I don’t pretend to appreciate the entertainment value of the dark, dismal slash-and-bash game environments where you tell the good guys from the bad by the ferocity of the weaponry, the distortion of their torsos, the amount of blood spilled, and the distance it splays. But there’s no ignoring the fact the technology that delivers […]
Diane Crawford
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The one sure thing about "E-service" is that it’s anything but one thing. Seek out the phrase with your favorite search engine and the findings tell the story. The global proliferation of businesses, universities, and government offices adopting e-service technologies appears limitless. It’s clearly a term that translates in any language, though its definition is […]
The digital rights management (DRM) technology discussed in the special section "Digital Rights Management and Fair Use by Design" (Apr. 2003) has difficulty simultaneously serving commercial needs and the public interest because of the deep tension among its wide-ranging goals—honoring fair use, providing appropriate economic benefit to publishers and authors, and enabling interoperability across multiple […]
I enjoyed Diomidis Spinellis’s article ("The Decay and Failures of Web References," Jan. 2003) on the longevity of URLs but would like to contradict his conclusion that search engines and Web archives are unable to solve the problem. Spinellis cites a 1999 paper to argue that search engine coverage is inadequate. While this may have […]
As I write this column, the press is having a field day over reports that the latest corporate entity to surf the Wi-Fi wave is, of all things, McDonald’s (see News Track, page 10). The decision may not be as pioneering as, say, the low-cal vegan McWrap, but the hamburger giant is surely in impressive […]
Alan Karp’s "Making Money Selling Content that Others Are Giving Away" (Jan. 2003) places the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) where it belongs—on the scrap heap of legislative solutions to outdated business models. Sometimes called the best legislation money can buy, the DMCA, along with digital rights management software, seeks to maintain existing business models. […]
Technologists today are in a precarious position. On the one hand they’re expected to build consumer electronics and computers that fulfill user desires to tap the Internet’s free-flowing nature, accessing and sharing all it has to offer. On the other hand they’re compelled by content owners and policymakers to build digital rights-enabled systems into these […]
So, we have all these wondrous gadgets and devices to help us track, find, and keep the information and communication we need and desire. But getting them to work together, and more importantly, to appreciate our personal state of concentration in order to determine the best time to communicate with us, is what sets Attentive […]
I was delighted to see there are many positions taken regarding the upgrade from the stopgap solution UML1 to a well-thought-out successor ("What UML Should Be," Nov. 2002). The notion that a large system should be addressed through several rounds of refinement and recursive applications of UML is very much to the point, though something […]
The ACM Fellows Program was established by Council in 1993 to recognize and honor outstanding ACM members for their achievements in computer science and information technology and for their significant contributions to the mission of the ACM. The ACM Fellows serve as distinguished colleagues to whom the ACM and its members look for guidance and […]
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