NP-hard optimization problems exhibit a rich set of possibilities, all the way from allowing approximability to any required degree, to essentially not allowing approximability at all. Despite this diversity, underlying the process of design of approximation algorithms are some common principles. We will explore these in the current chapter. An optimization problem is polynomial time solvable …
The last time Apple updated the Mac operating system—2009’s Snow Leopard release—the most noteworthy changes happened under the hood. That’s not the case with Lion, the next major version of Mac OS X. Apple has gradually pulled back the curtain on a pretty significant shift for the Mac OS, influenced in large part by Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS. Lion’s big changes naturall…
Economic competition is global, focused, and unrelenting; there is no such thing as a “safe” job. Whatever it was that formed the basis of your state’s economy 50, 25, or even 10 years ago is now at risk; and whatever it is that is coming next is hard to see or define, let alone prepare for. This came home to me in the late 1990s when the bloom of the dot com bubble was beginning to fade…
Information storage is a central pillar of information technology. A large quantity of digital information is being created every moment by individual and corporate consumers of IT. This information needs to be stored, protected, optimized, and managed. Not long ago, information storage was seen as only a bunch of disks or tapes attached to the back of the computer to store data. Even today, o…
The concept. Manufacturing industries worldwide are facing tough challenges as a consequence of the globalization of economy and the openness of the markets. Progress of the economic blocks such as the European Union, NAFTA, and MERCOSUR, and the global agreements such as GATT, in addition to their obvious economic and social consequences, provoke strong paradigm shifts in the way that the manu…
In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the European crisis and the recessions associated with these crises, one tends to think that the risk of deflation is greater than the risk of inflation as things stand at the end of 2012. This is a valid argument insofar as demand-pull factors and cost-push factors are associated with economic booms, when there is unutilized capacity in the econ…