Communications of the ACM articles from January 1997

Communications of the ACM archives from January 1997

If it grows, tax it. (planned taxation of the Internet)
January 1, 1997... Some people see the Internet as a worldwide free-speech machine. Tax officials see it as a cash-cow and as a potential tax-evasion machine. The fast-growing Internet business is part of the expending cyberspace sector of the national economy,...

The next date crisis and the ones after that. (computer date crisis)
January 1, 1997... Reality is the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of ugly facts. I'm sure you already know about how all information systems will go berserk when the year 2000 comes, the so-called "date crisis" everyone is talking about. This column...

Tomorrow's library today. (newest state-of-the art libraries)
January 1, 1997... Cyber-age form and function combined with public Internet access, electrically operated movable stacks, and vast electronic data resources update the old paper-based library model. Polished terrazzo. Perforated stainless steel panels. Raised...

Intel MMX for multimedia PCs. (MMX technology)(Cover Story)
January 1, 1997... Accelerating multimedia and communications applications, especially on the Internet, MMX technology, or multimedia extensions, for Intel microprocessors - starting with the Pentium - features 57 new instructions and other architectural...

The Legion vision of a worldwide virtual computer. (Legion software project)
January 1, 1997... Long a vision of science fiction writers and distributed systems researchers, the notion of a worldwide computer, now taking shape through the Legion project, distributes computation like the World-Wide Web distributes multimedia, creating the...

Computer virus - antivirus coevolution.
January 1, 1997... The battle to conquer computer viruses is far from won, but new and improved antidotes are controlling the field. As recently as six years ago, computer viruses were considered an urban myth by many. At the time, only a handful of PC viruses...

Artificial intelligence and virtual organizations.
January 1, 1997... It takes much more than the World-Wide Web to run a virtual organization. A virtual company has been defined as one where "complementary resources existing in a number of cooperating companies are left in place, but are integrated to support...

Ethics online. (need for online communications ethics)
January 1, 1997... Shaping social behavior online takes more than new laws and modified edicts. Nations around the world are in the process of making fundamental decisions about the future of their systems of online communication. The public discussions taking...

Adaptive recovery for mobile environments.
January 1, 1997... A new checkpoint protocol that is well adapted to the unique challenges of mobile environments is described. Mobile computing enables users to access and exchange information while they travel, roam in their home environments, or work at...

Fault-tolerant real-time objects.
January 1, 1997... The authors attack a challenging and important problem. Both the complexity of large-scale real-time (RT) computer systems in safety-critical application fields and the reliability expectations of the user community for such computer systems...

Parallel evaluation of software architecture specifications.
January 1, 1997... A hybrid model reduces the total number of nodes searched, processes generated, and communication channels required for the search process. The concept of software architecture has recently emerged as a new way to improve our ability to...

Mechanisms for detecting and handling timing errors.
January 1, 1997... High-assurance software systems are often implemented with the dangerous assumption that timing errors will never occur. Design and analysis of real-time systems is heavily based on knowing worst-case execution times (WCET) of periodic...

Cryptography, security, and the future. (maintaining computer security)
January 1, 1997... From email to cellular communications, from secure Web access to digital cash, cryptography is an essential part of today's information systems. Cryptography helps provide accountability, fairness, accuracy, and confidentiality. It can prevent...