Dear Readers:

Welcome to the first issue of Volume 8: Yes, J.UCS is now already in its eighth year and is going stronger than ever. We will have a number of surprises for you this year: however, I still want to keep them a bit "secret" till probably the April issue, so please do hang on! Nevertheless, among many other things we are going to start a PR campaign for J.UCS to further increase our subscription base, our readership and the number of contributions. And this issue is a part of this campaign, since the complete issue is accessible to everyone for FREE, i.e. in this issue (and in this 'sample issue' only) not just the abstracts are visible to everyone, but also all four full papers.

The decision to choose vol.8, no.1 as free sample is no coincidence: it contains an extremely important paper by Egon Börger, indeed a landmark contribution in the area of Abstract State Machines (AMS). It is supplemented by a position paper on the state-of-the-art of knowledge management, a paper on a large novel effort in distributed components systems, and an interesting result on register machines.

I believe you will find all contributions more than worth-while reading! Please make sure to spread the word that everyone can and should look at http://www.jucs.org/jucs_8_1 to get an impression of the depth and universality of J.UCS!

Happy reading!

Cordially,