Parallel programming truly redefines the programming model for multicore architecture, which has become commonplace. For this reason, parallel programming has been elevated to a core technology in the Microsoft .NET Framework 4. In this version of the .NET Framework, the Task Parallel Library (TPL) and the System.Threading.Tasks...

Gamification may be a new term, but the idea of using game-thinking and game mechanics to solve problems and engage audiences isn’t exactly new. The military has been using games and simulations for hundreds (if not thousands) of years, and the U.S. military has been a pioneer in the use of video games across branches. Three...

There was a time when people believed that the stars were bonfires lit by other tribes in the sky, that the universe was a flat plate resting on the shell of a giant turtle, and that the Earth, according to the Greek astronomer Ptolemy, was at the center of the universe. From the most remote of times, people have been curious...

At the instigation of the Iron and Steel Federation, the late Bernard Godfrey began work in 1952 on the first edition of the Steel Designers’ Manual. As principal author he worked on the manuscript almost continuously for a period of two years. On many Friday evenings he would meet with his co-authors, Charles Gray, Lewis Kent...

Haptic devices allow users to feel their interfaces and interactions. This has the potential to radically change the way we use computers. Haptic interaction is interaction related to the sense of touch. This could be based on force-feedback or tactile devices. We can take advantage of our powerful sense of touch as an alternative...

Although this book focuses on the problems and potentials for electronic representations of the fundamental materials of document-based knowledge in literature, similar conditions obtain for representations of works in music, philosophy, history, the law, and religion. These fields find in paper documents the primary materials of...

Well, that’s not quite accurate. What I mean is, I’m sorry I didn’t have time to update DNS and BIND to include all this new IPv6 material. DNS and BIND deserves a sixth edition, but I’m afraid my schedule is so hectic right now that I just don’t have time to...

In 2009, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates announced the company's leading web application platform for organizations, SharePoint, has exceeded 1 billion dollars in profits with over 100 million licenses sold. I was in the audience when he said that and couldn't help but reflect on how far SharePoint has come in less than a decade. In the...

Moodle is an e-learning platform that has transformed the way in which many teachers deliver their subject to students. Teachers who create courses for students can now build online versions with choices and possibilities that might not previously have existed. It has made this transition to online courses a straightforward and...

Gradle is a flexible yet model-driven JVM-based build tool. Gradle acknowledges and improves on the very best ideas from Make, Ant, Ivy, Maven, Rake, Gant, Scons, SBT, Leinengen, and Buildr. The best-of-breed features previously...

Researchers in Artificial Intelligence have traditionally been classified into two categories: the “neaties” and the “scruffies”. According to the scruffies, the neaties concentrate on building elegant formal frameworks, whose properties are beautifully expressed by means of definitions, lemmas, and theorems, but...

A major part of natural language processing now depends on the use of text data to build linguistic analyzers. We consider statistical, computational approaches to modeling linguistic structure. We seek to unify across many approaches and many kinds of linguistic structures. Assuming a basic understanding of natural language processing and/or...