8/20/2018
Setting aside for a moment the art and science aspects of Architecture, with the entrepreneurial role and responsibility to its Clients, all Architect's encounter both risks and rewards which are measurable. From my eighty (80) or so design and construction dispute case assignments, as Expert Witness, Mediator and /or Arbitrator, it has been my experience that the chance of an Architect being drawn into such matters is highly probable once there is a Plaintiff Complaint.
Given the mass of a bus or motorcoach, the carnage a moving bus or coach can inflict on a pedestrian is not surprising. Yet readers may be surprised by the carnage such a vehicle can cause when it is not moving - or just beginning to move or come to a stop.
Trademarks are everywhere. They're embodied in logos and symbols (Nike's Swoosh), color schemes (John Deere's green and yellow), numbers (501 jeans), slogans ("Eat Fresh"), and even shapes (Method's product packaging). They're memorable. They distinguish products and services of one provider from those of another, ensuring that customers do not confuse their source. In fact, avoiding consumer confusion is trademark law's primary goal.
Modern Internet-scale distributed networks have hundreds of thousands of servers deployed in hundreds of locations and networks around the world. Canonical examples of such networks are content delivery networks (called CDNs) that we study in this paper. The operating expenses of large distributed networks are increasingly driven by the cost of supplying power to their servers. Typically, CDNs procure power through long-term contracts from co-location providers and pay on the basis of the power (KWs) provisioned for them, rather than on the basis of the energy (KWHs) actually consumed. We propose the use of batteries to reduce both the required power supply and the incurred power cost of a CDN.
In 2011, a 5-year old boy was severely injured at a public playground when he fell through a second floor opening around a fireman's pole in a playhouse. He fell more than seven feet and struck a bare concrete floor. We are thankful that he eventually recovered from his injuries. The person who designed and built the playground was accused of negligence. A lawsuit ensued, and eventually settled in favor of the boy.
In a major ruling that underscores judicial independence, federal judge Richard J. Leon has just unconditionally approved the merger between AT&T and Time Warner, rebuffing the US government's effort to stop the $85.4 billion deal.
Hazardous waste is a waste with properties that make it potentially dangerous or harmful to human health or the environment. The universe of hazardous wastes is large and diverse. Hazardous wastes can be liquids, solids, or contained gases. They can be discrete chemical compounds, mixtures of compounds, or simply have some property that makes them hazardous. In regulatory terms, a hazardous waste is a waste that appears on one of the four RCRA (Resource Conservation and Recovery Act) hazardous wastes lists (the F-list, K-list, P-list, or U-list) or that exhibits one of the four characteristics of a hazardous waste - ignitability, corrosivity, reactivity, or toxicity.
It has long been a requirement that any subcontractor or material supplier seeking to enforce a mechanic's lien must first file a 20-day preliminary notice. The requirement existed before the California legislature revised laws relating to mechanic's liens and stop notices in 2012, and similar requirements exist after 2012.
For each route in each direction, transit stops are almost always located on one side of an intersection, not both. Stops just before the intersection are referred to as 'near-side' stops. Those just after the intersection are referred to as 'far-side' stops.
Recent technological advances in the development of flashmemory based devices have consolidated their leadership position as the preferred storage media in the embedded systems market and opened new vistas for deployment in enterprise-scale storage systems. Unlike hard disks, flash devices are free from any mechanical moving parts, have no seek or rotational delays and consume lower power. However, the internal idiosyncrasies of flash technology make its performance highly dependent on workload characteristics. The poor performance of random writes has been a cause of major concern which needs to be addressed to better utilize the potential of flash in enterprise-scale environments. We examine one of the important causes of this poor performance: the design of the Flash Translation Layer (FTL) which performs the virtual-to-physical address translations and hides the erase-before-write characteristics of flash. We propose a complete paradigm shift in the design of the core FTL engine from the existing techniques with our Demand-based Flash Translation Layer (DFTL) which selectively caches page-level address mappings. We develop a flash simulation framework called FlashSim. Our experimental evaluation with realistic enterprise-scale workloads endorses the utility of DFTL in enterprise-scale storage systems by demonstrating: (i) improved performance, (ii) reduced garbage collection overhead and (iii) better overload behavior compared to state-of-the-art FTL schemes. For example, a predominantly random-write dominant I/O trace from an OLTP application running at a large financial institution shows a 78% improvement in average response time (due to a 3-fold reduction in operations of the garbage collector), compared to a state-of-the-art FTL scheme. Even for the well-known read-dominant TPC-H benchmark, for which DFTL introduces additional overheads, we improve system response time by 56%.
