Communications of the ACM
The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
August 2011
From ACM Opinion
Technology Is Our Friend... Except When It Isn't
The technology in question starts with "gigapixel" photography. Gigapixel photos are giant panoramas that themselves consist of hundreds of component mega-pixel digital shots.
From ACM News
The 10 Commandments of Steve
More than anything else, Jobs's genius is in managing the creative process. Here's his playbook.
From ACM Opinion
Kids Today Need a Licence to Tinker
Back to school time and millions of British kids are heading back to classrooms to embark on the national curriculum so beloved of busybody ministers.
From ACM Opinion
How to Fix Our Math Education
There is widespread alarm in the United States about the state of our math education. The anxiety can be traced to the poor performance of American students on various international tests, and it is now embodied in George…
From ACM Opinion
Beware: Europe's 'unitary Patent' Could Mean nlimited Software Patents
Just as the U.S. software industry is experiencing the long-anticipated all-out software patent wars, the European Union has a plan to follow the same course. When the Hargreaves report urged the U.K. to avoid software patents…
From ACM News
Seeing the Future of the Office Internet
Inside the headquarters of networking giant Cisco in San Jose, California, lies a technology showcase where executives can test out advanced technologies like high-definition videoconferencing, a digital avatar named Halie…
From ACM News
Ben Fry, Information Designer
In the golden age of data visualization, he helps designers think like programmers, and vice versa.
From ACM Opinion
Jobs's Legacy: Changing How We Live
Steve Jobs's resignation as Chief Executive Officer of Apple is the end of an extraordinary era, not just for Apple, but for the global technology industry in general.
From ACM Opinion
Apple Will Do Amazingly Well Without Steve Jobs
On Thursday morning, shares of Apple are going to plummet. As a journalist who covers the company, I'm ethically restricted from investing. But you're not, and so I have one word for you: Buy.
From ACM Opinion
Let's Get Back to Real Space Exploration
Time to ditch the black armbands and look beyond low Earth orbit again. The shuttle's passing marks the start of an exciting new era.
From ACM News
Judge Says Warrant Required For Cell Phone Location Data
In recent years, the courts have struggled to decide whether the government needs a warrant to access historical records about a cell phone user's location. Some courts have found that when users turn on their cell phones,…
From ACM Opinion
Let Our Bots Do Our Tweeting For S
My tweets generally reflect a set of parochial interests I continually revisit: the shuffle function in iTunes, the Phillies’ crummy batting lineup, reviews of my book, and, of course, the latest tech news associated with…
From ACM Opinion
A Turbulent End to the Pc Era
The personal computer recently celebrated its 30th birthday. Then last week, Silicon Valley staged the PC's funeral.
From ACM Opinion
Why Google Had to Have Motorola Mobility
For several years now, Google has been following a vow made by former CEO Eric Schmidt: mobile first. New CEO Larry Page is taking that dictum to a new level by announcing a deal to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5bn.
From ACM Opinion
Why Software Is Eating the World
Last week, Hewlett-Packard (where I am on the board) announced that it is exploring jettisoning its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software, where it sees better potential for growth. Meanwhile…
From ACM Opinion
Can Math Beat Financial Markets?
Wall Street's wild swings last week helped skew both retirement portfolios and mathematical models of the financial markets. After all, a standard Gaussian function—a bell curve—would predict that such extreme dips and rises…
From ACM Opinion
Steve, Please Buy S a Carrier!
What should Apple do with its $76bn in cash? It could do worse than spend some of it on acquiring its own mobile carrier.
From ACM Opinion
Why Cctv Has Failed to Deter Criminals
I've lost track of the number of people who've asked me to comment on David Cameron's insane plan to cripple Britain's Internet in times of civil unrest by blocking Twitter and other services. In case you're wondering where…
From ACM Opinion
What Constitutes an Act of Cyberwar?
Before we get to that, there's a clue in the spelling of the word: cyberwar instead of cyber war. The U.S. Defense Department has determined that cyber is a fifth domain after air, land, sea, and space.
From ACM Opinion
11 Hard Truths About Html5
HTML5 heralds some nifty new features and the potential for sparking a Web programming paradigm shift, and as some members of the technical press have touted, there is nothing like HTML5 for fixing the Internet.
After several…From ACM News
The Death of Booting p
Remember "booting up"? It was the first thing you did every morning—you waited two minutes, three minutes, sometimes even longer while your computer ran through a series of self-tests, loading screens, and an error prompt…
From ACM TechNews
Nsf's Seidel: 'software Is the Modern Language of Science'
Software is the core technology behind a dramatic acceleration in all areas of science, and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the science community are faced with the challenge of building a cyberinfrastructure…
From ACM Opinion
Apple's Rise to Top Means Less Than You Think
With Apple officially becoming the world's most valuable company—at least for a day—it's tempting to engage in lofty talk about what this says about the rise of the tech economy and Silicon Valley.
From ACM Opinion
Why I Already Miss Physical Media
For years, I had a happy weekend ritual. I'd head to my local Tower Records and lose myself in the aisles of CDs and DVDs. After emerging from the store—usually with some purchases in hand—I'd move on to a nearby Borders,…
From ACM News
Futurist Ray Kurzweil Says He Can Bring His Dead Father Back to Life Through a Computer Avatar
Ray Kurzweil, a prominent inventor and "futurist" who has long predicted that mind and machine will one day merge, has been making arrangements to talk to his dead father through the help of a computer.
From ACM Opinion
Education Needs a Digital-Age pgrade
If you have a child entering grade school this fall, file away just one number with all those back-to-school forms: 65 percent. Chances are just that good that, in spite of anything you do, little Oliver or Abigail won’t end…
From ACM News
Google's Self-Driving Wreck: Really Human Error?
When a self-driving car crashes, one just has to wonder about those robots. Are they really all they're cracked up to be? Or might they be just as cracked as the rest of us? Should you have, this morning, been unreasonably…
From ACM Opinion
Why Isn't America Innovating Like It sed To?
America isn't innovating like it used to. And by "like it used to," I mean the period from after World War II to 1973, when an explosion of new technologies increased worker productivity at a pace that, had it continued to…
From ACM Opinion
When Knowledge Isn
“Making fun of Wikipedia is so 2007,” a French journalist said recently to Sue Gardner, the executive director of the foundation that runs the Wikipedia project.
And so Ms. Gardner, in turn, told an auditorium full of Wikipedia…From ACM TechNews
Above the Clouds: An Interview With Armando Fox
University of California, Berkeley professor Armando Fox, co-founder of the Reliable, Adaptive, and Distributed Systems Laboratory, co-wrote a paper that outlined some early challenges and advantages of high performance computing…