Every organization, no matter what the business involved, to achieve efficiency needs efficient people working for them. For a long time now, operating systems and applications have represented important tools in the work of these people and organizations. And if we are not capable of providing users with the proper tools, gaining an...

Surfaces are a central to geographical analysis. Their generation and manipulation are a key component of geographical information systems (GISs). However, geographical surface data is often not precise. When surfaces are used to model geographical entities, the data inherently contains uncertainty in terms of both position and attribute....

The new and exciting field of computational science, and in particular sim- ulational science, has seen rapid change since the first edition of this book came out. New methods have been found, fresh points of view have emerged, and features hidden so far have been uncovered. Almost all the methods presented in the first addition have...

Conventional object-oriented data models are "closed". Although they allow users to define application-specific classes, they usually come with a fixed set of modeling primitives. This constitutes a major problem as different application domains have different requirements on a data model. For example, database integration...

Pick one. Test-drive a few luxury sports cars. A Ferrari, a Lamborghini, a Maserati maybe? Or compare the top First Growth Bordeaux from 2005. Maybe an Haut-Brion, Latour and Mouton-Rothschild? Alternatively, go play in a social media application. Perhaps creating your profile on Facebook or blogging about your passions or sharing...

About four years ago David Luckham hinted to me the possibility of verifying a "real" compiler. At that time the idea seemed unrealistic, even absurd. After looking closer at the problem and getting more familiar with the possibilities of the Stanford verifier a verified compiler appeared not so impossible after all. In...

This is Volume 83 of the Advances in Computers, subtitled Security on the Web. This series, continuously published since 1960, is the oldest series covering the development of the computer industry. With the impact that the World Wide Web has on every facet of our lives today, this volume focuses on the security aspect of computing....

When I first discovered DMVs, I was enthralled because they made many difficult things so easy. It was simple to identify, typically within seconds, the core performance problems that affect SQL Server databases. For example, I could quickly discover which queries were taking the longest time to run, which indexes were missing, and...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty, ECSQARU 2011, held in Belfast, UK, in June/July 2011. The 60 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 108 submissions. The papers are...

Macromedia introduced Flex in 2004 so that developers could write web applications for the nearly ubiquitous Flash platform. These applications benefited from the improved design, usability, and portability that Flex made possible, dramatically changing the user experience. These features are a cornerstone of Web 2.0, a new generation...