Dr. Dobb's Journal January 1998
The next time you're sitting on the freeway, surrounded by wild-eyed commuters who see an upside to road rage, rest assured that researchers at Los Alamos National Labs are doing what they can to get you home safely. Using mathematics developed to understand water condensation in clouds, scientists are studying traffic patterns to find out where "mystery clogs" (aka "critical density") and other traffic jams come from. Simulations are based on cellular-automata models, where jamming cars are represented as condensing clouds.
Traffic jams have become more than an irritation in heavy-traffic areas. According to some studies, traffic congestion is costing San Francisco Bay Area businesses $3.5 billion annually in lost productivity and wasted resources. Santa Clara County (California), alone, loses 15,000 work hours a day due to heavy traffic.
-- Jonathan Erickson
Several vendors of Intel-based UNIX systems met in August at the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) headquarters to begin standardizing "86Open." The standard will allow a single binary to run on any compliant system. The meeting had representatives from Sunsoft (Solaris x86), SCO (OpenServer and UnixWare), FreeBSD, BSDI, NetBSD, and Linux. More information is available from http://www.telly.org/86open/.
Intel-based UNIX systems are already making inroads against RISC-based UNIX. This is largely because PC hardware is inexpensive. But software vendors have been slower to sell to this market; price-sensitive buyers don't buy a lot of traditional big-ticket UNIX software. If 86Open succeeds in its goal of binary compatibility, it will merge these previously fragmented markets, making it easier to sell the software, which may, in turn, make it easier for corporations to adopt these systems.
-- Tim Kientzle
If anyone benefits from the Justice Department's recent unfair business practices allegations against Microsoft, it may be Synet, an Illinois ISP which filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy last spring. Synet's problems began in 1994 when it launched a software package called "Internet Explorer," then applied for state and federal trademarks on the name in 1995. Microsoft subsequently released its "Internet Explorer" browser software in August 1995. When Microsoft refused to change the name of its software -- contending that "Internet Explorer" is too generic to deserve trademarking (unlike "Windows") -- Synet filed suit in 1996. According to Michael Sawyier, an attorney recently appointed by the court to represent Synet, the Justice Department's action may provide some "positive side effects" in the company's ongoing trademark-infringement suit against Microsoft. Sawyier expects the case to go to court within the next year.
-- Jonathan Erickson
Ever since McCulloch and Pitts wrote their seminal paper on perceptrons in the early 1940s, scientists have been studying vision computationally. Although quite a bit is known, there are relatively few commercial applications of machine vision.
Mark Nitzberg wants to change that. Nitzberg is president of BlindSight, a company exploring commercial applications of machine vision. Cofounded by former Harvard professor Alan Yuille, a well-known authority on machine vision, BlindSight's first project is building machines that assist the blind. Among other things, BlindSight is developing a hand-held device that recognizes and reads street signs. Some of these applications have potential beyond aiding the visually impaired. Nitzberg said, "Someone told me that there are more people in this world who can't read than those who can't see."
For more information, see http://www .blindsight.net/ or e-mail Nitzberg at nitzberg@blindsight.net.
-- Eugene Eric Kim
Founded in 1984 as a nonprofit user group to promote the Macintosh, the Berkeley (California) Macintosh User Group (BMUG) has hit on hard times and may be in danger of closing its doors. Under the weight of a $150,000 debt, the largest self-help computer group in the U.S. recently had to pass the hat to cover the final paychecks for the ten paid staff members. Members hope to keep BMUG alive, albeit on a smaller scale.
-- Jonathan Erickson
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has initiated an online campaign to encourage Internet users to demand up-front information regarding web-site visitor information collection and usage. EFF is asking users to e-mail webmasters of sites that do not post their collection and usage practices or privacy policies. A sample letter of complaint is available at http://www.eff.org/.
The campaign is part of the the TRUSTe program, launched by EFF (in conjunction with CommerceNet) last summer for the sole purpose of ensuring that Internet users retain control over what happens to their personal information online. More information is available at http://www.truste.org/.
-- Deirdre Blake
Before you start marketing your answer to the Year 2000 problem, be aware that your Year 1998 problem will likely be treading on someone else's trademark. More than 1500 U.S. trademarks have been granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for "Year 2000"-related products, with thousands more pending.
-- Jonathan Erickson
To celebrate the 50th birthday of its "Baby," the prototype to the Manchester Mark I, the University of Manchester is sponsoring a programming contest. Tom Kilburn, who built Baby and wrote its first program, is chairing the panel of judges. The winning entry will be run on a replica of Baby.
Baby used a CRT memory that stored 32 32-bit words, had 7 instructions, and could execute about 700 instructions per second. Its first program -- determining the largest factor of 218 -- was 17 instructions long and took 52 minutes to run.
The deadline for entering is March 31, 1998. More information is available at http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/prog98/.
-- Eugene Eric Kim
According to a report from Market Data Retrieval, access to the Internet for U.S. schools more than doubled over the last year. The report, entitled "Technology in Education 1997," claims that, in 1996, only 32 percent of the schools had Internet access. In 1997, that number climbed to 69.5 percent. Vermont boasts the highest numbers, with 92 percent of its schools having access. Mississippi came in with the lowest numbers, with access in only 44 percent of its schools.
-- Jonathan Erickson