An ongoing effort involving dozens of people and pilot programs with hundreds of employees at Sun Microsystems could be the next model for large high-tech companies worldwide in molding the workplace to information-age realities, reports the San Jose Mercury News. Whereas the setup of traditional high-tech companies was established in the industrial era, when people […]
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NASA, Carnegie Mellon, and a dozen leading technology firms have formed the High Dependability Computing Consortium with the goal of creating crash-free software. The group signed a three-year agreement to attack the problem of unstable systems by building tools “of such a magnitude that no single company could afford to build them alone,” explains James […]
The U.S. Copyright Office endorsed a new federal law, a provision of the 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act, that makes it illegal to break the technological safeguards for books, movies, and music distributed in digital form. The ruling was a defeat for several constituencies—including universities, libraries, and computer programmers—that had argued the law should preserve […]
A new study claims exposure in early education to computers can harm children’s ability to reason, imagine, and play, and calls for legislators to refocus early education toward a program that supports strong bonds with adults, time for spontaneous play, a curriculum rich in the arts, and hands-on interaction. The Alliance for Childhood, Washington, DC, […]
Most federal Web sites do not meet the commercial standards for Internet privacy set by the Federal Trade Commission, including the FTC’s own site, a study by the General Accounting Office has found. The GAO measured the sites against four federal standards for Internet privacy: that they disclose their information practices before personal data is […]
Computer science departments at U.S. colleges and universities are facing a depleted teaching staff as more professors test the entrepreneurial waters, reports the New York Times. While the hot economy has created a fair amount of turnover, observers say the current brain drain has not reached a crisis point. Many institutions are feeling the pinch […]
An increasing number of companies are creating a new position—”chief privacy officer”—to prevent legal or marketing disasters and help gain the trust of online customers, reports the San Jose Mercury News. Government scrutiny is a major factor in companies creating the post—the Federal Trade Commission recently filed a lawsuit to block the bankrupt Toysmart.com from […]
A human-image animation system that manipulates stored images of a person’s facial movements in response to phonemes (the smallest units of speech) and can then replicate voice and image in a realistic video duplicate has been developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology. The technology, called Digital Personnel, is voice-driven […]
The U.S. agriculture industry has been one of the slowest to embrace the Internet age, with farmers, who tend to be fiercely loyal to local merchants and banks, wary of e-commerce, reports BusinessWeek. But such a link is as inevitable as spring planting: of 2.1 million farmers in the U.S., the 380,000 largest ones produce […]
The tradition-bound institution may be late to the e-vironment, but many legal scholars are still stunned to learn the highest court in the U.S. opened its own Web site in mid-April (www.supremecourstus.gov). Many of the court’s written decisions will be posted online, as well as upcoming cases, opinions, orders, and arguments. The site makes it […]
Engineers in Japan are developing trains that can “fly,” reports New Scientist. Using the “wing-in-ground” (WIG) effect, in which a high-pressure cushion of air forms beneath flying objects as they approach the ground, they believe they can create trains that use only a quarter of the power required for magnetically levitated (maglev) trains. The WIG […]
The ACM Fellows Program was established by Council in 1993 to recognize and honor outstanding ACM members for their achievements in computer science and information technology and for their significant contributions to the mission of the ACM. The ACM Fellows serve as distinguished colleagues to whom the ACM and its members look for guidance and […]
Bank mergers dominated 1998; 1999 was the year of the telecommunications merger. And this could be the year of Internet mergers. Experts expect the record-setting $166 billion merger of AOL and Time Warner may be the beginning of a wave of Net mergers and acquisitions. Analyst Jim Breyer of Accel Partners, Palo Alto, says the […]
A growing circle of space and tourism industry veterans say leisure trips to the cosmos are just a few years away. More than a dozen startup companies, encouraged by the traveling public’s desire for new experiences and the technology needed to make space travel possible, are working to build rockets safe enough to carry paying […]
Professionals looking for IT-related jobs in the U.S. can expect starting salaries this year to increase an average of 6.8% over their 1999 levels, according to RHI Consulting, Menlo Park, Calif. Those specializing in systems integration will see the sharpest rise in base compensation, with starting salaries projected to increase more than 17% over 1999. […]
Engineers and network experts are extending the Internet into deep space, adapting Net architecture to space-based communications with the lofty goal of establishing an interplanetary Internet backbone, reports MSNBC. NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Next Generation Internet Project are funding the Interplanetary Net (IPN). With the growth of wireless networking and the […]
A proposal to improve the way information flows across the Internet has privacy advocates worried the design could be used to trace a person’s identity. The proposal, an addressing system called IPv6, was created by the Internet Engineering Task Force, an international standards body, and would include a unique serial number for each computer’s network […]
Software Engineering Code of Ethics Is Approved
The exhaustive efforts of the ACM and IEEE–CS has resulted in the adoption of a code of professional practices for software engineers to consider—and use.
An ongoing experiment that may change the nature of air traffic control is being studied by the Federal Aviation Administration. The $25 million experiment, funded in partnership by government and the airlines, uses a radical new approach to the way pilots relay information to ground controllers: incorporating GPS with a technology that identifies the precise […]
The National Conference of Commissions on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL) in July voted to promulgate the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA), formerly the Article 2B amendment of the Uniform Commercial Code. Under much scrutiny, and in the works for over 10 years, UCITA will govern all contracts in the development, sale, licensing, maintenance, and […]
Just as computers around the world are coping with the Y2K bug, the sun will enter the most violent and disruptive phase of its 11-year cycle, say astronomers, causing disruptions in satellite transmissions and triggering blackouts. According to reports at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, researchers are forecasting the sun’s cycle to peak […]
The design of a device that could quickly unscramble computer-generated code that until now has been considered secure was presented in Prague by one of the world’s foremost cryptographers, Adi Shamir, coinventor of R.S.A., the international standard for secure transmission. Shamir’s idea combines existing technology into a special, reasonably priced computer that would make factoring […]
At major U.S. corporations last year, there was a 43% chance—up sharply from 35% in 1997—employers monitored workers’ email files, voice mail, computer files, phone calls or other work-related activities, according to the American Management Association (AMA). Polling 1,054 human resource managers, the New-York-based AMA said the sample mirrored its corporate membership of 10,000 organizations […]
Changes in ACM’s Revised Copyright Policy
A helpful introduction to the new additions and alterations to this pioneering policy, particularly since the advent of digital libraries.
Shape the Future of Computing
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