As night settled on April 20, 2010, a series of explosions rocked Deepwater Horizon, the immense semisubmersible drilling platform leased by British Petroleum, located 40 miles off the Louisiana coast. The ensuing inferno claimed 11 lives, and it would rage uncontained for two days, until its wreckage sank to a final resting place nearly a...

In a city where fog lovers, strippers, and people with short attention spans all lay claim to their own fi lm festivals, and where starting your day with a potent Irish coffee is not considered anything out of the ordinary, it’s pretty much guaranteed you’ll have a great time. Where else in the world is it considered good, clean...

Frommer's England 2011 details the best...

In the Caribbean, you can hike through national parks and scuba dive along underwater mountains. But if your idea of the perfect island vacation is to plunk yourself down on the sands with a frosted drink in hand, you can do that, too. Whetheryou want a veranda with a view of the sea or a plantation house set in a field of sugar...

Since its release in 1996. the Java language has established itself as one of the leading languages for object-oriented programming. Today, despite competition from Microsoft's .NET Platform, Java continues to be one of the leading languages for application development, especially for web applications. And that's going to continue for...

The 20th ICPR (International Conference on Pattern Recognition) Conference took place in Istanbul, Turkey, during August 23–26, 2010. For the first time in the ICPR history, several scientific contests (http://www.icpr2010.org/ contests.php) were organized in parallel to the conference main tracks. The purpose of these contests was to...

It is a pleasure and an honour both to organize ICB 2009, the 3rd IAPR/IEEE International Conference on Biometrics. This will be held 2–5 June in Alghero, Italy, hosted by the Computer Vision Laboratory, University of Sassari. The conference series is the premier forum for presenting research in biometrics and its allied technologies:...

The phenomenal success of the iPhone, iPad and the iPod touch has ushered in a “gold rush” for developers, but with well over 300,000 apps in the highly competitive App Store, it has become increasingly difficult for new apps to stand out in the crowd. Achieving consumer awareness and sales longevity for your iOS app requires a...

Often computers are viewed as machines that run algorithms. This view of computers covers a vast range of devices, from simple computers that perform limited and specific computations (for example, a computer found in a wristwatch) to supercomputers, which are groups of computers linked together in homogeneous and heterogeneous clusters and...

Java Programming: From the Ground Up begins with the fundamentals of programming, moves through the object-oriented paradigm, and concludes with an introduction to graphics and event-driven programming. The broad coverage of topics as well as the modularity of the text makes the book suitable for both introductory and intermediatelevel...

The origin of queueing theory and its application traces back to Erlang’s historical work for telephony networks as recently celebrated by the Erlang Centennial, 100 Years of Queueing, Copenhagen, recalling his first paper in 1909. Ever since, the simplicity and fundamental flavour of Erlang’s famous expressions, such as his...

Grid Computing was a vision of using and sharing computers and data in the early 1990s. The integration, coordination, and sharing of computer resources which are geographically disperse among different physical domains and organizations became an every day reality. This emerging infrastructure aims to provide a mechanism for sharing...