URI

A URI identifies a resource either by location or name. More often than not, most of us use URIs that defines a location to a resource. However, a URI does not have to specify the location of a specific representation. Citing and example of a W3C URI for their home image, they use the following URI: http://www.w3.org/Icons/w3c_home. Note the absence of a file extension. The URI for the w3c_home image is still universally unique, but it does not specify the specific representation of the image (either a GIF, PNG, or JPG). The selection of the representation can be determined by the web server through HTTP content negotiation. The Apache HTTPD server has had excellent support for content negotiation for many years. Oddly, few sites take advantage of HTTP content negotiation. The W3C is one web application that makes heavy use of URIs and content negotiation. URL A URL is a URI but a URI is not a URL. A URL is a specialization of URI that defines the network location of a specific representation for a given resource. Taking the same W3C example, there are actually 2 representations available for the w3c_home resource:

http://www.w3.org/Icons/w3c_home.gif http://www.w3.org/Icons/w3c_home.png

These URIs also define the file extension that indicates what content type is available at the URL. Through content negotiation, the web server will forward the user agent to the proper type, depending on the clients capabilities, when the URI http://www.w3.org/Icons/w3c_home is accessed.

More often than not, URI is the correct term to use when referring to the location of resources on the WWW.

URIs can be classified as locators (URLs), as names (URNs), or as both. A uniform resource name (URN) functions like a person's name, while a uniform resource locator (URL) resembles that person's street address. In other words: the URN defines an item's identity, while the URL provides a method for finding it.

Mutual Exclusion A way of making sure that if one process is using a shared modifiable data, the other processes will be excluded from doing the same thing.

Formally, while one process executes the shared variable, all other processes desiring to do so at the same time moment should be kept waiting; when that process has finished executing the shared variable, one of the processes waiting; while that process has finished executing the shared variable, one of the processes waiting to do so should be allowed to proceed. In this fashion, each process executing the shared data (variables) excludes all others from doing so simultaneously. This is called Mutual Exclusion.

Note that mutual exclusion needs to be enforced only when processes access shared modifiable data - when processes are performing operations that do not conflict with one another they should be allowed to proceed concurrently.

Mutual Exclusion Conditions

If we could arrange matters such that no two processes were ever in their critical sections simultaneously, we could avoid race conditions. We need four conditions to hold to have a good solution for the critical section problem (mutual exclusion).

No two processes may at the same moment inside their critical sections. No assumptions are made about relative speeds of processes or number of CPUs. No process should outside its critical section should block other processes. No process should wait arbitrary long to enter its critical section.