By the time you’re reading this in a bookstore, BizTalk will have celebrated its tenth birthday. Over the past decade, there have been seven releases of Microsoft’s enterprise integration server, and it has become the most broadly deployed integration middleware technology in the industry, with over 10,000 customers worldwide....

Over the past 15 years, movie audiences all over the world have witnessed the emergence of one of the most revolutionary tools ever created to aid in the creation of films, the use of Computer Generated Imagery (CGI). Through the use of CGI, filmmakers have transported us to distant places, put us right in the middle of very dangerous shots,...

The ever decreasing price/performance ratio of microcontrollers makes it economically attractive to replace more and more conventional mechanical or electronic control systems within many products by embedded real-time computer systems. An embedded real-time computer system is always part of a well-specified larger system, which we call an...

The bulk of this book was written over a period of two years between the middle of 2008 and April 2010. In that time the world’s media systems were caught up in a massive vortex of uncertainty and change. News 2.0 captures the flavour of that period and sets it against an historical background. In short: Where did the news media’s...

In the late 1960s racer and businessman Gordon Spice familiarized himself with the Nürburgring using a rented BMW 2002. He went through a couple of sets of tires and three sets of brake pads during the exercise and covered the cost of such consumables by charging folks to ride with him! The rental company was somewhat puzzled by the fact...

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...

Film music is as old as cinema itself. Years before synchronized sound became the norm, projected moving images were shown to musical accompaniment, whether performed by a lone piano player or a hundred-piece orchestra. Today film music has become its own industry, indispensable to the marketability of movies around the world.
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Modernism ushered in some of the most exciting innovations in art and literature, from Fauvism, Cubism, and Dada, to the novels of James Joyce and Franz Kafka, to such provocative works as Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain." But Modernism also left many people puzzled in its wake. How can a routine bathroom fixture be considered a work...

A few years ago, I was teaching a workshop on advanced SketchUp techniques to a group of extremely bright middle and high school (or so I thought) students in Hot Springs, Arkansas. As subject matter went, I wasn’t pulling any punches — we were breezing through material I wouldn’t think of introducing to most groups...

GIVEN THAT YOU’RE READING the introduction to a Wrox book about Ektron, you likely have (or will soon have) some level of technical responsibility for a website powered by the Ektron Framework. Maybe you’re tasked with the duty of maintaining an existing site and are looking for information to help make that process more...

Recognizing patterns is at the core of man's attempts to understand the universe that we inhabit. Through the development of sensors and instruments, we have extended our ability to gather data far beyond the range and scale of man's natural senses. As a result we are now able to gather data on phenomena occurring in the far reaches...