Communications of the ACM
Innovation Is Overrated: A Provocation
Digital innovation is not working in the interest of the whole of society. It is time to radically rethink its purpose without…
From ACM Opinion
Got an Iphone or 3g Ipad? Apple Is Recording Your Moves
A hidden file in iOS 4 is regularly recording the position of devices.
From ACM Opinion
Patently Obvious
On Monday the Supreme Court will consider whether to fundamentally alter the way American patent law is litigated. Specifically, in the context of an otherwise...
From ACM News
How Google Is Teaching Computers to See
Computers used to be blind, and now they can see. Thanks to increasingly sophisticated algorithms, computers today can recognize and identify the Eiffel Tower...
From ACM News
Why Cisco's Flip Flopped in the Camera Business
Cisco is shutting down a business unit that it bought for over half-a-billion dollars: the Flip camcorder division. That's a shame, considering how high the Flip...
From ACM Opinion
Forget Space Travel: It's Just a Dream
The clash of two titans—physics and chemistry—are major barriers to human space travel to Mars and beyond, and may well make it impossible... at least with current...
From ACM Opinion
Mars Science Laboratory + Curiosity Rover: Interview with Nasa Jpl's Ashwin Vasavada
Boing Boing visited NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for a peek inside the clean room where NASA's next Mars rover, Curiosity, and other components of the Mars...
From ACM Opinion
The Problem with Design Education
University industrial design programs are usually cloistered in schools of art or architecture, and students in such programs are rarely required to study science...
From ACM Opinion
When Will Sci-Fi Tech Become Real? Sooner Than You Think
Growing up, physicist Michio Kaku had two heroes. The first, predictably enough for the man who co-founded a branch of string theory, was Albert Einstein. "Second...
From ACM News
How Did a British Polytechnic Graduate Become the Design Genius Behind
Few Westerners have ever seen the forging of a Japanese samurai sword. It's considered a sacred practice in Japan; one of the few traditional arts that has yet...
From ACM News
Japan Has Shifted 13 Feet!
What does Japan's earthquake mean for GPS? Friday's 9.0-magnitude earthquake was so powerful that it actually widened Japan. While parts of the country barely...
From ACM Opinion
The Future of Mobile Gadgets
I got my first cell phone a little more than a decade ago, just as I was finishing college and looking for my first job. I didn't need a mobile phone; none of...
From ACM Opinion
Cell Phones Are 'stalin's Dream,' Says Free Software Movement Founder
Nearly three decades into his quest to rid the world of proprietary software, Richard Stallman sees a new threat to user freedom: smartphones.
From ACM News
Is the Navy Trying to Start the Robot Apocalypse?
Whenever the military rolls out a new robot program, folks like to joke about SkyNet or the Rise of the Machines. But this time, the military really is starting...
From ACM News
10 Questions For David Ferrucci
Why aren't you letting Watson speak for himself today? Watson is trained to answer questions for Jeopardy! It's not an interactive dialogue system, so it can't...
From ACM News
Wiring in a Wireless Age
Is Intel's Thunderbolt cable a brilliant innovation or a worthless grasp at the past?
From ACM Opinion
Gadget Politics: Why Tech Fans Share the Love and Hate
I’ve been a consumer technology critic for over 10 years. During that time, hate mail has been part of my job every day.
From ACM Opinion
Apple: Disrupt or Perish
While the secret for Apple's success seems patently obvious to most&meash;as obvious as the form and function of the iPhone 4—a more subtle reason is the company's...
From ACM Opinion
Success of Verizon's Iphone Will Depend on Cdma Network Performance
Professor P.K. Kannan at the University of Maryland, says the success of the iPhone 4 released by Verizon boils down to one word: "performance. That is, the performance...
From ACM TechNews
European Exascale Project Drives Toward Next Supercomputing Milestone
The goal of the European Exascale Software Initiative (EESI) is to help effect the migration from petascale to exascale systems over the next 10 years by bringing...
From ACM Opinion