ACM Queue - opinion

Resolved: the Internet Is No Place for Critical Infrastructure

Dan Geer — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 20:43:59 GMT

Risk is a necessary consequence of dependence

Deduplicating Devices Considered Harmful

David Rosenthal — Tue, 17 May 2011 14:52:54 GMT

A good idea, but it can be taken too far

All-Optical Computing and All-Optical Networks are Dead

Charles Beeler, Craig Partridge — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:54:49 GMT

Anxiously awaiting the arrival of all-optical computing? Don't hold your breath.

Things I Learned in School

Terry Coatta — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:03:33 GMT

How many of us have not had the experience of sitting in a classroom wondering idly: "Is this really going to matter out in the real world?" It's curious, and in no small amount humbling, to realize how many of those nuggets of knowledge really do matter. One cropped up recently for me: the Finite State Machine (FSM). As we continue to develop the new UI for our product, we'll definitely be using FSMs wherever possible.

From Here to There, the SOA Way

Terry Coatta — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:03:32 GMT

SOA is no more a silver bullet than the approaches which preceded it. Back in ancient times, say, around the mid '80s when I was a grad student, distributed systems research was in its heyday. Systems like Trellis/Owl and Eden/Emerald were exploring issues in object-oriented language design, persistence, and distributed computing. One of the big themes to come out of that time period was 'location transparency', the idea that the way that you access an object should be independent of where it is located. That is, it shouldn't matter whether an object is in the same process, on the same machine in a different process, or on another machine altogether. Syntactically, the way that I interact with that object is the same; I'm just invoking a method on the object.

Only Code Has Value?

Terry Coatta — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:03:32 GMT

A recent conversation about development methodologies turned to the relative value of various artifacts produced during the development process, and the person I was talking with said: the code has "always been the only artifact that matters. It's just that we're only now coming to recognize that." My reaction to this, not expressed at that time, was twofold. First, I got quite a sense of déjà-vu since it hearkened back to my time as an undergraduate and memories of many heated discussions about whether code was self-documenting. Second, I thought of several instances from recent experience in which the code alone simply was not enough to understand why the system was architected in a particular way.

Corba: Gone but (Hopefully) Not Forgotten

Terry Coatta — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:03:31 GMT

There is no magic and the lessons of the past apply just as well today.

Ground Control to Architect Tom...

Alex Bell — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 10:36:49 GMT

Project managers love him, recent software engineering graduates bow to him, and he inspires code warriors deep in the development trenches to wonder if a technology time warp may have passed them by. How can it be that no one else has ever proposed software development with the simplicity, innovation, and automation being trumpeted by Architect Tom? His ideas sound so space-age, so futuristic, but why should that be so surprising? After all, Tom is an architecture astronaut!

Embracing Wired Networks

Mache Creeger — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 10:58:01 GMT

Most people I know run wireless networks in their homes. Not me. I hardwired my home and leave the Wi-Fi turned off. My feeling is to do it once, do it right, and then forget about it. I want a low-cost network infrastructure with guaranteed availability, bandwidth, and security. If these attributes are important to you, Wi-Fi alone is probably not going to cut it.

Repurposing Consumer Hardware

Mache Creeger — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 15:05:22 GMT

New uses for small form-factor, low-power machines