Paying for the Internet in the new millennium

The more a technology matures and gains popularity, the less one has to understand in order to use it. Similarly, the less a user has to understand, the greater the number of users who follow, leading to more imaginative uses of that technology. Predicting the Internet's future by the more-of-the-same approach (starting with Moore's law for both computing and communication) leads to obvious generic predictions (typically using terms like “the new millennium”). The really interesting innovations result from paradigm changes that are difficult to predict. However, one thing is guaranteed: the fundamentals never change, including the laws of physics and those of human nature. There are two important fundamental laws of large systems: someone must be in charge and plan it; and someone must pay for it. The future character of the Internet will be determined by those who will pay for it. However, the cost of the Internet is not just that of moving and viewing the bits. It includes the cost of providing the content, not just the distribution, because the real value of the Internet is the content it makes accessible. To sum it up: there is a crucial fork in the road for the character of the Internet. One path leads to an Internet whose content is primarily paid by commercial interests (like commercial television). The other path leads to an Internet whose content is primarily paid by its users (like public television). These are very different models with fundamentally opposing implications for the future character of the Internet     

Software in the new millennium: a virtual roundtable

What will software look like in the future? To answer this question, we conducted a survey of our editorial and industrial advisory boards, as well as a few outsiders. We constructed a set of 13 questions that we thought reflected the original query. We then circulated these questions to our boards, with a request to respond to the questions, or be extend them with additional are questions as appropriate. The answers were far ranging and sometimes surprising.     

Computer art in the new millennium

The concept of art in the twentieth century differs drastically from that of earlier periods. What began as picture storytelling in caves has evolved into elaborate conceptual art experiences. Computer technologies and graphic techniques have made this development possible. Artmaking with technology will continue to expand our ability to experience ideas. The author considers how the art-historical contributions from computer art to a broader aesthetic experience will include algorithmic and heuristic processes, interaction, and telemetric art     

Scene graphs in the new millennium

Hardware 3D graphics accelerators will be ubiquitous in the new millennium. The great majority of 3D graphics programs will, almost exclusively, use scene graphs. Rarely will graphics programs use immediate mode-if at all-and then only for very special effects, and scene graphs will grow to support new modalities such as sound and haptics. Outrageous? Probably. Predicting the future is never easy. By looking at where we are today and analyzing technology trends, these predictions may seem even more outrageous, outrageously mundane. The author considers how graphics technologies, hardware and software, are evolving at exponential rates     

Design & Test in the new decade: Continuity and new directions

This issue of D&T includes five special-issue theme articles on the design of secure ICs and verifying the physical trustworthiness of ICs and systems. These timely articles address hardware security and trust issues related to threats such as malicious insertion of Trojans, intellectual property (IP) and IC privacy, and attacks designed to extract encryption keys. These security issues are especially relevant today due to the emergence of a globalized and horizontal semiconductor industry. A sixth, nontheme article addresses a special-purpose operating system, VPOS, that can be used for SLF verification on FPGA prototypes.     

Viruses & spam fuel new laws

There is a flurry of other cybersecurity bills being introduced in Congress, some in response to the recent SoBig.F virus and Blaster worm and others resulting from the growing spam problem.This is a short news story only. Visit www.compseconline.com for the latest computer security industry news.     

Bracing for the millennium

In less than 12 months, New Year's Day will put the Y2K-compliance efforts of organizations large and small to the ultimate test on an international scale. As that date nears, awareness of the Y2K Problem's potential for disrupting travel, basic services, and even entire economies has begun spreading to the general public. News programs feature regular reports from self-proclaimed millennium bug experts, consultants eager for publicity utter dire warnings of a computer-generated apocalypse, and stand-up comics even work Y2K into their routines. As the year 2000 nears, we seek one high-profile technology consultant's unique perspective on the consequences, compliance efforts, legends, and hype that surround the Y2K Problem     

Stroke++: A new Chinese input method for touch screen mobile phones

Over the past few decades, users have been feeling clumsy inputting Chinese on mobile devices, partly because the layout of the keyboard/keypad is originally designed for inputting Latin alphabets. To improve this user experience, we propose Stroke++, a novel Chinese input method for touch screen mobile devices. More specifically, Stroke++ provides efficient keypad layout, a friendly user interface and a intelligent character/phrase candidate set generation algorithms. Stroke++ splits a Chinese character into multiple radicals. By leveraging hieroglyphic properties of Chinese characters, our method requires users to only input a subset of the radicals to identify the target character, making it much faster and easier to input Chinese on mobile phones. Our user study results show that Stroke++ outperforms most major Chinese input methods on mobile devices, including Stroke, Pinyin and Hand Writing Recognition (HWR), in terms of the input efficiency and usability. Moreover, we also demonstrate that Stroke++ offers a low entry barrier for Chinese-input novices.     

Cobol for the next millennium

Cobol 2002, the new Cobol standard, is expected to be finalized in approximately 18 months. Cobol 2002 builds on Cobol's first-class data handling capabilities and introduces object oriented features, environmental improvements, and many other modern constructs to the language. The improvements position Cobol as both a business and general-purpose programming language, capable of handling a wide variety of programming tasks