In these days the term virtualization is almost everywhere, especially in relation with server virtualization. One of the main goals is to describe the part of virtualization which is today not so known although it could have the same meaning for companies as the server virtualization had a few years ago. It is a desktop virtualization and this work includes not just a wide description of this but also related technologies such as data storage virtualization, application virtualization and cloud computing. Another goal is to hold desktop virtualization and find its benefits by placing into the area of small and medium businesses. Thesis is not focused only on the positives of using this technology but also on overall aspects of its use including related risks. Entire part of this thesis is business plan of the company that currently offers virtualization as a complex service for small and medium enterprises. Essential is not just a complete description of the fast growing area, but also concept the practical filling by the plan, which is in the acceptable form for potential investor.

This thesis serves as an introduction to use of the NetBeans Platform for development of desktop applications. Its goal is to present the platform both on a compact example application and on a real-world scenario application. Secondary goal is to provide a summary of materials for further learning. The description of the particular pieces of the platform is interlaid with the step by step tutorial, which invites to further testing of the platform's features. Some principles of the platform are then presented in a source code from a real-world application. This application is a tool for authors and should provide an evidence of both academic and literary texts, notes and named entities (like characters, locations, terms etc.). The analysis of this tool and a description in a more detail is presented in the appendix. An organized summary of shortly commented links to other sources is there too. The main benefits of this thesis are: the demonstration of the NetBeans Platform on particular examples in context, and the summary of online materials for further reading.

As IT industries develop, upgrade and diversify, heterogeneous operating environments running a mix of new and legacy systems become increasingly important. Such environments are currently inadequate due to lack of compatibility with each other. This thesis investigates how agents can be utilised to facilitate such heterogeneous environments, aiding enterprise systems in building bridges between incompatible software and hardware systems. An autonomous agent has independent agency and decision-making astuteness. When placed in heterogeneous environments to interact with other such agents, the consequences of its action and its preferred choice of actions are greatly influenced by actions of other agents interacting in heterogeneous environments. The main objectives of this thesis include examining the roles of agents in heterogeneous operating environments, development of a novel multi agent base architecture and an associated framework for single and heterogeneous environment. The research work also studies the plausible application to test the developed proof of concept by developing application and using the framework that utilises Windows services in a totally incompatible Solaris based Sun Ray ultra thin client environment. The work includes a novel method of modeling agent based communication architecture suitable for correspondence between two inherently different operating systems - Solaris and Microsoft Windows. The circumstances in which coordination or coordination failure occurs between these systems are investigated. The proposed method of agent based communication that can potentially overcome the barriers formed by two completely different software and hardware architectural regimes. An analysis of printing services in MS Windows and Solaris environments, review the age long problem of lack of device drivers for commonly (and cheaply) available Ink Jet printers for Unix (and like) operating systems. A novel method is proposed that uses agents in heterogeneous environment to overcome this problem. A new architecture that utilises Windows based printing services on a Sun Ray ultra thin client is presented to test and evaluate the proof of concept. This thesis is motivated by the need to provide a low cost printing solution to Sun Ray users. Most Windows based desktop users currently have access to variety of low cost printing solutions. Printer vendors ship device drivers only for Windows or at most Macintosh, as other operating systems such as Solaris, MVS, z/OS are used for corporate solutions and low cost desktop printing have not been a major requirement in the past.

<p>Scientific Computing is the collection of tools, techniques, and theories required to solve on a computer, mathematical models of problems from science and engineering, and its main goal is to gain insight in such problems. Generally, it is difficult to understand or communicate information from complex or large datasets generated by Scientific Computing methods and techniques (computational simulations, complex experiments, observational instruments etc.). Therefore, support of Scientific Visualization is needed, to provide the techniques, algorithms, and software tools needed to extract and display appropriately important information from numerical data.</p><p>Usually, complex computational and visualization algorithms require large amounts of computational power. The computing power of a single desktop computer is insufficient for running such complex algorithms, and, traditionally, large parallel supercomputers or dedicated clusters were used for this job. However, very high initial investments and maintenance costs limit the availability of such systems. A more convenient solution, which is becoming more and more popular, is based on the use of nondedicated desktop PCs in a Desktop Grid Computing environment. Harnessing idle CPU cycles, storage space and other resources of networked computers to work together on a particularly computational intensive application does this. Increasing power and communication bandwidth of desktop computers provides for this solution.</p><p>In a desktop grid system, the execution of an application is orchestrated by a central scheduler node, which distributes the tasks amongst the worker nodes and awaits workers’ results. An application only finishes when all tasks have been completed. The attractiveness of exploiting desktop grids is further reinforced by the fact that costs are highly distributed: every volunteer supports her resources (hardware, power costs and internet connections) while the benefited entity provides management infrastructures, namely network bandwidth, servers and management services, receiving in exchange a massive and otherwise unaffordable computing power. The usefulness of desktop grid computing is not limited to major high throughput public computing projects. Many institutions, ranging from academics to enterprises, hold vast number of desktop machines and could benefit from exploiting the idle cycles of their local machines.</p><p>In the work presented in this thesis, the central idea has been to provide a desktop grid computing framework and to prove its viability by testing it in some Scientific Computing and Visualization experiments. We present here QADPZ, an open source system for desktop grid computing that have been developed to meet the above presented needs. QADPZ enables users from a local network or Internet to share their resources. It is a multi-platform, heterogeneous system, where different computing resources from inside an organization can be used. It can be used also for volunteer computing, where the communication infrastructure is the Internet. QADPZ supports the following native operating systems: Linux, Windows, MacOS and Unix variants. The reason behind natively supporting multiple operating systems, and not only one (Unix or Windows, as other systems do), is that often, in real life, this kind of limitation restricts very much the usability of desktop grid computing.</p><p>QADPZ provides a flexible object-oriented software framework that makes it easy for programmers to write various applications, and for researchers to address issues such as adaptive parallelism, fault-tolerance, and scalability. The framework supports also the execution of legacy applications, which for different reasons could not be rewritten, and that makes it suitable for other domains as business. It also supports low-level programming languages as C/C++ or high-level language applications, (e.g. Lisp, Python, and Java), and provides the necessary mechanisms to use such applications in a computation. Consequently, users with various backgrounds can benefit from using QADPZ. The flexible object-oriented structure and the modularity allow facile improvements and further extensions to other programming languages.</p><p>We have developed a general-purpose runtime and an API to support new kinds of high performance computing applications, and therefore to benefit from the advantages offered by desktop grid computing. This API directly supports the C/C++ programming language. We have shown how distributed computing extends beyond the master-worker paradigm (typical for such systems) and provided QADPZ with an extended API that supports in addition lightweight tasks and parallel computing (using the message passing paradigm - MPI). This extends the range of applications that can be used to already existing MPI based applications - e.g. parallel numerical solvers used in computational science, or parallel visualization algorithms.</p><p>Another restriction of existing systems, especially middleware based, is that each resource provider needs to install a runtime module with administrator privileges. This poses some issues regarding data integrity and accessibility on providers computers. The QADPZ system tries to overcome this by allowing the middleware module to run as a non-privileged user, even with restricted access, to the local system.</p><p>QADPZ provides also low-level optimizations, such as on-the-fly compression and encryption for communication. The user can choose from different algorithms, depending on the application, improving both the communication overhead imposed by large data transfers and keeping privacy of the data. The system goes further, by providing an experimental, adaptive compression algorithm, which can transparently choose different algorithms to improve the application. QADPZ support two different protocols (UDP and TCP/IP) in order to improve the efficiency of communication.</p><p>Free source code allows its flexible installations and modifications based on the particular needs of research projects and institutions. In addition to being a very powerful tool for computationally intensive research, the open sourceness makes QADPZ a flexible educational platform for numerous smallsize student projects in the areas of operating systems, distributed systems, mobile agents, parallel algorithms, etc. Open source software is a natural choice for modern research as well, because it encourages effectively integration, cooperation and boosting of new ideas.</p><p>This thesis proposes also an improved conceptual model (based on the master-worker paradigm), which makes contributions in several directions: pull vs. push work-units, pipelining of work-units, more work-units sent at a time, adaptive number of workers, adaptive time-out interval for work-units, and multithreading. We have also demonstrated that the use of desktop grids should not be limited to only master-worker applications, but it can be used for more fine-grained parallel Scientific Computing and Visualization applications, by performing some specific experiments. This thesis makes supplementary contributions: a hierarchical taxonomy of the main existing desktop grids, and an adaptive compression algorithm for remote visualization. QADPZ has also pioneered autonomic computing approach for desktop grids and presents specific self-management features: self-knowledge, self-configuration, selfoptimization and self-healing. It is worth to mention that to the present the QADPZ has over a thousand users who have download it (since July, 2001 when it has been uploaded to sourceforge.net), and many of them use it for their daily tasks (see the appendix). Many of the results have been published or are in course of publishing as it can be seen from the references.</p>

Scientific Computing is the collection of tools, techniques, and theories required to solve on a computer, mathematical models of problems from science and engineering, and its main goal is to gain insight in such problems. Generally, it is difficult to understand or communicate information from complex or large datasets generated by Scientific Computing methods and techniques (computational simulations, complex experiments, observational instruments etc.). Therefore, support of Scientific Visualization is needed, to provide the techniques, algorithms, and software tools needed to extract and display appropriately important information from numerical data. Usually, complex computational and visualization algorithms require large amounts of computational power. The computing power of a single desktop computer is insufficient for running such complex algorithms, and, traditionally, large parallel supercomputers or dedicated clusters were used for this job. However, very high initial investments and maintenance costs limit the availability of such systems. A more convenient solution, which is becoming more and more popular, is based on the use of nondedicated desktop PCs in a Desktop Grid Computing environment. Harnessing idle CPU cycles, storage space and other resources of networked computers to work together on a particularly computational intensive application does this. Increasing power and communication bandwidth of desktop computers provides for this solution. In a desktop grid system, the execution of an application is orchestrated by a central scheduler node, which distributes the tasks amongst the worker nodes and awaits workers’ results. An application only finishes when all tasks have been completed. The attractiveness of exploiting desktop grids is further reinforced by the fact that costs are highly distributed: every volunteer supports her resources (hardware, power costs and internet connections) while the benefited entity provides management infrastructures, namely network bandwidth, servers and management services, receiving in exchange a massive and otherwise unaffordable computing power. The usefulness of desktop grid computing is not limited to major high throughput public computing projects. Many institutions, ranging from academics to enterprises, hold vast number of desktop machines and could benefit from exploiting the idle cycles of their local machines. In the work presented in this thesis, the central idea has been to provide a desktop grid computing framework and to prove its viability by testing it in some Scientific Computing and Visualization experiments. We present here QADPZ, an open source system for desktop grid computing that have been developed to meet the above presented needs. QADPZ enables users from a local network or Internet to share their resources. It is a multi-platform, heterogeneous system, where different computing resources from inside an organization can be used. It can be used also for volunteer computing, where the communication infrastructure is the Internet. QADPZ supports the following native operating systems: Linux, Windows, MacOS and Unix variants. The reason behind natively supporting multiple operating systems, and not only one (Unix or Windows, as other systems do), is that often, in real life, this kind of limitation restricts very much the usability of desktop grid computing. QADPZ provides a flexible object-oriented software framework that makes it easy for programmers to write various applications, and for researchers to address issues such as adaptive parallelism, fault-tolerance, and scalability. The framework supports also the execution of legacy applications, which for different reasons could not be rewritten, and that makes it suitable for other domains as business. It also supports low-level programming languages as C/C++ or high-level language applications, (e.g. Lisp, Python, and Java), and provides the necessary mechanisms to use such applications in a computation. Consequently, users with various backgrounds can benefit from using QADPZ. The flexible object-oriented structure and the modularity allow facile improvements and further extensions to other programming languages. We have developed a general-purpose runtime and an API to support new kinds of high performance computing applications, and therefore to benefit from the advantages offered by desktop grid computing. This API directly supports the C/C++ programming language. We have shown how distributed computing extends beyond the master-worker paradigm (typical for such systems) and provided QADPZ with an extended API that supports in addition lightweight tasks and parallel computing (using the message passing paradigm - MPI). This extends the range of applications that can be used to already existing MPI based applications - e.g. parallel numerical solvers used in computational science, or parallel visualization algorithms. Another restriction of existing systems, especially middleware based, is that each resource provider needs to install a runtime module with administrator privileges. This poses some issues regarding data integrity and accessibility on providers computers. The QADPZ system tries to overcome this by allowing the middleware module to run as a non-privileged user, even with restricted access, to the local system. QADPZ provides also low-level optimizations, such as on-the-fly compression and encryption for communication. The user can choose from different algorithms, depending on the application, improving both the communication overhead imposed by large data transfers and keeping privacy of the data. The system goes further, by providing an experimental, adaptive compression algorithm, which can transparently choose different algorithms to improve the application. QADPZ support two different protocols (UDP and TCP/IP) in order to improve the efficiency of communication. Free source code allows its flexible installations and modifications based on the particular needs of research projects and institutions. In addition to being a very powerful tool for computationally intensive research, the open sourceness makes QADPZ a flexible educational platform for numerous smallsize student projects in the areas of operating systems, distributed systems, mobile agents, parallel algorithms, etc. Open source software is a natural choice for modern research as well, because it encourages effectively integration, cooperation and boosting of new ideas. This thesis proposes also an improved conceptual model (based on the master-worker paradigm), which makes contributions in several directions: pull vs. push work-units, pipelining of work-units, more work-units sent at a time, adaptive number of workers, adaptive time-out interval for work-units, and multithreading. We have also demonstrated that the use of desktop grids should not be limited to only master-worker applications, but it can be used for more fine-grained parallel Scientific Computing and Visualization applications, by performing some specific experiments. This thesis makes supplementary contributions: a hierarchical taxonomy of the main existing desktop grids, and an adaptive compression algorithm for remote visualization. QADPZ has also pioneered autonomic computing approach for desktop grids and presents specific self-management features: self-knowledge, self-configuration, selfoptimization and self-healing. It is worth to mention that to the present the QADPZ has over a thousand users who have download it (since July, 2001 when it has been uploaded to sourceforge.net), and many of them use it for their daily tasks (see the appendix). Many of the results have been published or are in course of publishing as it can be seen from the references.

The Millennials, today’s pupils and students, is the first generation to grow up with tools for interactive communication and media production. Many students choose to study music production in higher education establishments. Therefore music production is an emerging subject and important research topic. The aim of this thesis is to develop knowledge of music production and to identify key skills necessary for music producers and music production teachers. Three sub-studies were performed to investigate what characterizes music production, both in an educational context and as a professional activity. In the first study, a Desktop Music Production project in a municipal music school was investigated. Observations and interviews were used as data collection methods. The results show that teachers need to be multi skilled to teach musicproduction. In addition to standard teaching skills they need to have extensive knowledge of music technology and relevant contemporary knowledge about trends in youth culture and popular music. In the second study students' views on important learning outcomes in music production were investigated. Questionnaires and group interviews were used to collect data. The results show that music production is a topic that includes various types of content. Issues regarding music, technology, music industry, personal development and employability were of central importance to the students. In the third study eleven professionals were interviewed, all music production teachers or active music producers. The main result was that the skills required for both music producers and music production teachers are varied and extensive. Psychology and leadership, music, technology, ethics, law and copyright, entrepreneurship and cultural timing are particularly relevant to music production. Based on these results, a model for education in music production is presented. Music production also differs from traditional music education. In addition to traditional musical and pedagogic skills it requires technical competence from the teachers. Men dominate music production teaching, and the vast majority of professional music producers are also men. Technological developments are affecting young people's musical skills, and therefore it’s a challenge for music teachers to meet pupils and students who already have advanced knowledge of music production and are eager to learn more.

Desktop-based Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointers (WIMP) interfaces have changed very little in the last 30 years, and are still limited by a lack of powerful and expressive input devices and interactions. In order to make desktop interactions more expressive and controllable, expressive input mechanisms like pressure input must be made available to desktop users. One way to provide pressure input to these users is through a pressure-augmented computer mouse; however, before pressure-augmented mice can be developed, design information must be provided to mouse developers. The problem we address in this thesis is that there is a lack of ergonomics and performance information for the design of pressure-augmented mice. Our solution was to provide empirical performance and ergonomics information for pressure-augmented mice by performing five experiments. With the results of our experiments we were able to identify the optimal design parameters for pressure-augmented mice and provide a set of recommendations for future pressure-augmented mouse designs.

Desktop-based Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointers (WIMP) interfaces have changed very little in the last 30 years, and are still limited by a lack of powerful and expressive input devices and interactions. In order to make desktop interactions more expressive and controllable, expressive input mechanisms like pressure input must be made available to desktop users. One way to provide pressure input to these users is through a pressure-augmented computer mouse; however, before pressure-augmented mice can be developed, design information must be provided to mouse developers. The problem we address in this thesis is that there is a lack of ergonomics and performance information for the design of pressure-augmented mice. Our solution was to provide empirical performance and ergonomics information for pressure-augmented mice by performing five experiments. With the results of our experiments we were able to identify the optimal design parameters for pressure-augmented mice and provide a set of recommendations for future pressure-augmented mouse designs.

Diversity of consumers, timely needs of the times, combined with market information, production and selling out of products, enterprises can profit possible. Want in the fierce competition; we must attach importance to production and sales co-ordination and integration. This study aimed to clarify the "Toyota production and sales integrated management system," in close connection with production and sales, rapid response to changes in the meaning and operation of the structure and conditions of its formation. "Toyota production and sales integrated management system," the biggest feature is the production site with frequent sales information for the various stages of the production plan to do a different range of amendments, the final production and micro-adjustments to billboards, fast response to changes in demand. In the full sales pipeline, the distributor effective master customer information and establish long-term relationships with customers, thus the right to collect and prepare sales forecasts, and quickly back to the Toyota Motor Sales, such as Toyota's strong sales management an important support system behind the production factors. "Toyota production and sales integrated management systems," the transfer of applications across industries, from brand computer makers and electronics contract manufacturing service provider of supply chain production micro-tune the system for evidence. Through analysis and comparison of the two operational framework that, dismantling of production steps, multi-stage production scheduling amendments, the changes in the components remain the highest to the final assembly, so that the flexible "instant production of Just-In-Time" , can be applied in different industries. "Toyota production and sales integrated management systems," the production of micro-adjustment of the operational structure to clarify and resolve inter-industry transfer of instances, not only academic significance, other electronic products manufacturing industry for practical application, also has a reference value.

<p>Planning is indeed a highly regulated procedure at the operational level such as military related activities where the staff may benefit from documents such as guidelines that regulate the work process, responsibilities and results of such planning activities.</p><p>This thesis proposes a method for analyzing office documents that make up an operational order according to document ontology. With the semantic desktops aiming at combining semantic annotations and intelligent reasoning in desktop computers, the product of this project intends to add a plug-in to such environments such as IRIS semantic desktop, which accordingly enables such application to interpret documents whether the they  or change within the application.</p><p>The result of our work helps the end user to extract data using his/her favorite patterns such as goals, targets or even milestones that make up decisive points. This information eventually form semantic objects, which ultimately reside in the knowledgebase of the semantic desktop for further reasoning in the future referring of the application, whether automatically or upon the user's request.</p>