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The article discusses the potential for cognitive bias to appear in the development of computer software, examining the use of traceability to eradicate the effect of cognitive bias while individuals perform change to design artifacts. Software developers may employ heuristics that are informed by cognitive biases when changing software artifacts, the article states. Other topics include the use of the cognitive aid traceability, simplifying complex inference tasks, the use of anchoring and adjustment, and peoples' initial estimates about a problem.

The article discusses the mental processes that lead to success and failure in code review during computer software engineering. The results of a study funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the British government's leading funding agency for research and training in engineering, which investigated if there is a specific personality type that is correlated with performance on code-review tasks, are analyzed. The study revealed that there are likely innate human traits that affect code review ability.

The article discusses multi-agent systems, which are gaining acceptance in the computer industry and academia as a paradigm for designing and developing software systems. The author suggests that there is a need for a conceptual framework that defines the abstractions of different agent-based systems, which can be very confusing for software engineers. The authors stress the fact that successful multi-agent system deployment requires modeling languages to explore the use of agent-related abstractions. Methods to reduce risk with the system are examined.

The article discusses the concept of "flow" in games and other computer software. Flow represents the feeling of complete and energized focus in an activity, characterized by a high level of enjoyment and fulfillment. The eight major components of Flow, which include a challenging activity requiring skill, a merging of action and awareness, clear goals, direct and immediate feedback, concentration on the task at hand, a sense of control, a loss of self consciousness, and an altered sense of time, are analyzed.

The article discusses disk wiping, which is the process of destroying all digital data on a computer system so that it can never be recovered. Disk wiping is important when users are concerned with privacy or are attempting to guard corporate and personal secrets. An evaluation comparing several popular consumer and professional disk wiping utilities, including Cipher, which is built into Microsoft Windows, Cyberscrub, PGP Shred, Wincleaner Destroy-It! Pro, and Evidence Eliminator, is presented.

This article focuses on enabling computer-aided design systems (CAD) with the ability to automatically invent new solutions. This idea is controversial because some researchers believe creativity is too unpredictable to be envisaged by a computer system, while others defend the potential capacity of computers to reach novel solutions using mechanisms very different from those humans use to be creative. The authors argue that several problems must be solved before a system can be developed that is significantly more helpful than current CAD systems, and point out that no autonomous design system that offers the same degree of satisfaction as working with a human designer has yet been developed.

The article discusses reuse knowledge management in the development of software. Reuse has long been an idea ahead of its time. As knowledge management increasingly becomes crucial to the survival of software organizations, it is imperative that software development organizations appreciate that knowledge exploitation is a dynamic, three-pronged process that covers public, quasi-public, and private knowledge spaces. Two recent trends in computing have brought reuse to the forefront. These include open source development projects such as Linux, and component-based software development. The success of open source development rests on individuals contributing code fragments, scripts, and ideas to the public knowledge space associated with the project. The most frequent users of open source knowledge and code are rookies rather than experts, and temporary project teams rather than the permanent open source community directly associated with the project. However, the success of open source projects depends on experts and veteran programmers contributing to the public knowledge space. The success of the open source model therefore depends upon new and different types of incentive systems to sustain high-quality knowledge contributions in the medium and long run.

This article proposes a definition that distinguishes portals from all other types of information systems and a General Portal Model for identifying and organizing the basic services portals provide. The potential of the web portal market and its technology has attracted some of the biggest computer and software firms. It has inspired the mutation of search engines and the establishment of new vendors. Yet the meaning of portal is not well defined and its use, even within the industry, remains problematic. Originally coined to describe Web-based applications that provide organized access to the resources of the Internet through search engines and lists of Web sites, the term portal has been applied to systems that differ widely in capabilities and complexity, from static Web pages providing links to resources on a given topic to interorganizational systems providing access to multiple heterogeneous data sources and applications. Portal is defined as an infrastructure providing secure, customizable, personalizable, integrated access to dynamic content from a variety of sources, in a variety of source formats, wherever it is needed.

In the late 1980's, artificial intelligence (AI) research encountered a difficult period. Funding agencies had lost faith in the primary, long-term objectives of Al research computers that think, understand, and exhibit expert behavior. The headway toward secondary goals--including speech recognition, pattern recognition, natural language translation, automatic classification, machine inference, diagnostics, decision support, chess, and robotics--was not enough to overcome doubts about achievability of the primary goals. Language-action philosophy reveals practical ways to improve coordination and effective action. A prominent example, discussed, was captured in an email system by Action Technologies called The Coordinator. This system, which ran on half a million IBM DOSP Windows platforms, tracked conversations for action, the loops in which one person performs an action in response to another person's request. In a 1987 demo, my Action Technologies host showed me he could manage twice as many projects using the software.

In the article, the author assumes that the rebirth of the computer industry has begun. According to him, there are a number of signals pointing in this direction, including the general state of the IT industry, awareness of enormous risks associated with the Internet, the U.S. and European antitrust litigation, the open source movement, the IBM autonomous computing announcement, redirection of Microsoft product development, competition from telecommunications industry, and resistance in investing in new general-purpose computer products and services. Regardless of whether Microsoft, IBM, or telecommunications industry establishes the basis for rebirth, this scenario would stimulate worldwide competition in providing highly integrated hardware-software stableware platforms. Stableware and valueware competition would provide opportunities for existing as well as new suppliers around the globe. If this transpires, the general-purpose computer industry would be well on its way to maturity and society would be the benefactor of trustworthy products and services.

The article focuses on the need to consider the change-centric Enduring Business Themes (EBTs) standard when building highly adaptable business software systems. Although, it appears obvious that the specification of an easily adaptable software application is primarily a business problem, not a technical one, the most important questions have to do with the underlying business. EBTs can be used as an ideal foundation for the related software application, specifically, after the appropriate enduring themes of the business industry are understood and catalogued, an adaptable software framework is proposed and be constructed using object-oriented (OO) technology as an implementation approach. Such an adaptable software framework is called an "enduring business framework" (EBF). A properly constructed EBF enables the rapid construction of business objects and business applications that support the corresponding EBT. One of the most glaring problems with OO technology has been the failure management to exercise its proper role in the software process, cited with examples of problems of central planning lacking city, city problem, custom manufacturing and transportation. The article points out that EBTs are superior and to build adaptable business applications in a short time frame at a reasonable cost , it is necessary to be clear in separation of policy from mechanism, enduring issues from temporal, and difficult implementation problems from trivial.

Presents several letters to the editor related to software project failure published in November 1999 issue of the journal Communications of the ACM. Chasm between academe and computer industry; Cases of successful cooperation between these two; Standard risks of software projects.

This article focuses on the use of computers in education. Anyone in the computer business knows the industry changes rapidly in a fraction of that time. The emphasis on computer technology in schools is overrated, because whatever students learn is obsolete by the time they are working. A deep understanding of the complexity of mathematical calculations makes one appreciate the computer. The primary purpose of schools is education, not training, particularly in the early years. Computers are more suitable for training than for education. One needs a computer to learn how to use the latest software. But computers are not essential for education; at best, they serve only to reinforce what has already been taught, a goal that can be accomplished just as easily with books. The author have two responses: first, the article examines only internal effects of quality. It ignores external effects, principally customers' responses to quality and second, the article ignores ethics of software quality.

This article reports on the importance of licensing of packaged softwares. The licensing agreement forms that come along with buying of computer softwares, are often glanced as documents that construe breaking open the plastic shrink-wrap or installing the software on a computer as assent to the terms of the license. These documents typically disclaim all warranties, tell that some remote jurisdiction's law will apply in the event of a dispute over the software, and sometimes deny the authority to make backup copies, modify or resell the software or decompile the code for any purpose. Most judicial opinions have refused to enforce shrink wrap licenses because consumers have not meaningfully assented to the terms. Three factors currently threaten to upset this status quo. The most significant factor is proposed Article 2B of the Uniform Commercial Code. This code is a model law designed for enactment by state legislatures. It would not only validate shrink-wrap and other mass market licenses of information, it would also set rules about electronic contracting for information products and services, establish new rules about warranties and allow software developers to embed technical self-help features that can be triggered if licensees fail to pay royalties for the software. A second factor is a trend toward new distribution channel for software. Copyright law has always insisted on there being a balance between the rights conferred on authors and the rights reserved to the public.

As the computer industry's reliance on component software increases, it becomes increasingly difficult to integrate complex component systems. Modern development environments take a variety of approaches to simplifying this programming problem. This article describes how three programming language implementations provide access to Microsofts Corp.'s component object model (COM) and how they attempt to reduce the complexity of writing and using COM objects. Using COM is complex for two reasons. COM semantics may not match the object semantics of the language and hence require glue code between COM and the application. In addition COM itself is very complex, with a large API and many special cases. Many development environments can provide access to services such as COM. Though COM reflects the linguistic heritage of its creators, it was designed to be accessed from all languages, and it can be. Such access can be straightforward, at least initially. It is also clear, though, the work required to support COM differs greatly from language to language and from environment to environment. Visual C++ and Visual J++ depend on extralinguistic features. INSETS: Using IDispathc from Dylan.;Abstract Server Pages..

The microkernel story is full of good ideas and blind alleys. The story began with enthusiasm about he promised dramatic increase in flexibility, safety and modularity. But over the years, enthusiasm changed to disappointment because the first generation processor microkernels were insufficient and inflexible. Traditionally, the word kernel denotes the mandatory part of the operating system common to all other software. The kernel can use all features of a processor (e.g., programming the memory management unit); software running in user mode cannot execute such safety critical operations. Most early operating systems were implemented by means of large monolithic kernels. Loosely speaking, the complete operating system-scheduling, file system, networking, device drivers, memory management, paging, and more-was packed into a single kernel. In contrast, the microkernel approach involves minimizing the kernel and implementing servers outside the kernel. Ideally, the kernel implements only address spaces, interprocess communication and basic scheduling. INSETS: Frequently Asked Questions on External Pagers;Frequently Asked Questions on User-Level Device Drivers;Frequently Asked Questions on Memory Servers.

The Little Planet Literacy Series is a multimedia language and literacy program for beginning readers. Its no-floor, no-ceiling design is learner-centered, based on five years of research with a range of students, including those at risk of school failure and those well on the road to learning to read. The research and prototypes for the series were developed at Vanderbilt University, then licensed to Little Planet Publishing in Nashville, Tennessee for development and distribution. The Little Planet Series evolved from several earlier research programs, including the Jasper Woodbury Problem Solving Series and Schools For Thought. The program is structured around video stories that anchor a series of activities targeting deep comprehension, composition and oral language, along with traditional print-based skills. The Young Children's Literacy Project has been supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Development, the Office of Special Education and the James S. McDonnell Foundation.

Programmers usually type characters on a keyboard to enter, test and debug computer programs. More than 30 years ago researchers began augmenting those characters with diagrams [20] but pure ASCII text is still the ubiquitous standard. Various radical syntaxes for programs are feasible and offer many advantages over the state of the art. Programs, for example, can be defined by the topology of sketches, even hand-drawn scanned sketches. A programming environment can parse these sketches and generate animations of the drawings that evolve as the program executes. Or programs can be defined by manipulating physical objects, for example, by connecting blocks together or inserting plastic cards into slots. In the near future we may see program development systems that exist only in virtual reality or ones that interpret gestures in the real world. Program sources need not be static collections of text or even text and pictures, but can be animated, tactile, enhanced with sound effects and have physical form.

The article focuses on the computer game business. In the early days of computer games the television was inextricably linked to the idea of presented electronic displays. In fact there was no other source than television broadcasts for electronically displayed imagery. When the computer game industry was being invented it was much cheaper to create computer games using actual televisions from which the tuner would be striped out rather than buying CRTs. The early games used standard production model television sets that were modified. The game industry, like the business industry, moved from mechanical to electronics to computers. Many user interfaces were developed for the game business. The user interface demands of games are undeniable. From the leisure/entertainment definition games must be easy to interact with and learn. The use of a non-keyboard interface was perfected in the game industry. The dependence on direct manipulation of on-screen programming, and the use of anthropomorphic characters to create a sense of relationship started in the game industry.

Today's personal computers are designed and sold by Apple, IBM Corp., and others, but researchers had developed ideas and techniques they use by the mid of 1970s. This article discusses nine of those early ideas, the people who had them, and labs where they worked. The personal computer industry had a foundation to build on. The first years were like a fast-forward replay of the computer and word processing industries, assemblers, high-level languages, operating systems, superscalar CPU, and modern applications, were implemented as soon as falling cost allowed. The similarity of today's systems to the Alto, is an indication that the computer industry has consumed much of the intellectual capital developed at MIT, SRI, and PARC. Vannevar Bush, a prominent researcher at MIT developed a device called memex, which keeps an account of all books, records, and communications. Interactive computer bloomed at MIT in the 1950s, beginning with Jay Forrester's Whirlwind computer.

The article discusses about the development of information technology (IT) in India. The industry has nearly quadrupled in the past six years, exceeding sales of $1 billion in 1991-1992. In a year marked by global recession, Indian IT sales grew by nearly 24% over 1990-1991. Western computer and business publications have begun to draw attention to India's potential for developing software and providing on-site software services. International computer companies including Hewlett Packard, DEC and IBM have begun staking out positions in the Indian industry. Since 1991, the new government under Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Manmohan Singh has placed even greater emphasis on the growth of private sectors. Domestic IT companies can forge joint ventures with foreign corporations who are not allowed to acquire majority ownership. The domestic hardware and software industries continue to receive protection, often to the detriment of the Indian consumer. The Department of Electronics (DOE) is the primary agency over seeing government IT policy formulation and implementation.

On January 1, 1992 an era in the computer field ended with the death of admiral/Dr. Grace Murray Hopper. She saw the beginning of the computer field with her work on MARK I, a physically large electro-mechanical machine, and lived to see and influence people who could carry around small electronic computers with a capability many orders of magnitude greater. Grace Hopper's lifework epitomized the development of the software field from primitive programs to sophisticated compilers and their verification. She was the greatest woman in the computer field, and one of the dozen top people in the field to date. Hopper's first real computing publication was based on her initial work on the Harvard MARK I and was "A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator," Annals of the Harvard Computation Laboratory. Her first significant paper dealing with software "The Education of a Computer" was presented in 1952 at one of the very early ACM conferences. It was reprinted in the Annals of the History of Computing.

Describes the ObjectStore as an object-oriented database management system. Provision of a tightly integrated language interface; Persistent storage; Transaction management distributed data access; Object-access speed for persistent data.

Focuses on the development of the Gemstone, a commercially available object database management system. Satisfaction of the commercial and MIS markets; Inclusion of a low bug rate; Ability to store, manipulate and execute behavior within the database.

Presents schedules of conferences related to computing. World computer law conference; International symposium on computer architecture; Neural nets applications conference; Software technology conference; Genetic algorithms; Artificial intelligence.

Presents letters to the editor referencing articles and topics discussed in previous issues. "Program Verification: The Very Idea," which discussed the verification part of programming; Purpose of program verification; Idea of program derivation.

The author reflects on issues related to computer programming. According to the author, the software crisis is widely recognized and widely battled within the computer industry. He states that certification or regulation of software professionals would bring social forces to bear on a problem for which technical forces have proven to be insufficient.

Presents several letters to the editor about the technical industry. Focus on the harm caused by the use of GOTOs in programming; Efforts on attempting to eliminate the GOTO; Problems created by GOTO for those attempting to maintain or understand code written by someone else; Comments on the higher the percentage of GOTO statements; Discussion on procedures of programming languages that treats all specialized control structures as combinations of properly compiled procedure.

Illustrates several important steps in the programming process. Information on small computer programs that are often educational and entertaining; Usefulness of a tiny program, which proved quite useful to a small company; Purchase of several personal computers by the company for software programming; Exploration of the design space, which shows that one program is far superior to the rest.

A common tool for proving the termination of programs is the well-founded set, a set ordered in such a way as to admit no infinite descending sequences. The basic approach is to find a termination function that maps the values of the program variables into some well-founded set, such that the value of the termination function is repeatedly reduced throughout the computation. All too often, the termination functions required are difficult to find and are of a complexity out of proportion to the program under consideration. Multisets (bags) over a given well-founded set S are sets that admit multiple occurrences of elements taken fróm S. The given ordering on S induces an ordering on the finite multisets over S. This multiset ordering is shown to be well-founded. The multiset ordering enables the use of relatively simple and intuitive termination functions in otherwise difficult termination proofs. In particular, the multiset ordering is used to prove the termination of production systems, programs defined in terms of sets of rewriting rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A security kernel is a software and hardware mechanism that enforces access controls within a computer system. The correctness of a security kernel on a PDP-11/45 is being proved. This paper describes the technique used to carry out the first step of the proof: validating a formal specification of the program with respect to axioms for a secure system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microscopic level Job stream data obtained in a production environment by an event-driven software probe is used to drive a model of a multiprogramming computer system. The CPU scheduling algorithm of the model is systematically varied. This technique, called trace-driven modeling, provides an accurate replica of a production environment for the testing of variations in the system. At the same time alterations in scheduling methods can be easily carried out in a controlled way with cause and effects relationships being isolated. The scheduling methods tested included the best possible and worst possible methods, the traditional methods of multiprogramming theory, round-robin, first-come- first-served, etc., and dynamic predictors. The relative and absolute performances of these scheduling methods are given. It is concluded that a successful CPU scheduling method must be preemptive and must prevent a given job from holding the CPU for too long a period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An overview of the current and future positions with respect to operating system performance is given. While a great deal of information and a large number of models for subsystems have been developed, gaps still exist in our knowledge. Because of the severe interactions between the various subsystems of an operating system, an overall model of the total system must be developed to be able to analyze and design the performance aspects of an operating system. Although such total system designs are exceptional today, it is projected that they will become increasingly more common and necessary in the near future. Such a design philosophy will clearly have a severe impact on the way we go about modularizing operating and computer systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the software designed to automate Weblog publication. Weblogs were distinct in both form and content from the Web journals that had preceded them. They are also distinct from e-zines, which were published on a schedule, like paper periodicals, and contained longer original articles and artwork. E-zines required planning, organization, and a certain level of skill in layout, typography and the other elements of Web design. By contrast, Weblogs were rudimentary in design and content. In late 1999, several companies released software designed to automate Weblog publication, one of which was Blogger. Blogger epitomized the dot-com era. When news stories began defining Weblogs as "a Web site made with Blogger," it quickly became the most widely used blogging tool — and changed Weblog culture. Trackback, introduced by Movable Type in 2001, automated crossblog talk itself. Trackback allows bloggers to ping other Weblogs, placing a reciprocal link — a trackback — in the entry they have just referenced.

The profile of people who use software and hardware systems has changed, while systems and the culture in which they are developed have not made the necessary adjustments. In order to transform the culture in which information technology systems are designed, developed and manufactured and to meet growing needs of computer users, the author recently proposed a User's Bill of Rights, a set of goals to challenge the computer industry to respect and address needs of computer users. The fundamental principle of the bill is that the user is always right. The user's rights define computer industry goals. Technology solutions are composed of a variety of hardware and software components and need to be tested as complete systems. End users and customers need to have results of these tests available. Technology magazines and journals could improve product reviews by testing with real user scenarios. Tasks users want to complete, not features that are available, are key to the value proposition when considering a technology purchase. Consumers can be supplied with the summary user data on performance and satisfaction based on working with different systems to complete real work. INSET: The User's Bill of Rights..

The article focuses on Microsoft Rewards, a program launched by technology company Microsoft to encourage people to use its products by offering rewards. Topics covered include the opportunity to collect points when browsing through Edge or buying items at Microsoft Stores, the difference between Bing Rewards, which focused on the search engine Bing, and Microsoft Rewards, and how Microsoft Rewards will work on Edge.

This article describes the seven work plans for Year-2000 (Y2K) software upgrade projects. The seven approaches are pruning the business, waiting, replacing the application by a purchase or new build, expanding YY year fields to YYYY, using other "intelligent" digits, dating window(s) and date-shifting of code or data. All seven approaches are easy to understand, especially waiting. Part of the triage approach should be to determine which functions or programs can safely be ignored until next decade because their shortcomings will be cosmetic at worst. At the opposite end of "do nothing" are systems absolutely critical to the business but have a truly prohibitive Y2K compliance cost. If the company will become unprofitable due to that outlay, consider shutting it down or selling it. The third approach could modernize the business, but the users would not be able to regression-test incrementally. The fourth method is the most appealing and elegant Y2K date-fix approach. One can make similar changes to keep up with industry-wide formats. But time is short and resources limited to expand all to YYYY.

Most educational software assumes the system knows more than the learner. In simple cases, the system knows the correct answers, in more elaborate cases, the system knows how to solve problems. Researchers developed a research prototype called People Power to investigate human-computer collaborative learning. In People Power, a human learner collaborates with a co-learner, played by a machine. People Power is written in Procyon Lisp and runs on Macintosh systems. Its pedagogical goal is for human users to deepen their understanding of electoral systems. People Power does not discuss democracy per se, helping users instead discover which features make an electoral system more or less proportional. The learner can design an electoral system by defining parties, candidates, constituencies, and so forth. The learner can also modify the electoral laws, run a simulation of elections, and read the results of elections. The system computes the electoral bias, that is, the sum of the (absolute) differences between the percentage of votes and the percentage of seats, for each party.

The article presents information about various events related to computer industry. 11th Annual ACM Mountain Regional Conference will be held on April 18-19, in Denver, Colorado. The Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will sponsor the Conference on Large Scale Scientific Computation on May 17-19, in Madison. Annual Meeting of the Human Factors Society sponsored by the Human Factors Society will be held on October 10-14, in Norfolk, Virginia. Third Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science sponsored by National Centre for Software Development and Computing Techniques will be held on December 12-14, in Bangalore, India.

This article reports global developments related to the computer industry as of July 1982. Special research initiation awards for new investigators in information science and technology are available from the Division of Information Science and Technology of the National Science Foundation. Basic and applied research is supported in three related programs: Information Science, Information Technology, and Information Impact. Particular research problems of interest in the Information Science Program include the formal characterization of the properties of information and information systems as well as the definitions of objective and quantitative measures of attributes of information such as complexity, meaning, utility, and value. The winner of the first homebuilt robot picture contest sponsored by the journal "Robotics Age" was a robot named Avatar, designed and built by Charles Balmer of Urbana, Ohio. Avatar is an autonomous mobile robot with sensors that allow exploration of a home or office environment and an on-board computer with 64K bytes of memory. This computer doubles as Avatar's software development workstation when the robot is immobilized; it is connected to floppy disk, conventional CRT terminal, and a printer.

Presents several letters to the editor. Reports developments related to the computer industry in the U.S. Impact of the Association for Computing Machinery on government; Relevance of programming courses on academic success; Investigation of the correlation between natural language skills and aptitude for learning programming.

Presents letters to the editor referencing articles and topics discussed in previous issues. Description of proprietary software packages; Importance of proprietary software packages in the computer field; Problems related to the access to the U.S. Government's scientific and technical information; Selection of IFIP Congresses sites.

This article presents news briefs related to the computer industry. Fred P. Brooks has been appointed Association of Computing Machinery's (ACM) representative to the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council. Brooks is a professor in the department of information sciences at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The ACM Professional Development Program will continue its policy of one and two-day seminars in conjunction with national meetings at major cities with two one-day seminars to be presented on August 28, 1967 prior to the ACM 1967 National Conference in Washington D.C. A Special Interest Committee on Programming Languages of the ACM has decided to add an information bulletin on the string manipulation language SNOBOL to those on ALGOL, PL/I, COBOL and JOVIAL. William M. Waite, a scholar of the University of Colorado, has been appointed editor of the bulletin. He invites contributions concerning SNOBOL which may be of interest to users and implementers of the language or to the computing community in general.