In July 2006, the Federal Reserve will end its provision of free daylight credit to governmentsponsored enterprises (GSEs), financial services corporations created by Congress to establish a secondary market in mortgages and other consumer loans. To meet their payments to investors, the GSEs can use a wide variety of alternative funding arrangements. While such arrangements can in theory distri...

The sections on designing within current and future versions of VRML were written by Dr Avon Huxor, post-doctoral researcher in virtual environments, who also contributed sections on interaction in social spaces and augmented realities. Helena Athoussaki and Grethe Mitchell, postgraduate students of the MA Design for Interactive Media, built a VRML model as the other component of this SIMA Proj...

Greening of computing processes is an environmental strategy gaining momentum in the 21st century as evidenced by increased virtual communications. Because of the rising cost of fuel to travel to meetings and conferences, corporations are adopting sophisticated technologies that provide a “personal” experience for geographically disbursed colleagues to interact in real time. This article highli...

Virtual Heritage (VH) is the use of electronic media to recreate or interpret culture and cultural artifacts as they are today or as they might have been in the past (Moltenbrey, 2001; Roehl, 1997). By definition, VH applications employ some kind of three dimensional representation; the means used to display it range from still photos to immersive Virtual Reality. Virtual Heritage is a very act...

Through the integrated framework of participation theory and political economy, this article analyzes participatory opportunities in the virtual world Habbo Hotel, and how participation is constrained and framed by the producer’s commercial strategies, which are based on advertising and sales of virtual goods. The study also looks into the ways in which the producer Sulake Corporation discursiv...

Conventional methods of navigating within a virtual reality environment involve the use of interfaces such as keyboards, hand-held input devices such as joysticks, mice, and trackballs, and hand-worn data gloves. While these devices are mostly adequate, they are rather obstrusive and require some amount of training to use. Researchers have begun investigation into interfaces that have the capab...

A virtual private network (VPN) is simply secure network connectivity over a shared public network—basically, a private network on a public network infrastructure (the Internet). Figure 1 (next page) shows an example of a network layer VPN (adapted from Paul Ferguson and Geoff Huston, “What is a VPN? Part I,”The Internet Protocol J., June 1998,pp.2-19).Corporation X’s subnetworks (which belong ...

VMware® ESX Server® 2 provides a robust, scalable virtualization framework for consolidating multiple systems onto a single hardware platform. By default, machine resources are shared equally among the multiple virtual systems. In addition customers can tailor virtual machine configurations to allocate CPU and system resources based on various environmental, application, and workload factors. T...