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The article discusses the issues whether and when viral terms should be directly enforceable against downstream users. It is mentioned that the technical infrastructure that the Internet provides is not adequate and it is important that viral terms be widely enforceable. Discussed also are peer production of software, viral marketing, academic peer review and commenting. Courts and commentators have applied two different justifications to the enforcement of viral terms. It is stated that notice strategies and registration of viral terms would be infeasible and ineffectual. In addition, it is inferred that the Internet has the capacity to create more changes in the business and if some viral terms are enforceable, viral business methods can develop fully.

Abstract: Timing has a key role in several traffic control functions encountered in modern packet-switched networks. In order to be effective, a timing unit must provide fine resolution, be simple to implement and scale well with the number of controlled traffic streams. This paper addresses the design, implementation and evaluation of a timing unit that can support accurate and efficient implementations of traffic shaping, policing and charging in packet-switched networks. The timing unit is implemented in hardware and, therefore, overcomes constraints associated with software-based timers. It accommodates a pool of independently-clocked timers and counters, organised in timing blocks, and, consequently, is able to support, in parallel, traffic streams with diverse timing requirements. The design supports shaping and policing through token buckets, leaky buckets and a scheme, variation of the token bucket, that aims at providing statistical quality of service guarantees by exploiting the effective rate concept. Charging is supported by dedicated counters that measure the utilization of the effective rate. The granularity of the timing unit is adjustable in run-time to adapt to changes in the rate parameters of the shaping and policing functions. The validation of the timing unit is done through the development of a prototype board consisting of programmable hardware and embedded software blocks. The temporal resolution of the timing unit and the advantages of the hardware/software co-design are experimentally evaluated. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this study we focus on knowledge-intensive services used by small and medium-sized companies in the software industry. Our study explores the sources, use and perceived importance of different types of knowledge-intensive services in software business. In addition to revealing the use of commercial privately or publicly produced knowledge-intensive business services, the results of this study indicate the remarkable proportion and strategic role of non-commercial knowledge-intensive service activities that are co-produced in network partnerships. These activities are accomplished in networks in order to mutually generate or transfer knowledge between companies, customers, subcontractors or authorities of the industry, and the knowledge itself is not an object of trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: High-level performance estimation of embedded software implemented in a particular processor is essential for a fast design space exploration, when the designer needs to evaluate different processor architectures (and their different versions) and also different task allocations in a multiprocessor system. The development of fast and adequate performance estimators is required to achieve the necessary speed in this design phase. However, advanced architectures present many features, such as pipelines, branch prediction mechanisms, and caches, which have a non-linear impact on the execution time, which thus becomes hard to evaluate using simple linear methods. In order to cope with this problem, this paper presents a high-level performance estimator based on a neural network, which easily adapts to the non-linear behaviour of the execution time in advanced architectures and presents a speed-up up to 190 times in comparison with cycle-accurate simulators, using the PowerPC 750 as target architecture. A method for automatic domain classification is proposed to group applications with similar characteristics, resulting in an increase of the estimation precision. For the PowerPC 750, the mean estimation error has been reduced from 7.90% to 6.41% thanks to domain-specific estimators. This precision level and the fast estimation time are suitable for high-level design space exploration, when different architectures or processor versions and different task allocations need to be evaluated in a fast way. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article reports on the study about aggregating experimental results derived from previous studies that address the same problem in unit testing in software engineering. The researchers aim to determine through experimental results the manner by which aggregation could help practitioners make better decisions. The researchers made of previous experiments dealing on the same problems through extensive research on the digital libraries. Most experiments chosen are focused on the effectiveness and efficiency of the techniques applied while others are laboratory experiments, thus, assuming that aggregation results are not conclusive and far from the ideal. INSET: Unit-Testing Techniques.

The article explores open-world software in the realm of business processes. The authors argue for the application of service-oriented design that has long driven the telecommunications infrastructure development and applications development. Because of its strong emphasis on modularization, development of service-oriented software radically alters the way business processes are modeled, realized, and maintained. The complex functions of the underlying business applications are virtualized by domain-specific services so that they can be loosely coupled to form transorganizational processes. They suggest new tools to guarantee a vertically seamless development of the modeled process.

We propose the first practical and secure way to integrate the iris biometric into cryptographic applications. A repeatable binary string, which we call a biometric key, is generated reliably from genuine iris codes. A well-known difficulty has been how to cope with the 10 to 20 percent of error bits within an iris code and derive an error-free key. To solve this problem, we carefully studied the error patterns within iris codes and devised a two-layer error correction technique that combines Hadamard and Reed-Solomon codes. The key is generated from a subject's iris image with the aid of auxiliary error-correction data, which do not reveal the key and can be saved in a tamper-resistant token, such as a smart card. The reproduction of the key depends on two factors: the iris biometric and the token. The attacker has to procure both of them to compromise the key. We evaluated our technique using iris samples from 70 different eyes, with 10 samples from each eye. We found that an error-free key can be reproduced reliably from genuine iris codes with a 99.5 percent success rate. We can generate up to 140 bits of biometric key, more than enough for 128-bit AES. The extraction of a repeatable binary string from biometrics opens new possible applications, where a strong binding is required between a person and cryptographic operations. For example, it is possible to identify individuals without maintaining a central database of biometric templates, to which privacy objections might be raised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the software product blue print that would let stakeholders view a software project's status at any point in its development. It explains that one element of project management is cost and time estimation in which researchers in software engineering spent a great deal of effort in trying to effectively estimate a project's effort and duration and to develop supporting tools and metrics. The software product blueprint would likely be the answer, it is a high-level drawing of the software code modules and how these modules are decomposed, interact, and are deployed in hardware that would be helpful for progress tracking.

The article discusses how static code-analysis tools are used and what defects they can detect. It compares several open source tools which reduces the number of bugs of all software types before deploying the more expensive verification techniques. The author explains that programmers employs static checkers after compilation and before testing, they work with a program that has an initial indication of correctness and avoid well known traps and pitfalls before measuring it against its specifications. Open source tools used to detect defects includes FindBugs static code checking in Java developed by the University of Maryland, the program compiles but fails to do the programmers wants, and the PMD and Checkstyle, are tools used for coding problems.

The article suggests a new approach for multimethod implementation in C++. Several programming languages allow for multimethods, but C++ semantics do not. The proposed approach is based on recursive deferred dispatching. The multimethod implementation in C++ is discussed. The approach offers advantages that includes using a conventional multimethod syntax, it provides strong compile-time type safety and it decreases compilation time and ensures acceptable usability in real-world projects.

The article reports on the development of an architectural approach for effectively representing and analyzing fault-tolerant software systems. The proposed solution relies on exception handling to tolerate faults associated with component and connector failures, architectural mismatches, and configuration faults. The author implies that a well-structured system is essential for satisfying dependability-related requirements. From the fault-tolerance perspective, system structuring should ensure that the extra software involved in error detection and error handling.

The article focuses on the importance of architecture models and generic middleware on runtime adaptation for mobile computing applications. The architecture strongly influences the software system's properties, including maintainability and runtime properties such as performance and reliability. The three main functions of the middleware are: detect context changes, reason about the changes and make decisions about what adaptation to perform, and implement the adaptation choices. The author discusses the side effects of the development of adaptive applications, utilizing the architecture models at runtime. INSET: Changing Environments: An Example..

The article focuses on the importance of architecture information modeling language in simplifying the lengthy and costly certification of safety-critical software. Safety-critical systems, such as those in the avionics, automotive, power, space, and medical industries, are predominantly driven by real-time embedded software and are often referred to as high-integrity real-time systems (HIRTS). It also features an information model for the HIRTS domain, an amalgamation of modeling artifacts employed in the architectural and system design tools of the aerospace industry.

The article focuses on the use of architectural patterns and blueprints for service-oriented architecture (SOA). The author implies that in understanding SOA and all of its implications for software applications requires introducing a set of architectural principles that define SOA more concretely. The central objective of a service-oriented approach is to reduce dependencies between software islands, which basically comprise services and the clients accessing those services. The author also introduces the fundamental architectural principles that form the base of the current understanding of SOA systems.

The article explores the relationship and synergies between architecture-centric design and analysis methods and the Extreme Programming framework. The developers design the programming interface to match the tests' needs, and they write the code to match the tests and the interface. Architecture-centric methods can also add value to agile methods by emphasizing quality attributes and their role in shaping the architecture's design and by making it possible to adapt agile methods using a hybrid approach to handle larger, more complex systems.

The article focuses on the transition from basic research to an essential element of software system design and construction. The author examines software architecture's growth in the context of a technology maturation model, matching its significant accomplishments to the model's stages to gain perspective on where the field stands today. The authors also present the six typical phases of software technologies and they have concluded that software engineering research is often motivated by problems arising in producing and using real-world software.

The article focuses on the evolution of software architecture. The author discusses the innovative methods and techniques emerging from research to support software architecture practice. They also emphasize the methods, techniques, tools, and software engineering principles that support organizations taking an architecture-centric approach to software development. Software architecture involves the structure and organization by which modern system components and subsystems interact to form systems and the properties of systems that can best be designed and analyzed at the system level.

The article reports on the importance of object-oriented (OO) approach in achieving a high degree of reuse with the development of countless highly accessible libraries and frameworks and their concomitant availability. Examples of this reuse include graphical user-interface libraries such as Microsoft Foundation Classes and Java Swing, as well as container and algorithm classes such as the C standard library. However, reusing object libraries and frameworks requires skill in OO programming and an underlying knowledge of the classes, as well as the services that they provide.

This paper addresses the issues related to improving the overall quality of the dynamic candidate link generation for the requirements tracing process for Verification and Validation and Independent Verification and Validation analysts. The contribution of the paper is four-fold: We define goals for a tracing tool based on analyst responsibilities in the tracing process, we introduce several new measures for validating that the goals have been satisfied, we implement analyst feedback in the tracing process, and we present a prototype tool that we built, RETRO (requirements tracing On-target), to address these goals. We also present the results of a study used to assess RETRO's support of goals and goal elements that can be measured objectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An understanding of how software is employed in the field can yield many opportunities for quality improvements. Profiling released software can provide such an understanding. However, profiling released software is difficult due to the potentially large number of deployed sites that must be profiled, the transparency requirements at a user's site, and the remote data collection and deployment management process. Researchers have recently proposed various approaches to tap into the opportunities offered by profiling deployed systems and overcome those challenges. Initial studies have illustrated the application of these approaches and have shown their feasibility. Still, the proposed approaches, and the tradeoffs between overhead, accuracy, and potential benefits for the testing activity have been barely quantified. This paper aims to overcome those limitations. Our analysis of 1,200 user sessions on a 155 KLOC deployed system substantiates the ability of field data to support test suite improvements, assesses the efficiency of profiling techniques for released software, and the effectiveness of testing efforts that leverage profiled field data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compositional adaptation enables software to modify its structure and behavior dynamically in response to changes in its execution environment. A review of current technology compares how, when, and where recomposition occurs. Moreover, this article will also offer a review of the supporting technologies, proposed solutions, and areas that require further study. Many of the mechanisms for compositional adaptation are available now, and we expect their use to increase as programmers become more familiar with adaptive software technologies and society comes to expect computer systems to manage themselves. Compositional adaptation is powerful, but without appropriate tools to automatically generate and verify code, its use can negatively impact, rather than improve, system integrity and security. The computer science community must build development technologies and tools, well grounded in rigorous software engineering, to support compositional adaptation. This foundation will raise next generation of computing to new levels of flexibility, autonomy, and maintainability without sacrificing assurance and security.

The author reflects on the architecture of a software-intensive system. A comparison between intentional architecture and accidental architecture was made. Intentional architecture is explicitly identified and then implemented, while an accidental architecture emerges from the multitude individual design decisions that occur during development. The architectural patterns of a Web-centric system focusing on innovations is provided. At the center of Web-centric systems, service-oriented architectures have taken hold because it provides a solution to the problem of building systems of systems.

The article offers developments on software architecture. The author discusses the fundamental elements of architecture in works that expose and compare common architectural styles. The author also presents a handbook of software architecture in which its primary goal is to fill this empirical void in software engineering by codifying the architecture of 100 interesting software-intensive systems, presenting them in a manner that exposes their essential patterns and permits comparisons across domains and architectural styles.

The article presents views and insights of the author concerning employment references in the computer software industry. Some of the qualities that need to demonstrate to individual's prospective references include teamwork, persistence, work ethic, maturity, responsibility, attention to detail, empathy toward others, and organization. According to the author the strategy for acquiring peer references is clearly time consuming and a great deal of work. The author also discusses the ways to find out about the technical qualifications without asking individual's references.

The article presents insights and views of the author concerning the nature and purpose of class characterization in the context of computer software industry. The author discusses the role stereotypes which help characterize initial candidate objects and communicate the ideas. The stereotypes presented by the author includes information holder, structurer, service provider, controller, and coordinator. Class characterization is a key step of object design. It serves two purposes: to clarify at a glance some important aspects of a class's expected behavior and to communicate its design intent to others.

Discusses significant aspects of Web services computing in the United States. Definition of Web services; Importance of the role of Web services in integration initiatives; Advantages of using Web services compared with other conventional programs such as the common object request broker architecture and the distributed component object model; Description of the content of four articles featured under this subject.