Abstract: A card retention mechanism securely holds a card within a slot on a circuit board. The retention mechanism may include a carrier and a retainer. The carrier mounts to a chassis of the computer system adjacent to the card slot. The retainer may be pivotally mounted to the carrier. When the retainer is in a closed position, at least one surface of the retainer engages an endplate of the card, and the retainer engages the carrier. The engagement of the retainer and the carrier inhibits rotation of the retainer from the closed position to an open position. When the retainer is in the closed position, the retainer securely holds the card to the chassis of the computer system.

Abstract: An image compression system includes a vectorizer and a hierarchical vector quantization table that outputs embedded code. The vectorizer converts an image into image vectors representing respective blocks of image pixels. The table provides computation-free transformation and compression of the image vectors. Table design can be divided into codebook design and fill-in procedures for each stage. Codebook design for the preliminary stages uses a splitting generalized Lloyd algorithm (LBG/GLA) using a perceptually weighted distortion measure. Codebook design for the final stage uses a greedily-grown and then entropy-pruned tree-structure variation of GLA with an entropy-constrained distortion measure. Table fill-in for all stages uses an unweighted proximity measure for assigning inputs to codebook vectors. Transformations and compression are fast because they are computation free. The hierarchical, multi-stage, character of the table allow it to operate with low memory requirements.

Abstract: A computer program for automatically generating queries to a database management system (DBMS) is disclosed. The computer program receives a high level specification of the data sought to be retrieved from an application program. The high level specification includes the columns from which data is sought, and any constraints on the data to be retrieved from those columns such as filter constraints. The computer program also receives a context for the columns to be queried, so that it can be determined which tables of the DBMS the columns are associated with. The computer program further receives a specification of the schema of the DBMS, with the schema specifying the relationship between the various data storage entities of the DBMS.