The digitisation of traditional media formats, such as text, images, video, and sound provides us with the ability to store, process, and transport content in a uniform way. This has led the formerly distinct industries of media, telecommunications, and information technology to converge. Cross-media publishing and service delivery are important new trends emerging in the content industry landscape. Mass-media organizations and content providers traditionally targeted content production towards a single delivery channel. However, recent economic and technological changes in the industry led content providers to extend their brands to cover multiple delivery channels. Following the content industry trend to "create once and publish everywhere"-COPE, a number of architectures, technologies, and tools are currently being developed and deployed to facilitate the automatic conversion of content to multiple formats, and the creation of innovative multi-platform services. This new approach enables the seamless access to information over different network infrastructures and client platforms. This work aims to bring together a cross-disciplinary core of contributors to address the technical and business issues of cross-media publishing and service delivery. The volume is based on papers presented at the conference on Cross-Media Service Delivery-CMSD-2003 that took place in Santorini, Greece in May 2003. Each contribution was reviewed by at least two reviewers-typically three. From the 30 papers that were submitted 20 were selected for presentation at the conference. Those were further "shepherded" by programme committee members to be improved according to the review suggestions.

This book provides a complete overview of production systems and describes the best approaches to analyze their performance. Written by experts in the field, this work also presents numerous techniques that can be used to describe, model, and optimize the performance of various types of production lines. The book is intended for researchers, production managers, and graduate students in industrial, mechanical, and systems engineering.

Cross-Media Service Delivery is of interest to professionals and academicians working in content authoring and electronic publishing platforms; as well as in media and broadcasting.
The digitization of traditional media formats, such as text, images, video, and sound provides us with the ability to store, process, and transport content in a uniform way. This has led the formerly distinct industries of media, telecommunications, and information technology to converge. Cross-media publishing and service delivery are important new trends emerging in the content industry landscape. Mass-media organizations and content providers transitionally targeted content production towards a single delivery channel. However, recent economic and technological changes in the industry led content providers to extend their brands to cover multiple delivery channels. Following the content industry trend to "create once and publish everywhere" - COPE, a number of architectures, technologies, and tools are currently being developed and deployed to facilitate the automatic conversion of content to multiple formats, and the creation of innovative multi-platform services. This new approach enables the seamless access to information over different network infrastructures and client platforms.
This work uniquely brings together a cross-disciplinary core of contributors to address the technical and business issues of cross-media publishing and service delivery. The contributions are organized into four different areas: the business issues driving the requirements for cross media content delivery, the architectures used for delivering content to multiple platforms, technologies that address specificpractical problems, and, last but not least, concrete applications.

Analysis and Design of Discrete Part Production Lines provides a complete overview of production systems, investigating several production line problems, and describing the best approaches to the analysis of production line performance. Written by experts in the field of production and manufacturing research, this book also presents numerous techniques that can be used to describe and model various types of production lines.

Special Features:

* Includes access to a supplementary web-based software package, providing algorithms and examples, developed by distinguished experts of the field.

* Describes new results for evaluative techniques and design algorithms as well as several open problems in production line optimization.

* Presents in detail the theory and techniques that underlie production system management, design, and analysis, allowing the book to serve as an excellent introduction to newcomers in the field.

* Has potential for use in a graduate level course in industrial or manufacturing engineering, or in a business course with a manufacturing focus.

* Contains appendices providing an overview of several mathematical techniques employed to design and evaluate production line models.

What are the ingredients of robust, elegant, flexible, and maintainable software architecture? "Beautiful Architecture" seeks to answer this question with a collection of intriguing essays from more than a dozen of today's leading software designers and architects. In each essay, one or two contributors present a favorite piece of software architecture, and analyze what makes it innovative and ideal for its purpose. Some of the engineers in this book reveal how they developed a specific project, including the decisions they faced and the trade offs they made, while others take a step back to investigate the impact certain architectural aspects have had on computing as a whole.Topics include: Facebook's architecture as the basis for a data-centric application ecosystem; The magic behind the Jikes RVM self-optimizable, self-hosting runtime for a high-level language; Differences and similarities between object-oriented and functional architectural analysis; How architectures can affect system evolution and developer engagement; The effect of Xen's well-designed architecture on the way operating systems evolve; Design choices and building blocks that made Tandem the platform of choice in high-availability environments for over two decades; How creeping featurism has helped GNU Emacs gain unanticipated functionality; and, How community processes can help software architectures evolve from rough sketches to beautiful systems. Go behind the scenes to learn what it takes to design elegant software architecture, and how it can shape the way you approach your own projects, with "Beautiful Architecture".