Abstract: An electronic commerce system includes a broker that enables customers to purchase items from multiple different merchants. A customer anonymously interacts with the merchants to identify items to purchase, and the merchants provide virtual shopping carts including the item and tax information to the broker. The tax information describes tax rates for the item in multiple jurisdictions. The broker determines the jurisdiction applicable to the customer by, for example, determining a shipping address for the customer. The broker uses the tax information and jurisdiction to calculate the taxes to collect for the item. The broker determines the total cost for the transaction, and conducts an electronic commerce transaction for the item with the customer.

Abstract: A method, information processing system, and computer readable medium for annotating graphs to allow for subsequent quick loading and analysis of very large graphs is described. The present invention encompasses a way to order and annotate nodes of a graph into a data stream that allows for optimization of subsequent processing of nodes in later analysis. For example, a very large reference graph representing heap snapshots may be annotated to facilitate post-processing and visualization of the heap for memory leak analysis. In such an example, the present invention reduces the number of objects and references to be modeled in memory, while still capturing the essence of the non-modeled portions. In this example, the present invention may process reference graphs on the scale of one hundred million live objects per snapshot using a computer with one gigabyte of memory.

Abstract: An electronic commerce system includes a broker that enables customers to purchase items from multiple different merchants. A customer anonymously interacts with the merchants to identify items to purchase, and the merchants provide virtual shopping carts including the item and tax information to the broker. The tax information describes tax rates for the item in multiple jurisdictions. The broker determines the jurisdiction applicable to the customer by, for example, determining a shipping address for the customer. The broker uses the tax information and jurisdiction to calculate the taxes to collect for the item. The broker determines the total cost for the transaction, and conducts an electronic commerce transaction for the item with the customer.

Abstract: A system, method, and computer program for identifying evolving regions in a graph of interrelated nodes representing a computer system environment. The method includes generating a series of samples (302) of the environment. Each sample includes a plurality of interrelated nodes (502) and at least one edge (504) classified into a plurality of at least one of node type and edge type, respectively. A summary (900) of the plurality of at least one of node type (502) and edge type (504) is created for the series of samples (302). A summary instance (312) of the summary (900) is created for each sample. At least one summary instance (312) is compared to at least one subsequent summary instance (314) and at least one result (318) is stored in memory (106). A successive behavior is characterized for one or more of the at least one of the node type and the edge type.

Abstract: A system and method for increasing the speed and resource utilization of a computer system in which a personal computer uses a portable computer as an extra hard disk. While the portable computer is in SCSI target mode, the unused memory of the portable computer is converted into a disk cache for the hard disk of the portable computer. This enables the portable computer to perform as a very fast disk.

Abstract: A method for arbitrating display output on a display device of a computer system comprises comparing a candidate display area with each rendering display area in a rendering collection and each waiting display area in a waiting collection, and determining whether at least one dependency exists for the candidate display area based on the comparing step, wherein the candidate display area is placed in the waiting queue when at least one dependency exists. The method further includes placing the candidate display area in the rendering collection when the at least one dependency does not exist. The method of arbitration includes releasing the current rendering display area.

Abstract: A system and method for increasing utilization of a system bus and frame buffer throughput in a graphic display system. The frame buffer is changed from cache inhibited mode to cached mode in order to take advantage of the burst mode of system bus in which a plurality of values are transferred to the frame buffer following one address. Data coherency is maintained between the cache and the frame buffer by invalidating a cache-line before writing to the cache-line, and by explicitly flushing the cache-line after the cache-line is filled with data.

Abstract: A method for improving the execution speed of compare operations in graphic software functions running on a RISC processor. A branch instruction in a software function comparing the value of two variables is replaced with an inline compare instruction that encodes the result of the compare into a third variable using an arithmetic shift-left instruction. An inline choice instruction selects the value of one of the two variables using the value of the third variable as a mask. The inline compare and an inline choice instructions reduce processor stalls during execution.

Abstract: A method for increasing the speed of a Z-buffer process. The method operates on the observation that groups of points in a scan-line of a polygon are either all visible or all obscured by existing points in the frame buffer. The method processes visible points separately from obscured points. The method only calculates changes in point intensity for the groups of visible points. In addition, the termination of the two separate processes is controlled by placing sentinels at the edge of each scan-line of the polygon so that the comparison of the point's z-values also act as a check for process termination.

Abstract: A method and system for accelerating graphics images in a computer system comprises encoding a first value information into an address signal from a CPU within the computer system and then encoding a second value information into the data signal from the CPU within the computer system. By encoding the information in this manner the location of the graphics data is unimportant. Hence, an address space of the memory can be utilized as the accelerator. In one aspect of the present invention, a span of a particular scan-line can be encoded in the address signal and the row and color information of the scan-line can be encoded in the data signal. In another embodiment, the span of a particular scan-line can be encoded in the address signal and the row, color information and intensity value information can be encoded into the data signal. The method and system uses to advantage that the main memory of the computer system has a large area which can be configured as an addressable space when rendering graphic images.