The Electronic Frontier Foundation has awarded its 1998 Pioneer Awards to free software advocates Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds. ("Free software" refers to the freedom, not the price, to redistribute the software, either with or without changes, either gratis or for a fee.) Stallman founded the GNU project in 1984, which led to GNU, a UNIX-compatible operating system. He is also the principal author of GNU Emacs, GNU C Compiler, GNU Debugger GDB, and other GNU programs. Torvalds, a recipient of the 1995 "Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award," developed Linux, a free UNIX-like kernel, which is estimated to have over five million users.
-- Jonathan Erickson
Interested in owning a Cray supercomputer? Tony Cole is your man. Cole's company, MemoryBilia (San Mateo, CA) sells various pieces of Cray supercomputers for prices ranging from a few hundred dollars for memory boards encased in lucite to several thousand dollars for a Cray-1 chassis (for those in the market for a very expensive bench). Five years ago, Cole bought Lawrence Livermore Labs' Cray-1, which was about to be junked, for $10,101.01 (it originally cost $19 million). Two years later, Cole called Cray Supercomputers to try and track down more equipment. After persisting for two months, Cole finally got through to Seymour Cray himself, and managed to buy a Cray-2, Cray-3, and Cray-4 for $5000. Cray may have got the better of the deal, since $5000 was more than they would have received from the junkyard. Cole has since added a Cray-YMP and Cray-XMP to his collection, and is planning to expand his business to other computer relics such as core memory. More information is available at http:// www .memorybilia.com/.
-- Eugene Eric Kim
These days, cellular phones and other hand-held devices can perform every communications task imaginable: e-mail, voice-mail, paging, web browsing. But even with all this palm-sized power, entering information remains a serious problem. Rather than miniaturize existing input devices or experiment with handwriting or speech recognition, Tegic Communications decided to make existing input methods smarter. Using a 12-button telephone keypad with three letters per key, Tegic's T9 software takes a sequence of keypresses, and compares the possible variations of character sequences with a dictionary to determine the word the user meant to type. The algorithm is patent-pending, and Tegic Communications is currently licensing dictionaries in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Korean. For more information, see http://www.tegic.com/.
-- Eugene Eric Kim
If you didn't get enough of last winter's cold and snow, check out http://www .mageesci.com/Antarctic/, where National Science Foundation (NSF) researcher Tony Hansen is posting video clips of his "vacation" to the South Pole. Hansen's primary goal is to collect information regarding the degree of environmental pollution, specifically aerosol black carbon.
-- Jonathan Erickson
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced the release of Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) as a W3C Proposed Recommendation. MathML is a low-level syntax for representing structured data (such as mathematics) and mathematical expressions over the Web. In other words, MathML is an XML-compliant markup language that describes the content and presentation of mathematical expressions. MathML provides two sets of markup tags: one for presenting notation of mathematical data in markup format, and the other for relaying the semantic meaning of mathematical expressions. For more information, see http:// www.w3.org/Math/.
-- Jonathan Erickson
According to a recent IRS pronouncement -- Statement of Position (SOP) 97-2, Software Revenue Recognition -- software companies must further standardize financial reporting. This may result in changes in the way some companies recognize revenue. For example, some companies may be required to defer reporting revenue longer, which could negatively affect short-term earnings.
-- Jonathan Erickson
Researchers at the University of Southern California's Laboratory for Molecular Robotics have used a uniquely programmed atomic force microscope as a robot to push gold particles 15 nanometers in size into precise locations on a poly lysine-coated mica surface, spelling out the letters "USC." The gold particles are about 500 times smaller than a red blood cell and comparable in size to some molecules. Ari Requicha, professor of computer science and electrical engineering/systems and leader of the USC team, says that "Control over the structure of matter at the atomic or molecular scale will undoubtedly trigger a major revolution in man-made artifacts." Applications for this type of technology (which is called "nanoelectromechanical systems," or NEMS for short) include cell repair, ultrastrong materials derived from molecularly perfect prototypes, or compact disc machines with a thousand times more capacity than current models. For more information, see http://www-lmr.usc.edu/~lmr/.
-- Jonathan Erickson
John Ousterhout, the creator of Tcl/Tk, has left Sun Microsystems to found Scriptics, a company devoted to scripting tools, applications, and services. Scriptics' flagship product will be TclPro, a development environment for Tcl, which will include a source-level debugger and other tools. While no official release date has been set, Ousterhout expects the product to be ready by the fall.
Ousterhout noted, "We're really excited about this opportunity. We'll get to do a lot of things for Tcl that we've wanted to do for a long time." More information is available at http://www.scriptics.com/.
-- Eugene Eric Kim