches.  Contraco partner Andreas ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1029w.html#item10

"As Silicon Valley Reboots, the Geeks Take Charge"
A number of small companies are thriving in Silicon Valley,
staffed with experienced hardware and software engineers that
understand business plans are not as valuable as good technology.
Tellme Networks' business is finally taking off after four years ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1029w.html#item11

"Hollywood to the Computer Industry: We Don't Need No Stinking
 Napsters!"
Arguing that unchecked digital piracy will signal the end of free
TV, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) wants the
government to require digital TV broadcasts to include broadcast
flag encryption, thus requiring hardware makers to design ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1029w.html#item12

"The Next Wave"
A desktop supercomputer is what aficionados claim the next stage
of the Internet's evolution, the "grid," will be like, when vast
computing resources will be available to anyone with a Web
connection.  "The notion here is that a grid of computers can ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1029w.html#item13

"Patchy Years Ahead for Software Users"
Network administrators are finding most of their time taken up
with deploying software patches to fix network vulnerabilities or
upgrade features, and there appear to be few signs of relief on
the horizon, despite announcements from patch vendors that they ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1029w.html#item14

"The Decentralization Imperative"
MIT Sloan School of Management professor of information systems
Thomas Malone says cheaper communications are transforming
business organization.  He says people overestimated how quickly
technology would change business in the late 1990s and that the ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1029w.html#item15

"'Net Security Gets Root-Level Boost"
The domain name system (DNS) is stronger than ever, one year
since the massive distributed denial-of-service attack that
clogged traffic flowing between several root servers and the
Internet.  Operators of the 13 root servers have been deploying ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1029w.html#item16

"The Future of Software Bugs"
The continuing threat of software bugs stems from a variety of
factors, including software vendors and in-house development
teams that rush testing and sacrifice quality so they can rapidly
move products to market; academic computer science programs that ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1029w.html#item17

"No Need to Shut Down, Just Pull the Plug..."
Stanford University's Armando Fox believes that building
computers to crash would make them much more reliable and robust
tools.  Fox, who heads the university's software infrastructure
group, is working to design a system that allows people to shut ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1029w.html#item18

"Server Consolidation Using Performance Modeling"
The most successful server consolidation projects are those in
which performance is predicted before any changes are made, and
this can be done through performance modeling.  Performance
modeling yields a deeply abstracted set of performance metrics to ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1029w.html#item19

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