65,807 research outputs found
The problems of assessing software reliability ...When you really need to depend on it
This paper looks at the ways in which the reliability of software can be assessed and predicted. It shows that the levels of reliability that can be claimed with scientific justification are relatively modest
Recommended from our members
Modeling software design diversity
Design diversity has been used for many years now as a means of achieving a degree of fault tolerance in software-based systems. Whilst there is clear evidence that the approach can be expected to deliver some increase in reliability compared with a single version, there is not agreement about the extent of this. More importantly, it remains difficult to evaluate exactly how reliable a particular diverse fault-tolerant system is. This difficulty arises because assumptions of independence of failures between different versions have been shown not to be tenable: assessment of the actual level of dependence present is therefore needed, and this is hard. In this tutorial we survey the modelling issues here, with an emphasis upon the impact these have upon the problem of assessing the reliability of fault tolerant systems. The intended audience is one of designers, assessors and project managers with only a basic knowledge of probabilities, as well as reliability experts without detailed knowledge of software, who seek an introduction to the probabilistic issues in decisions about design diversity
Ontology as Product-Service System: Lessons Learned from GO, BFO and DOLCE
This paper defends a view of the Gene Ontology (GO) and of Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as examples of what the manufacturing industry calls product-service systems. This means that they are products (the ontologies) bundled with a range of ontology services such as updates, training, help desk, and permanent identifiers. The paper argues that GO and BFO are contrasted in this respect with DOLCE, which approximates more closely to a scientific theory or a scientific publication. The paper provides a detailed overview of ontology services and concludes with a discussion of some implications of the product-service system approach for the understanding of the nature of applied ontology. Ontology developer communities are compared in this respect with developers of scientific theories and of standards (such as W3C). For each of these we can ask: what kinds of products do they develop and what kinds of services do they provide for the users of these products
Cultural Environmentalism and the Constructed Commons
Van Houweling explores both the benefits and failings of conservation easements on land on the one hand and the licensing commons on the other. Conservation easement The tools of cultural environmentalism in the lights of objections to conservation easements and more general concerns with complicated and fragmented property rights are also considered. Among other things, she provides clear theoretical differences between the public domain, where freedom is based on the absence of property rights, and the licensing commons, where freedom is based on the absence on the preemptive exercise of the property rights by the rights holder in order to grant use privileges to users of the commons, and sometimes binds to those future users to add their own improvements back to the common pool
Towards operational measures of computer security
Ideally, a measure of the security of a system should capture quantitatively the intuitive notion of âthe ability of the system to resist attackâ. That is, it should be operational, reflecting the degree to which the system can be expected to remain free of security breaches under particular conditions of operation (including attack). Instead, current security levels at best merely reflect the extensiveness of safeguards introduced during the design and development of a system. Whilst we might expect a system developed to a higher level than another to exhibit âmore secure behaviourâ in operation, this cannot be guaranteed; more particularly, we cannot infer what the actual security behaviour will be from knowledge of such a level. In the paper we discuss similarities between reliability and security with the intention of working towards measures of âoperational securityâ similar to those that we have for reliability of systems. Very informally, these measures could involve expressions such as the rate of occurrence of security breaches (cf rate of occurrence of failures in reliability), or the probability that a specified âmissionâ can be accomplished without a security breach (cf reliability function). This new approach is based on the analogy between system failure and security breach. A number of other analogies to support this view are introduced. We examine this duality critically, and have identified a number of important open questions that need to be answered before this quantitative approach can be taken further. The work described here is therefore somewhat tentative, and one of our major intentions is to invite discussion about the plausibility and feasibility of this new approach
CRAFT: A library for easier application-level Checkpoint/Restart and Automatic Fault Tolerance
In order to efficiently use the future generations of supercomputers, fault
tolerance and power consumption are two of the prime challenges anticipated by
the High Performance Computing (HPC) community. Checkpoint/Restart (CR) has
been and still is the most widely used technique to deal with hard failures.
Application-level CR is the most effective CR technique in terms of overhead
efficiency but it takes a lot of implementation effort. This work presents the
implementation of our C++ based library CRAFT (Checkpoint-Restart and Automatic
Fault Tolerance), which serves two purposes. First, it provides an extendable
library that significantly eases the implementation of application-level
checkpointing. The most basic and frequently used checkpoint data types are
already part of CRAFT and can be directly used out of the box. The library can
be easily extended to add more data types. As means of overhead reduction, the
library offers a build-in asynchronous checkpointing mechanism and also
supports the Scalable Checkpoint/Restart (SCR) library for node level
checkpointing. Second, CRAFT provides an easier interface for User-Level
Failure Mitigation (ULFM) based dynamic process recovery, which significantly
reduces the complexity and effort of failure detection and communication
recovery mechanism. By utilizing both functionalities together, applications
can write application-level checkpoints and recover dynamically from process
failures with very limited programming effort. This work presents the design
and use of our library in detail. The associated overheads are thoroughly
analyzed using several benchmarks
hpDJ: An automated DJ with floorshow feedback
Many radio stations and nightclubs employ Disk-Jockeys (DJs) to provide a continuous uninterrupted stream or âmixâ of dance music, built from a sequence of individual song-tracks. In the last decade, commercial pre-recorded compilation CDs of DJ mixes have become a growth market. DJs exercise skill in deciding an appropriate sequence of tracks and in mixing 'seamlessly' from one track to the next. Online access to large-scale archives of digitized music via automated music information retrieval systems offers users the possibility of discovering many songs they like, but the majority of consumers are unlikely to want to learn the DJ skills of sequencing and mixing. This paper describes hpDJ, an automatic method by which compilations of dance-music can be sequenced and seamlessly mixed by computer, with minimal user involvement. The user may specify a selection of tracks, and may give a qualitative indication of the type of mix required. The resultant mix can be presented as a continuous single digital audio file, whether for burning to CD, or for play-out from a personal playback device such as an iPod, or for play-out to rooms full of dancers in a nightclub. Results from an early version of this system have been tested on an audience of patrons in a London nightclub, with very favourable results. Subsequent to that experiment, we designed technologies which allow the hpDJ system to monitor the responses of crowds of dancers/listeners, so that hpDJ can dynamically react to those responses from the crowd. The initial intention was that hpDJ would monitor the crowdâs reaction to the song-track currently being played, and use that response to guide its selection of subsequent song-tracks tracks in the mix. In that version, itâs assumed that all the song-tracks existed in some archive or library of pre-recorded files. However, once reliable crowd-monitoring technology is available, it becomes possible to use the crowd-response data to dynamically âremixâ existing song-tracks (i.e, alter the track in some way, tailoring it to the response of the crowd) and even to dynamically âcomposeâ new song-tracks suited to that crowd. Thus, the music played by hpDJ to any particular crowd of listeners on any particular night becomes a direct function of that particular crowdâs particular responses on that particular night. On a different night, the same crowd of people might react in a different way, leading hpDJ to create different music. Thus, the music composed and played by hpDJ could be viewed as an âemergentâ property of the dynamic interaction between the computer system and the crowd, and the crowd could then be viewed as having collectively collaborated on composing the music that was played on that night. This en masse collective composition raises some interesting legal issues regarding the ownership of the composition (i.e.: who, exactly, is the author of the work?), but revenue-generating businesses can nevertheless plausibly be built from such technologies
Dual licensing in open source software markets
Dual licensing has proved to be a sustainable business model for various commercial software vendors employing open source strategies. In this paper we study the main characteristics of dual licensing and under which conditions it represents a profitable commercial strategy. We show that dual licensing is a form of versioning, whereby the software vendor uses the open source licensing terms in order to induce commercial customers to select the proprietary version of the software. Furthermore, we show that the software vendor prefers dual licensing to a fully proprietary strategy when the customers are very sensitive to the reciprocal terms of the open source license
Diffusion of Original and Counterfeit Products in a Developing Country
We study the diffusion of original and counterfeit products in three distinct categories in a developing country. The focus is on when their diffusion processes peak, how sales of original and counterfeit products are related and how marketing efforts can influence this process. Using a unique data set for Suriname (South America) on televisions, mobile phones and DVDs, we can support various predictions from theory and give recommendations for marketing management.developing countries;diffusion;counterfeits
Review of High-Quality Random Number Generators
This is a review of pseudorandom number generators (RNG's) of the highest
quality, suitable for use in the most demanding Monte Carlo calculations. All
the RNG's we recommend here are based on the Kolmogorov-Anosov theory of mixing
in classical mechanical systems, which guarantees under certain conditions and
in certain asymptotic limits, that points on the trajectories of these systems
can be used to produce random number sequences of exceptional quality. We
outline this theory of mixing and establish criteria for deciding which RNG's
are sufficiently good approximations to the ideal mathematical systems that
guarantee highest quality. The well-known RANLUX (at highest luxury level) and
its recent variant RANLUX++ are seen to meet our criteria, and some of the
proposed versions of MIXMAX can be modified easily to meet the same criteria.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figure
- âŠ