Communications of the ACM articles from April 1997

Communications of the ACM archives from April 1997

Email - the good, the bad, and the ugly.
April 1, 1997... Electronic mail has become the unexciting and mundane electronic communication medium we love to hate. It wasn't always that way. Hate is a fairly recent emotion. Email has been with us in one form or another since the earliest days of...

The ups and downs of programmer stress.
April 1, 1997... It is well known that the 1990s trend toward downsizing/ rightsizing has led to trauma among people in industry. Those axed must deal with the severe trauma of losing a job; those who are left behind must add the work of the axed to what they...

Taking stock for university patents.
April 1, 1997... Future Looks Bleak for Research." This newspaper headline, summarizing recent findings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, hardly came as a surprise to members of the academic community. Cutbacks in federal funding of non...

The debugging scandal and what to do about it.(Cover Story)
April 1, 1997... No longer limited to trial-and-error methods, frustrated programmers now have debugging tools that provide active assistance in the detective work of bug-hunting. Debugging is the dirty little secret of computer science. Despite the progress...

My hairiest bug war stories. (programming bugs)(Cover Story)
April 1, 1997... Despite the availability of industrial-strength debuggers and integrated program development environment, professional programmers still engage in far more detective work than they should have to. This is their story - along with some of the ways...

Debugging and the experience of immediacy.(Cover Story)
April 1, 1997... When programming environments convey the experience of immediacy, programmers perceive and manipulate the facets of the program and its unfolding computation with less conscious effort - and accelerate the debugging process. A good user...

Software visualization for debugging.(Cover Story)
April 1, 1997... Representing programs through algorithm animation, typographic source-code presentation, and interactive auralization transforms the hunt for bugs into a cognitively accessible multimedia experience. Software visualization is the systematic and...

Programming on an already full brain. (use of Emacs Menus)(Cover Story)
April 1, 1997... Bugs happen because people create them when they can't remember the details needed to write correct programs. Why waste the user's scarce biological cache memory when plentiful computer memory performs better? Programmers optimize the inner...

Fostering debugging communities on the Web.(Cover Story)
April 1, 1997... Programmers worldwide can collaboratively debug programs synchronously and asynchronously by tapping into the Internet Software Visualization Laboratory. How often do we go to a colleague or local software guru to solve a seemingly intractable...

From Kansas to Oz. (collaborative debugging using the Kansas multiuser programming environment)(Cover Story)
April 1, 1997... Collaborative Debugging When a Shared World Breaks Users in programmable virtual worlds can introduce bugs that render entire worlds inoperable. But Kansas, a multiuser virtual world, helps heal itself, sometimes sending the Kansas - possibly...

Noncollaborative telepresentations come of age.
April 1, 1997... New technology now allows us to attend business conferences without physically attending the conferences. Is this cost-cutting, time-saving practice the next killer app? At this moment, thousands of people are criss-crossing the globe to...

Digital multimedia offers key to educational reform.
April 1, 1997... An interactive multimedia program called Teacher 2000 is an early reflection of the growing potential for new learning tools that can transform education. Multimedia technologies, like most other technologies, have evolved over the past few...

Motives, hurdles, and dropouts. (Internet)
April 1, 1997... Who is on and off the Internet, and why. The explosion of interest in and surveys on the Internet has focused primarily on the commercial potential and secondarily on the demographics of users [4, 5]. Often ignored are the perceptions of...

Data models in geographic information systems.
April 1, 1997... Using object-oriented database technology to model the real world. Geographic information systems are used to collect, analyze, and present information describing the physical and logical properties of the geographic world. Geographically...

Hermeneutic computer science.
April 1, 1997... The field of study and practice we call computer science and software engineering is seriously flawed. A deep, but too often ignored, division in philosophy and perspective divides the community. On occasion this division is made manifest and we...

Webware security.
April 1, 1997... Many systems, including Java, ActiveX, JavaScript, and Web plug-ins, allow Web authors to attach an executable program to a Web page, so that anyone visiting the page automatically downloads and runs the program. These systems (collectively known...