The Parapet research group at Princeton University focuses on power-related issues in computer hardware and software design. Citing the importance of power efficiency both in mobile applications as well as in the general goal of shrinking technology sizes on chips, the authors of this paper discuss the role of dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) in managing power during runtime. This interesting...

Open source code has allowed for the proliferation of open source software that competes with the big guns of software development, like Microsoft. Tempers run high, with the key issues focused on differing philosophies on the best business model to use and disputes over copyright, leading to lawsuits and heated online discussions. This issue of Topic in Depth provides an overview of open source...

This research group from the University of California at Irvine conducts "empirically-based studies of the processes, practices, and communities that develop open source software." The group's homepage includes many recent publications, including one that outlines several potential advantages of implementing major academic, commercial, or governmental software systems with open source practices as...

Disk fragmentation can cause computers to run at greatly reduced speeds, so it's nice to learn about the existence about Smart Defrag 1.11. This application will defrag users' hard drive and also help optimize disk performance. Visitors can also schedule defrag operations for certain times as well. This version is designed for Windows Vista, XP, 2000, and Windows 7.

Individuals' music collections that are stored on a computer, whether legal or not, are often quite large and consist of many different artists. This unique research paper from Hewlett-Packard outlines a system that can automatically identify the singer of a song based upon digital samples of that song, allowing for hassle-free sorting of many titles. The system is first trained by exposing it to...