The group is responsible for the management of the corporation on a day-to-day basis. Despite its name, the board was not a board of directors, but rather is a management team. As RTÉ was not legally a company as defined by the Companies’ Acts, it did not have a board of directors as such. However that role is filled by the RTÉ Authority, who were the statutory body charged with running RTÉ under the Broadcasting Authority Acts 1960-2002. The Authority was however a part-time non-executive body, while the members of the Board work full time for RTÉ and are full-time executives of the corporation.This will change following the enactment of the Broadcasting Act 2009 and RTÉ will become a semi-state company under the Companies Acts.

The Executive Board reports to the RTÉ Board through the Director General.

As RTÉ is a state owned corporation, the Executive thus has responsibility to those householders with a television that pay the tv licence. It should be pointed out however, that legal responsibility for the service rests with the Board of Radio Telifís Éireann and not the Executive.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article RTÉ Executive Board, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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In 1995 Cinergi Pictures acquired an effects company from visual effects pioneer Doug Trumbull. It was originally known as Cinergi F/X but was subsequently named Mass Illusions. In 1997 Cinergi was acquired by Disney and Cinergi pulled out of Mass Illusions. The company was rescued from liquidation by the Columbus, Ohio based company Manex Financial Management Inc and in 1998 it was again renamed, this time to Manex Visual Effects, headed by managing director Robert Bobo.

In 1998 Manex completed work on the movie ”What Dreams May Come”. This featured an extended sequence in which the character played by Robin Williams entered a painted world. Manex provided the visual effects for this sequence and partly as a result of this work the movie was awarded an Academy Award for Visual Effects.

In 1999 Manex completed work on The Matrix which again received an Academy Award. The team at Manex, led by John Gaeta, created the signature Bullet time sequences from the movie. They also developed a system for image-based rendering allowing choreographed camera movements through computer graphic reconstructed sets (also known as Virtual Cinematography) for which Manex was awarded an Academy Award for Technical Achievement. Manex further developed their virtual cinematography work in movies such as Michael Jordan to the Max and Mission: Impossible 2.

In 1999 Manex expanded, acquiring the Los Angeles operations of the Computer Film Company. The company underwent reorganization including the formation on an interactive division. Manex Interactive received a New York International Independent Film & Video Festival award for its experimental short film Seriality. Manex Studios also converted thousands of square feet in old hanger space to film studios where dozens of commercials, special events and feature films were shot.

In 2001 Manex expected to carry out work on the Matrix sequels. However, after extensive pre-production Warner Brothers instead gave the work to ESC Entertainment (which was funded indirectly by Warner Bros.) in an effort to save money on the production. In addition, Manex was released from the bidding for the Matrix sequels because of internal mismanagement issues, and an inability to properly submit materials needed for the bid. Many artists became disillusioned and joined the ESC team, literally across the street. (ESC as in the Escape key on the qwerty keyboard). Manex was later involved in a litigation action against Warner Brothers regarding the bidding process, and lost revenues. Manex were, however, credited on Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions for their extensive work leading to the cutting edge effects.

Manex subsequently moved to Trenton, New Jersey and in 2002 became involved in a project to build movie production facilities.

Subsequently to management and key staff leaving in 2001 there has been little or no creative output from Manex.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Manex Visual Effects, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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He is a personality, who create firms and organizations. He is a teacher and coach of time management, sale and personal growth. His organization Martin & Co. is the parent company for another projects.

Category:Czech footballers

Category:SFC Opava players

Category:1983 births

Category:Living people

Category:Czech businesspeople
Adapted from the Wikipedia article Martin Balcárek, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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Rousseau uses a process for new product development and integration according to the Stage-Gate model in Project Management from Robert G. Cooper. The different steps are :

# preliminary and detailed study: market research, focus group, survey;

# conception: ideation, prototype, test bed, Computer-Aided Design (CAD);

# validation: audit 0, extern validation;

# launching: marketing, spec sheets, assembly guides, promotional literature, product specifications, and a production file that includes a technology roadmap;

# training: internal and external;

# post-mortem : statistics, customer information.

In 1997, Rousseau first obtained ISO standards 9002-1994 certification and in November 2003, they received ISO standards 9001-2000 (now 9001-2008). Rousseau strives to continuously make improvements and depends on its employees to play an important role in this endeavor. Different departments use Kaizen to apply the Toyota Production System methods. These methods include : 5S, the Poka-yoke, work cells, reducing batch sizes, Just-in-time, Kanban, the Andon system, cartography, etc. Also, Rousseau received the price Lachance-Morin in 2007, which is given every year by the board of directors of ASP Métal Électrique to companies committed to accident prevention.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Rousseau Metal, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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OS/360 MFT (Multitasking with a Fixed number of Tasks) provided multitasking: several memory partitions, each of a fixed size, were set up when the operating system was installed and when the operator redefined them. For example, there might be a small partition, two medium partitions, and a large partition. If there were two large programs ready to run, one would have to wait on the other until it finished and vacated the large partition.

OS/360 MVT (Multitasking with a Variable number of Tasks) was an enhancement that further refined memory usage. Instead of using fixed-size memory partitions, MVT allocated memory to regions for job steps as needed ”provided” there was enough ”contiguous” physical memory available. This was a significant advance over MFT’s memory management. But it had some weaknesses: if a job allocated memory dynamically (as most sort programs and database management systems do), the programmers had to estimate the job’s maximum memory requirement and pre-define it for MVT; a job step that contained a mixture of small and large programs would waste memory while the small programs were running; most seriously, memory could become fragmented, i.e., the memory not used by current jobs could be divided into uselessly small chunks between the areas used by current jobs, and the only remedy was to wait some current jobs finished before starting any new ones.

In the early 1970s IBM sought to mitigate these difficulties by introducing virtual memory (referred to by IBM as “virtual storage”), which allowed programs to request address spaces larger than physical memory. The original implementations had a single virtual address space, shared by all jobs. OS/VS1 was OS/360 MFT within a single virtual address space; OS/VS2 SVS was OS/360 MVT within a single virtual address space. So OS/VS1 and SVS in principle had the same disadvantages as MFT and MVT but the impacts were less severe because jobs could request much larger address spaces and because the requests came out of a 16 MiB pool even if the physical storage was smaller..

{| cellpadding=”5″ cellspacing=”0″ align=”right”

| align=”center” | MVS address spaces – global view

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In the mid-1970s IBM introduced MVS, which allowed an indefinite number of applications to run in different address spaces – two concurrent programs might try to access the same virtual memory address, but the virtual memory system redirected these requests to different areas of physical memory. Each of these address spaces consisted of 3 areas: operating system (one instance shared by all jobs); application area which was unique for each application; shared virtual area which was used for various purposes including inter-job communication. IBM promised that the application areas would always be at least 8MB.

MVS originally supported 24-bit addressing (i.e., up to 16MB). As the underlying hardware progressed it supported 31-bit (XA and ESA; up to 2048MB) and now (as z/OS) 64-bit addressing. Two of the most significant reasons for the rapid upgrade to 31-bit addressing were: the growth of large transaction-processing networks, mostly controlled by CICS, which ran in a single address space; the DB2 relational database management system needed more than 8MB of application address space in order to run efficiently (early versions were configured into two address spaces which communicated via the shared virtual area, but this imposed a significant overhead since all such communications had to be transmitted via the operating system).

The main user interfaces to MVS are: Job Control Language (JCL), which was originally designed for batch processing but from the 1970s onwards was also used to start and allocate resources to long-running interactive jobs such CICS; and TSO (Time Sharing Option), the interactive time-sharing interface, which was mainly used to run development tools and a few end-user information systems. ISPF is a TSO application for users on 3270-family terminals (and later, on VM as well) which allows the user to accomplish the same tasks as TSO’s command line but in a menu and form oriented manner, and with a full screen editor and file browser. TSO’s basic interface is command line, although facilities were added later for creating form-driven interfaces).

Early editions of MVS (mid-1970s) were among the first of the IBM OS series to support multiprocessor configurations, though it had previously been supported in the 1960s on a limited basis by the M65MP variant of OS/360 running on 360/65 and 360-67. The 360-67 had also hosted the multiprocessor capable TSS/360 and MTS operating systems. In tightly-coupled systems, two CPUs shared concurrent access to the same memory (and copy of the operating system) and peripherals, providing greater processing power and a degree of graceful degradation if one CPU failed. In loosely-coupled configurations each of a group of processors (single and / or tightly-coupled) had its own memory and operating system but shared peripherals and the operating system component JES3 allowed the whole group to be managed from one console – this provided greater resilience and enabled operators to decide which processor should run which jobs from a central job queue.

MVS took a major step forward in fault-tolerance, built on the earlier STAE facility, that IBM called ‘software recovery’. IBM decided to do this after years of practical real-world experience with MVT in the business world – system failures were now having major impacts on customer businesses and IBM decided to take a major design jump, to assume that despite the very best software development and testing techniques, that ‘problems WILL occur’. This profound assumption was pivotal in adding great percentages of fault-tolerance code to the system, but likely contributed to the system’s success in tolerating software and hardware failures. Statistical information is hard to come by to prove the value of these design features (how can you measure ‘prevented’ or ‘recovered’ problems?), but IBM has, in many dimensions, enhanced these fault-tolerant software recovery and rapid problem resolution features, over time.

This design specified a hierarchy of error-handling programs, in system (kernel/’privileged’) mode, called Functional Recovery Routines, and in user (‘task’ or ‘problem program’) mode, called “ESTAE” (Extended Specified Task Abnormal Exit routines) that were invoked in case the system detected an error (actually, hardware processor or storage error, or software error). The purpose of each recovery routine was to make the ‘mainline’ function reinvokable, capture error diagnostic data sufficient to debug the causing problem, and either ‘retry’ (reinvoke the mainline) or ‘percolate’ (escalate error processing to the next recovery routine in the hierarchy).

Thus, with each and every error: diagnostic data was captured, an attempt was made to perform a repair and keep the system up. The worst thing possible was to take down a user address space (a ‘job’) in the case of unrepaired errors. Although it was an initial design point, it was not until the most recent MVS version (z/OS), that recovery program was not only guaranteed its own recovery routine, but each recovery routine now has its own recovery routine.

This recovery structure was embedded in the basic MVS control program, and programming facilities are available and used by application program developers and 3rd party developers.

Practically, it has been observed that the MVS software recovery made problem debugging both easier and more difficult: Software recovery required that programs leave ‘tracks’ of where they were and what they were doing, thus facilitating debugging, but the fact that processing does not stop at the time of an error, but rather progresses, can make the tracks over-written. Early date capture at the time of the error maximizes debugging, and facilities exist for the recovery routines (task and system mode, both) to do this.

IBM included additional criteria for a major software problem that would require IBM service to repair it: If a mainline component failed to initiate software recovery, that was considered a reportable valid failure. Also, if a recovery routine failed to collect significant diagnostic data such that the original problem was solvable by data collected by that recovery routine, IBM standards dictated that this fault was reportable and required repair. Thus, IBM standards, when applied rigorously, would encourage continuous improvement.

IBM introduced an on-demand hypervisor, a major serviceability tool, called Dynamic Support System (DSS), in the first release of MVS. This facility could be invoked to initiate a session to create diagnostic procedures, or invoke already-stored procedures. The procedures ‘trapped’ special events, such as the loading of a program, device I/O, system procedure calls, and then triggered the activation of the previously-defined procedures. These procedures, which could be invoked recursively, allowed for reading and writing of data, and alteration of instruction flow. Program Event Recording hardware was used. Due to the overhead of this tool, it was removed from customer-available MVS systems. Program-Event Recording (PER) exploitation was performed by the enhancement of the diagnostic “SLIP” command with the introduction of the PER support (SLIP/Per) in SU 64/65 (1978).

Multiple copies of MVS (or other IBM operating systems) could share the

same machine if that machine was controlled by VM/370 – in this case VM/370 was the real operating system and regarded the “guest” operating systems as applications with unusually high privileges. As a result of later hardware enhancements one instance of an operating system (either MVS, or VM with guests, or other) could also occupy a Logical Partition (LPAR) instead of an entire physical system.

Multiple MVS instances can be organized and collectively administered in a structure called a ”systems complex” or ”sysplex”, introduced in September, 1990. Instances interoperate through a software component called a Cross-system Coupling Facility (XCF) and a hardware component called a ”Hardware Coupling Facility” (CF or Integrated Coupling Facility, ICF, if co-located on the same mainframe hardware). Multiple sysplexes can be joined via standard network protocols such as IBM’s proprietary Systems Network Architecture (SNA) or, more recently, via TCP/IP.

The z/OS operating system (MVS’ most recent descendant) also has native support to execute POSIX applications.

Files are properly called data sets in MVS. Names of those files are organized in ”catalogs” which are VSAM files themselves.

The native encoding scheme of IBM mainframes and their peripherals is Big Endian EBCDIC, but MVS provides hardware-accelerated services to perform translation and support of ASCII, Little Endian, and Unicode.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article MVS, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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