Hacking: Myth or menace,Part I

Is hacking about the disposition of the perpetrator or the situation of the insecure computer network. Improving the security of the perceived target may reduce the opportunity for the hacker, but can it ever eradicate the problem? Criminologists increasingly insist that the solution must lie in understanding the perspective of the hacker and address the problem at the political, social and cultural levels. The following two part study aims to offer insights about the actual threat before embarking on more legislation, policing or prohibitively expensive and probably, inadequate target hardening.     

Artificial intelligence: hype or reality?

Artificial intelligence is not just hype, as many working applications use AI techniques. However, we have yet to develop a system that spans the full spectrum of intelligent behavior. For example, building a system that an make sensible decisions about unfamiliar situations in everyday, nonspecialist domains remains difficult. Nevertheless, it seems likely that applications like distributed blackboards will continue apace in specialist domains. This quiet revolution can make a significant contribution to our lives. Meanwhile, we can also expect progress toward the popular idea of AI manifested in human-like robots as we progress in simulating vision, language, common sense, and adaptability behaviors.     

Virtual reality: Panacea or pandora's box?

Developments in hardware and software for Virtual Reality systems are making rapid advances and there is a feeling that the technology will become ubiquitous. Alongside the ‘hype’, there is an undercurrent of unease regarding potentially harmful effects of VR systems to the health of individual users and to society. This paper directly expresses some of these concerns in the hope that they will be taken seriously by VR developers.     

Real-time collaboration in design engineering: an expensive fantasy or affordable reality?

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the main issues that are both driving and impeding the implementation and use of CSCW systems within the automotive industry. The paper begins by describing the current competitive pressures within the European Automotive industry and then moves on to highlight the main requirements for real-time collaborative systems, as expressed by various organizations along the automotive supply chain. Finally, the paper presents the results of a recent project in this area and some conclusions on the viability of CSCW technology in the current technical and commercial climate.     

Cobol: perception and reality

The authors list the perceptions they have uncovered and counter them with the reality of Cobol. Some of the perceptions are: Cobol is a mainframe language-it has been available on PCs since their inception; Cobol stopped evolving in the 1970s, stopped growing in popularity in the 1980s, and stopped being used to develop client-server and Web-based applications in the 1990s; and Cobol is not an object-oriented language, when, in fact, it has objects galore     

Three views of virtual reality: nonimmersive virtual reality

Nonimmersive virtual reality (VR), which places the user in a 3D environment that can be directly manipulated with a conventional graphics workstation using a monitor, a keyboard; and a mouse, is discussed. The scene is displayed with the same 3D depth cues used in immersive VR: perspective view, hidden-surface elimination, color, texture, lighting, shading and shadows. As in immersive VR, animation and simulation are interactively controlled in response to the user's direct manipulation. Much of the technology used to support immersive and nonimmersive VR is the same. They use the same 3D modeling and rendering and many of the same interaction techniques. The advantages and applications of nonimmersive VR systems are discussed. Immersive and nonimmersive VR systems are compared and hybrid possibilities are reviewed     

Distributed CAD/CAM: Myth and Reality

The technologies needed to implement distributed design and computer-integrated manufacturing already exist. Vendors must now develop the products required by this new level of automation.     

Augmented reality and ubiquitous computing: the hidden potentialities of augmented reality

The aim of this paper was to highlight the augmented reality’s potentialities, depicting its main characteristics and focusing attention on what its goal should be in order to have a new technology completely different from those that already exist. From a technological point of view, augmented reality is still in its infancy and so even the general idea of what a good augmented reality should be is still uncertain. Commonly, augmented reality is identified as opposed to the virtual reality because augmented reality merges digital information with the real environment. However, there is another technology, with a different history, which has this same basic goal: ubiquitous computing. The absence of a clear distinction between ubiquitous computing and augmented reality makes it difficult to identify what these two technologies should pursue. I will analyse the main aspects of ubiquitous computing and augmented reality from a phenomenological point of view in order to highlight the main differences and to shed light on the real potentialities of augmented reality, focusing attention on what its goal should be.     

Process definition: theory and reality

The approach taken by General Electric Aerospace to define the process it uses to develop and maintain software is outlined. It is shown that two major issues in process definition are deciding what information to include and what form of graphical representation to use. The lessons learned in developing and implementing this approach are discussed     

Digital evidence: dream and reality

Digital evidence is inherently weak. New evidence-gathering technologies-digital black boxes-must be developed and deployed to support investigations of irreproducible events such as digitally signing a document or electronically casting a ballot.     

Election security: Perception and reality

Voters' trust in elections comes from a combination of the mechanisms and procedures we use to record and tally votes, and from confidence in election officials' competence and honesty. Electronic voting systems pose considerable risks to both the perception and reality of trustworthy elections.     

A method to measure the uniformity of the virtual image distance in an augmented reality or virtual reality device

The virtual image distance in an augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) device is an important factor in determining its performance. In this paper, a method for measuring the virtual image distance and its uniformity is proposed. The setup for measurement consists of a two-dimensional spatial sensor array on the translational stage and a pinhole array plate placed in front of the AR or VR device. As the distance between the pinhole plate and the two-dimensional spatial sensor array were changed, the positions of the rays through each pinhole were measured by a two-dimensional spatial sensor array. The ray trajectories through each pinhole were obtained by fitting these positions to straight lines. The relative distances between these ray trajectories were calculated with respect to the distance from the pinhole plate. This method is effective for measuring the uniformity, such as the azimuthal dependence of the virtual image distance or the dependence of the virtual image distance on the distance from the optical axis of the VR lens.     

Information as reality in inanimate nature or attributive concept of information 2.0: Problems and prospects of development

K.K. Kolin’s attributive concept of the four worlds of reality is analyzed, which proves the existence of information in the physical world of inanimate nature in the context of the world of the first kind of ideal reality. The falseness of this assumption is shown.     

Management by Myth

Like the ancient Greeks who believed in many myths, many organizations believe their data base technologies possess such godlike capabilities as completely eliminating data redundancy and improving the productivity of programmers. This column reveals the truths behind these and other myths and discusses why it is the people, not simply the technology, that contribute to a successful data base environment.     

Management by Myth

Abstract

Like the ancient Greeks who believed in many myths, many organizations believe their data base technologies possess such godlike capabilities as completely eliminating data redundancy and improving the productivity of programmers. This column reveals the truths behind these and other myths and discusses why it is the people, not simply the technology, that contribute to a successful data base environment.     

Deep view: high-resolution reality

We have designed the Deep View visualization system, which consists of a Linux cluster that performs computations to produce 3D geometry, renders the geometry to produce 2D pixels, and then transfers the pixels to be displayed on the T221 display (or video wall). We accelerate the pixel transfer operations using IBM's Scalable Graphics Engine (SGE). We drive high-resolution displays at interactive frame rates using our cluster and the SGE. The SGE is a network-attached frame buffer capable of double buffering up to 16 million pixels. It routes incoming pixels from multiple sources to the appropriate locations in its frame buffer and then transfers the composited result to the T221 display using digital video interface (DVI) output. In total, the SGE can accept up to 16 input links and can drive as many as eight synchronized DVI outputs. In addition, it can time interleave image pairs from its frame buffer to effect time-division stereo. In the current Deep View configuration, the rendered pixels are sent by each node in the cluster to the SGE over a Gigabit Ethernet link, and we use four of the synchronized DVI outputs to drive the T221 at full resolution     

Schools in contact; Electronic mail— myth or reality?

A variety of services, including Dialcom, BTGold, Prestel Mailbox, JANET and TTNS offering one-to-one to many communication services between educational and other institutions, have been in the market place for a considerable time, in some cases over 10 years. Schools have been slow to exploit the range of facilities available. A number of factors have inhibited growth, not least those of cost. Hertfordshire Local Education Authority has been in the forefront of pioneering on-line services between its schools and colleges and is now fully committed to both an integrated electronic mail service and a wide provision on on-line search facilities such as NERIS and PROFILE. The developments have, in the main, been curriculum led. Monitoring and assessing the quality of the communication between pupils, class groups and teachers, can prove difficult as the medium offers mainly a transient environment. This barrier to researching the effect that electronic mail has on human communication has been overcome to some extent by using the system itself to record a number of features concerning messages, e.g. length, time sent etc. In addition, the contents and styles of messaging are being observed by random sampling at a number of stations in educational institutions. In addition to reporting on this routine activity, the author will give account of a number of specific projects currently active including collaborative creative writing, Chatline for children with special needs and school twinning with other European countries, the Commonwealth and the U.S.A.     

Developing speech input for virtual reality applications: A reality based interaction approach

An input device should be natural and convenient for a user to transmit information to a computer, and should be designed from an understanding of the task to be performed and the interrelationship between the task and the device from the perspective of the user. In order to investigate the potential of speech input as a reality based interaction device, this paper presents the findings of a study that investigated speech input in a VR application. Two independent user trials were combined within the same experimental design to evaluate the commands that users employed when they used free speech in which they were not restricted to a specific vocabulary. The study also investigated when participants were told they were either talking to a machine (e.g. a speech recognition system) or instructing another person to complete a VR based task. Previous research has illustrated that when users are limited to a specific vocabulary, this can alter the interaction style employed. The findings from this research illustrate that the interaction style users employ are very different when they are told they are talking to a machine or another person. Using this knowledge, recommendations can be drawn for the development of speech input vocabularies for future VR applications.