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Volume 6, Issue 716:  Monday, November 8, 2004

  • "For Innovation's Sake"
    InternetNews.com (11/05/04); Wagner, Jim

    Reports that copyright infringement lawsuits are strangling software innovation are countered by industry experts such as U.S. Patent & Trademark Office commissioner of patents Nick Godici, who recalls that current criticism toward his office's ability to accommodate new patents and ascertain their originality echoes similar criticism leveled at the USPTO over a century ago. "Every invention that's worth a lot of money is going to come under scrutiny, and there's going to be two sides of the coin and so on," he explains. Godici estimates that a mere 1 percent of the 170,000 to 180,000 patent claims that reach the USPTO annually are brought before a court, and just one in seven of that 1 percent make it to a final judgment in which 65 percent of the patents are supported. However, software patent critic Bruce Perens argues that software companies are defensively compiling patent rights for use in cross-licensing deals, with the end result being a stifling of free software development because free software developers targeted by infringement lawsuits will be unable to afford a legal defense. Leon Kappelman of the University of North Texas' Information Systems Research Center attributes the feeling that software innovation is slipping to innovators' failure to apply engineering principles to their work. "We're building engineering products that lives often depend on, and I don't think we take it seriously enough," he contends. Meanwhile, IBM's Danny Yellin maintains that software innovation is taking place, only in less industry-redefining ways than people have become accustomed to. RFID tagging, computer-animated movies, aspect-oriented programming, and Web services are areas of software innovation he cites.
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  • "New Clusters Emerge at Supercomputing Show"
    CNet (10/07/04); Shankland, Stephen

    New computing cluster options that can be used to create high-performance technical computers are expected to be announced by Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and other companies on Nov. 8 in conjunction with ACM's SC2004 supercomputing conference in Pittsburgh. New servers from Hewlett-Packard include Unified Cluster Portfolio platform technologies based on new Itanium chips from Intel, such as XC System Software for cluster management, Scalable File Share Software for storage, and cluster installation and configuration services. Expected to become available by the end of next June is the HP Scalable Visualization System, a cluster-based graphics system that can rapidly display images of up to 100 million pixels. HP also plans to announce a series of Itanium 2-based lower-end Integrity servers: The Integrity rx4640, which features four processors, is available with a new high-end Itanium 2 running at 1.6 GHz and boasting 9 MB of built-in memory. A new lower-end Itanium 2 with 1.6 GHz and 3 MB of memory can be purchased with HP's two-processor rx1620, and includes a 533 MHz memory data pathway. Even more expandable than the rx1620 is HP's dual-chip rx2620, which is thinner. Meanwhile, Dell VP Paul Gottsegen reports that Dell's new PowerEdge SC1425 server, which employs Intel's Nocona generation of 64-bit Xeon processors, is modeled after its 1850 server, only without redundant power supplies and advanced hard-drive features, which allows the SC1425 to be sold for less; the system features Rocks software from Platform Computing that performs such tasks as implementing software, managing servers, and passing messages among servers in a high-performance cluster.
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    For more information on SC2004, visit http://www.sc-conference.org/sc2004/.

  • "Duke Robot Climbs to Victory in Madrid"
    Duke University News & Communications (11/04/04)

    Wallter, an autonomous wall-climbing machine designed and built by Duke University researchers, successfully completed a vertical course to win first prize at the seventh annual International Conference on Climbing and Walking Robotics held in Madrid in late September. Pratt School undergraduate Kevin Parker reports that Wallter was the only entry that successfully executed all five of the competition's required tasks--starting on a metal wall and climbing as high as possible, climbing after the addition of randomly positioned obstacles, going over a barrier across the wall, starting from the floor and then ascending, and halting after crossing the finish line. The wheeled robot hugged the wall and initiated its climb using a "tornado in a cup," a device developed by Vortex that harnesses air currents in a cylinder to exert suction on a flat surface. Project faculty advisor and Vortex VP Jason Janet says the device functions through the simultaneous swirling of a spiral and a toroidal vortex that keep the vehicle attached to the wall without hindering free movement. Wallter was made autonomous with the addition of infrared and ultrasonic sensors and a microcontroller that used custom-written software to navigate according to sensor input. Magnets were later added to the vehicle to take advantage of the metal wall at the competition, which also required an adjustment to the software. Janet notes that the Vortex technology used in Wallter was developed with a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Microsystems Technology Office, and says that Duke will partner with Carnegie Mellon University to design an autonomous land vehicle to participate in DARPA's Grand Challenge. The university is also focused on the development of underwater robot vehicles.
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  • "Scaling New Heights With Digital Imaging"
    IST Results (11/05/04)

    Photographic documentation is a key element of architectural and cultural conservation, one that is complicated when the scale of buildings necessitates the time-consuming construction of scaffolds and other complex structures to ensure that the photographer can operate safely and efficiently. The IST's Vitra project takes scaffolding out of the equation by providing a digital imaging system on a robotic platform; the platform features a mast that telescopes pneumatically, allowing the camera and artificial lighting system to be positioned up to 15 meters above floor level, explains Vitra coordinator Lindsay MacDonald. Floor-level operators can preview scenes, zoom in and out, steer the camera, and control other settings using an interface that displays real-time system status information, and also produces camera position data that can assist image archivists and future conservation work. The Vitra project has yielded new software algorithms that can integrate multiple photos into a single image, or remove undesirable shadows from pictures of stained-glass windows. Another algorithm can help mosaics and stained-glass windows to be accurately reproduced by characterizing colors within images in relation to standard colors. Vitra has also augmented its image database and developed a new viewer for panoramic images, using Java-3D and JPEG2000 software as a foundation. MacDonald says the system was evaluated at four German sites and one English site.
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  • "MIT Team Guides Airplane Remotely Using Spoken English"
    MIT News (11/02/04); Clark, Lauren J.

    MIT researchers have devised a remote guidance system that allows an airplane pilot to control an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) using everyday English. The system is part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Software Enabled Control (SEC) program demo, and SEC program manager John Bay says a successful flight test at Edwards Air Force base in June offered proof of "advanced behaviors that may now be integrated into the next generation of unmanned vehicles." The experiment demonstrated that the UAV could effectively handle abrupt changes in flight plan and evade unexpected dangers in real time. Mario Valenti, a Boeing engineer pursuing a Ph.D. at MIT, says the pilot operating the guidance system basically regards the robot drone as a wingman. "The system allows the pilot to interface with the UAV at a high level--not just 'turn right, turn left' but 'fly to this region and perform this task,'" he notes. The guidance system's flexibility and intelligence is derived from three interconnected components: A natural language interface that provides two-way translation between the pilot and the UAV, produced by the MIT team in collaboration with Teragram; a task scheduler designed by Valenti that monitors the manned aircraft's mission data and converts it into jobs the UAV can execute; and a safe-trajectory-planning algorithm based on mixed-integer linear programming to facilitate collision avoidance. The UAV can select the fastest safe route to its destination and perform split-second course changes in response to new directives or unanticipated obstacles thanks to commercially available CPLEX optimization software. With this system, a pilot could gather images of enemy encampments from a safe distance, while other potential applications include the coordination of multiple air or space vehicles.
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  • "Hi Robot"
    The Engineer (11/05/04); Excell, Jon

    Birmingham University's Intelligent Robotics lab has received 1 million euros for a four-year research project focusing on the development of intelligent robots that can comprehend natural speech and interact more effectively with people. Lab director Dr. Jeremy Wyatt notes that the vision of a robot in every household will not come to pass until machines can interact with humans and meet their expectations about acceptable behavior, and his researchers hope to achieve this by better understanding the mechanics of object recognition. This initiative will begin by attaching a vision system to a mobile platform to monitor an arm on a separate table and report back its observations using natural language. Wyatt explains that robots' capabilities are often overestimated by people, possibly because they are wowed by technically sophisticated robots such as Sony and Honda's biped machines. These robots use an enormous amount of computational muscle to perform an action that is simple for humans, while leaving little room for more abstract cognitive processes. Wyatt expects increasingly intelligent niche appliances rather than domestic humanoid robots. "Your hoovering robot might still be a flat disc on the floor but it will be able to recognize certain types of objects and figure out when the house is empty--stuff will appear, but not in the way that science fiction sometimes predicts," he forecasts. The Birmingham project is part of the European Commission's Cognitive Systems for Cognitive Assistants program, which is expected to be allocated about 8 million euros over the next five years.
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  • "How Zombie Networks Fuel Cybercrime"
    New Scientist (11/03/04); Biever, Celeste

    Botnet sabotage is one way to commit crimes against e-commerce, and hackers are offering them for hire. Software bots are planted on computers through viruses, and when a hacker types a command in a particular chat room, it wakes the bots up and they begin sending page requests to the target servers to overwhelm them. The attacks can be blackmail attempts or competitive moves. The FBI has begun prosecuting individuals for the mercenary use of botnets, and expects to do more of it. Distributed denial of service attacks used to be limited, since it was hard for hackers to gather many attacking PCs to overwhelm a major Web site, but botnets make it automatic. A virus installs a back-door program to leave open an Internet port on a PC, and the hacker probes PCs online to find the ports and install bots on hard drives. University of Chicago systems administrator Viki Navratilova says there is no real limit to the possible size of a botnet, and University of Washington systems administrator David Dittrich says that chat rooms' Internet Relay Chat protocol makes it convenient to command and control botnets. Symantec Antivirus reports that botnets compromised over 60,000 computers by May of this year. One way to detect active zombies in a network is to look for signs of "master-slave" traffic, where a number of computers are receiving data from the same site and then trying to connect to another large site.
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  • "Does the Internet Need to Be Governed?"
    CircleID (11/04/04); Cerf, Vinton

    The Internet is a flexible and increasingly pervasive communications and commerce medium that reflects many of the problems common in off-line society, including copyright theft, breaking and entering, fraud, harassment, pornography, and other concerns, writes ICANN board Chairman Vinton Cerf. At the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), world governments need to address these issues of Internet governance, but realize the role of ICANN was intentionally made separate from these issues. ICANN is meant to deal with a limited set of technical details which are complex, but entirely different than many of the problems facing the Internet and the World Wide Web today. Over the past six years, ICANN has developed a framework for addressing issues of technical governance, which nonetheless have serious policy ramifications, including how to introduce non-Latin characters in Internet addresses, setting restrictions on registrations, and administering domain-name assignment. The voluntary root servers, Regional Internet address registries, and domain name registers and registrars are all part of this representative framework for discussing and resolving common issues of a more technical nature. Cerf argues that other organizations are better suited to tackle governance issues: The World Intellectual Property Organization or World Trade Organization should take the lead on protection of intellectual property online and Interpol could become more involved in fighting online crime, for example. Other examples of problems that should be addressed by groups other than ICANN include digital signatures, international electronic transaction mediation, and international taxation for e-commerce. Though some at the WSIS have suggested the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) take over ICANN's role, Cerf notes that the ITU is geared more toward traditional communications technologies that do not have the dynamic aspect of the Internet.
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  • "Metaphorically Speaking"
    Economist (10/28/04) Vol. 373, No. 8399, P. 518

    Interfaces are metaphorical portals through which people can access and move around a technology, and the most successful interfaces, as demonstrated by Apple's iPod wheel and Google's white page, are those that stress simplicity. The iPod's wheel interface is easy to use, and seems intuitive in the sense that built-in features such as acceleration give the impression that the device knows when users want to scroll through a list of songs slowly or quickly; the white page limits the word count, and thus the clutter, of Web pages. Both interfaces use complex technology, but they spare users from dealing with this complexity. The desktop interface metaphor needs to be simplified in order to tackle the growing problem of information overload fueled by the blurring lines between PCs and the Internet. Filtering becomes crucial in light of such a development, says IDEO CEO Tim Brown. Google is generating interest with its planned release of new search algorithms to enhance the retrieval of documents on a user's PC, and the company's launch of Gmail, which provides users 1 GB of free email storage, could be the first move toward the storage of all customers' data on Google's servers instead of on their PCs. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates also pledged the development of new metaphors such as the Windows upgrade known as Longhorn, which has stalled. Microsoft research director Jack Breese argues that the popular vision of a speech recognition interface as a replacement metaphor for the desktop is unrealistic, because speech recognition cannot enable simplicity. Donald Norman, author of "The Invisible Computer," defines truly simple interfaces as "information appliances" whose functions are relatively modest in scope.
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  • "My Baby Bot"
    Herald Sun (AU) (11/03/04); Familari, Peter

    NEC's Junichi Osada and a team of designers have spent the last 14 years developing a small robot that is able to perform a range of human responses, such as responding to a human voice with a smile or sigh, conversing, and delivering personal messages. Osada says PaPeRo, which also is able to turn off the television when he falls asleep, is talented. "We've programmed PaPeRo to take photographs, tell us about tomorrow's weather, provide updates on the stock market, and connect to the Internet," says Osada. More than $10 million has been spent developing PaPeRo, an acronym for partner-type personal robot, which includes IT and audio-video technology, makes use of visual and voice-recognition electronics, and has cameras for eyes and a network of sensors to determine distances. PaPeRo represents the electronic helper of the future that will serve as a housekeeper, security guard, and child companion. Observers say such human-computer interaction is on the rise, and some maintain that it is already here. Rather then expecting a machine to resemble Star Wars' R2D2, household automation comes in the form of a powerful, handheld computer that uses sophisticated software to control devices in the home, office, and the car.
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  • "Information Sharing Crucial for IT Security"
    VNUNet (10/27/04); Thomas, Daniel

    If IT security in the United Kingdom is to improve, businesses and government must share information and train staff better, says Sir David Omand, the U.K. government's chief security and intelligence coordinator and Cabinet Office Public Secretary. Omand also says that more must be done to educate both the general public and small businesses about security threats, and that raising IT security standards will better protect consumers, businesses, and the government. "There is no part of the economy or government not affected by this," he says. Government security teams and private sector firms must work more closely; the private sector manages most of the critical national infrastructure in the United Kingdom. The Ministry of Defense intends to introduce new policies and an education campaign to strengthen IT security, and the Joint Security Coordination Center will increase the number of computer emergency response teams based in the U.K. armed forces. Research indicates that attacks on critical national infrastructure IT systems have gone up tenfold during the past four years, and hackers have been recently concentrating on systems that control transportation, electricity, water, and sewage. The new cross-governmental National Infrastructure Security Coordination Center will increase security efforts and work with private sector companies to protect computer systems. Meanwhile, the Cabinet Office's Central Sponsor for Information Assurance group coordinates information security projects throughout government and is working with the private and public sectors to promote Internet security to individuals and small businesses; it is testing the "Claims Test Mark" accreditation scheme, which will make sure IT security products meet basic quality standards and provide purchasing guidance.
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  • "Sender Authentication Hits Roadblocks"
    Network World (11/01/04) Vol. 21, No. 44, P. 50; Garretson, Cara

    Microsoft has revised Sender ID and sent the latest version of its sender authentication proposal to the IETF. In September, the IETF asked Microsoft to rework its proposal for sender authentication due to concerns about its licensing structure and technology. Sender ID, which combines Microsoft's Caller ID technology with the Sender Framework Policy of Pobox.com's Meng Weng Wong, is the most popular proposal for sender authentication, which is seen as a way to provide clues about senders of spam and phishing email. Other proposals include DomainKeys, authentication technology that uses Yahoo!'s cryptography, and Identified Internet Mail, a Cisco proposal that uses attached signatures. "Once you know mail is legitimate...it makes sense to shift the strategy away from the current mail filters that [weed] out the bad stuff and switch to where we filter in the good stuff," says Sendmail Chairman Greg Olson. However, there are some concerns that sender authentication technology will not end spam because not all spammers hide their identity, as well as its overall effectiveness in reducing mail that is not spoofed. "Sure, [sender authentication] might prevent [spoofing] email from citibank.com, but it won't prevent clever phishers from creating ecitibank.com or cit1bank.com, or a thousand other variations," says Steven Bellovin, security area director for the IETF and an AT&T fellow.
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  • "Sci Fi No More, Robots Gearing Up for Life Outside the Lab"
    EE Times (11/01/04) No. 1345, P. 6; Merritt, Rick

    The recent RoboNexus International Conference served as a showcase for commercial robot technologies as well as a platform where experts detailed the challenges that must be overcome for robots to move into the commercial market. MIT researcher and iRobot CTO Rodney Brooks delivered a keynote address in which he said that robots will not revolutionize targeted fields such as manufacturing and health care until their navigation, recognition, and manual dexterity are improved. To be more dexterous, robots need hands with a greater degree of freedom of motion, the adroitness to handle objects of varying weight, and tactile, moisture, and temperature sensors; meanwhile, computer vision must be refined to compensate for shadows, recognize people despite changes brought on by age, and perform other tasks comparable to human vision systems--as well as work in inexpensive cameras and DSPs. Brooks explained that homeowners cannot afford the technology robots currently use to build internal maps of their surroundings, and lower-cost alternatives such as sonar, ultrasound, and RFID are being investigated by iRobot and other companies. By surmounting these obstacles, Brooks said that "we can create an economic tsunami that would rival what happened with semiconductors and computers in Silicon Valley." IRobot Chairwoman Helen Grenier buoyed optimism among RoboNexus attendees by noting that iRobot has sold 1 million Roomba robot vacuum cleaners since their debut two years ago, adding that military market expansion has overtaken consumer markets. Among the products spotlighted at the conference was Element Products' Scribbler, a programmable robotic car that draws, and Kawada Industries' HRP-3, a dust- and water-resistant humanoid robot that can walk on rough and slippery outdoor surfaces. Both machines' usability is challenged by the high cost of sensors.
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  • "The Art of Object-Relational Mapping"
    SD Times (11/01/04) No. 113, P. 25; Walsh, George

    Object-relational (O/R) mapping has grown in importance as the chasm between relational databases and programming techniques used by those who have to access the databases has widened; IT pros can narrow the gap either by writing custom code that retrieves information from the database, or by employing a third-party automation tool. DMCI COO Raul Davidovich reports that O/R tools have improved to the point that they can streamline systems and enhance performance with proper usage. The increasing popularity of object-oriented language programming has spurred companies to address the problem by building object databases or object caches that sit in front of relational databases, yet Gus Bjorklund of Progress Software's Object Store comments that the ubiquity of relational databases has limited the appeal of object-oriented databases to niche applications. He sees people's general unawareness of O/R mapping tools' existence as the reason why O/R mapping has not caught on. The growing use of XML and a corporate need to store unstructured data in relational tables is another problem that O/R mapping tools can tackle, especially as the expanding population of XML schemas and DTDs makes in-house O/R mapping infeasible. Among the database vendors getting involved in O/R mapping is Oracle, whose TopLink Java object-to-relational persistence architecture can facilitate the storage of Java objects and Enterprise Java Beans in relational database tables. Meanwhile, IBM and BEA's Service Data Objects specification is designed to permit uniform access to and manipulation of data from heterogeneous sources by application programmers. Microsoft SQL architect James Hamilton explains that there is a definite need for O/R mapping, but adds that it is only one tool in the arsenal required to simplify and cut the costs of writing data-intensive programs.
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  • "Vetronics of the Future Combat System"
    Military & Aerospace Electronics (10/04) Vol. 15, No. 10, P. 20; Keller, John

    American and allied warfighters will enjoy an unprecedented level of situation awareness and maneuverability in the future battlefield thanks to electronic and optoelectronic technologies that help manned and automated vehicles communicate with commanders and troops over global and theater-level radio and telecommunications networks. The platform for this "force transformation" will be advanced vehicle electronics (vetronics) technologies, including automatic target recognition, computer-based decision aids, high-speed distributed computing, robotics, and high-speed wireless mobile networks, that together facilitate access to a vast amount of battlefield data and real-time information-sharing between all friendly forces. Each core element of force transformation--networking, automation, and situational awareness--will use vetronics as a central enabling technology. Networking will stem from the linkage of high-speed mobile networks, theater-level wired networks, and ultra-broadband satellite networks, while advanced IP communications will establish an "infosphere" that commanders and troops can use to keep tabs on the position and capabilities of friends and foes; automation will rely on real-time reliable machine navigation to help unmanned ground vehicles keep up with mobile forces; and situational awareness will depend on a diversity of networked RF, optical, and acoustic sensors, computer processing, Internet-type networking, and advanced graphical processing and displays. The practical application of force transformation will be the Future Combat System (FCS), a scheme connecting roughly 18 independent systems to troops and commanders in a framework linking warfighters to manned and robotic vehicles and sensors in order to build a comprehensive battlefield perspective. The connectivity component of the FCS project is the Warfighter Information Network-Tactical, which will facilitate communications between all force segments over wired or wireless phones, computers, video terminals, the in-vehicle Joint Tactical Radio System, and older military communications systems.
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  • "Beyond Point Clouds"
    GeoWorld (10/04) Vol. 17, No. 10, P. 38; Xu, Xueming; Aiken, Carlos; Thurmond, John

    Accurate, globally georeferenced, and photorealistic 3D models extracted from imagery captured by ground scanners, digital cameras, and Global Positioning System technology and draped over shapes were the goal of a joint University of Texas at Dallas-RealEarthModels project. New point-cloud laser scanners and attached detectors or scanners produce almost photographic-quality images, but the researchers noted that the breakup of 3D volumes as viewers zoomed in made the technique insufficient for virtual visualization applications. The University of Texas approach was to accurately drape photos by employing a series of non-linear transformations to associate the features in real-world x, y, z space with pixels on a photo in u, v space. The model-building methodology the researchers used combines photogrammetry and computer visualization components to build surfaces from the laser points prior to draping photos, instead of fitting points to flat surfaces. For example, a railroad tunnel was photorealistically mapped by converting the point cloud into a triangulated mesh that was draped with photos. The technique was primarily applied to the geosciences field, whereby geologic exposures of rock were mapped to gain better understanding of geology not normally accessible. Beneficiaries include geology students who experience 3D virtual field trips and oil companies that can improve petroleum extraction by studying virtual models of specific sites. Tools for viewing and analyzing 3D models range from simple, low-end products such as GeoWall and 3D stereo systems to more immersive technologies such as the Cave Automatic Virtual Environment, but the cost of the software and hardware needed to generate detailed photorealistic models prompted the researchers to plan a cheaper and more efficient visualization and analysis platform based on open software, freeware, or both.
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  • "Dumbing Down Smart Objects"
    Wired (10/04) Vol. 12, No. 10, P. 77; Sterling, Bruce

    Futurist Bruce Sterling notes that the incorporation of rudimentary communications and database links into everyday objects is making their nature transparent to users, which could lead to improvements in the practicality, efficiency, and user- and environmental-friendliness of manufactured items. "Unlike the smart objects imagined by futurists for decades, things to come will be refreshingly dumb, but they'll make their users smarter," Sterling predicts. He describes such products as "spimes," based on their ability to be tracked accurately in space and time. Sterling uses books sold online by outlets such as Amazon.com as early examples of spimes. Not only do the books listed on the site boast the appearance, feel, and behavior of regular books, but information such as cost, publisher, printer, alternate editions, readers' opinions, and other works by the same author are easily accessible. Sterling reasons that "In a world of spimes, even the simplest objects--furniture, cutlery, power tools--will be little more than material billboards for a vast, interactive, postindustrial support system." He acknowledges that spimes, like any popular information technology, will have a dark side, foreseeing such frustrations and inconveniences as the spime equivalent of spam, software glitches, identity theft, scams, and malware.
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  • "The Ten Secrets of Embedded Debugging"
    Embedded Systems Programming (10/04) Vol. 17, No. 10, P. 21; Schneider, Stan; Fraleigh, Lori

    Experience dictates 10 lessons that must be followed for successful debugging of embedded systems. The first lesson is that programmers must be familiar and proficient with a diverse array of tools that includes source-level debuggers, in-circuit emulators, data monitors, operating system monitors, profilers, memory testers, execution tracers, and coverage testers. Lesson 2 is to detect memory problems--classified as leaks, fragmentation, and corruption--early on, while lesson 3 demonstrates that code efficiency can only be maximized by understanding how the CPU is executing the code via performance profiling. The fourth lesson is to clearly indicate suspicious or potentially problematic code at the outset to avoid searching for it later, as well as to regularly scan for errors as a preventative measure; the fifth lesson is to reliably recreate the problem and then isolate it by keeping detailed logs of any changes noticed during testing; and the sixth lesson is to furnish a backwards-traceable record of the embedded system development process so that future problems will be understood as they crop up. Lesson 7 mandates the use of coverage testing to determine and confirm the thoroughness of the test suite, with the level of required testing dictated by the application. Lesson 8 is to test and scan for problems as you go to avoid much more costly and time-consuming end-cycle debugging, while lesson 9 is to use dynamic debugging tools such as operating-system monitors, data monitors, and profilers to analyze programs while they are in operation. The tenth and final lesson of successful debugging recommends that the coder refresh his perspective of a problem by taking time off, in order to prevent a close-mindedness that can set in during long debugging sessions.
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