The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
There you are, peacefully reading an article or watching a video on the Internet. You finish, find it thought-provoking, and scroll down to the comments section to see what other people thought. And there, lurking among dozens…
In the opening moments of the new Web video "The Story of Electronics," I found myself nodding in recognition as host Annie Leonard held up a tangled mess of electronic gadget chargers. Lurking in my basement at home is a…
It’s a special week in America. All over the country, families are gathering in warmly lighted homes. They’re sitting down to fancy feasts at decorated tables. They smile, they pour libations, they raise their glasses.
British chip designer ARM will soon be 20 years old. Bill Thompson was there at the start.
The Web is critical not merely to the digital revolution but to our continued prosperity—and even our liberty. Like democracy itself, it needs defending.
The Intel researcher is designing computers that can recognize gestures and objects to better bridge the virtual and real worlds.
Asked to name the world’s wealthiest entrepreneurs, few people would think of Eric Lefkofsky, who is 40 and keeps a deliberately low profile in his hometown of Chicago. But Lefkofsky has an impressive entrepreneurial track…
Four decades ago, NASA put a man on the moon using a computer system less powerful than the electronics in many modern-day toasters. With that audacious act of technological faith, the U.S. took a giant step toward global…
Do away with Google? Break up Facebook? We can't imagine life without them—and that's the problem.
Barack Obama was the embodiment of the modern, high-tech president when he took office. However, halfway through his first term, he has yet to deliver on much of his sweeping tech agenda, tempering the high expectations many…
Pixar Animation Studios president Ed Catmull says he once used realistic computer-generated animation as a goal because "doing it is so hard that it would help drive us forward."
Whether you know him by name, you almost certainly have firsthand experience with some of Nolan Bushnell's work. He's known by many as the father of video games, since he created Pong and co-founded Atari. And he may have…
The origins of our Webified age were hardly auspicious. Two decades ago, Tim Berners-Lee, a British software programmer at the CERN physics-research laboratory outside Geneva, was sketching out a global system for sharing…
Cloud computing is a lot like the weather: Everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it. Just 9.3% of companies say they'll be using platform or infrastructure as a service (P/IaaS) offerings by the end of the…
What kind of discipline is computer science? I thought it was a science when I received my bachelor's degree. I believed its subdiscipline software engineering was engineering when I received my Ph.D. I’d heard, and would…
The Air Force calls the situation "Launch Facilities Down." On Oct. 23, a Wyoming-based squadron of 50 nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs)—enough firepower to kill some 20 million people—lost computer…
Peak performance doesn't equal sustained performance, and the NVIDIA GPUs in the Tianhe 1A are especially bad at the latter.
Everyone knows that speed cameras work. They create the discipline of a lissom lady in leather and make sure everyone understands just what the rules are. In fact, some people are so in awe of speed cameras' discipline that…
So you might have heard a story yesterday about a little magazine called Cooks Source. Up until then, you might never have heard of Cooks Source. But maybe you've heard of "the Internet." Cooks Source now undoubtedly wishes…
Among the scores of fabless chip companies and product design houses in Silicon Valley, Intel is a standout. It's an American high-tech company that not only creates but builds some of the most sophisticated tech products…
American broadband capacity might not be able to keep up with everyone who wants to stream movies.
CTO says $2 million project has less than 50% chance of success.
When it comes to the future of technology, Jeff Han literally has his finger on the pulse.
The director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications has seen the future of supercomputing and it can be summed up in three letters: GPU.
With China expected to officially take the supercomputer performance crown next month, I asked an expert about the state of supercomputing in the U.S. and whether China poses a long-term threat to the United States' current preeminence…
The danger of allowing an advertising company to control the index of human knowledge is too obvious to ignore.
Reading between the lines of the thematic gap between the supply and demand of online news.
If we want more computer science students, and if we want computer scientists to be understood for what we are, we must clarify the message about computer science that all students will receive as part of their K–12 education…
Evaluating governmental actions—and inactions—toward improving cyber security and addressing future challenges.
Lessons from the field derived from developing wireless sensor networks for monitoring active and hazardous volcanoes.