When considering this month’s special section on component-based enterprise frameworks, I was reminded of the photomosaic works of Robert Silvers. You’ve probably seen many examples of this artist’s work in recent years. He specializes in conjoining and layering hundreds of small images to form a totally different, yet recognizable, image. Indeed, the April 1998 cover […]
Diane Crawford
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Forum: What Defines a Programming Relic?
Glass’s differentiation of art versus practice is right on the money (July 2000, p. 15). But what I see as the problem for the mature practitioner (besides the smugness of the younger ones) is not necessarily overcoming technical obsolescence but emotional obsolescence. And this is what upper management and the young practitioners sense as well. […]
Speech technology is a curious field that has been on the threshold of "emerging" for many years. In 1960, J.C.R. Licklider estimated we would achieve significant speech recognition by 1965. Indeed, I recall sitting in the plush offices of a true industry guru well over a decade ago as he demonstrated the latest in speech-to-text. […]
I enjoyed Brock Meeks’s column, "Bad Moon Rising" (Jun. 2000, p. 19). I was particularly amused by AOL’s Steve Case’s quoted comments that "all competitors would be welcome on the AOL-Time Warner system." In keeping with Meeks’s grave doubts, Time Warner is already violating these precepts. Many RCA televisions have a built-in feature called the […]
If this issue does nothing else, it should convince you that personalization means something different to anyone who uses it, creates it, designs tools around it, even writes about it. Indeed, this milestone edition came about because of differing opinions over the questions and technologies that define personalization. It all began in March 1999, when […]
I caught an interview with Tom Cruise on TV the other day, out promoting his latest box-office boon Mission Impossible 2. Clips from the film’s action-packed scenes show Cruise scaling treacherous mountains thousands of feet high with nothing more than his fingernails, his megawatt smile, and a piece of chalk. Cut to Tom leaping from […]
IT really doesn’t require a turn of the century to get computing professionals to address the enigma of system integration. It’s been an ongoing practice—complete with professional and financial headaches—since organizations realized the rich benefits of building, layering, and evolving their own unique information systems and application domains. Considering the critical role system integration plays […]
Enterprise resource planning systems promise to integrate a wide array of business functions within an organization, everything from inventory control, to sales, production, purchasing, finance, human resources, and more. It all sounds pretty straightforward, and it would be, if all companies followed the same straightforward path. Fortunately, ERP systems have become far more flexible and […]
The familiar interfaces that have allowed humans and computers to communicate are being transformed before our eyes. The era of pointing, clicking, or typing is giving way to new seamless, intuitive links between the two worlds. This issue presents two very different special sections with one common anthem: It’s clear we’ve reached a turning point […]
Forum: Software Project Failure Lessons Learned
This letter, triggered by Robert Glass’s "Practical Programmer" column "Buzzwordism and the Epic $150 Million Software Debacle" (Aug. 1999, p. 17), aims at a more general scope than just replying to Glass’s claims. Let me start, however, with a claim I share 100% with Glass: There is a big and unfortunate chasm between academe and […]
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