Communications of the ACM articles from August 1998

Communications of the ACM archives from August 1998

Editorial pointers.(Editorial)
August 1, 1998... WHITE House senior policy advisor Ira Magaziner, regarding the impact of information technology on the U.S. economy (see "From Washington," p. 21), lets the numbers tell the story. He points out that while IT firms account for only 8% of the...

Say ahhhh ...(News Track)(Brief Article)
August 1, 1998... After two decades of limited acceptance as a way to provide health care to people in areas where there are few doctors, telemedicine is getting its due, with prisons serving as proving ground for broadening its use, reports the New York Times....

Not necessarily for women only.(News Track)
August 1, 1998... Gathering information on the Web can be exhausting, with search engines listing Web sites not even remotely familiar to the subject matter presented. What follows is a list of some Web sites pertaining to women's health. * The National...

E-commerce law.(News Track)(Brief Article)
August 1, 1998... Singapore passed an electronic commerce law as part of an effort to establish the country as an international hub for growing cyber trade. "We need to create an environment of trust, predictability and certainty in the Singapore System, with...

Snatched away.(News Track)(Brief Article)
August 1, 1998... In their voracious hiring search, high-tech companies are leaving computer science departments across U.S. campuses bereft of graduate students and, in growing numbers, undergraduates, with the lure of well-paying jobs. Faculty positions in...

Where have all the PCs gone?(News Track)(Brief Article)(Illustration)
August 1, 1998... In 1997, more than 1.5 million desktop and laptop PCs were stolen, damaged, or destroyed, with losses of more than $2.5 billion. Causes of loss: Accidents 35% Theft 26% Power surge 18% Lightning ...

Net roulette.(News Track)(Brief Article)
August 1, 1998... Online gambling will increase from $535 million to over $10 billion per year according to a report by Datamonitor, a management consulting group. Revenues from online gambling in the U.S., which has the highest online population, will rise from...

Click-on coupons.(News Track)(Brief Article)
August 1, 1998... The latest Web marketing gimmick is high-tech coupons by Catalina Marketing, St. Petersburg, Fla., which sits on a vast database of personal shopping histories gleaned from its thousands of supermarket scanners across the country. The company...

Flying into glitches.(News Track)(Brief Article)
August 1, 1998... Reserving electronic airline tickets has become popular, expanding e-ticketing to more routes, and causing travelers to discover more glitches, reports USA Today. A survey by the American Society of Travel Agents showed 47% of its members had...

The beep of love.(News Track)
August 1, 1998... In Japan, love is in the air thanks to the love beeper or Lovegety, an oval disc that fits in your hand and sends different signals, depending on the setting. When someone of the opposite sex carrying Lovegety comes into range, the two machines...

Using technology to address old problems in new ways.(Log on Education)
August 1, 1998... After attending a school board meeting, you find yourself walking to the parking lot with the school's superintendent. She knows you are involved in technology and turns to ask: "So, what is the value of computers in education?" This is what's...

Shaping public policy in the information age.(From Washington)
August 1, 1998... Policy makers and computing professionals converged on Washington in May to participate in the first major meeting designed to promote an ongoing dialog between the two camps. The goal of the ACM Policy '98 Conference was to create avenues of...

Only the names have changed.(Forum)(Letter to the Editor)
August 1, 1998... THANKS FOR ROBERT GLASS'S excellent column, "Everything Old is New Again" (May 1998, p. 17). I agree with most everything Glass says. My favorite characterization of the IT industry is "back to the future." My disagreement: The...

Shooting blanks.(Forum)(Letter to the Editor)
August 1, 1998... I'D LIKE TO POINT OUT THE May 1998 "Electronic Frontier" column ("Don't Shoot Me, I'm Famous," p. 13) by Brock Meeks was the worst piece I've read in Communications. It consisted mainly of partisan, biased Feinstein-bashing. Is Meeks...

A missed menace.(Letter to the Editor)
August 1, 1998... A "NEws TRACK" ITEM ("Sidestepping Cryptography Prohibition," May 1998, p. 10), explained how a Netherlands subsidiary of Network Associates is planning to release a version of the PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) program outside the U.S., thus...

Correction.(Forum)(Correction Notice)
August 1, 1998... An article by James W. Cooper in the special section on Java ("Using Design Patterns," June 1998, p. 65) contains some misrepresented code lines. The correct code segments can be found in Cooper's article in ACM's Digital Library; www.acm.org.

Information systems and economics.(Cover Story)
August 1, 1998... Do big dollar expenditures on information systems pay off?. Friction-free: is that what we really want markets to be [3]? Is it time for consumers to say goodbye to fixed pricing [2]? The Internet creates an environment in which the cost of...

The emerging role of electronic marketplaces on the Internet: Internet-based electronic marketplaces leverage information technology to match buyers and sellers with increased effectiveness and lower transaction costs, leading to more efficient, "friction-free" markets.(Internet Economics)
August 1, 1998... Markets play a central role in the economy, facilitating the exchange of information, goods, services, and payments. In the process, they create economic value for buyers, sellers, market intermediaries, and for society at large. Recent years...

Internet service providers, proprietary content, and the battle for users' dollars.
August 1, 1998... That "someone else" mentioned in the newspaper item reprinted here is WorldCom, a giant telecommunications company that owns UUnet and is a major provider of Internet backbone and connectivity services. AOL announced it was selling its...

Beyond the productivity paradox: computers are the catalyst for bigger changes.(The Business Value of IT)
August 1, 1998... Why Should We Care About Productivity? An important question that has been debated for almost a decade is whether computers contribute to productivity growth. Productivity isn't everything. However, as noted by the economist Paul Krugman,...

International dimensions of the productivity paradox: don't blame IT!
August 1, 1998... The productivity paradox of information technology questions the contributions of IT to economic output and productivity, based on the fact that there has been a marked slowdown in productivity growth despite massive and growing investments in...

Progress, obstacles, and opportunities in software engineering economics: pressing demands from industry suggest more attention should be focused on this critical area.
August 1, 1998... Nearly a decade of Workshops on Information Systems and Economics (WISE) have examined a wide range of research topics. These include a number of what could be termed "demand-side" topics, which focus on the effective use of information...

Evaluating the cost of software quality: the time has come to financially justify investments in software quality improvements, just like we justify other software projects.
August 1, 1998... The explosive growth of the software industry in recent years has focused attention on the problems long associated with software development: uncontrollable costs, missed schedules, and unpredictable quality. To remain competitive, software...

Spam! Junk email--yes, it's annoying, but it can also be overwhelming. A new study evaluates the current extent of the spamming problem and suggests there are no quick fixes to solve the situation.
August 1, 1998... Concern about the proliferation of unsolicited bulk email, commonly referred to as "spam," has been steadily increasing. When received in small quantities, spam may annoy recipients, but rarely poses a significant problem. However, some...

Web-based development of complex information products: want to launch a virtual enterprise using the Web as your technology infrastructure? First learn what's missing from today's Web architecture and which extensions are needed for large-scale collaboration.
August 1, 1998... The World-Wide Web connects islands of information, along with the people seeking that information, from within corporate intranets and across the global Internet, easily and effectively. Sharing information without regard to physical location...

The case for user-centered CASE tools: CASE tools need to become more useful if they are to be applied to the practice of software production.
August 1, 1998... The interest in CASE tools is based on expectations of increased productivity, improved product quality, easier maintenance, and making software development a more enjoyable task. Current experiences, however, suggest that CASE technology...

Effective distribution of object-oriented applications: as OO applications proliferate, how much of the traditional distribution schemes can be reused, and what new strategies need to be devised?
August 1, 1998... In the last few years, the move towards distributed systems has been rapid. Distributed processing models have matured from early master/slave models to new patterns such as client/server computing and intranet computing. There is also a...

Achieving bottom-line improvements with enterprise frameworks.(Thinking Oobjectively)
August 1, 1998... Enterprise Frameworks address such broad application domains as telecommunications, avionics, financial services, and manufacturing. Enterprise frameworks are expensive to develop and/or purchase, relative to system infrastructure (such as GUI...

Calendar of events.(Calendar)
August 1, 1998... ACM's calendar policy is to list open computer science meetings that are sponsored by ACM, sister societies, or other scientific, technical or educational tax-exempt organizations. Educational seminars, institutes, and courses are not included...

Computer science and software engineering: filing for divorce?(Inside Risks)
August 1, 1998... Recent proposals to license software engineers have strained the uneasy tension between computer scientists and software engineers. Software engineers tend to believe that certification is valuable and licensing is inevitable; they want...