August 2003 - Vol. 46 No. 8

Features

Opinion Editorial pointers Aug 1 2003

Software programming and development practices are at the very core of this publication—where the ever-changing nature of the field has been traced, tested, disputed, and tested again for as long as both have coexisted. At every turn, the goal is to impart new insights or real-world experience to challenge conventional wisdom and inspire further progress. […]

Diane Crawford

Computing Applications

News News track Aug 1 2003

News Track

It’s official. The very video games that make parents squirm are in fact beneficial for at least building visual attention skills in children. Researchers from the Center for Visual Science at the University of Rochester have found that first-person shooter games—the ones that require players to kill or maim virtual enemies and destroy screen-based surroundings—significantly […]

ACM Staff

Computing Applications

Opinion Forum Aug 1 2003

Forum

Robert L. Glass’s suggestion that domain-specific languages are superior to domain-independent languages is an interesting point ("One Giant Step Backward," Practical Programmer, May 2003). As a long-time programmer, I thus tend to agree with his assessment that we might actually have done some things better in the past. Meanwhile, however, the industry has apparently replaced […]

Diane Crawford

Computing Applications

Opinion Digital village Aug 1 2003

The Discipline of Internet Forensics

A well-defined field of study and practice has evolved as a result of network hacker activity.

Hal Berghel

Computing Applications

Practice Practical programmer Aug 1 2003

A Mugwump’s-Eye View of Web Work

Choosing a point of entry into a contemporary software development debate.

Robert L. Glass

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoint Aug 1 2003

Discovery Informatics

Add it to the ACM Computing Classification System as a new methodology at the level of AI and simulation, due to its importance in identifying and validating patterns in data. The Great Data Famine! I recall shuddering when I read that 1970s prediction, with its specter of “millions of computers fighting for the same small […]

William W. Agresti

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Opinion Viewpoint Aug 1 2003

Voting and Technology: Who Gets to Count Your Vote?

Paperless voting machines threaten the integrity of democratic process by what they don't do.

David L. Dill, Bruce Schneier, and Barbara Simons

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Software techniques for program compaction Aug 1 2003

Introduction

There was a time when programmers worked with assembly code. Computers were rare, expensive machines and a good programmer could pack a lot of functionality into a few kilobytes of memory. During this period, being a good programmer or designer mainly meant being a good compactor [2]. Since that bygone era, several technological advances have […]

Bjorn De Sutter and Koen De Bosschere

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Software techniques for program compaction Aug 1 2003

Extracting Library-Based Java Applications

Reducing the size of Java applications by creating an application extractor.

Frank Tip, Peter F. Sweeney, and Chris Laffra

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Software techniques for program compaction Aug 1 2003

Post-Pass Compaction Techniques

Seeking to resolve many of the problems related to code size in traditional program development environments.

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Software techniques for program compaction Aug 1 2003

Mixed-Width Instruction Sets

Encoding a program's computations to reduce memory and power consumption without sacrificing performance.

Arvind Krishnaswamy and Rajiv Gupta

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Software techniques for program compaction Aug 1 2003

Cold Code Decompression at Runtime

Using a software-based technique to dynamically decompress selected code fragments during program execution.

Saumya Debray and William S. Evans

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Software techniques for program compaction Aug 1 2003

Grammar-Based Compression of Interpreted Code

Automatically designing and implementing compact interpretable bytecodes.

William S. Evans and Christopher W. Fraser

Computing Applications