With the invention of the steamship and the opening of the Suez Canal, the time was reduced to a month or two. Air mail reduced the time further to a week or two, and eventually to a few days (“when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight”). The deployment of commercial email systems introduced us to wait times of only a few minutes (depending on how often you polled your server…
The goal of having computers automatically solve problems is central to artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the broad area encompassed by what Turing called “machine intelligence” (Turing, 1948). Machine learning pioneer Arthur Samuel, in his 1983 talk entitled “AI: Where It Has Been and Where It Is Going” (Samuel, 1983), stated that the main goal of the fields of machine l…
Opinions about Bitcoin are highly polarized between enthusiasts and skeptics. The au- thor believes that the point of view of the skeptics is easier to grasp for someone not familiar with Bitcoin’s technology. The objective of this book is to present the technology and arguments from both sides of the divide so that readers can form an informed opin- ion of their own. What drives the passion …
Xamarin has built three core products for developing iOS and Android applications in C#: Xamarin Studio, Xamarin.iOS, and Xamarin.Android. Xamarin gives you direct access to the native APIs on each platform and the flexibility to share C# code between platforms. Using Xamarin and C#, you get better productivity when compared to Java or Objective- C, and still retain great performance compared t…
In today's world of desktop applications, there is a great amount of incentive in being able to develop applications that can run in more than one environment. Currently, there are a handful of options available for cross platform frameworks to develop desktop applications in Python; wxPython is one such cross platform GUI toolkit for the Python programming language. It allows Python programmer…
Accounting knowledge is a core business skill that both complements and enhances your other talents. Individuals promoted to management or supervisory roles from either line or staff jobs find that many of their new responsibilities involve knowing something about accounting. Congratulations on your promotion! You’ve come to the right place to start developing those accounting skills. If you …
Accounting knowledge is a core business skill that both complements and enhances your other talents. Individuals promoted to management or supervisory roles from either line or staff jobs find that many of their new responsibilities involve knowing something about accounting. Congratulations on your promotion! You’ve come to the right place to start developing those accounting skills. If you …
OpenSSL is a popular and effective open source version of SSL/TLS, the most widely used protocol for secure network communications. The only guide available on the subject, Network Security with OpenSSLdetails the challenges in securing network communications, and shows you how to use OpenSSL tools to best meet those challenges. Focused on the practical, this book provides only the information …
I’m not a historian. Nor am I a pirate. I’m an economist with a long-standing interest in privately created law and order who happened to wonder one day how pirates cooperated since they had no government. Like many others, my interest in pirates goes back many years. I went to Disney World when I was eight; Pirates of the Caribbean was my favorite ride. My parents bought me a “silver” …
The subject of financial markets is fascinating to many people: to those who care about money and investments, to those who care about the well-being of modern society, to those who like gambling, to those who like applications of mathematics, and so on. We, the authors of this book, care about many of these things (no, not the gambling), but what we care about most is teaching. The main reason…
This text is part of the subject matter of the course on Basics of Traffic Engineering (H111) taught to the students in the Department of Civil Engineering at the Katholieke Universiteit of Leuven (Belgium). The text is intended to introduce the student to some elementary principles of transport economics and may serve as a stepping stone to more advanced courses. This is a preliminary version …
In a series of recent writings we have sought to re-open a debate over the economics of socialism. We have argued that the collapse of the Soviet system does not necessitate the conclusion that all forms of socialist economy are doomed to inefficiency. Updating and extending a line of reasoning found in Lange (1967) and Johansen (1977),1 we have claimed that modern information technology permit…
Modern web applications represent the new way to write software. Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia are some well-known examples of such applications. They run on servers, and users can access them with a browser via either desktop or mobile devices. We refer to these as “modern” applications because they combine a rich user interface with real-time interaction and the capability to connect w…
If I wanted my server to accept many concurrent connections, the common solution was to use threads, and soon I had created my fi rst multi-threaded TCP server. This server accessed a shared data structure, which needed to synchronize the access to all the client threads that had been spawned. Getting the synchronization fi ne-grained (to maximize resources and time) and right (to avoid deadloc…
One of the basic building blocks for managing a successful treasury department is the establishment of a comprehensive set of treasury policies. Such policies define the principal financial risks a company is facing and how these risks will be managed by the treasury department. Chapter 1 covers the process of identifying and measuring these risks. What are the typical treasury-related financia…
One of the basic building blocks for managing a successful treasury department is the establishment of a comprehensive set of treasury policies. Such policies define the principal financial risks a company is facing and how these risks will be managed by the treasury department. Chapter 1 covers the process of identifying and measuring these risks. What are the typical treasury-related financia…