text:
Sheila Vogel-Coupe, 85, in a scene from Extraordinary Lives: My Granny the Escort. Rory Mulvey
85-year-old escort pulls in $450 an hour
by scronin
4th Aug 2014 6:00 AM | Updated: 6:36 AM
MEET Sheila Vogel-Coupe, the London grandmother with an unusual pastime.
The 85-year-old works as an escort and only got into the profession four years ago at the age of 81.
She pulls in up to $450 AUD an hour for her work and entertains up to 10 clients a week who are as young as 20.
"It's something I wanted to do," Sheila told APN.
"It keeps me happy, keeps me young. I have lovely experiences with these gentlemen."
The grandmother is well-travelled and enjoyed two happy marriages, both of which ended when her husbands passed away from illness.
"I've never known such a thing as divorce, and sexually I had everything I wanted with these two men," Sheila said.
"It wasn't until the last one died that I realised there was something I missed, so I got out and got it.
"I was lonely and I wanted to keep my freedom."
The straight-talking senior features in the new TV documentary Extraordinary Lives: My Granny the Escort airing tonight on Channel 9.
The doco follows three women who have turned to the sex industry for work in their later years.
Sheila is by far the oldest of the three. Fellow escorts Beverly and Sophie are 64 and 57 respectively.
And she's certainly not shy about being an escort, or bothered by the widespread social taboos associated with it.
"I am very careful. I won't see just anybody," she said.
"I am very, very choosy of whom I will see. I won't just see anybody because I don't do it just for the money. Yes the money's very useful, but I do it for satisfaction for myself and more importantly I like to make my men happy."
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In her younger years Sheila enjoyed a career as a successful businesswoman, running a nanny employment agency which honored the discretion of its high-profile clients. The only one she will name is King Hussein of Jordan.
But Sheila's work as an escort isn't without its problems. The majority of her family has disowned her.
"Two of my daughters turned against me completely," she said.
"They didn't want to know about it. I have a lovely brother and he didn't want to know about it either.
"They were all very judgemental. I have one daughter who is 62, Josie, and a lovely grandson of 26 and they say 'Mum we'll back you up as much as we possibly can, go ahead we love you'."
She hopes to inspire other seniors to embrace sexuality in their later years.
"I'm getting out the message to older women that it's very nice that they're wanted and they can go under the covers," she said.
"Sometimes I think I'm too honest, but I've always been that way (laughs)."
Extraordinary Lives: My Granny the Escort airs tonight at 9.30pm on Channel 9/WIN.
Gillard media reforms have hurt local TV: study
Aussie actress makes directorial debut with doco The Polygon
Aussie biologist goes bush with Africa's baboons
editors picks my granny the escort


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Microsoft has today released the second Windows 10 Mobile Redstone Insider Preview Build 14283 to Windows Insiders in the Fast ring. Currently, this includes the Lumia 950, 950 XL, 650, 550, Xiaomi Mi4, and ALCATEL ONETOUCH Fierce XL. Microsoft has initially made new mobile builds available only to devices that shipped with Windows 10 Mobile. Once they start releasing Windows 10 Mobile to other devices updates will be available to other phones as well. If you are a Windows Insider on a device not mentioned above, you can stay in the Fast ring and sit tight until we expand to other devices or go back to Build 10586 and switch to the Release Preview ring to continue helping us test Cumulative Updates.
We know how important it is to stay informed when someone is trying to reach you, whether that's through notifications, Live tiles on your Start screen, or directly within your communications applications. To help with this, we've added missed call and voicemail waiting indicators to the tabs inside the Phone app. Once you navigate to a tab with a missed call or voicemail – the indicator goes away. We've got another change coming that will keep the indicator in place until you navigate away from the tab. There is also a bug where you might not see the indicator clear right away – a fix is coming soon for this as well. Let us know what you think!
Yesterday, we released an update to the Outlook Mail & Calendar apps that introduces some new features and improvements. In Outlook Mail, you can turn off the message preview text in the message list (Settings > Reading > Conversation and turning "Show preview text" off). You can also quickly get rid of junk email in your inbox by pressing down on a message to bring up the context menu and choosing 'Move to Junk'. In Outlook Calendar, you can now let others know "I'll be late" directly from meeting notifications.
When you open Insider Hub on this build, you will see a new welcome dialog for Feedback Hub. Coming in the next mobile and PC build – we are bringing together the Insider Hub and Windows Feedback apps into a single app called the Feedback Hub. The Feedback Hub carries over all of the best things from the previous two apps plus some new things Insiders will enjoy. For example, in addition to upvoting feedback, you will be able to also leave comments on feedback. We have also redesigned the homepage in Feedback Hub to bring together announcements and quests. Stay tuned as we'll have more to say about the Feedback Hub with the next builds for mobile and PC when the app is ready for Insiders to use.
•We have addressed an issue where the background behind the All apps list would not have an overlay (causing it to appear too bright or too dark, depending on your background) if you went back to All apps list after launching an app.
•We fixed an issue causing the title of a song in volume control to flicker a few times when you pressed play or changed tracks after a pause.
•We fixed an issue some users were experiencing with Build 14267 where your device could hang while typing and reboot.
•We made some more improvements to the Live tile refresh logic. First, if there are pending notifications for several Live tiles, we will now update them in one quick sweep across the Start screen rather than one at a time. Second, if a Live tile has both badge and content updates, they will now appear at the same time. Finally, apps will now launch faster from the Start screen if there are incoming Live tile updates at the same time.
•We fixed an issue where Live tiles for certain apps (such as the Weather app) would sometimes unexpectedly be cleared of active notifications.
•We fixed an issue in which the Start screen background would appear to stutter behind the tiles when scrolling up and down the Start screen on some devices such as the Lumia 950.
•We fixed an issue where the keyboard would sometimes pop up when swiping over to the All apps list.
•We fixed an issue where icons for certain apps would appear too tiny on Live folders on the Start screen if your phone was set to 350% DPI.
•We fixed an issue where "More notifications" message in Action Center was not properly formatted.
•We fixed an issue where for certain languages, pressing "@" button could result the contents of the clipboard being pasted.
•We fixed an issue where notifications using custom sounds would be silent if the underlying audio file had been deleted. Now, if that file is not present, it will play the default notification sound.
•Connected to wireless displays should now work by going to Action Center and expanding Quick actions and choosing "Connect".


text:
Le lac de Kastráki, en , est un lac de barrage du district régional d'Étolie-Acarnanie en Grèce-Occidentale.

Il est situé près des villages de  et de , sur le lit du  fleuve Achéloos, dans la zone où il rejoint l'affluent, la rivière Ínachos. La surface du lac qui a été créé est de  et contient  d'eau. Les eaux ont recouvert la quasi-totalité de la zone des villages de  et de Bambalió, presque tous les habitants ont été contraints de partir, mais un petit nombre d'entre eux se sont réinstallés dans les zones riveraines du lac. Le  est haut de , long de  et épais de  à sa base<!- à voir-->. Le lac a été créé également par un second barrage. Une centrale hydroélectrique a été créée.

Notes et références

Voir aussi

Kastráki
Géographie de la Grèce-Occidentale

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Category: Cuban Civil Society Advisory Group
First Report of the Advisory Group / Cuban Civil Society Advisory Group
A brief summary of topics that describe the situation of Cuba in late 2013 could be summed up in two words: reform and repression.
The reforms have been directed mostly in the right direction, but in a superficial way and excessively slowly. In addition to trying to alleviate an economic situation caused by years of volunteerism and contempt for the most basic economic laws, the reforms try to formalize the assignment of minimum space to entrepreneurs who were already earning from the illegal activities, perhaps so that they don't feel incentives to leave the country or join the opposition.
The repression has been characterized by increased brief and arbitrary arrests and systematic maintenance of the acts of repudiation in which a portion of the population is driven by pressures and incentives to attack and insult to other citizens who peacefully express their disagreement with government policy. This undoubtedly constitutes incitement to commit acts that qualify as hate crimes. One of the objectives of repression is to isolate and terrorize malcontents who have not yet dared to cross the fuzzy line between loyalty and opposition.
A Reform to Delay "The Change" and Encourage Entrepreneurs
The list of the substantive reforms implemented by President Raul Castro since he formally took over the country in early 2008 is well-known:
Access to cell phone, permission to stay in hotels, buying and selling of cars and houses, expanding the list of jobs allowed to the self-employed, expanding the leasing of land under the concept of usufruct, the abolition of the exit permit and the concept of Final Exit, opening the Nauta network for connecting to the Internet, the so-called non-agricultural cooperatives, the ability to hire labor, the tacit acceptance of professionalism in sports, and other measures of greater or lesser importance. All of this could raise a wave of optimism to make people believe that the changes could ultimately anticipate The Change.
The limit that hampers this platform of changes is that it doesn't touch the essentials. By not explicitly accepting private ownership of the means of production, nor merchant activity in the broadest sense, it impedes the emergence of small and medium businesses that would generate the appearance of a middle class country. It lacks a political commitment to make it clear that prosperity will not be criminalized. The decision not to allow the concentration of ownership, clearly raised in the Guidelines of the 6th Congress of the Cuban Communist Party, leaves a very narrow framework and becomes a straightjacket for the development of the nation to emerge from the exhausted paths of socialism.
The country's economy remains a stronghold of State decisions, especially foreign trade, industry and banking. The debts between companies, inflated payrolls, lack of productivity, lack of diversity, the absence of initiative, are still hallmarks of what is known bureaucratically as the "State sector."
Moreover, the dual currency, the lack of a living wage, excessive taxation, the unaffordable prices of staples, and widespread corruption create an atmosphere of mistrust and insecurity that drives away potential foreign investors.
As long as there is no sound legal basis that enshrines the right to property and provides guarantees to domestic entrepreneurs, the reforms will seen be with suspicion and mistrust, as mere instruments to gain time and to keep the ruling elite in power. However, these reforms have no significant effect on the life choices of the population. The fact that around 400,000 Cubans are engaged in self-employment and no longer depend on the State, opens sociological perspectives that were unthinkable just a decade ago. continue reading
In this dynamic of reform and repression, self-employment is seen from the more radical sectors of officialdom as a necessary evil, far from the utopian aspiration of the "New Man"; a noxious weed that the 1968 Revolutionary Offensive of 1968 tried to eradicate and that now resurges as a new class to emphasize the inevitable inequalities. Paradoxically, from the most radical opposition sectors, the self-employed are often described as "complicit with the dictatorship," people who neither protest nor collaborate with any opposition activities, in order to keep their businesses afloat. Indeed, with their lights and shadows, the self-employed are the most dynamic sign of this time. Their existence and growth belies all the political discourse of half a century.
In mid-2013 , as part of these reforms, the Cuban government announced the opening of 118 Internet access points throughout the country. Under the name of Nauta, the new service includes email and browsing at prices ranging between 1.50 Cuban Convertible Pesos (CUC) and 4.50 CUC per hour of connection time. The measure, insufficient but welcome , enabled more than 100,000 Cubans to become users of this service in just two months. However, such flexibility does not live up to expectations for the fiber optic cable between Cuba and Venezuela. The majority consulted on this issue said they had hoped to allowed Internet access, without ideological considerations and priced in Cuban pesos (CUP), from home.
Still, one can speak of an increase in new connectivity alternatives promoted by the development of technology rather than by government permissiveness. The emergence of wireless file sharing; the consecration of USB flash memory as a mechanism for transferring information; the so-called "combos" or "packages" of videos circulating in the self-employment market; and the illegal satellite dishes to pick up the television signals from nearby countries, among others, are some of the parallel paths used by the Cuban population to access news, documentaries, digital books and information taken from websites.
The official media have opened some spaces for criticism and debate in the last five years. Among these are the letters to the editor pages of the newspaper Granma. Analysis segments have also appeared on national television news programs, pointing to an intention to approach the reality but without mentioning either the lack of legitimacy of the rulers or the infeasibility of the system. Consequently, there remains a strict Party monopoly on the mass media. There have been no legal advanced with regards in allowing the existence of a press not associated with the Communist Party. However, in the last five years, there has been a great increase in the number of websites, newsletters, periodicals and blogs created without official permission and from the critical sector.
Repression as a Means of Control of Citizens Without Rights
The main unresolved issue of the so-called Raulista reforms is in the field of political and social rights. Freedom of expression and association are the most violated, but the effects on freedom of religion also persist and, despite modest advances, signs remain of discrimination with regards to race, gender and sexual preferences.
Members of the Ladies in White, members of the Patriotic Union of Cuba, the activists of the Citizen Demand For Another Cuba – demanding that the government ratify the United Nations covenants on rights – and numerous independent journalists and librarians, have all been victims of police harassment. There have been verbal aggression, threats, beatings and abuse of all kinds. According to data documented by the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, since January of this year to the date of this report, arbitrary arrests are hovering around the 4,000, data to which must be added to the 12,800 cases reported since 2010, the year the release of political prisoners from the 2003 Black Spring began.
The spiritual life of the Cuban people, rich in nuances and traditions, was terribly damaged by decades of official imposition of atheism. Only after 1991 were there signs of some tolerance, but rigid control exercised from the Office of Attention to Religious Affairs of the Cuban Communist Party was still maintained. This entity, despite being legitimized as a partisan branch, exercises governmental functions over religious hierarchies or fraternal associations, regulates permits for repairing churches, the import of goods, the licensing of bank accounts and other administrative functions, whose main purpose is to put political conditions on the development of spiritual life.
The issue of racial discrimination in Cuba cannot be reduced to a simple comparison with the times before the Revolution. In conflict with partisan agreements and ministerial resolutions, the Cuban prison population remains predominantly black and the same can be said with regards to people with less income. Prisoners are also those who are less likely to have a presence in academic, scientific, diplomatic and political environments. In the media, in commercial advertising (rare, but it does exist) the presence of racial diversity does not match, or even come close, to the mixture that defines us.
With regard to discrimination based on gender or sexual preference, it should be noted that the role of masculinity remains predominant, with a discourse in which virility is expressed as a virtue. There is only one authorized women's organization that functions in the classic way of being a mechanism to impose on women whatever is convenient for the State according to the circumstances, whether with regards to work or breastfeeding. Only in recent years, timidly and late, have they been promoting acceptance of diversity of sexual preferences, but it is recognized that these proposals come not from within the LGBT community, government institutions dictate what should be done and how far it should go.
The national educational system, taken over by ideology, turns the most innocent elementary school reading class into political indoctrination that parents cannot prevent. The motto that "the universities are for revolutionaries" is not a simple slogan of a student organization, but official policy. Even today there are cases of university students expelled with no recourse for political reasons and many more who are forced to wear a mask of simulation to finish their studies.
Citizen Responses to Reform and Repression
In all this time, neither alternative civil society nor political opposition groups have managed to articulate an effective response against the deficiencies of the reforms or the excesses of repression. The Party-Government that rules the destiny of the country, or at least tries to lead it, had a platform no longer based on ideology but rather a single chorus, repeated endlessly: Order, Discipline, Demand. In the midst of a panorama of deterioration and loss of ethical and moral principals, the delayed struggle to rescue these values is now an indissoluble part of the government slogans. This battle is the result of a hijacking of the discourse of the opposition, and the same can be said for the migratory reform and most of the measures taken by the government, applied, that is, in a superficial media-focused way, without the depth proposed by the opposition.
The challenge now for civil society and the peaceful opposition is not to deny the existence of these reforms, but to take advantage of them in creative ways. It is not about uncritically applauding them, but exposing their inadequacies and unmasking their traps, which are many. Only peaceful citizen resistance can confront the repression: the timely and accurate denunciation of every event in solidarity with those who can make sure your message is heard by others.
There is great diversity among the projects undertaken Cuban civil society and a slight but growing tendency to find common ground, although in principle there can be only minimal consensus. Among these the most important are the need for respect for all the issues listed in the Charter of Human Rights, the call for democracy, full respect for the plurality of opinions, and renunciation of violence.
This first report, which doesn't pretend to cover everything, is a modest attempt to understand problems from a shared perspective, and is an invitation to debate and find solutions.
Author Misc AuthorsPosted on October 26, 2013 October 26, 2013 Categories Cuban Civil Society Advisory Group

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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text:
The Royal Collection is one of the largest and most important art collections in the world, and one of the last great European royal collections to remain intact. Comprising almost all aspects of the fine and decorative arts and running to more than a million objects, the Collection is a unique and valuable record of the personal tastes of kings and queens over the past 500 years.
Following the execution of Charles I in 1649, the greater part of the King's magnificent possessions was sold by order of Oliver Cromwell, and the Royal Collection has largely been formed since the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660.
The most important additions to the Royal Collection were made by Frederick, Prince of Wales; George III; George IV; Queen Victoria and Prince Albert; and Queen Mary, consort of King George V.
The Royal Collection is held in trust by The Queen as Sovereign for her successors and the nation. It is not owned by her as a private individual.
Source: The Royal Collection


text:
order: 0
title:
  zh-CN: 基本
  en-US: Basic
---

## zh-CN

最简单的用法。

## en-US

The simplest usage.

```` html
<template>
  <atu-tooltip title="prompt text">
    <span>Tooltip will show when mouse enter.</span>
  </atu-tooltip>
</template>

<script>
import AtuTooltip from '@/tooltip'

export default {
  components: {
    AtuTooltip
  }
}
</script>
````

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Chennai Open: Somdev crashes out
The 18-year-old wild card entrant, Andrey Rublev, subdued Somdev Devvarman 6-3, 3-6, 6-3 and set up a date with top seed Stanislas Wawrinka.
Abhishek Mukherjee
Chennai 05 January, 2016 20:16 IST
Somdev Devvarman in action at the Chennai Open on Tuesday. - M. Prabhu
Andrey Rublev received a wildcard for the Chennai Open tournament. - M. Prabhu
Despite generous encouragement from the crowd and a brief glimpse of revival, Somdev Devvarman came up short against his more attacking and risk-taking opponent, Andrey Rublev.
Gesticulating animatedly at his own mistakes and repeatedly attempting winners down the line, Rublev looked hungry to get the win, with an effort to hit serves and winners as hard as he could.
Somdev kept himself in the hunt till the end, but his stroke-making looked weaker. In the second set, he benefitted from playing a stable game as Rublev frustratingly suffered a break to lose the set. However, in the end the Russian subdued Somdev for a 6-3, 3-6, 6-3 win.
> Scorecentre
Rublev, the 18-year old who received a wildcard for this tournament, looked scratchy in the beginning as the more composed Somdev broke him in the very first game of the match.
At the time, Somdev looked at ease facing Rublev's aggressive shots. However, later it was evident Roblev was showing an urgency to win points: a few drop shots were poorly executed, but a couple of others helped him steal points.
Somdev later acknowledged the spark from the teenager. "He's one of the bright stars of the future."
Rublev shone through in the latter half of the first set; his sharpness lifted as his forehand and backhand winners sizzled down the lines in the court.
Somdev participated in the rallies but lost often as Rublev made him dance around the court to make him retrieve. His perfectly played rally was similar to the routine of a forehand to the right of the court, a backhand to the left of the court, and a winner down the middle. The anomaly was a flurry of enforced errors in the second set in the pursuit of winners, which gave Somdev a crucial break to take the contest to the third set.
Rublev's intent continued through to the third set, and although Somdev seemed to gain some confidence in front of a cheering crowd, he suffered a crucial break, and that took the match away from his grasp. A double-fault from Somdev, and a couple of crisp winners from his opponent in that game had cost him.
A brief glimpse at a comeback at 3-5 down was cut short with clean and powerful serves from Rublev, who recognised the value of what he had achieved: "I'm really happy to win a tough match against a good player."
That was he was in his zone when playing his strong winners was encapsulated when he summed it up as, "I don't know, I was just trying to play my tennis."
Somdev was not overly hurt with the loss, as he felt he was in a comfortable space with regards to his game. "There weren't any big holes [with my game]," he observed, after the match. "I feel I know where I am, I hope I'll have a better year."
The difference between a win and a loss in this contest, according to him were due to a few 'mental errors', and a general flatness.
"I didn't execute [my shots], didn't move my feet. Little sharpness was missing."
Rublev is scheduled to play the top seed Stanislas Wawrinka on Wednesday, but regardless of what happens there, the evidence of today suggests an inevitable rise for him in the tennis pecking order soon.
WEDNESDAY'S ORDER OF PLAY
STADIUM COURT (5 p.m.)
Borna Coric vs Austin Krajicek
Stan Wawrinka vs Andrey Rublev
John Millman vs Roberto Bautista-Agut
COURT 1 (5 p.m.)
N. Sriram Balaji / Ramkumar Ramanathan vs M. Daniell / A. Sitak
Ante Pavic vs Guillermo Garcia-Lopez
S. Devvarman / J. Nedunchezhiyan vs N. Monroe / H. Podlipnik-Castillo
O. Marach / F. Martin vs A. Bedene / T. Huey
A. Krajicek / B. Paire vs S. Betov / M. Elgin
Read more stories on Tennis.


text:
Quick Answer: What is the maximum speed of cyclone?
What is the highest speed of cyclone?
What is the maximum speed a cyclone can cover?
How fast can a cyclone be?
Which cyclone is coming in 2021?
Which country has the most cyclones?
What is maximum wind speed?
Is there any cyclone in India today?
Is cyclone a natural disaster?
What is the highest cyclone category?
Major records
Deadliest tropical cyclone season 500,805+ fatalities during the 1970 North Indian Ocean cyclone season
Most tornadoes spawned 120 confirmed tornadoes
Highest wind gusts 113 m/s (255 mph; 220 kn; 405 km/h)
Highest Accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) index for a tropical cyclone 82
Tropical cyclones are associated with a variety of hazards. Damaging or destructive winds may reach speeds in excess of 300 km/h in the most intense systems.
Cyclones have gale force winds with wind gusts in excess of 90 km/h around their centre. In the most severe cyclones, gusts can exceed 280 km/h. These winds can cause extensive property damage and turn airborne debris into potentially lethal missiles.
As of October 2021, the strongest tropical cyclone is Cyclone Tauktae, with maximum wind speeds of 185 km/h (115 mph) and a minimum barometric pressure of 950 hPa (28.05 inHg).
Severe Cyclonic Storm Shaheen.
Severe cyclonic storm (IMD)
Category 1 tropical cyclone (SSHWS)
Duration September 30 – October 4
b. Annual number of TC landfalls by country
THIS IS INTERESTING: Is Dallas prone to tornadoes?
Yearly average No.
1 CHINA 6.714
2 PHILLIPINES 4
3 JAPAN 3.743
4 USA 3.31
Maximum sustained wind
Wind speeds (for 1-minute maximum sustained winds)
Four 58–70 m/s 130–156 mph
Three 50–58 m/s 111–129 mph
Two 43–49 m/s 96–110 mph
One 33–42 m/s 74–95 mph
There are no active storms.
Cyclones – Natural Disasters – Earth watching. Cyclones, Hurricanes and Typhoons are powerful storms that have winds in excess of 119 kilometres per hour (74 MPH). … On average there are between 80-100 of these storms each year, and while only a fraction of these approach land they can cause devastation once they do.
Extremely dangerous with widespread destruction. A category five cyclone's strongest winds are VERY DESTRUCTIVE winds with typical gusts over open flat land of more than 280kph. These winds correspond to the highest category on the Beaufort scale, Beaufort 12 (hurricane).


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We understand that plans change while on holiday. With this in mind we invite you to make a no obligation booking. Payment is collected on the day of the tour and we take no deposit ahead of time.
For the morning tour, book transport with us, "make a day of it", and after the tour we will drop you off in Ubud. You can then enjoy this great village all afternoon. We will then pick you up at a time of your choosing and return you to your hotel.
For the afternoon tour it works the same except that we would bring you to Ubud in the morning, give you time to explore then pick you up for the tour. After the tour we return you to your hotel.


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Goldman Sachs' sick con: How they made money off your misery
7th April 2014 alternativefreepress
Documents and emails show manipulation was part of the game at Goldman — and what led them to win big on the crash
By Simon Head
Salon : April 6, 2014
In the financial crisis of 2007-08, Computer Business Systems (CBS) performed on a much bigger stage than any we have encountered so far. The scope and impact of the systems extended beyond the corporate and the national to the global, and the damage inflicted was correspondingly great. In the financial crisis, CBSs and their constituent technologies came together with an unprecedented malignancy. The operations of Wall Street's mortgage machine before and during the crash, and the role of CBSs within the machine, closely fits what Joseph Schumpeter called the "mechanization of progress," whereby innovation becomes "depersonalized and automated" and "bureau and committee work" replaces individual actions and judgments.
The Wall Street machine relied on information technologies to create a virtual assembly line on which something as simple as a single subprime mortgage at the start of the line could become by the time it reached the end a molecule within a financial derivative so complex that it was beyond the powers of the IT systems themselves to manage or keep track of. Amid these highly complex IT systems, it was easy to forget that this vast, inverted pyramid of financial manipulation pivoted on the creditworthiness of countless middle- and lower-income families obtaining mortgages for the first time for homes they could ill afford.
As with the making of Ford's Model T, the making of a financial derivative moved through multiple stages, with each stage responsible for adding an essential component to the product. On the Wall Street line, in contrast to Ford's, these way stations were also independent financial agencies, each exacting hefty fees and markups as the product passed through its segment of the line. The U.S. government—J. K. Galbraith's "countervailing power"—which might have set limits on the machine's operations, was in fact actively working on the machine's behalf. In their book "Thirteen Bankers," Simon Johnson and James Kwak show in detail how the regulatory regime that allowed the machine to run amok was as much the work of Wall Street Democrats such as Robert Rubin and Larry Summers as it was of Reagan Republicans such as Donald Regan and Senator Phil Gramm of Texas.
As the machine worked flat-out in the run-up to the crisis, there were eight principal businesses at work along the line: the mortgage brokers who worked directly with the subprime clients; the mortgage bankers, who, benefiting from the recommendations of the brokers, underwrote the subprime mortgages, bundled them together, and passed them on to investment bankers as mortgage-backed securities (MBSs); the mortgage servicers responsible for collecting the monthly mortgage payments from the subprime clients, even as the ownership of the mortgages moved from one remote owner to another along the line; the investment bankers who bundled the MBSs with further bundles of debt—student loans, credit card debt—to form collateralized debt obligations (CDOs); the rating agencies—Moody's, S&P, Fitch—who examined the CDOs and, with a stroke of financial alchemy worthy of Merlin the magician, transformed CDOs heavy with poorly rated MBSs into top-rated derivatives with a AAA rating; the insurers, such as AIG, who made it possible for anyone, whether they owned a CDO or not, to take out an insurance policy—a credit default swap (CDS)—against a CDO's possible default; the CDO brokers who marketed the newly sanitized derivatives; and at the very end of the line the purchasers of the CDOs and MBSs beyond Wall Street—foundations, universities, pension funds, midwestern school districts, German regional banks, all very big losers once the MBSs and CDOs went bad.
The millions of mortgages, student loans, and other debt contracts that constituted the raw material of the machine had a dual existence both as documents in the safekeeping of legal custodians, themselves a minor component of the machine, and as electronic bits in digital space. Once the transformation from the physical to the digital had taken place, the transactions could be assembled, subassembled according to risk, and moved between way stations at high speeds.
As we have seen, speed is also achieved in mass production by automating as far as possible the cognitive functions that may have to be performed at points along the line. That is why call-center agents deal with their clients with the use of digital scripts and why HMOs are constantly pressing their physician clients to observe standard treatment protocols that, according to the HMO database, are faster and cheaper than the alternatives. Unless this happens, and if instead employees are allowed to exercise their own judgment free of rigorous time constraints, then the business process or subprocess will not achieve management's targets for time and cost—its key performance indicators—and, from management's perspectives, the system will have failed.
The Wall Street machine was able to achieve the speed that it did only by automating, at three critical points along the line, complex judgments about financial instruments that should have been subject to painstaking, time-consuming analysis. But once again, the rules of this automated decision making were always the outcome of executive decision making that, once embedded in the system, had to be followed by front-line employees. The Wall Street machine was therefore as much an example of digital industrialism as the call centers of the front office. The operatives of the Wall Street machine relied on software-born indexes of risk to pass favorable judgment on the derivatives as they moved along the line.
The first of the three indexes at the heart of the crisis was the FICO score, used to estimate the creditworthiness of mortgage borrowers, that could be gamed by system designers to show that a Mexican immigrant worker with an income of twenty thousand dollars could handle a subprime mortgage worth three hundred thousand dollars. The second of the indexes was the rating agencies that treated subprime borrowers as if they were small businesses and, looking at the historical record for small business failures, found that the probability of subprime default was low. Finally, the value-at-risk (VAR) indexes pioneered by Professor Philippe Jorion of the University of California were heavily relied on to assess the risk of CDOs. For its failure to allow for the unexpected and exceptional, Nassim Taleb of the Black Swan characterized this index, a decade before the debacle, as "charlatanism" and "potentially dangerous malpractice" for a "school for sitting ducks."
We will now, in the language of CBSs, drill down and look at how integration within the mortgage machine shaped the conduct of one of Wall Street's leading actors, Goldman Sachs. Goldman's handling of the Wall Street crash during its critical, formative months between the middle of 2006 and the end of 2007 must be among the most heavily documented events in modern business history. Pride of place in this bibliography goes to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations' (the Levin Committee's) 266-page report on Goldman, "Failing to Manage Conflicts of Interest: A Case Study of Goldman Sachs," which is just one section within a 639-page report on the role of investment banks in the crisis. The report draws on the tens of thousands of e-mails subpoenaed from Wall Street firms by the committee and provides a day-to-day, and sometimes hour-by-hour, account of what went on at Goldman during those months. A companion volume to the report is the transcript and video footage of the hearings before the Levin Committee, which took place on October 27, 2010, when Goldman's crisis team, from CEO Lloyd Blankfein down to the humblest traders, gave their side of the story.
In addition, there is the growing list of lawsuits against Goldman, all with their accompanying texts, brought by government agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Federal Housing Authority, and also by aggrieved clients of Goldman such as the now defunct Australian hedge fund Basis Capital and by ACAS Capital, which collaborated with Goldman in the creation of the Abacus CDO, notorious for the role of the hedge-fund manager John Paulson in selecting the securities to be included in the CDO. In July 2010, the SEC fined Goldman $550 million to settle charges that it "failed to disclose to investors vital information about the Abacus CDO . . . particularly the role that Paulson and Co. played in the portfolio selection process." In other court actions against Goldman the actions are still pending and Goldman's level of culpability has yet to be decided. But the Levin Committee's report and hearings provide, I believe, strong evidence that the deception and manipulation of clients eventually became an integral part of Goldman's trading strategy.
In trawling through the documents, it is essential never to lose sight of the role of the Goldman corporate hierarchy in the crisis and the highly disciplined way in which it managed the company. The answer to the old Watergate question "What did the president know, and when did he know it?" is, in the case of Goldman's big three—Lloyd Blankfein, CEO; Gary Cohn and Jon Winkelried, co-presidents—that they knew everything that mattered (and in real time). The big three's point man for the crisis, Goldman's own H. R. Haldeman, was co-president Gary Cohn, whose name turns up frequently in the e-mail flow of his subordinates. Although the e-mail vocabulary between Blankfein, Cohn, and their subordinates has a certain locker-room familiarity about it, there is never any doubt about who is in charge.
Blankfein, Cohn, and their team were men of the machine and, as it turned out, among the most skillful manipulators of the machine on Wall Street. By the early 2000s, Goldman's derivatives trading could no longer be called banking in any meaningful sense of the term, but had become an industrial activity, turning out virtual products whose fortunes depended on the efficient management and coordination of processes: the accumulation of mortgages and other forms of debt from bankers and brokers, their transformation into financial derivatives, and their selling on to clients.
In Goldman's culture these processes were of supreme value because they were vehicles for the creation of Goldman's earnings and profits, and so critical for the health of the Goldman stock price, the size of the salaries and bonuses paid out to Goldman executives, and the reach of Goldman's power and fame on Wall Street and beyond. As long as house prices continued to rise and those along the process chain continued to make money, the model's flaws could be ignored, notably the dismal quality of the subprime mortgages upon which the whole system depended.
But once the housing market turned, the system collapsed. The difference between Goldman and the other leading players on Wall Street was that Goldman saw it coming and was able to recalibrate its machine so that not only did it avoid the catastrophic losses that destroyed Lehman Brothers and crippled Citicorp, but it actually came out ahead. But to achieve this Goldman behaved, I will argue, with ruthless cynicism, above all in deceiving and exploiting its clients. Why did Goldman do this? The simple answer is that for Goldman, wealth creation on its own behalf took priority over everything else, and nothing was going to stand in its way. In histories that tell of how Goldman acted on its view of the deteriorating markets and came out ahead, the word warehouse often appears, a choice word that is revealing both as a pointer to the heavily industrial character of Goldman's trading activities and as providing a mental diagram to locate the various financial instruments Goldman was dealing in. But warehouse does not fully capture the reality of what was going on at Goldman.
A real warehouse is a place where finished goods are stored before they are shipped off to customers or retailers, whereas Goldman's "warehouse" was much more like a factory where industrial processing of financial instruments took place on a virtual assembly line. The Goldman "factory" was an electronic space where the "raw materials" of loans coming in from such mortgage brokers as New Century, Long Beach, and Countrywide were processed on the virtual line into financial instruments such as mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, and credit default swaps, which then were marketed to clients. In the precrisis world, where it was assumed that house prices would go on rising indefinitely, the processes of "securitization," that is, the processing of the raw loans coming in from the brokers, were relatively straightforward.
In the case of mortgage-backed securities, the incoming loans were bundled together by Goldman, their ownership vested in a trust, with the trust issuing securities to investors, which gave them the right to the cash flows generated by the loans as householders paid off their mortgages. With collateralized debt obligations, several MBSs would be bundled together, along with bundles of student, consumer, or corporate loans, again with ownership of the loans vested in a trust, with the trust issuing securities to investors. In addition, there was a whole superstructure of insurance, known as credit default swaps, attached to the MBSs and CDOs. The owners of the MBS and CDO securities, or indeed anybody, could take out an insurance policy against their loss of value and receive compensation if this happened. Equally, the owners of the securities, if they were confident that they would hold their value, could be the providers of insurance and receive regular premium payments from the policy holders. If the securities lost value, then, as with any insurance policy, the issuer of the insurance was obliged to compensate the policy holder for their loss.
Whether Goldman was pursuing a coherent trading strategy during these crisis months is a fraught issue, because it is claimed by those suing Goldman that it had a consistently pessimistic view of the market, and although this pessimism shaped its trading on its own behalf, Goldman hid this pessimism from many of its clients, fed them an upbeat view of the market that it did not believe in, and persuaded them to buy assets that it knew were flawed and would lose value, and indeed did. Goldman's defense all along has been that it had no aggressive moneymaking strategy at all and was simply the prudent guardian of its clients and its own interests. In its own words, "The risk management of the firm's exposures and the activities of our clients dictated the firm's action, not any view of what might or might not happen to any security or market."
This was also the line taken by Lloyd Blankfein himself during his appearance before the Levin Committee on October 27, 2010, where he spoke of Goldman as virtually a charitable organization, the passive counterparty in deals where strong-minded clients came in and told Goldman exactly what they wanted, and Goldman respectfully executed their instructions. So Blankfein: "The customers who are coming to us for risk in the housing market wanted to have a security that gave them exposure to the housing market, and that is what they get. . . . [T]he security itself delivered the specific exposure that the client wanted to have." And again: "What clients are buying, or customers are buying, is they are buying an exposure. The thing that we are selling to them is supposed to give them the risk they want. They are not coming to us to represent what our views are. . . . [T]he institutional clients we have wouldn't care what our views are. They shouldn't care."
At the Senate hearings the Goldman team from Blankfein on downward was much helped in its own defense by the extreme complexity and variety of the derivatives Goldman traded during the crisis period and the difficulty for laymen, including those on the Levin Committee, of distinguishing between them, and especially the differing legal obligations attached to each of them. It was here that the Levin Committee hearings fell short in ways that undermined the impact of the report and the hearings in the public policy debate. In his preamble to the hearings, Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) drew attention to Goldman's differing obligations to its clients as market maker and underwriter, but Levin and his fellow senators lost sight of this distinction when questioning Blankfein and his colleagues, allowing them to slip away again and again behind a fog of obfuscation.
One way of cutting through this obfuscation is to imagine for a moment that Goldman was a real industrial company making and selling real products, rather than a virtual industrial company making and selling virtual products. Imagine Goldman for a moment as the Goldman Motor Manufacturing Company, or GMMC, a Detroit competitor of Ford in the early days of mass production in the 1920s. One day GMMC discovers to its horror that there is a serious flaw in its manufacturing processes so that a significant percentage of the engines installed in its best-selling model, the Model G, break down after just a few weeks on the road. The vice president for manufacturing tells the CEO that GMMC must immediately close its plant for retooling, recall the products it has already sold, and strip down the models it has in stock, selling off the uncontaminated engine parts to local component dealers.
But the vice president for finance quickly does his sums and persuades his colleagues that the cost of this plan A is too great, and they must decide instead on plan B. With plan B, GMMC instructs its salesmen to avoid its local Detroit dealers, whom the company suspects have gotten wind of problems at the plant, and tells the GMMC salesmen instead to ship the problem Model Gs to the South and sell them directly to unsuspecting farmers in rural Kentucky and Tennessee. Without telling these customers that there is anything wrong with the Model Gs, GMMC quietly takes out an insurance policy with a local Detroit company that will pay out to GMMC every time one of its cars goes wrong. When the owners of the stricken vehicles demand a refund, GMMC refuses. This is a simplified but essentially accurate account of what Goldman frequently did in its derivatives trading. Looked at day- to-day, Goldman's trading strategies were complex, sometimes counterintuitive, and lacking in obvious direction. The GMMC fable can be a helpful guide as we try to make sense of what Goldman was doing.
Drawing on its vast e-mail trove, the Levin Committee report shows Blankfein's image of Goldman as a charitable organization to be entirely fictitious and repeatedly quotes chapter and verse to prove it. The report shows that from late 2006 onward, Goldman's senior executives had a consistently pessimistic view of the housing market and the financial instruments attached to it and thenceforth pursued an aggressive trading strategy to maximize its gains from the crisis, with the manipulation of clients becoming, I will argue, an integral part of Goldman's chosen strategy. The evidence of how Goldman's top executives really viewed the markets is therefore germane to this whole history, and some of it now follows.
In an internal "self-review" dated September 26, 2007, Michael J. Swenson, head of the Goldman Sachs Mortgage Department's Structured Products Group, wrote that "during the early summer of 2006 it was clear that the market fundamentals of subprime and the highly leveraged nature of Collateralized Debt Obligations were going to have a very unhappy ending." On December 7, 2006, Daniel Sparks, head of Goldman's Mortgage Department and a key link between the trading floor and the Goldman big three, exchanged e-mails with Thomas Montag, a senior Goldman executive and co-head of Global Securities for the Americas, "about why Goldman was not doing more to reduce the firm's risk associated with its net long positions" in housing-related assets.
On December 14, 2006, David Viniar, chief financial officer and therefore number four in the Goldman hierarchy after the big three, convened a meeting in the conference room next to his office on the thirtieth floor (the seat of power where the big three also had their offices), where they conducted an in-depth review of the Mortgage Department's holdings because its "position in subprime mortgage related assets was too long, and its risk exposure was too great."
The next day Viniar e-mailed Montag about the deteriorating markets and the opportunities it opened up: "My basic message was lets [sic] be aggressive distributing things because there will be very good opportunities as the markets [go] into what is likely to be even greater distress and we want to be in a position to take advantage of them."
Then on February 11, 2007, and from the thirtieth floor itself, Blankfein urged the Mortgage Department to get on with the task of selling off its deteriorating assets: "Could/should we have cleaned up these books before and are we doing enough right now to sell off cats and dogs in other books throughout the divisions?" On February 14, 2007, Daniel Sparks reported further on the deteriorating markets and the trading opportunities it opened up: "Subprime environment—bad; and getting worse. Everyday [sic] is a major fight for some aspect of the business. Credit issues are worsening on deals and pain is broad. . . . [D]istressed opportunities will be real, but we aren't close to that time yet."
In 2006 and 2007 Goldman originated twenty-seven CDOs and ninety-three MBSs with a total value of about $100 billion. The problem for Goldman from the summer of 2006 onward was that its "factory" was clogged with components of MBSs and CDOs in varying stages of manufacture—raw loans just in from the brokers and not yet bundled, loans in the process of being bundled, bundles of MBSs not yet put together as CDOs, finished CDOs and MBSs not yet marketed, and securities of old CDOs and MBSs that Goldman had not yet sold and were still in the factory. Goldman had acquired and processed these assets on the assumption that the housing market was strong and that there would be an equally strong demand for the finished CDOs and MBSs.13 But now the market was about to collapse, and Goldman had billions' worth of what it believed would become failing assets on its hands. So what to do with them?
Much of what Goldman then did was what any owner of a big stock portfolio would do if faced with a collapsing market. Goldman stopped taking in any more loans from the mortgage dealers; it abandoned some CDOs and MBSs that were still "under construction" and liquidated others that were fully formed, selling off their components in the markets, as it also did with some of the "raw" loans recently acquired from the brokers that had yet to enter the securitization process. If this is all that Goldman had done, there would be no Goldman story, Blankfein would be esteemed on Wall Street as the great survivor, and Goldman would not be the target of multiple lawsuits that could still cost it hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars.
But what Goldman also did, and this has been the source of its troubles, was to persist with the creation of new CDOs and MBSs and to continue with the marketing of existing ones, even bringing some of its own proprietary assets into the factory so that they too could become part of a new CDO. Goldman also began taking the insurance structure pivoting on the CDOs, the credit default swaps, much more seriously as a potential source of revenue. Although the trading strategies involved in these activities were sometimes complex, the motive underlying them was simple and straightforward. Goldman believed that it could make more money by disposing of its factory assets as components of CDOs, MBSs, and CDSs than by just selling them off unadorned in the market.
The problem that then arose for Goldman was that in marketing the three kinds of financial derivatives, the company was acting as underwriter and placement agent and not simply as market maker or trader on its own behalf. As underwriter and placement agent, Goldman was subject to rules on fair disclosure that as market maker it was not. In the Levin Committee hearings, the Goldman team, from Blankfein on down, went to very considerable lengths to blur the distinction between the different roles and to cast themselves, whenever possible, as humble market makers. There can be little doubt that in preparing for the hearings, a high-risk event for Blankfein et al., Goldman's extremely high-priced lawyers got together with their clients and advised them that, in view of their record, obfuscation on the distinction between underwriter and market maker was advisable.
This evasion was much in evidence at the hearings and especially in the gladiatorial contest between Senator Levin and Blankfein on the final day, when Levin searched with increasing frustration for the smoking gun that would sink Blankfein but never quite managed to find it. In reading the committee transcript, and simultaneously watching the contest on a podcast available at the Levin Committee website, I was reminded not so much of Watergate and the search for the Nixonian smoking gun as a remarkable scene that appears in several versions on YouTube.
In it a gigantic Alaskan brown bear sits on a slab of rock overlooking a fast-moving river full of salmon. The bear is trying to scoop up one of the salmon with his paws, but most of the time the salmon are much too quick for him and he fails. But just occasionally, he succeeds and has a terrific meal. There was something bearlike about Senator Levin peering down at Blankfein from his senatorial perch as he flailed around, trying to land his quarry, but with the slippery Blankfein swimming clear every time. The blurring of the distinction between market maker and underwriter was central to Blankfein's evasive strategy, as the following exchanges reveal:
Senator Levin: Is there not a conflict when you sell something to somebody and then are determined to bet against that same security and you didn't disclose that to the person you are selling it to? Do you see a problem?
Lloyd Blankfein: In the context of market making, that is not a conflict. What clients are buying, or customers are buying, is they are buying an exposure. The thing that we are selling to them is supposed to give them the risk they want.
Senator Levin wasn't satisfied:
Senator Levin: How about you are investing in these securities. This isn't a market making deal. This is where you have a decision to bet against, to take the short side of a security that you are selling, and you don't think there is any moral obligation here?
Lloyd Blankfein: Every transaction Senator, and this is—and I think it is important and again, I am not trying to be resistant but to make sure your terminology—when as a market maker, we are buying from sellers and selling to buyers . . .
Levin cuts him off but later returns to the attack:
Senator Levin (with increasing frustration): You are betting against that same security you are out selling. I have just got to keep repeating this. I am not talking about generally in the market. I am saying you have got a short bet against that security. You don't think the client would care?
Lloyd Blankfein: I don't, Senator. I can't speak to what people would care. I would say that the obligations of a market maker are to make sure your clients are suitable and to make sure they understand it. But we are a part of a market process. We do hundreds of thousands, if not millions of transactions as a market maker.
Again the Uriah Heep side of Blankfein as he relegates Goldman to being just another humble market maker along with all the others on the trading floor at the New York Stock Exchange. This was a clever strategy, but also high risk. It was clever because anyone with a serious interest in the stock market, which presumably included most of the members of the Levin Committee, knew what market makers do. They hold a supply of a stock for those who wish to buy or sell it. They adjust the price with shifts in supply and demand, and they are obliged to buy and sell at prices broadly in line with the rest of the market. It is not their role to advise investors about the wisdom of buying a stock, and they are not at fault if a stock loses 20 percent of its value within an hour of its purchase.
With his answers to Senator Levin, Blankfein was trying hard to cloak Goldman and himself in the passive neutrality of the market maker. But this was also high risk because it would have taken only one senator with forensic lawyerly skills to rip through this defense and reach—at last—the smoking gun. With the marketing of CDOs and MBSs to its clients, Goldman was not a market maker but an underwriter or placement agent and was therefore subject to rules of disclosure about the suitability of its product for the investor that it had manifestly violated. To grasp the sheer chutzpah of Goldman's marketing, one needs to look at one of these deals in detail. Among the most revealing was Goldman's marketing of the Timberwolf CDO between September 2006 and June 2007, the very months when its own view of the housing market soured and when it began to dispose of its own flawed assets.
(Read the full article at Salon or buy the book it's taken from at Amazon)
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A real-time operating system (RTOS) is an operating system (OS) for real-time computing applications that processes data and events that have critically defined time constraints. An RTOS is distinct from a time-sharing operating system, such as Unix, which manages the sharing of system resources with a scheduler, data buffers, or fixed task prioritization in a multitasking or multiprogramming environment. Processing time  requirements need to be fully understood and bound rather than just kept as a minimum. All processing must occur within the defined constraints. Real-time operating systems are event-driven and preemptive, meaning the OS can monitor the relevant priority of competing tasks, and make changes to the task priority. Event-driven systems switch between tasks based on their priorities, while time-sharing systems switch the task based on clock interrupts.

Characteristics
A key characteristic of an RTOS is the level of its consistency concerning the amount of time it takes to accept and complete an application's task; the variability is 'jitter'. A 'hard' real-time operating system (hard RTOS) has less jitter than a 'soft' real-time operating system (soft RTOS). A late answer is a wrong answer in a hard RTOS while a late answer is acceptable in a soft RTOS. The chief design goal is not high throughput, but rather a guarantee of a soft or hard performance category. An RTOS that can usually or generally meet a deadline is a soft real-time OS, but if it can meet a deadline deterministically it is a hard real-time OS.

An RTOS has an advanced algorithm for scheduling. Scheduler flexibility enables a wider, computer-system orchestration of process priorities, but a real-time OS is more frequently dedicated to a narrow set of applications. Key factors in a real-time OS are minimal interrupt latency and minimal thread switching latency; a real-time OS is valued more for how quickly or how predictably it can respond than for the amount of work it can perform in a given period of time.

See the comparison of real-time operating systems for a comprehensive list. Also, see the list of operating systems for all types of operating systems.

Design philosophies
An RTOS is an operating system in which the time taken to process an input stimulus is less than the time lapsed until the next input stimulus of the same type.

The most common designs are:
 Event-driven – switches tasks only when an event of higher priority needs servicing; called preemptive priority, or priority scheduling.
 Time-sharing – switches tasks on a regular clocked interrupt, and on events; called round robin.

Time sharing designs switch tasks more often than strictly needed, but give smoother multitasking, giving the illusion that a process or user has sole use of a machine.

Early CPU designs needed many cycles to switch tasks during which the CPU could do nothing else useful. Because switching took so long, early OSes tried to minimize wasting CPU time by avoiding unnecessary task switching.

Scheduling
In typical designs, a task has three states:
 Running (executing on the CPU);
 Ready (ready to be executed);
 Blocked (waiting for an event, I/O for example).

Most tasks are blocked or ready most of the time because generally only one task can run at a time per CPU. The number of items in the ready queue can vary greatly, depending on the number of tasks the system needs to perform and the type of scheduler that the system uses. On simpler non-preemptive but still multitasking systems, a task has to give up its time on the CPU to other tasks, which can cause the ready queue to have a greater number of overall tasks in the ready to be executed state (resource starvation).

Usually, the data structure of the ready list in the scheduler is designed to minimize the worst-case length of time spent in the scheduler's critical section, during which preemption is inhibited, and, in some cases, all interrupts are disabled, but the choice of data structure depends also on the maximum number of tasks that can be on the ready list.

If there are never more than a few tasks on the ready list, then a doubly linked list of ready tasks is likely optimal. If the ready list usually contains only a few tasks but occasionally contains more, then the list should be sorted by priority. That way, finding the highest priority task to run does not require iterating through the entire list. Inserting a task then requires walking the ready list until reaching either the end of the list, or a task of lower priority than that of the task being inserted.

Care must be taken not to inhibit preemption during this search. Longer critical sections should be divided into small pieces. If an interrupt occurs that makes a high priority task ready during the insertion of a low priority task, that high priority task can be inserted and run immediately before the low priority task is inserted.

The critical response time, sometimes called the flyback time, is the time it takes to queue a new ready task and restore the state of the highest priority task to running. In a well-designed RTOS, readying a new task will take 3 to 20 instructions per ready-queue entry, and restoration of the highest-priority ready task will take 5 to 30 instructions.

In more advanced systems, real-time tasks share computing resources with many non-real-time tasks, and the ready list can be arbitrarily long. In such systems, a scheduler ready list implemented as a linked list would be inadequate.

Algorithms
Some commonly used RTOS scheduling algorithms are:
 Cooperative scheduling
 Preemptive scheduling
 Rate-monotonic scheduling
 Round-robin scheduling
 Fixed priority pre-emptive scheduling, an implementation of preemptive time slicing
 Fixed-Priority Scheduling with Deferred Preemption
 Fixed-Priority Non-preemptive Scheduling
 Critical section preemptive scheduling
 Static time scheduling
 Earliest Deadline First approach
 Stochastic digraphs with multi-threaded graph traversal

Intertask communication and resource sharing
A multitasking operating system like Unix is poor at real-time tasks. The scheduler gives the highest priority to jobs with the lowest demand on the computer, so there is no way to ensure that a time-critical job will have access to enough resources. Multitasking systems must manage sharing data and hardware resources among multiple tasks. It is usually unsafe for two tasks to access the same specific data or hardware resource simultaneously. There are three common approaches to resolve this problem:

Temporarily masking/disabling interrupts
General-purpose operating systems usually do not allow user programs to mask (disable) interrupts, because the user program could control the CPU for as long as it is made to. Some modern CPUs do not allow user mode code to disable interrupts as such control is considered a key operating system resource. Many embedded systems and RTOSs, however, allow the application itself to run in kernel mode for greater system call efficiency and also to permit the application to have greater control of the operating environment without requiring OS intervention.

On single-processor systems, an application running in kernel mode and masking interrupts is the lowest overhead method to prevent simultaneous access to a shared resource. While interrupts are masked and the current task does not make a blocking OS call, the current task has exclusive use of the CPU since no other task or interrupt can take control, so the critical section is protected. When the task exits its critical section, it must unmask interrupts; pending interrupts, if any, will then execute. Temporarily masking interrupts should only be done when the longest path through the critical section is shorter than the desired maximum interrupt latency. Typically this method of protection is used only when the critical section is just a few instructions and contains no loops. This method is ideal for protecting hardware bit-mapped registers when the bits are controlled by different tasks.

Mutexes
When the shared resource must be reserved without blocking all other tasks (such as waiting for Flash memory to be written), it is better to use mechanisms also available on general-purpose operating systems, such as a mutex and OS-supervised interprocess messaging. Such mechanisms involve system calls, and usually invoke the OS's dispatcher code on exit, so they typically take hundreds of CPU instructions to execute, while masking interrupts may take as few as one instruction on some processors.

A (non-recursive) mutex is either locked or unlocked. When a task has locked the mutex, all other tasks must wait for the mutex to be unlocked by its  owner - the original thread. A task may set a timeout on its wait for a mutex. There are several well-known problems with mutex based designs such as priority inversion and deadlocks.

In priority inversion a high priority task waits because a low priority task has a mutex, but the lower priority task is not given CPU time to finish its work. A typical solution is to have the task that owns a mutex 'inherit' the priority of the highest waiting task. But this simple approach gets more complex when there are multiple levels of waiting: task A waits for a mutex locked by task B, which waits for a mutex locked by task C. Handling multiple levels of inheritance causes other code to run in high priority context and thus can cause starvation of medium-priority threads.

In a deadlock, two or more tasks lock mutex without timeouts and then wait forever for the other task's mutex, creating a cyclic dependency. The simplest deadlock scenario occurs when two tasks alternately lock two mutex, but in the opposite order. Deadlock is prevented by careful design.

Message passing
The other approach to resource sharing is for tasks to send messages in an organized message passing scheme. In this paradigm, the resource is managed directly by only one task. When another task wants to interrogate or manipulate the resource, it sends a message to the managing task. Although their real-time behavior is less crisp than semaphore systems, simple message-based systems avoid most protocol deadlock hazards, and are generally better-behaved than semaphore systems. However, problems like those of semaphores are possible. Priority inversion can occur when a task is working on a low-priority message and ignores a higher-priority message (or a message originating indirectly from a high priority task) in its incoming message queue. Protocol deadlocks can occur when two or more tasks wait for each other to send response messages.

Interrupt handlers and the scheduler
Since an interrupt handler blocks the highest priority task from running, and since real-time operating systems are designed to keep thread latency to a minimum, interrupt handlers are typically kept as short as possible. The interrupt handler defers all interaction with the hardware if possible; typically all that is necessary is to acknowledge or disable the interrupt (so that it won't occur again when the interrupt handler returns) and notify a task that work needs to be done. This can be done by unblocking a driver task through releasing a semaphore, setting a flag or sending a message. A scheduler often provides the ability to unblock a task from interrupt handler context.

An OS maintains catalogues of objects it manages such as threads, mutexes, memory, and so on. Updates to this catalogue must be strictly controlled. For this reason, it can be problematic when an interrupt handler calls an OS function while the application is in the act of also doing so. The OS function called from an interrupt handler could find the object database to be in an inconsistent state because of the application's update. There are two major approaches to deal with this problem: the unified architecture and the segmented architecture. RTOSs implementing the unified architecture solve the problem by simply disabling interrupts while the internal catalogue is updated. The downside of this is that interrupt latency increases, potentially losing interrupts. The segmented architecture does not make direct OS calls but delegates the OS related work to a separate handler. This handler runs at a higher priority than any thread but lower than the interrupt handlers. The advantage of this architecture is that it adds very few cycles to interrupt latency. As a result, OSes which implement the segmented architecture are more predictable and can deal with higher interrupt rates compared to the unified architecture.

Similarly, the System Management Mode on x86 compatible Hardware can take a lot of time before it returns control to the operating system.

Memory allocation
Memory allocation is more critical in a real-time operating system than in other operating systems.

First, for stability there cannot be memory leaks (memory that is allocated but not freed after use). The device should work indefinitely, without ever needing a reboot. For this reason, dynamic memory allocation is frowned upon. Whenever possible, all required memory allocation is specified statically at compile time.

Another reason to avoid dynamic memory allocation is memory fragmentation. With frequent allocation and releasing of small chunks of memory, a situation may occur where available memory is divided into several sections and the RTOS cannot allocate a large enough continuous block of memory, although there is enough free memory. Secondly, speed of allocation is important. A standard memory allocation scheme scans a linked list of indeterminate length to find a suitable free memory block, which is unacceptable in an RTOS since memory allocation has to occur within a certain amount of time.

Because mechanical disks have much longer and more unpredictable response times, swapping to disk files is not used for the same reasons as RAM allocation discussed above.

The simple fixed-size-blocks algorithm works quite well for simple embedded systems because of its low overhead.

See also

 Adaptive Partition Scheduler
 Comparison of real-time operating systems
 Data General RDOS
 DO-178B
 Earliest deadline first scheduling
 Firmware
 FreeRTOS
 Interruptible operating system
 Least slack time scheduling
 OSEK
 POSIX
 Rate-monotonic scheduling
 Robot Operating System
 SCADA
 Synchronous programming language
 Time-triggered system
 Time-utility function

References

Operating systems
Real-time computing


The International Wine Guild calendar of upcoming courses is below. To view only those classes within a certain category, choose the class category you'd like to view from the drop-down menu and select the narrow results button.
Show All Public Courses Level I Courses Level II Courses Level III Courses Level IV Courses Intensive Courses Only All Locations ...coming soon!
Level 1 Wine Seminar or Level 1 Spirits Seminar.
The Level 1 seminars are fundamental, beginning education. All of our courses begin with the Guild Level 1 Wine Seminar or the Guild Level 1 Spirits Seminar. Each of our Level 1 Seminars is a 12-hour, day and a half (Saturday-Sunday) seminar. The wine seminar is offered the first weekend of every month in Denver as well as other locations. Check the schedule for dates and locations.
The Level 1 Spirits Seminar is offered 4 times a year. Check the schedule for dates and locations.
The Level 2 courses build upon the foundation established in the Level 1 Wine or Spirits seminar. These are intermediate level courses.
Intensive Study Advanced Wine Course (6-Day).
For those that don't live in Colorado we recommend the Intensive Study Advanced Wine Course (6-Day). The course content, wine tasting and instruction are identical in the 11-Week and 6-Day courses.
The Level 2 Advanced Fine Spirits Course is also an intermediate level course. It is available in two formats: (a0 10-Week and (b) 5-Day.
Master level courses are advanced courses that are a step above the Level 2 intermediate courses.
You can register for any of the courses, however, we recommend, but don't require, that you go through the Level 1 Wine Seminar first. Go to the following hyperlinks to learn more about our Level 3 courses.
Advanced Wine and Food Pairing Course.
All Level 3 courses can be taken in a 10-Week or 5-day format. Contact the Guild for more details by clicking here.


Exciting news for open-source community - we have opened the source code of ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors!
ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors is an office suite that allows users to create, view and edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations on PC or Mac without Internet connection. Being fully compatible with MS Office, the editors also support other popular formats, including ODF. The editors can be easily connected to your ONLYOFFICE portal, no matter which solution you use - cloud, Enterprise edition, open source or your free personal portal. In online mode you may use all the collaboration features: two co-editing modes (fast and strict), commenting and built-in chat.
The editors' functionality can be extended by third-party plugins. Create templates, insert video from YouTube or write your own plugin to add a function you need to the editors.
The office suite is available under AGPL license v3. This means you're able to download and use ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors without any restrictions.
The current version is available for Windows (both 64-bit and 32-bit), Mac OS 10.10 or higher and Linux.
- GUI package - for other popular Linux distributives.
If you have any questions or some technical problems while installing or using ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors, post the descriptions in the appropriate section "Desktop Editors" within this cloud forum.


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Frank Stack is credited with inventing "underground comix" -- the now celebrated precursors to today's graphic novels -- back in 1962. Those first slender volumes, released under the unlikely nom de plume of Foolbert Sturgeon, depicted the contemporary escapades of a scruffy, socially conscious Jesus Christ. Stack's Adventures of Jesus revolutionized the comic book genre, inspired hipsters and hippies around the world, and turned the native of rural Texas into a 1960s-era icon.
But comic celebrity was hardly Stack's plan. In a conversation from his living-room studio, Stack, now 66, recalls a young adulthood immersed in history's great painters while in art school at the University of Texas, Austin. He settled for a commercial graphic arts job, he says, only "to prove to my dad I could make a living."
Once on the job, Stack had a rapid change of heart: "I began to think, 'God, I guess I'd really rather be Toulouse-Lautrec.'"
"I don't mean being debauched," he deadpans in a slow drawl. "But to be able to go out with my sketchbook and interpret the life I had seen."
Even while drawing his famous comics, Stack continued his fine arts training, first at the Art Institute of Chicago, then at the graduate art program at the University of Wyoming and, finally, at the Académie Grande Chaumière of Paris. Stack joined MU's fine arts faculty in 1963, and quickly distinguished himself. Today his paintings and prints are shown in galleries throughout the United States, Europe and Asia.
These pages depict mostly recent works in oil and watercolor -- some collected from Stack's personal holdings, others provided courtesy of Columbia's Legacy Art Gallery. Together they illustrate the bold commingling of light and color that has come to characterize Stack's landscape and figure painting.
"He's somebody who understands color relationships on such an intimate level; how to use the juxtaposition of colors to accentuate and augment one another," says Legacy owner James Downey. "I've seen him engage an artist and say, 'Gauguin did this, this way and for this reason.' It's just so much a part of Frank's nature. He'll say, 'It works for this reason, this is why it's successful.' It's an incredible depth of knowledge; it allows him to accomplish things most artists can only aspire to."


text:
Oxyptilus catathectes is a moth of the family Pterophoridae, that can be found in Indonesia (Java).

References

Oxyptilini
Moths described in 1933
Plume moths of Asia
Moths of Indonesia


(a) Notice of Preliminary Determination of Non-Compliance. Whenever it is determined that a covered provider may not be in compliance with the requirements of Sections 1002.2 or 1002.3 of this Part and has not obtained a waiver, the provider shall be notified in writing of the basis for that determination. Such notice shall provide the covered provider with an opportunity and a procedure to submit additional or clarifying information within thirty (30) calendar days of the provider's receipt of such notice to demonstrate compliance with this Part. Failure to submit additional or clarifying information within the required time period shall result in the determination of non-compliance becoming final.
(a) Corrective Action Period. If the determination of non-compliance becomes final as set forth in subdivision (a) or if the department or its designee determines, after reviewing and considering any information submitted by the covered provider, that such provider is not in compliance with the requirements of sections 1002.2 or 1002.3 of this regulation, the provider shall receive notice of such determination and a notice to cure. Such notice shall allow the covered provider a period of not less than six months to correct the violation(s) identified (the "corrective action period") prior to additional enforcement action or penalties being imposed, and shall require that the covered provider submit within thirty (30) calendar days a corrective action plan ("CAP") for approval by the department or its designee.
(b) Corrective Action Plan. Within thirty (30) calendar days of receipt of the covered provider's CAP, the department or its designee shall either approve such CAP or request clarification or alterations. The covered provider shall make such alterations to the CAP as may be reasonably required by the department or its designee. Once the CAP has been approved and the covered provider notified, and unless otherwise provided in the approved CAP, the covered provider shall have six months to complete the CAP and comply with this Part.
(d) Any other lawful actions or penalties deemed appropriate by the department or its designee.
(e) Opportunity for Appeal. Within thirty (30) calendar days of receipt of a final determination of noncompliance and notice of proposed sanctions, a covered provider may request an administrative appeal by submitting a written request to the name and address set forth in the notice. The request must include a detailed explanation of the legal and factual bases for the provider's challenge to the determination and all documentation in support of the provider's position. If a request for an administrative appeal is not made within the required thirty (30) calendar days, the determination of noncompliance shall become final and the proposed sanction shall be imposed. Unless the department seeks to impose a sanction for which an administrative hearing is otherwise required by statute or regulation, the covered provider's appeal shall be limited to an administrative review of the record. Following the review, the covered provider shall be provided with a final written determination setting forth the findings of fact and conclusions of law that support the determination. If the provider is found to be non-compliant, the proposed sanction may be imposed forthwith.


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Staatssekretär (StS) ist in Deutschland die Amtsbezeichnung für das höchste statusrechtliche Amt, das ein Beamter in seinem Beamtenverhältnis erreichen kann, und zugleich eine Funktionsbezeichnung. Die Funktion eines Staatssekretärs kann ausnahmsweise auch einem außertariflich Beschäftigten übertragen werden. Der Staatssekretär vertritt den Minister innerministeriell in dessen Funktion als Behördenleiter, hat die höchste Dienststellung unterhalb der politischen Leitung inne und Weisungsrecht gegenüber den Beschäftigten des Ressorts. Gibt es mehrere Staatssekretäre in einem Ministerium, sind deren Kompetenzen gegeneinander abgegrenzt und beziehen sich in der Regel auf die Zuständigkeiten bestimmter Ministerialabteilungen. Staatssekretäre stehen grundsätzlich in einem Beamtenverhältnis auf Lebenszeit, können aber als politische Beamte jederzeit ohne Angabe von Gründen in den einstweiligen Ruhestand versetzt bzw. im Beamtenverhältnis auf Probe entlassen werden. Bei Beschäftigungsverhältnissen kommt eine Freistellung bzw. Kündigung in Betracht.

Zur Abgrenzung zum Parlamentarischen Staatssekretär auf Bundesebene, der kein Beamter ist, sondern wie der Minister in einem öffentlich-rechtlichen Amtsverhältnis steht, werden die Staatssekretäre umgangssprachlich zuweilen als "beamtete Staatssekretäre" bezeichnet.

Bund

Dienstposten für Staatssekretäre gibt es nur in obersten Bundesbehörden. Die meisten Staatssekretäre sind in den Bundesministerien tätig; ein (BMU) bis fünf (BMI) Staatssekretäre mit Beamtenstatus pro Ministerium. Es gibt etwa 31 Staatssekretäre im Bund (Stand 2015); im Jahr 2014 waren es 28 und 25 im Jahr 2013.

Staatssekretär außerhalb der Bundesministerien
Der "Chef des Bundespräsidialamtes" ist ein Staatssekretär. Protokollarisch ist er der ranghöchste (beamtete) Staatssekretär. Er leitet das Bundespräsidialamt und ist für die Tätigkeit der ihm unterstehenden Beschäftigten verantwortlich. Gleichzeitig ist er der erste Berater des Bundespräsidenten. Der Staatssekretär des Bundespräsidialamts hat das Recht, an den Kabinettssitzungen der Bundesregierung teilzunehmen. Bei den Sitzungen des Bundessicherheitsrates kommt ihm Beobachterstatus zu.

Seit dem 1. Januar 2008 ist der Direktor beim Deutschen Bundestag ein Staatssekretär. Davor war die jetzige Dienstpostenbezeichnung auch seine Amtsbezeichnung. Der Direktor beim Deutschen Bundestag ist nicht der Vertreter des Präsidenten des Deutschen Bundestages. Dies sind nur seine aus den Reihen der Bundestagsabgeordneten gewählten Stellvertreter.

Der Direktor des Bundesrates hat das Amt eines Staatssekretärs.

Im Bundeskanzleramt gibt es einen Staatssekretär mit besonderem Aufgabengebiet. Bis 2021 war er als Beauftragte für die Nachrichtendienste des Bundes tätig, seitdem ist er den Abteilungen für Finanzen, Wirtschaft und Verkehr sowie Europa vorgesetzt. Der Regierungssprecher, der an der Spitze des Presse- und Informationsamtes der Bundesregierung steht, ist ebenso Staatssekretär.

Dienstbezüge
Das Grundgehalt der Besoldungsgruppe B 11 für Staatssekretäre im Bund beläuft sich seit dem 1. April 2022 auf monatlich 15074,80 Euro. Hinzu kommen 552,76 Euro als sogenannte Ministerialzulage. Neben den Staatssekretären ist bei den Beamten nur das Amt des Präsidenten des Bundesrechnungshofes der Besoldungsgruppe B 11 zugeordnet. Daneben erhält auch der Bundesbeauftragte für den Datenschutz und die Informationsfreiheit, der kein Beamter ist, sondern in einem Amtsverhältnis steht, Amtsbezüge entsprechend der Besoldungsgruppe B 11.

Länder
In den Stadtstaaten Hamburg und Bremen lautet die Amtsbezeichnung der Spitzenbeamten der senatorischen Behörden Staatsrat statt Staatssekretär. In Bayern und Baden-Württemberg ist der Ministerialdirektor an Stelle eines Staatssekretärs der Vertreter des Ministers in Verwaltungsangelegenheiten; daneben gibt es, jedoch nicht in allen Ministerien beider Länder, den (Politischen) Staatssekretär als Vertreter des Ministers in politischen Angelegenheiten (entspricht dem Parlamentarischen Staatssekretär auf Bundesebene).

Dienstbezüge
Die Besoldungsordnungen der Länder weisen dem Amt unterschiedliche Besoldungsgruppen zwischen B 7 (Berlin) und B 10 (z. B. Hamburg) zu, die sich wiederum auf die unterschiedlichen Besoldungstabellen der Länder beziehen.

Literatur

Weblinks

Einzelnachweise

Staatssekretär (Deutschland) nach Bundesland
Amtsbezeichnung (Deutschland)