Dr. Dobb's Journal July 2001
In the case of McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission (http://www.uakron.edu/lawrev/whitt.html), the Supreme Court held 7-2 that anonymous speech is protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. But does this right apply to the Internet too? U.S. District Judge Thomas Zilly thinks so, and has issued an opinion that says anonymous speech on the Internet enjoys at least some protection from arbitrary scrutiny. In this particular case, a company called 2TheMart.com was unhappy about comments made in investor forums and requested the court to force ISPs to turn over the names of 23 people who had posted the comments. Judge Zilly denied the request for a subpoena, stating "the First Amendment clearly applies to the Internet."
A Stanford University computer science professor has voiced concern over a growing shortage of highly trained computer scientists. Speaking to the Stanford Computer Forum, Eric Roberts claimed that industry's huge demand for software developers is creating a shortage of computer science Ph.D. candidates, who would ostensibly teach the next generation of programmers. Being lured by large salaries, many CS undergraduates opt to go into industry rather than to graduate school, in some cases even before finishing their undergraduate work.
Roberts also challenged skeptics who claim that the shortage is an industry-contrived ploy to justify the hiring of lower paid workers. The problem has more to do with the "huge variability in the productivity of software people." The answer to that problem is to generate more well-trained programmers by keeping them in school. "This year, there will be at least three CS faculty openings for every candidate," said Roberts. "The number of people who will come out of the pipeline is certain to decline at a time when every serious labor economist believes that it needs to increase."
AcroWizard, a program from Anvil Logic, is designed to "solve the serious productivity problems for Federal workers and contractors caused by the increasing use of acronyms." We won't bother to spell these out (you'll have to run AcroWizard), but the following acronyms were all taken from a single paragraph of a document designed for civilians hoping to sell to the Air Force: AFFARS, MAJCOMs, FOAs, DRUs, FAR/DFARS, and SAF/AQCD, to name a few. AcroWizard comes with a database of 25,000 acronyms and integrates with Microsoft Word, so that you can decipher acronyms on-the-fly. FYI, there's an FAQ at http://www.anvillogic.com/.
The Khronos Group, a consortium of digital media and graphics industry leaders consisting of 3Dlabs, ATI, Discreet, Evans & Sutherland, Intel, NVIDIA, SGI, and Sun Microsystems, has released the OpenML 1.0 specification. OpenML is a software environment that is complementary to the peer OpenGL API. According to Khronos, the specification enables digital content authoring application developers to easily integrate video, audio, and graphics capabilities into their application suites, making these applications portable over multiple operating systems, CPU architectures, and add-in hardware devices. For more information, see http://www.khronos.org/.
Although C# is seen by some as Microsoft's attempt to muscle Java aside, even its critics concede that the language is well designed. And while Anders Hejlsberg, C#'s chief designer and recipient of this year's Dr. Dobb's Excellence In Programming Award, doesn't deny C#'s role as the "Java-killer," he does say that his primary interest is moving to a Property/Method/Event (PME) model of programming while still preserving the C++ heritage: "First and foremost was to capitalize on this trend toward what I call component-oriented computing," Hejlsberg recently told DDJ.
The PME model originated at Borland, while Hejlsberg was chief architect of Delphi. Events and properties can be created in Java and C++, but only by use of special conventions: "If you squint, it's like an event; there's just all this extra plumbing in your face," says Hejlsberg. "These concepts have become important enough in our programming life to be first-class elements in the language."
Many features of C# are designed to aid developers, but can be circumvented if you choose. For instance, "pay-as-you-go typing" lets you treat the standard types as primitives or as objects. C# is type-safe, but if you need to use pointers, structs, and static arrays, you can declare unsafe classes and methods. Hejlsberg thinks this has "been widely misunderstood" as a fundamental security breach: In the .NET security model, unsafe code won't be executed outside a trusted environment. "We're just calling a spade a spade," he says. "And if you write unsafe code you have to say, 'hey, this is unsafe.'" For more on C#, see "C# Strikes a Chord," by Jacques Surveyer (http://www.ddj.com/articles/2000/0065/0065g/0065g.htm), "The C# Programming Language," by Scott Wiltamuth (DDJ, October 2000), and "C# Versus Java," by Marc Eaddy (DDJ, February 2001).
Congratulations to students at the Sandia Preparatory School (Albuquerque, New Mexico) who took the top prize in the 11th annual New Mexico High School Supercomputing Challenge at the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Joan Goldsworthy, Joelle Jones, and Heather Wood were each awarded a $1000 savings bond for their supercomputer program "Parallel Processing of Human Genomic Leukemia Data Using Neural Networks." Their teacher, Neil McBeth, received a classroom computer. The team also received the Cray High Performance Computing Award for their project, which used advanced computing techniques like the Message Passing Interface to allow multiple processors to work on the same problem. The team of Tom Widland, Lizzie Brown, Ryan Davies, Kurt Diegert, and Sarah Oman from Albuquerque's Academy High School received second place for their "Cost Minimization Through Flight Scheduling" project.
Nearly 250 students competed in the New Mexico High School Supercomputing Challenge, which aims to increase knowledge of science and computing, expose students and teachers to computers and applied mathematics, and instill enthusiasm for science in high-school students. The Supercomputing Challenge is sponsored by Los Alamos National Lab and New Mexico Technet. Benefactors include Compaq, Intel, Kinko's, Microsoft, and NASA-Minority University Space Interdisciplinary Network. For more information, including many of the final reports, see http://www.challenge.nm.org/.