Stories about: Empirical

It seems that the battle for net neutrality has boiled down to an argument over economics. Dueling reports paint vastly different visions of the economic outlook for the broadband and Internet industries should the US FCC be successful in imposing net neutrality guidelines.

A leading economist has predicted the National Broadband Network (NBN) will boost all industries but also hurt retail and wholesale companies.

Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Yahoo are partnering for cloud computing research and education in order to advance the development and adoption of large-scale, data-intensive Internet-hosted applications and related IT infrastructure.

Phishing researchers will congregate at Carnegie Mellon University October 4-5 to debate whether users ever will get a clue about the dangers of phishing, among other issues pertaining to online crime.

YouTube's new online video advertising model may be the right balance between what viewers will tolerate and what advertisers will pay, analysts said Wednesday. If that's the case, it could ultimately justify Google's pricey acquisition of the online video Web site.

Users of online banking sites tend to bypass critical clues that the integrity of those sites may have been compromised, according to the working draft of a study released on Sunday by researchers at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The annual Demo 2007 conference in Palm Desert, California, this week will lay bare for an audience of venture capitalists the results of thousands of hours of blood, sweat, and tears on the part of hardware and software engineers.

It's taken five years, enough lines of code to span the globe several times, countless thousands of hours of developer time, and so many builds, betas, and release candidates that you'd need a cluster-based supercomputer to keep track of them all -- but Windows Vista is finally here.

I have prepared an account of the history of .Net and Java that's intended to balance more fanciful post-mortem accounts (of .Net and Java, not of me). It reads thus: Sun created Java to cash in on the success of Visual Basic and to convince development managers that C++ coders are all slobbering toddlers playing with nail guns. Sun did grant C++ dispensation for "performance-sensitive applications," a category that covered most of Sun's software catalog. Microsoft created .Net to keep Java from gaining traction and to put that cross-platform nonsense to rest once and for all. One OS, one run-time, many languages was the best way to go. C#, the Microsoft alternative to Java with the honesty to use "C" in its name, still kept the pencils and paper clips away from the inmates, except, of course, for those developers working on performance-sensitive applications, a category that covered most of Microsoft's software catalog.

China's first direct connection to the Internet was established 10 years ago this week. Through a series of feature articles, this six-page report looks back at how the world’s largest nation got connected to the Net, takes a look at the key players, the role of the government and what lies ahead.