This short history identifies 32 major classes of software methods that have emerged over the last 50 years. There are many variations of each major class of software method, which renders the number of software methods in the hundreds. This short history contains a brief synopsis of each of the 32 major classes of software methods, identifying the decade and year they appeared, their purpose, their major tenets, their strengths, and their weaknesses. The year each software method appeared corresponds to the seminal work that introduced the method based on extensive bibliographic research and the strengths and weaknesses were based on scholarly and empirical works to provide an objective capstone for each method.
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The history of computers starts out about 2000 years ago, at the birth of the abacus, a wooden rack holding two horizontal wires with beads strung on them. When these beads are moved around, according to programming rules memorized by the user, all regular arithmetic problems can be done. Another important invention around the same time was the Astrolabe, used for navigation. Blaise Pascal is usually credited for building the first digital computer in 1642. It added numbers entered with dials and was made to help his father, a tax collector. In 1671, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz invented a computer that was built in 1694. It could add, and, after changing some things around, multiply. Leibniz invented a special stepped gear mechanism for introducing the addend digits, and this is still being used.
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Niklaus Wirth of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology {ETH] waspresented the 1984 ACM A. M. Ihring Award at the Association’s Annual Conference in San Francisco in October in recognition of his outstanding work in developing a sequence of innovative computer languages: Euler’ ALGOL-W, Modula, and Pascal. Pascal, in particular, has become significant pedagogically and has established a foundation for future research in the areas of computer language, systems, and architecture. The hallmarks of a Wirth language are its simplicity, economy of design, and high-quality engineering, which result in a language whose notation appears to be a natural extension of algorithmic thinking rather than an extraneous formalism.
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Over the last several years, computing systems based on adaptive learning with fine-grained parallel architectures have moved from obscurity to front-page prominence. These systems derive some of their novel architecture from ideas gleaned from biology, hence the name “neural network”. Although many of the ideas behind this field are not new, improved computing hardware, better understanding of learning algorithms, and limitations of traditional approaches have combined to renew interest in neural nets.
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Borland Delphi is known to be a great environment for the development of stand-alone and client-server applications on the Microsoft Windows platform. Its virtues range from full OOP support to visual development, in a unique combination of power and ease. However, the new frontier of development is now Internet programming. What has Delphi got to offer in this new context? Which are the features you can rely upon to build great Internet applications with Delphi? That’s what this paper intends to reveal. We’ll see that Delphi can be used:
• For direct socket and TCP/IP programming;
• In conjunction with third-party components that implement the most common Internet protocols, on the client or the server side;
• To produce HTML pages on the server side, with the WebBroker and Internet Express architectures;
• As well as to work with Microsoft’s core technologies, including MTS, COM, ASP, and ActiveX.
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There is an ongoing information war raging in the software world. Despite free software developers’ best efforts, new proprietary software continues to proliferate. Improved techniques must be developed to reverse engineer efficiently closed data formats so that free, interoperable solutions can be deployed under Linux.

Software reverse engineering occurs on various levels. It may be necessary to study a piece of poorly written, poorly commented code developed in a high-level language such as C++ and understand what the original program was supposed to accomplish. It may also be necessary to disassemble a program that has been compiled into machine language and express it as a higher-level language. In doing this, the underlying algorithms can eventually be expressed as higher-level concepts in a human language. After obtaining an algorithmic description via reverse engineering, the algorithm can be reimplemented for any language on any computing platform.
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DOT NET is one of the key products that enable application development under the new vision. However, DOT NET is not quite backward compatible with prior versions like visual basic version 6. This makes migration a serious issue. Converting existing source code to DOT NET architecture is not just a matter of loading it to the new version. DOT NET has its built-in migration tool, which performs the vital task of converting the source code syntax. But that’s just half of the work done. But before the converted code is actually compiled, the developer needs to enable it to smoothly fix lot of issues to fit into DOT NET architecture. In present efforts to find out solutions to these migration issues, a re-engineering Migration Model for Legacy Source Code (MMLC) has been proposed in this study. Proposed model has been further validated using a in-house project at one of the leading software development organisation. It is envisaged from the experimental try-out that the model would help the developer community to easily convert their legacy source code to DOT NET framework.
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Although traditional firewalls have effectively prevented network-level attacks, most future attacks will be at the application level, where current security mechanisms are woefully inadequate. Application-level security vulnerabilities are inherent in a Web application’s code, regardless of the technology in which the application is implemented or the security of the Web server and backend database on which it is built. A recent advisory published by Internet Security Systems (see the “Internet Resources” sidebar, p. 44) claims that 11 widely deployed shopping cart applications are vulnerable to a simple attack that lets hackers pur- chase goods for much less than their listed price. Worryingly, the attack does not require particular technical skill; it suffices to save the shopping cart’s HTML confirmation form to disk, use a text editor to modify the price of the goods (stored in a hidden form field), and load the HTML form back into the browser.
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