The West Coast trounced the East Coast for the seventh time in ten tries at The Computer Museum's Tenth Annual Computer Bowl, a trivia contest held in Boston (West Coast fans gathered in Silicon Valley at Moffett Field's Hangar One to participate via video simulcast) that pits teams of five industry luminaries against each other. The West Coast, garbed in cowboy hats and led by Netscape cofounder Marc Andreesen, dominated the event, beating the frilly-shirt-wearing East Coast, 230-70. John Ratzenberger (aka Cliff Clavin, mailman and trivia buff from the TV show Cheers) was master of ceremonies of the event, asking questions ranging from the highly technical ("How many times more bandwidth does a T1 line have than a 56 kilobaud modem?") to the highly obscure ("How many microprocessors are there on Mars?"). Pride and fine food were at stake, which raises money for the museum -- Sunnyvale, California, Mayor James Roberts won a lobster feast from a bet with Boston, Massachusetts, Mayor Thomas Menino. For more information, see http://www.computerbowl.org/.
SAC Technologies (http://www.sacman.com/), a biometrics security company that provides technology for network and computer security without the use of pin numbers, passwords, or tokens, has received certification from the International Computer Security Association (http://www.icsa. net/). Certification was in the one-to-many Identification category. Identification is the process of comparing the biometric characteristics of an unknown individual against characteristics stored in a database to determine their identity. Identification asks, "Who is this?" and establishes whether more than one biometric record exists, thus denying an individual who is attempting to pass himself off with more than one identity.
A "PIN-less" automatic teller machine (ATM) has gone online at the Nationwide Building Society bank in Great Britain. The system, designed by NCR, uses a biometric iris-identification system developed by Sensar (http://www.sensar.com/). To use the system, bank customers simply insert their ATM card into a reader and a camera mounted in the machine compares the customer's iris (one of the few human body parts to remain unchanged as aging occurs) with records in the databank. The process takes as little two seconds.
Sensar uses iris-recognition software developed by IriScan (http://www.iriscan. com/). The software is also being tested in Virginia by Spring Technologies as an automated fare-collection system in mass-transit applications. The goal of this automated system, called "TranScan," is to expedite commuter entry and exit at subway and train stations by minimizing and eventually eliminating the commuter's need to insert a card, pass, or token.
Premia Corp. has announced a macro writing contest for Premia's Codewright Programmer's Editor. The contest is being run in conjunction with the addition of Perl, AppBasic, and API (C-like) macros in Codewright 5.1. The grand prize for the best macro is $5000, or one of a number of other prizes. In addition, there will be first, second, and third place prizes for macros written in each of the three macro languages. Submissions must be received no later than August 1, 1998. Winners will be announced at the SD '98 East Conference in Washington, D.C. on August 18, 1998. For more information, see http://www.premia.com/.
The U.S. Post Office has approved electronic postage stamps (e-stamps) for testing and, if things go as expected, we'll be printing our own stamps using PCs and the Internet. E-stamps include the postage amount, name and zip code of the local post office, date the postage was printed, and rate category (first class or whatever). In addition, e-stamps will have electronic bar coding of the same information as well as the identification number of the printing device and a digital pattern that will make each envelope unique and hard to counterfeit.
The system approved for testing, called "SmartStamp," was developed by E-Stamp Corp. (http://www.e-stamp.com/). Other approaches, such as PostagePlus from Neopost (http://www.neopost.com/), are coming online too. SmartStamp requires dongle-like hardware that fits into a printer port, serving as an electronic vault for postage. PostagePlus, on the other hand, requires no additional hardware. Customers will have an account with e-stamp companies and can download postage into this vault via the Internet.
Over the last few years, Metrowerks' CodeWarrior (http://www.metrowerks.com/) development tools have been extended from their Mac origins to include support for a wide array of languages (C, C++, Object Pascal, and Java), processors (including x86, PowerPC, MIPS, and Java VM), and systems (BeOS, PowerStation, Windows, and so on).
One of CodeWarrior's biggest competitors is GNU GCC, which has good support for cross-compilation to a variety of processors. To better appeal to companies that have standardized on GNU GCC, Metrowerks now officially supports the GNU GCC compiler from within the CodeWarrior environment (as an alternative to Metrowerks' own compiler). A new subsidiary, Quorum Technologies, has been formed for the express purpose of supporting GCC within CodeWarrior.
Taking only about six hours of work, cryptographers at the University of California at Berkeley cracked Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) codes, enabling them to "clone" a digital cellphone and make unauthorized calls from another phone. In the process, Ian Goldberg, David Wagner, and Marc Briceno also discovered indications that the code may have been intentionally weakened during its design. The GSM digital standard is the most widely used in the world, with more than 79 million phones in use.
According to a recent report by market-research firm Dataquest, sales of personal computers continue to grow at double-digit rates. Overall, says Dataquest, worldwide PC shipments were up 14.1 percent for the first quarter of 1998, compared with the same period in 1997. U.S. growth was 16.2 percent.
As for who's leading the vendor pack, Compaq maintained its market-share lead with 12.5 percent worldwide and 17.1 percent in the U.S. Dell Computer weighed in with an 11.7 percent in the U.S. Worldwide shipments by Hewlett-Packard and Dell were up 72 percent and 66.1 percent, respectively, over the last year.