At first glance, Cisco’s AON (Application Oriented Networking) looks like a brilliant idea. Essentially, it proposes to suck all manner of security, administrative, and even business policy functions into its routers and switches. That looks as if it should benefit everyone – especially existing and prospective Cisco customers – and might even grease the wheels for quicker and easier adoption of SOA.

But it’s by no means clear that the rest of us should uncritically welcome “putting intelligence into the network”. One of the main reasons for the Internet’s success has been its profound indifference to the content of the packets it transports. Compromising on the hallowed principle of “dumb pipes” could crack open Pandora’s box – indeed, several boxes.

In Cisco’s words, AON “makes it possible to embed intelligence capabilities into the network”. Obviously this is a gross exaggeration: all it really does is to teach Cisco’s network devices a bunch of new rote tricks. Any intelligence involved must come from the developers, security specialists and sysadmins who write the rules (no doubt with plenty of help from Cisco’s Advanced Services, which will go to boost AON’s gross margins).

At the marketing level, AON really is a work of genius. It presses every hot button, leaves no fashionable acronym unmentioned, and on top of all that it promises to align IT with business, and cut costs, quickly and with little effort. Specifically, it is said to support Web services, SOA, BPM, and EDA, while supercharging BI, BAM, and RFID. It also helps companies to ensure compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, and BASEL II. It’s fast, secure, selective, visible, cheap (well, relatively) – and it slices, dices and rices. What’s not to like?

Of course, the primary beneficiary of AON is meant to be Cisco itself. Despite its boast that “The Cisco name has become synonymous with the Internet”, the San Jose giant’s 85 per cent share of the router market in the late 1990s has dropped to somewhere between half and two thirds, depending on which segments you look at. Rivals like Juniper and Alcatel are winning sales and slicing into Cisco’s dominant position.

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Cisco’s AON: Jeeves in a router or a box of evils?

The U.S. secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, will fly into a storm of criticism Monday as she begins a four-country swing through Europe amid mounting outrage over allegations that the United States has conducted covert counterterrorism missions on the Continent.

Accusations that the United States has snatched terrorism suspects from European streets, operated secret detention facilities, and used airports as stopover points for CIA planes transferring captives have caused a furor.

The charges have provoked parliamentary inquiries, caused close U.S. allies to issue indignant demands for information, and triggered a spate of criminal investigations.

Most of the allegations are speculative, but they have made for shrill headlines from Portugal to Poland in recent days and stoked anti-U.S. anger on the Continent to levels not seen since the invasion of Iraq.

The European Union's top justice official warned last week that any member state found to have permitted secret U.S. jails on its territory could be stripped of its voting rights in the organization.

European storm awaits Rice on CIA allegations...

Swaziland, with the world's highest rate of HIV, cut Aids day events, and South Africa's health minister publicly refused to back anti-retroviral drugs.
US President George W Bush pledged new funds and called for decisive action. The EU stressed the need for effective measures to prevent the disease.
More than 40m people are infected with HIV/Aids, according to the UN.
"The lessons of nearly 25 years into the Aids epidemic are clear. Investments made in HIV prevention break the cycle of new infections," said Peter Piot, executive director of UNAids.
"By making these investments, each and every country can reverse the spread of Aids."

Controversy clouds World Aids Day

believe that there is no God. I'm beyond atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy -- you can't prove a negative, so there's no work to do. You can't prove that there isn't an elephant inside the trunk of my car. You sure? How about now? Maybe he was just hiding before. Check again. Did I mention that my personal heartfelt definition of the word "elephant" includes mystery, order, goodness, love and a spare tire?

So, anyone with a love for truth outside of herself has to start with no belief in God and then look for evidence of God. She needs to search for some objective evidence of a supernatural power. All the people I write e-mails to often are still stuck at this searching stage. The atheism part is easy.

But, this "This I Believe" thing seems to demand something more personal, some leap of faith that helps one see life's big picture, some rules to live by. So, I'm saying, "This I believe: I believe there is no God."

Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. I'm not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it's everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I'm raising now is enough that I don't need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day.

Believing there's no God means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That's good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.

Believing there's no God stops me from being solipsistic. I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures. Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I'm wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate. I don't travel in circles where people say, "I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith." That's just a long-winded religious way to say, "shut up," or another two words that the FCC likes less. But all obscenity is less insulting than, "How I was brought up and my imaginary friend means more to me than anything you can ever say or do." So, believing there is no God lets me be proven wrong and that's always fun. It means I'm learning something.

Believing there is no God means the suffering I've seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn't caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn't bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future.

Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-O and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.

There Is No God By Penn Jillette

The American poet Wallace Stevens died 50 years ago this year. Commentator Jay Keyser says Stevens wrote the best short poem in the English language, "The Snow Man." Stevens marries what the poem is about with the way that it is built.

Wallace Stevens: 'The Snow Man'

Linux operating system specialist MontaVista Software, Inc., has teamed with Mobilinux Open Framework partners SKY MobileMedia, Bluefin Mobile and Digital Airways to develop an integrated mobile phone solution atop MontaVista's Linux OS.
MontaVista's Linux operating system forms the underlying platform, Bluefin Mobile's LinuxTel provides the hardware abstraction layer for communication with the wireless network, while SKY MobileMedia's SKY-MAP the mobile applications engine. Digital Airway's Kaleido MMI is used for the visual interface and managed end user interaction.
The software operates atop a Texas Instruments OMAP processor-based smartphone reference platform.
The companies used this week’s World Handset Forum in San Diego, California, to demonstrate the initial design which, they say, addresses many of the complexities associated with the integration and interaction of voice and data software components, making it easier for handset developers to design Linux-based mobile phones.
The partners worked on the project under the auspices of the MontaVista's Mobilinux Open Framework program, an initiative designed to assist handset vendors that are migrating from proprietary operating system platforms to Linux.

Companies team for Linux-based integrated phone

Submissions are being accepted through Dec. 8 for the annual Student Design Contest, jointly sponsored by the Design Automation Conference (DAC) and the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC).
The contest accepts designs for analog, digital or programmable circuits and systems. Submissions can be embodied as ICs, reconfigurable processors, system-on-chips (SoCs), platform-based or embedded systems designs.

Submissions are open to full-time graduate and undergraduate students in three categories: operational, which means that an IC design was built and tested; system design, which focuses on FPGA or other programmable architectures; and conceptual, where a project was designed and simulated. The design must be part of the students' course or research work at the university and must have been completed within 18 months prior to the Dec. 8 submission deadline.

The total prize money is expected to be close to $15,000, shared between first, second and third place winners in each category. Winners will be notified prior to the DAC in July and offered travel assistance to attend.

The contest is made possible through the contributions of corporate sponsors who are encouraged to provide financial support for this year's contest. An award ceremony will be held here during DAC. In 2005, the Student Design Contest had 48 submissions from 14 countries and 34 schools.

Submissions being accepted for Student Design Contest

Motorola Inc. and PIPS Technology are releasing an innovative license plate reader technology to public safety organizations nationwide.
Called Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR), the technology installed in police cars "reads" vehicle plates as they enter the view of a vehicle-mounted or roadside infrared camera, and checks them against a database for nearly instantaneous identification. The system runs continuously, automatically capturing images of license plates with a camera that works in nearly every lighting condition.
"This technology is completely automated and built into the car's operation, so it requires no action on the part of the police officer to capture the plate numbers and have them verified. It is not something the officer has to initiate," said Steve Most, multimedia business director, Motorola radio systems division, in a statement.
Previous technologies required officers to manually type in a plate number and request a database search for each number, which can be time consuming and prone to errors.
Before bringing the ALPR system into Motorola's product portfolio, Motorola (Schaumburg, Ill.) worked with PIPS (Hampshire, U.K.) to further ruggedize its license plate technology to meet Motorola specifications for mission critical public safety communications in the United States.

Motorola unveils license plate readers

Alert: Americans who honor the U.S. Constitution’s strict separation of church and state are now genuinely alarmed. Agnostics and atheists, as well as observant people of every faith, fear — sensibly — that the religious right is gaining historic political power, via an ultraconservative movement with highly placed friends.
But many of us feel helpless. We haven’t read the Founding Documents since school (if then). We lack arguing tools, “verbal karate” evidence we can cite in defending a secular United States.
For instance, such extremists claim — and, too often, we ourselves assume — that U.S. law has religious roots. Yet the Constitution contains no reference to a deity.
The Declaration

Fighting Words for a Secular America: Ashcroft & Friends vs. George Washington & the Framers

Proponents of an emerging video codec called H.264 are predicting the scheme will turn the video market on its head by enabling delivery of Internet Protocol-based broadcast-quality video at data rates of less than 1 Mbit/second. Although demand for H.264 may not hit volume before 2004, the broadcasting industry's interest in the codec has gone way past the talk stage — far enough that MPEG-4, long pitched as the logical interactive enhancement to MPEG-2, could be lost in the shuffle.

The first rumblings of the promised upheaval were felt here last week at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC). Chips, evaluation boards and software tools targeting the H.264 codec (formerly H.26L) trickled into private demonstrations and a few public venues at IBC. Presenters of H.264 previews included Canadian company VideoLocus Inc. and Germany's Heinrich-Hertz-Institut f¼r Nachrichtentechnik Berlin GmbH (HHI). Texas Instruments Inc., in launching its 600-MHz digital media processor, joined with such third-party partners as UB Video Inc. and Ingenient Technologies to show an H.264 video algorithm running on its C64x DSP family. And Equator Technologies similarly claimed its media processor's architecture will be capable of real-time H.264 encoding and decoding.

The yet-to-be-ratified international codec is now officially known as H.264 in the telecommunications world. Some in the MPEG community, however, are calling it MPEG-4 Part 10, and yet a third faction refers to it as "the proposed JVT/AVC standard."

H.264 codec jeopardizes MPEG-4's ascendancy