Gartner's Seven Grand Challenges

In this month's CACM, there's a short piece highlighting the "seven IT grand challenges that, if met, will have a profound economic, scientific, and societal impacts" according to Gartner.

1. manual recharge of wireless devices
   
2. parallel programming
3. non-tactile, natural computing interfaces
4. speech translation
5. reliable long-term digital storage
6. increase programmer productivity by 100-fold [CAMC got this wrong, they said "100%"]
   
7. identify the financial consequences of IT investments

My knee-jerk reactions are:

• 2 and 4 definitely.
• 1 and 3 and 6 maybe.
• 5 is a good problem to solve, yeah, but I'm not sure if it meets what I think of as Grand.
  
• 7 is probably not on the right list. How is this different from, say, understanding where my marketing dollars go?

Rebirth of CACM

CACM is apparently trying to reincarnate itself, and so they sent me a free copy this week; this is probably related to the demise of Queue. CACM is trying to appeal to a "diverse mix of researchers, practitioners, and educators" -- well, okay, so that matches my profile at about (0.20, 1.0, 0.20), given my nonpracticing interest in research and CS higher education.

And I must admit, the articles I skimmed were really pretty good. I was a little dismayed to see Yet Another Interview With Knuth, but it was actually a nice behind-the-scenes approach. And the ISCA review made me more than a bit nostaligc.

But for $100/year membership? Probably not, I've no real need to join ACM, do I? If they had a magazine-only rate, that might be appealing.

GeoExpress 7 SDK now available

Another of my LizardTech blog posts.

Tiles and precincts and progression orders, oh my!

A post by me on the LizardTech blog.

FogBugz - It’s smart and it helps us get things done

One of my occasional posts to the LizardTech blog.