Super-Streaming: A New Object Delivery Paradigm for Continuous Media Servers

A number of studies have focused on the design of continuous media, CM, (e.g., video and audio) servers to support the real-time delivery of CM objects. These systems have been deployed in local environments such as hotels, hospitals and cruise ships to support media-on-demand applications. They typically stream CM objects to the clients with the objective of minimizing the buffer space required at the client site. This objective can now be relaxed due to the availability of inexpensive storage devices at the client side. Therefore, we propose a Super-streaming paradigm that can utilize the client side resources in order to improve the utilization of the CM server. To support super-streaming, we propose a technique to enable the CM servers to deliver CM objects at a rate higher than their display bandwidth requirement. We also propose alternative admission control policies to downgrade super-streams in favor of regular streams when the resources are scarce. We demonstrate the superiority of our paradigm over streaming with both analytical and simulation models.Moreover, new distributed applications such as distant-learning, digital libraries, and home entertainment require the delivery of CM objects to geographically disbursed clients. For quality purposes, recently many studies proposed dedicated distributed architectures to support these types of applications. We extend our super-streaming paradigm to be applicable in such distributed architectures. We propose a sophisticated resource management policy to support super-streaming in the presence of multiple servers, network links and clients. Due to the complexity involved in modeling these architectures, we only evaluate the performance of super-streaming by a simulation study.     

数字多媒体处理器TMS320DM355启动分析

分析了TI公司的TMS320DM355的启动方式和NAND启动流程,使开发者能够根据实际需求改动DVSDK中的UBL与编译U-Boot,并排除开发过程中出现的错误。使开发者通过各种方式下载操作系统内核映像至DM355的Flsah,并建立NFS文件系统,从而建立一个完整的开发环境。     

The world’s most intense online gaming culture: Addiction and high-engagement prevalence rates among South Korean adolescents and young adults

Failure to establish agreed-upon criteria by which to measure and identify online video game addiction has resulted in a lack of reliable evidence of the actual percentage of individuals who are pathologically dependent. Building upon prior research, the present study sought to better determine the magnitude of pathological online video game play using a distinction between core and peripheral criteria for behavioral addiction. Preferences and perceptions towards online video games and addiction were also examined to better understand players’ habits. A questionnaire was administered to 1332 South Korean students across 11 high schools and 1 middle school in an area surrounding the capital of Seoul. Using a monothetic and a polythetic classification system, findings showed rates ranging between 1.7% and 25.5%, with a 2.7% addiction rate when distinguishing core from peripheral criteria. These results may suggest that online video game addiction rates in intense gaming cultures such as South Korea are not as high as otherwise believed. The findings will be of assistance to educators, policymakers, clinicians, and researchers in understanding the challenges in deriving meaningful video game addiction prevalence rates, and thus being able to better separate reality from conjecture with regard to the notion of pathological game play.     

Emotion understanding and performance during computer-supported collaboration

Individuals collaborating around and through computers benefit from receiving information that helps them understand one another, which is often termed awareness. This article explores what collaborators understand about each other’s emotions and the potential benefits for performance that might come from raising this understanding. In Experiment 1 co-located collaborators judged each other’s emotions after playing a game that required cooperative data collection and analysis. Their judgements were largely inaccurate and based on their own emotions, suggesting limited emotion understanding. Experiment 2 explored if this could be overcome by making collaborators aware of each other’s emotions. Co-located and remote collaborators played a cooperative puzzle-solving game under conditions of awareness or no awareness. Awareness was manipulated by making collaborators share their self-reported emotions during key moments of their game play. Both remote and co-located collaborators improved their performance after sharing their emotions. However, unlike co-located collaborators, remote collaborators also improved their understanding of each other’s emotions and experienced more positive affect. We conclude by discussing the content of collaborators’ emotion understanding and the probable mechanisms underlying the observed effects of being made aware of a partner’s emotions.     

Odyssey: a high‐performance clustered video server

Video servers are essential in video‐on‐demand and other multimedia applications. In this paper, we present our high‐performance clustered CBR video server, Odyssey. Odyssey is a server connecting PCs with switched Ethernet. It provides efficient support for normal play and interactive browsing functions such as fast‐forward and fast‐backward. We designed a set of algorithms for scheduling, synchronization and admission control, which results in a high utilization of resources. Odyssey is able to deliver a large number of video streams. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Negotiating Dialogue Games

Recently in the field of agent communication, many authors have adopted the view of interaction as a joint activity regulated by means of dialogue games. It is argued in particular that this approach should increase the flexibility of dialogues by allowing a variety of game compositions. In this research note, we present a framework suited to this feature. A preliminary attempt to capture the negotiation phase (which allows agents to agree upon the dialogue game currently regulating their conversation) is discussed.     

一种新的半像素快速搜索算法

提出了一种基于在整像素搜索结果的± 1像素邻域内 SAD函数随着与亚像素全局最小点距离的增加而单调增大的半像素两步快速搜索算法。本算法相继在水平和垂直两个共轭的方向上搜索半像素 SAD值的最小点 ,从而得到运动矢量的半像素分量。同时还采用了在每次计算 SAD值之前按需对块进行插值的方法。仿真结果表明本算法在保持图像质量和码流长度基本不变的同时使运算量下降到原来的一半以下。     

Analysis of Matrix-Convex Functions

The properties of matrix-convex functions, which may take values from an expanded numerical axis, are analyzed. Matrix convexity is specified by a pair of matrices, a final set of matrices, or an infinite family of matrices. The results obtained are used in the theory of differential games.     

公平竞争意识:了解英国文化的重要窗口

在使英语成为世界性语言的诸多因素当中，英国化扮演着重要的角色。在英国化众多的亮点中，自然有许多东西值得我们学习和领悟。由于现代体育竞技项目大多起源于英国，在这个过程中，公平竞争意识(体育精神)无疑起了关键的作用。作分析了体育精神的起源、发展和特征。指出，理解公平竞争意识至少可以使我们在以下几个方面有所收获1)加深对英国化的了解，增强英语学习的兴趣；2)有助于学生实用能力的培养；3)使我们真正认识奥运会的特殊内涵和意义。