acm - an acm publication

Commentaries

2005

  • Artificial and Biological Intelligence
    Subhash Kak of Louisiana State University says that "humans will eventually create silicon machines with minds that will slowly spread all over the world, and the entire universe will eventually become a conscious machine."
  • Mailbag
    In his article 'Artificial and Biological Intelligence,' Subhash Kak of Louisiana State University asks if 'humans will eventually create silicon machines with minds that will slowly spread all over the world, and the entire universe will eventually become a conscious machine?' These are some comments on his paper.
  • INDUS: A New Platform for Ubiquitous Computing
    Kallol Borah began development of the Indus project at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 2002. Indus demonstrates how general purpose object oriented programming languages can be extended to enable ubiquitous computing applications.
  • A Three-Dimensional Model for Evaluating Software Development Projects
    In this model created by Dr. K.V.K.K. Prasad, software development is viewed in two dimensions (despite the title), based on the answer to the questions: 1) Is it inspired by considerations of utility and value? 2) Does it advance software technology?
  • IT job outsourcing
    Bhumika Ghimire, who is from Nepal, is a graduate of Schiller University, where he studied IT Management and where outsourcing was his special field of interest. Here, he asks, "How do we define outsourcing?"
  • Reflections on challenges to the goal of invisible computing
    "Technology becomes subordinate to values through economics, government, or the professions. Our biggest problem is learning to recognize that we do have options, albeit often limited ones. Our tendency is to just create more technology rather than ask why." (Carl Mitcham, as he articulates the thesis of Albert Borgmann on the relationship between contemporary technologies and human values)
  • PCs in the classroom & open book exams
    What are the motivations behind giving an open-book/open-notes exam? Does giving free access to all of the resources of the Internet conflict with these motivations?
  • Science and Engineering of Large-Scale Complex Systems
    The world's economy can be seen as a an excellent playing field for the multiple, multi-faceted scientific disciplines and scientists. But for various reasons and causes, they are or disregarded or sometimes even carefully avoided. Kemal Delic, a lab scientist with Hewlett-Packard's R&D operations and a senior enterprise architect, explains.
  • A Concise Guide to the Major Internet Bodies
    The bodies responsible for the Internet's protocols and parameters can be said to steer the Internet in a significant sense. This document, by Alex Simonelis of Dawson College in Montreal, is a summary of those bodies and their most important characteristics.
  • What makes users unhappy: share-point team services web server security
    Computer & Internet Security is very important but sometimes it is so confusing and frustrating that it makes users very unhappy to a point where the system is so secure that it cannot be used by its most legitimate users, like system administrators