Abstract: In aspect an application may be configured to issue a request to store an object, with the request including an object reference. A delegate may be configured to receive the request to store the object, determine a hosted storage service, from among multiple hosted storage services, and a corresponding access protocol based on the object reference, and store the object in the hosted storage service using the corresponding protocol.

Abstract: A solution to the problem of maintaining application integrity when device drivers fail. This solution employs a new mechanism, the shadow driver, which is an operating system (OS) kernel agent that monitors communication between the OS kernel and the device driver it “shadows.” When a device driver error occurs, the shadow driver acts in place of the failed device driver, intercepting and responding to calls from the OS kernel and the device driver during cleanup, unloading, reloading, and re-initialization of the failed device driver. Applications and the OS kernel are thus isolated from the failure. An initial embodiment was developed for use with the Linux™ OS and was tested with a dozen device drivers. Results demonstrate that shadow drivers successfully mask device driver failures from applications, impose minimal performance overhead, require no changes to existing applications and device drivers, and can be implemented with relatively little code.

Abstract: Applications and services are accessed over the Web without requiring any modification to the currently available code for such applications. Virtual machines (VMs) can each be associated with one or more pre-configured and pre-installed software applications and hosted by Web sites. A VM is accessed and run when a user of a client computing device selects a Web object for the VM in a browser program. A plug-in in the browser reads a configuration file for the selected VM from a server and requests a server-side controller daemon to launch the VM on the server. The plug-in then opens a remote desktop connection to the VM, which is displayed as an embedded window in the Web page on the browser program. The user can then interact with and use the VM and its provided application software and services from within the browser program.

Abstract: A solution to the problem of maintaining application integrity when device drivers fail. This solution employs a new mechanism, the shadow driver, which is an operating system (OS) kernel agent that monitors communication between the OS kernel and the device driver it “shadows.” When a device driver error occurs, the shadow driver acts in place of the failed device driver, intercepting and responding to calls from the OS kernel and the device driver during cleanup, unloading, reloading, and re-initialization of the failed device driver. Applications and the OS kernel are thus isolated from the failure. An initial embodiment was developed for use with the Linux™ OS and was tested with a dozen device drivers. Results demonstrate that shadow drivers successfully mask device driver failures from applications, impose minimal performance overhead, require no changes to existing applications and device drivers, and can be implemented with relatively little code.

Abstract: A predictive tuning system enables a user to easily and efficiently find desired digital content among a plurality of content streams. Using a data collector, analyzer, and distributed tuning service, users may specify one or more particular items of interest, and the system, through the use of predictive algorithms, determines a subset of the plurality of content streams that should be monitored in order to optimize along one or more dimensions, such as the length of time that the user must wait in order to receive their desired digital content. Various strategies can be employed to find the desired content in the data streams, and a combination of strategies can provide the most efficient approach to achieving the desired content. Once found, a desired content can be accessed contemporaneously, stored for later access, or can be input to another application.

Abstract: A system and method for reducing access latency to stable storage are described. A technique referred to as fault trickling is used to improve access latency to stable storage such as flash memory. In particular, data requests from a central processing unit are preferentially satisfied by a memory management unit providing access to a main memory. When the requested data does not reside in the main memory, however, the memory management unit satisfies the request by providing direct fine-grain access to the flash memory. In addition, concurrently with satisfying the data request directly from the flash memory, a block transfer is initiated from the flash memory to the main memory. Once the block transfer is completed, a memory map, such as an address translation table, is updated to indicate that the data now resides in the more convenient source of data--the main memory. Accordingly, subsequent data requests, for that or proximately located data, can be satisfied by accessing the main memory.

Abstract: A method for managing the power consumed by a disk drive in a portable laptop computer which includes spinning the disk up during period when the computer apparatus is in an active or idle mode, creating a threshold to determine when to spin down the disk as a function of a period of disk inactivity, spinning the disk down when the threshold is exceeded in order to reduce the power consumption of the disk, automatically increasing the threshold when an undesirable spin up of the disk has occurred and automatically decreasing the threshold when an acceptable spin up of the disk occurs. By virtue of this method, the threshold for disk inactivity is continually monitored and adjusted to maintain a balance between energy consumption and undesirable disk spin down.