INTRODUCTION Nosocomial infections are one of the greatest problems in public health. Several studies have highlighted the role played by the hospital environment as a possible source of transmission of nosocomial pathogens. METHODS A five-year monitoring of bacterial contamination on healthcare workers hands, surfaces most closely in contact with inpatient wards, operating theatres and "at r...

Oberon simultaneously refers to a modular, extensible operating system and an object-oriented programming language developed for its implementation. Although the original Oberon System had been conceived as the native operating system for a custom-built workstation, further implementations for several commercial platforms were developed later and are described here. All of these implementations...

Users are increasingly requesting distributed and remote monitoring and control capabilities in the SCADA system they have. They want to have a system that is easy to use and runs in a familiar environment. To allow this, some standard technology is needed. The answer is web browser and internet technology. This way existing communication media can be used efficiently and easily, and familiar u...

This chapter deals with the problems of evaluating operating information services, the objective of such evaluation being to determine how successful the service is in satisfying the needs of its users. The major emphasis of the chapter is the 'human aspects' of information services, machine aspects being dealt with in the chapter by Barraclough. The chapter first introduces some basic concepts...

Recently we have seen an explosive growth in the number of high performance, low cost workstations available on the market. An increase in the usage and popularHy of new applications like windowing systems and object oriented applications has resulted from this growth. These applications rely heavily on data sharing. To support these applications, the operating system must support efficient sha...

We present a runtime environment that partially reconfigures and executes hardware tasks on Xilinx Virtex. To that end, the FPGA’s reconfigurable surface is split into a varying number of variable-sized vertical task slots that can accommodate the hardware tasks. A bus-based communication infrastructure allows for task communication and I/O. We discuss the design of the runtime system and its p...

■ The user executed untested code. Because of time constraints, it’s not uncommon for developers to release untested code—code in which users can stumble across bugs. ■ The order in which statements were executed in actual use differed from that during testing. This order can determine whether software works or fails. ■ The user applied a combination of untested input values. The possible input...

Grid application frameworks have increasingly aligned themselves with the developments in Web services. Web services are currently the most popular infrastructure based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm. There are three core areas within the SOA framework: a set of capabilities that are remotely accessible, communications using messages, and metadata pertaining to the aforemention...

This paper presents our Linux/RTOS hybrid operating environment constructed upon Gandalf VMM. Gandalf can host multiple RTOSes along with Linux, and RTOSes and Linux execute within their own isolated protection domains; thus, they can be spatially and temporally protected from each other. We design Gandalf from scratch as a simple and efficient VMM in order to minimize overheads incurred by vir...

Markov reliability model of a system, operating in random environment is introduced and investigated. The model is described by multidimensional Markov process with block-wise in nitesimal matrix. Algorithms for calculation of time-dependent and steady state probabilities as well as Quality of Service (QoS) characteristics of the system based on this special form of in nitesimal matrix are give...