Communications of the ACM articles from December 1997

Communications of the ACM archives from December 1997

China's new Internet regulations: two steps forward, one step back.(International Perspectives)(Column)
December 1, 1997... China's recent double-digit economic growth has impressed the world, but its telecommunications sector has been growing faster than the economy as a whole, expanding at an annual rate of 30%-50% since 1989 [10]. Each year, about 10 million...

How best to provide the services IS programmers need. (information systems)(Practical Programmer)(Column)
December 1, 1997... Many previous column about Cobol begat a firestorm of responses. Obviously, there are deep feelings -- both pro and con -- about that ancient programming language and the needs of the information systems domain. One of the most frequent...

Lessons learned during requirements acquisition for COTS system. (commercial off-the-shelf)(On Site)(Column)
December 1, 1997... In an effort to inform readers of the lessons learned when selecting a complex commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software system, we report here on the problems of and solutions to requirements acquisition and product selection. We encourage...

Visual information management.(Cover Story)
December 1, 1997... Many disparate advances in technology are making visual information in computing as important at it is in regular biological human life. We humans are most adept and comfortable with visual information, using our vision for routine activities as...

In search of information in visual media.
December 1, 1997... Information is data with semantic association. An information system's most important role is to capture the data and its semantic associations so users can perform meaningful tasks with the information. An information system's design and...

Retrieving and visualizing video.
December 1, 1997... A new front-page interface promises automated access, visualization, and manipulation of video images, clips, and compressed storage. Like its traditional database counterpart, a digital video database management system (VDBMS) seeks to provide...

Video abstracting.
December 1, 1997... Pulling together clips of a feature film selected for such content as text, dialogs, and explosions yields a video abstract that can be put onto an html page for browsing. The abstract of an article is a short summary often used to pre-select...

Visual information retrieval from large distributed online repositories.
December 1, 1997... Digital images and video are becoming an integral part of human communication. The ease of creating and capturing digital imagery has enabled its proliferation, making our interaction with online information sources largely visual. We...

Managing multimedia information in database systems.
December 1, 1997... In the past decade, the database field has been quite active, discovering more efficient methods for managing alphanumeric data; bringing application-dependent concepts, such as rules, into database environments; and managing such new types of...

A nation of strangers? (patterns of friendship and involvement in Internet users)
December 1, 1997... Readers of New York tabloid newspapers may have been shocked earlier this year by a front-page photograph showing a local computer expert being led away in handcuffs, having been arrested on charges of raping a woman he had met via the...

Slim binaries. (compression of the object file of a computer program)
December 1, 1997... The traditional path to software portability among various hardware platforms takes a new turn with the use of slim binaries. The power of computers has increased dramatically over the past 20 years. Not only has the performance of processors...

A formal specifications maturity model. (process improvement model for software development)
December 1, 1997... Software quality is an issue of generally recognized importance. We propose a measurement model to determine the capability maturity levels of formal specification processes in software development environments. Formal specification methods...

Using objects for systems analysis. (object-oriented programming and software design)
December 1, 1997... By drawing on distinctive models of representation we are able to analyze the role of objects in domain modeling. This method leads to a clearer understanding of various aspects of the 00 approach. The object-oriented approach originated...

ACM's computing classification system reflects changing times. (Association for Computing Machinery)(Column)
December 1, 1997... ACM's Computing Classification System (CCS) has been updated. The 1998 CCS (effective in January) is now available at http://www.acm. org/class/, together with its 1964 and 1991 predecessors. CCS forms the framework for indexing all...

Programming as a discipline?(Technical Opinion)(Column)
December 1, 1997... Programming is not just an activity, it's a discipline, with its own value system -- or so I believed. I'd like to describe an experience that shook my faith. A few years ago I started building a system for understanding speech. I wanted...

System development woes. (problems in software and systems engineering)(Inside Risks)(Column)
December 1, 1997... A past Risks column ("System Development Woes," Oct. 1993) considered some system development efforts that were cancelled, seriously late, overrun, or otherwise unacceptable. In the light of recent fiascos reported in the Risks Forum, it seems...