Techno-News Blog Ray Schroeder, editor, OTEL - University of Illinois at Springfield |
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Saturday, June 22, 2002
http://cyberatlas.internet.com/markets/retailing/article/0,,6061_1369641,00.html Trust Is in the Details Robyn Greenspan Web site designers take heed: Internet users are paying attention to the details. A study of 1,649 online users, primarily from the United States and Finland, conducted by Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab and sponsored by Makovsky & Company, revealed that little things, such as misspellings, could be detrimental to a site's credibility. The study analyzed key factors — expertise, trustworthiness, sponsorship, and miscellaneous criteria — to determine the credibility of Web sites, finding some of the highest rated elements to be: quick response to customer service queries; comprehensive and attributable information; author's credentials are listed; search capabilities; site has proven useful in the past; full contact information is listed; privacy policy clearly stated; site has been prominently advertised; ads on site are relevant; and professional design.... http://www.memsnet.org/mems/ About MEMS Technology Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) are tiny machines that integrate "mechanical elements, sensors, actuators, and electronics…through the utilization of microfabrication technology." This site provides a good introduction to MEMS, how they are built, and how they operate. The most descriptive section is The Beginner’s Guide to MEMS Processing, which explains the processes of deposition, lithography, and etching. For each of these, there are illustrations that show what happens at the microscopic level. Other sections tell the history and current direction of research and development, as well as the challenges that face this growing technology. From The NSDL Scout Report for Math, Engineering, and Technology, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2002. http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/ Friday, June 21, 2002
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/18306.html Serious Business of Search Engines Elizabeth Millard, NewsFactor Network June 20, 2002 "There is money being made, although it doesn't seem like it," IDC research vice president Sue Feldman told NewsFactor. "And there is definitely money to be made in the future." In today's lackluster advertising market, search engines seem to be concentrating less on profits and more on what they do best: building ever-better mousetraps that can trounce the engines that have come before. However, to survive in the long run, search engine companies will have to focus on more than the number and breadth of Web pages scanned.... http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june02/shabajee/06shabajee.htmlPrimary Multimedia Objects and 'Educational Metadata' - A Fundamental Dilemma for Developers of Multimedia Archives Paul Shabajee, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK Abstract Large multimedia database systems have great potential for educational use. Their assets can often be used to support educational and research activities in a wide variety of educational contexts, supporting learners and educators from many subject areas. This article focuses on what appears to be a fundamental dilemma for the developers of such systems regarding how to tag or index their assets with metadata so as to support discovery of the assets by these educational users. On the one hand, developers are unlikely to want (or be able) to restrictively specify who their users should be and, in particular, how they should use individual assets in their particular educational contexts. Thus they would not want to tag assets with metadata related to how the object should be used. On the other hand, they must make decisions about what metadata terms to choose to describe their assets. To do this, they must make a very limited choice, from the many thousands of potential terms available from different subject disciplines and different levels. Thus developers are seemingly forced to make choices about who their target users are and how they will want to use the resources. In other words developers may have to do exactly what they do not want to do. This article explores in detail the causes of this dilemma and introduces three complementary approaches to resolving the situation.... Thursday, June 20, 2002
http://www.nwfusion.com/yourtake/2002/0617yourtake.html University IT exec balances net needs of students, faculty - Interview with UIUC's Pete Siegel Network World Home to some of the world's most powerful supercomputers and bandwidth-intensive app-lications, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) was a pioneer in the use of high-speed networks for scientific research. Now UIUC is upgrading its campus network to provide better performance to all of its departments - not just computer science and engineering. Pete Siegel, CIO of UIUC, spoke recently with Network World Senior Editor Carolyn Duffy Marsan about: Planned net upgrades; Emerging net technologies with promise; Major infrastructure challenges; Security; Fusion-exclusive questions .... http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/06/19/020619hnchips.xml New method to make faster, smaller computer chips Reuters Computer microchips could become smaller, faster and cheaper, thanks to scientists in the United States who have developed a speedier method of printing minuscule patterns on silicon chips. The discovery, by Stephen Chou and fellow scientists at Princeton University in New Jersey, could allow electronics manufacturers to increase the density of transistors on silicon chips by 100-fold and streamline production at the same time. Instead of taking 10 or 20 minutes to make a computer chip, the electrical engineers have imprinted features measuring 10 nanometers, or 10 millionths of a millimeter, on a computer chip in a quarter of a millionth of a second.... http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews6-3.html#interview The Internet Archive Brewster Kahle, The Internet Archive Editors' Note The editors interviewed Brewster Kahle by phone on May 15, 2002. Here is an edited version of the interview. Brewster Kahle is the founder and director of the Internet Archive; co-founder of Alexa Internet, an Internet-focused company that concentrates on Web navigation tools and techniques; and inventor and founder of Wide Area Information Servers, Inc. The Internet Archive launched the Wayback Machine, a Web site that provides an interface to the Internet Archive collections, in October 2001.... http://www.archive.org/ Wednesday, June 19, 2002
http://www.nandotimes.com/technology/story/438740p-3511621c.html Microsoft cutting off Sun D. IAN HOPPER, AP Technology Writer Just before closing arguments in its antitrust case, Microsoft delivered a broadside to one of its bitter software rivals, declaring Tuesday it will stop supporting Sun Microsystems' flagship product by 2004. Microsoft cited Sun's opposition in the case as the reason for the decision to remove support for Sun's Java programming language from future versions of Microsoft's Windows operating system.... http://www.nandotimes.com/technology/story/437951p-3506299c.html Miscommunication after flaw found in Apache server software D. IAN HOPPER, AP Technology Writer A security bug was found in software used by millions of Web sites. Private experts alerted users and the FBI's computer security division. The problem is, they didn't tell the maker of the software. Then they issued the wrong prescription for fixing the problem.... http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/06/18/020618hnjavasupport.xml Microsoft to Add Java Support to Win XP... for now Joris Evers MICROSOFT IS MAKING its Java Virtual Machine (JVM) a standard part of Windows XP in an attempt to clear a legal dispute with rival Sun Microsystems, Microsoft said Tuesday. The JVM is software that allows users to run applications written in Java, the programming language created by Sun. Windows XP shipped without Java support, instead offering a download-on-demand feature whereby the JVM was automatically downloaded when Windows needed it, Microsoft said.... Tuesday, June 18, 2002
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/06/17/020617hnapache.xml Experts warn of major hole in Apache Web server Joris Evers A security flaw in the popular Apache Web server could allow a malicious hacker to launch a denial of service attack or even take over a system on which the software is running, the Apache Software Foundation warned in an advisory Monday. The flaw relates to the way the Web server parses uploaded data, and can cause the software to misinterpret the size of incoming chunks of data. It can be exploited by sending a carefully crafted request to the server, said the Foundation, which manages development of the open-source Apache products.... http://www.instantmessagingplanet.com/enterprise/article/0,,10816_1366931,00.html U.S. In-Home IM Usage Hits 41M Bob Woods Nearly 40% of the active U.S.-based Internet-using population at home logged onto one of the public instant-messaging (IM) networks at least once in the month of May, while 31% of U.S. business 'Net surfers used IM in that same time frame, according to a new study from Nielsen//NetRatings. Broken out in numbers of users, more than 41 million consumers used one of the four IM networks -- AOL's AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger -- in May, while nearly 12.6 million office workers used instant messaging, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.... http://www.nandotimes.com/technology/story/436874p-3497631c.html AlltheWeb claims to index more Internet information than Google MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP Business Writer SAN FRANCISCO (June 17, 2002 7:45 a.m. EDT) - Hoping to attract more mass appeal for an online search engine with a cult following, AlltheWeb.com declared Monday that it indexes more Internet information than longtime pacesetter Google. AlltheWeb, owned by Norway's Fast Search & Transfer, says its database spans 2.1 billion Web pages, just ahead of the 2.07 billion scanned by Google at the end of last week. AlltheWeb has been quietly building upon its previous foundation of 800 million pages over the past two months.... http://www.nua.ie/surveys/index.cgi?f=VS&art_id=905358060&rel=true Rich rule the online roost Households which earn more than USD75,000 a year will be the largest online group in the US in 2006. With an estimated 21.8 million households online, the ‘mass affluent’ group will account for a quarter of the total US Internet population in four years time, up from 17.6 million in 2002. However, Jupiter Media Metrix predicts that the fastest growing income segment online over the next four years will be those under USD15,000 a year in household income.... http://news.com.com/2100-1023-934655.html Web usage grows across globe Gwendolyn Mariano, Staff Writer, CNET News.com Internet usage is increasing worldwide, with more people logging on for greater lengths of time, according to a report released Monday by Nielsen/NetRatings. The number of people with Internet access at home grew 16 percent from April 2001 to April 2002, reaching 422.4 million home users in the 21 countries surveyed by the research firm. The number of people actively using the Web from home climbed 18 percent to 241.4 million in the same period, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.... Monday, June 17, 2002
http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i41/41a03101.htm Your E-Mail Message to a Colleague Could Be Tomorrow's Headline - Public colleges find that open-records laws apply to seemingly private communication ANDREA L. FOSTER Mike S. Adams was a little-known professor of criminal justice at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington until administrators read through his e-mail messages last October. Now, he's a cause célèbre among privacy advocates. Despite backing from a variety of such advocates, Mr. Adams and other public-college professors may not be able to stop the public from inspecting much of their e-mail. That's because many states define professors at public institutions as state employees. Under open-records laws, their letters, documents, and often their e-mail messages, too, are -- like those of state officeholders -- open to public scrutiny.... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60194-2002Jun16.html Number of U.S. Telecommuters Rising May Wong, AP Technology Writer MILL VALLEY, Calif. –– With its quaint shops and leafy residential roads, it's easy to mistake Mill Valley for simply a quiet, upscale bedroom community across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. Truth is, there's as much wheeling and dealing in this town as in a big-city skyscraper.From their Mill Valley homes, Joe Caldwell handles the investment portfolios of millionaire clients, Robin Thompson works with large corporations like Wells Fargo or Oracle, promoting Canada as a meeting destination, and Marilyn Jackson's computer consultancy clocks in at three clients a day. The three are part of a growing contingent of Americans whose commutes consist of a walk down the hall or a jaunt to the converted garage.... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55122-2002Jun15.html Mozilla, an Old Browser New Again Rob Pegoraro Why should anybody care that a bunch of programmers, after starting work in 1998, finally shipped an open-source version of a Web browser that most people abandoned years ago? Two reasons should suffice: Mozilla 1.0 blocks pop-up ads, but it doesn't make you give up any of the best features of Internet Explorer. In other words, you don't need to dislike Microsoft to like Mozilla. http://www.mozilla.org http://smallworld.sociology.columbia.edu/ Overview of the small world experiment at Columbia University Can anyone in the world reach anyone else through a chain of only 6 friends? With your help, we intend to find out. We are a team of sociologists at Columbia University interested in what is known as the "Small World Phenomenon." This is the idea that everyone in the world can be reached through a short chain of social acquaintances. This claim has led to the famous phrase "Six Degrees of Separation", but after more than thirty years, nobody knows if it's true.... Sunday, June 16, 2002
http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/f_coyle_1.html XML, Web Services and the Changing Face of Distributed Computing Frank P. Coyle A new kind of network offers a world of possibilities for moving data and building application architectures centered around common Internet protocols. The face of distributed computing is changing. The client server networks that dominated the 1980s and early 1990s are giving way to a new kind of network built around the Web using open protocols and a new data representation language called XML. The implication of this shift is that organizations, instead of focusing on networks and transport, can now shift their attention to data and its role in cementing relationships with customers, partners and suppliers using the global Web already in place.... http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2002/0610/web-cyber-06-11-02.asp Cybersecurity guide delayed Dibya Sarkar The federal government is pushing back plans to unveil a national roadmap for securing cyberspace from this summer to mid-September, President Bush's cybersecurity czar said June 10. Richard Clarke, White House special adviser for cyberspace security, said the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace will not be written by bureaucrats, but by people in such areas as higher education, banking, transportation, oil and gas, and state and local governments. The effort has been under way for several months, with town hall meetings conducted in Portland, Ore., Denver and Chicago. Another is scheduled for next week in Atlanta.... |
