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. […]
Readers of this column are familiar with the risks of illegal monitoring of Internet traffic. Less familiar, but perhaps just as serious, are the risks introduced when law enforcement taps that same traffic legally. Ironically, as insecure as the Internet may be in general, monitoring a particular user’s traffic as part of a legal wiretap […]
Computer science departments at U.S. colleges and universities are facing a depleted teaching staff as more professors test the entrepreneurial waters, reports the New York Times. While the hot economy has created a fair amount of turnover, observers say the current brain drain has not reached a crisis point. Many institutions are feeling the pinch […]
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 […]
As localized objects evolve into distributed components, developers are asking that UML provide better support for component-based development using EJB and COM+.
Paying close attention to the tasks OO is best suited for—rather than assuming it's the best option every time—may be one way to maximize the usability of OO approaches.
The software paradigms of component-based frameworks for e-commerce promise to provide companies with the speed and agility they need to compete in Internet time.
Communications of the ACM (CACM) is now a fully Open Access publication.
By opening CACM to the world, we hope to increase engagement among the broader computer science community and encourage non-members to discover the rich resources ACM has to offer.