ACM Queue is a magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery, and its online version is available at this site. The publication strives to intelligently assess "the challenges expected to arise in the near term as emerging capabilities or technologies gain widespread acceptance." While it is targeted at computing professionals, many of its features are of interest to a general audience since...

An informative collection of articles on computer hardware and operation is presented by Ars Technica. Many of the more recent articles (July 2002 to February 2003) have shifted from focusing on specific technologies and platforms to explaining basic principles of computer architecture. This includes "pipelining and superscalar execution," bandwidth and latency, multithreading, and CPU caching....

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...

If you've ever dreamed of seeing computer science in an informal and "unplugged" setting, this website is for you. Computer Science Unplugged (CS Unplugged) is "a project that provides free games and activities to communicate Computer Science concepts to students of all ages." The site contains 50 different videos in a range of languages and topics like cryptography, binary numbers, and computer...

Cupcloud is a free application that allows users to save, open, and share multiple documents and web pages simply. The program assists interested parties with accessing these materials from any computer or device, and it's great for collaborating on group projects and the like. There's a helpful How to Cup section here, along with a primer and a blog. This version is compatible with all operating...

Embedded Systems is one of the specialized sites stemming from Dr. Dobb's Journal. In addition to serving as an excellent source of news and product development articles, the site is a portal to many other Internet resources on embedded system applications. Information tailored to specific programming languages, like C++, Java, and many others, is grouped into separate categories. There are also...

Embedded systems are dedicated computers designed to perform a specific task. They are usually fairly simple devices that are used in areas where powerful, customizable computers are unnecessary; however, they can also be quite complex on occasion. Embedded systems can be found almost anywhere, including automobiles and cellular phones, and their importance is reflected in their near...

This particular corner of the Internet Archive brings together a variety of videos about computing and technology, paying special attention to two television programs from the 1980s and 1990s: Computer Chronicles and Net Cafe. Computer Chronicles was hosted by Stewart Cheifet and it was produced from 1983 to 2002. Visitors can watch many of these episodes and might start by looking at a profile of...

Cooltown is Hewlett-Packard's ambitious vision of a pervasive computing environment, where mobile services, Internet, and intelligent devices are intertwined to make an omnipresent networked experience. This vision of the future makes up a high profile research effort to develop technologies that will enable such a connected world. The program's homepage has a great deal of information about...

This site covers the interesting new frontier of molecular computing, which links molecular biology with computer science. It is Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT's) Amorphous Computing homepage. Amorphous computing is defined by the MIT amorphous computer engineers as "methods for instructing myriads of programmable entities to cooperate to achieve particular goals," and sometimes...