Communications of the ACM articles from November 1998

Communications of the ACM archives from November 1998

News Track.(News Briefs)
November 1, 1998... "I knew it wouldn't be too long before the Jetsons became reality." --Jeffrey Kagan of Atlanta's Kagan Associates, commenting on the latest communications technology: a 24-hour, low-flying aircraft circling the skies over major...

Stop, in the Name of Spam.(letters to the editor)(Letter to the Editor)
November 1, 1998... I read the article by Lorrie Faith Cranor and Brian A. LaMacchia ("Spam!," Aug. 1998, p. 74) with interest. I find the title is inaccurate; I still use the old definitions of the terms "hacker" and "spam," and I insist that people use the...

A Digital Government for the 21st Century.
November 1, 1998... A recent workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the Government Information Technology Services Board, and the National Institutes of Health investigated the use of information technology within the federal government. A final...

The Internet in India: Better Times Ahead?(Internet/Web/Online Service Information)
November 1, 1998... India: The world's largest democracy; focal point of competition between rival empires--local and foreign--for more than 4,000 years; the world's second most populous nation, after the People's Republic of China. The number of...

HPC Export Controls: Navigating Choppy Waters.(handheld PCs)(Government Activity)
November 1, 1998... The U.S. Debate Over Export Controls of high-performance computing (HPC) never goes away. In October 1995, President Clinton announced the second major revision to the HPC export control policy of his administration. Since then, press reports...

The High-Performance Computing Continuum.(Technology Information)
November 1, 1998... Just as in the worldwide PC environment, high-end systems are increasingly ubiquitous, continuous, and pervasive. The ability and capacity of computing systems continue to increase at an ever-quickening pace. This trend is perhaps most...

Architecture.(supercomputer design)(Technology Information)
November 1, 1998... Uniting commodity processors by the thousands, emerging parallel architectures promise solutions to complex calculations--at least until the laws of physics impose a fundamental barrier to human innovation. To appreciate the advance in...

Metasystems.(Technology Information)
November 1, 1998... How they, create the illusion of a giant desktop computational environment--transparent, distributed, shared, secure, fault-tolerant. Metasystems give users the illusion that the files, databases, computers, and external devices they can...

Data-Intensive Computing and Digital Libraries.(scientific applications)(Technology Information)
November 1, 1998... How to automate management of the flood of scientific data being collected in astronomical and neuroscience projects. Computational science is expanding to include not only analyses based on simulations but those requiring manipulation of...

Programming Tools and Environments.(for supercomputing)(Technology Information)
November 1, 1998... Along with new languages, numerical libraries, and infrastructure--with names like KeLp, Titanium, and Meta-Chaos--They let scientists create deeply complex compute- and data-intensive applications. Advances in the computational...

Education, Outreach, and Training.(Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure)(Industry Trend or Event)
November 1, 1998... Enlarging the high-performance computational community while educating U.S. students at all levels in basic math and science. For the past decade, the industrial, business, and scientific communities have warned that the U.S. technical...

A FRAMEWORK for IDENTIFYING SOFTWARE PROJECT RISKS.(Technology Information)(Technical)
November 1, 1998... We've all heard tales of multimillion dollar mistakes that somehow ran off course. Are software projects that risky or do managers need to take a fresh approach when preparing for such critical expeditions? Software projects are...

THE VIRTUAL DESIGN TEAM.(new project management simulation methods)(Technology Information)(Technical)
November 1, 1998... A computational simulation model of project organizations that is usable and predictive for touche, project-oriented design tasks. Faced with increasingly competitive global markets and tight-fisted taxpayers, many private and public...

NEW DESIGN CONCEPTS FOR AN INTELLIGENT INTERNET.(Internet/Web/Online Service Information)(Technical)
November 1, 1998... Addressing security requirements, performance efficiency, and operational simplicity in a high-speed network environment. Information service is the focal point of all networks. In recent years, Advanced Intelligent Network (AIN), a...

EMPLOYMENT AND SALARIES OF RECENT CS DOCTORATES.(question of shortage vs .surplus)(Technology Information)
November 1, 1998... Is there a shortage or surplus of doctorates in computer science? In 1995, Massy and Goldman [3] predicted a national oversupply of doctorates in a number of science fields, while Ralston [6] provided a case study of an abundance of applicants...

Toward Trustworthy Networked Information Systems.(Technology Information)
November 1, 1998... When today's networked information systems (NISs) perform badly or don't work at all, lives, liberty, and property can be put at risk (see "Inside Risks," Jan. 1998). Interrupting service can threaten lives and property; destroying...

Myths about Rough Set Theory.(data analysis technique)(Technology Information)
November 1, 1998... The main concept of rough set theory (RST) is an indiscernibility relation normally associated with a set of attributes. For example, it may be the set consisting of attributes BloodPressure, Headache, and Temperature for an information table...