In a dynamic computing environment, such as the Grid, resource management plays a crucial role for making distributed resources available on-demand to anyone from anywhere at any time without undermining the resource autonomy; this becomes an art when dealing with heterogeneous resources distributed under multiple trust domains spanning across the Internet. Today Grid execution environments provide abstract workflow descriptions that need a dynamic mapping to actual deployments; this further accentuates the importance of resource management in the Grid.

This monograph renders boundaries of the Grid resource management, identifies research challenges and proposes new solutions with innovative techniques for on-demand provisioning, automatic deployments, dynamic synthesis, negotiation-based advance reservation and capacity planning of Grid resources. The Grid capacity planning is performed with multi-constrained optimized resource allocations by modelling resource allocation as an on-line strip packing problem and introducing a new solution that optimizes resource utilization and QoS while generating contention-free solutions.

On-demand resource provisioning becomes possible by simplifying abstract resource descriptions independent from the concrete installations. The book further explains the use of the semantic web technologies in the Grid to specify explicit definitions and unambiguous machine interpretable resource descriptions for intelligent resource matching and synthesis; the synthesis process generates new compound resources with aggregated capabilities and prowess. The newly introduced techniques haven been developed and integrated in ASKALON Grid application development and runtime environment, deployed in the Austrian Grid, and demonstrated through well performed experiments.

The Linux Programming Bible is the definitive reference for beginning and veteran Linux programmers. Written by John Goerzen, a developer for the Debian GNU/Linux Distribution, this comprehensive guide leads you step by step from simple shell programs to sophisticated CGI applications.

You'll find complete coverage of Linux programming, including:

• Techniques for C/C++, Perl, CGI, and shell programming
• Basic tools, such as bash, regular expression, sed, grep, Emacs, and more
• Communication using semaphores, pipelines, FIFOs, and TCP/IP
• Practical tips on CVS collaboration security, and performance optimization
• Linux C tools, including compilers, libraries, and debuggers

Filled with savvy programming advice and clear code examples, the Linux Programming Bible is all you need to take your Linux programming skills to the next level.

Production Grids in Asia: Applications, Developments and Global Ties, an edited volume, is based on ISGC (International Symposium on Grid Computing), one of the most prestigious annual events in Asia. It brings together scientists and engineers worldwide to exchange ideas, present challenges/solutions, and introduce future development in the field of Grid Computing.

ISGC 2008 was held at Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan in April 2008. The edited proceedings present international projects in Grid operation, Grid Middleware and e-Science applications. Leading Grid projects from Asia-Pacific are also covered.

Production Grids in Asia: Applications, Developments and Global Ties is designed for a professional audience composed of industry researchers and practitioners within the Grid community. This volume is also suitable for advanced-level students in computer science.

The emergence of China as a future major participant in international aviation raises some interesting questions, especially from a strategic policy perspective. The progressive shift from a command to a mixed market economy under the central leadership of the Beijing administration now finds itself faced with the needs to balance a strategic duality in the context of the role of China's civil aviation industry. In a very real sense this situation requires the design and accommodation of a growing role for China's mainstream carriers within the operational context of the need to meet the complex challenges from increasing international market competition. In parallel with such major external pressures, central government must also accommodate domestic priorities with regard to internal economic development. The fruits of economic progress as a function of market reform are commonly understood to have positively reshaped the live of only a proportion of the national population to date. The need to create greater access to economic growth for the more remote western and northern provinces has required that the rapid development of airports become a factor in the planning and allocation of developmental priorities. To complicate matters further, prevailing requirements of airspace defence remain a major parameter within the larger context of national aviation policy. This book explores the political, economic and strategic issues raised by the inevitable tension between the domestic and international aspects of Beijing's current civil aviation strategy. It also seeks to identify some of the problems that face the industry as a key sector in the larger context of macroeconomic reform and the further pressures now being exerted by China's membership of the WTO.

Power Quality (PQ) indices are a powerful tool for quickly quantifying PQ disturbances. They also serve as the basis for illustrating the negative impact of electrical disturbances on components and for assessing compliance with the required standards and recommendations within a regulating framework.

Within these pages lies a comprehensive overview of both the traditional PQ indices in use today and new indices likely to be used in the future.

Key features of this book include:

• a special focus on the metrics for quantifying PQ disturbances;
• a complete review of methods and indices for assessing disturbance responsibilities between customers and utilities;
• a survey on PQ objectives around the world, with highlights on the economic aspects of PQ disturbances.

Inside, you will find a thorough and well-balanced treatment on theoretical concepts and practical applications, enhanced by examples and exercises of PQ indices computation and use.

This is an important resource for academics, students of power quality, reliability and electrical power systems courses, and also for practicing engineers involved in solving PQ problems in the new structures of liberalised energy markets. 

Although in Hinduism it is mainly used to refer to widow immolation, the term 'sati' means 'true woman' - a female hero. Whitney Kelting has learned that in Jainism satis appear as subjects of devotional hymns. This seems paradoxical, given that Jain spirituality is to disengage oneself from worldly existence and Jain devotionalism is usually directed toward those souls who have reached perfect detachment. In fact, however, there is a vast corpus of popular texts, many of them written by prominent scholar-monks between the 16th and 18th centuries, illustrating the distinctly worldly virtues of devoted Jain wives. In this fieldwork-based study, Kelting explores the ways in which Jain women use sati narratives and rituals to understand wifehood as a choice, which these women's ongoing ritual practices continually shape. She focuses on eight well-known Jain sati narratives, recorded in both formal ritual contexts and in informal retellings, and also as read aloud from printed versions. She finds that one of the principal functions of Jain sati narratives is to contribute to a discourse of wifehood, which addresses the concerns of Jain laywomen within the Jain value system and provides a fertile context in which Jain women can explore their questions of virtue and piety.

Agriculture has a small, and declining, importance in employment and income generation within the EU, but a political importance well beyond its economic impact. The EU's common agricultural policy (CAP) has often been the source of conflict between the EU and its trade partners within first the GATT, and then the WTO. In the Doha Round agriculture was again a sticking point, resulting in setbacks and delays. The position of the EU is pivotal. Due to the comparatively limited competitiveness of the EU's agricultural sector, and the EU's institutionally constrained ability to undertake CAP reform, the CAP sets limits for agricultural trade liberalization blocking progress across the full compass of the WTO agenda. Therefore, the farm trade negotiation, with the CAP at its core, is the key to understanding the dynamics of trade rounds in the WTO.

The book, written by a political scientist and an agricultural economist, applies theory on ideas to explain how the agricultural sector came to be included in the Single Undertaking that resulted in the Uruguay Round agreements, and how this led to a dynamic interplay between CAP reform and the possibility of further agricultural trade liberalization within the WTO, thereby providing useful insights into international trade relations.

For the better part of its history sociology shared with commonsense its assumption of the ‘nature-like’ character of society – and consequently developed as the science of unfreedom. In this powerful and engaging work, first published in 1976, Professor Bauman outlines the historical roots of such a science and describes how the new trends in sociology emerging from phenomenology and existentialism do not challenge this preoccupation. Rather, he claims, they deepen and extend it by stressing the key role of commonsense, particularly the ways in which it is sustained and embedded in the routines and assumptions of everyday life.

Professor Bauman sets out the form of a critical sociology, based on emancipatory reason. His main concerns are the `validity' of commonsense and the truth of a theory which would resolve to transcend the limitations of commonsensical evidence. Aimed at human liberation A Critical Sociology is designed to question the very same　routines and assumptions of everyday life informed by commonsense.

This book was born out of the need to ‘capture’ the experience and understanding of the regeneration management process that is neither UK centric nor centred exclusively on urban areas. Written by experts working in the USA, Holland, Greece, Jamaica, Turkey, Spain, Trinidad and the Czech Republic, this book seeks to locate the issue of regeneration in a context which will enable the reader to reflect upon practices which are ‘local’ but are shaped by international processes.

As well as proving an accessible review of the theoretical literature on globalisation and its impact upon managing regeneration initiatives, this book also illustrates these theoretical debates with specific examples which provide insight to both urban and rural developments. This book will be of great interest to students, researchers and practitioners engaged in regeneration management, providing a thematic exploration and examination of the ‘global’ regeneration experience.