Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer tells the gripping story of how Xerox invented the personal-computing technology in the 1970s, and then "miscalculated and mishandled" the opportunity to fully exploit it.
Moshe Y. Vardi
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Where Have All the Workshops Gone?
My initiation into the computing-research community was a workshop on "Logic and Databases" in 1979. I was the only graduate student attending the workshop. In spite of the informality of the event I was quite in awe of the senior researchers who attended.
On P, NP, and Computational Complexity
While the P vs. NP quandary is a central problem in computer science, a resolution of the problem may have limited practical impact.
Science has been growing new legs of late. The traditional "legs" (or "pillars") of the scientific method were theory and experimentation. Computational science has been called the 'third pillar' of scientific inquiry, and has been recently augmented by yet a "fourth paradigm."
In the two years since we launched the revitalized Communications of the ACM, I have received hundreds of email messages from readers. The feedback has been mostly, but not universally, positive.
Globalization and Offshoring of Software Revisited
ACM Council commissioned in 2004 a Task Force to "look at the facts behind the rapid globalization of IT and the migration of jobs resulting from outsourcing and offshoring." Do the insights produced by the resulting report still ring true four years and a major economic crisis later?
Revisiting the Publication Culture in Computing Research
In my May 2009 Editor's Letter, "Conferences vs. Journals in Computing Research," I addressed the publication culture of our field: "As far as I know, we are the only scientific community that considers conference publication as the primary means of publishing our research results.' Why are we the only discipline driving on the conference side of the 'publication road?'"
In this issue of Communications we have a debate that is quite a rarity in computing research: a technical debate. A pair of Contributed Articles debate the relative merits of MapReduce and relational database management systems. I have no doubt that our readers will find this technical debate highly instructive.
When Communications relaunched in July 2008, the issue included a "Viewpoint" column by Rick Rashid, entitled "Image Crisis: Inspiring a New Generation of Computer Scientists." Has anything changed in that regard in the last 17 months?
The Financial Meltdown and Computing
For many of us, the past year has been one of the most unsettling in our lifetime. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, we watched communism collapse of its own dead weight. In late 2008, we saw capitalism nearly crumble. Lehman Brothers, a major U.S. investment bank, declared bankruptcy last September, sending the world's financial system into a tailspin. Only a massive intervention by central banks saved the system from collapse.
Shape the Future of Computing
ACM encourages its members to take a direct hand in shaping the future of the association. There are more ways than ever to get involved.
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