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The article focuses on trust extensions for commodity computers. Topics include secure systems software development, the creation of trust extension systems through network protocols, and the practice of bootstrapping trust. Information is provided on security features in commodity computers, trusted platform modules (TPMs), and network access during malware breaches and computer security attacks. The article also discusses how to execute code securely without vulnerabilities in computer security systems. INSET: Security Features in Commodity Computers.

The article discusses difficulties that can exist with computer software. Problems discussed in the article include a lack of metrics to measure software dependability, the dependability of a computer system's software, and software verification problems. Research is being completed on steps that can be taken to make certified software code more dependable. Changes that have been made to programming languages, formal semantics, and program verifications have helped power the advances that have occurred in certified software.

The article discusses a push by the U.S. government to spend almost $20 billion to digitize medical records. The money is meant to speed the computerization of patient medical data and prescriptions, the article indicates. Commentary is provided by Jeff Goldsmith, author of "Digital Medicine: Implications for Healthcare Leaders."

This article examines how technology is changing the traditional work paradigm of Wall Street and other financial centers. Computers who analyze and complete stock trades are making inroads. Called algorithmic trading, it is now handling over 70% of foreign currency trades at Deutsche Bank of London.

The article focuses on the effectiveness of computer misuse policies among university students. A study of Midwestern college students found that more than a third of business students, (undergraduate and graduate), had misused computer system resources or software in their lifetimes. Paradoxically, the study found that students who had read the computer misuse policy of the university committed more abuse. Greater familiarity with computers was also an indicator of greater levels of computer misuse; in general, undergraduate misuse was lower than graduate student misuse. The study's implications for corporate computer use policies are discussed.

The very idea of a virtual environment (VE) is compelling--being able to go places and do and experience things you couldn't or wouldn't in the real world. The wow factor certainly makes people's initial experience with the technology exciting, along with the fact that most people who have experienced VE's have done so in entertainment venues carefully designed to be engaging and fun. It is the user's immersion in the sights and sounds of the virtual world that sets VE applications apart from their conventional counterparts. However, despite VE- system limitations, compelling and successful VE applications do exist. Some are very compelling because of their realism. Other VE's, while not compelling in the sense of personally gripping, are impressive simply because the application wouldn't exist without VE. A compelling VE application depends on a VE system being able to provide high-quality sensory immersion, a well-designed application, and a motivated user. INSET: PRESENCE..

Today's software often has countless intricate interdependencies on modern operating systems, other enterprise applications and the high-speed networking infrastructure. It is within such highly integrated information technology environments that software security is becoming a focal point for designing, developing and deploying software applications. The study outlines various classes of security-related risks and threats that need to be considered during the design phase of the software development process. The universe of software risks and threats is divided into three categories based on their target of attack: Application layer, Platform layer and Network layer. By taking into consideration security risks and threats and their impact on the quality of the target system, software architects and designers need to select protection mechanisms, the application of appropriate security technologies and approaches to provide necessary safeguards. The study provides today's security professionals with an understanding of the context in which their technologies relate to the entire software system and provide for software security design requirements to be fully analyzed.

This article discusses various issues related to an evolutionary framework to categorize the enterprise software market. The software industry and information technology (IT) departments are facing extreme pressures to provide new applications that add value in today's competitive environment. In response to traditional and emerging markets, software vendors are realizing they must satisfy the needs of a wide range of companies and to develop applications tailored to each niche. Facing these changes involves the daunting task of understanding key differences among software packages and identifying the major players within each market segment. A framework has been developed that organizes software applications similarly to the evolutionary categorization of animals. This framework can help software buyers identify key differences among currently available systems, and can also help software vendors and customers highlight today's trends, with an eye toward guiding organizations toward future software choices. The ideas of Darwinian evolution can be used to describe the tumultuous IT environment in which enterprises compete.

This article focuses on communication management experiences and its effect on e-commerce. Effective e-commerce relies on an efficient and precise information interchange between participating stakeholders, using the existing infrastructure. The Internet and intranet communication facilities are making the amount of available information quite large, and it continues to increase progressively. Experiences using a multi-agent system (MAS)- based intermediation service for e-commerce, implemented with computer software Java and CORBA are described in this article, with emphasis on communication and management system activities. Using Java as the communication medium between modules inside each domain allows higher speed than using CORBA but requires replacing call-back versatility with a more complex implementation code. At the same time, the application environment does not tend to be extremely distributed or heterogeneous, so that CORBA utilization in intradomain communications could be justified.

The article highlights the success of pair programming based on a "pair programming survey," in context of Robert L. Fulgham's essay titled "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." The article reports that when it comes to programming practices, studies show two heads are almost better than one. Pair programming is a practice in which two programmers work side-by-side at one computer, continuously collaborating on the same design, algorithm, code, or test. Anecdotal and initial statistical evidence indicates pair programming is highly beneficial, which is also attributed by Extreme programming. In the case of transition to pair programming from solitary programming, to avoid hesitation and to work successfully, some principles referred to are sharing of the work, sharing of key board typing and continuous analysis, avoiding negative thoughts, leaving ego etc. As a final thought, the article points out that making transition to pair programming involves breaking down some personal barriers. The success lies in hands of them in understanding the value of intercommunication skills, in confidently sharing the work and accepting the ownership of the partner's work. INSET: All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten..

This article focuses on the use of software in safety-critical systems. Computers are used in safety- critical applications. Software decisions are often based on economic rather than safety considerations. It is sometimes assumed that software is totally reliable since software does not wear out. Instead, the errors occur in a much more random and unpredictable manner. Software is a digital rather than analog artifact. As such, techniques like interpolation and extrapolation, used by many hardware engineers in calculations, do not apply. Changing a single bit in a computer program can have a very unpredictable effect on its operation or may be completely benign in some circumstances. The complexity of most software is such that it is extremely difficult to reason about its behavior with great certainty. The highest quality of personnel should be employed in the development of safety-critical applications. The engineers involved should be capable of absorbing the required toolkit of knowledge and also accurately comprehending the required operation of computer-based systems. No special qualifications are currently required for personnel developing or maintaining software for safety-critical systems. This contrasts with the more established engineering professions where standards, regulations, certification, and accreditation often apply much more strictly. INSETS: Formal Methods and Formal Specification.;Code of Practice for Engineers and Managers..

This article focuses on three-dimensional (3D) visualization of software architectures. Software architectures refers to the art and science of structuring very large programs and concerns the organization of a system in terms of its components, global control structures, physical distribution, evolution and more. The discipline of software architecture recently received a boost from new technological options for visualizing and analyzing software systems. These options are the result of the virtual reality modeling language (VRML), which is a de facto worldwide standard. There are several reasons why it is worthwhile to investigate and apply the emerging VRML technology to visualizing software designs. The main one is that VRML technology is available today and can help upgrade two-dimensional (2D) approaches to show design information. Moreover, 3D makes it possible to make a layout of the design objects more consistent with the object's intended role than can be done in a single plane. 3D visualization helps identify new design metaphors, fostering new ideas with respect to design principles.

The article evaluates several software including Apple Computer Appleworks 5.0 from Apple Computer, Corel WordPerfect Office 2000 Standard Edition from Corel, and Microsoft Office 98 Macintosh Edition.

The article focuses on the computer architecture. The successful introduction of a new computer architecture into the marketplace requires that both software and hardware be available simultaneously at the time of system introduction. Reduced instruction set computer (RISC) microprocessors team of Motorola Inc. is developing new software tools, including state-of-the-art compilers and simulators. All members of PowerPC simulator family of Motorola Inc. share some common features. This common feature set ensures that support code developed on one simulator will run appropriately on another member of the family. It also lessens the burden of learning a new set of commands for a new simulator. the PowerPC Architectural simulator (PPCArch) family is a set of programs that emulate various PowerPC microprocessors. The PPCArch simulators are based on a type of simulator originally developed for the Motorola M88K RISC microprocessor developed a style of threaded code simulator that used a unique C language.

The PowerPC 603 allows the system designer to control energy consumption through both hardware and software means as well as providing automatic internal power management. A sophisticated feature of the PowerPC 603 is dynamic power management (DPM), which automatically powers up and down the individual execution units on the chip, based on the contents of the instruction stream. The most unique feature of the 603 is the inclusion of four power states: Full On, Doze, Nap, and Sleep. Software selects these modes by setting one of the three power-saving mode bits. The 603 microprocessor provides a separate interrupt and interrupt vector for power management: the System Management Interrupter (SMI). The 603 also contains a decrement timer that allows it to enter the Nap or Doze mode for a predetermined amount of time and then return to Full On operation through the Decrementer interrupt (DI). The Nap mode disables the PowerPC 603 but still maintains the Phase Locked Loop (PLL) and the decrement timer. The timer can be used to wake up after a programmed amount of time.

The article presents information on software complexity and maintenance costs. While the link between the difficulty in understanding computer software and the cost of maintaining it is appealing, prior empirical evidence linking software complexity to software maintenance costs is relatively weak. Many of the attempts to link software complexity to maintainability are based on experiments involving small pieces of code, or are based on analysis of software written by students. Such evidence is valuable, but several researchers have noted that such results must be applied cautiously to the large-scale commercial application systems that account for most software maintenance expenditures. Further- more, the limited large-scale research that has been undertaken has generated either conflicting results or none at all, as, for example, on the effects of software modularity and software structure. Additionally, none of the previous work develops estimates of the actual cost of complexity, estimates that could be used by software maintenance managers to make the best use of their resources. While research supporting the statistical significance of a factor is, of course, a necessary first step in this process, practitioners must also have an understanding of the practical magnitudes of the effects of complexity if they are to be able to make informed decisions.

Software reviews are not a new idea. They have been around almost as long as software has. One of the most natural ways to check if something is correct is to look at it. In the 1950s and 1960s, large software projects often included some sort of software review. By the 1970s, various review methods had emerged with different names, software reviews, technical reviews, formal reviews, walkthroughs, structured walkthroughs, and code inspections. Each review method had different forms to fill out, different review team sizes and makeup, and so on, but none suggested any approach for reviewing the software or other work product other than just looking at it and discussing it. One might wonder why reviews are used at all, since most software is tested anyway. There are several reasons for doing something other than testing. Among these reasons are the expense and insufficiency of testing. It is well known that a software system cannot be made reliable by testing. Since independent inspections are routine in many other disciplines, such a financial accounting and building construction, it is surprising that inspection is not a significant element of software development.

This article focuses on the evaluation of safety-critical software. It is increasingly common to use programmable computers in applications where their failure could be life-threatening and could result in extensive damage. For example, computers now have safety-critical functions in both military and civilian aircraft, in nuclear plants. and in medical devices. Within the engineering community software systems have a reputation for being undependable, especially in the first years of their use. The public is aware of a few spectacular stories such as the Space Shuttle flight that was delayed by a software timing problem, or the Venus probe that was lost because of a punctuation error. In the software community, the problem is known to be much more widespread. Generally, many uses and many failures are required before a product is considered reliable. Software products, including those that have become relatively reliable, behave like other products of evolution-like processes; they often fail, even years after they were built, when the operating conditions change.

This article focuses on software development and maintenance. Software maintenance, the correction, adaptation, and perfection of operational software that has been a relatively neglected subject in the literature of software engineering and management. The virtues of these techniques are often held to include ease of maintenance on implementation. Systems beget systems; better systems generate more systems, subject data bases, and strategic information systems. The installed software base grows larger and more diversified as end user developed systems, third party developed systems, and purchased packages are added. The allocation of organizational resources to new system development and installed system maintenance has rarely been studied as a joint problem. The mature information systems organization is therefore responsible for a substantial accumulation of installed application systems, which undergoes continuous growth and "evolution" and which must be managed in conjunction with the acquisition and development of those new systems to which the organization also commits itself.

Presents the views of several authors about Fortran-8x, a new programming language. Discussion about various aspects of Fortran-8x; View that introduction of Fortran-8x would be contrary to the trend in computer systems; Use of Fortran as the lingua franca of scientific and engineering programming; Report that the vast majority of computing tasks are Turing Machine processes; Information about the prospects offered by Fortran-8x.

This article presents information related to the various functional and behavioral aspects of computer-aided software engineering (CASE). Recent CASE advertisements suggest that users are reporting productivity improvements ranging from 30 to 300 percent. Two additional factors which were considered very important during system development were also included along with the CASE product functions. They were communication among project team members and adherence to the enterprise's system development standards. Although the implementation of technological functions may vary in other CASE products, most of the competing CASE products support an equivalent function. Testing of all 17 functions required that 136 paired comparisons be made by the subjects. For the software engineer's preferences, the preferred representation of the 136 similarity rankings was in three dimensions with 88 percent of the total original pairwise ranks accounted for. A study implies that CASE product offerings need not be as robust in functionality as the one used in the study in order to positively affect productivity.

This article focuses on the problem of levels in error-message generation in interactive software systems. Most computer users are not familiar with how their systems work beyond a certain level of operations. Consequently, there is often a problem with error-message generation in interactive software systems. Such problems of file creation error often occur at a program execution level unknown to the user. Many computer users have probably experienced these kinds of error messages. The problem with these messages is that, among many other things, they are signaled by a lower level operation that has been invoked by the user command without the user being aware of it. The difficulties in error-message generation in such cases arise because a lower level operation can be invoked by many different user commands that serve radically different user intentions. An error message signaled at any level is designed with the assumption that the receiver is the caller of that operation. There is, of course, nothing wrong with this assumption if the command is activated by the user. The trouble occurs when the user is not the caller of that operation.

The article discusses the introduction of Automated Enterprise Management Systems (ASUPs), a management information system, in the industrial enterprises of the U.S.S.R. The Communist party and the government of the Soviet Union have orchestrated an unprecedented program to introduce computer-based information systems from the top down on the scale of an entire country. But the integration of these systems into the general economy of the U.S.S.R. has been fraught with numerous difficulties. The majority of ASUPs were geared toward manufacturing industries. Between 1965 and 1985, about 7500 ASUs were built throughout the Soviet economy. About 3300 are at the enterprise level, a few hundred are ministry-level systems and most of the rest are for process control. The Soviets have built a large computer infrastructure that has succeeded in delivering usable hardware and software to a large number of organizations throughout the economy. The infrastructure had the most success in building hardware, systems and applications software were next, and training a knowledgeable user base was last.

The article offers a comparative examination of the working-set approach and FIFO method for efficient dynamic storage-allocation mechanisms in run-time software and operating systems. It states that the said approach and method were evaluated according to their performance using three data representing the characteristics of arrival patterns to dynamic allocation software. The results indicate that using the working-set approach will consistently result in higher cache hit ratios than the FIFO method, except for sequential access to enough different sizes, which results in FIFO's performing as well as the working set.

The article presents a calendar of events related to computer science. It includes, International Conference on Machine Translation; Computer Science and Statistics: 16th Symposium on the Interface; Fourth Latin American Conference in Computer Science; Seventh International Conference on Pattern Recognition; Ohio Instructional Computing Conference; Computer Networking Symposium; Third Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science; Total Systems Reliability Symposium; The Fourth International Conference on Information Systems; Second International Conference on Advanced Automation; Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences; Workshop on Sublanguage Description and Processing; International Symposium on Logic Programming; International Symposium on the Performance of Computer-Communication Systems; Seventh International Conference on Software Engineering; Seventh International Conference on Software Engineering; and International Workshop on Models and Languages for Software Specification and Design.

The nature of programming is changing. These changes will accelerate as improved software development practices and more sophisticated development tools and environments are produced. This paper surveys the most likely changes in the programming task and in the nature of software over the short term, the medium term, and the long term. In the short term, the focus is on gains in programmer productivity through improved tools and integrated development environments. In the medium term, programmers will be able to take advantage of libraries of software components and to make use of packages that generate programs automatically for certain kinds of common systems. Over the longer term, the nature of programming will change even more significantly as programmers become able to describe desired functions in a nonprocedural way, perhaps through a set of rules or formal specification languages. As these changes occur, the job of the application programmer will become increasingly analysis-oriented and software developers will be able to attack a large number of application areas which could not previously be addressed effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The STRUM system was created to apply software engineering techniques to microprogramming. It provides the tools that allow the microprogrammer to use high level language, structured programming, and formal program verification to create emulations for a horizontally microprogrammed computer. This system is evaluated in two parts: (1) High level microprogramming language design and its use in structured microprogramming; and (2) Verification of a large microprogram. Both parts of this evaluation include experimental results. Part I includes a comparison of an emulation created using traditional techniques to the same emulation created using the STRUM system. Part II describes the formal verification of a 1700 line program that was immediately subjected to extensive testing. This work provides new results on the efficiency of high level microprogramming languages, the effectiveness of peephole optimization for microcode and the practicality of formal microprogram verification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing trend of application of computerized simulation studies to large and complex systems necessitates the development of an assessment methodology for simulation studies. The basic concepts and criteria necessary for such an assessment methodology are presented in a systematic way. The proposed framework permits discussion of the concepts and criteria related to the acceptability of the following components of a simulation study: Simulation results, real world and simulated data, parametric model and the values of the model parameters, specification of the experimentation, representation and execution of the computer program, and modeling, experimentation, simulation, and programming methodologies or techniques used. The acceptability of the components of a simulation study are discussed with respect to the goal of the simulation study, the structure and data of the real system, the parametric model, the model parameter set, the specification of the experimentation, and the existing or conceivable norms of modeling methodology, experimentation technique, simulation methodology, and software engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consistency control has to be enforced in database management systems (DBMS) where several transactions may concurrently access the database. This control is usually achieved by dividing the database into locking units or granules, and by specifying a locking policy which ensures integrity of the information. However, a drawback of integrity enforcement through locking policies is the degradation of the global system performance. This is mainly due to the restriction imposed by the locking policies to the access of transactions to the database, and to the overheads involved with the management of locks. A framework for the quantitative analysis of the impact of these factors on the performance of DBMS is presented in this paper. In a first step, the main factors which determine the behavior of these systems are pointed out and analyzed independently. The results hereby obtained are aggregated in a second step to yield a global performance evaluation. Throughout this hierarchical modeling approach various analytical techniques are used and the results are illustrated by numerical examples. The paper concludes by pointing out the final results' sensitivity to some basic assumptions concerning transaction behavior and the need for more experimental studies in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors contend that it is both possible and necessary to clearly demark and explicitly define the transition between the software design and software implementation phases of the software life cycle. The output of the software design phase is defined to be a logical design of software, and the logical design can be described explicitly if the software is viewed as a system of data sets and data transforms. Logical Construction of Software (LCS) is a software design methodology that guides the designer in defining and describing these software components and their relationships. The methodology is illustrated via a practical application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on new design possibilities that visual and task focused systems offer. In the 1970s when the infrastructure, methodologies, specifications, architecture and goals for large scale corporate systems were set, the focus of applications software was data processing. The hardware was, of course primitive by today's standards. But hardware aside, the first 10 to 15 years of application development were focused on structuring environments to capture, transform, and report on data-largely transaction data. The first systems author remember were insurance, banking people used to keypunch from when batch systems were the rage. Of course, since the paper forms couldn't be represented well and since display screen real estate was such a priority, these "data entry"screens contained huge numbers of fields with minimalist cryptic labels. Since people weren't doing anything but entering data that existed on source paper forms, the focus was on rapid data entry. And since data transmission was costly, the goal was to have as much on a display as possible before pressing transmit or enter.

The typical business operation has to address a variety of issues, not the least of which are rapidly changing business environments, training employees, satisfying and retaining customers. One of the responses to these challenges is the development of a relatively new type of software called Electronic Performance Support Systems (EPSS), a term that is widely used but has no generally agreed-upon definition. One can characterize an EPSS by its purpose, its design, and its development methodology. Expressions such as "just-in-time knowledge" or "delivering the right knowledge at the right time" are often used to describe EPSS. The immediate purpose of an EPSS is to support and enhance users' performance by providing them with the knowledge required by the task they are performing at the time they are actually performing the task. This knowledge can be explicit, as in the case of information retrieved from a database and delivered to the user. It can also be implicit, such as the knowledge that goes into designing a graphical user interface data entry screen that guides the users efficiently through the task they are performing.

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.

Object-oriented techniques for analysis, design, and construction of software systems have been espoused with fervor in the computing literature. Advocates cite successes in a wide variety of applications, from graphical user interfaces and distributed databases to large-scale financial simulations. Object technology (OT) offers several advantages that map well to recent changes in the industrial marketplace. As priorities shift to emphasize speed and responsiveness to market conditions, traditional software engineering methodologies like the, so-called "water-fall model" fall short. Object orientation (OO), on the other hand, makes it possible to model systems that are very close in structure to their real-world analogues. The objective of OO design is to identify accurately the principal roles in an organization or process, assign responsibilities to each of those roles, and define the circumstances under which roles interact with one another. Each role is encapsulated in the form of an object. INSETS: Glossary of Object Acronyms.;Is Object Technology Still "Emerging"?.