Communications of the ACM
Practice Archive
The Practice archive provides access to all Practice articles published in past issues of Communications of the ACM.
June 2009
From Communications of the ACM
Hard-Disk Drives: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
New drive technologies and increased capacities create new categories of failure modes that will influence system designs.
From Communications of the ACM
Network Front-End Processors, Yet Again
The history of NFE processors sheds light on the trade-offs involved in designing network stack software.
From Communications of the ACM
Whither Sockets?
The pervasive and long-lasting sockets API has remained largely unchanged since 1982. How have developers worked around its inherent limitations and what is the future of sockets in a changing networked world?