Communications of the ACM articles from April 1999

Communications of the ACM archives from April 1999

News Track.(light speed slowed to 38 mph; half of US homes now have PCs; University of Texas develops electroic tongue; parishoners ask God for Y2K solution; top IT salaries in US)(Technology Information)
April 1, 1999... SLOWING A SCREAMING BEAM The speed of light, which travels through empty space at about 186,171 miles per second--the highest speed anything can attain--has been slowed to 38 miles an hour by Danish physicists, reports Nature. The medium...

SHOW ME THE MONEY.(average IT budgets)(Industry Trend or Event)
April 1, 1999... Average IT budget as a Average IT budget as a percentage of company revenue, percentage of company revenue, 1996-1998, worldwide: by country, 1998: China 20%...

Y2K COUNTDOWN.(Industry Trend or Event)
April 1, 1999... China's Millennium Worries A survey of 512 major firms by the Chinese government found 53% did not know how to detect possible computer date problems, reports the Beijing Morning Post. Although the banking, securities, and futures...

A Righteous Balance of Internet Freedom.(Internet/Web/Online Service Information)
April 1, 1999... IN THE JANUARY 1999 Communications (p. 27), ACM President Barbara Simons says we should insist that leaders "spend less time worrying about how to censor the Net and more time on how to use it to provide timely and easy-to-access information...

Inspections--Some Surprising Findings.(inspections most effective in locating software errors)(Industry Trend or Event)
April 1, 1999... "You can see a lot just by observing"--attributed to Yogi Berra Someone recently asked me to name the three best software engineering practices. After mulling over the question, I came up with the equivalent of a realtor's answer:...

IT Skills Standards.(Industry Trend or Event)
April 1, 1999... The team needs another expert programmer, but the pool of available people includes no one with such expertise. So the team hires someone who is prepared to learn on the job. How many times is this story re-enacted every day in advanced...

Taking the Lead in Licensing Software Engineers.(Industry Trend or Event)
April 1, 1999... IT WAS INEVITABLE. In the mid-1970s, the term "software engineering" became a permanent part of the computing lexicon. For instance, ACM started the Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT), and ACM Software Engineering...

ACM Digital Library Enhancements.
April 1, 1999... As the new Executive Director and CEO of ACM, I am delighted to have this opportunity to share with you my excitement regarding some of the new initiatives and services ACM is launching this year. The organization has made major investments...

Lessons from open-source software development.(Industry Trend or Event)
April 1, 1999... Open source is a term that has recently gained currency as a way to describe the tradition of open standards, shared source code, and collaborative development behind software such as the Linux and FreeBSD operating systems, the Apache Web...

The Linux edge.(operating system)(Technology Information)
April 1, 1999... Linux today has millions of users, thousands of developers, and a growing market. It is used in embedded systems; it is used to control robotic devices; it has flown on the space shuttle. I'd like to say that I knew this would happen, that...

The Origin OF THE Camel Lot IN THE Breakdown OF THE Bilingual Unix.(Technology Information)
April 1, 1999... Approximately 12 years ago, the Unix programming universe consisted of two linguistic cultures. You either programmed in C, or you programmed in the shell (for some value of shell). The two systems were good for different things, so their...

Shared Leadership IN THE Apache Project.(Technology Information)
April 1, 1999... The Apache Project [1] is a collaborative software development effort aimed at creating and maintaining a robust, secure, efficient, extensible, and open-source implementation of an HTTP (Web) server. The project is managed by the Apache...

Free Software Needs Profit.(Technology Information)
April 1, 1999... Sooner or later, every successful open-source software package will have one or more profitable businesses associated with it. For example, the Linux operating system is supported by several companies including Red Hat and Caldera; the GNU...

Following the Path of Evolvable Hardware.(Technology Information)
April 1, 1999... Evolvable hardware (EHW) refers to one particular type of hardware whose architecture, structure, and functions change dynamically and autonomously in order to improve its performance in performing certain tasks [1]. The emergence of this new...

Quo Vadis Evolvable Hardware?(Technology Information)
April 1, 1999... From Darwin to Darware: Why computer engineers have started listening to Mother (Nature). Whether one looks outside the window or stands in front of a mirror, nature's work is evident in all its glory. Be it a pine tree, a flea, or a...

Field-Programmable Gate Arrays.(Technology Information)
April 1, 1999... Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are integrated circuits, which constitute the "new kid in town" where digital hardware technology is concerned. An FPGA is an array of logic blocks (cells) placed in an infrastructure of...

Evolvable hardware chips for industrial applications.(Technology Information)
April 1, 1999... Autonomous, dynamic, and suitable for a variety of real-world applications. In contrast to conventional hardware, in which the structure is irreversibly fixed in the design process, evolvable hardware is designed to adapt, as the...

Hardware evolution system AdAM.
April 1, 1999... The Adoptive Architecture Methodology (ADAM) [3] is o platform utilized in a hardware evolution experiment. We constructed the hardware evolution system AdAM based on Hardware Description Language (HDL). This system automatically generates...

Experiments on evolving software models of analog circuits.(Technology Information)
April 1, 1999... Analog circuits are of great importance in electronic system design since the world is fundamentally analog in nature. While the amount of digital design activity for outpaces that of analog design, most digital systems require analog modules...

Analysis of unconventional evolved electronics.(Technology Information)
April 1, 1999... Artificial evolution can produce bizarre circuits that work--but do we need to understand them? In recent years, several research groups have demonstrated the potential for artificial evolution to design electronic circuits...

Building consumer trust online.(Internet/Web/Online Service Information)
April 1, 1999... How merchants can win back lost consumer trust in the interests of e-commerce sales. Moving some Web consumers along to the purchase click is proving to be difficult, despite the impressive recent growth in online shopping. Consumer...

GPS-based geographic addressing, routing, and resource discovery.(Global Positioning System)(Internet/Web/Online Service Information)
April 1, 1999... The Global Positioning System can be used to give every terminal a geographic address for multicasting to and from recipients within specified geographical areas. GPS cards will soon be included in cars manufactured in the U.S. and...

Top management toolbox for managing corporate IT.(Industry Trend or Event)
April 1, 1999... These checks and balances prevent project runaways and deliver systems that further corporate strategy and performance. The rapid introduction of new IT into organizations and the increased competition in the general business environment...

OO distributed programming is not distributed OO programming.(object-oriented distributed programming)(Technology Information)
April 1, 1999... Object-oriented distributed programming is fundamentally different from building mechanisms that hide remote invocations behind traditional, centralized abstractions. The metaphor of a community of independent objects communicating by passing...

Just a Matter of Bandwidth.(Humor)
April 1, 1999... The previously incomprehensible increases in communication capacities now appearing almost daily may be enabling a quantum leap in one of the ultimately most promising, yet underfunded, areas of scientific research--teleportation. But to an...