Communications of the ACM
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From Communications of the ACM
You Don't Know Jack About Software Maintenance
Long considered an afterthought, software maintenance is easiest and most effective when built into a system from the ground up.
From Communications of the ACM
Four Billion Little Brothers?: Privacy, Mobile Phones, and Ubiquitous Data Collection
Participatory sensing technologies could improve our lives and our communities, but at what cost to our privacy?
From Communications of the ACM
Communications Surveillance: Privacy and Security at Risk
As the sophistication of wiretapping technology grows, so too do the risks it poses to our privacy and security.
From Communications of the ACM
A Conversation with David E. Shaw
Stanford professor Pat Hanrahan sits down with the noted hedge fund founder, computational biochemist, and (above all) computer scientist.
From Communications of the ACM
Unifying Biological Image Formats with HDF5
The biosciences need an image format capable of high performance and long-term maintenance. Is HDF5 the answer?
From Communications of the ACM
Probing Biomolecular Machines with Graphics Processors
GPU acceleration and other computer performance increases will offer critical benefits to biomedical science.
From Communications of the ACM
Making Sense of Revision-Control Systems
All revision-control systems come with complicated sets of trade-offs. How do you find the best match between tool and team?
From Communications of the ACM
Monitoring and Control of Large Systems With MonALISA
MonALISA developers describe how it works, the key design principles behind it, and the biggest technical challenges in building it.
From Communications of the ACM
Reveling in Constraints
The Google Web Toolkit is an end-run around Web development obstacles.
From Communications of the ACM
CTO Roundtable: Cloud Computing
The age of cloud computing has begun. How can companies take advantage of the new opportunities it provides?
From Communications of the ACM
The Pathologies of Big Data
Scale up your datasets enough and your apps come undone. What are the typical problems and where do the bottlenecks surface?
From Communications of the ACM
Browser Security: Lessons from Google Chrome
To shield the browser from attacks, Google Chrome developers eyed three key problems.
From Communications of the ACM
Fighting Physics: A Tough Battle
The laws of physics and the Internet's routing infrastructure affect performance in a big way.
From Communications of the ACM
The Five-Minute Rule 20 Years Later
Revisiting Gray and Putzolu's famous rule in the age of Flash.
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...
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
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
Debugging AJAX in Production
Lacking proper browser support, what steps can we take to debug production AJAX code?
From Communications of the ACM
API Design Matters
It is very easy to create a bad API and rather difficult to create a good one. Recent APIs implemented in modern programming languages make the same mistakes as...
From Communications of the ACM