MPEG-4 (with a formal ISO/IEC designation ISO/IEC 14496) standardization was initiated in 1994 to address the requirements of the rapidly converging telecommunication, computer, and TV/film industries. MPEG-4 had a mandate to standardize algorithms for audiovisual coding in multimedia applications, digital television, interactive graphics, and interactive multimedia applications. The functionalities of MPEG-4 cover content-based interactivity, universal access, and compression, and a brief summary of these is provided..

Agile Development, in particular, eXtreme Programming (XP), has been gaining a lot of momentum because it can effectively address the problems plaguing software development such as mis-understanding customers' requirements, missing deadlines, over-budget, conflicts between customers and developers and poor maintainability of legacy systems.
However, it is so difficult to teach the skills needed to be agile. In 2002, we, the Macau Productivity and Technology Center (CPTTM), started to hold courses on XP and Object Oriented design to teach the skills by hiring a well known software training and consulting company to do the teaching...

Addison-Wesley | ISBN: 0201500221 | 1997 | 1179 p | RARed | PDF | 3.53MB[/center]
This comprehensive book on application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) describes the latest methods in VLSI-systems design. ASIC design, using commercial tools and pre-designed cell libraries, is the fastest, most cost-effective, and least error-prone method of IC design. As a consequence, ASICs and ASIC-design methods have become increasingly popular in industry for a wide range of applications...

The basic motivation of this work was the integration of biophysical models within the interval constraints framework for decision support. Comparing the major features of biophysical models with the expressive power of the existing interval constraints framework, it was clear that the most important inadequacy was related with the representation of differential equations. System dynamics is often modelled through differential equations but there was no way of expressing a differential equation as a constraint and integrate it within the constraints framework...

Combinatorics is one of the fastest growing fields of mathematics. One reason for this is because many practical problems can be modeled and then efficiently solved using combinator combinatorial theory. This real world motivation for studying algorithmic combinatorics has led not only to the development of many software packages but also to some beautiful mathematics which has no direct application to applied problems. This book highlights a few of the exciting recent developments in algorithmic combinatorics, including the search for patterns in DNA and protein sequences, the theory of semi-definite programming and its role in combinatorial optimization, and the algorithmic aspects of tree decompositions and it's applications to the theory of databases, code optimization, and bioinformatics...

My purpose in writing Interactive Video: Algorithms and Technologies is to respond to an increased demand for a complete scientific guide that covers concepts, benefits, algorithms and interfaces of the emerging interactive digital video technology. This technology promises an end of the days of dull videos, linear playback, manual video search, and non-consent video-content. Many futurists and I share the view that interactive video is becoming the future standard of the most attractive video formats which will offer users nonconventional interactive features, powerful knowledge-acquisition and teaching tools, efficient storage, as well as non-linear ways of navigation and searching...

Most of my computing life has been spent in Emacs starting back in 1990 building Obj-C applications for school. I fell in love with the multiple buffers the way I could quickly navigate back and forth between them. I could even run a make and have compiler errors jump me to the offending code, how cool is that! Well it was cool in 1990. Through the years I tried various IDE’s (JBuilder, Visual Café, NetBeans, etc) but could never make the leap out of Emacs. I just liked not having to go to the mouse, I liked integrated features and besides I had the key strokes burned into my gray matter so it was hard to write code without them. Then along came Eclipse...

Parlor Press | ISBN: 1602350051 | 2006. | 173 p. | RARed PDF 2.25MB[/center]
PEERS, PIRATES, AND PERSUASION: RHETORIC IN THE PEER-TO-PEER DEBATES investigates the role of rhetoric in shaping public perceptions about a novel technology: peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. While broadband Internet services now allow speedy transfers of complex media files, Americans face real uncertainty about whether peer-to-peer file sharing is or should be legal. John Logie analyzes the public arguments growing out of more than five years of debate sparked by the advent of Napster, the first widely adopted peer-to-peer technology. The debate continues with the second wave of peer-to-peer file transfer utilities like Limewire, KaZaA, and BitTorrent...

The ability to manage knowledge is relevant for millions of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) that operate in high-tech environments. They strongly depend on external knowledge about customers, technologies, and competitors because, as opposed to large companies, they have limited internal knowledge resources and little power to control their business environments. Present KM literature, however, mainly focuses on large companies and therefore does not explain, how SMEs, for example, can successfully apply groupware, data mining, semantic networks, and knowledge maps. This book addresses this problem by introducing the concept of knowledge integration (KI) that places emphasis on the identification, acquisition and use of external knowledge. Drawing from this theoretical basis, the book presents concepts and instruments specifically designed for SMEs, as well as examples of their implementation and use in practice...

Novell eDirectory (formerly Novell Directory Services- NDS) is employed by system administrator to define users on the network and links those same users to their access rights with corporate resources, devices like printers and security policies. Novell eDirectory is comparable to Microsoft's Active Directory and is designed for large-scale, high-end directory deployments. Its strengths are scalability and reliability, a flexible yet strong security architecture, compatibility with key industry standards and operating systems...

Advances in technology are increasingly impacting the way in which curriculum is delivered and assessed. The emergence of the Internet has offered learners a new instructional delivery system that connects them with educational resources. Advances in Web-Based Education: Personalized Learning Environments covers a wide range of factors that influence the design, use and adoption of personalized learning environments, and it shows how user and pedagogical considerations can be integrated into the design, development and implementation of adaptive hypermedia systems to create effective personalized learning environments...

This report aims to help executives identify Business Performance Intelligence (BPI) software best suited to their organizations’ objectives. It provides an overview of the increasingly complex BPI market (which includes 1) strategy development/execution & performance management, 2) planning, budgeting & forecasting, and 3) business analytics and cost/profitability management) and suggests a framework CEOs and CFOs can use to evaluate the capabilities and potential value of 47 specific BPI systems...

Rapid advances in microelectronic integration and the advent of Systems-on-Chip have fueled the need for high-level synthesis, i.e., an automated approach to the synthesis of hardware from behavioral descriptions. SPARK: A Parallelizing Approach to the High - Level Synthesis of Digital Circuits presents a novel approach to the high-level synthesis of digital circuits -- that of parallelizing high-level synthesis (PHLS). This approach uses aggressive code parallelizing and code motion techniques to discover circuit optimization opportunities beyond what is possible with traditional high-level synthesis...