Communications of the ACM articles from June 1998

Communications of the ACM archives from June 1998

Editorial pointers.(Editorial)
June 1, 1998... IT'S hard to believe that Java is only three years old, especially when you consider it's spent most of that time at the top of everyone's wired consciousness. The meteoric rise of this object-oriented programming language can be traced to the...

Internet part deux.(News Track)(Brief Article)
June 1, 1998... A SUPER-FAST COMPUTER NETWORK connecting more than 100 U.S. universities was unveiled by Vice President Al Gore. The project, dubbed Internet2, was started in 1996 and funded by $500 million in private investment from such sponsors as Cisco...

Internationally weak phone key?(News Track)(Brief Article)
June 1, 1998... A GROUP OF UNIVERSITY OF CALIfornia computer researchers successfully cracked a widely used encryption method designed to prevent the cloning of digital cellular phones--that is, detecting a phone number and using it in another phone to...

Desktop reference.(News Track)(Brief Article)
June 1, 1998... SOFTWARE THAT ALLOWS PHYSICIANS in one hospital to instantly access patient records in another, a utility that seems obviously desirable and long overdue, is being developed by W3Health in Boston, reports Wired. Called W3EMRS, the software is...

Top 10 Y2K date-problem spending projections.(News Track)(Brief Article)(Illustration)
June 1, 1998... COMPANY SPENDING Citicorp 600 General Motors 410-540 Bank America 380 AT&T 350 GTE 350 Chase Manhattan 300 Bell Atlantic 200-300 J.P....

Digital dust.(News Track)(Brief Article)
June 1, 1998... IN THE WORLD'S MAD DASH TO be digital, Forrester Research estimates that by 2000, 75% of all data will be "born digital"--that is, will never have existed on paper--but that the digital storage medium is so fragile, some information might not...

Eyes not only a window to the soul.(News Track)(Brief Article)
June 1, 1998... PIN NUMBERS WILL SOON BE A forgotten memory, if a demonstration at the Nationwide Building Society in Swindon, England, proves to be a tech harbinger. In order for customers to use a cash machine, the system, which Nationwide describes as the...

The E-book to end all P-books.(News Track)(Brief Article)
June 1, 1998... THE BOOK OF THE FUTURE WILL not be on a disk or a monitor but instead "printed" on bound leafable pages, with a memory to hold a number of different titles, transportable anywhere. MIT researchers are working on a project they call "the last...

Auto chip to sniff whiff.(News Track)(Brief Article)
June 1, 1998... RESEARCHERS ARE DEVELOPING a tiny "electronic nose" to monitor the interior air quality and exterior emissions of automobiles to see whether they meet government regulations, reports Computerworld. The environmental sensor on a chip is part of...

Data-processing folklore.(News Track)(Brief Article)
June 1, 1998... RUMOR HAS IT A RETAIL CHAIN put all its checkout-counter data into a giant digital warehouse and set the disk drives spinning, popping out the most unusual correlation: sales of diapers and beer. It seems young fathers would make a late-night...

Protecting an invaluable and ever-widening infrastructure.(International Perspectives)
June 1, 1998... Infrastructure" is defined as "the basic facilities, services, and installations needed for the functioning of a community or society, such as transportation and communications systems, water and power lines, and public institutions." Societies...

Low-cost estimation of travel trade-offs.(Personal Computing)
June 1, 1998... We have seen a dramatic reduction in the cost of communication during the last 20 years as the transmission capacity of fiber has increased ten-fold every four years since the mid-1970s [3]. Improved technology and the substitution of optical...

Who needs educational software?(Forum)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 1998... ELLIOT SOLOWAY'S OBSERVATIONS on educational software ("No One Is Making Money from Educational Software," Feb. 1998, p. 11) are not only valid for U.S. schools, but for schools and universities in the Netherlands. However, he overrates the...

Campus-wide computing.(Forum)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 1998... THE SET OF ARTICLES IN THE January special section on campus-wide computing was excellent. I maintain a Web page with a matrix of information on notebook computer campuses and there are links to the Web sites of the respective institutions...

Sun's role in Java standards.(Forum)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 1998... HAVING BEEN ONE OF THE principal participants, I'd like to amplify the story behind Roy Rada's column ("Corporate Shortcut to Standardization/Jan. 1998, p. 11) and show what it means to Sun Microsystems, ISO, and the industry. Sun was...

What Y2K problem?(Forum)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 1998... JUST IN CASE I NEEDED CONvincing (I don't) that I'm fully obsolete, my lack of understanding of the Y2K problem clinches the case. In particular, "Calculating the Cost of Year-2000 Compliance" by Kappelman et al. (Feb. 1998, p. 30) leaves me...

Mysterious forces at work.(Forum)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 1998... THE MARCH I998 NEWS TRACK (p. 11) carried an item about mysterious forces restructuring the Internet address system, which now provides four numbers 000-255 for a total of 4.3 billion addresses, approximately the Earth's population. The new...

A question of addiction.(Forum)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 1998... IN PETER G. NEUMANN'S RISKS column, "Are Computers Addictive?" (Mar. 1998, p. 128), he states, "Hackers have stereo typically been associated with such compulsive behavior as chronically bad eating habits, generally antisocial manners... Even...

Object objections.(Forum)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 1998... JEFFREY PARSONS AND YAIR Wand (Dec. 1997, "Using Objects for Systems Analysis," p. 104) make an important point in separating the things of a problem domain from the structure and organization of the things. Unfortunately, they fail to...

Internet malcontents of the world--unite!(Viewpoint)
June 1, 1998... Ever since the Clinton administration announced its program to escrow encryption keys for law enforcement and national security, it has tried to convince a skeptical international community that other governments around the world favored a...

Building an informational bridge to China.(On Site)
June 1, 1998... China is undergoing a technological sea change in the late 1990s, and the effects will be felt far into the new millennium. The country will play a major role--perhaps the major role--in the computer-dominated world of the next century. ...

The Java factor.(Cover Story)
June 1, 1998... THE "WRITE ONCE, RUN ANYWHERE" SLOGAN IS SYNONYMOUS WITH THE JAVA PROGRAMMING language. The Java run-time library provides application developers with the ability to write code in one single language and the confidence that the code will...

Why are we using Java again?
June 1, 1998... The practical answer you'll receive when asking anyone why they're programming in Java is based in the ultimate dream of platform-independence. Write an application in one place and it can run on any machine under any operating system (at least...

Business process components for distributed object applications: the San Francisco project offers developers extendable components to simplify the transition to distributed, easily customizable applications.
June 1, 1998... THE SAN FRANCISCO PROJECT WAS STARTED WHEN SEVERAL IBM BUSINESS PARTNERS asked for help in modernizing their application products. These application products typically were written in procedural languages, such as RPG or Cobol. The code ranged...

Adding real-time capabilities to Java: through extensive experimentation, developers somehow find the right combination of parameters to maximize cost, performance, and compliance with real-time constraints.
June 1, 1998... SUN MICROSYSTEMS INITIALLY DEVELOPED JAVA AS A TOOL TO SUPPORT INTERNAL development of small embedded systems. Later, they determined the language was appropriate for development and distribution of Internet applications and released the...

The virtual reality modeling language and Java: integrating two powerful and portable software languages provides interactive 3D graphics plus complete programming capabilities and network access.
June 1, 1998... THE WEB IS BEING EXTENDED TO THREE SPATIAL DIMENSIONS THANKS TO VRML, a dynamic 3D scene description language that can include embedded behaviors and camera animation. A rich set of graphics primitives provides a common-denominator file format...

Using design patterns.
June 1, 1998... DESIGN PATTERNS ARE A CATALOG OF USEFUL, TESTED METHODS FOR WRITING MORE effective object-oriented programs [2]. Although some believe these patterns are esoterica, they are actually extremely useful ways to write better programs. Writing a...

Java object-sharing in Habanero: a new framework for collaborative tool development uses any platform that supports Java.
June 1, 1998... The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois hosts University and corporate supercomputer research teams distributed around the world. Typically, the various research teams use a wide variety of...

Benchmarking European software management practices.
June 1, 1998... The strategic importance of software has long been understood by practitioners and policy makers all over the world. Not only does software form the backbone of such industries as banking, airlines, and publishing, it is an increasingly...

Programs that offer fast, flawless, logical reasoning: confused by too many reasonable conclusions? Sort them out through automated reasoning using special strategies that logically restrict and direct the search for the answer.
June 1, 1998... The English detective Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek's Mr. Spock could reason logically and flawlessly, always. Some people you know have that ability, sometimes. Unfortunately, without perfect reasoning, diverse problems arise, like bugs in...

Profiling successful reengineering projects: the most successful reengineering projects direct attention to social design and process transformation rather than analyzing existing procedures.
June 1, 1998... The rapidity with which the concept of business process reengineering has been introduced and adopted by many organizations in the last few years has been nothing short of incredible. Many success stories of IT-enabled BPR have been reported...

Calendar of events.(Calendar)
June 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...

Infrastructure risk reduction.(Inside Risks)
June 1, 1998... The FBI and U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno recently announced plans to establish a National Infrastructure Protection Center. Critical processing and communication structures are to be protected against hackers and criminals. Given today's IT...