Communications of the ACM articles from October 1998

Communications of the ACM archives from October 1998

Editorial pointers.(Editorial)
October 1, 1998... THE magic of middleware is obvious when we see software and hardware that weren't created to communicate with each other now conversing seamlessly. Such is the story with the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA)--a highly popular...

Practically giving it all away.(News Track)
October 1, 1998... A SURPLUS OF U.S. MILITARY equipment sold around the world often contains technology that should have been removed, says a General Accounting Office report, based on a six-month investigation that ended in May. Military sales are held...

Minority Internet gains.(News Track)(Brief Article)
October 1, 1998... ROUGHLY 70 MILLION MEN AND women over the age of 16 and living in the U.S. use the Internet, according to the June 1998 findings by Nielson Media Research and CommerceNet, representing a 26% increase from a September 1997 study. Growth rates...

Strictly decaf.(News Track)(Brief Article)
October 1, 1998... A BREAKTHROUGH METHOD TO replace the corrosive chemicals used to etch circuits on silicon chips is being tested at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, reports New Scientist. Carbon dioxide (C[O.sub.2]), which is used to extract...

Bowie's hunky dory ISP.(News Track)(Brief Article)
October 1, 1998... ROCK STAR DAVID BOWIE now offers high-speed Internet service (www.davidbowie.com) across North America, with worldwide service expected by year's end. Users get a customizable home page, email address, chat rooms, news, weather, and sports....

The cyberbionic man.(News Track)
October 1, 1998... A SILICON CHIP TRANSPONDER was surgically implanted into the arm of a cybernetics professor at the University of Reading in England, reports PC World Online. The chip, about an inch long and one-tenth of an inch wide, is commercially...

Glasnot? Nyet.(News Track)(Brief Article)
October 1, 1998... RUSSIA PLANS TO INTRODUCE A bill requiring Russian Internet providers to install black-box snooping devices in their servers and build high-speed fiber-optic links directly to Russia's Federal Security Service (the KGB's successor), reports...

Modern-day Vatican: pope net.(News Track)
October 1, 1998... IN AN EFFORT TO PROMOTE ITS "image in the world of modern social communication," the Vatican now broadcasts live audio and video of some of the pope's religious services across the Internet. People can watch and listen to the broadcasts using...

Determining sewage spills.(News Track)
October 1, 1998... A COMPUTER SYSTEM THAT determines the severity of sewage spills and which beaches they will affect has been installed in the New York, tri-state region. Developed by New Jersey-based Hydroqual, the $105,000 system processes water temperature,...

Top five cities with the highest median pay for computer consultants.(News Track)
October 1, 1998... Top five cities with the highest median pay for computer consultants: $ per hour New York 80 San Francisco/ 75 Silicon Valley Boston 70 Chicago 68 Seattle ...

Gauging Mount Everest's peak.(News Track)(Brief Article)
October 1, 1998... USING THE GLOBAL POSITIONING System, a 12-satellite navigation system initially developed for the U.S. military, scientists and climbers discovered: * Mount Everest is growing by about one centimeter a year * Though the world's...

Young gun.(News Track)
October 1, 1998... THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD MAKONNEN Hannah was appointed computer consultant to the government of Jamaica. Hannah reports to Jamaica's minister of Commerce and Technology, keeping him abreast of new trends in computing and is responsible for "putting...

Y2K countdown.(News Track)(Illustration)
October 1, 1998... MAKING THE GRADE The House Government, Management, Information and Technology subcommittee graded federal agencies on their efforts to fix the Y2K computer problem. Here's the report card: Agency Grade...

Who won the Mosaic War?(Digital Village)
October 1, 1998... Remember the Mosaic War? It was the hot topic of techie conversation a few years ago. The term hearkens back to the kinder and simpler era of Web antiquity (circa, 1994!). Like "navigator/browser," "helper app" and "X-windows," the term...

Outlawing technology.(From the President)(Editorial)
October 1, 1998... Along with the development of the Web, some exciting predictions have come true. People anticipated having vast libraries and entertainment such as movies, music, and games accessible from home computers. We are about to enter a new era of...

An Internet diffusion framework.(Personal Computing)
October 1, 1998... Over the years, we covered the globe with cities then linked them with railroads, highways, telephone lines, power grids, canals, and so forth. We are now deploying the Internet, and several organizations and projects are tracking this global...

Maintaining high living standards through innovation, strong patents.(Viewpoint)
October 1, 1998... Much has been written about how the explosion of patent litigation between high technology companies threatens to cripple the U.S.'s most innovative companies. Critics of the patent system have been quick to point out how patent infringement...

The CORBA connection.(Cover Story)
October 1, 1998... In the early days of computing, computers operated independently of one another with no communication between them. The hardware and the system software were proprietary and supplied by a single vendor. The software applications were usually...

OMG overview: CORBA and the OMA in enterprise computing: coordinating support for every phase of computing.
October 1, 1998... When the Object Management Group (OMG) was formed in 1989, interoperability was its founders' primary, and almost their sole, objective: A vision of software components working smoothly together, without regard to details of any component's...

New features for CORBA 3.0: despite its original flexibility and applicability to various environments, CORBA evolves to remain viable as a standard for distributed object-oriented applications.
October 1, 1998... Fundamentally, CORBA is an application integration technology. Since its inception in 1991, CORBA has provided abstractions for distributed object-oriented programming that have allowed developers to seamlessly integrate diverse applications...

Evaluating architectures for multithreaded object request brokers: developing threading architectures capable of efficient handling of multiple clients presents challenging complexity.
October 1, 1998... CORBA Object Request Brokers (ORBs) deliver client requests to servants and return responses to clients. To accomplish this, ORBs manage transport connections, perform transport endpoint demultiplexing, and provide the multithreading...

Binding, migration, and scalability in CORBA: One Repository to register them all, One Repository to find them, One Repository to start them all, and with IIOP bind them, in the land of CORBA where the Objects lie. (With apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien).
October 1, 1998... ORBA's object model [4] relies to a large degree on the semantics of object references. An object reference uniquely identifies a local or remote object instance--clients can only invoke an operation on an object if they hold a reference to...

The benefits of CORBA-based network management: the choice of CORBA and Java combined with the open Interface Definition Language interface leads to a highly open, extensible, and distributed solution.
October 1, 1998... Network management systems have become an increasingly important part of today's computer networks. As the complexity of networks increases, so have the requirements of the systems managing these networks. These requirements include providing...

Internet security and the case of Bank of America: a recent pilot project proves it is feasible to exchange critical business transactions over the Net in a secure, reliable, and faster manner.
October 1, 1998... Until recently, most firms trusted their critical electronic business transactions to external value-added network (VAN) providers. Today, however, the Internet is often proposed as an alternative to VANs as the transport medium based on the...

Toward a unified view of electronic commerce: is it strictly a selling tool or does it encompass a spectrum of telecommunications technologies? That's the debate between practitioners and researchers over what constitutes e-commerce. The recent emergence of extranets, however, promises to bridge the gap between internal and external uses of the Internet.
October 1, 1998... There has been an unprecedented growth in the usage of telecommunications applications recently such as electronic data interchange (EDI), email, and the Internet. The commercialization of the Internet has led many to believe that a new era...

How to anticipate the Internet's global diffusion: don't ignore the user and application diversity factor when trying to predict the future number of Internet hosts.
October 1, 1998... Tracking the Internet's global diffusion is a daunting but increasingly important task, especially for network capacity planners [8]. A 1997 report found that the Internet consists of more than 16 million registered host computers. Conceived...

Engineering in software.(Technical Opinion)
October 1, 1998... Software development is similar to building bridges. Technical expertise is applied to build something that may be confidently used where expertise is lacking. A person crosses a bridge without measuring the beams and repeating the stress...

Calendar of events.(Calendar)
October 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...

Risks of e-education.(Inside Risks)
October 1, 1998... Some universities and other institutions are offering or contemplating courses to be taken remotely via Internet, including a few with degree programs. There are many potential benefits: teachers can reuse collaboratively prepared course...