One Laptop Per Child: Vision vs. Reality

ACM's flagship magazine, Communications of the ACM, is the premier chronicler of computing technologies, covering the latest discoveries, innovations, and research that inspire and influence the field. Each month, Communications brings readers in-depth stories of emerging areas of computer science, new trends in IT, and practical research applications. Industry leaders choose Communications to debate technology implications, public policies, engineering challenges, and market trends.

Read by over 85,000 computing researchers and practitioners worldwide, Communications is recognized as the most trusted and knowledgeable source of industry information for today's computing professional.


Table of Contents

DEPARTMENT: ACM-W letter
ACM-W Celebrates Women in Computing

Computer science is no longer the hot, high-enrollment field it once was. While many suggestions have been made for increasing enrollments, it is unlikely that computer science will ever be as vibrant as it could be — and should …
Elaine Weyuker
Page 5

DEPARTMENT: Letters to the editor
Share the Threats
CACM Staff
Page 9

DEPARTMENT: blog@CACM
Speech-Activated User Interfaces and Climbing Mt. Exascale
The Communications Web site, cacm.acm.org, features 13 bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish excerpts from selected posts, plus readers' comments. Tessa Lau discusses why she doesn't …
Tessa Lau, Daniel Reed
Pages 10-11

DEPARTMENT: CACM online
Making That Connection
David Roman
Page 12

COLUMN: News
Micromedicine to the Rescue
Medical researchers have long dreamed of "magic bullets" that go directly where they are needed. With micromedicine, this dream could become a life-saving reality.
Don Monroe
Pages 13-15

Content Control
Entertainment businesses say digital rights management prevents the theft of their products, but access control technologies have been a uniform failure when it comes to preventing piracy. Fortunately, change is on the way.
Leah Hoffmann
Pages 16-17

Autonomous Helicopters
Researchers are improving unmanned helicopters' capabilities to address regulatory requirements and commercial uses.
Gregory Goth
Pages 18-20

Looking Backward and Forward
CRA's Computing Community Consortium hosted a day-long symposium to discuss the important computing advances of the last several decades and how to sustain that track record of innovation.
Bob Violino
Page 21

COLUMN: Viewpoints
Answering the Wrong Questions Is No Answer
Asking the wrong questions when building and deploying systems results in systems that cannot be sufficiently protected against the threats they face.
Eugene H. Spafford
Pages 22-24

Reducing Risks of Implantable Medical Devices
A prescription to improve security and privacy of pervasive health care.
Kevin Fu
Pages 25-27

Beyond Computational Thinking
If we are not careful, our fascination with "computational thinking" may lead us back into the trap we are trying to escape.
Peter J. Denning
Pages 28-30

Why 'Open Source' Misses the Point of Free Software
Decoding the important differences in terminology, underlying philosophy, and value systems between two similar categories of software.
Richard Stallman
Pages 31-33

Kode Vicious: Obvious Truths
How to determine when to put the brakes on late-running projects and untested software patches.
George V. Neville-Neil
Pages 34-35

SECTION: Practice
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.
Jon Elerath
Pages 38-45

Network Front-End Processors, Yet Again
The history of NFE processors sheds light on the trade-offs involved in designing network stack software.
Mike O'Dell
Pages 46-50

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 future of sockets in a changing networked world?
George V. Neville-Neil
Pages 51-55

SECTION: Contributed articles
The Claremont Report on Database Research
Database research is expanding, with major efforts in system architecture, new languages, cloud services, mobile and virtual worlds, and interplay between structure and text.
Rakesh Agrawal, Anastasia Ailamaki, Philip A. Bernstein, Eric A. Brewer, Michael J. Carey, Surajit Chaudhuri, Anhai Doan, Daniela Florescu, Michael J. Franklin, Hector Garcia-Molina, Johannes Gehrke, Le Gruenwald, Laura M. Haas, Alon Y. Halevy, Joseph M.
Pages 56-65

One Laptop Per Child: Vision vs. Reality
The vision is being overwhelmed by the reality of business, politics, logistics, and competing interests worldwide.
Kenneth L. Kraemer, Jason Dedrick, Prakul Sharma
Pages 66-73

SECTION: Review articles
How Computer Science Serves the Developing World
Information and communication technology for development can greatly improve quality of life for the world's neediest people.
M. Bernardine Dias, Eric Brewer
Pages 74-80

SECTION: Research highlights
Reframing Security for the Web
Andrew Myers
Page 82

Securing Frame Communication in Browsers
Many Web sites embed third-party content in frames, relying on the browser's security policy to protect against malicious content. However, frames provide insufficient isolation in browsers that let framed content navigate other …
Adam Barth, Collin Jackson, John C. Mitchell
Pages 83-91

Software and Hardware Support for Deterministic Replay of Parallel Programs
Norman P. Jouppi
Page 92

Two Hardware-Based Approaches for Deterministic Multiprocessor Replay
Modern computer systems are inherently nondeterministic due to a variety of events that occur during an execution, including I/O, interrupts, and DMA fills. The lack of repeatability that arises from this nondeterminism can make …
Derek R. Hower, Pablo Montesinos, Luis Ceze, Mark D. Hill, Josep Torrellas
Pages 93-100

COLUMN: Last byte
Puzzled: Solutions and Sources
Last month (May 2009, p. 112) we posed a trio of brain teasers, including one as yet unsolved, concerning relationships among numbers.
Peter Winkler
Page 103

Future Tense: Webmind Says Hello
Future Tense, one of the revolving features on this page, presents stories and essays from the intersection of computational science and technological speculation, their boundaries limited only by our ability to imagine what …
Robert J. Sawyer
Page 104