communications of the acm

Departments

5 President’s Letter

A New Beginning, A Fond Farewell By Stuart I. Feldman

7 Letters To The Editor

Words Both Kind and Contrary

8 CACM Online

Small Changes Hint at Bigger Things By David Roman

101 Careers

Last Byte

104 Puzzled

Delightful Graph Theory By Peter Winkler

News

9 Designing the Perfect Auction Distributed algorithmic mechanism design is a field at the intersection of computer science and economics. By Hal R. Varian

12 Access for All

Accessible technologies are improving the lives of millions of physically impaired people around the world. By Peggy Aycinena

15 Challenging Poverty Information and communication technologies are an important component in the generation of wealth. How can they help reduce poverty?

By Sarah Underwood

18 Remembering Jim

Both melancholy and reverential, the Jim Gray Tribute at the University of California at Berkeley honored one of computer science’s leading pioneers and visionaries.

By Michael Ross

Viewpoints

19 The Profession of IT

Voices of Computing

The choir of engineers, mathematicians, and scientists who make up the bulk of our field better represents computing than the solo voice of the programmer.

By Peter J. Denning

22 From the Front Lines

Software Development Amidst the Whiz of Silver Bullets

Software development organizations must accept the inevitability of silver-bullet solution proposals and devise strategies to defend against them. By Alex E. Bell

25 Education

Paving the Way for Computational Thinking Drawing on methods from diverse disciplines—including computer science, education, sociology, and psychology—to improve computing education. By Mark Guzdial

28 Viewpoint

Envisioning the Future of Computing Research

Advances in computing have changed our lives—the Computing Community Consortium aims to help the research community continue that lineage.

By Ed Lazowska

31 Interview

Donald Knuth:

A Life’s Work Interrupted

In this second of a two-part interview by Edward Feigenbaum, we find Knuth, having completed three volumes of The Art of Computer Programming, drawn to creating a system to produce books digitally. Edited by Len Shustek

Practice

38 Scaling in Games and Virtual Worlds Online games and virtual worlds have familiar scaling requirements, but don’t be fooled: Everything you know is wrong.

By Jim Waldo

45 CTO Storage Roundtable Leaders in the storage world offer valuable advice for making more effective architecture and technology decisions.

By Mache Creeger, Moderator

52 The Rise and Fall of CORBA There’s a lot we can learn from CORBA’s mistakes.

By Michi Henning