Consuming online communities : computer operating systems, identity and resistance

A defining feature of the modern era of computer technologies has been a massive reliance upon the mass consumption of personal operating system software. Currently three products dominate how the world experiences computer operating system – Microsoft‘s Windows, Apple‘s Mac, and Linux. The near monopoly held by Windows has been a crucial enabler of the ICT revolution, while the small but significant markets held by Mac and Linux provide alternatives to Windows monoculture. Aside from their technical differences each offers distinct examples of modern-day branding, with individuals forming communities in which members signify their allegiance with these products. This thesis presents these individuals as User-Fans – those who develop an affinity with the mundane products of modern culture. Adapted from the fan models forwarded by Thorne and Bruner (2006), and Hunt, Bristol and Bashaw (1999), it is proposed that User-Fans are an acknowledgement of the extremes of devotion displayed by modern consumerism while also conveying an acceptance that consumerism is a form of discourse where strong allegiances can exist. Central to this thesis is the idea that brand communities exist as a consumer response to the emerging influence of the consumer society. Muñiz and O‘Guinn‘s (2001) brand community theory provides an apt description of the behaviour and bonds exhibited by the consumers central to this study. In outlining the convergence of individual and communal worship‘ of brands the brand community concept is adopted as both a form of communal interaction and the outcome of consumer devotion. The emergence of brand communities and User-Fandom reflects wider shifts in a society enveloped within the rhetoric of consumerism and the influence of the consumer society. Central to this is the manner in which the relationship between producers and consumers has evolved. In noting this relationship it becomes important to determine whether individuals are active agents within this system or if they are passive to the hegemonic forces that surround them. For the purpose of this research the consumer perspective was focused upon. It is the description of these converging forces that stands as the major theoretical contribution of this study. In performing netnographic research on the postings of operating systems users on online forums, the research identifies distinct forms of social interaction and consumer-product relationships. The broad concepts of community, identity, the consumer society and resistance have been brought together to establish a framework in an attempt to explain the socielity within this context. The analysis of the forums through the theoretical grounding allow for the concepts of brand communities, User-Fandom and resistance through consumerism to be explored

Developing a person guidance module for hospital robots

This dissertation describes the design and implementation of the Person Guidance Module (PGM) that enables the IWARD (Intelligent Robot Swarm for attendance, Recognition, Cleaning and delivery) base robot to offer route guidance service to the patients or visitors inside the hospital arena. One of the common problems encountered in huge hospital buildings today is foreigners not being able to find their way around in the hospital. Although there are a variety of guide robots currently existing on the market and offering a wide range of guidance and related activities, they do not fit into the modular concept of the IWARD project. The PGM features a robust and foolproof non-hierarchical sensor fusion approach of an active RFID, stereovision and cricket mote sensor for guiding a patient to the X-ray room, or a visitor to a patient’s ward in every possible scenario in a complex, dynamic and crowded hospital environment. Moreover, the speed of the robot can be adjusted automatically according to the pace of the follower for physical comfort using this system. Furthermore, the module performs these tasks in any unconstructed environment solely from a robot’s onboard perceptual resources in order to limit the hardware installation costs and therefore the indoor setting support. Similar comprehensive solution in one single platform has remained elusive in existing literature. The finished module can be connected to any IWARD base robot using quick-change mechanical connections and standard electrical connections. The PGM module box is equipped with a Gumstix embedded computer for all module computing which is powered up automatically once the module box is inserted into the robot. In line with the general software architecture of the IWARD project, all software modules are developed as Orca2 components and cross-complied for Gumstix’s XScale processor. To support standardized communication between different software components, Internet Communications Engine (Ice) has been used as middleware. Additionally, plug-and-play capabilities have been developed and incorporated so that swarm system is aware at all times of which robot is equipped with PGM. Finally, in several field trials in hospital environments, the person guidance module has shown its suitability for a challenging real-world application as well as the necessary user acceptance

Performance-oriented Cloud Provisioning: Taxonomy and Survey

Cloud computing is being viewed as the technology of today and the future. Through this paradigm, the customers gain access to shared computing resources located in remote data centers that are hosted by cloud providers (CP). This technology allows for provisioning of various resources such as virtual machines (VM), physical machines, processors, memory, network, storage and software as per the needs of customers. Application providers (AP), who are customers of the CP, deploy applications on the cloud infrastructure and then these applications are used by the end-users. To meet the fluctuating application workload demands, dynamic provisioning is essential and this article provides a detailed literature survey of dynamic provisioning within cloud systems with focus on application performance. The well-known types of provisioning and the associated problems are clearly and pictorially explained and the provisioning terminology is clarified. A very detailed and general cloud provisioning classification is presented, which views provisioning from different perspectives, aiding in understanding the process inside-out. Cloud dynamic provisioning is explained by considering resources, stakeholders, techniques, technologies, algorithms, problems, goals and more.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, 3 table

ظاهرة الغلو وأثرها على الأمن الفكري (دراسة تحليلية بالمملكة العربية السعودية)

Abstract: The problem of the study is the spread of the phenomenon of intolerance in ideas and beliefs, which threatens the intellectual security of societies and the disputes and non- unity. The study aimed to highlight the role of intellectual security in promoting moderation in light of the revolution of information technology. And identify the most important social and economic variables help to spread the phenomenon of intolerance. The importance of the study stems from the pioneering role of intellectual security in combating intellectual invasion and the profanity of terrorist groups. The study examined (3) main hypotheses: There is a relationship between the diversity of knowledge sourcesAbstract: The problem of the study is the spread of the phenomenon of intolerance in ideas and beliefs, which threatens the intellectual security of societies and the disputes and non- unity. The study aimed to highlight the role of intellectual security in promoting moderation in light of the revolution of information technology. And identify the most important social and economic variables help to spread the phenomenon of intolerance. The importance of the study stems from the pioneering role of intellectual security in combating intellectual invasion and the profanity of terrorist groups. The study examined (3) main hypotheses: There is a relationship between the diversity of knowledge sources and the spread of the phenomenon of intolerance, which threatens the intellectual security of Saudi society. There is a relationship between the social and economic conditions and the spread of the phenomenon of intolerance, which threatens the intellectual security of individuals. There is a relationship between the spread of the phenomenon of intolerance and religious extremism and destabilized the unity and solidarity of the Islamic nation. To achieve the objectives of the study and test hypotheses, the researcher adopted descriptive, analytical and inductive methods through previous studies to identify the problem and the objectives

GameWave: An Interactive, Educational Sound Exhibit

Sound art is an increasingly relevant and creative branch of art, exploring various social, economic, and academic ideas in real time. Sound artists look to the latest technology to record, replay, and remix sounds around them or create completely novel noises. GameWave is a museum installation which uses a game-like interface to turn music into a creative learning experience. Participants create their own music from well-known video game tunes via a classic handheld controller. As they alter the song, they have immediate visual and auditory feedback of the changes to the sounds. The waveform of the song changes while the altered music plays from the speakers. Overall, GameWave is a fun introduction to sound which encourages participants to create unique music in real time

An Open Management and Administration Platform for IEEE 802.11 Networks

The deployment of Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) has greatly increased in past years. Due to the large deployment of the WLAN, the immediate need of management platforms has been recognized, which has a significant impact on the performance of a WLAN. Although there are various vendor-specific and proprietary solutions available in the market to cope with the management of wireless LAN, they have problems in interoperability and compatibility. To address this issues, IETF has come up with the interoperability standard of management of WLANs devices, Control And Provisioning of Wireless Access Points (CAPWAP) protocol, which is still in the draft phase. Commercial implementation of this draft protocol from WLAN equipment vendors is rather expensive. Open source community, therefore, tried to provide free management solutions. An open source project called openCAPWAP was initiated. However, it lacks a graphic user interface that makes it hard to implement for novice network administrators or regular customers. Therefore, the researcher designed and developed a web interface framework that encapsulates openCAPWAP at the bottom to provide user-friendly management experience. This application platform was designed to work with any remote web server in the public domain through which it can connect to access points or access controllers through a secure shell to configure them. This open platform is purely open source-based. It is operating system independent: it can be implemented on any open source environment such as regular Linux operating system or embedded operation system small form factor single board computers. The platform was designed and tested in a laboratory environment and a remote system. This development contributes to network administration in both network planning and operational management of the WLAN networks

Evolutionary Search Techniques with Strong Heuristics for Multi-Objective Feature Selection in Software Product Lines

Software design is a process of trading off competing objectives. If the user objective space is rich, then we should use optimizers that can fully exploit that richness. For example, this study configures software product lines (expressed as feature models) using various search-based software engineering methods. Our main result is that as we increase the number of optimization objectives, the methods in widespread use (e.g. NSGA-II, SPEA2) perform much worse than IBEA (Indicator-Based Evolutionary Algorithm). IBEA works best since it makes most use of user preference knowledge. Hence it does better on the standard measures (hypervolume and spread) but it also generates far more products with 0 violations of domain constraints. We also present significant improvements to IBEA\u27s performance by employing three strong heuristic techniques that we call PUSH, PULL, and seeding. The PUSH technique forces the evolutionary search to respect certain rules and dependencies defined by the feature models, while the PULL technique gives higher weight to constraint satisfaction as an optimization objective and thus achieves a higher percentage of fully-compliant configurations within shorter runtimes. The seeding technique helps in guiding very large feature models to correct configurations very early in the optimization process. Our conclusion is that the methods we apply in search-based software engineering need to be carefully chosen, particularly when studying complex decision spaces with many optimization objectives. Also, we conclude that search methods must be customized to fit the problem at hand. Specifically, the evolutionary search must respect domain constraints

PARbot: Personal Assistive Robot

The aging population of the United States is creating a growing need to provide assistive care for elderly and people with disabilities. As the Baby Boomer generation enters retirement, the ratio of caregivers to those that require assistance is projected to decrease. There are currently no commercially available modular assistive robots that can fill this need. Our project aims to provide an alternative to current assisted living options through the development, construction, and testing of a Personal Assistive Robot (PARbot) that allows individuals with general or age related disabilities to maintain some aspects of their independence, such as the ability to shop

Electronic instructional materials and course requirements "Computer science" for specialty: 1-53 01 01 «Automation of technological processes and production»

The purpose of the electronic instructional materials and course requirements by the discipline «Computer science» (EIMCR) is to develop theoretical systemic and practical knowledge in different fields of Computer science. Features of structuring and submission of educational material: EIMCR includes the following sections: theoretical, practical, knowledge control, auxiliary. The theoretical section presents lecture material in accordance with the main sections and topics of the syllabus. The practical section of the EIMCR contains materials for conducting practical classes aimed to develop modern computational thinking, basic skills in computing and making decisions in the field of the fundamentals of computer theory and many computer science fields. The knowledge control section of the EIMCR contains: guidelines for the implementation of the control work aimed at developing the skills of independent work on the course under study, developing the skills of selecting, analyzing and writing out the necessary material, as well as the correct execution of the tasks; list of questions for the credit by the discipline. The auxiliary section of the EIMCR contains the following elements of the syllabus: explanatory note; thematic lectures plan; tables of distribution of classroom hours by topics and informational and methodological part. EIMCR contains active links to quickly find the necessary material