Windows NT Research Articles

Social movements and institutional entrepreneurship as facilitators of technology transition: The case of free/open-source software

We integrate insights from the literature on social movements and institutional entrepreneurship into the strategic niche management (SNM) and multilevel perspective (MLP) frameworks to understand the emergence of Linux, a free/open-source operating system, in a regime dominated by proprietary operating systems such as Unix and Windows NT. Employing a “microhistories” methodology, we document how actors in the free/open-source movement took steps that enabled an alternate technological niche to form, gain momentum and eventually infiltrate the extant regime. Our account delineates the key role that actors play in shaping the identity of a niche, amplifying its presence, and finally mainstreaming it. We observe a heterogenous response by incumbents to the emergent niche and highlight the sustained coexistence of a niche and regime as a distinct form of technological transition. Finally, we demonstrate the significant impact that a niche can have, spanning beyond the targeted regime, and becoming part of the landscape. Our insights highlight how tracing the processes involved in the emergence and development of a niche can provide a prospective and generative understanding of technological transition, thereby contributing to and complementing the extant SNM and MLP literatures.

Многоуровневая модель политики безопасности управления доступом операционных систем семейства Windows

The purpose of research – development of a more advanced Windows NT family access control mechanism to protect against information leakage from memory by hidden channels. The method of research – analysis of Windows NT family models of mandatory access control and integrity control, modeling of access control security policy for specified security properties, automatic verification of models. The Lamport Temporal Logic of Actions (TLA +) used to describe the model and its specification is used. TLA+ allows automatic verification of the model with the specified security properties. The result of research – revealed the main limitations of the existing mandatory integrity control of operating systems of the Windows NT family. A set of structures of a multilevel model has been developed, reflecting the attributes that are significant for modeling the process of access of subjects to objects. The key mechanisms of access control in the operating system are modeled: management of users, groups, subjects, objects, roles, rights, discretionary and mandatory access control, mandatory integrity control - multilevel control of subjects’ access to objects. The model defines a mechanism for controlling the creation of subjects based on executable files to organize an isolated software environment. The values of the attributes of the model variables for the initialization stage are determined. The invariants of variables correctness in the process of verification and subjects to objects safe access are developed. The model was specified using the TLA + modeling language and verified.

A cloud server energy consumption measurement system for heterogeneous cloud environments

With rapid development of cloud computing technologies and applications, the number and scale of cloud data centers have grown exponentially in recent years. One of the major problems with current cloud data centers is their huge energy consumption, which makes energy consumption management one of the hottest research topics in the field of cloud computing. This paper aims at implementing an effective Distributed Energy Meter (DEM) system for heterogeneous cloud environments based on a multi-component power consumption model for cloud servers. Specifically, we propose a modeling method for the energy consumption of key components (CPU, memory and disk) of computer servers and reveal the mathematical relationship between the resource usage of the key components and the system energy consumption. The proposed DEM system cannot only estimate the energy consumption of heterogeneous cluster environments (Linux and Windows NT), but also support various CPU power consumption models. In addition, a unique disk power consumption model that uses different thresholds to distinguish various disk I/O states (sequential/random, read/write) to achieve an accurate estimation of disk power consumption. Experimental studies conducted on a heterogeneous cluster with workloads generated by PCMark and Sysbench demonstrate that the proposed DEM system outperforms the state-of-art models in estimating the energy consumption of heterogeneous cloud environments.

Архитектура и реализация программы онлайн-тестировщика для проверки решений задач по олимпиадному программированию

Introduction. The possibility of automated checking the works of participants of the Olympiads in programming is considered. The architecture and operation of the server part of the check system of performing the Olympiad programming tasks is described. Materials and Methods. The technologies of MySQL, PHP, C ++, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS are considered as the application framework. The test program is implemented in C ++ for operating systems of the Windows NT family. Research Results. The opportunity of the automated check of the Olympiad participants’ works in a real-time mode is fulfilled. A program-tester of the system is developed to check the programming Olympiad works. Discussion and Conclusions. As a result of the analysis of the global network and client/server technology operation, capabilities for the organization of interaction of the application with Internet-resources are defined. The developed application has proved expediency and efficiency of the interoperability of the application and Internet-resources.

Mixed-mode Operating System for Real-time Performance

The purpose of the mixed-mode system research is to handle devices with the accuracy of real-time systems and at the same time, having all the benefits and facilities of a matured Graphic User Interface (GUI) operating system which is typically nonreal-time. This mixed-mode operating system comprising of a real-time portion and a non-real-time portion was studied and implemented to identify the feasibilities and performances in practical applications (in the context of scheduled the real-time events). In this research an i8751 microcontroller-based hardware was used to measure the performance of the system in real-time-only as well as non-real-time-only configurations. The real-time portion is an 486DX-40 IBM PC system running under DOS-based realtime kernel and the non-real-time portion is a Pentium III based system running under Windows NT. It was found that mixed-mode systems performed as good as a typical realtime system and in fact, gave many additional benefits such as simplified/modular programming and load tolerance.

Mixed - mode Operating System for Real - time Performance

The purpose of the mixed-mode system research is to handle devices with the accuracy of real-time systems and at the same time, having all the benefits and facilities of a matured Graphic User Interface(GUI)operating system which is typicallynon-real-time. This mixed-mode operating system comprising of a real-time portion and a non-real-time portion was studied and implemented to identify the feasibilities and performances in practical applications (in the context of scheduled the real-time events). In this research an i8751 microcontroller-based hardware was used to measure the performance of the system in real-time-only as well as non-real-time-only configurations. The real-time portion is an 486DX-40 IBM PC system running under DOS-based real-time kernel and the non-real-time portion is a Pentium IIIbased system running under Windows NT. It was found that mixed-mode systems performed as good as a typical real-time system and in fact, gave many additional benefits such as simplified/modular programming and load tolerance.

The design and experimental research of an open architecture soft-CNC system based on RTX and an IPC

The concept of open architectures has been discussed extensively for many years. Software-oriented Computer Numerical Control (soft-CNC) is considered as one of the ideal solutions for open architecture CNC (OACNC). In recent years, this has become the mainstream direction for open CNC systems by employing a personal computer (PC) as the hardware platform and a real-time operating system as the software platform. However, existing CNC systems are limited in expansibility, portability, modularity, networking, and openness. In order to overcome these problems and in accordance with the characteristics and requirements of an OACNC system, a novel numerical control kernel (NCK) based on the real-time extension (RTX) and an industrial personal computer (IPC) is proposed. The implementation of the NCK is a difficult task, especially when real-time performance is desired. To compensate for the lack of real-time features in Windows NT, RTX provides a real-time software environment to implement the time-critical operations of a CNC system on an IPC by modifying the hardware abstraction layer (HAL). The proposed soft-CNC system consists of four components: the human machine interface (HMI), shared memory, the real-time subsystem (RTSS), and the device layer. This work first presents the hierarchical system architecture for developing an open architecture soft-CNC system and then describes the choices for the hardware and software platform of the soft-CNC system. Furthermore, this paper focuses on the software design and implementation of the soft-CNC system; thus, the software tasks, data flow, and the communication mechanisms are studied in detail. Finally, experiments are conducted to validate the real-time performance, the schedulability and the functions of the proposed soft-CNC system, thus verifying its feasibility.

The role of compositionality in standardized problem list generation.

Compositionality is the ability of a Vocabulary System to record non-atomic strings. In this manuscript we define the types of composition, which can occur. We will then propose methods for both server based and client-based composition. We will differentiate the terms Pre-Coordination, Post-Coordination, and User-Directed Coordination. A simple grammar for the recording of terms with concept level identification will be presented, with examples from the Unified Medical Language System's (UMLS) Metathesaurus. We present an implementation of a Window's NT based client application and a remote Internet Based Vocabulary Server, which makes use of this method of compositionality. Finally we will suggest a research agenda which we believe is necessary to move forward toward a more complete understanding of compositionality. This work has the promise of paving the way toward a robust and complete Problem List Entry Tool.

Creating Smart Governance: The key to radical ICT overhaul at the City of Munich

Around the end of the first decade in the 21 st century, quite a few city governments in municipalities of various sizes began conducting so-called smart-city initiatives. While many of these initiatives have successfully reached for low- hanging fruits and easy wins when responding to the growing demand of smart online services, others have identified the need for fundamental change and overhaul with regard to organizational integration and alignment as well as interorganizational information system interoperability as a pre-requisite for creating smart operations and providing smart services. Sweepingly changing the governance over citywide information and communication technologies (ICTs) turned out to be at the core of creating an environment conducive to smart operations and smart services, and ultimately, smart city government. The City of Munich in Germany embarked on a fundamental overhaul of its ICT structures. The article describes the case and the challenges, insights, and workarounds in this multiyear change program, which ultimately led to the successful overhaul of the ICT governance model. In principle, Munich's approach might be transferable to other cases. At the very least, the case holds valuable lessons learned when engaging in smart government initiatives in practice. When Microsoft ended the support for Windows NT 4.0 in late 2003, with its some 18,000 desktop workstations the City of Munich made a dramatic decision in disfavor of migrating to the then next version of the proprietary Windows platform (Windows XP). Despite a dramatic personal onsite en- gagement of Microsoft's then CEO Steve Balmer who attempted to make the City cancel its decision with a blend of cajoling and coercing, Munich's elected officials were unimpressed and stayed course in their decision to walk away from proprietary platforms and rather migrate to an open source-based (Linux) platform for their servers and desktops. The City of Munich's move made headlines around the world, since such an attempt to escape the proprietary path dependencyand vendor lock-in had been un- heard of before, since the inevitable switching cost were (and still are by many) considered prohibitive. While for the vast majority of the City's systems the migration ultimately took exactly a decade to com- plete at overall cost by and large as projected, the City government's elected officials, senior appointed officials along with the City's ICT leadership had entered an uncharted territory, in which they felt capa- ble of building the City's future ICT landscape. However, when the migration to Linux began in 2006, it quickly became obviousthat an even deeperand more fundamentaloverhaulof organizationalstructures

Development of agent-based system for monitoring software resources in a network environment

Mobile agent is becoming an emerging tool for monitoring and managing computer networks. Its usefulness in this regard emanates from its ability to communicate with other agents and devices, and navigate a computer network to collect data and take actions autonomously. In this research, an investigation of the use of an agent-based system to monitor the software tools on the nodes of a computer network is carried out. The proposed framework adopts a multi-agent system approach combining a static server agent with a mobile monitor agent which move around and extract data from each node via the server agent. The system was tested in a computer network environment which is characterized by a Windows NT. The programming and mobility infrastructure is the C\#, an object-oriented and multifunctional programming scheme. The performance of the proposed agent-based system and Remote MONitoring (RMON) system are simulated and the results obtained show the cost of service, query time and delay overhead is lower in the agent-based system than that of RMON.

A Smart Exhibition Platform of Power Measurement Vehicle based on the GIS and GPS Techniques

A kind of embedded, GIS and GPS centered, smart exhibition platform of power system engineering vehicle were developed in this paper. The system was composed by three parts, which is the vehicle terminal, the server software platform and the monitoring center. The Windows NT Server, Oracle software and VB.NET were used as the developing tools. Together with the GIS and GPS technologies, the N-tier Architecture and the reusable component technology were used to display the real time information of engineering vehicle. The trial operation in the Chongqing Power Electrical Corp. indicated that, with the special structure, the application program development has no connection with the software platform, the heterogeneous database interaction is very convenient, and the system is open, safety and efficient. This smart exhibition system enhanced the dispatching management on the power measurement engineering vehicle, improved the reaction ability on the sudden accident of power equipment and power measurement equipment, and played an important role in the safety maintenance of power grid as well as the loss decrease caused by the measurement errors of power measurement equipment.

Integrated Technique for Geostationary Satellite IR Data Processing System Applied to Earthquake Monitoring

A management service system of quasi-real time processing for satellite data is designed based on the integration of Windows NT Service and socket application,aquasi-real time satellite data auto-process-ing system has been developed.A massive cloud-eliminated database and a suited imagery info database have been set up without a large number of manual operations,IR-brightness temperature tracing and a-nomaly warning for any monitored area has been implemented through the system.Through the develop-ment of this system,a lot of experiences in satellite thermal infrared remote sensing,the ground application system,the technology for processing the space-earth integration observation data have been gained,and practical technology foundations and methods are provided for earthquake thermal infrared research.

Research and Design of the Keyboard Filter Driver

Driver is a communicated program between the operating system and hardware. It is the responsibility of handling I/O request packet. Keyboard filter driver which used Windows NT driver model is completed in DDK developed environment. This driver realized filtering and recording key information. Its convenient for users to view information of keyboard history. The design of this driver can also be studied for other Windows drivers.

A study of real-time memory management - evaluating operating system's performance

The paper addresses computer memory management with real-time operation in mind. Two essential memory allocation algorithms are analyzed, Hoard and jemalloc, as well as a default algorithm for each specific platform considered. Benchmarking experiments for four platforms, Mac OS X, Linux, Windows NT, and VxWorks, were conducted and respective data collected and analyzed.

A Decade of OS Access-control Extensibility

To discuss operating system security is to marvel at the diversity of deployed access-control models: Unix and Windows NT multiuser security; Type Enforcement in SELinux; anti-malware products; app sandboxing in Apple OS X, Apple iOS, and Google Android; and application-facing systems such as Capsicum in FreeBSD. This diversity is the result of a stunning transition from the narrow 1990s Unix and NT status quo to ’security localization’ - the adaptation of operating-system security models to site-local or product-specific requirements.

A Chess-Playing Robot Based on SERCOS

This paper presents a chess-playing robot and its control system based on SERCOS. Thanks to Windows NT operating system and RTX real-time extension, the control system is excellent in real-time property. The whole system, supported by a standard IPC hardware platform and a modularized architecture of system software, is open-ended and expansible. In addition, the chess-playing software makes a contribution to the excellent interaction between players and the chess-playing robot.

The Data Fusion of Chess-Playing Robot Based on SERCOS

This paper presents a data fusion system of chess-playing robot based on SERCOS. Owing to the environment of Windows NT + RTX, especially the SERCOS bus interface card, the control system is excellent in real-time property, more importantly, the highly efficiency of data fusion and image processing is guaranteed and therefore the good interaction between people and robot is ensured.

A CNC system based on real-time Ethernet and Windows NT

Modern manufacturing industry requires computer numerical control (CNC) systems to be more open, extendable, and networked. Real-time Ethernet is introduced and its use in CNC is discussed in this paper. Compared to traditional fieldbus, a real-time Ethernet which modifies the Ethernet data link layer to achieve fast delivery time and high synchronization accuracy is discussed. The method of synchronizing distributing clocks to reduce cumulative jitter of transmission for a synchronization frame is proposed. Some special considerations of this real-time Ethernet are discussed, e.g., incorporation with Windows NT and making feedback returned faster. A CNC system based on such a real-time Ethernet and Windows NT has been developed and presented. The system involves the service-oriented Windows Communication Foundation as an up-layer interface to the Internet, and a real-time Ethernet for connecting to hardware components of a machine tool. The non-real-time aspect of Windows NT is accounted for; for example, a driver rewriting the interrupt descriptor table is introduced and packets to be sent are buffered. Design and implementation of this system, such as main classes and services in the NC kernel, main modules (e.g., data link layer) in salve nodes, are also discussed. At last, experimental results are presented to illustrate the Windows NT’s performance and the real-time accuracy of the synchronization method.

Automatic predicate abstraction of C programs

Model checking has been widely successful in validating and debugging designs in the hardware and protocol domains. However, state-space explosion limits the applicability of model checking tools, so model checkers typically operate on abstractions of systems. Recently, there has been significant interest in applying model checking to software. For infinite-state systems like software, abstraction is even more critical. Techniques for abstracting software are a prerequisite to making software model checking a reality. We present the first algorithm to automatically construct a predicate abstraction of programs written in am industrial programming language such as C, and its implementation in a tool -- C2BP. The C2BP tool is part of the SLAM toolkit, which uses a combination of predicate abstraction, model checking, symbolic reasoning, and iterative refinement to statically check temporal safety properties of programs. Predicate abstraction of software has many applications, including detecting program errors, synthesizing program invariants, and improving the precision of program analyses through predicate sensitivity. We discuss our experience applying the C2BP predicate abstraction tool to a variety of problems, ranging from checking that list-manipulating code preserves heap invariants to finding errors in Windows NT device drivers.

Reducing mortality in individuals at high risk for advanced melanoma through education and screening

Incidence and mortality rates of melanoma throughout most of the developed world have increased in the past 25 years. We propose that reduction of deaths from melanoma can be best enhanced by strong collaborations between experts in dermatology, primary care, oncology, cancer education and health systems research, epidemiologists, and behavioral scientists, among others. Public and professional educational campaigns should be guided by an understanding of 3 underlying but overlapping roots: epidemiology and preventable mortality (an understanding of who is most likely to be given the diagnosis of thick or late-stage melanoma), biology (an investigation of tumor types that are relatively common but potentially most lethal), and sociology (an analysis of the changes needed in social structures to improve access to those most in need of early detection programs). We review these major concepts, concentrating on the key risk factors for advanced melanoma.