Juniper and Lucent have called on fellow vendors and network operators throughout the industry and the world to cooperate to speed the migration to all-IP to ensure better quality, reliability and security for wireline and wireless Internet communications.

There are three fundamental aspects to delivering the assured performance of an infranet:

* The ability for a customer's chosen application to automatically request the level of security, quality and bandwidth it requires from the network.

* The network's ability to ensure delivery of services with the level of performance and security required by the customer's application.

[The RIAA's] attack on trustworthiness points to one obvious reaction: move from a system with search horizons to one with real membranes, and make those membranes social as well as technological.

... trusted intermediaries who broker introductions ... act as a kind of social Visa system. You search for resources a certain social distance from you.

... ways to move to such membrane-bounded systems include retrofitting existing networks to allow sub-groups with controlled membership ...

[If the RIAA succeeds,] users will switch to social spaces.

The RIAA may reason that they have little to lose by attacking social sharing systems with a vengeance.

Sit down, turn off your cellphone, and prepare to be fascinated. Clear your schedule, because once you've started reading this interview, you won't be able to put it down until you've finished it.

Gray: We have an embarrassment of riches in that we're able to store more than we can access. Capacities continue to double each year, while access times are improving at 10 percent per year. So, we have a vastly larger storage pool, with a relatively narrow pipeline into it. We're not really geared for this.

Gray, on databases: Two groups start; one group uses an easy-to-use system, and another uses a not-so-easy-to-use system. The first group gets done first, and the competition is over. The winners move forward and the other guys go home. That situation is now happening in the Web services space. People who have better tools win.

In the next decade, disks will replace tapes, and disks will have infinite capacity. Period. This will dramatically change the way we architect our file systems. There are many more questions opened by this than resolved.

... interviews with artists, critics, and theorists who are intimately involved in building the content, interfaces, and architectures of new media ...

Topics discussed include digital aesthetics, sound art, navigating deep audio space, Japanese techno tribes, hybrid identities, the storage of social movements, theory of the virtual class, virtual and urban spaces, corporate takeover of the Internet, and the role of cyberspace in the rise of nongovernmental organizations.

The strength of the Hyperwall lies in its ability to take one simulation and look at many different quantities, cross-sections, magnifications, and time steps, while keeping the whole image, or images, visible in subarrays.

Advances in hardware and software technology are leading to exciting new computing applications ranging from robotic brain surgery to autonomous flying sensors. Innovations like this are saving lives and enabling us to do things previously thought impossible.

"Computing Meets the Physical World," is a one-day public symposium in Washington, DC, organized by the National Academy of Engineering in conjunction with the National Academies Computer Science and Telecommunications Board.

Flatland's potential can be seen in an application related to one of the more difficult problems in scientific visualization: the folding of protein molecules in a solution, a key process in the search for new drug therapies.

In the visualization, the water molecules appeared as tetrahedrons with one large ball at the center representing an oxygen atom and two smaller balls at the ends of sticks representing hydrogen atoms, their colors indicating proximity to the electrical field.

"We could look at things from different perspectives, trying different hypotheses for why the hydrogen didn't bind until we uncovered our error."

The latest effort with Flatland is a "situational awareness" visualization for network intrusion detection.

The LAN will be represented as a landscape being defended from potential attackers in a surrounding dome-like sky. The Internet and its different domains and regions will be distributed in the sky as constellations, with unusual patterns or intrusion attempts immediately recognizable.