Interactive products designed for children-whether toys, games, educational products, or websites-are increasingly embedded in children's lives and school experiences. Making these products safe, effective, and entertaining requires new methodologies for carrying out sound and unbiased evaluations for these users with unique requirements, environments, and ethical considerations.
This book directly addresses this need by thoroughly covering the evaluation of all types of interactive technology for children. Based on the authors' workshops, conference courses, and own design experience and research, this highly practical book reads like a handbook, while being thoroughly grounded in the latest research. Throughout, the authors illustrate techniques and principles with numerous mini case studies and highlight practical information in tips and exercises and conclude with three in-depth case studies. Essential reading for usability experts, product developers, and researchers in the field.
* Presents an essential background in child development and child psychology, particularly as they relate to technology.
* Captures best practices for observing and surveying children, training evaluators, and capturing the child user experience using audio and visual technology.
* Examines ethical and legal issues involved in working with children and offers guidelines for effective risk management.

Check Point NGX R65 is the next major release of Check Point's flagship firewall software product, which has over 750,000 registered users. Check Point's NGX is the underlying security software platform for all of the company's enterprise firewall, VPN and management solutions. It enables enterprises of all sizes to reduce the cost and complexity of security management and ensure that their security systems can be easily extended to adapt to new and emerging threats. This title is a continuation of Syngress' best-selling references on Check Point's market leading Firewall and VPN products.
* First book to market covering Check Point's new, flagship NGX R65 Firewall/VPN.
* Provides bonus coverage for Check Point's upcoming NGX R65 Certification exams.
* Companion Web site offers customized scripts for managing log files.

WE ARE ADRIFT IN A SEA OF INFORMATION. We need information to make good decisions, to get things done, to learn, and to gain better mastery of the world around us. But we do not always have good control of our information - not even in the "home waters" of an office or on the hard drive of a computer. Instead, information may be controlling us - keeping us from doing the things we need to do, getting us to waste money and precious time. The growth of available information, plus the technologies for its creation, storage, retrieval, distribution and use, is astonishing and sometimes bewildering. Can there be a similar growth in our understanding for how best to manage information and informational tools?
This book provides a comprehensive overview of personal information management (PIM) as both a study and a practice of the activities people do and need to be doing so that information can work for them in their daily lives.
Introductory chapters of "Keeping Found Things Found: The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management" provide an overview of PIM and a sense for its many facets. The next chapters look more closely at the essential challenges of PIM, including finding, keeping, organizing, maintaining, managing privacy, and managing information flow. The book also contains chapters on search, email, mobile PIM, web-based support, and other technologies relevant to PIM.
*For more information and author blog visit http: //www.keepingthingsfound.com/.
* Focuses exclusively on one of the most interesting and challenging problems in today's world
* Explores what good and better PIM looks like, and how to measure improvements
* Presents key questions to consider when evaluating any new PIM informational tools or systems

The sexy, elegant design of the Apple PowerBook combined with the Unix-like OS X operating system based on FreeBSD, have once again made OS X the Apple of every hacker s eye. In this unique and engaging book covering the brand new OS X 10.4 Tiger, the world s foremost true hackers unleash the power of OS X for everything form cutting edge research and development to just plain old fun.
OS X 10.4 Tiger is a major upgrade for Mac OS X for running Apple s Macintosh computers and laptops. This book is not a reference to every feature and menu item for OS X. Rather, it teaches hackers of all types from software developers to security professionals to hobbyists, how to use the most powerful (and often obscure) features of OS X for wireless networking, WarDriving, software development, penetration testing, scripting administrative tasks, and much more.
* Analyst reports indicate that OS X sales will double in 2005. OS X Tiger is currently the #1 selling software product on Amazon and the 12-inch PowerBook is the #1 selling laptop
* Only book on the market directly appealing to groundswell of hackers migrating to OS X
* Each chapter written by hacker most commonly associated with that topic, such as Chris Hurley (Roamer) organizer of the World Wide War Drive"

Almost all of the messages that are received by the cerebral cortex from the environment or from the body's internal receptors come through the thalamus and much current thought about perceptual processing is based on sensory pathways that relay in the thalamus. This volume focuses on three major areas: the role of thalamocortical communication in cognition and attention; the role of the thalamus in communication between cortical areas; the hypothesis that much or all of the information relayed by thalamus, even to classical, pure "sensory" areas of cortex, represents a corollary message being sent simultaneously to motor centers. It presents a broad overview of important recent advances in these areas.
* Provides a look at brain structures involved in perception and action
* Includes summaries by leading investigators in the field
* Presents recent advances in our understanding of brain functions

"This book is a comprehensive text for the design of safety critical, hard real-time embedded systems. It offers a splendid example for the balanced, integrated treatment of systems and software engineering, helping readers tackle the hardest problems of advanced real-time system design, such as determinism, compositionality, timing and fault management. This book is an essential reading for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in a wide range of disciplines impacted by embedded computing and software. Its conceptual clarity, the style of explanations and the examples make the abstract conceptsaccessible for a wide audience."
Janos Sztipanovits, Director
E. Bronson Ingram Distinguished Professor of Engineering
Institute for Software Integrated Systems
Vanderbilt University

"Real-Time Systems" focuses on hard real-time systems, which are computing systems that must meet their temporal specification in all anticipated load and fault scenarios. The book stresses the system aspects of distributed real-time applications, treating the issues of real-time, distribution and fault-tolerance from an integral point of view. A unique cross-fertilization of ideas and concepts between the academic and industrial worlds has led to the inclusion of many insightful examples from industry to explain the fundamental scientific concepts in a real-world setting. Compared to the first edition, new developments incomplexity management, energy and power management, dependability, security, andthe internet of things, are addressed.

The book is written as a standard textbook for a high-level undergraduate or graduate course on real-time embedded systems or cyber-physical systems. Its practical approach to solving real-time problems, along with numerous summary exercises, makes it an excellent choice for researchers and practitioners alike."

This book presents a comprehensive introduction to Internetware, covering aspects ranging from the fundamental principles and engineering methodologies to operational platforms, quality measurements and assurance and future directions. It also includes guidelines and numerous representative real-world case studies that serve as an invaluable reference resource for software engineers involved in the development of Internetware applications. Providing a detailed analysis of current trends in modern software engineering in the Internet, it offers an essential blueprint and an important contribution to the research on software engineering and systems for future Internet computing.

More than ever before, energy is becoming one of the most crucial concerns in economical and industrial development. ""Intelligent Information Systems and Knowledge Management for Energy: Applications for Decision Support, Usage, and Environmental Protection"" provides in-depth analysis of the need for a holistic approach for the construction and engineering of cities and societies. This defining body of research examines key issues and approaches for energy use and provides future direction of development as well.

Process calculi are among the most successful models of concurrent systems. Various behavior equivalences between processes are central notions in CCS (calculus of communicating systems) and other process calculi. In the real applications, specification and implementation are described as two processes, and correctness of programs is treated as a certain behavior equivalence between them. The purpose of this book is to establish a theory of approximate correctness and infinite evolution of concurrent programs by employing some notions and tools from point-set topology. This book is restricted to CCS for simplicity, but the main idea also applies to some other process calculi. The concept of bisimulation limits, useful for the understanding and analysis of infinite evolution of processes, is introduced. In addition, the notions of near bisimulations and bisimulation indexes, suitable in describing approximate correctness of concurrent programs, are proposed. The book will be of particular interest to researchers in the fields of theoretical computer science, especially theory of concurrency and hybrid systems, and graduate students in related disciplines. It will also be valuable to practical system designers developing concurrent and/or real-time systems.

The BeOS is the exciting new operating system designed natively for the Internet and digital media. Programmers are drawn to the BeOS by its many state-of-the-art features, including pervasive multithreading, a symmetric multiprocessing architecture, and an integrated multithreaded graphics system. The Be engineering team also built in many UNIX-like capabilities as part of a POSIX toolkit. Best of all, the BeOS runs on a variety of Intel architectures and PowerPC platforms and uses off-the-shelf hardware.

This book explores the BeOS from a POSIX programmer's point of view, providing a comprehensive and practical guide to porting UNIX and other POSIX-based software to the BeOS. BeOS: Porting UNIX Applications will help you move your favorite UNIX software to an environment designed from the ground up for high-performance applications.
* Supports BeOS Release 3
* Provides a step-by-step guide to the porting process from downloading the source code to installing the application
* Explains how to port off-the-shelf utilities like Emacs and Perl as well as your own programs and tools to the BeOS
* Offers a comprehensive POSIX reference for anyone who is porting or writing software for the BeOS
* Furnishes a simple catalog of tools and features available on the BeOS

The kernel of any operating system is its most critical component, as the rest of the system depends on it. This book shows how the formal specification of kernels can be followed by a completely formal refinement process that leads to the extraction of executable code. This formal refinement process ensures that the code precisely meets the specification. The author documents the complete process, including proofs.

This volume contains selected papers from the 10th Interdisciplinary Workshop in Informatics and Psychology which had as its theme Cognitive Aspects in Visual Languages and Interfaces. Visual languages in general, visual programming languages in particular, and graphical or visual user interfaces are increasingly regarded as important improvements for the interaction between people and artifacts. Visual and graphical user interfaces have already a history of a number of years in terms of research and development. The focus on visual languages and visual programming languages, however, is more recent. The development of graphical user interfaces was accompanied and reinforced by psychological research but visual languages are still mainly inventions of designers and not designed on the basis of principles derived also from knowledge of psychology or other behavioral sciences.

The presentations and discussions at the workshop showed increasing interest in paradigms of visual languages and their psychological foundation. Visual languages and interfaces must be seen as means to support and enhance represention, application and processing knowledge visually. The study of the cognitive aspects in visual languages and interfaces is thus an important part of Human-Computer Interaction as a discipline "concerned with the design, evaluation and implementation of interactive computer systems for human use and with the study of major phenomena surrounding them" (definition of HCI in the ACM SIGCHI Curricula for Human-Computer Interaction). This book will stimulate future research in the area of Human-Computer Interaction and Visual Languages.

This book grants the reader a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art in system-level memory management (data transfer and storage) related issues for complex data-dominated real-time signal and data processing applications. The authors introduce their own system-level data transfer and storage exploration methodology for data-dominated video applications. This methodology tackles the power and area reduction cost components in the architecture for this target domain, namely the system-level busses and the background memories. For the most critical tasks in the methodology, prototype tools have been developed to reduce the design time. The approach is also very heavily application-driven which is illustrated by several realistic demonstrators, partly used as red-thread examples in the book. The quite general applicability and effectiveness has been substantiated for several industrial data-dominated applications, including H.263 video conferencing decoding and medical computer tomography (CT) back projection. To the researcher the book will serve as an excellent reference source, both for the overall description of the methodology and for the detailed descriptions of the system-level methodologies and synthesis techniques and algorithms. To the design engineers and CAD managers it offers an invaluable insight into the anticipated evolution of commercially available design tools as well as allowing them to utilize the book's concepts in their own research and development.

Since its establishment in 1998, Microsoft Research Asia's trademark and long term commitment has been to foster innovative research and advanced education in the Asia-Pacific region. Through open collaboration and partnership with universities, government and other academic partners, MSRA has been consistently advancing the state-of-the-art in computer science. This book was compiled to record these outstanding collaborations, as Microsoft Research Asia celebrates its 10th Anniversary.

The selected papers are all authored or co-authored by faculty members or students through collaboration with MSRA lab researchers, or with the financial support of MSRA. Papers previously published in top-tier international conference proceedings and journals are compiled here into one accessible volume of outstanding research. Innovation Together highlights the outstanding work of Microsoft Research Asia as it celebrates ten years of achievement and looks forward to the next decade of success.

Compilers and Operating Systems for Low Power focuses on both application-level compiler directed energy optimization and low-power operating systems. Chapters have been written exclusively for this volume by several of the leading researchers and application developers active in the field. The first six chapters focus on low energy operating systems, or more in general, energy-aware middleware services. The next five chapters are centered on compilation and code optimization. Finally, the last chapter takes a more general viewpoint on mobile computing. The material demonstrates the state-of-the-art work and proves that to obtain the best energy/performance characteristics, compilers, system software, and architecture must work together. The relationship between energy-aware middleware and wireless microsensors, mobile computing and other wireless applications are covered.

This work will be of interest to researchers in the areas of low-power computing, embedded systems, compiler optimizations, and operating systems.

Computer interfaces and documentation are notoriously difficult for any user, regardless of his or her level of experience. Advances in technology are not making applications more friendly. Introducing concepts from linguistics and language teaching, Language and Communication proposes a new approach to computer interface design. The book explains for the first time why the much hyped user-friendly interface is treated with such derision by the user community. The author argues that software and hardware designers should consider such fundamental language concepts as meaning, context, function, variety, and equivalence. She goes on to show how imagining an interface as a new language can be an invaluable design exercise, calling into question deeply held beliefs and assumptions about what users will or will not understand. Written for a wide range of computer scientists and professionals, and presuming no prior knowledge of language-related terminology, this volume is a key step in the on-going information revolution.

This book encapsulates some work done in the DIRC project concerned with trust and responsibility in socio-technical systems. It brings together a range of disciplinary approaches - computer science, sociology and software engineering - to produce a socio-technical systems perspective on the issues surrounding trust in technology in complex settings. Computer systems can only bring about their purported benefits if functionality, users and usability are central to their design and deployment. Thus, technology can only be trusted in situ and in everyday use if these issues have been brought to bear on the process of technology design, implementation and use. The studies detailed in this book analyse the ways in which trust in technology is achieved and/or worked around in everyday situations in a range of settings - including hospitals, a steelworks, a public enquiry, the financial services sector and air traffic control.

Operating System Forensics is the first book to cover all three critical operating systems for digital forensic investigations in one comprehensive reference. Users will learn how to conduct successful digital forensic examinations in Windows, Linux, and Mac OS, the methodologies used, key technical concepts, and the tools needed to perform examinations. Mobile operating systems such as Android, iOS, Windows, and Blackberry are also covered, providing everything practitioners need to conduct a forensic investigation of the most commonly used operating systems, including technical details of how each operating system works and how to find artifacts. This book walks you through the critical components of investigation and operating system functionality, including file systems, data recovery, memory forensics, system configuration, Internet access, cloud computing, tracking artifacts, executable layouts, malware, and log files. You'll find coverage of key technical topics like Windows Registry, /etc directory, Web browers caches, Mbox, PST files, GPS data, ELF, and more. Hands-on exercises in each chapter drive home the concepts covered in the book. You'll get everything you need for a successful forensics examination, including incident response tactics and legal requirements. Operating System Forensics is the only place you'll find all this covered in one book.

In today s world, services and data are integrated in ever new constellations, requiring the easy, flexible and scalable integration of autonomous, heterogeneous components into complex systems at any time.

Event-based architectures inherently decouple system components. Event-based components are not designed to work with specific other components in a traditional request/reply mode, but separate communication from computation through asynchronous communication mechanisms via a dedicated notification service.

Muhl, Fiege, and Pietzuch provide the reader with an in-depth description of event-based systems. They cover the complete spectrum of topics, ranging from a treatment of local event matching and distributed event forwarding algorithms, through a more practical discussion of software engineering issues raised by the event-based style, to a presentation of state-of-the-art research topics in event-based systems, such as composite event detection and security. Their presentation gives researchers a comprehensive overview of the area and lots of hints for future research. In addition, they show the power of event-based architectures in modern system design, thus encouraging professionals to exploit this technique in next generation large-scale distributed applications like information dissemination, network monitoring, enterprise application integration, or mobile systems.