The refereed proceedings of the IFIP/ACM International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms, Middleware 2003, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in June 2003. The 25 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 158 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on peer-to-peer computing, publish-subscribe middleware, adaptability and context-awareness, web-based middleware, and mobile and ubiquitous computing.

Territories of Profit compares Dell Computer, the dominant computer manufacturer of the late twentieth century, and G. F. Swift, the leading meatpacking firm of the late nineteenth century, to reveal how communications revolutions in different periods enabled businesses to innovate their operations, reorganize the structure of the firm, and reshape the geography of profit-making. By depicting the parallel experiences of Dell and Swift, which both deployed revolutionary communications technologies in their business systems and transformed patterns of development through their innovative advances, the book challenges simplified representations of the contemporary economy as historically unprecedented. Territories of Profit also incorporates information from interview sources within Dell to portray the "Dell Model" in ways never before revealed in existing studies of the PC maker.

A great deal has been written about Steve Jobs and Apple. Not nearly as much has been produced about Bill Gates and Microsoft, especially in the ten-year period that Dave Jaworski was at Microsoft. Microsoft was the company that drove the hardest and built the fastest. He was there during this rapid rise to the top. Dave kept meticulous notes and took lots of photos and documented the risks taken, the dreams shared, the lessons learned, the hopes realized, and the mistakes made. Many of the issues at the time are similar to issues confronting leaders in business today. All can learn from Microsoft's past. Dave also details several secrets-some only his family knows. Some of these secrets were known to only a handful of people within the company at a time when it went through its explosive growth period: like the secret recipe for Coca-Cola or Colonel Sanders' chicken recipe, these secrets were literally changing the competitive landscape in the technology industry and were rewriting the business rules of the day. Understanding these secrets and the thinking behind them can provide strategic insights and advantages to professionals and their businesses. Better still, they can help them define their own secrets to accelerate them past competitors and over hurdles to success.

Information Technology has become symbolic of modernity and progress almost since its inception. The nature and boundaries of IT have also meant that it has shaped, or become embedded within a wide range of other scientific, technological and economic developments. Governments, from the outset, saw the computer as a strategic technology, a keystone of economic development and an area where technology policy should be targeted. This was true for those economies interested in maintaining their technological and economic leadership, but also figured strongly in the developmental programmes of those seeking to modernise or catch up. So strong was the notion that IT policy should be the centre of economic strategy that predominant political economic ideologies have frequently been subverted or distorted to allow for special efforts to promote either the production or use of IT. This book brings together a series of country-based studies to examine, in depth, the nature and extent of IT policies as they have evolved from a complex historical interaction of politics, technology, institutions, and social and cultural factors. In doing so many key questions are critically examined. Where can we find successful examples of IT policy? Who has shaped policy? Who did governments turn to for advice in framing policy? Several chapters outline the impact of military influence on IT. What is the precise nature of this influence on IT development? How closely were industry leaders linked to government programs and to what extent were these programs, particularly those aimed at the generation of 'national champions', misconceived through undue special pleading? How effective were government personnel and politicians in assessing the merits of programs predicated on technological trajectories extrapolated from increasingly complex and specialised information? This book will be of interest to academics and graduate students of Management Studies, History, Economics, and Technology Studies, and Government and Corporate policy makers engaged with IT and Technology policy.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Joint ERCIM/CologNet International Workshop on Constraint Solving and Constraint Logic Programming, held in Cork, Ireland in June 2002. The 14 revised full papers presented were carefully selected for inclusion in the book during two rounds of reviewing and revision. Among the topics addressed are verification and debugging of constraint logic programs, modeling and solving CSPs, explanation generation, inference and inconsistency processing, SAT and 0/1 encodings of CSPs, soft constraints and constraint relaxation, real-world applications, and distributed constraint solving.

This book is a useful text for advanced students of MIS and ICT courses, and for those studying ICT in related areas: Management and Organization Studies, Cultural Studies, and Technology and Innovation. As ICT's permeate every sphere of society-business, education, leisure, government, etc.-it is important to reflect the character and complexity of the interaction between people and computer, between society and technology. For example, the user may represent a much broader set of actors than 'the user' conventionally found in many texts: the operator, the customer, the citizen, the gendered individual, the entrepreneur, the 'poor', the student. Each actor uses ICT in different ways. This book examines these issues, deploying a number of methods such as Actor Network Theory, Socio-Technical Systems, and phenomenological approaches. Management concerns about strategy and productivity are covered together with issues of power, politics, and globalization. Topics range from long-standing themes in the study of IT in organizations such as implementation, strategy, and evaluation, to general analysis of IT as socio-economic change. A distinguished group of contributors, including Bruno Latour, Saskia Sassen, Robert Galliers, Frank Land, Ian Angel, and Richard Boland, offer the reader a rich set of perspectives and ideas on the relationship between ICT and society, organizational knowledge and innovation.

 This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed joint post-proceedings of the VLDB 2002 Workshop on Efficiency and Effectiveness of XML Tools and Techniques, EEXTT and the CAiSE 2002 Workshop on Data Integration over the Web, DIWeb. The 10 revised full papers presented were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and revision. The papers are organized in topical sections on XML languages, XML modeling and integration, XML storage, benchmarking XML, and data integration over the Web.

This monograph extends Realization Theory to the discrete-time domain. It includes new results and constructs a new and very wide inclusion relation for various non-linear dynamical systems. After establishing some features of discrete-time dynamical systems it presents results concerning systems which are proposed by the authors for the first time. They introduce General Dynamical Systems, Linear Representation Systems, Affine Dynamical Systems, Pseudo Linear Systems, Almost Linear Systems and So-called Linear Systems for discrete-time and demonstrate the relationship between them and the other dynamical systems. This book is intended for graduate students and researchers who study control theory.

What accounts for the growing income inequalities in Silicon Valley, despite huge technological and economic strides? Why have the once-powerful labor unions declined in their influence? How are increasing waves of immigration and ethnic diversity changing the workplace in the Valley? "Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream" examines these questions from a fresh perspective: that provided by the history of women in Silicon Valley in the twentieth century.
Silicon Valley is internationally renowned. It is less well known, however, that the Valley once contained the world's largest concentration of fruit-processing plants, set in a sea of fruit orchards. Despite the many differences between the fruit and electronics industries, one important thread connects them: the production workers have been preponderantly immigrant women. (In the early part of the twentieth century, the newcomers came primarily from southern Europe; in the latter part of the century, they came mostly from Asia and Latin America, especially Mexico.) The author examines both industries, both work forces, and the changing nature of the local power structure. Although she documents the many sources of vitality and ferment that have undergirded the region's economic might, she also demonstrates that its wealth has not been equally distributed.

XPAgileUniverse2003isthethirdconferenceinaseriesrunninginNorthA- rica and attracting participants from all over the world who are interested in the research, development and application of agile software processes. Agile app- aches value people and interaction over processes and tools - moving software engineering from the process-oriented software development approaches of the 1990s towards people-oriented approaches that we are starting to see more and more in this decade. Agile approaches stress a holistic view of software deve- pers as being involved in analysis, design, implementation and testing activities, while more traditional, tayloristic approaches separate these tasks and assign them to di?erent "resources. " Tayloristic approaches create knowledge-sharing problems as information gathered by one person needs to be handed over - usually in the form of documentation - to the next person in the chain. Agile approaches reduce the number of hand-o?s and, thus, decrease the amount of required documentation for knowledge sharing. While deemed a novelty only a few years ago, agile methods are now be- ming established in the software industry and are being applied in more and more application domains. While agile approaches move into the mainstream of software organizations, we are only now beginning to understand their bene?ts, areas of applicability, and also their dangers. This year's conference will increase this understanding and provide a better base for industry practitioners as they assess the e?ectiveness of agile methods in their environment.

The refereed proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases, SSTD 2003, held at Santorini Island, Greece in July 2003.

The 28 revised full papers presented together with a keynote paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 105 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on access methods, advanced query processing, data mining and data warehousing, distance-based queries, mobility and moving points management, modeling and languages, similarity processing, systems and implementation issues.

The refereed proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Multiple Classifier Systems, MCS 2003, held in Guildford, UK in June 2003. The 40 revised full papers presented with one invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected for presentation. The papers are organized in topical sections on boosting, combination rules, multi-class methods, fusion schemes and architectures, neural network ensembles, ensemble strategies, and applications

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Database Programming Languages, DBPL 2001, held in Frascati, Italy, in September 2001.The 18 revised full papers presented together with an invited paper were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and revision. The papers are organized in topical sections on semistructured data; OLAP and data mining; systems, schema integration, and index concurrency; XML; spatial databases; user languages; and rules.

As social beings, humans are not living in isolation but rather interact and communicate within their social network via language, meant to convey parts of some conceptualization from the sender to a single recipient or a set of recipients. Communities of agents not only share a common language but also the individual conceptualizations of the world (real and abstract) have to overlap to a significant extent, allowing for efficient reference to whole conceptual structures like "the German constitution," "game theory" or "medical sciences." For "societies" of interacting technical devices or software agents the situation is not quite as Babylonian since although these agents are meant to act individually (and also have a private state and private knowledge) in most cases they are designed to refer to one common ontology or standardized protocol and thus do not have to deal with misunderstanding. However, the more these systems become interconnected, the more this situation resembles the one described for societies of human agents even though the misunderstanding might be easier to detect when the different reference ontologies are made explicit and published. Obviously, in both cases standardization of a common language or set of rules for interaction reduces the individual degree of freedom for the sake of compatibility and benefits derived from interaction. In his work, Falk Graf von Westarp addresses the software market as a domain strongly depending on compatibility effects of the individuals' decisions.

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"An important contribution to the contemporary critique of high tech industry."
-- "Contemporary Sociology"

"Offers a lot for the general reader. The authors must be congratulated."
--"International Migration Review"

"Powerful and passionate exposA(c)"
-- "Journal of American Ethnic History"

"An important contribution to the environmental sociology literature."
-- "Choice"

"Powerful, compelling and revealing. Pellow and Park weave a fascinating story of both the historical and current domination of gender, class and race in Silicon Valley."
-- "Alternatives Journal"

"The Silicon Valley of Dreams . . . exposes the numerous inequities that plague the area, from the huge number of temporary workers, the highest per capita in the nation, to the obvious absence of union jobs."
--"Conscious Choice"

"The authors of [this] important [book] share a sense of compassion for and commitment to the struggle of labor, community, civil rights and environmental activists."
--"Los Angeles Times"

""The Silicon Valley of Dreams" provides a progressive intervention into environmental sociology and into public discourse on the relationship between immigration and environment."
-- "American Journal of Sociology"

"Critical reading for students and scholars in ethnic studies, immigration, urban studies, gender studies, social movements and environmental studies, as well as activists and policy-makers working to address the need of workers, communities and industry."
--"Educational Book Review"

Next to the nuclear industry, the largest producer of contaminants in the air, land, and water is theelectronics industry. Silicon Valley hosts the highest density of Superfund sites anywhere in the nation and leads the country in the number of temporary workers per capita and in workforce gender inequities. Silicon Valley offers a sobering illustration of environmental inequality and other problems that are increasingly linked to the globalization of the world's economies.

In The Silicon Valley of Dreams, the authors take a hard look at the high-tech region of Silicon Valley to examine environmental racism within the context of immigrant patterns, labor markets, and the historical patterns of colonialism. One cannot understand Silicon Valley or the high-tech global economy in general, they contend, without also understanding the role people of color play in the labor force, working in the electronic industry's toxic environments. These toxic work environments produce chemical pollution that, in turn, disrupts the ecosystems of surrounding communities inhabited by people of color and immigrants. The authors trace the origins of this exploitation and provide a new understanding of the present-day struggles for occupational health and safety.

The Silicon Valley of Dreams will be critical reading for students and scholars in ethnic studies, immigration, urban studies, gender studies, social movements, and the environment, as well as activists and policy-makers working to address the needs of workers, communities, and industry.

What accounts for the growing income inequalities in Silicon Valley, despite huge technological and economic strides? Why have the once-powerful labor unions declined in their influence? How are increasing waves of immigration and ethnic diversity changing the workplace in the Valley? "Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream" examines these questions from a fresh perspective: that provided by the history of women in Silicon Valley in the twentieth century.
Silicon Valley is internationally renowned. It is less well known, however, that the Valley once contained the world's largest concentration of fruit-processing plants, set in a sea of fruit orchards. Despite the many differences between the fruit and electronics industries, one important thread connects them: the production workers have been preponderantly immigrant women. (In the early part of the twentieth century, the newcomers came primarily from southern Europe; in the latter part of the century, they came mostly from Asia and Latin America, especially Mexico.) The author examines both industries, both work forces, and the changing nature of the local power structure. Although she documents the many sources of vitality and ferment that have undergirded the region's economic might, she also demonstrates that its wealth has not been equally distributed.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second Software Product Line Conference SPLC2, held in San Diego, Ca, USA in August 2002.The 24 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. Among the topics addressed are the introduction of product lines and the dynamics of organizations attempting to introduce product lines; it is evaluated how to choose, which products to produce, and how to model the features of those products.

One of the most important elements in the computer revolution has been agreement on technological standards. The advances in communication allowed by millions of computers connecting over various networks are based on these networks sharing a common language. This book tells the complete story of the battle between several competing technologies in the late 1970s and early 1980s to become the compatibility standard in one high-tech arena, the LAN (local area network) industry.
In the end, a single technology succeeded in dominating the entire industry: Ethernet. The author argues that Ethernet triumphed not because it was better or cheaper, but because of a clever strategy by Ethernet's corporate sponsors. This strategy mandated the building of a large supplier base around the technology in order to compensate for an inability to produce all required components and devices. Within a few years, Ethernet had greatly surpassed its competitors in gaining suppliers, which included specialized start-ups, semiconductor firms, and established computer manufacturers. This supplier advantage proved an invaluable strategic asset. As suppliers developed various price and product advantages that were easily adopted by Ethernet, its competitors were driven out of the market.
Key to understanding the importance of a supplier base in the race for standards is the crucial role of a technological community. The book demonstrates how technological communities account not only for critical differences in the standardization strategies of various LAN vendors, but also for the emergence of other important instances of technological competition. For example, the recent rise of Linux and Java can be seen as the result of successful community-driven strategies.
The story of the battle for the LAN standard is also a story of the Internet more broadly, and so the book offers unique insights into its dazzling growth, as LANs became important corporate on-ramps to the Internet and several LAN suppliers (such as 3Com) evolved into leading suppliers of Internet technology.

One of the most important elements in the computer revolution has been agreement on technological standards. The advances in communication allowed by millions of computers connecting over various networks are based on these networks sharing a common language. This book tells the complete story of the battle between several competing technologies in the late 1970s and early 1980s to become the compatibility standard in one high-tech arena, the LAN (local area network) industry.
In the end, a single technology succeeded in dominating the entire industry: Ethernet. The author argues that Ethernet triumphed not because it was better or cheaper, but because of a clever strategy by Ethernet's corporate sponsors. This strategy mandated the building of a large supplier base around the technology in order to compensate for an inability to produce all required components and devices. Within a few years, Ethernet had greatly surpassed its competitors in gaining suppliers, which included specialized start-ups, semiconductor firms, and established computer manufacturers. This supplier advantage proved an invaluable strategic asset. As suppliers developed various price and product advantages that were easily adopted by Ethernet, its competitors were driven out of the market.
Key to understanding the importance of a supplier base in the race for standards is the crucial role of a technological community. The book demonstrates how technological communities account not only for critical differences in the standardization strategies of various LAN vendors, but also for the emergence of other important instances of technological competition. For example, the recent rise of Linux and Java can be seen as the result of successful community-driven strategies.
The story of the battle for the LAN standard is also a story of the Internet more broadly, and so the book offers unique insights into its dazzling growth, as LANs became important corporate on-ramps to the Internet and several LAN suppliers (such as 3Com) evolved into leading suppliers of Internet technology.

This volume contains 39 of the papers presented at the Sixth European Multigrid Conference, held in Gent, Belgium, September 27-30, 1999. The topics treated at the conference cover all aspects of Multigrid Methods: theory, analysis, computer implementation, applications in the fields of physics, chemistry, fluid mechanics, structural mechanics and magnetism.

Momentous developments in the global economy over the last two decades have dramatically increased the availability of industrial investment sites and lowered the cost of relocating core activities to new countries. But how should these developments be exploited for competitive advantage? Firms face competing pressures: scale economies and the advantages of proximity push them to concentrate activities in one or only a few locations, while low wages and new markets invite dispersal across several countries.
This book examines how location decisions have contributed to the global dominance of U.S. firms in the hard disk drive industry. In analyzing the industry since its beginnings some forty years ago, the book explains how American leadership in disk drives has rested on the formation of two complementary industrial clusters. Fundamental research and product development has been located almost entirely in the United States, principally California. Manufacturing has been concentrated in Southeast Asia (initially in Singapore and later in Thailand and Malaysia as well). This duality has proven key to the successful competitive position of the U.S. disk drive industry.
Beyond the particulars of the disk drive industry, the authors present new perspectives on the sources of industrial leadership, the strategic behavior of multinational corporations, the geographic evolution of industry, and the creation and endurance of industrial clusters. Managers will gain insight into how location decisions can contribute to organizational effectiveness, and will learn that globalizing production, while keeping innovative activities at home, can contribute to their firms' competitive advantage. Policy makers will find that first mover advantages may be as important for countries as for companies, since early and systematic efforts to attract a specific industry can generate a critical mass of investments that, over time, will make a location resistant to inducements offered by other countries.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Quality of Future Internet Services, QofIS 2001, organized by the European COST Action 263, in Coimbra, Portugal, in September 2001.The 22 revised full papers presented were carefully selected during a competitive reviewing process from a total of 87 submissions. The book offers topical sections on quality of service for multimedia communication, admission control, QoS routing, differentiated services networks, QoS monitoring and mapping, and traffic engineering.

Many have described the Japanese competitive success in information technology; very few have explained it. In this book Martin Fransman advances our understanding by developing the concept of the Japanese Innovation System--an arrangement consisting of competing and cooperating private companies, government policy-makers and researchers, and universities. It will be of interest to all teachers, students and policy makers interested in technological competition.

Momentous developments in the global economy over the last two decades have dramatically increased the availability of industrial investment sites and lowered the cost of relocating core activities to new countries. But how should these developments be exploited for competitive advantage? Firms face competing pressures: scale economies and the advantages of proximity push them to concentrate activities in one or only a few locations, while low wages and new markets invite dispersal across several countries.
This book examines how location decisions have contributed to the global dominance of U.S. firms in the hard disk drive industry. In analyzing the industry since its beginnings some forty years ago, the book explains how American leadership in disk drives has rested on the formation of two complementary industrial clusters. Fundamental research and product development has been located almost entirely in the United States, principally California. Manufacturing has been concentrated in Southeast Asia (initially in Singapore and later in Thailand and Malaysia as well). This duality has proven key to the successful competitive position of the U.S. disk drive industry.
Beyond the particulars of the disk drive industry, the authors present new perspectives on the sources of industrial leadership, the strategic behavior of multinational corporations, the geographic evolution of industry, and the creation and endurance of industrial clusters. Managers will gain insight into how location decisions can contribute to organizational effectiveness, and will learn that globalizing production, while keeping innovative activities at home, can contribute to their firms' competitive advantage. Policy makers will find that first mover advantages may be as important for countries as for companies, since early and systematic efforts to attract a specific industry can generate a critical mass of investments that, over time, will make a location resistant to inducements offered by other countries.

Over the last decade, China has made rapid strides to 'catch up' with the West in computer and information technologies. Qiwen Lu takes an inside look at the development of four large Chinese domestic computer enterprises (the Stone Group, the Legend Group, the Founder Group, and the China Great Wall Computer Group) from their inception to their establishment as multi-billion businesses. He shows how and why indigenous Chinese high-tech firms gained technology capabilities and modern marketing know-how, and how they were able to compete directly with Western multinationals.