Although one is unlikely to ever want to brute-force an Android lock pattern, many do wonder about the relative strength of the lock pattern versus a multi-digit personal identification number (PIN). It becomes obvious pretty quickly that there are many more lock patterns than the 10,000 possible four-digit PINs. Figure 1 Android lock pattern screen But, how many lock patterns are there? The of...

The guardrail is an indispensable part of ballasted track structures on bridges. In order to reveal its influence the track–bridge interaction continuous welded rail (CWR), longitudinal resistance model fastener and influential factors are established through tests. By taking a girder bridge (CGB) for railways as example, stock rail-guardrail-sleeper-bridge-pier integrated simulation developed....

Previous studies have paid little attention to the employees' ability to exit a job-lock situation and factors that determine this ability. It remains unclear why some employees who experience job lock are able to exit this state while others remain in job lock. We use longitudinal data to identify employees who have fallen in the state of job lock and their subsequent behavior-exiting or remai...

Atomic operations are a key primitive in parallel computing systems. The standard implementation mechanism for atomic operations uses mutual exclusion locks. In an object-based programming system the natural granularity is to give each object its own lock. Each operation can then make its execution atomic by acquiring and releasing the lock for the object that it accesses. But this ne lock gran...

Traditionally digital lock-in amplifiers sample the input signal at a rate much higher than the lock-in reference frequency and perform the lock-in algorithm with high-speed processors. We present a small and simple digital lock-in amplifier that uses a 20 bit current integrating analogue-to-digital converter interfaced to a microcontroller. The sample rate is set to twice the reference frequen...

Storing, querying, and updating XML documents in multi-user environments requires data processing guarded by a transactional context to assure the well-known ACID properties, particularly with regard to isolate concurrent transactions. In this paper, we introduce the taDOM tree, an extended data model which considers organization of both attribute nodes and node values in a new way and allows f...

vintage, technology lock-in, institutional lock-in, clean development mechanisms.

Lock preemption is a common problem with twophase locking. While a transaction is still active, its locks may be preempted to avoid a deadlock or to satisfy the lock request of a higher-priority transaction. In general, the victim of preemption is aborted. This paper suggests that the victim could be continued and its work up to preemption could be saved if the preempted lock is restored on its...

Mutual exclusion primitives based on user-level atomic instructions (often called spin locks) have proven to be much more eecient than operating-system semaphores in situations where the contention on the semaphore is low. However, many of these spin lock schemes do not permit registration of ownership to be carried out atomically with acquisition, potentially leaving the ownership undetermined...