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18932568 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-software%20license | Free-software license | A free-software license is a notice that grants the recipient of a piece of software extensive rights to modify and redistribute that software. These actions are usually prohibited by copyright law, but the rights-holder (usually the author) of a piece of software can remove these restrictions by accompanying the software with a software license which grants the recipient these rights. Software using such a license is free software (or free and open-source software) as conferred by the copyright holder. Free-software licenses are applied to software in source code and also binary object-code form, as the copyright law recognizes both forms.
Comparison
Free-software licenses provide risk mitigation against different legal threats or behaviors that are seen as potentially harmful by developers:
History
Pre-1980s
In the early times of software, sharing of software and source code was common in certain communities, for instance academic institutions.
Before the US Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU) decided in 1974 that "computer programs, to the extent that they embody an author's original creation, are proper subject matter of copyright", software was not considered copyrightable. Therefore, software had no licenses attached and was shared as public-domain software. The CONTU decision plus court decisions such as Apple v. Franklin in 1983 for object code, clarified that the Copyright Act gave computer programs the copyright status of literary works and started the licensing of software.
Free-software licenses before the late 1980s were generally informal notices written by the developers themselves. These early licenses were of the "permissive" kind.
1980s
In the mid-1980s, the GNU project produced copyleft free-software licenses for each of its software packages. An early such license (the "GNU Emacs Copying Permission Notice") was used for GNU Emacs in 1985, which was revised into the "GNU Emacs General Public License" in late 1985, and clarified in March 1987 and February 1988. Likewise, the similar GCC General Public License was applied to the GNU Compiler Collection, which was initially published in 1987. The original BSD license is also one of the first free-software licenses, dating to 1988. In 1989, version1 of the GNU General Public License (GPL) was published. Version2 of the GPL, released in 1991, went on to become the most widely used free-software license.
1990s to 2000s
Starting in the mid-1990s and until the mid-2000s, the open-source movement pushed and focused the free-software idea forward in the wider public and business perception. In the Dot-com bubble time, Netscape Communications' step to release its webbrowser under a FOSS license in 1998, inspired many other companies to adapt to the FOSS ecosystem. In this trend companies and new projects (Mozilla, Apache foundation, and Sun, see also this list) wrote their own FOSS licenses, or adapted existing licenses. This License proliferation was later recognized as problem for the Free and open-source ecosystem due to the increased complexity of license compatibility considerations. While the creation of new licenses slowed down later, license proliferation and its impact are considered an ongoing serious challenge for the free and open-source ecosystem.
From the free-software licenses, the GNU GPL version2 has been tested in to court, first in Germany in 2004 and later in the USA. In the German case the judge did not explicitly discuss the validity of the GPL's clauses but accepted that the GPL had to be adhered to: "If the GPL were not agreed upon by the parties, defendant would notwithstanding lack the necessary rights to copy, distribute, and make the software 'netfilter/iptables' publicly available." Because the defendant did not comply with the GPL, it had to cease use of the software. The US case (MySQL vs Progress) was settled before a verdict was arrived at, but at an initial hearing, Judge Saris "saw no reason" that the GPL would not be enforceable.
Around 2004 lawyer Lawrence Rosen argued in the essay Why the public domain isn't a license software could not truly be waived into public domain and can't be interpreted as very permissive FOSS license, a position which faced opposition by Daniel J. Bernstein and others. In 2012 the dispute was finally resolved when Rosen accepted the CC0 as open source license, while admitting that contrary to his previous claims copyright can be waived away, backed by Ninth circuit decisions.
In 2007, after years of draft discussion, the GPLv3 as major update of the GPLv2 was released. The release was controversial due to the significant extended scope of the license, which made it incompatible with the GPLv2. Several major FOSS projects (Linux kernel, MySQL, BusyBox, Blender, VLC media player) decided against adopting the GPLv3.
On the other hand, in 2009, two years after the release of the GPLv3, Google open-source programs office manager Chris DiBona reported that the number of open-source projects licensed software that had moved to GPLv3 from GPLv2 was 50%, counting the projects hosted at Google Code.
2010s
In 2011, four years after the release of the GPLv3, 6.5% of all open-source licensed projects were GPLv3 while 42.5% were still GPLv2 according to Black Duck Software data. Following in 2011 451 Group analyst Matthew Aslett argued in a blog post that copyleft licenses went into decline and permissive licenses increased, based on statistics from Black Duck Software.
In 2015 according to Black Duck Software and GitHub statistics, the permissive MIT license dethroned the GPLv2 as most popular free-software license to the second place while the permissive Apache license follows already at third place. In June 2016 an analysis of Fedora Project's packages revealed as most used licenses the GPL, MIT, BSD, and the LGPL.
Definitions
OSI-approved open-source licenses
The group Open Source Initiative (OSI) defines and maintains a list of approved open-source licenses. OSI agrees with FSF on all widely used free-software licenses, but differ from FSF's list, as it approves against the Open Source Definition rather than the Free Software Definition. It considers Free Software Permissive license group to be a reference implementation of a Free Software license. Thus its requirements for approving licenses are different.
FSF-approved free-software licenses
The Free Software Foundation, the group that maintains the Free Software Definition, maintains a non-exhaustive list of free-software licences.
The Free Software Foundation prefers copyleft (share-alike) free-software licensing rather than permissive free-software licensing for most purposes. Its list distinguishes between free-software licenses that are compatible or incompatible with the FSF's copyleft GNU General Public License.
Conditions in free-software licenses
There exists an ongoing debate within the free-software community regarding the fine line between what restrictions can be applied and still be called "free".
Only "public-domain software" and software under a public-domain-like license is restriction-free. Examples of public-domain-like licenses are, for instance, the WTFPL and the CC0 license. Permissive licenses might carry small obligations like attribution of the author but allow practically all code use cases. Certain licenses, namely the copyleft licenses, include intentionally stronger restrictions (especially on the distribution/distributor) in order to force derived projects to guarantee specific rights which can't be taken away.
Copyleft
The free-software share-alike licenses written by Richard Stallman in the mid-1980s pioneered a concept known as "copyleft". Ensuing copyleft provisions stated that when modified versions of free software are distributed, they must be distributed under the same terms as the original software. Hence they are referred to as "share and share alike" or "quid pro quo". This results in the new software being open source as well. Since copyleft ensures that later generations of the software grant the freedom to modify the code, this is "free software". Non-copyleft licenses do not ensure that later generations of the software will remain free.
Developers who use GPL code in their product must make the source code available to anyone when they share or sell the object code. In this case, the source code must also contain any changes the developers may have made. If GPL code is used but not shared or sold, the code is not required to be made available and any changes may remain private. This permits developers and organizations to use and modify GPL code for private purposes (that is, when the code or the project is not sold or otherwise shared) without being required to make their changes available to the public.
Supporters of GPL claim that by mandating that derivative works remain under the GPL, it fosters the growth of free software and requires equal participation by all users. Opponents of GPL claim that "no license can guarantee future software availability" and that the disadvantages of GPL outweigh its advantages. Some also argue that restricting distribution makes the license less free. Whereas proponents would argue that not preserving freedom during distribution would make it less free. For example, a non-copyleft license does not grant the author the freedom to see modified versions of his or her work if it gets publicly published, whereas a copyleft license does grant that freedom.
Patent retaliation
During the 1990s, free-software licenses began including clauses, such as patent retaliation, in order to protect against software patent litigation cases – a problem which had not previously existed. This new threat was one of the reasons for writing version3 of the GNU GPL in 2006. In recent years, a term coined tivoization describes a process where hardware restrictions are used to prevent users from running modified versions of the software on that hardware, in which the TiVo device is an example. It is viewed by the FSF as a way to turn free software to effectively non-free, and is why they have chosen to prohibit it in GPLv3.
Most newly written free-software licenses since the late 1990s include some form of patent retaliation clauses. These measures stipulate that one's rights under the license (such as to redistribution), may be terminated if one attempts to enforce patents relating to the licensed software, under certain circumstances. As an example, the Apple Public Source License may terminate a user's rights if said user embarks on litigation proceedings against them due to patent litigation. Patent retaliation emerged in response to proliferation and abuse of software patents.
Hardware restrictions
Version3 of the GNU GPL includes specific language prohibiting additional restrictions being enforced by hardware restrictions and digital rights management (DRM), a practice FSF calls tivoization after Tivo used GPL’d software on devices that disallowed user modification of that software.
Attribution, disclaimers and notices
The majority of free-software licenses require that modified software not claim to be unmodified. Some licenses also require that copyright holders be credited. One such example is version2 of the GNU GPL, which requires that interactive programs that print warranty or license information, may not have these notices removed from modified versions intended for distribution.
Practical problems with licenses
License compatibility
Licenses of software packages containing contradictory requirements render it impossible to combine source code from such packages in order to create new software packages. License compatibility between a copyleft license and another license is often only a one-way compatibility. This "one-way compatibility" characteristic is, for instanced, criticized by the Apache Foundation, who provides the more permissive Apache license which doesn't have this characteristic. Non-copyleft licenses, such as the FOSS permissive licenses, have a less complicated license interaction and normally exhibit better license compatibility. For example, if one license says "modified versions must mention the developers in any advertising materials", and another license says "modified versions cannot contain additional attribution requirements", then, if someone combined a software package which uses one license with a software package which uses the other, it would be impossible to distribute the combination because these contradictory requirements cannot be fulfilled simultaneously. Thus, these two packages would be license-incompatible. When it comes to copyleft software licenses, they are not inherently compatible with other copyleft licenses, even the GPLv2 is, by itself, not compatible with the GPLv3.
Purpose of use
Restrictions on use of a software ("use restrictions") are generally unacceptable according to the FSF, OSI, Debian, or the BSD-based distributions. Examples include prohibiting that the software be used for non-private applications, for military purposes, for comparison or benchmarking, for good use, for ethically questionable means, or in commercial organizations.
While some restrictions on user freedom, e.g. concerning nuclear war, seem to enjoy moral support among most free software developers, it is generally believed that such agendas should not be served through software licenses; among other things because of practical aspects such as resulting legal uncertainties and problems with enforceability of vague, broad and/or subjective criteria or because tool makers are generally not held responsible for other people’s use of their tools. Nevertheless some projects include legally non-binding pleas to the user, prominently SQLite. Among the repeated attempts by developers to regulate user behavior through the license that sparked wider debate are Douglas Crockford’s (joking) “no evil” clause, which affected the release process of the Debian distribution in 2012 and got the JSMin-PHP project expelled from Google Code, the addition of a pacifist condition based on Asimov’s First Law of Robotics to the GPL for the distributed computing software GPU in 2005, as well as several software projects trying to exclude use by big cloud providers.
Definition conflicts
As there are several defining organizations and groups who publish definitions and guidelines about FOSS licenses, notably the FSF, the OSI, the Debian project, and the BSDs, there are sometimes conflicting opinions and interpretations.
Permissive versus copyleft opinions
Many users and developers of BSD-based operating systems have a different position on licensing. The main difference is the belief that the copyleft licenses, particularly the GNU General Public License (GPL), are undesirably complicated and/or restrictive. The GPL requires any derivative work to also be released according to the GPL while the BSD license does not. Essentially, the BSD license's only requirement is to acknowledge the original authors, and poses no restrictions on how the source code may be used.
As a result, BSD code can be used in proprietary software that only acknowledges the authors. For instance, Microsoft Windows NT 3.1 and macOS have proprietary IP stacks which are derived from BSD-licensed software. In extreme cases, the sub- or re-licensing possibilities with BSD or other permissive licenses might prevent further use in the open-source ecosystem. For instance, MathWorks' FileExchange repository offers the BSD license for user contributions but prevents with additional terms of use any usage beside their own proprietary MATLAB software, for instance with the FOSS GNU Octave software.
Supporters of the BSD license argue that it is more free than the GPL because it grants the right to do anything with the source code, provided that the attribution is preserved. The approach has led to BSD code being used in widely used proprietary software. Proponents of the GPL point out that once code becomes proprietary, users are denied the freedoms that define free software. As a result, they consider the BSD license less free than the GPL, and that freedom is more than a lack of restriction. Since the BSD license restricts the right of developers to have changes recontributed to the community, neither it nor the GPL is "free" in the sense of "lacking any restrictions."
Debian
The Debian project uses the criteria laid out in its Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG). The only notable cases where Debian and Free Software Foundation disagree are over the Artistic License and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). Debian accepts the original Artistic License as being a free software license, but FSF disagrees. This has very little impact however since the Artistic License is almost always used in a dual-license setup, along with the GNU General Public License.
Controversial borderline cases
The vast majority of free software uses undisputed free-software licenses; however, there have been many debates over whether or not certain other licenses qualify for the definition.
Examples of licenses that provoked debate were the 1.x series of the Apple Public Source License, which were accepted by the Open Source Initiative but not by the Free Software Foundation or Debian and the RealNetworks Public Source License, which was accepted by Open Source Initiative and Free Software Foundation but not by Debian.
Also, the FSF recommended GNU Free Documentation License, which is incompatible with the GPL, was considered "non-free" by the Debian project around 2006, Nathanael Nerode, and Bruce Perens. The FSF argues that documentation is qualitatively different from software and is subject to different requirements. Debian accepted, in a later resolution, that the GNU FDL complied with the Debian Free Software Guidelines when the controversial "invariant section" is removed, but considers it "still not free of trouble". Notwithstanding, most GNU documentation includes "invariant sections". Similarly, the FLOSS Manuals foundation, an organization devoted to creating manuals for free software, decided to eschew the GFDL in favor of the GPL for its texts in 2007, citing the incompatibility between the two, difficulties in implementing the GFDL, and the fact that the GFDL "does not allow for easy duplication and modification", especially for digital documentation.
SLUC is a software license published in Spain in December 2006 to allow all but military use. The writers of the license maintain it is free software, but the Free Software Foundation says it is not free because it infringes the so-called "zero freedom" of the GPL, that is, the freedom to use the software for any purpose.
Market share
While historically the most widely used FOSS license has been the GPLv2, in 2015, according to Black Duck Software the permissive MIT license dethroned the GPLv2 to the second place while the permissive Apache license follows at third place.
A study from 2012, which used publicly available data, criticized Black Duck Software for not publishing their methodology used in collecting statistics. Daniel German, professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Victoria in Canada, presented a talk in 2013 about the methodological challenges in determining which are the most widely used free-software licenses, and showed how he could not replicate the result from Black Duck Software.
A GitHub study in 2015 on their statistical data found that the MIT license was the most prominent FOSS license on that platform.
In June 2016 an analysis of the Fedora Project's packages showed as most used licenses the GPL family, followed by MIT, BSD, the LGP family, Artistic (for Perl packages), LPPL (for texlive packages), and ASL. The GNU GPLv2+ was the single most popular license
See also
Comparison of free and open-source software licenses
Developer Certificate of Origin
End-user license agreement
License-free software
List of free-content licenses
Public domain
Software license
Notes
References
External links
The Free Software Definition, by the Free Software Foundation.
The Free Software Foundation's list of free and non-free licenses
Debian's license information page
Open Source Initiative's list of licenses
OpenBSD's "goals" page describes its view of free software
Transcripts of license strategy discussions , mostly of Stallman and Moglen, during the drafting of GPLv3
Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing, by Andrew M. St. Laurent
Report on free software business models and licensing (58 pages)
A 45-page licensing primer by Software Freedom Law Center
Open Source Best Practices
Terms of service |
26516614 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese%20espionage%20in%20the%20United%20States | Chinese espionage in the United States | The United States has often accused the government of the People's Republic of China of attempting to unlawfully acquire U.S. military technology and classified information as well as trade secrets of U.S. companies in order to support China's long-term military and commercial development. Chinese government agencies and affiliated personnel have been accused of using a number of methods to obtain U.S. technology (using U.S. law to avoid prosecution), including espionage, exploitation of commercial entities, and a network of scientific, academic and business contacts. Espionage cases include Larry Wu-Tai Chin, Katrina Leung, Gwo-Bao Min, Chi Mak and Peter Lee.
In addition to traditional espionage, China partners civilian Chinese companies with American businesses to acquire technology and economic data and uses cyber spying to penetrate the computer networks of U.S. businesses and government agencies; an example is the December 2009 Operation Aurora. U.S. law enforcement officials have identified China as the most active foreign power involved in the illegal acquisition of American technology. On May 19, 2014, the United States Department of Justice announced that a Federal grand jury had indicted five People's Liberation Army officers for stealing confidential business information and intellectual property from U.S. commercial firms and planting malware on their computers.
Methods
China has used a variety of methods to gather intelligence in the United States. Individuals attempt to obtain targeted information from open sources such as libraries, research institutions and unclassified databases. Chinese travelers are recruited to carry out specific intelligence activities, and China debriefs returnees from exchange programs, trade missions and scientific-cooperation programs. Chinese citizens may be coerced to cooperate.
Much technology acquisition occurs through commerce and commercial regulations. The regulatory and commercial environment in China pressures American and other foreign companies to transfer technology, capital and manufacturing expertise, especially in defense-related or dual-use industries such as computers, to their Chinese partners as part of doing business in China's huge, lucrative markets. Chinese agents purchase high-tech equipment through front organizations in Hong Kong. China also uses state-run firms to purchase American companies with access to the targeted technology.
China also accesses foreign technology through industrial espionage, with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials rating China's industrial-espionage and theft operations as the leading threat to U.S. technological security. In 2021, Acting NCSC Director Michael Orlando estimated that China stole between $200 billion and $600 billion worth of American intellectual property every year. Between October 2002 and January 2003 five Chinese businessmen were accused of illegally shipping equipment and trade secrets from California to China, and U.S. officials prevented a Chinese man from shipping a new, high-speed computer used in classified projects (including nuclear-weapons development) from Sandia National Laboratories.
In July 2020, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray called China the "greatest long-term threat" to the United States. He said that "the FBI is now opening a new China-related counterintelligence case every 10 hours. Of the nearly 5,000 active counterintelligence cases currently under way across the country, almost half are related to China." For example, Eric Swalwell, who serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, was in the past targeted by a Chinese woman believed to be a clandestine officer of China's Ministry of State Security. The alleged Chinese spy later participated in fundraising for Swalwell's 2014 congressional election bid and helped place an intern inside Swalwell's congressional office. FBI gave Swalwell a "defensive briefing" in 2015, informing him that woman was a suspected Chinese agent.
Nuclear espionage
A 1999 United States House of Representatives Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military and Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China report, known as the Cox Report, warned that China has stolen classified information on every thermonuclear warhead in the country's intercontinental ballistic missile arsenal. Information is collected through espionage, reviews of U.S. technical and academic publications and interaction with U.S. scientists. China tasks a large number of individuals to collect small pieces of information (which are collated and analyzed), and individual agents can more easily escape suspicion. U.S. government personnel suspect that China's intelligence-gathering efforts directed towards the development of modern nuclear weapons are focused on the Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, Sandia and Oak Ridge National Laboratories. China is known to have stolen classified information on the W-56 Minuteman II ICBM, the W-62 Minuteman III ICBM, the W-70 Lance short-range ballistic missile (SRBM), the W-76 Trident C-4 submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM), the W-78 Minuteman III Mark 12A ICBM, the W-87 Peacekeeper ICBM and the W-88 Trident D-5 SLBM and weapon-design concepts and features.
In 2016, the U.S. Justice Department charged China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN) with stealing nuclear secrets from the United States. The Guardian reported: "According to the US Department of Justice, the FBI has discovered evidence that China General Nuclear Power (CGN) has been engaged in a conspiracy to steal US nuclear secrets stretching back almost two decades. Both CGN and one of the corporation’s senior advisers, Szuhsiung Ho, have been charged with conspiring to help the Chinese government develop nuclear material in a manner that is in clear breach of US law."
Cyberwarfare
China conducts political and corporate espionage to access the networks of financial, defense and technology companies and research institutions in the United States. Email attachments attempting to enter the networks of U.S. companies and organizations exploit security weaknesses in software. A recipient opens an email attachment, apparently from a familiar source, containing a program which embeds in the recipient's computer. The remotely controlled program allows an attacker to access the recipient's email, send sensitive documents to specific addresses and turns on such instruments as web cameras or microphones.
In January 2010, Google reported "a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google". According to investigators, the Google cyber-attack targeted the Gmail accounts of Chinese human-rights activists. At least 34 other companies have been attacked, including Yahoo, Symantec, Adobe, Northrop Grumman and Dow Chemical.
In January 2013, The New York Times reported that it was the victim of hacking attempts originating from China during the previous four months after it published an article on Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. According to the newspaper, the "attacks appear to be part of a broader computer espionage campaign against American news media companies that have reported on Chinese leaders and corporations."
Chinese cyber-attacks seem to target strategic industries in which China lags; attacks on defense companies target weapons-systems information, and attacks on technology companies seek source code critical to software applications. Operation Aurora emphasized what senior U.S. government officials have called an increasingly serious cyber threat to critical industries.
On August 6, 2020, U.S. President Donald Trump officially extended restrictions against Chinese-owned apps by signing two executive orders that would ban U.S. residents from doing business with TikTok and WeChat, a popular messaging platform run by Tencent Holdings Ltd. The ban was enacted, citing the security risk of leaving Americans’ personal data exposed. However, on September 28, 2020, the ban was temporarily blocked by a federal judge.
2010–2012 compromise of CIA network
Between 2010 and 2012, China was able to arrest or kill between 18 and 20 CIA assets within China. A joint CIA/FBI counterintelligence operation, codenamed "Honey Bear", was unable to definitively determine the source of the compromises, though theories include the existence of a mole, cyber-espionage, or poor tradecraft. Mark Kelton, then the deputy director of the National Clandestine Service for Counterintelligence, was initially skeptical that a mole was to blame.
In January 2018, a former CIA officer named Jerry Chun Shing Lee was arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport, on suspicion of helping dismantle the CIA's network of informants in China.
Cyber cases
In 2007 the computer security company McAfee alleged that China was actively involved in cyberwarfare, accusing the country of cyber-attacks on India, Germany and the United States; China denied knowledge of these attacks.
In September 2007 former senior U.S. information security official Paul Strassmann said that 735,598 computers in the U.S. were "infested with Chinese zombies"; computers infected in this manner can theoretically form a botnet capable of carrying out unsophisticated yet potentially dangerous denial-of-service attacks. A cyber spying network known as GhostNet, using servers primarily based in China, was reported as tapping into the classified documents of government and private organizations in 103 countries (including Tibetan exiles); China denied the claim.
In a July 2021 joint statement with NATO, the EU, and other Western nations, the US accused the Ministry of State Security of perpetrating several cyberattacks, most notably the 2021 Microsoft Exchange Server data breach. Additionally, the Justice Department credited four Chinese nationals (accused of working for the MSS) with a hacking campaign targeting government, academic, and private institutions; the individuals were each charged with one count of conspiracy to commit computer fraud and conspiracy to commit economic espionage.
APT 1
In December 2009 and January 2010 a cyberattack, known as Operation Aurora, was launched from China on Google and over 20 other companies. Google said that the attacks originated from China, and it would "review the feasibility" of its business operations in China as a result of the incident. According to Google, at least 20 other companies in a variety of sectors were also targeted by the attacks. According to McAfee, "this is the highest profile attack of its kind that we have seen in recent memory."
In May 2014, a U.S. Federal grand jury indicted five Chinese military officers for cybercrimes and stealing trade secrets. It was alleged that the Chinese officers hacked into the computers of six U.S. companies to steal information that would provide an economic advantage to Chinese competitors, including Chinese state-owned enterprises. China said that the charges were "made-up", and the indictment would damage trust between the two nations. Although the indictments have been called relatively meaningless, they could limit travel by the officers due to U.S. extradition treaties.
APT 3
In November 2017, the Department of Justice charged three Chinese employees of Guangzhou Bo Yu Information Technology Company Limited with hacking into corporate entities in the United States, including Siemens AG, Moody's Analytics, and Trimble Inc.
APT 10
Since at least 2013, a Chinese espionage group called TEMP.Periscope by FireEye is reported to have been engaged in espionage against maritime-related subjects. FireEye reported that the information targeted was likely of commercial and economic importance.
The People's Liberation Army (PLA) was tied to economic espionage involving stolen business plans, intellectual property, and infringed on private conversations from Westinghouse Electric and United States Steel Corporation.
Chinese hackers have stolen information on the Patriot missile system, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, and the U.S. Navy's new Littoral combat ship. These blueprints of U.S. weapon and control systems were stolen to advance the development of Chinese weaponry.
The protection of the South China Sea is highly important to the U.S. because a Chinese Cyber Unit has already succeeded in an intrusion into the Philippine's government and military networks. Military documents, internal communications, and other sensitive materials related to the dispute were lost due to the cyber invasion.
In January and February 2018, Chinese hackers reportedly stole 614 gigabytes of data from a Naval Undersea Warfare Center-affiliated contractor. The compromised material reportedly included information on a project dubbed "Sea Dragon", as well as United States Navy submarine cryptographic systems and electronic warfare.
The New York Times reported that Russia and China are routinely eavesdropping on calls from an iPhone used by President Donald Trump, with China reportedly attempting to influence the President by identifying and influencing the people Trump is regularly in contact with.
According to the cybersecurity firm Area 1, hackers working for the People's Liberation Army Strategic Support Force compromised the networks of the AFL–CIO in order to gain information on negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
As part of a campaign called Cloudhopper, hackers working for the Ministry of State Security compromised the networks of IBM and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and used that access to compromise those companies' clients. The Cloudhopper attacks began no later than 2014, and included targets in Brazil, Germany, India, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
In October 2018, Bloomberg Businessweek published a story which alleged that Supermicro's contractors in China had been compromised by the People's Liberation Army to implant microchips with hardware backdoors in its servers. The report was widely disputed by the sources and companies who were named therein.
In March 2019, iDefense reported that Chinese hackers had launched cyberattacks on dozens of academic institutions in an attempt to gain information on technology being developed for the United States Navy. Some of the targets included the University of Hawaii, the University of Washington, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The attacks have been underway since at least April 2017.
In July 2020, the United States Department of Justice charged two Chinese hackers who allegedly targeted intellectual property and confidential business information, including COVID-19 research. The two hackers allegedly worked with the Guangdong State Security Department of the Ministry of State Security.
Aerospace
In an effort to steal the technology to enable Chinese companies to supply the components for the Comac C919 aircraft, the Chinese engaged in both cyber and humanint operations. According to a report from cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike and a US Justice Department indictment, from 2010 to 2015 the Chinese cyberthreat actor Turbine Panda, linked to the Ministry of State Security’s Jiangsu Bureau, penetrated a number of the C919's foreign components manufacturers including Ametek, Capstone Turbine, GE Aviation, Honeywell, Safran, and others and stole intellectual property and industrial processes data with the aim of transitioning component manufacturing to Chinese companies. The report stated that the operations involved both cyber intrusion and theft as well as HUMINT operations, in most cases using a piece of code custom written for this industrial espionage operation.
As of 2019, four people have been arrested in the US as a result of investigations into this economic espionage and theft of trade secrets. Yanjun Xu, a senior intelligence officer of the MSS, was arrested in Belgium and extradited to the US and is alleged to have been involved in recruiting company insiders at multiple aerospace and aviation companies like GE Aviation to gain knowledge about technologies including those involving the use of composite materials in jet engine turbine blades.
Higher education
In September 2020, it was reported that the U.S. canceled the visas of 1,000 Chinese students and researchers. The authorities claimed that the students had ties with the Chinese military and also accused some of them of conducting espionage. The U.S. began revoking these visas June 1, 2020.
In December 2020, Axios reported an investigation into the case of a suspected Chinese spy who was enrolled as a student at a Bay Area university. The suspected intelligence operative, known as Christine Fang, developed extensive ties with politicians at local and national levels between 2011 and 2015, including U.S. representative for California's 15th congressional district Eric Swalwell. She was reportedly having sexual or romantic relationships with at least two mayors in the Midwest, according to a former elected official and a U.S. intelligence official.
In January 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice arrested Dr. Charles Lieber, Chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. Dr. Lieber was also the Principal Investigator of the Lieber Research Group at Harvard University, giving him direct access to information on nanoscience. The grants he received to oversee this work required him to disclose any foreign financial transactions. In 2011, Dr. Lieber was granted the title of "Strategic Scientist" at the Wuhan University of Technology. He received this role under China's Thousand Talents Program, which seeks to bring the expertise of prominent scientists to China and has been accused of stealing foreign information. He was required to work for the Wuhan lab for at least 9 months out of the year, and he got paid $50,000 per month. Dr. Lieber failed to inform the relevant institutions of his role, and he outright lied about his involvement in the program in 2018 and 2019.
See also
CIA activities in China
Chinese intelligence activity abroad
Cold War
Second Cold War
China–United States trade war
Cox Report
Criticism of Confucius Institutes#Espionage
Chinese Students and Scholars Association
Cyberwarfare by China
Economic and Industrial Espionage
GhostNet
Operation Aurora
Gregg Bergersen
List of Chinese spy cases in the United States
Notes
References
Citations
Sources
Works cited
deGraffenreid, Kenneth (ed.), The Unanimous and Bipartisan Report of the House Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China ("The Cox Report"). Select Committee, U.S. House of Representatives (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1999).
Eftimiades, Nicholas, Chinese Intelligence Operations (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1994).
Wortzel, Larry M., Hearing on "Enforcement of Federal Espionage Laws." Testimony before the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security of the House Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. House of Representatives, January 29, 2008.
External links
United States and Canadian computer security researchers monitor a Chinese cyber-spying operation
Chinese coordinated assault on the email accounts of journalists, academics, and human rights activists
Google decides to lift censorship in China
More journalists have their email accounts hacked
Google reaction to Chinese cyber attack
More examples of how China steals U.S. Military Secrets
Britain warns businesses of the Chinese spying threat
Vast Chinese espionage campaign
Chinese spy buys Pentagon secrets
Espionage in China
Espionage in the United States
Cyberwarfare in China
Cyberwarfare in the United States
China–United States relations
1990s in the United States
2000s in the United States
2010s in the United States |
42104661 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savukku | Savukku | Savukku () is an anonymous, non-profit, whistle blowing website. The website has been called the Tamil's WikiLeaks. The site publishes articles in Tamil and English. It is known for leaking sensational 2G spectrum case taped conversation and publishing articles on corrupt government employees, politicians, judges, journalists and socio-political affairs. It is believed to be run by Savukku Shankar alias achimuthu shankar, a former lower division clerk in the Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-corruption. On 28 February 2014, the website was blocked on Madras High Court orders after a writ for defamation was filed by a Sun TV employee, Mahalakshmi. In a different matter, Shankar was charged under Sections 66, 70 and 72 of the Information Technology Act, alleged to have leaked the conversation between former Chief Secretary to Government and former Director of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption. He was acquitted on 24 February 2017.
Overview
The website publishes articles anonymously, they say, about corrupt government employees, politicians, judges and journalists. It was started in September 2010. It does not give any information about the owner(s) or the publisher(s) of posts on website, but is said to have run by Achimuthu Shankar, a former lower division clerk in the Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-corruption. In 2008, Shankar allegedly leaked the transcript of a taped conversation between S. K. Upadhyay, then director of DVAC, and L. K. Tripathi, then chief secretary of the state to the Deccan Chronicle English daily newspaper. He was found guilty and arrested and was subjected to the third-degree torture and was forced to swear against some officers. After being released on bail, he started collecting information through Right to information act, and later made a blog post to make public the information he has gathered. It allegedly led to the second arrest of Shankar, but on charges of road rage. Thereafter he converted his blog into a website called, Savukku to expose corruption.
The first blog post was published anonymously on the website in September 2010 and it presently has around 960 posts since then including the 2G taped conversation.
In 2010-2011, when Aam Aadmi Party leader and senior advocate Prashant Bhushan released the tapes of alleged conversation between Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam Rajya Sabha member Kanimozhi and the then Tamil Nadu police chief of intelligence, Jaffar Sait, it was said to have made public by the website three days earlier.
On 1 February 2014, the website had publicly posted four tapes exposing the conversation between Kanimozhi and former additional director general of police Jaffer Sait and between Jaffer Sait and Sharad Kumar Reddy, a former director of Kalaignar TV owned by Karunanidhi. The authenticity of the taped conversation has not yet been challenged by either Kanimozhi or Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party.
Block
Mahalakshmi, an advocate and Sun TV newsreader had lodged a defamation case against the website for writing about her personal life, that she claimed have degraded her reputation. She later filed a writ petition in the Madras High Court citing inactivity of the police.
On 28 February 2014, the Madras High Court ordered the Joint Secretary, Cyber Law Division of Union Department of Information Technology to block the website within ten days and called other affected individuals to lodge separate police cases, on hearing the writ petition filed by Mahalakshmi. The court said that,
On 2 March 2014, following the court orders to block the website, many proxies were created to evade the block. The website continued to host mirrors of the site Savukku, this time naming the Judge of the Madras High Court who is hearing the case.
Achimuthu Shankar
Achimuthu Shankar is a former lower division clerk in the Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-corruption, which he joined in 1991. In 2008, he allegedly made public sensational information which included taped conversation between S. K. Upadhyay, then Director of Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-corruption, and L. K. Tripathi, then Chief Secretary, through the Deccan Chronicle English daily newspaper. Following the leak of sensitive information in public, the then Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam government of the Tamil Nadu state appointed a commission headed by Judge P. Shanmugam to probe the leak. Shankar was found guilty by the commission of inquiry. However, Shankar denied the allegations and said, charges were false and he was contesting them in courts. He also said that, he was made to face the third degree torture and was forced to bear witness against some officials. He was later released on bail.
In mid-2010, He published a blog post of information collected through the Right to information act and he was arrested on the charges of road rage next day. He said, "The next day I was arrested on some false charges of road rage. I was expecting them to [arrest me]. They did not disappoint".
He later upgraded his blog into a website after receiving encouragement by readers. In 2011, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam government lost the polls to form the government. Shankar opined, even though the new government, many stuffs related to social welfare still do not reach to public. He said,
Shankar is an admirer of V. Prabhakaran, chief of LTTE. The website had a picture of V. Prabhakaran on one side and a picture of a cowboy with a whip on the other side of the header. He continued to publish articles along with contesting the suspension of him from Department of Vigilance and Anti-corruption. He is called the Tamil's Julian Assange.
The website was the first to release the 2G tapes ahead of Prasant Bushan. An audio of conversation between, Kalaignar TV MD, Sharad Kumar and former TN Intelligence Chief Jaffer Sait IPS.
The website was the first to expose the arithmetical errors in the judgment of Justice CR Kumarasamy, acquitting Selvi Jayalalitha, CM of Tamil Nadu in the month of May 2015
Arrests
On 31 January 2014, A Puducherry-based web designer Murugaiyan was arrested by the Cyber Crime Police of Chennai for designing the website. After 21 days of imprisonment, Murugaiyan was released on bail by the Madras High Court.
On 24 July 2014, Following the Madras High Court orders, Central Crime Branch arrested Pothi Kalimuthu on charge of hosting the website. He allegedly did own the website domain located in France and maintained a server located in Singapore for the website. The CCB officers had to make a request to the France Telecom through the Department of Telecommunications to reveal the address of the owner of the website domain.
In a conversation, Achimuthu Shankar said to Indian Express English newspaper that, he met Kalimuthu online. Kalimuthu offered his help with making of new website after the original website was blocked on court orders and refused to take money for hosting the website.
Protest
Professor A., a human rights activist said that, one may not necessarily agree with the contents posted by the website but the blocking the website is unacceptable. The affected individuals are free to take legal action separately.
P. Sundarajan, a lawyer opined that, this is most unfortunate, and the particular Judge should refrain himself from hearing the case because he was also written about by the website and this order is nothing but a mockery of justice.
Citizens for Freedom of Expression, an organisation comprising senior advocates and activists said that they will prosecute in the case on behalf of the website and said that, the court order is a serious threat to freedom of expression.
A former BBC Tamil employee T.N. Gopalan filed a PIL in the Madras High Court, requesting the court to resist government from blocking the website except in the case described in the Information Technology Rules, 2009. Gopalan said that, he was not expecting the block on website which has discovered several scams and investigates and publishes information in public welfare.
J. Anbazhgan, president of Chennai Union of Journalists said that the union believes that the complaint filed by Mahalakhsmi is not accurate and is related to the ownership of 2G tapes by Shankar and a representative from the union has met the chief minister J. Jayalalitha, to provide relief to Shankar.
Acquittal
Savukku Shankar was acquitted by the XVII Additional Sessions Court Chennai on 24 February 2017. Shankar was charged under Sections 66, 70 and 72 of the Information Technology Act and was alleged to have leaked the conversation between former Chief Secretary to Government and former Director of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption.
References
Information sensitivity
Whistleblowing
2010 establishments in India
Internet properties established in 2010
Indian whistleblowers
Indian news websites
Internet censorship in India |
9812891 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mina%20%28drum%29 | Mina (drum) | The Mina drum (Tambor Mina) is the largest of the drums that have origins in the Barlovento, Miranda region of Venezuela. They are used during the celebrations of St. John the Baptist and the Midsummer. It is a specialized form of the Cumaco drum. Its origins have been traced to the Mina civilization, which occupied what is now Benin in Africa.
Organology
The drum is made out of the trunk of the guava tree (or other hardwood) that has been naturally hollowed out by termites. It can measure up to 2m (6 ft) in length, with a diameter varying (because it fluctuates with the available material) between 20 and 40 cm (about 10-14 inches). One end is capped with a head made of cow or deer hide held in place with a peg and rope assembly. The other end is open.
Playing style
The mina is placed on a fork to elevate the drum head to the soloist's chest level. The soloist holds a pair of sticks to beat the main pattern and improvisations on the drum head. A group of accompanists stand and squat alongside and beat an ostinato pattern with sticks on the shell. A smaller drum, named curbata plays the basic pattern with little or no deviation. Unlike the pattern of the redondo drum, which is divided in multiples of 3 beats per measure, the pattern of the Mina battery is based on multiples of 2 beats per measure.
Cultural significance
The mina battery is an integral part of the summer celebrations in Afro-Venezuelan communities of North-Central Venezuela (the region called Barlovento). The celebrations of the Summer Solstice coincides with the day of San Juan Bautista (St. John the Baptist), which may account for the Saint's popularity in Barlovento. The mina (also called Tambor Grande or large drum) is set up on a fixed location, where people converge to hear and dance to the performance. In contrast, the smaller, lighter redondo battery (called Tambor Pequeño or small drum) is carried around by the musicians and played at different points of the procession dedicated to St. John.
Cumaco or Mina?
The Mina is a specialized form of the cumaco drum. The main differences between the two terms are:
Cumacos are widespread in many Afro-Venezuelan communities. The Mina is unique to Barlovento.
Cumacos have the head nailed or tacked on the drum shell. Minas use a rope/wedge assembly (a method still used in Africa in the Ewe, Adowa and the Igba drum families).
Cumaco ensembles may include more than one large drum. Mina ensembles only have one large drum and a smaller one, the aforementioned curbata.
Cumacos are often laid on the ground and played by sitting astride (soloist) and squatting alongside. Minas are held on a diagonal with a wooden fork, so the soloist may stand in front of the drum head.
Bibliography
Max H. Brandt African Drumming from Rural Communities around Caracas and Its Impact on Venezuelan Music and Ethnic Identity - published in Music and Black Ethnicity: the Caribbean and South America edited by Gerard H. Béhague - North-South Center Press at the University of Miami, 1994.
Jesús Chucho García Barlovento: Nuestro Patrimonio Cultural - Caracas, Fundación Afroamérica, Centro Cultural BID, IACEM n/d
Venezuelan musical instruments |
5070879 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamurabi%20%28video%20game%29 | Hamurabi (video game) | Hamurabi is a text-based strategy video game of land and resource management. It was first developed under the name King of Sumeria or The Sumer Game by Doug Dyment in 1968 at Digital Equipment Corporation as a computer game for fellow employee Richard Merrill's newly invented FOCAL programming language.
The game consists of ten rounds wherein the player, as the ancient Babylonian king Hammurabi, manages how much of their grain to spend on crops for the next round, feeding their people, and purchasing additional land, while dealing with random variations in crop yields and plagues. The Sumer Game was inspired by The Sumerian Game, a much more in-depth text-based economic simulation intended for children, developed from 1964 to 1966 by designer and elementary school teacher Mabel Addis and IBM programmer William McKay.
Multiple versions of the game were created for the FOCAL language, but around 1971 David H. Ahl ported it to DEC BASIC and in 1973 published it in 101 BASIC Games. This was later republished in Microsoft BASIC form in 1978's BASIC Computer Games. His expanded version of the game, titled Hamurabi, quickly became the more prominent version due to the popularity of both the book and the programming language. Hamurabi influenced many later strategy and simulation games and is also an antecedent to the city-building genre.
Gameplay
Hamurabi is a text-based strategy video game centered on resource management in which the player, identified in the text as the ancient Babylonian king Hammurabi, enters numbers in response to questions posed by the game. The resources that the player must manage are people, acres of land, and bushels of grain. These are managed over the course of ten rounds, each of which represents a year. Each person can farm a set amount of land, which produces grain. Grain, in turn, can be used to feed people, who otherwise die the following round, or planted for the following year's crop. The player may also buy or sell land to their neighbors each turn in exchange for grain. Each round begins with an adviser stating "Hamurabi: I beg to report to you" the current status of the city, including the prior year's harvest and change in population, followed by a series of questions as to how many bushels of grain to spend on land, seeds, and feeding the people.
The game's variations are driven by random numbers: the price of land is randomly decided each round from between 17 and 26 bushels per acre, the amount of bushels generated each round is randomly decided, random amounts of bushels are eaten by rats, and new people come to the city each year in random amounts. Each year also presents the possibility of a plague reducing the population by half. The game ends after ten rounds, or earlier if the entire population of the city dies or at least 45 percent of the people starve in a single round. The end-game appraisal, added in the 1973 version of the game, compares the player to historical rulers—such as "Your heavy-handed performance smacks of Nero and Ivan IV."
Development
In 1962, Westchester County, New York and IBM began studying the use of computers in education, using a grant from the U.S. Office of Education to produce "economic games" for sixth-grade students. One, The Sumerian Game (1964), was a model of ancient Sumerian civilization, written and designed by elementary-school teacher Mabel Addis and programmed by William McKay of IBM. The early mainframe game, set in 3500 B.C., has players act as rulers of the city of Lagash. In 1966 Addis revised the game and interspersed it with cutscenes of taped audio lectures and slide projector images.
In 1968, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) employee Richard Merrill invented the FOCAL programming language. Fellow employee Doug Dyment heard a description of The Sumerian Game after a talk at the University of Alberta, and as an early program for the language developed King of Sumeria, programming it for a DEC PDP-8 minicomputer. The game is sometimes erroneously attributed to Merrill in 1969, but 1969 and 1973 program catalogs by the Digital Equipment Computer Users Society (DECUS) list Dyment as the original developer, though they also renamed it to The Sumer Game.
The game was originally described as: "This is a simulation program/game which will run on a minimal PDP-8 system. The economy of a Sumerian city in the year 3000 B. C. is simulated in the fashion of a modern-day 'business game.'" "Business games" were text-based business management simulation games, such as The Management Game, which was used in business schools such as at Carnegie Mellon University since at least 1958. By 1961, there were over 89 different business and economic simulation games in use, with various graphical capabilities. The final game was, according to Dyment, "the largest piece of FOCAL-8 code that could fit in a 4K machine: there was literally not room for a single extra character". As a result, the game uses shortened forms for much of the text, including spelling the player-controlled ruler, changed from Luduga to the Babylonian king Hammurabi, as "Hamurabi".
Multiple versions of The Sumer Game were created. Jerry Pournelle recalled in 1989 that "half the people I know wrote a Hammurabi program back in the 1970s; for many, it was the first program they'd ever written in their lives". The 1973 DECUS catalog additionally lists a French-language version by Belgians J. F. Champarnaud and F. H. Bostem for the FOCAL-69 version of the language, and a 1978 catalog adds Ruben by James R. B. Howard II and Jimmie B. Fletcher, "a modification of the 'King of Sumeria' game" with additional features. The French version of the game, however, despite being listed as "Sumer (French)", described itself not as a translation of the original game, but as a translation of "Hamurabi (The Sumer Game)", due to another version of the game which was already released by then.
In 1970, DEC employee David H. Ahl was working in the educational sales department and found that customers outside DEC's Boston-area home were uninterested in using FOCAL. He hired a Brooklyn programmer to write a version of BASIC for the PDP-8. Around 1971, he ported a version of The Sumer Game to BASIC and published it in DEC's educational newsletter, Edu. The new version was renamed Hamurabi and added an end-of-game performance appraisal. Unlike FOCAL, BASIC was widely available on many platforms and the new version was soon found on many of them. In 1973 he re-published the game as part of the collection in 101 BASIC Computer Games, which became a best-seller with over 10,000 copies sold, more than the number of computers in the world at the time.
In 1975 the Altair 8800 was released, and soon after, Altair BASIC. The microcomputer revolution followed, and BASIC was the standard language on these machines. Ahl re-published his book once again, this time under the title BASIC Computer Games, which became the best selling computer book of all time, with well over a million copies sold. The popularity of both the book and the programming language itself meant that Ahl's version of the game became the more widely known version over the relatively obscure original, as evidenced by the 1973 French FOCAL version considering "Hamurabi" to be the more prominent name.
BASIC Computer Games noted that the game was a modification of a game "written in FOCAL at DEC", but listed the author as "unknown". The 1978 edition of the book, which was the first million-selling computer book, noted that the game's name was intended to be "Hammurabi", but not only was one "m" dropped in the file name to fit in an eight-character limit, but Ahl consistently misspelled the name inside of the game, following Dyment's spelling, leading to the generally accepted name of the game to be Hamurabi.
Legacy
In addition to the multiple versions of Hamurabi, several simulation games have been created as expansions of the core game. These include Kingdom (1974) by Lee Schneider and Todd Voros, which was then expanded to Dukedom (1976). Other derivations include King (1978) by James A. Storer, and Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio (1978) by George Blank; Santa Paravia added the concept of city building management to the basic structure of Hamurabi, making it an antecedent to the city-building genre as well as an early strategy game. A conversion of this game was included on the BBC Micro's Welcome Tape and Welcome Disc as Yellow River Kingdom (1981). Hamurabi inspired more complicated economic simulation games; M.U.L.E. (1983) and Anacreon (1987) are two games that critics mentioned as being similar to Hamurabi.
References
External links
1968 video games
Early history of video games
CP/M games
Mainframe games
Public-domain software with source code
Strategy video games
Video games developed in the United States
Video games set in antiquity
Video games with textual graphics
Video games based on real people
Hammurabi |
174370 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root%20name%20server | Root name server | A root name server is a name server for the root zone of the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. It directly answers requests for records in the root zone and answers other requests by returning a list of the authoritative name servers for the appropriate top-level domain (TLD). The root name servers are a critical part of the Internet infrastructure because they are the first step in resolving human-readable host names into IP addresses that are used in communication between Internet hosts.
A combination of limits in the DNS and certain protocols, namely the practical size of unfragmented User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets, resulted in a decision to limit the number of root servers to thirteen server addresses. The use of anycast addressing permits the actual number of root server instances to be much larger, and is 1,510 .
Root domain
The DNS is a hierarchical naming system for computers, services, or any resource participating in the Internet. The top of that hierarchy is the root domain. The root domain does not have a formal name and its label in the DNS hierarchy is an empty string. All fully qualified domain names (FQDNs) on the Internet can be regarded as ending with this empty string for the root domain, and therefore ending in a full stop character (the label delimiter), e.g., "". This is generally implied rather than explicit, as modern DNS software does not actually require that the terminating dot be included when attempting to translate a domain name to an IP address.
The root domain contains all top-level domains of the Internet. , it contained 1058 TLDs, including 730 generic top-level domains (gTLDs) and 301 country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) in the root domain. In addition, the domain is used for technical name spaces in the management of Internet addressing and other resources. A domain is used for testing internationalized domain names.
Resolver operation
When a computer on the Internet needs to resolve a domain name, it uses resolver software to perform the lookup. A resolver breaks the name up into its labels from right to left. The first component (TLD) is queried using a root server to obtain the responsible authoritative server. Queries for each label return more specific name servers until a name server returns the answer of the original query.
In practice, most of this information does not change very often over a period of hours and therefore it is cached by intermediate name servers or by a name cache built into the user's application. DNS lookups to the root name servers may therefore be relatively infrequent. A survey in 2003 reported that only 2% of all queries to the root servers were legitimate. Incorrect or non-existent caching was responsible for 75% of the queries, 12.5% were for unknown TLDs, 7% were for lookups using IP addresses as if they were domain names, etc. Some misconfigured desktop computers even tried to update the root server records for the TLDs. A similar list of observed problems and recommended fixes has been published in RFC 4697.
Although any local implementation of DNS can implement its own private root name servers, the term "root name server" is generally used to describe the thirteen well-known root name servers that implement the root name space domain for the Internet's official global implementation of the Domain Name System. Resolvers use a small 3 KB root.hints file published by Internic to bootstrap this initial list of root server addresses.
Root server addresses
There are 13 logical root name servers specified, with logical names in the form , where ranges from a to m. The choice of thirteen name servers was made because of limitations in the original DNS specification, which specifies a maximum packet size of 512 bytes when using the User Datagram Protocol (UDP). Technically however, fourteen name servers fit into an IPv4 packet. The addition of IPv6 addresses for the root name servers requires more than 512 bytes, which is facilitated by the EDNS0 extension to the DNS standard.
This does not mean that there are only 13 physical servers; each operator uses redundant computer equipment to provide reliable service even if failure of hardware or software occurs. Additionally, all operate in multiple geographical locations using a routing technique called anycast addressing, providing increased performance and even more fault tolerance. An informational homepage exists for every logical server (except G-Root) under the Root Server Technical Operations Association domain with web address in the form , where ranges from a to m.
Ten servers were originally in the United States; all are now operated using anycast addressing. Three servers were originally located in Stockholm (I-Root), Amsterdam (K-Root), and Tokyo (M-Root) respectively.
Older servers had their own name before the policy of using similar names was established. With anycast, most of the physical root servers are now outside the United States, allowing for high performance worldwide.
There are also several alternative namespace systems with an alternative DNS root using their own set of root name servers that exist in parallel to the mainstream name servers. The first, AlterNIC, generated a substantial amount of press.
The function of a root name server may also be implemented locally, or on a provider network. Such servers are synchronized with the official root zone file as published by ICANN, and do not constitute an alternate root.
As the root name servers are an important part of the Internet, they have come under attack several times, although none of the attacks have ever been serious enough to severely affect the performance of the Internet.
Root server supervision
The DNS Root Server System Advisory Committee is an ICANN committee. ICANN's bylaws assign authority over the operation of the root name servers of the Domain Name System to the DNS Root Server System Advisory Committee.
Root zone file
The root zone file is a small (about 2 MB) data set whose publication is the primary purpose of root name servers. This is not to be confused with the root.hints file used to bootstrap a resolver.
The root zone file is at the apex of a hierarchical distributed database called the Domain Name System (DNS). This database is used by almost all Internet applications to translate worldwide unique names such as www.wikipedia.org into other identifiers such as IP addresses.
The contents of the root zone file is a list of names and numeric IP addresses of the authoritative DNS servers for all top-level domains (TLDs) such as com, org, edu, and the country code top-level domains. On 12 December 2004, 773 different authoritative servers for the TLDs were listed. Later the number of TLDs increased greatly. , the root zone consisted of 1511 TLDs (that does not include 55 domains that are not assigned, 8 that are retired and 11 test domains). Other name servers forward queries for which they do not have any information about authoritative servers to a root name server. The root name server, using its root zone file, answers with a referral to the authoritative servers for the appropriate TLD or with an indication that no such TLD exists.
See also
Blackhole server
Distributed denial-of-service attacks on root nameservers
Extension Mechanisms for DNS (Extended DNS, version 0)
Internet backbone
Open Root Server Network
.root
Notes
References
Further reading
Root Server Technical Operations Association
List of Root Servers, IANA
Root Servers' Geographical Locations on Google Maps
DNS Root Server System Advisory Committee
DNS Root Name Servers Explained For Non-Experts
DNS Root Name Servers Frequently Asked Questions
Location of Root servers in Asia-Pacific
Bogus Queries received at the Root Servers
– IAB Technical Comment on the Unique DNS Root
– Root Name Server Operational Requirements
– Observed DNS Resolution Misbehavior (from observations on the Root Servers)
ORSN, Open Root Server Network – an unrelated, competing DNS-based name infrastructure
External links
Root Server Technical Operations Association
Root Files, IANA
orsn.org Open Root Server Network
root-servers.net.zone
Root Server response times
DNS root nameservers explained for non-experts
Domain Name System |
31681428 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List%20of%20hacker%20groups | List of hacker groups | This is a partial list of notable hacker groups
Anonymous, originating in 2003, Anonymous was created as a group for people who fought for the right to privacy.
Bangladesh Black Hat Hackers, founded in 2012.
Chaos Computer Club, is based in Germany and other German-speaking countries. Famous among older hackers.
Cicada 3301, a group of hackers and cryptographers that recruited from the public on three occasions between 2012 and 2014 by way of complex puzzles and hacking scavenger hunts.
Cozy Bear, a Russian hacker group believed to be associated with one or more intelligence agencies of Russia.
Croatian Revolution Hackers, a now-defunct group of Croatian hackers credited with one of the largest attacks to have occurred in the Balkans.
Cult of the Dead Cow, also known as cDc or cDc Communications, is a computer hacker and DIY media organization founded in 1984 in Lubbock, Texas.
Cyber Partisans, a Belarusian hacktivist group that emerged in 2020, that performed attacks on the Belarusian government and governmental agencies.
DCLeaks, claims to be a group of "American hacktivists (though indicted individuals were found to be in Russia) who respect and appreciate freedom of speech, human rights and government of the people."
Decocidio#Ө is an anonymous, autonomous collective of hacktivists who are part of Earth First!, a radical environmental protest organization, and adheres to Climate Justice Action.
Derp, a hacker group that attacked several game sites in late 2013.
Digital DawgPound (DDP) The DDP was founded and named by StankDawg.
Equation Group, suspected to be the offensive operations wing of the U.S. National Security Agency.
Fancy Bear, a Russian cyberespionage group.
Ghost Squad Hackers, or by the abbreviation "GSH" is a politically motivated hacktivist team from India. The group's prime intent and focus is embedded in Digital marketing and Antispam cyber protests within current involvements of media speculation and real-life happenings from 2016 to the present.
Rocket Kitten or the Rocket Kitten Group is a hacker group thought to be linked to the Iranian government. Formed in 2010 by the hacker personas "Cair3x" and "HUrr!c4nE!".
Global kOS was a grey hat (leaning black hat) computer hacker group active from 1996 through 2000.
globalHell was a group of hackers, composed of about 60 individuals. The group disbanded in 1999 when 12 members were prosecuted for computer intrusion and 30 for lesser offenses.
Goatse Security (GoatSec) is a loose-knit, nine-person grey hat hacker group that specializes in uncovering security flaws.
Hackweiser is an underground hacking group and hacking magazine founded in 1999.
Honker Union is a group known for hacktivism, mainly present in Mainland China, whose members launched a series of attacks on websites in the United States, mostly government-related sites.
L0pht, was a hacker collective active between 1992 and 2000 and located in the Boston, Massachusetts area.
Lazarus Group, with strong links to the North Korean government, involved in the Sony Pictures hack, the Bangladesh Bank robbery and the WannaCry ransomware attack.
Legion of Doom; LOD was a hacker group active in the early 80s and mid-90s. Had noted rivalry with Masters of Deception (MOD).
Legion Hacktivist Group, a hacking group that hijacked the Indian Yahoo server and hacked online news portals of India.
Level Seven was a hacking group during the mid to late 1990s. Eventually dispersing in early 2000 when their nominal leader "vent" was raided by the FBI on February 25, 2000.
Lizard Squad, known for their claims of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks primarily to disrupt gaming-related services. Currently broken up.
LulzSec, a group of hackers originating and disbanding in 2011 that claimed to hack "for the lulz". Currently broken up.
Masters of Deception, MOD's initial membership grew from meetings on Loop-Around Test Lines in the early- to mid-1980s. Had noted rivalry with Legion of Doom (LOD).
Mazafaka, financially motivated group and crime forum.
milw0rm is a group of "hacktivists" best known for penetrating the computers of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in Mumbai.
NCPH is a Chinese hacker group based out of Zigong in Sichuan Province.
OurMine, a hacker group of unknown origin that has compromised various websites and Twitter accounts as a way of advertising their "professional services".
P.H.I.R.M., an early hacking group that was founded in the early 1980s.
Phone Losers of America, an internet prank call community founded in 1994 as a phone phreaking and hacking group.
Powerful Greek Army, is a Greek group of black-hat computer hackers founded in 2016.
RedHack is a socialist hacker group based in Turkey, founded in 1997. They usually launch attacks against the Turkish government's websites and leak secret documents of the Turkish government.
Sandworm, also known as Unit 74455, a Russian cyber military unit of the GRU.
The Shadow Brokers (TSB), originating in summer 2016. They published several leaks containing hacking tools, including several zero-day exploits of the National Security Agency (NSA).
ShinyHunters is a Hacker Group that is said to be responsible for numerous data breaches in 2020 and 2021.
Scattered Canary is a black-hat computer hacker group that originated in Nigeria and was responsible for the numerous targets on United States Of America state unemployment benefits during the COVID-19 pandemic
TeaMp0isoN is a group of black-hat computer hackers established in mid-2009.
TeslaTeam is a group of black-hat computer hackers from Serbia established in 2010.
TESO was a hacker group originating in Austria that was active primarily from 1998 to 2004.
The Unknowns is a group of white-hat hackers that exploited many high-profiled websites and became very active in 2012 when the group was founded and disbanded.
UGNazi, a hacking group led by JoshTheGod, was founded in 2011. They are best known for several attacks on US government sites, leaking WHMC's database, DDoS attacks, and exposing personal information of celebrities and other high-profile figures on exposed.su.
Wizard Spider Russian / Ukrainian hacker group, suspected of being behind the Ireland Health Service Executive cyberattack, sometimes called Trickbot per the malware.
YIPL/TAP - Youth International Party Line or Technological Assistance Program, was an early phone phreak organization and publication created in the 1970s by activists Abbie Hoffman.
Xbox Underground, an international group responsible for hacking game developers, including Microsoft.
UNC1151, believed to be based in Belarus.
See also
List of hackers
List of fictional hackers
List of computer criminals
Information security
Computer security conference
References
hacker groups |
176323 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe%20InDesign | Adobe InDesign | Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing and page layout designing software application produced by Adobe Inc. It can be used to create works such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers, presentations, books and ebooks. InDesign can also publish content suitable for tablet devices in conjunction with Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. Graphic designers and production artists are the principal users, creating and laying out periodical publications, posters, and print media. It also supports export to EPUB and SWF formats to create e-books and digital publications, including digital magazines, and content suitable for consumption on tablet computers. In addition, InDesign supports XML, style sheets, and other coding markup, making it suitable for exporting tagged text content for use in other digital and online formats. The Adobe InCopy word processor uses the same formatting engine as InDesign.
History
InDesign is the successor to Adobe PageMaker, which Adobe acquired by buying Aldus Corporation in late 1994. (Freehand, Aldus's competitor to Adobe Illustrator, was sold to Altsys, the maker of Fontographer.) By 1998 PageMaker had lost much of professional market to the comparatively feature-rich QuarkXPress version 3.3, released in 1992, and version 4.0, released in 1996. In 1999, Quark announced its offer to buy Adobe and to divest the combined company of PageMaker to avoid problems under United States antitrust law. Adobe rebuffed Quark's offer and continued to develop a new desktop publishing application. Aldus had begun developing a successor to PageMaker, which was code-named "Shuksan". Later, Adobe code-named the project "K2", and Adobe released InDesign 1.0 in 1999.
Adobe launched InDesign in the United Kingdom through a series of promotional presentations in hotels. The marketing concentrated on new software architecture—a small central software kernel (about 2Mb) to which add-ons would be bolted as the program's functionality expanded in later versions. However, the Postscript printer driver for InDesign 1.0 was an external app that tended to acquire frequent corruption problems, requiring periodic reinstallation.
Copies of InDesign 1.5 were usually given away when it was found that a host of bugs had to be corrected. By InDesign 2.0, the temperamental printer driver was embedded in the main software. The 'kernel' architecture was never mentioned again.
InDesign was the first native Mac OS X desktop publishing (DTP) software. With the third major version, InDesign CS, Adobe increased InDesign's distribution by bundling it with Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe Acrobat in Adobe Creative Suite.
InDesign exports documents in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) and supports multiple languages. It was the first DTP application to support Unicode character sets, advanced typography with OpenType fonts, advanced transparency features, layout styles, optical margin alignment, and cross-platform scripting with JavaScript.
Later versions of the software introduced new file formats. To support the new features, especially typographic, introduced with InDesign CS, both the program and its document format are not backward-compatible. Instead, InDesign CS2 introduced the INX () format, an XML-based document representation, to allow backwards compatibility with future versions. InDesign CS versions updated with the 3.1 April 2005 update can read InDesign CS2-saved files exported to the format. The InDesign Interchange format does not support versions earlier than InDesign CS. With InDesign CS4, Adobe replaced INX with InDesign Markup Language (IDML), another XML-based document representation.
Adobe worked on the provision of a 'Drag and Drop' feature and this became available after 2004 but was restricted to dropping graphics and images, not text. Adobe developed InDesign CS3 (and Creative Suite 3) as universal binary software compatible with native Intel and PowerPC Macs in 2007, two years after the announced 2005 schedule, inconveniencing early adopters of Intel-based Macs. Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen had announced that "Adobe will be first with a complete line of universal applications".
The CS2 Mac version had code tightly integrated to the PPC architecture, and not natively compatible with the Intel processors in Apple's new machines, so porting the products to another platform was more difficult than had been anticipated. Adobe developed the CS3 application integrating Macromedia products (2005), rather than recompiling CS2 and simultaneously developing CS3. By this time 'Drag and Drop' of type was made available.
InDesign and Leopard
InDesign CS3 initially had a serious compatibility issue with Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5), as Adobe stated: "InDesign CS3 may unexpectedly quit when using the Place, Save, Save As or Export commands using either the OS or Adobe dialog boxes. Unfortunately, there are no workarounds for these known issues." Apple fixed this with their OS X 10.5.4 update.
Server version
In October 2005, Adobe released InDesign Server CS2, a modified version of InDesign (without a user interface) for Windows and Macintosh server platforms. It does not provide any editing client; rather, it is for use by developers in creating client–server solutions with the InDesign plug-in technology. In March 2007 Adobe officially announced Adobe InDesign CS3 Server as part of the Adobe InDesign family.
File format
The MIME type is not official
File Open formats:
New File formats:
File Save As formats:
Save file format for InCopy:
(Assignment file)
(Content file, Exported file)
(Package for InCopy)
(Package for InDesign)
File Export formats:
Versions
InDesign 1.0 (codenamed Shuksan, then K2): August 31, 1999;
InDesign 1.0J (codenamed Hotaka): Japanese support;
InDesign 1.5 (codenamed Sherpa): April 2001;
InDesign 2.0 (codenamed Annapurna): January 2002 (just days before QuarkXPress 5). First version to support Mac OS X, native transparency and drop shadows;
InDesign CS (codenamed Dragontail) and InDesign CS Page Maker Edition (3.0): October 2003;
InDesign CS2 (4.0) (codenamed Firedrake): May 2005;
InDesign Server (codenamed Bishop): October 2005;
InDesign CS3 (5.0) (codenamed Cobalt): April 2007. First version to support Intel-based Macs, regular expression and table styles;
InDesign CS3 Server (codenamed Xenon): May 2007;
InDesign CS4 (6.0) (codenamed Basil): October 2008;
InDesign CS4 Server (codenamed Thyme);
InDesign CS5 (7.0) (codenamed Rocket): April 2010;
InDesign CS6 (8.0) (codenamed Athos): April 23, 2012; (last 32-bit version, last perpetually licensed version)
InDesign CC (9.2) (codenamed Citius): January 15, 2014;
InDesign CC 2014 (10) (codenamed Sirius): June 18, 2014;
InDesign CC 2014.1 (10.1): October 6, 2014;
InDesign CC 2014.2 (10.2): February 11, 2015;
InDesign CC 2015 (11.0): June 15, 2015;
InDesign CC 2015.1 (11.1): August 11, 2015;
InDesign CC 2015.2 (11.2): November 30, 2015;
InDesign CC 2015.4 (11.4): June 20, 2016;
InDesign CC 2017 (12.0): November 2, 2016;
InDesign CC 2017.1 (12.1): April 14, 2017;
InDesign CC 2018 (13.0): October 18, 2017;
InDesign CC 2018 (13.0.1): November 2017;
InDesign CC 2018.1 (13.1): March 2018;
InDesign CC 2018.2 (13.2): March 2018;
InDesign CC 2019 (14.0.1): November 2018;
InDesign CC 2019 (14.0.2): April 2019;
InDesign CC 2019 (14.0.3.433): September 2019;
InDesign CC 2020 (15.0): November 2019;
InDesign CC 2020 (15.0.1): December 2019;
InDesign CC 2020 (15.1 and 15.1.1 a few days later): June 2020. Introduces “Share for Review” feature enabling nonusers to add comments in a way similar to a PDF.
InDesign CC 2020 (16.0): October 2020;
InDesign CC 2021 (16.1): January 2021;
InDesign CC 2021 (16.2): 19 April 2021;
InDesign CC 2021 (16.3)
InDesign CC 2021 (16.4): 18 August 2021.
Newer versions can, as a rule, open files created by older versions, but the reverse is not true. Current versions can export the InDesign file as an IDML file (InDesign Markup Language), which can be opened by InDesign versions from CS4 upwards; older versions from CS4 down can export to an INX file (InDesign Interchange format).
Internationalization and localization
InDesign Middle Eastern editions come with special settings for laying out Arabic or Hebrew text. They feature:
Text settings: Special settings for laying out Arabic or Hebrew text, such as:
Ability to use Arabic, Persian or Hindi digits;
Use kashidas for letter spacing and full justification;
Ligature option;
Adjust the position of diacritics, such as vowels of the Arabic script;
Justify text in three possible ways: Standard, Arabic, Naskh;
Option to insert special characters, including Geresh, Gershayim, Maqaf for Hebrew and Kashida for Arabic texts;
Apply standard, Arabic or Hebrew styles for page, paragraph and footnote numbering.
Bi-directional text flow: The notion of right-to-left behavior applies to several objects: Story, paragraph, character and table. It allows mixing right-to-left and left-to-right words, paragraphs and stories in a document. It is possible to change the direction of neutral characters (e.g. / or ?) according to the user's keyboard language.
Table of contents: Provides a set of table of contents titles, one for each supported language. This table is sorted according to the chosen language. InDesign CS4 Middle Eastern versions allow users to choose the language of the index title and cross-references.
Indices: Allows creating of a simple keyword index or a somewhat more detailed index of the information in the text using embedded indexing codes. Unlike more sophisticated programs, InDesign is incapable of inserting character style information as part of an index entry (e.g., when indexing book, journal or movie titles). Indices are limited to four levels (top level and three sub-levels). Like tables of contents, indices can be sorted according to the selected language.
Importing and exporting: Can import QuarkXPress files up to version 4.1 (1999), even using Arabic XT, Arabic Phonyx or Hebrew XPressWay fonts, retaining the layout and content. Includes 50 import/export filters, including a Microsoft Word 97-98-2000 import filter and a plain text import filter. Exports IDML files which can be read by QuarkXPress 2017.
Reverse layout: Include a reverse layout feature to reverse the layout of a document, when converting a left-to-right document to a right-to-left one or vice versa.
Complex script rendering: InDesign supports Unicode character encoding, with Middle East editions supporting complex text layout for Arabic and Hebrew types of complex script. The underlying Arabic and Hebrew support is present in the Western editions of InDesign CS4, CS5, CS5.5 and CS6, but the user interface is not exposed, so it is difficult to access.
User groups
InDesign has spawned 86 user groups in 36 countries with a total membership of over 51,000.
See also
Creative Cloud controversy
Scribus, a free, cross-platform and non-proprietary alternative to Adobe InDesign
Tasmeem, an Arabic enhancement
References
External links
1999 software
Indesign
Indesign
Desktop publishing software
Graphics software
Typesetting software
Classic Mac OS software
DTP for MacOS
DTP for Windows |
163878 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterative%20and%20incremental%20development | Iterative and incremental development | Iterative and incremental development is any combination of both iterative design or iterative method and incremental build model for development.
Usage of the term began in software development, with a long-standing combination of the two terms iterative and incremental having been widely suggested for large development efforts. For example, the 1985 DOD-STD-2167
mentions (in section 4.1.2): "During software development, more than one iteration of the software development cycle may be in progress at the same time." and "This process may be described as an 'evolutionary acquisition' or 'incremental build' approach." In software, the relationship between iterations and increments is determined by the overall software development process.
Overview
The basic idea behind this method is to develop a system through repeated cycles (iterative) and in smaller portions at a time (incremental), allowing software developers to take advantage of what was learned during development of earlier parts or versions of the system. Learning comes from both the development and use of the system, where possible key steps in the process start with a simple implementation of a subset of the software requirements and iteratively enhance the evolving versions until the full system is implemented. At each iteration, design modifications are made and new functional capabilities are added.
The procedure itself consists of the initialization step, the iteration step, and the Project Control List. The initialization step creates a base version of the system. The goal for this initial implementation is to create a product to which the user can react. It should offer a sampling of the key aspects of the problem and provide a solution that is simple enough to understand and implement easily. To guide the iteration process, a project control list is created that contains a record of all tasks that need to be performed. It includes items such as new features to be implemented and areas of redesign of the existing solution. The control list is constantly being revised as a result of the analysis phase.
The iteration involves the redesign and implementation of iteration is to be simple, straightforward, and modular, supporting redesign at that stage or as a task added to the project control list. The level of design detail is not dictated by the iterative approach. In a light-weight iterative project the code may represent the major source of documentation of the system; however, in a critical iterative project a formal Software Design Document may be used. The analysis of an iteration is based upon user feedback, and the program analysis facilities available. It involves analysis of the structure, modularity, usability, reliability, efficiency, & achievement of goals. The project control list is modified in light of the analysis results.
Phases
Incremental development slices the system functionality into increments (portions). In each increment, a slice of functionality is delivered through cross-discipline work, from the requirements to the deployment. The Unified Process groups increments/iterations into phases: inception, elaboration, construction, and transition.
Inception identifies project scope, requirements (functional and non-functional) and risks at a high level but in enough detail that work can be estimated.
Elaboration delivers a working architecture that mitigates the top risks and fulfills the non-functional requirements.
Construction incrementally fills-in the architecture with production-ready code produced from analysis, design, implementation, and testing of the functional requirements.
Transition delivers the system into the production operating environment.
Each of the phases may be divided into 1 or more iterations, which are usually time-boxed rather than feature-boxed. Architects and analysts work one iteration ahead of developers and testers to keep their work-product backlog full.
Usage/History
Many examples of early usage are provided in Craig Larman and Victor Basili's article "Iterative and Incremental Development: A Brief History", with one of the earliest being NASA's 1960s Project Mercury.
Some of those Mercury engineers later formed a new division within IBM, where "another early and striking example of a major IID success [was] the very heart of NASA’s space shuttle software—the primary avionics software system, which [they] built from 1977 to 1980. The team applied IID in a series of 17 iterations over 31 months, averaging around eight weeks per iteration. Their motivation for avoiding the waterfall life cycle was that the shuttle program’s requirements changed during the software development process."
Some organizations, such as the US Department of Defense, have a preference for iterative methodologies, starting with MIL-STD-498 "clearly encouraging evolutionary acquisition and IID".
The DoD Instruction 5000.2 released in 2000 stated a clear preference for IID: There are two approaches, evolutionary and single step [waterfall], to full capability. An evolutionary approach is preferred. … [In this] approach, the ultimate capability delivered to the user is divided into two or more blocks, with increasing increments of capability...software development shall follow an iterative spiral development process in which continually expanding software versions are based on learning from earlier development. It can also be done in phases. Recent revisions to DoDI 5000.02 no longer refer to "spiral development," but do advocate the general approach as a baseline for software-intensive development/procurement programs. In addition, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) also employs an iterative and incremental developmental approach to its programming cycle to design, monitor, evaluate, learn and adapt international development projects with a project management approach that focuses on incorporating collaboration, learning, and adaptation strategies to iterate and adapt programming.
Contrast with Waterfall development
The main cause of the software development projects failure is the choice of the model, so should be made with a great care.
For example, the Waterfall development paradigm completes the project-wide work-products of each discipline in one step before moving on to the next discipline in a succeeding step. Business value is delivered all at once, and only at the very end of the project, whereas backtracking is possible in an iterative approach. Comparing the two approaches, some patterns begin to emerge:
User involvement: In the waterfall model, the user is involved in two stages of the model, i.e. requirements and acceptance testing, and possibly creation of user education material. Whereas in the incremental model, the client is involved at each and every stage.
Variability: The software is delivered to the user only after the build stage of the life cycle is completed, for user acceptance testing. On the other hand, every increment is delivered to the user and after the approval of user, the developer is allowed to move towards the next module.
Human resources: In the incremental model fewer staff are potentially required as compared to the waterfall model.
Time limitation: An operational product is delivered after months while in the incremental model the product is given to the user within a few weeks.
Project size: Waterfall model is unsuitable for small projects while the incremental model is suitable for small, as well as large projects.
Implementation guidelines
Guidelines that drive software implementation and analysis include:
Any difficulty in design, coding and testing a modification should signal the need for redesign or re-coding.
Modifications should fit easily into isolated and easy-to-find modules. If they do not, some redesign is possibly needed.
Modifications to tables should be especially easy to make. If any table modification is not quickly and easily done, redesign is indicated.
Modifications should become easier to make as the iterations progress. If they are not, there is a basic problem such as a design flaw or a proliferation of patches.
Patches should normally be allowed to exist for only one or two iterations. Patches may be necessary to avoid redesigning during an implementation phase.
The existing implementation should be analyzed frequently to determine how well it measures up to project goals.
Program analysis facilities should be used whenever available to aid in the analysis of partial implementations.
User reaction should be solicited and analyzed for indications of deficiencies in the current implementation.
Use in hardware and embedded systems
While the term iterative and incremental development got started in the software industry, many hardware and embedded software development efforts are using iterative and incremental techniques.
Examples of this may be seen in a number of industries. One sector that has recently been substantially affected by this shift of thinking has been the space launch industry, with substantial new competitive forces at work brought about by faster and more extensive technology innovation brought to bear by the formation of private companies pursuing space launch. These companies, such as SpaceX and Rocket Lab, are now both providing commercial orbital launch services in the past decade, something that only six nations had done prior to a decade ago. New innovation in technology development approaches, pricing, and service offerings—including the ability that has existed only since 2016 to fly to space on a previously-flown (reusable) booster stage—further decreasing the price of obtaining access to space.
SpaceX has been explicit about its effort to bring iterative design practices into the space industry, and uses the technique on spacecraft, launch vehicles, electronics and avionics, and operational flight hardware operations.
As the industry has begun to change, other launch competitors are beginning to change their long-term development practices with government agencies as well. For example, the large US launch service provider United Launch Alliance (ULA) began in 2015 a decade-long project to restructure its launch business—reducing two launch vehicles to one—using an iterative and incremental approach to get to a partially-reusable and much lower-cost launch system over the next decade.
See also
Adaptive management
Agile software development
Continuous integration
Dynamic systems development method
Goal-Driven Software Development Process
Interaction design
Kaizen
Microsoft Solutions Framework
Object-oriented analysis and design
OpenUP/Basic
PDCA
Rapid application development
Release early, release often
Notes
References
Software development philosophies
Software project management |
20444608 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage%20area%20network | Storage area network | A storage area network (SAN) or storage network is a computer network which provides access to consolidated, block-level data storage. SANs are primarily used to access data storage devices, such as disk arrays and tape libraries from servers so that the devices appear to the operating system as direct-attached storage. A SAN typically is a dedicated network of storage devices not accessible through the local area network (LAN).
Although a SAN provides only block-level access, file systems built on top of SANs do provide file-level access and are known as shared-disk file systems.
Storage architectures
Storage area networks (SANs) are sometimes referred to as network behind the servers and historically developed out of a centralized data storage model, but with its own data network. A SAN is, at its simplest, a dedicated network for data storage. In addition to storing data, SANs allow for the automatic backup of data, and the monitoring of the storage as well as the backup process. A SAN is a combination of hardware and software. It grew out of data-centric mainframe architectures, where clients in a network can connect to several servers that store different types of data. To scale storage capacities as the volumes of data grew, direct-attached storage (DAS) was developed, where disk arrays or just a bunch of disks (JBODs) were attached to servers. In this architecture, storage devices can be added to increase storage capacity. However, the server through which the storage devices are accessed is a single point of failure, and a large part of the LAN network bandwidth is used for accessing, storing and backing up data. To solve the single point of failure issue, a direct-attached shared storage architecture was implemented, where several servers could access the same storage device.
DAS was the first network storage system and is still widely used where data storage requirements are not very high. Out of it developed the network-attached storage (NAS) architecture, where one or more dedicated file server or storage devices are made available in a LAN. Therefore, the transfer of data, particularly for backup, still takes place over the existing LAN. If more than a terabyte of data was stored at any one time, LAN bandwidth became a bottleneck. Therefore, SANs were developed, where a dedicated storage network was attached to the LAN, and terabytes of data are transferred over a dedicated high speed and bandwidth network. Within the SAN, storage devices are interconnected. Transfer of data between storage devices, such as for backup, happens behind the servers and is meant to be transparent. In a NAS architecture data is transferred using the TCP and IP protocols over Ethernet. Distinct protocols were developed for SANs, such as Fibre Channel, iSCSI, Infiniband. Therefore, SANs often have their own network and storage devices, which have to be bought, installed, and configured. This makes SANs inherently more expensive than NAS architectures.
Components
SANs have their own networking devices, such as SAN switches. To access the SAN, so-called SAN servers are used, which in turn connect to SAN host adapters. Within the SAN, a range of data storage devices may be interconnected, such as SAN-capable disk arrays, JBODS and tape libraries.
Host layer
Servers that allow access to the SAN and its storage devices are said to form the host layer of the SAN. Such servers have host adapters, which are cards that attach to slots on the server motherboard (usually PCI slots) and run with a corresponding firmware and device driver. Through the host adapters the operating system of the server can communicate with the storage devices in the SAN.
In Fibre channel deployments, a cable connects to the host adapter through the gigabit interface converter (GBIC). GBICs are also used on switches and storage devices within the SAN, and they convert digital bits into light impulses that can then be transmitted over the Fibre Channel cables. Conversely, the GBIC converts incoming light impulses back into digital bits. The predecessor of the GBIC was called gigabit link module (GLM).
Fabric layer
The fabric layer consists of SAN networking devices that include SAN switches, routers, protocol bridges, gateway devices, and cables. SAN network devices move data within the SAN, or between an initiator, such as an HBA port of a server, and a target, such as the port of a storage device.
When SANs were first built, hubs were the only devices that were Fibre Channel capable, but Fibre Channel switches were developed and hubs are now rarely found in SANs. Switches have the advantage over hubs that they allow all attached devices to communicate simultaneously, as a switch provides a dedicated link to connect all its ports with one another. When SANs were first built, Fibre Channel had to be implemented over copper cables, these days multimode optical fibre cables are used in SANs.
SANs are usually built with redundancy, so SAN switches are connected with redundant links. SAN switches connect the servers with the storage devices and are typically non-blocking allowing transmission of data across all attached wires at the same time. SAN switches are for redundancy purposes set up in a meshed topology. A single SAN switch can have as few as 8 ports and up to 32 ports with modular extensions. So-called director-class switches can have as many as 128 ports.
In switched SANs, the Fibre Channel switched fabric protocol FC-SW-6 is used under which every device in the SAN has a hardcoded World Wide Name (WWN) address in the host bus adapter (HBA). If a device is connected to the SAN its WWN is registered in the SAN switch name server. In place of a WWN, or worldwide port name (WWPN), SAN Fibre Channel storage device vendors may also hardcode a worldwide node name (WWNN). The ports of storage devices often have a WWN starting with 5, while the bus adapters of servers start with 10 or 21.
Storage layer
The serialized Small Computer Systems Interface (SCSI) protocol is often used on top of the Fibre Channel switched fabric protocol in servers and SAN storage devices. The Internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI) over Ethernet and the Infiniband protocols may also be found implemented in SANs, but are often bridged into the Fibre Channel SAN. However, Infiniband and iSCSI storage devices, in particular, disk arrays, are available.
The various storage devices in a SAN are said to form the storage layer. It can include a variety of hard disk and magnetic tape devices that store data. In SANs, disk arrays are joined through a RAID which makes a lot of hard disks look and perform like one big storage device. Every storage device, or even partition on that storage device, has a logical unit number (LUN) assigned to it. This is a unique number within the SAN. Every node in the SAN, be it a server or another storage device, can access the storage by referencing the LUN. The LUNs allow for the storage capacity of a SAN to be segmented and for the implementation of access controls. A particular server, or a group of servers, may, for example, be only given access to a particular part of the SAN storage layer, in the form of LUNs. When a storage device receives a request to read or write data, it will check its access list to establish whether the node, identified by its LUN, is allowed to access the storage area, also identified by a LUN. LUN masking is a technique whereby the host bus adapter and the SAN software of a server restrict the LUNs for which commands are accepted. In doing so LUNs that should never be accessed by the server are masked. Another method to restrict server access to particular SAN storage devices is fabric-based access control, or zoning, which is enforced by the SAN networking devices and servers. Under zoning, server access is restricted to storage devices that are in a particular SAN zone.
Network protocols
A mapping layer to other protocols is used to form a network:
ATA over Ethernet (AoE), mapping of AT Attachment (ATA) over Ethernet
Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP), a mapping of SCSI over Fibre Channel
Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)
ESCON over Fibre Channel (FICON), used by mainframe computers
HyperSCSI, mapping of SCSI over Ethernet
iFCP or SANoIP mapping of FCP over IP
iSCSI, mapping of SCSI over TCP/IP
iSCSI Extensions for RDMA (iSER), mapping of iSCSI over InfiniBand
Network block device, mapping device node requests on UNIX-like systems over stream sockets like TCP/IP
SCSI RDMA Protocol (SRP), another SCSI implementation for remote direct memory access (RDMA) transports
Storage networks may also be built using Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial ATA (SATA) technologies. SAS evolved from SCSI direct-attached storage. SATA evolved from Parallel ATA direct-attached storage. SAS and SATA devices can be networked using SAS Expanders.
Software
The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) defines a SAN as "a network whose primary purpose is the transfer of data between computer systems and storage elements". But a SAN does not just consist of a communication infrastructure, it also has a software management layer. This software organizes the servers, storage devices, and the network so that data can be transferred and stored. Because a SAN does not use direct attached storage (DAS), the storage devices in the SAN are not owned and managed by a server. A SAN allows a server to access a large data storage capacity and this storage capacity may also be accessible by other servers. Moreover, SAN software must ensure that data is directly moved between storage devices within the SAN, with minimal server intervention.
SAN management software is installed on one or more servers and management clients on the storage devices. Two approaches have developed in SAN management software: in-band and out-of band management. In-band means that management data between server and storage devices is transmitted on the same network as the storage data. While out-of-band means that management data is transmitted over dedicated links. SAN management software will collect management data from all storage devices in the storage layer. This includes info on read and write failures, storage capacity bottlenecks and failure of storage devices. SAN management software may integrate with the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP).
In 1999 Common Information Model (CIM), an open standard, was introduced for managing storage devices and to provide interoperability, The web-based version of CIM is called Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) and defines SAN storage device objects and process transactions. Use of these protocols involves a CIM object manager (CIMOM), to manage objects and interactions, and allows for the central management of SAN storage devices. Basic device management for SANs can also be achieved through the Storage Management Interface Specification (SMI-S), were CIM objects and processes are registered in a directory. Software applications and subsystems can then draw on this directory. Management software applications are also available to configure SAN storage devices, allowing, for example, the configuration of zones and LUNs.
Ultimately SAN networking and storage devices are available from many vendors and every SAN vendor has its own management and configuration software. Common management in SANs that include devices from different vendors is only possible if vendors make the application programming interface (API) for their devices available to other vendors. In such cases, upper-level SAN management software can manage the SAN devices from other vendors.
Filesystems support
In a SAN, data is transferred, stored and accessed on a block level. As such, a SAN does not provide data file abstraction, only block-level storage and operations. Server operating systems maintain their own file systems on their own dedicated, non-shared LUNs on the SAN, as though they were local to themselves. If multiple systems were simply to attempt to share a LUN, these would interfere with each other and quickly corrupt the data. Any planned sharing of data on different computers within a LUN requires software. File systems have been developed to work with SAN software to provide file-level access. These are known as shared-disk file system.
In media and entertainment
Video editing systems require very high data transfer rates and very low latency. SANs in media and entertainment are often referred to as serverless due to the nature of the configuration which places the video workflow (ingest, editing, playout) desktop clients directly on the SAN rather than attaching to servers. Control of data flow is managed by a distributed file system. Per-node bandwidth usage control, sometimes referred to as quality of service (QoS), is especially important in video editing as it ensures fair and prioritized bandwidth usage across the network.
Quality of service
SAN Storage QoS enables the desired storage performance to be calculated and maintained for network customers accessing the device. Some factors that affect SAN QoS are:
Bandwidth The rate of data throughput available on the system.
Latency The time delay for a read/write operation to execute.
Queue depth The number of outstanding operations waiting to execute to the underlying disks (traditional or solid-state drives).
Alternatively, over-provisioning can be used to provide additional capacity to compensate for peak network traffic loads. However, where network loads are not predictable, over-provisioning can eventually cause all bandwidth to be fully consumed and latency to increase significantly resulting in SAN performance degradation.
Storage virtualization
Storage virtualization is the process of abstracting logical storage from physical storage. The physical storage resources are aggregated into storage pools, from which the logical storage is created. It presents to the user a logical space for data storage and transparently handles the process of mapping it to the physical location, a concept called location transparency. This is implemented in modern disk arrays, often using vendor-proprietary technology. However, the goal of storage virtualization is to group multiple disk arrays from different vendors, scattered over a network, into a single storage device. The single storage device can then be managed uniformly.
See also
ATA over Ethernet (AoE)
Direct-attached storage (DAS)
Disk array
Fibre Channel
Fibre Channel over Ethernet
Host bus adapter (HBA)
iSCSI
iSCSI Extensions for RDMA
List of networked storage hardware platforms
List of storage area network management systems
Massive array of idle disks (MAID)
Network-attached storage (NAS)
Redundant array of independent disks (RAID)
SCSI RDMA Protocol (SRP)
Storage Management Initiative – Specification (SMI-S)
Storage hypervisor
Storage resource management (SRM)
Storage virtualization
System area network
References
External links
What Is a Storage Area Network (SAN)?
Introduction to Storage Area Networks Exhaustive Introduction into SAN, IBM Redbook
SAN vs. DAS: A Cost Analysis of Storage in the Enterprise
SAS and SATA, solid-state storage lower data center power consumption
SAN NAS Videos
Storage Area Network Info
20 most promising enterprise storage solution providers of 2018
Data management
Telecommunications engineering |
8385046 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core%20banking | Core banking | Core banking is a banking service provided by a group of networked bank branches where customers may access their bank account and perform basic transactions from any of the member branch offices.
Core banking is often associated with retail banking and many banks treat the retail customers as their core banking customers. Businesses are usually managed via the corporate banking division of the institution. Core banking covers basic depositing and lending of money.
Core banking functions will include transaction accounts, loans, mortgages and payments. Banks make these services available across multiple channels like automated teller machines, Internet banking, mobile banking and branches.
Banking software and network technology allows a bank to centralise its record keeping and allow access from any location.
History
Core banking became possible with the advent of computer and telecommunication technology that allowed information to be shared between bank branches quickly and efficiently.
Before the 1970s it used to take at least a day for a transaction to reflect in the real account because each branch had their local servers, and the data from the server in each branch was sent in a batch to the servers in the data center only at the end of the day (EOD).
Over the following 30 years most banks moved to core banking applications to support their operations creating a Centralized Online Real-time Exchange (or Environment) (CORE). This meant that all the bank's branches could access applications from centralized data centers. Deposits made were reflected immediately on the bank's servers, and the customer could withdraw the deposited money from any of the bank's branches.
Software
Advancements in Internet and information technology reduced manual work in banks and increased efficiency. Computer software is developed to perform core operations of banking like recording of transactions, passbook maintenance, interest calculations on loans and deposits, customer records, the balance of payments, and withdrawal. This software is installed at different branches of the bank and then interconnected by means of computer networks based on telephones, satellite and the Internet.
Gartner defines a core banking system as a back-end system that processes daily banking transactions, and posts updates to accounts and other financial records. Core banking systems typically include deposit, loan, and credit-processing capabilities, with interfaces to general ledger systems and reporting tools. Core banking applications are often one of the largest single expenses for banks and legacy software is a major issue in terms of allocating resources. Spending on these systems is based on a combination of service-oriented architecture and supporting technologies.
Many banks implement custom applications for core banking. Others implement or customize commercial independent software vendor packages. Systems integrators implement these core banking packages at banks.
Open-source Technology in core banking solutions or software can help banks to maintain their productivity and profitability at the same time.
Providers
While larger financial institutions may implement their own custom core, community banks and credit unions tend to outsource their core systems to system providers. While there is no consensus or a public register on the actual Core Banking Providers, various market research companies like Gartner or Forrester Research release annual deal surveys mentioning platform deals.
There are few providers that help leverage the existing legacy systems itself, by hollowing out customer engagement functions from the core system and managing it as a horizontal cross-enterprise layer. This layer provides banks with enhanced product innovation capabilities, sophisticated customer data management, partner ecosystem, and revenue management and pricing. With this approach, banks can quickly adopt new technologies, add more functionality and capabilities, offer customized products and enhance the customer experience. The goal is to transition from a product-based to an agile, customer-first organization.
References
Banking terms
Business software |
69396451 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022%20USC%20Trojans%20football%20team | 2022 USC Trojans football team | The 2022 USC Trojans football team represents the University of Southern California in the 2022 NCAA Division I FBS football season. They play their home games at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and compete as members of the South Division of the Pac-12 Conference. They will be led by first-year head coach Lincoln Riley.
Previous season
Offseason
Coaching staff departures
Transfers
The Trojans lost 24 players via transfer.
The Trojans add 13 players via transfer.
Returning starters
Key departures include :
Vavae Malepeai (TB – 12 games, 5 started).
Keaontay Ingram (TB – 10 games, 7 started).
Drake London (WR – 8 games, 8 started).
Erik Krommenhoek (TE – 12 games, 10 started). Jalen McKenzie (OT – 12 games, 6 started). Liam Jimmons (OG – 12 games, 12 started). Kana’i Mauga (LB – 12 games, 12 started). Drake Jackson (OLB – 11 games, 9 started). Chris Steele (CB – 11 games, 11 started). Isaac Taylor-Stuart (CB – 11 games, 10 started).
Greg Johnson (S – 10 games, 9 started). Ben Griffiths (P – 12 games, 12 started). Parker Lewis (K – 10 games, 10 started). Damon Johnson (LS – 12 games, 12 started).
Other departures include :
Kedon Slovis (QB – 9 games, 9 started). Jaxson Dart (QB – 6 games, 3 started). KD Nixon (WR – 10 games). Michael Trigg (TE – 6 games, 4 started). Jacob Lichtenstein (DL – 12 games, 8 started). Hunter Echols (OLB – 11 games, 3 started). Raymond Scott (LB – 11 games, 3 started). Chase Williams (S – 12 games, 9 started).
Offense
Defense
Special Teams
† Indicates player was a starter in 2021 but missed all of 2022 due to injury.
Recruiting class
The Trojans signed a total of yet scholarship recruits and walk-ons during national signing period.
Overall class rankings
Recruits
Preseason
Spring Game
Award watch lists
Listed in the order that they were released
Pac-12 Media Day
The Pac-12 Media Day was held in July 2022 in Hollywood, California.
Preseason All-Pac-12 teams
First Team
Second Team
Personnel
Roster
Coaching staff
Support Staff
Graduate Assistants
Analysts
Depth Chart
True Freshman
Injury report
Scholarship distribution chart
Projected Scholarship Distribution 2022
/ / * Former Walk-on
– 85 scholarships permitted
– XX recruited players on scholarship
Schedule
Regular season
Game summaries
Rice
Fresno State
Notre Dame
Arizona State
Washington State
California
Colorado
Utah
Arizona
UCLA Bruins
Stanford
Oregon State
Rankings
Statistics
Team
Individual Leaders
Offense
Defense
Key: POS: Position, SOLO: Solo Tackles, AST: Assisted Tackles, TOT: Total Tackles, TFL: Tackles-for-loss, SACK: Quarterback Sacks, INT: Interceptions, BU: Passes Broken Up, PD: Passes Defended, QBH: Quarterback Hits, FR: Fumbles Recovered, FF: Forced Fumbles, BLK: Kicks or Punts Blocked, SAF: Safeties, TD : Touchdown
Special teams
Scoring
USC vs Non-Conference Opponents
USC vs Pac-12 opponents
USC vs All Opponents
After the season
Awards and honors
PAC-12 Conference Individual Awards
Individual Yearly Awards
All-Americans
Bowl games
All Star games
NFL Draft
The NFL Draft will be held at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, MO on April 27–29, 2023.
Trojans who were picked in the 2023 NFL Draft:
NFL Draft combine
No members of the 2022 team were invited to participate in drills at the 2023 NFL scouting Combine.
† Top performer
DNP = Did not participate
Notes
November 28, 2021 – Lincoln Riley Named New USC Football Head Coach.
References
USC
USC Trojans football seasons
USC Trojans football
USC Trojans football |
22373 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object%20code | Object code | In computing, object code or object module is the product of a compiler.
In a general sense object code is a sequence of statements or instructions in a computer language, usually a machine code language (i.e., binary) or an intermediate language such as register transfer language (RTL). The term indicates that the code is the goal or result of the compiling process, with some early sources referring to source code as a "subject program".
Details
Object files can in turn be linked to form an executable file or library file. In order to be used, object code must either be placed in an executable file, a library file, or an object file.
Object code is a portion of machine code that has not yet been linked into a complete program. It is the machine code for one particular library or module that will make up the completed product. It may also contain placeholders or offsets, not found in the machine code of a completed program, that the linker will use to connect everything together. Whereas machine code is binary code that can be executed directly by the CPU, object code has the jumps partially parametrized so that a linker can fill them in.
An assembler is used to convert assembly code into machine code (object code). A linker links several object (and library) files to generate an executable. Assemblers can also assemble directly to machine code executable files without the object intermediary step.
References
Machine code
kk:Объектілік модуль
ru:Объектный модуль |
370465 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limitations%20on%20exclusive%20rights%3A%20Computer%20programs | Limitations on exclusive rights: Computer programs | Limitations on exclusive rights: Computer programs is the title of the current form of section 117 of the U.S. Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 117). In United States copyright law, it provides users with certain adaptation rights for computer software that they own.
Background
The current form of section 117 is the result of a recommendation by CONTU, the National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works. The U.S. Congress established CONTU to study and make recommendations on modifying the 1976 Copyright Act to deal with new technologies, particularly computer software, that Congress had not addressed when it passed the 1976 Act. CONTU operated from 1975 to 1978, and its principal recommendation to Congress was to revise the wording of section 117. Its report stated:
Because the placement of a work into a computer is the preparation of a copy, the law should provide that persons in rightful possession of copies of programs be able to use them freely without fear of exposure to copyright liability. Obviously, creators, lessors, licensors, and vendors of copies of programs intend that they be used by their customers, so that rightful users would but rarely need a legal shield against potential copyright problems. It is easy to imagine, however, a situation in which the copyright owner might desire, for good reason or none at all, to force a lawful owner or possessor of a copy to stop using a particular program. One who rightfully possesses a copy of a program, therefore, should be provided with a legal right to copy it to that extent which will permit its use by that possessor. This would include the right to load it into a computer and to prepare archival copies of it to guard against destruction or damage by mechanical or electrical failure. But this permission would not extend to other copies of the program. Thus, one could not, for example, make archival copies of a program and later sell some while retaining some for use. The sale of a copy of a program by a rightful possessor to another must be of all rights in the program, thus creating a new rightful possessor and destroying that status as regards the seller.
The revisions recommended by CONTU were approved with one important change. Instead of "rightful possessor" of a computer program Congress used the word "owner" of a computer program. It is not clear why this change was made. This one change resulted in a state of affairs in which software vendors began to take the position that customers do not own their software but rather only "license" it. The courts have split on whether the assertion in software agreements that the customer does not own the software, and has only a right to use it in accordance with the license agreement, is legally enforceable.
Users' rights under § 117
Section 117 is a limitation on the rights granted to holders of copyright on computer programs. The limitation allows the owner of a particular copy of a copyrighted computer program to make copies or adaptations of the program for any of several reasons:
Utilization of the program. The user is allowed to install the software to his hard disk and run the software in random-access memory.
Making backup and archival copies. The user is allowed to make copies of the software to protect himself from loss in the event of the original distribution media being damaged.
Making copies of software in order to repair or maintain machines, provided that the copies used in repairing the machine is destroyed after the repair or maintenance is complete.
The law allows any copies that are created for the above purposes to be transferred when the software is sold, only along with the copy made to prepare them. Adaptations made can not be transferred without permission from the copyright holder.
Reverse engineering
While it is not part of section 117, it is also lawful to reverse engineer software for compatibility purposes. Sec. 103(f) of the DMCA (17 U.S.C. § 1201 (f)) says that a person who is in legal possession of a program, is permitted to reverse-engineer and circumvent its protection against copying if this is necessary in order to achieve "interoperability" - a term broadly covering other devices and programs being able to interact with it, make use of it, and to use and transfer data to and from it, in useful ways. A limited exemption exists that allows the knowledge thus gained to be shared and used for interoperability purposes.
More generally, it has been held that reverse engineering is a fair use. In Sega v. Accolade, the Ninth Circuit held that making copies in the course of reverse engineering is a fair use, when it is the only way to get access to the "ideas and functional elements" in the copyrighted code, and when "there is a legitimate reason for seeking such access."
See also
Software patents under United States patent law
References
External links
Text of section 117
CONTU Final Draft
Computer law
United States copyright law |
1699254 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Networking%20hardware | Networking hardware | Networking hardware, also known as network equipment or computer networking devices, are electronic devices which are required for communication and interaction between devices on a computer network. Specifically, they mediate data transmission in a computer network. Units which are the last receiver or generate data are called hosts, end systems or data terminal equipment.
Range
Networking devices includes a broad range of equipment which can be classified as core network components which interconnect other network components, hybrid components which can be found in the core or border of a network and hardware or software components which typically sit on the connection point of different networks.
The most common kind of networking hardware today is a copper-based Ethernet adapter which is a standard inclusion on most modern computer systems. Wireless networking has become increasingly popular, especially for portable and handheld devices.
Other networking hardware used in computers includes data center equipment (such as file servers, database servers and storage areas), network services (such as DNS, DHCP, email, etc.) as well as devices which assure content delivery.
Taking a wider view, mobile phones, tablet computers and devices associated with the internet of things may also be considered networking hardware. As technology advances and IP-based networks are integrated into building infrastructure and household utilities, network hardware will become an ambiguous term owing to the vastly increasing number of network capable endpoints.
Specific devices
Network hardware can be classified by its location and role in the network.
Core
Core network components interconnect other network components.
Gateway: an interface providing a compatibility between networks by converting transmission speeds, protocols, codes, or security measures.
Router: a networking device that forwards data packets between computer networks. Routers perform the "traffic directing" functions on the Internet. A data packet is typically forwarded from one router to another through the networks that constitute the internetwork until it reaches its destination node. It works on OSI layer 3.
Switch: a device that connects devices together on a computer network, by using packet switching to receive, process and forward data to the destination device. Unlike less advanced network hubs, a network switch forwards data only to one or multiple devices that need to receive it, rather than broadcasting the same data out of each of its ports. It works on OSI layer 2.
Bridge: a device that connects multiple network segments. It works on OSI layers 1 and 2.
Repeater: an electronic device that receives a signal and retransmits it at a higher level or higher power, or onto the other side of an obstruction, so that the signal can cover longer distances.
Repeater hub: for connecting multiple Ethernet devices together and making them act as a single network segment. It has multiple input/output (I/O) ports, in which a signal introduced at the input of any port appears at the output of every port except the original incoming. A hub works at the physical layer (layer 1) of the OSI model. Repeater hubs also participate in collision detection, forwarding a jam signal to all ports if it detects a collision. Hubs are now largely obsolete, having been replaced by network switches except in very old installations or specialized applications.
Wireless access point
Structured cabling
Hybrid
Hybrid components can be found in the core or border of a network.
Multilayer switch: a switch that, in addition to switching on OSI layer 2, provides functionality at higher protocol layers.
Protocol converter: a hardware device that converts between two different types of transmission, for interoperation.
Bridge router (brouter): a device that works as a bridge and as a router. The brouter routes packets for known protocols and simply forwards all other packets as a bridge would.
Border
Hardware or software components which typically sit on the connection point of different networks (for example, between an internal network and an external network) include:
Proxy server: computer network service which allows clients to make indirect network connections to other network services.
Firewall: a piece of hardware or software put on the network to prevent some communications forbidden by the network policy. A firewall typically establishes a barrier between a trusted, secure internal network and another outside network, such as the Internet, that is assumed to not be secure or trusted.
Network address translator (NAT): network service (provided as hardware or as software) that converts internal to external network addresses and vice versa.
Residential gateway: interface between a WAN connection to an internet service provider and the home network.
Terminal server: connects devices with a serial port to a local area network.
End stations
Other hardware devices used for establishing networks or dial-up connections include:
Network interface controller (NIC): a device connecting a computer to a wire-based computer network.
Wireless network interface controller: a device connecting the attached computer to a radio-based computer network.
Modem: device that modulates an analog "carrier" signal (such as sound) to encode digital information, and that also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. Used (for example) when a computer communicates with another computer over a telephone network.
ISDN terminal adapter (TA): a specialized gateway for ISDN.
Line driver: a device to increase transmission distance by amplifying the signal; used in base-band networks only.
See also
Computer hardware
Data circuit-terminating equipment
List of networking hardware vendors
Network simulation
Node (networking)
Telecommunications equipment
References
External links
USF Explanation of network hardware
Computer networking |
38567859 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin%20Leyton-Brown | Kevin Leyton-Brown | Kevin Leyton-Brown (born May 12, 1975) is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. He received his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 2003. He was the recipient of a 2014 NSERC E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship, a 2013/14 Killam Teaching Prize, and a 2013 Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher Prize from the Canadian Association of Computer Science.
Leyton-Brown co-teaches a popular game theory course on Coursera.org, along with Matthew O. Jackson and Yoav Shoham. Leyton-Brown serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, the Artificial Intelligence journal, and ''ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation', and was program chair for the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce in 2012.
Leyton-Brown and coauthors have received the IJCAI-JAIR Best Paper Prize and numerous medals in international SAT competitions (2003–12).
Leyton-Brown's research is at the intersection of computer science and microeconomics, addressing computational problems in economic contexts and incentive issues in multiagent systems. He also studies the application of machine learning to the automated design and analysis of algorithms for solving hard computational problems.
Selected publications
References
External links
Leyton-Brown's homepage at the University of British Columbia
1975 births
Living people
Canadian computer scientists
Artificial intelligence researchers
Stanford University alumni
University of British Columbia faculty
Academic journal editors |
5088388 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iphigenia%20%28film%29 | Iphigenia (film) | Iphigenia () is a 1977 Greek film directed by Michael Cacoyannis, based on the Greek myth of Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra who was ordered by the goddess Artemis to be sacrificed. Cacoyannis adapted the film, the third in his "Greek tragedy" trilogy (after the released of Electra in 1962 and The Trojan Women in 1971), from his stage production of Euripides' play Iphigenia at Aulis. The film stars Tatiana Papamoschou as Iphigenia, Kostas Kazakos as Agamemnon and the legendary actress Irene Papas as Clytemnestra. The score was composed by Mikis Theodorakis.
Iphigenia was nominated for one Oscar, Best Foreign Language Film. It was also nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 1977 Cannes Film Festival. Iphigenia received the 1978 Belgian Femina Award and received the Best Film Award at the 1977 Thessaloniki Film Festival, where Tatiania Papamoschou also received the Best Leading Actress Award for her role as Iphigenia.
Plot
"Iphigenia" relates the story of an incident that took place just prior to the Trojan War. Helen, wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta, had eloped to Troy with Paris, son of King Priam. Menelaus' brother, Agamemnon, King of Argos, had assembled a huge Greek expeditionary force on the shores of Aulis that he planned to lead to Troy in order to reclaim his brother's wife. The Goddess Artemis, taking revenge for an insult done to her by Agamemnon's father, King Atreus, created a meteorological problem by sending storms, or calms, to prevent the Greek fleet from sailing to Troy. This is where the film begins.
The Greek armies have waited for what seems an eternity for the winds to rise, blow eastward and carry their boats to Troy. The men are tired, bored, hungry, as well as anxious to go into battle. In a public relations gesture intended to placate the men, Agamemnon (Costa Kazakos) directs them to go and help themselves to a flock of sheep that belong to the nearby temple dedicated to Artemis. In the ensuing mayhem, Artemis' sacred deer is accidentally slain. Calchas (Dimitris Aronis), high priest of Artemis' temple, is incensed by the sacrilege. He delivers an oracle to Agamemnon, with Menelaus (Kostas Karras) and Odysseus (Christos Tsagas) also present. The oracle, according to Calchas emanating from Artemis herself, demands that Agamemnon offers a sacrifice to atone for the defiling of the holy ground and the killing of the sacred stag. Once the sacrifice is made, Artemis will consent for the armies to sail to Troy by allowing the winds to blow eastward. The sacrifice is to be Agamemnon's first-born daughter, Iphigenia (Tatiana Papamoschou). The news of "the deal" soon spreads through the armies' ranks, although the nature of the sacrifice remains temporarily unknown to them.
After considerable argument and recrimination between the two brothers, Agamemnon sends a message to his wife Clytemnestra (Irene Papas), in Argos. In his letter, Agamemnon is asking his wife to send their daughter Iphigenia, to Aulis, ostensibly to wed Achilles (Panos Mihalopoulos). Achilles, leader of the Mymirdon army, is a member of Agamemnon's expeditionary forces. Against her husband's instructions, Clytemnestra decides to accompany her daughter to Aulis.
From this point forward to the climax, the tempo and the development of the tragedy stretches tighter. Agamemnon has second thoughts about his plan. After confessing his ruse to his old servant (Angelos Yannoulis), Agamemnon dispatches him with another letter to Clytemnestra that reveals the truth and tells her to cancel Iphigenia's trip. The old man is intercepted on the road by Menelaus' men and returned to Aulis. In the ensuing confrontation, Menelaus rebukes his brother for betraying the honor of Greece for his personal benefit. Agamemnon argues persuasively and convinces Menelaus that no war is worth the life of a child. Following their understanding, Agamemnon decides to personally carry the letter to Clytemnestra, but is too late. A messenger announces the imminent arrival of the wedding party, which includes Clytemnestra. Agamemnon is stunned by the announcement and he resigns himself to the worst: "From now on fate rules. Not I."
Clytemnestra arrives at Aulis filled with happiness over her daughter's prospective wedding the famous Myrmidon leader, Achilles. Iphigenia's first meeting with her father is couched in double entendre which is devastating: as she talks about her upcoming wedding, he talks about her upcoming sacrifice. They use the same words, but the meanings could not be more horribly apart. When Agamemnon meets with Clytemnestra, he still vainly tries to convince her to return to Argos without witnessing the "wedding." Clytemnestra and Achilles soon learn the truth from Agamemnon's old servant. Achilles is overcome with shame and rage when he learns of the deceit that has involved him in this tragedy. Clytemnestra rises into a fury and in desperation, confronts her husband one last time. Agamemnon, however, is trapped in his own web and cannot now back down, as Odysseus has threatened to inform the army of the exact nature of the sacrifice if Agamemnon does not follow through on the oracle's demand.
Meanwhile, preparations for the sacrifice are proceeding. "Let's not delay, the wind is rising," says Calchas. Odysseus finally forces the situation when he tells the army who is to be the sacrificial victim. Now, there is no turning back. Iphigenia briefly escapes, but she is soon recaptured by Odysseus' soldiers. In a poignant scene, suggestive of the scene of the slowly dying sacred stag at the beginning of the film, Iphigenia is caught lying down, panting and out of breath, "dying," on the forest floor. Her captors return her to the camp to face her executioners. Now resigned to her fate, she has a last, heartrending meeting with her father, before walking up the hill toward her final destiny. While Agamemnon, surrounded by his cheering army, watches helplessly on the steps below, Iphigenia reaches the top and is quickly grabbed by Calchas. At that same moment, upon seeing the wind rising. Agamemnon runs up the steps and as he reaches the top of hill, his face reflects what is assumed to be the sight of the dead Iphigenia. A strong wind now blows. The men run to the beach, push their ships into the sea and sail toward Troy and its promised treasures.
Cast
Irene Papas as Clytemnestra
Tatiana Papamoschou as Iphigenia
Kostas Kazakos as Agamemnon
Costas Carras as Menelaus
Christos Tsagas as Odysseus
Panos Mihalopoulos as Achilles
Dimitri Aronis as Calchas
Divergences from the original play
Cacoyannis made a number of changes to Iphigenia at Aulis in order to adapt it to modern cinema, some of them significant divergences from the original plot. Cacoyannis does away with the traditional Greek tragic chorus originally employed to explain key scenes, replacing it in some cases with a chorus of Greek soldiers. He adds new characters who were not present, but who were mentioned, in the original play, Odysseus and Calchas, to further the plot and voice certain themes.
As in Euripides' original work, Cacoyannis deliberately renders the ending ambiguous. Though Greek myth states that Iphigenia was miraculously saved by the deities at the moment of her death, this event is not directly depicted in either the play or the film, leaving Iphigenia's true fate in question. In Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis, Iphigenia's rescue is described second-hand by a messenger. In the film, there is no overt reference to this event: the audience sees only the knife fall, followed by a shot of Agamemnon's shocked expression.
DVD
Iphigenia was released on DVD by MGM Home Entertainment on July 24th, 2007 as a Region 1 DVD.
See also
Iphigeneia
Iphigeneia at Aulis
Iphigeneia in Tauris
List of historical drama films
Greek mythology in popular culture
List of submissions to the 50th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film
List of Greek submissions for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film
References
External links
1977 films
1977 drama films
Greek films
Greek drama films
Greek-language films
Films based on ancient Greek plays
Films based on works by Euripides
Films directed by Michael Cacoyannis
Films set in ancient Greece
Films set in Greece
Films based on classical mythology
Trojan War films
Films scored by Mikis Theodorakis
Cultural depictions of Achilles
Agamemnon
Works based on Iphigenia in Aulis |
23611251 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wing%20IDE | Wing IDE | The Wing Python IDE family of integrated development environments (IDEs) from Wingware was created specifically for the Python programming language, with support for editing, testing, debugging, inspecting/browsing, and error checking Python code.
There are three products in this product line, each focused on different types of users:
Wing Pro – a full-featured commercial version, for professional programmers
Wing Personal – free version that omits some features, for students and hobbyists
Wing 101 – a very simplified free version, for teaching beginning programmers
Wing Pro provides local and remote debugging, editing (with multiple key bindings, auto-completion, and auto-editing), multi-selection, source browser and code navigation, code refactoring, error checking, auto-reformatting, unit testing, version control, project management, Python environment and package management, search abilities, fine-grained customization, support for Docker and LXC containers, assistance for working with third party frameworks and tools (such as Django, Flask, Matplotlib, Pandas, Blender, Maya, Unreal Engine, PyQt, wxPython, and others) extension through Python scripting, and comprehensive documentation.
Wing Personal and Wing 101 omit some of these features. For details on features provided in each product see the product overview. All three versions of Wing run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
Free licenses for Wing Pro are available on application for some educational uses and for unpaid open-source software developers, (see here).
Debugger
The debugger can be used to track down and fix bugs, and also as a way to write new code interactively in the live runtime state for which the code is being designed. The level of the debugging support depends on the version used.
Wing 101 supports:
Debug code launched from the IDE (as a file or module with 'python -m')
Interactive debugging from (and within) the integrated Python Shell
Exception and traceback reporting
View stack, locals/globals, and return values
Data frame and array viewer
Integrated Debug I/O tool with configurable text encoding
Optional native console I/O
Steps over importlib frames
Wing Personal adds:
Multi-threaded debugging
Debug code launched outside of the IDE, including code running under a web framework or embedded instance of Python
Debug value tooltips
Alter debug data values
Define named entry points and debug launch configurations
Wing Pro adds:
Interactive Debug Probe command line for inspecting the current debug frame, with auto-completion, syntax highlighting, goto-definition, call tips, and documentation links
Multi-process and automatic child process debugging
Launch remote debug processes from the IDE
Conditional and ignore-counted breakpoints
Enable/disable breakpoints
Move debug program counter
Debug unit tests
How-Tos and extra features for Django, Flask, Jupyter, matplotlib, web2py, Plone, Zope, Docker, AWS, Vagrant, Raspberry Pi, Windows Subsystem for Linux, Blender, Unreal Engine, Nuke, and many others
Press Shift-Space to view the value of all symbols in the editor
Recursive debugging of code invoked in the context of another debug stack frame
Convenient Restart Debugging tool
Track values by reference
Evaluate expressions
Breakpoint manager
Debug process attach/detach
Inspect sys.modules
Mark a range of code in the editor for quick reevaluation in Python Shell or Debug Probe
Code intelligence
The code intelligence features speed up editing, facilitate navigation through code, and inspects code for errors. These features rely both on static analysis of Python code found in the project and on the Python Path, and on runtime analysis of code whenever the debugger is active or the code is active in the integrated Python Shell.
The features available depend on product level:
Wing 101 provides:
Auto-completer offers completions in Python code and in the integrated Python shell (this feature is disabled by default in Wing 101 but can be enabled in preferences)
Source index menus in each editor provide a handy index into source code
Goto-definition
Auto-indent
PEP8, Black, and YAPF reformatting
Syntax and indentation error indicators
Convert indents and end-of-line characters on paste
Understands PEP 484 and 526 type hinting
Wing Personal adds:
Find Symbol: keyboard-driven goto-definition within current file or any project file.
Auto-completion in non-Python files
Indentation analysis and conversion
Source Assistant: provides context-appropriate call signature and documentation with rendering of PEP287 docstrings
Class browser for single files or whole project
Wing Pro adds:
Code Warnings tool
Pylint, pep8 checker, mypy, and flake8 integrations
Module browser
Source Assistant includes standard library documentation links
Find all points of use of a symbol, filtering out different but like-named symbols
Find symbol by name, in current file or all project files
Refactoring: rename or move a symbol and update points of use, extract a range of code to a new function or method, or introduce a variable
Version control
Version control integration is available only in Wing Pro. It supports the following tools:
git
Mercurial
Perforce
Subversion
CVS
Unit testing
Unit Testing support is available only in Wing Pro. It supports running and debugging unit tests written for the unittest, pytest, doctest, nose, and Django testing frameworks.
Remote development
Wing Pro also supports secure development on remote hosts, virtual machines, or containers hosted by Docker, Docker Compose, or LXC/LXD. Code on the remote system may be edited, debugged, tested, and managed from the IDE, as for locally stored files. Remote development also supports externally launched debugging.
Other features
Other features present in all the product levels include:
Editor emulates vim, emacs, Visual Studio, Eclipse, XCode, matlab, and Brief
Syntax highlighting for most programming languages, including Python, Django (web framework) templates, CoffeeScript, HTML/XML, CSS, JavaScript, C/C++, and about 70 others
Integrated Python shell with auto-completion, syntax highlighting
Search within the current file
Configurable color palettes and user interface layout
Extensive documentation, How-Tos, and tutorial
German, French, and Russian UI localization
Wing Personal adds:
Multi-select to simultaneously editing multiple parts of a file
Define custom key bindings
Create projects for different development tasks
Quickly open project files by name fragment
Add, delete, rename, and move files in the project
Create new virtualenv or Anaconda env projects
Project-wide and multi-file search
Regex and wildcard search
Search documentation
Wing Pro adds:
Goto-definition, call tips, and documentation links in the integrated Python shell
Python environment creation with virtualenv, pipenv, conda, and Docker
Python package management with pip, pipenv, and conda
File add, delete, rename, and move operations track to the active revision control systems
Set and traverse bookmarks
Code snippets with recursive inline data entry
Perspectives for naming custom user interface layouts
Execute external commands in integrated OS Commands tool
Extend the IDE's functionality with Python scripts
History
First public version of Wing was released on 2000-09-07, as 1.0 beta, only for Linux.
First stable version was v1.0 for Linux, on 2000-12-01.
Corporate name change: Archaeopteryx Software Inc is now doing business as Wingware: March 29, 2004
Wing version 4.x and earlier were based on GTK2 and the OS X version required X11. Wing 5 changed to Qt4 via PySide and no longer uses X11 on OS X. Wing 6 moved to Qt5 with PyQt5.
The history of all releases to date can be found at https://wingware.com/news
See also
List of integrated development environments for Python
References
External links
Integrated development environments
Python (programming language) development tools |
62420336 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter%20Schnell | Peter Schnell | Peter M. Schnell (* 10 June 1938 in Berlin) is a German computer scientist, founder of Software AG and long-time chairman of the Vorstand, executive board.
Life
He grew up in Alsbach-Hähnlein near Darmstadt. Schnell was impressed by the IBM 650, the first commercial mainframe computer that Alwin Walther had procured for Technische Universität Darmstadt (TU Darmstadt). He then studied physics and mathematics at TU Darmstadt. In 1965 he graduated with a diplom in mathematics under Walther. Already as a student he gave courses in programming languages and worked as a freelance programmer for Euratom and at the German Computer Center in Darmstadt.
He was one of the best Go players in Europe.
Software AG
In 1969, together with five other colleagues from the Institute for Applied Information Processing (AIV), Schnell founded Software AG in Darmstadt out of a garage with a starting capital of 6.000 German Mark and several patents. Among the colleagues was Peter Pagé, who left the company in 1992 after differences with Schnell. In the company, Schnell designed and developed the Adabas (Adaptable Database System) database management system. The mathematician based his concept on the NF² database model (NF² stands for NFNF = non first normal form). In 1971, the high-performance system was put into operation for the first time at Westdeutsche Landesbank. Schnell was responsible for the maintenance and further development of Adabas for mainframe systems of IBM and Siemens AG. The system was later used by numerous customers on the operating system platforms VMS from DEC, various Unix systems, Linux and Windows. Adabas is the fastest commercially available database management system in the world.
In 1996, the sole shareholder retired from the Vorstand of Software AG and did not move to the supervisory board. At that time, Software AG had 28 subsidiaries in 80 countries, more than 3,300 employees were employed and sales revenues at that time amounted to approximately 800 million German Mark.
Schnell then became a founder of the Software AG Foundation, one of the largest private foundations in Germany with headquarters in Darmstadt. The foundation holds 29 percent of the shares of Software AG. Soon after leaving his company, he devoted himself entirely to the foundation's work. He is an anthroposophist, and the foundation supports projects in the field of youth, elderly and disabled work as well as in science, research, education and nature conservation, including the University of Witten-Herdecke and the Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences in Bonn. Schnells work was strongly influenced by the teaching of Rudolf Steiner. One motive for Schnells social commitment was that he himself has two sons with intellectual disabilities.
Awards
In 2002 he was awarded the Medal for Services to the Foundation System of the Federal Association of German Foundations for his foundation work by the President of Germany Johannes Rau. On 7 May 2009, Schnell was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit, 1st class.
He received an honorary doctorate from the Witten/Herdecke University.
References
1938 births
Officers Crosses of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
Anthroposophists
Businesspeople from Darmstadt
Businesspeople in information technology
Living people
German computer scientists
Technische Universität Darmstadt alumni |
67627133 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thackeray%20ministry | Thackeray ministry | After the 2019 Maharashtra Legislative Assembly elections, post-poll alliance was formed in between Shiv Sena, Nationalist Congress Party and Indian National Congress to form Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA). Uddhav Thackeray, the president of Shiv Sena was sworn in as the 19th Chief Minister of Maharashtra on 28 November 2019. Following is the list of ministers from the cabinet of Uddhav Thackeray starting from November 2019.
Government formation
The Thackeray ministry proved its majority in the Legislative Assembly on November 30, 2019.
Council of Ministers
Guardian Ministers
Ministers by Party
Former members
References
Cabinets established in 2019
2019 establishments in Maharashtra
Lists of current Indian state and territorial ministries
2019 in Indian politics
Thackeray
Nationalist Congress Party
Shiv Sena
Indian National Congress |
659213 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tektronix | Tektronix | Tektronix, Inc., historically widely known as Tek, is an American company best known for manufacturing test and measurement devices such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and video and mobile test protocol equipment.
Originally an independent company, it is now a subsidiary of Fortive, a spinoff from Danaher Corporation.
Several charities are, or were, associated with Tektronix, including the Tektronix Foundation and the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust in Vancouver, Washington.
History
1946–1954
The company traces its roots to the electronics revolution that immediately followed World War II. It was founded in December 1945 as Tekrad. The name was similar to that of a California company, Techrad, so in 1946, the four partners, Howard Vollum, Jack Murdock and Miles Tippery, who had both served in the Coast Guard, and accountant Glenn McDowell, formed Tektronix, Inc. Each contributed an initial $2,600 for equal shares.
Howard Vollum had graduated in 1936 from Reed College with a degree in physics and a keen interest in oscilloscopes, then worked as a radio technician at Jack Murdock's Murdock Radio and Appliance Company (M.J. Murdock Company) prior to the outbreak of war, during which he served in the Signal Corps. Following the founding of Tektronix, Vollum invented the world's first triggered oscilloscope in 1946, a significant technological breakthrough. This oscilloscope—refined and developed by Tektronix—was the model 511 produced from 1947 to 1953. The model 511 was a triggering with sweep oscilloscope. The first oscilloscope with a true time-base was the Tektronix Model 513.
The leading oscilloscope manufacturer at the time was DuMont Laboratories. DuMont pioneered the frequency-synch trigger and sweep. Allen DuMont personally tried the 511 at an electronics show and was impressed, but when he saw the price of $795 (equivalent to $ today), which was about twice as much as his equivalent model, he told Howard Vollum at the show that they would have a hard time selling many.
Tektronix was incorporated in 1946 with its headquarters at SE Foster Road and SE 59th Avenue in Portland, Oregon, just six blocks from Murdock's first family home. In 1947 there were 12 employees. Four years later, in 1951, Tektronix had 250 employees. Murdock and Vollum were known humanitarians and sought to operate their business as one might run a large and caring family. In 1978, Tektronix was named by authors Robert Levering and Milton Moskowitz, et al., as among The 100 best companies to work for in America in their book of the same name.
By 1950 the company began building a manufacturing facility in Washington County, Oregon, at Barnes Road and the Sunset Highway and, by 1956, had expanded the facility to . The company then moved its headquarters to this site, following an employee vote.
A detailed story of Howard Vollum and Jack Murdock along with the products that made Tektronix a leader in oscilloscopes can be found at the Museum of Vintage Tektronix Equipment.
1955–1969
In 1956, a large property in Beaverton became available, and the company's employee retirement trust purchased the land and leased it back to the company. Construction began in 1957 and on May 1, 1959, Tektronix moved into its new Beaverton headquarters campus, on a site which came to be called the Tektronix Industrial Park.
In the late 1950s (1957–58), Tektronix set a new trend in oscilloscope applications that would continue into the 1980s. This was the introduction of the plug-in oscilloscope. Started with the 530 and 540 series oscilloscopes, the operator could switch in different horizontal sweep or vertical input plug-ins. This allowed the oscilloscope to be an adaptable test instrument. Later Tektronix added plug-ins to have the scope operate as a spectrum analyzer, waveform sampler, cable tester and transistor curve tracer. The 530 and 540 series also ushered in the delayed trigger, allowing to trigger between a sweep rather than at the beginning. This allows more stable triggering and better waveform reproduction.
In 1961, Tektronix sold its first (possibly the world's first practical) completely portable oscilloscope, the model 321. This oscilloscope could run on AC line (power mains) or on rechargeable batteries. It also brought the oscilloscope into the transistor age (only a Nuvistor ceramic tube was used for the vertical amp input). A year and a half later the all transistor model 321A came out.
The 560 series introduced the rectangular CRT to oscilloscopes. In 1964 Tektronix made an oscilloscope breakthrough, the world's first mass-produced analog storage oscilloscope the model 564. Hughes Aircraft Company is credited with the first working storage oscilloscope (the model 104D) but it was made in very small numbers and is extremely rare today.
In 1966, Tektronix brought out a line of high frequency full function oscilloscopes called the 400 series. The oscilloscopes were packed with features for field work applications. These scopes were outstanding performers often preferred over their laboratory bench models. The first models were the 422, a 16 MHz bandwidth and the 453, a 50 MHz bandwidth model. The following year the 454, a 150 MHz portable. These models put Tektronix well ahead of their competitors for years. The US Military contracted with Tektronix for a model 453 "ruggedized" for field servicing. The 400 series models would continue to be popular choices in the 1970s and '80s. In addition the styling of the 400 series would be copied by Tektronix's competitors. 400 series oscilloscopes were still being used as of 2013.
1970–1985
The company's IPO, when it publicly sold its first shares of stock, was on September 11, 1963. In 1974, the company acquired in Wilsonville, Oregon where it built a facility for its imaging group. By 1976, the company employed nearly 10,000, and was the state's largest employer. Tektronix's 1956 expansion and, in 1962, Electro Scientific Industries' similar move to Washington County and expansion are credited with fostering the development of a large high-tech industry in Washington County, a number of firms which collectively are often referred to as the "Silicon Forest".
For many years, Tektronix was the major electronics manufacturer in Oregon, and in 1981, its U.S. payroll peaked at over 24,000 employees. Tektronix also had operations in Europe, South America and Asia. European factories were located in Saint Peter's, Guernsey (then in the European Free Trade Association) until 1990, Hoddesdon (Hertfordshire, UK) and Heerenveen, Netherlands (then in the European Common Market). Some oscilloscopes marketed in Europe and the UK were sold under the brand name Telequipment but many in the UK used the Tektronix brand name in the 1960s and 70s.
For many years, Tektronix operated in Japan as Sony-Tektronix, a 50-50 joint venture of Sony Corporation and Tektronix, Inc; this was due to Japanese trade restrictions at the time. Since then, Tektronix has bought out Sony's share and is now the sole owner of the Japanese operation. Under the Sony-Tektronix name, the 300 series oscilloscopes were light weight and totally portable. They replaced the model 321/321A oscilloscopes. Examples of the Sony/Tektronix models were 314, 323, 335 and 370.
During the early 1970s, Tektronix made a major design change to their oscilloscopes. The 5000 and 7000 series oscilloscopes maintained the plug-in capabilities that originally started with the 530 and 540 series; however, the choice of plug-ins was even greater. These scopes used custom designed integrated circuits fabricated by Tektronix. The CRTs were all rectangular and were all fabricated by Tektronix. These oscilloscopes provided on screen controls setting. The 5000 series was the general purpose line while the 7000 series were capable of a wide variety of applications and could accept as many as 4 plug-ins. One model the 7104 (introduced 1978) was a true 1 GHz bandwidth oscilloscope.
Beginning with the firm's first cathode ray oscilloscopes, Tektronix has enjoyed a leading position in the test and measurement market. Although its equipment was expensive, it had performance, quality, and stability. Most test equipment manufacturers built their oscilloscopes with off-the-shelf, generally available components. But Tektronix, in order to gain an extra measure of performance, used many custom-designed or specially-selected components. They even had their own factory for making ultra-bright and sharp CRT tubes. Later on, they built their own integrated circuit manufacturing facility in order to make custom ICs for their equipment.
Tektronix instruments contributed significantly to the development of computers, test, and communications equipment and to the advancement of research and development in the high-technology electronics industry generally.
Tektronix as time went on fabricated more and more of their electronic parts. This led to very specialized skills and talents which in time led to employees forming new businesses. Some former Tektronix employees left to create other successful "Silicon Forest" companies. Spin-offs include Mentor Graphics, Planar Systems, Floating Point Systems, Cascade Microtech, Merix Corporation, Anthro Corporation and Northwest Instrument Systems (NWIS) - later renamed to MicroCase. Even some of the spin-offs have created spin-offs, such as InFocus. As Tektronix fabricated more specialized parts, they spread out their product base to include logic analyzers, digital multimeters and signal generators. The TM500 and TM5000 rack mount series was born featuring custom designed test instruments chosen by the buyer.
During this period, Tektronix acquired what were sold as the 8000 and 8002 Microprocessor Development System (MDS), the 8000 being a software development system running editors and cross-compilers with twin floppy disk storage, while the 8002 could be fitted with real-time emulators for several processors including the 8080, Z80 and 6502. These were later replaced by the 8540/8550/8560. The 8550 was a standalone development system capable of being fitted with real time emulation hardware for several different processors. The 8560 emerged just after Bell Labs were able to sell UNIX commercially, and ran a mildly modified version of Version 7 UNIX, called TNIX, supporting 4 or 8 (depending on how many I/O processor cards were fitted) serial terminals, with a special High-Speed Input/Output, based on RS-422, to connect to a remote 8540. There was a hard drive of about 34MB, later increased, and a variable amount of RAM depending on the processor card fitted, which was either a DEC LSI11-23+ or a LSI11-73, which had a wider address bus as well as a higher clock speed. The final upgraded variant was the 8562. The 8540, of which several could be connected to the 8560, contained emulation hardware similar to that available for the 8550, including RAM cards, Trigger Trace Analyser, 1 or 2 processor emulator cards, each with external probe, etc. The 8540 had no software development capability, but worked with the 8560, or other systems such as a VAX, which would provide the software development environment. It was unique in its day, in that the serial terminal could be connected to the 8540, on the bench, or to the 8560, and would pass UNIX commands automatically to the 8560, which passed emulator commands back to the 8540 for execution, completely transparently. Thus a complete compile, link, load and emulate session could be run from a UNIX shell script, a facility probably not seen on any development system since. The 8540/8550/8560 supported many 8-bit and 16-bit microprocessor types, with a change of emulator cards and probes, and installation of assembler and possibly compiler software, and did not require any particular code to be linked in to the user's code to facilitate register tracing at breakpoints, a shortcoming of the only real alternative multi-manufacturer MDS of that era, by HP. However, an impressive feature was that by including a special instruction sequence, typically a double NOP followed by a call to a specific address, the emulator would generate a "Service Call" to take whatever action the user required, and continue execution. This for example could allow UNIX to write variables to a log file as commanded by the running program on the emulated microprocessor.
It is not clear at present why Tektronix eventually withdrew from the MDS business, as their products were highly regarded.
1986–2006
Tektronix faces big challenges to its business structure. In the 1980s, Tektronix found itself distracted with too many divisions in too many markets. This led to decreasing earnings in almost every quarter. A period of layoffs, top management changes and sell-offs followed. In 1994, Tektronix spun off its printed circuit board manufacturing operation as a separate company, Merix Corp., headquartered in Forest Grove, Oregon.
Eventually, Tektronix was left with its original test and measurement equipment. Upon his promotion in 2000, the current CEO, Richard H. "Rick" Wills, carefully limited corporate spending in the face of the collapsing high-tech bubble. This led the way for Tektronix to emerge as one of the largest companies in its product niche, with a market capitalization of $3 billion . However, this failed to prevent it from becoming an acquisition target, and Tektronix was acquired by Danaher Corporation in 2007.
Major Product Changes—Digital Sampling Scopes. With the advancement in signal sampling techniques and digital processing, oscilloscope manufacturers found a new horizon in the market. The ability to sample the signal and digitize it for real time viewing or digitally store it for future use and maintain the integrity of the waveform. In addition a computer can be integrated with the scope to store many waveforms or instruct the scope to do further analysis. Color enhanced waveforms can be produced for ease in identification.
Tektronix was heavily involved with designing digital sampling oscilloscopes. In the mid-1980s, they quickly replaced their analog oscilloscopes. Their 400, 5000 and 7000 series oscilloscopes were replaced with a new generation of digital oscilloscopes with storage capability, the 11000 and TDS series. The 11000 series were large rack mount laboratory models with large a flat CRT face and had touch screen, multiple color, and multiwaveform display capability. They were still plug-in units and could accept the older 7000 series 7- plug-ins and the new 11000 series 11A- plug-ins. The TDS series replaced the 300 and 400 series portable line. They had the same panel layout but with enhanced storage and measuring capabilities. During this period Tektronix would also expand its test equipment line to logic analyzers, signal generators etc.
By the mid 1990s the use of the CRT was dropped and Tektronix started using LCD panels for display. The 11000 series would be replaced by the MSO (Mixed Signal Oscilloscope) which featured a color active matrix LCD. The TDS continued but with LCD panels starting with the TDS-210. In the TDS models, the lower priced models replaced the last of the 2000 series analog scopes and featured monochrome display while the higher end models were color LCD models which were more like the older 400 series scopes in performance. Spinoffs of the TDS was the TBS storage scope series. Later Tektronix would replace the 200 mini oscilloscopes with the TH series hand held digital oscilloscopes. All TDS and spinoff series with LCD display are totally portable (light weight and can run AC or on batteries).
2007 to present
On November 21, 2007, Tektronix was acquired by Danaher Corporation for $2.85 billion. Prior to the acquisition, Tektronix traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol TEK, the nickname by which Tektronix is known to its employees, customers, and neighbors. On October 15, 2007, Danaher Corporation tendered an offer to acquire Tektronix for $38 cash a share, which equated to a valuation of approximately $2.8 billion. The deal closed five and a half weeks later, with 90 percent of TEK shares being sold in the tender offer.
Also, as part of its acquisition by Danaher, the Communications Business division of Tektronix was spun off into a separate business entity under Danaher, Tektronix Communications.
The digital oscilloscope line that was introduced in the 1990s (MSO, TDS, TH series) are still being manufactured in some form.
On February 1, 2016, Tektronix introduced a new logo design, replacing a logo that had been in use since 1992, and indicated a shift in strategy to offer measurement products tailored for specific fields such as computing, communications and automotive. Danaher spun off several subsidiaries, including Tektronix, in 2016 to create Fortive.
Tektronix Video, commonly known for their waveform monitors, was merged with Telestream via an agreement with Fortive on April 25, 2019.
Production of oscilloscopes has moved to China in recent years.
Early oscilloscope models
For individual model history Tektronix and Tektronix Collectors has complete details. Just go click to the reference number next to the Tek Product Series. You will be directed to the latest link.
7000 series oscilloscopes and plug-ins 1970-1985
5000 series oscilloscopes and plug-ins 1970-1985
2000 series portable oscilloscopes (1978-?)
500 series oscilloscopes and plug-ins 1946-1970
400 series portable oscilloscopes and spectrum analyzers 1966-1989
300 series portable oscilloscopes 1952-1969?
200 series portable oscilloscopes (1975-?)
'Non test' products
Some important non-test equipment Tektronix created and sold include:
Tektronix 4014 computer terminal
Tektronix 405x graphical microcomputers
Tektronix 408x graphical minicomputers (original DRADIS of Battlestar Galactica)
Tektronix FEM181 Finite Element Modeling software system
Tektronix 4115 color raster scan graphics or the TGRAPH emulator
Tektronix 6130 NS 32016 workstation series running UTek, a 4.2BSD clone
Tektronix 4300 Motorola 68020 graphic workstation series running UTek, a 4.2BSD clone
Tektronix XD88 Motorola 88000 graphic workstation running Utek V, another Tektronix Unix based on Unix System V Release 3
Flatbed plotters used with Tektronix computers
TekXPress X-terminals, later sold to Network Computing Devices
Phaser -branded color computer printers, including their pioneering Solid Ink models, sold to Xerox in 1999
Television studio and video production equipment manufactured by onetime Tek subsidiary Grass Valley Group, which was spun off as an independent company (and later bought by Thomson SA). The Grass Valley is now owned by Black Dragon Capital.
Notable employees
The following notable individuals currently work for Tektronix, or have previously worked for Tektronix in some capacity. This list includes persons who are notable for reasons unrelated to their Tektronix careers.
Howard Vollum: founder, former president and chairman of the board, recipient of the Legion of Merit award for work on radar for England in WW II, noted philanthropist. (See Howard Vollum Award)
Jean Auel: technical writer; author of Children of Earth novels
Kent Beck: engineer; Extreme Programming developer
Tom Bruggere: engineer; later founded Mentor Graphics in 1981; 1996 candidate for United States Senate
James B. Castles: General Counsel; one of three original Trustees of the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust
Ward Cunningham: engineer; Extreme Programming developer, inventor of the wiki
Miller M. Duris: politician who served as mayor and county commissioner
Barrie Gilbert: popularized the Gilbert cell, a type of electronic mixer
Robert W. Lundeen: Director, CEO
Vivek Maddala: composer and musician
Steven McGeady: engineer; later Intel Vice-president and co-founder of Intel Architecture Labs
Merrill A. McPeak: Director; former US Air Force chief of staff
Keith Packard: engineer; X Window System developer
Randal L. Schwartz: Perl and computer security expert, author
Norm Winningstad: engineer; founder of Floating Point Systems, author
Rebecca Wirfs-Brock: engineer; technical lead for the first commercial Smalltalk implementation; author of books on object-oriented programming
Delbert Yocam: former president, COO; former COO of Apple Computer
Craig Ryan: Technical writer, author of non-fiction Sonic Wind and film of same title.
William D. Walker: former president, COO; former President of Electro Scientific Industries, former President of Planar Systems, former chair of Tek Foundation, former board of Oregon Graduate Center.
Randall Woodfield: American serial killer.
See also
Semiconductor curve tracer
Waveform monitor / Vectorscope
First Tech Credit Union, originally Tektronix Federal Credit Union
Tektronix Analog Oscilloscopes
List of companies based in Oregon
SyntheSys Research
References
Further reading
Winning with People: The First 40 Years of Tektronix by Marshall M. Lee. Published by Tektronix, Inc., October, 1986.
External links
Corporate Home Page
The Spirit of Tek Documentary produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting
archive of Tektronix vintage catalog PDFs
Electronics companies of the United States
Electronic test equipment manufacturers
Manufacturing companies based in Oregon
Companies based in Beaverton, Oregon
American companies established in 1946
Electronics companies established in 1946
2007 mergers and acquisitions
1946 establishments in Oregon
Danaher subsidiaries
Video equipment manufacturers |
102490 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell | Dell | Dell is an American company that develops, sells, repairs, and supports computers and related products and services, and is owned by its parent company of Dell Technologies. Founded in 1984 by Michael Dell, the company is one of the largest technology corporations in the world, employing more than 165,000 people in the United States (US) and around the world.
Dell sells personal computers (PCs), servers, data storage devices, network switches, software, computer peripherals, HDTVs, cameras, printers, and electronics built by other manufacturers. The company is well known for its innovations in supply chain management and electronic commerce, particularly its direct-sales model and its "build-to-order" or "configure to order" approach to manufacturing—delivering individual PCs configured to customer specifications. Dell was a pure hardware vendor for much of its existence, but with the acquisition in 2009 of Perot Systems, Dell entered the market for IT services. The company has since made additional acquisitions in storage and networking systems, with the aim of expanding their portfolio from offering computers only to delivering complete solutions for enterprise customers.
Dell was listed at number 51 in the Fortune 500 list until 2014. Its rank is 34th on the Fortune 500 currently. It is the world's 3rd largest personal computer vendor by unit sales as of January 2021, following Lenovo and HP Inc. Dell is the largest shipper of PC monitors worldwide. Dell is the sixth-largest company in Texas by total revenue, according to Fortune magazine. It is the second-largest non-oil company in Texas (behind AT&T) and the largest company in the Greater Austin area. After going private in 2013, the newly confidential nature of its financial information prevents the company from being ranked by Fortune. It was a publicly traded company (), as well as a component of the NASDAQ-100 and S&P 500, until it was taken private in a leveraged buyout which closed on October 30, 2013.
In 2015, Dell acquired the enterprise technology firm EMC Corporation; following the completion of the purchase, Dell and EMC became divisions of Dell Technologies. Dell EMC as a part of Dell Technologies focus on data storage, information security, virtualization, analytics, cloud computing and other related products and services.
History
Founding and startup
Michael Dell founded Dell Computer Corporation, doing business as PCs Limited, in 1984 while a student at the University of Texas at Austin. Operating from Michael Dell's off-campus dormitory room at Dobie Center, the startup aimed to sell IBM PC-compatible computers built from stock components. Michael Dell started trading in the belief that by selling personal computer systems directly to customers, PCs Limited could better understand customers' needs and provide the most effective computing solutions to meet those needs. Michael Dell dropped out of college upon completion of his freshman year at the University of Texas at Austin in order to focus full-time on his fledgling business, after getting about $1,000 in expansion-capital from his family. As of April 2021, Michael Dell's net worth was estimated to be over $50 billion.
In 1985, the company produced the first computer of its own design — the "Turbo PC", sold for US$795 — containing an Intel 8088-compatible processor running at a speed of 8 MHz. PCs Limited advertised the systems in national computer magazines for sale directly to consumers, and custom assembled each ordered unit according to a selection of options. This offered buyers prices lower than those of retail brands, but with greater convenience than assembling the components themselves. Although not the first company to use this business model, PCs Limited became one of the first to succeed with it. The company grossed more than $73 million in its first year of trading.
The company dropped the PC's Limited name in 1987 to become Dell Computer Corporation and began expanding globally. At the time, the reasoning was this new company name better reflected its presence in the business market, as well as resolved issues with the use of "Limited" in a company name in certain countries. The company set up its first international operations in Britain; eleven more followed within the next four years. In June 1988, Dell Computer's market capitalization grew by $30 million to $80 million from its June 22 initial public offering of 3.5 million shares at $8.50 a share. In 1989, Dell Computer set up its first on-site service programs in order to compensate for the lack of local retailers prepared to act as service centers.
Growth in the 1990s and early 2000s
In 1990, Dell Computer tried selling its products indirectly through warehouse clubs and computer superstores, but met with little success, and the company re-focused on its more successful direct-to-consumer sales model. In 1992, Fortune included Dell Computer Corporation in its list of the world's 500 largest companies, making Michael Dell the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company at that time.
In 1993, to complement its own direct sales channel, Dell planned to sell PCs at big-box retail outlets such as Wal-Mart, which would have brought in an additional $125 million in annual revenue. Bain consultant Kevin Rollins persuaded Michael Dell to pull out of these deals, believing they would be money losers in the long run. Margins at retail were thin at best and Dell left the reseller channel in 1994. Rollins would soon join Dell full-time and eventually become the company president and CEO.
Originally, Dell did not emphasize the consumer market, due to the higher costs and low profit margins in selling to individuals and households; this changed when the company's Internet site took off in 1996 and 1997. While the industry's average selling price to individuals was going down, Dell's was going up, as second- and third-time computer buyers who wanted powerful computers with multiple features and did not need much technical support were choosing Dell. Dell found an opportunity among PC-savvy individuals who liked the convenience of buying direct, customizing their PC to their means, and having it delivered in days. In early 1997, Dell created an internal sales and marketing group dedicated to serving the home market and introduced a product line designed especially for individual users.
From 1997 to 2004, Dell steadily grew and it gained market share from competitors even during industry slumps. During the same period, rival PC vendors such as Compaq, Gateway, IBM, Packard Bell, and AST Research struggled and eventually left the market or were bought out. Dell surpassed Compaq to become the largest PC manufacturer in 1999. Operating costs made up only 10 percent of Dell's $35 billion in revenue in 2002, compared with 21 percent of revenue at Hewlett-Packard, 25 percent at Gateway, and 46 percent at Cisco. In 2002, when Compaq merged with Hewlett-Packard (the fourth-place PC maker), the newly combined Hewlett-Packard took the top spot for a time but struggled and Dell soon regained its lead. Dell grew the fastest in the early 2000s.
In 2002, Dell expanded its product line to include televisions, handhelds, digital audio players, and printers. Chairman and CEO Michael Dell had repeatedly blocked President and COO Kevin Rollins's attempt to lessen the company's heavy dependency on PCs, which Rollins wanted to fix by acquiring EMC Corporation; a move that would eventually occur over 12 years later.
In 2003, at the annual company meeting, the stockholders approved changing the company name to "Dell Inc." to recognize the company's expansion beyond computers.
In 2004, the company announced that it would build a new assembly-plant near Winston-Salem, North Carolina; the city and county provided Dell with $37.2 million in incentive packages; the state provided approximately $250 million in incentives and tax breaks. In July, Michael Dell stepped aside as chief executive officer while retaining his position as chairman of the board. Kevin Rollins, who had held a number of executive posts at Dell, became the new CEO. Despite no longer holding the CEO title, Dell essentially acted as a de facto co-CEO with Rollins.
Under Rollins, Dell purchased the computer hardware manufacturer Alienware in 2006. Dell Inc.'s plan anticipated Alienware continuing to operate independently under its existing management. Alienware expected to benefit from Dell's efficient manufacturing system.
Disappointments
In 2005, while earnings and sales continued to rise, sales growth slowed considerably, and the company stock lost 25% of its value that year. By June 2006, the stock traded around US$25 which was 40% down from July 2005—the high-water mark of the company in the post-dotcom era.
The slowing sales growth has been attributed to the maturing PC market, which constituted 66% of Dell's sales, and analysts suggested that Dell needed to make inroads into non-PC business segments such as storage, services, and servers. Dell's price advantage was tied to its ultra-lean manufacturing for desktop PCs, but this became less important as savings became harder to find inside the company's supply chain, and as competitors such as Hewlett-Packard and Acer made their PC manufacturing operations more efficient to match Dell, weakening Dell's traditional price differentiation. Throughout the entire PC industry, declines in prices along with commensurate increases in performance meant that Dell had fewer opportunities to upsell to their customers (a lucrative strategy of encouraging buyers to upgrade the processor or memory). As a result, the company was selling a greater proportion of inexpensive PCs than before, which eroded profit margins. The laptop segment had become the fastest-growing of the PC market, but Dell produced low-cost notebooks in China like other PC manufacturers which eliminated Dell's manufacturing cost advantages, plus Dell's reliance on Internet sales meant that it missed out on growing notebook sales in big box stores. CNET has suggested that Dell was getting trapped in the increasing commoditization of high volume low margin computers, which prevented it from offering more exciting devices that consumers demanded.
Despite plans of expanding into other global regions and product segments, Dell was heavily dependent on US corporate PC market, as desktop PCs sold to both commercial and corporate customers accounted for 32 percent of its revenue, 85 percent of its revenue comes from businesses, and sixty-four percent of its revenue comes from North and South America, according to its 2006 third-quarter results. US shipments of desktop PCs were shrinking, and the corporate PC market, which purchases PCs in upgrade cycles, had largely decided to take a break from buying new systems. The last cycle started around 2002, three or so years after companies started buying PCs ahead of the perceived Y2K problems, and corporate clients were not expected to upgrade again until extensive testing of Microsoft's Windows Vista (expected in early 2007), putting the next upgrade cycle around 2008. Heavily dependent on PCs, Dell had to slash prices to boost sales volumes, while demanding deep cuts from suppliers.
Dell had long stuck by its direct sales model. Consumers had become the main drivers of PC sales in recent years, yet there had a decline in consumers purchasing PCs through the Web or on the phone, as increasing numbers were visiting consumer electronics retail stores to try out the devices first. Dell's rivals in the PC industry, HP, Gateway and Acer, had a long retail presence and so were well poised to take advantage of the consumer shift. The lack of a retail presence stymied Dell's attempts to offer consumer electronics such as flat-panel TVs and MP3 players. Dell responded by experimenting with mall kiosks, plus quasi-retail stores in Texas and New York.
Dell had a reputation as a company that relied upon supply chain efficiencies to sell established technologies at low prices, instead of being an innovator. By the mid-2000s many analysts were looking to innovating companies as the next source of growth in the technology sector. Dell's low spending on R&D relative to its revenue (compared to IBM, Hewlett Packard, and Apple Inc.)—which worked well in the commoditized PC market—prevented it from making inroads into more lucrative segments, such as MP3 players and later mobile devices. Increasing spending on R&D would have cut into the operating margins that the company emphasized. Dell had done well with a horizontal organization that focused on PCs when the computing industry moved to horizontal mix-and-match layers in the 1980s, but by the mid-2000 the industry shifted to vertically integrated stacks to deliver an end-to-end IT product, and Dell lagged far behind competitors like Hewlett Packard and Oracle.
Dell's reputation for poor customer service, since 2002, which was exacerbated as it moved call centers offshore and as its growth outstripped its technical support infrastructure, came under increasing scrutiny on the Web. The original Dell model was known for high customer satisfaction when PCs sold for thousands but by the 2000s, the company could not justify that level of service when computers in the same lineup sold for hundreds. Rollins responded by shifting Dick Hunter from the head of manufacturing to head of customer service. Hunter, who noted that Dell's DNA of cost-cutting "got in the way," aimed to reduce call transfer times and have call center representatives resolve inquiries in one call. By 2006, Dell had spent $100 million in just a few months to improve on this and rolled out DellConnect to answer customer inquiries more quickly. In July 2006, the company started its Direct2Dell blog, and then in February 2007, Michael Dell launched IdeaStorm.com, asking customers for advice including selling Linux computers and reducing the promotional "bloatware" on PCs. These initiatives did manage to cut the negative blog posts from 49% to 22%, as well as reduce the "Dell Hell" prominent on Internet search engines.
There was also criticism that Dell used faulty components for its PCs, particularly the 11.8 million OptiPlex desktop computers sold to businesses and governments from May 2003 to July 2005, that suffered from faulty capacitors. A battery recall in August 2006, as a result of a Dell laptop catching fire caused much negative attention for the company though later, Sony was found responsible for the manufacturing of the batteries, however spokesman for Sony Yoshikazu Ochiai said the problem concerned the combination of the battery with a charger, which is specific to Dell in this case.
2006 marked the first year that Dell's growth was slower than the PC industry as a whole. By the fourth quarter of 2006, Dell lost its title of the largest PC manufacturer to rival Hewlett Packard whose Personal Systems Group was invigorated thanks to a restructuring initiated by their CEO Mark Hurd.
SEC investigation
In August 2005, Dell became the subject of an informal investigation by the US SEC. In 2006, the company disclosed that the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York had subpoenaed documents related to the company's financial reporting dating back to 2002. The company delayed filing financial reports for the third and fourth fiscal quarter of 2006, and several class-action lawsuits were filed. Dell Inc's failure to file its quarterly earnings report could have subjected the company to de-listing from the NASDAQ, but the exchange granted Dell a waiver, allowing the stock to trade normally. In August 2007, the Company announced that it would restate its earnings for fiscal years 2003 through 2006 and the first quarter of 2007 after an internal audit found that certain employees had changed corporate account balances to meet quarterly financial targets. In July 2010, the SEC announced charges against several senior Dell executives, including Dell Chairman and CEO Michael Dell, former CEO Kevin Rollins, and former CFO James Schneider, "with failing to disclose material information to investors and using fraudulent accounting to make it falsely appear that the company was consistently meeting Wall Street earnings targets and reducing its operating expenses." Dell, inc. was fined $100 million, with Michael Dell personally fined $4 million.
Michael Dell resumes CEO role
After four out of five quarterly earnings reports were below expectations, Rollins resigned as president and CEO on January 31, 2007, and founder Michael Dell assumed the role of CEO again.
On March 1, 2007, the company issued a preliminary quarterly earnings report showing gross sales of $14.4 billion, down 5% year-over-year, and net income of $687 million (30 cents per share), down 33%. Net earnings would have declined even more if not for the effects of eliminated employee bonuses, which accounted for six cents per share. NASDAQ extended the company's deadline for filing financials to May 4.
Dell 2.0 and downsizing
Dell announced a change campaign called "Dell 2.0," reducing the number of employees and diversifying the company's products. While chairman of the board after relinquishing his CEO position, Michael Dell still had significant input in the company during Rollins' years as CEO. With the return of Michael Dell as CEO, the company saw changes in operations, the exodus of many senior vice-presidents and new personnel brought in from outside the company. Michael Dell announced a number of initiatives and plans (part of the "Dell 2.0" initiative) to improve the company's financial performance. These include elimination of 2006 bonuses for employees with some discretionary awards, reduction in the number of managers reporting directly to Michael Dell from 20 to 12, and reduction of "bureaucracy". Jim Schneider retired as CFO and was replaced by Donald Carty, as the company came under an SEC probe for its accounting practices.
On April 23, 2008, Dell announced the closure of one of its biggest Canadian call-centers in Kanata, Ontario, terminating approximately 1100 employees, with 500 of those redundancies effective on the spot, and with the official closure of the center scheduled for the summer. The call-center had opened in 2006 after the city of Ottawa won a bid to host it. Less than a year later, Dell planned to double its workforce to nearly 3,000 workers add a new building. These plans were reversed, due to a high Canadian dollar that made the Ottawa staff relatively expensive, and also as part of Dell's turnaround, which involved moving these call-center jobs offshore to cut costs.
The company had also announced the shutdown of its Edmonton, Alberta, office, losing 900 jobs. In total, Dell announced the ending of about 8,800 jobs in 2007–2008 — 10% of its workforce.
By the late 2000s, Dell's "configure to order" approach of manufacturing—delivering individual PCs configured to customer specifications from its US facilities was no longer as efficient or competitive with high-volume Asian contract manufacturers as PCs became powerful low-cost commodities. Dell closed plants that produced desktop computers for the North American market, including the Mort Topfer Manufacturing Center in Austin, Texas (original location) and Lebanon, Tennessee (opened in 1999) in 2008 and early 2009, respectively. The desktop production plant in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, received US$280 million in incentives from the state and opened in 2005, but ceased operations in November 2010. Dell's contract with the state required them to repay the incentives for failing to meet the conditions, and they sold the North Carolina plant to Herbalife. Much work was transferred to manufacturers in Asia and Mexico, or some of Dell's own factories overseas. On January 8, 2009, Dell announced the closure of its manufacturing plant in Limerick, Ireland, with the loss of 1,900 jobs and the transfer of production to its plant in Łodź in Poland.
Attempts at diversification
The release of Apple's iPad tablet computer had a negative impact on Dell and other major PC vendors, as consumers switched away from desktop and laptop PCs. Dell's own mobility division has not managed success with developing smartphones or tablets, whether running Windows or Google Android. The Dell Streak was a failure commercially and critically due to its outdated OS, numerous bugs, and low resolution screen. InfoWorld suggested that Dell and other OEMs saw tablets as a short-term, low-investment opportunity running Google Android, an approach that neglected user interface and failed to gain long term market traction with consumers. Dell has responded by pushing higher-end PCs, such as the XPS line of notebooks, which do not compete with the Apple iPad and Kindle Fire tablets. The growing popularity of smartphones and tablet computers instead of PCs drove Dell's consumer segment to an operating loss in Q3 2012. In December 2012, Dell suffered its first decline in holiday sales in five years, despite the introduction of Windows 8.
In the shrinking PC industry, Dell continued to lose market share, as it dropped below Lenovo in 2011 to fall to number three in the world. Dell and fellow American contemporary Hewlett Packard came under pressure from Asian PC manufacturers Lenovo, Asus, and Acer, all of which had lower production costs and were willing to accept lower profit margins. In addition, while the Asian PC vendors had been improving their quality and design—for instance, Lenovo's ThinkPad series was winning corporate customers away from Dell's laptops—Dell's customer service and reputation had been slipping. Dell remained the second-most profitable PC vendor, as it took 13 percent of operating profits in the PC industry during Q4 2012, behind Apple's Mac that took 45 percent, seven percent at Hewlett Packard, six percent at Lenovo and Asus, and one percent for Acer.
Dell attempted to offset its declining PC business, which still accounted for half of its revenue and generates steady cash flow, by expanding into the enterprise market with servers, networking, software, and services. It avoided many of the acquisition write-downs and management turnover that plagued its chief rival Hewlett Packard. Dell also managed some success in taking advantage of its high-touch direct sales heritage to establish close relationships and design solutions for clients. Despite spending $13 billion on acquisitions to diversify its portfolio beyond hardware, the company was unable to convince the market that it could thrive or made the transformation in the post-PC world, as it suffered continued declines in revenue and share price. Dell's market share in the corporate segment was previously a "moat" against rivals but this has no longer been the case as sales and profits have fallen precipitously.
2013 buyout
After several weeks of rumors, which started around January 11, 2013, Dell announced on February 5, 2013, that it had struck a $24.4 billion leveraged buyout deal, that would have delisted its shares from the NASDAQ and Hong Kong Stock Exchange and taken it private. Reuters reported that Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners, aided by a $2 billion loan from Microsoft, would acquire the public shares at $13.65 apiece. The $24.4 billion buyout was projected to be the largest leveraged buyout backed by private equity since the 2007 financial crisis. It is also the largest technology buyout ever, surpassing the 2006 buyout of Freescale Semiconductor for $17.5 billion.
The founder of Dell, Michael Dell, said of the February offer "I believe this transaction will open an exciting new chapter for Dell, our customers and team members". Dell rival Lenovo responded to the buyout, saying, "the financial actions of some of our traditional competitors will not substantially change our outlook."
In March 2013, the Blackstone Group and Carl Icahn expressed interest in purchasing Dell. In April 2013, Blackstone withdrew their offer, citing deteriorating business. Other private equity firms such as KKR & Co. and TPG Capital declined to submit alternative bids for Dell, citing the uncertain market for personal computers and competitive pressures, so the "wide-open bidding war" never materialized. Analysts said that the biggest challenge facing Silver Lake would be to find an "exit strategy" to profit from its investment, which would be when the company would hold an IPO to go public again, and one warned "But even if you can get a $25bn enterprise value for Dell, it will take years to get out."
In May 2013, Dell joined his board in voting for his offer. The following August he reached a deal with the special committee on the board for $13.88 (a raised price of $13.75 plus a special dividend of 13 cents per share), as well as a change to the voting rules. The $13.88 cash offer (plus a $.08 per share dividend for the third fiscal quarter) was accepted on September 12 and closed on October 30, 2013, ending Dell's 25-year run as a publicly-traded company.
After the buyout, the newly private Dell offered a Voluntary Separation Program that they expected to reduce their workforce by up to seven percent. The reception to the program so exceeded the expectations that Dell may be forced to hire new staff to make up for the losses.
Recent history
On November 19, 2015, Dell, alongside ARM Holdings, Cisco Systems, Intel, Microsoft, and Princeton University, founded the OpenFog Consortium, to promote interests and development in fog computing.
Acquisition of EMC
On October 12, 2015, Dell Inc. announced its intent to acquire EMC Corporation in a cash-and-stock deal valued at $67 billion, which has been considered the largest-ever acquisition in the technology sector. As part of the acquisition, Dell would take over EMC's 81% stake in the cloud-computing and virtualization company VMWare. This would combine Dell's enterprise server, personal computer, and mobile businesses with EMC's enterprise storage business in a significant Vertical merger of IT giants. Dell would pay $24.05 per share of EMC, and $9.05 per share of tracking stock in VMware.
The announcement came two years after Dell Inc. returned to private ownership, claiming that it faced bleak prospects and would need several years out of the public eye to rebuild its business. It's thought that the company's value has roughly doubled since then. EMC was being pressured by Elliott Management, a hedge fund holding 2.2% of EMC's stock, to reorganize their unusual "Federation" structure, in which EMC's divisions were effectively being run as independent companies. Elliott argued this structure deeply undervalued EMC's core "EMC II" data storage business, and that increasing competition between EMC II and VMware products was confusing the market and hindering both companies. The Wall Street Journal estimated that in 2014 Dell had revenue of $27.3billion from personal computers and $8.9bn from servers, while EMC had $16.5bn from EMC II, $1bn from RSA Security, $6bn from VMware, and $230million from Pivotal Software. EMC owns around 80 percent of the stock of VMware. The proposed acquisition will maintain VMware as a separate company, held via a new tracking stock, while the other parts of EMC will be rolled into Dell. Once the acquisition closes Dell will again publish quarterly financial results, having ceased these on going private in 2013.
The combined business was expected to address the markets for scale-out architecture, converged infrastructure and private cloud computing, playing to the strengths of both EMC and Dell. Commentators have questioned the deal, with FBR Capital Markets saying that though it makes a "ton of sense" for Dell, it's a "nightmare scenario that would lack strategic synergies" for EMC. Fortune said there was a lot for Dell to like in EMC's portfolio, but "does it all add up enough to justify tens of billions of dollars for the entire package? Probably not." The Register reported the view of William Blair & Company that the merger would "blow up the current IT chess board", forcing other IT infrastructure vendors to restructure to achieve scale and vertical integration. The value of VMware stock fell 10% after the announcement, valuing the deal at around $63–64bn rather than the $67bn originally reported. Key investors backing the deal besides Dell were Singapore's Temasek Holdings and Silver Lake Partners.
On September 7, 2016, Dell Inc. completed the merger with EMC Corp., which involved the issuance of $45.9 billion in debt and $4.4 billion common stock. At the time, some analysts claimed that Dell's acquisition of the former
Iomega could harm the LenovoEMC partnership.
In July 2018, Dell announced intentions to become a publicly traded company again by paying $21.7 billion in both cash and stock to buy back shares from its stake in VMware, offering shareholders roughly 60 cents on the dollar as part of the deal. In November, Carl Icahn (9.3% owner of Dell) sued the company over plans to go public. As a result of pressure from Icahn and other activist investors, Dell renegotiated the deal, ultimately offering shareholders about 80% of market value. As part of this deal, Dell once again became a public company, with the original Dell computer business and Dell EMC operating under the newly created parent, Dell Technologies.
Post-acquisition, Dell was re-organized with a new parent company, Dell Technologies; Dell's consumer and workstation businesses are internally referred to as the Dell Client Solutions Group, and is one of the company's three main business divisions alongside Dell EMC and VMware.
In January 2021, Dell reported $94 billion in sales and $13 billion operating cash flow during 2020.
Dell and AMD
When Dell acquired Alienware early in 2006, some Alienware systems had AMD chips. On August 17, 2006, a Dell press release stated that starting in September, Dell Dimension desktop computers would have AMD processors and that later in the year Dell would release a two-socket, quad-processor server using AMD Opteron chips, moving away from Dell's tradition of only offering Intel processors in Dell PCs.
CNet's News.com on August 17, 2006, cited Dell's CEO Kevin Rollins as attributing the move to AMD processors to lower costs and to AMD technology. AMD's senior VP in commercial business, Marty Seyer, stated: "Dell's wider embrace of AMD processor-based offerings is a win for Dell, for the industry and most importantly for Dell customers."
On October 23, 2006, Dell announced new AMD-based servers — the PowerEdge 6950 and the PowerEdge SC1435.
On November 1, 2006, Dell's website began offering notebooks based on AMD processors (the Inspiron 1501 with a display) with the choice of a single-core MK-36 processor, dual-core Turion X2 chips or Mobile Sempron.
In 2017, Dell released the AlienWare 17. The model was primarily based on NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 systems, making it perfect for gaming and graphic designing.
Dell and desktop Linux
In 1998, Ralph Nader asked Dell (and five other major OEMs) to offer alternate operating systems to Microsoft Windows, specifically including Linux, for which "there is clearly a growing interest" Possibly coincidentally, Dell started offering Linux notebook systems that "cost no more than their Windows 98 counterparts" in 2000, and soon expanded, with Dell becoming "the first major manufacturer to offer Linux across its full product line". However, by early 2001 Dell had "disbanded its Linux business unit."
On February 26, 2007, Dell announced that it had commenced a program to sell and distribute a range of computers with pre-installed Linux distributions as an alternative to Microsoft Windows. Dell indicated that Novell's SUSE Linux would appear first. However, the next day, Dell announced that its previous announcement related to certifying the hardware as ready to work with Novell SUSE Linux and that it (Dell) had no plans to sell systems pre-installed with Linux in the near future. On March 28, 2007, Dell announced that it would begin shipping some desktops and laptops with Linux pre-installed, although it did not specify which distribution of Linux or which hardware would lead. On April 18, a report appeared suggesting that Michael Dell used Ubuntu on one of his home systems. On May 1, 2007, Dell announced it would ship the Ubuntu Linux distribution. On May 24, 2007, Dell started selling models with Ubuntu Linux 7.04 pre-installed: a laptop, a budget computer, and a high-end PC.
On June 27, 2007, Dell announced on its Direct2Dell blog that it planned to offer more pre-loaded systems (the new Dell Inspiron desktops and laptops). After the IdeaStorm site supported extending the bundles beyond the US market, Dell later announced more international marketing. On August 7, 2007, Dell officially announced that it would offer one notebook and one desktop in the UK, France and Germany with Ubuntu "pre-installed". At LinuxWorld 2007 Dell announced plans to provide Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop on selected models in China, "factory-installed". On November 30, 2007, Dell reported shipping 40,000 Ubuntu PCs. On January 24, 2008, Dell in Germany, Spain, France, and the United Kingdom launched a second laptop, an XPS M1330 with Ubuntu 7.10, for 849 euro or GBP 599 upwards. On February 18, 2008, Dell announced that the Inspiron 1525 would have Ubuntu as an optional operating system. On February 22, 2008, Dell announced plans to sell Ubuntu in Canada and in Latin America From September 16, 2008, Dell has shipped both Dell Ubuntu Netbook Remix and Windows XP Home versions of the Inspiron Mini 9 and the Inspiron Mini 12. Dell shipped the Inspiron Mini laptops with Ubuntu version 8.04.
As of 2021, Dell continues to offer select laptops and workstations with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed, under the "Developer Edition" moniker.
List of Dell marketing slogans
Be direct (1998-2001)
Easy as Dell (2001-2004)
Get more out of now (2004–2005)
It's a Dell (2005-2006)
Dell. Purely You (2006–2007)
Yours is Here (2007–2011)
The power to do more (2011–present)
Senior leadership
List of chairmen
Michael Dell (1984– )
List of chief executives
Michael Dell (1984–2004)
Kevin Rollins (2004–2007)
Michael Dell (2007–present); second term
Acquisitions
Dell facilities
Dell's headquarters is located in Round Rock, Texas. the company employed about 14,000 people in central Texas and was the region's largest private employer, which has of space. As of 1999 almost half of the general fund of the city of Round Rock originated from sales taxes generated from the Dell headquarters.
Dell previously had its headquarters in the Arboretum complex in northern Austin, Texas. In 1989 Dell occupied in the Arboretum complex. In 1990, Dell had 1,200 employees in its headquarters. In 1993, Dell submitted a document to Round Rock officials, titled "Dell Computer Corporate Headquarters, Round Rock, Texas, May 1993 Schematic Design." Despite the filing, during that year the company said that it was not going to move its headquarters. In 1994, Dell announced that it was moving most of its employees out of the Arboretum, but that it was going to continue to occupy the top floor of the Arboretum and that the company's official headquarters address would continue to be the Arboretum. The top floor continued to hold Dell's board room, demonstration center, and visitor meeting room. Less than one month prior to August 29, 1994, Dell moved 1,100 customer support and telephone sales employees to Round Rock. Dell's lease in the Arboretum had been scheduled to expire in 1994.
By 1996, Dell was moving its headquarters to Round Rock. As of January 1996, 3,500 people still worked at the current Dell headquarters. One building of the Round Rock headquarters, Round Rock 3, had space for 6,400 employees and was scheduled to be completed in November 1996. In 1998 Dell announced that it was going to add two buildings to its Round Rock complex, adding of office space to the complex.
In 2000, Dell announced that it would lease of space in the Las Cimas office complex in unincorporated Travis County, Texas, between Austin and West Lake Hills, to house the company's executive offices and corporate headquarters. 100 senior executives were scheduled to work in the building by the end of 2000. In January 2001, the company leased the space in Las Cimas 2, located along Loop 360. Las Cimas 2 housed Dell's executives, the investment operations, and some corporate functions. Dell also had an option for of space in Las Cimas 3. After a slowdown in business required reducing employees and production capacity, Dell decided to sublease its offices in two buildings in the Las Cimas office complex. In 2002 Dell announced that it planned to sublease its space to another tenant; the company planned to move its headquarters back to Round Rock once a tenant was secured. By 2003, Dell moved its headquarters back to Round Rock. It leased all of Las Cimas I and II, with a total of , for about a seven-year period after 2003. By that year roughly of that space was absorbed by new subtenants.
In 2008, Dell switched the power sources of the Round Rock headquarters to more environmentally friendly ones, with 60% of the total power coming from TXU Energy wind farms and 40% coming from the Austin Community Landfill gas-to-energy plant operated by Waste Management, Inc.
Dell facilities in the United States are located in Austin, Texas; Nashua, New Hampshire; Nashville, Tennessee; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Peoria, Illinois; Hillsboro, Oregon (Portland area); Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Eden Prairie, Minnesota (Dell Compellent); Bowling Green, Kentucky; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Miami, Florida. Facilities located abroad include Penang, Malaysia; Xiamen, China; Bracknell, UK; Manila, Philippines Chennai, India; Hyderabad, India; Noida, India; Hortolandia and Porto Alegre, Brazil; Bratislava, Slovakia; Łódź, Poland; Panama City, Panama; Dublin and Limerick, Ireland; Casablanca, Morocco and Montpellier, France.
The US and India are the only countries that have all Dell's business functions and provide support globally: research and development, manufacturing, finance, analysis, and customer care.
Manufacturing
From its early beginnings, Dell operated as a pioneer in the "configure to order" approach to manufacturing—delivering individual PCs configured to customer specifications. In contrast, most PC manufacturers in those times delivered large orders to intermediaries on a quarterly basis.
To minimize the delay between purchase and delivery, Dell has a general policy of manufacturing its products close to its customers. This also allows for implementing a just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing approach, which minimizes inventory costs. Low inventory is another signature of the Dell business model—a critical consideration in an industry where components depreciate very rapidly.
Dell's manufacturing process covers assembly, software installation, functional testing (including "burn-in"), and quality control. Throughout most of the company's history, Dell manufactured desktop machines in-house and contracted out the manufacturing of base notebooks for configuration in-house. The company's approach has changed, as cited in the 2006 Annual Report, which states, "We are continuing to expand our use of original design manufacturing partnerships and manufacturing outsourcing relationships." The Wall Street Journal reported in September 2008 that "Dell has approached contract computer manufacturers with offers to sell" their plants. By the late 2000s, Dell's "configure to order" approach of manufacturing—delivering individual PCs configured to customer specifications from its US facilities was no longer as efficient or competitive with high-volume Asian contract manufacturers as PCs became powerful low-cost commodities.
Assembly of desktop computers for the North American market formerly took place at Dell plants in Austin, Texas, (original location) and Lebanon, Tennessee, (opened in 1999), which were closed in 2008 and early 2009, respectively. The plant in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, opened in 2005 but ceased operations in November 2010. Most of the work that used to take place in Dell's US plants was transferred to contract manufacturers in Asia and Mexico, or some of Dell's own factories overseas. The Miami, Florida, facility of its Alienware subsidiary remains in operation, while Dell continues to produce its servers (its most profitable products) in Austin, Texas.
Dell assembled computers for the EMEA market at the Limerick facility in the Republic of Ireland, and once employed about 4,500 people in that country. Dell began manufacturing in Limerick in 1991 and went on to become Ireland's largest exporter of goods and its second-largest company and foreign investor. On January 8, 2009, Dell announced that it would move all Dell manufacturing in Limerick to Dell's new plant in the Polish city of Łódź by January 2010. European Union officials said they would investigate a €52.7million aid package the Polish government used to attract Dell away from Ireland. European Manufacturing Facility 1 (EMF1, opened in 1990) and EMF3 form part of the Raheen Industrial Estate near Limerick. EMF2 (previously a Wang facility, later occupied by Flextronics, situated in Castletroy) closed in 2002, and Dell Inc. has consolidated production into EMF3 (EMF1 now contains only offices). Subsidies from the Polish government did keep Dell for a long time. After ending assembly in the Limerick plant the Cherrywood Technology Campus in Dublin was the largest Dell office in the republic with over 1200 people in sales (mainly UK & Ireland), support (enterprise support for EMEA) and research and development for cloud computing, but no more manufacturing except Dell's Alienware subsidiary, which manufactures PCs in an Athlone, Ireland, plant. Whether this facility will remain in Ireland is not certain. Dell started production at EMF4 in Łódź, Poland, in late 2007.
Dell moved desktop, notebook and PowerEdge server manufacturing for the South American market from the Eldorado do Sul plant opened in 1999, to a new plant in Hortolandia, Brazil, in 2007.
Products
Scope and brands
The corporation markets specific brand names to different market segments.
Its Business/Corporate class includes:
OptiPlex (office desktop computer systems)
Dimension (home desktop computer systems)
Vostro (office/small business desktop and notebook systems)
n Series (desktop and notebook computers shipped with Linux or FreeDOS installed)
Latitude (business-focused notebooks)
Precision (workstation systems and high-performance "Mobile Workstation" notebooks),
PowerEdge (business servers)
PowerVault (direct-attach and network-attached storage)
Force10 (network switches)
PowerConnect (network switches)
Dell Compellent (storage area networks)
EqualLogic (enterprise class iSCSI SANs)
Dell EMR (electronic medical records)
Dell's Home Office/Consumer class includes:
Inspiron (budget desktop and notebook computers)
XPS (high-end desktop and notebook computers)
G Series (high/medium-performance gaming laptops)
Alienware (high-performance gaming systems)
Venue (Tablets Android / Windows)
Dell's Peripherals class includes USB keydrives, LCD televisions, and printers; Dell monitors includes LCD TVs, plasma TVs and projectors for HDTV and monitors. Dell UltraSharp is further a high-end brand of monitors.
Dell service and support brands include the Dell Solution Station (extended domestic support services, previously "Dell on Call"), Dell Support Center (extended support services abroad), Dell Business Support (a commercial service-contract that provides an industry-certified technician with a lower call-volume than in normal queues), Dell Everdream Desktop Management ("Software as a Service" remote-desktop management, originally a SaaS company founded by Elon Musk's cousin, Lyndon Rive, which Dell bought in 2007), and Your Tech Team (a support-queue available to home users who purchased their systems either through Dell's website or through Dell phone-centers).
Discontinued products and brands include Axim (PDA; discontinued April 9, 2007), Dimension (home and small office desktop computers; discontinued July 2007), Dell Digital Jukebox (MP3 player; discontinued August 2006), Dell PowerApp (application-based servers), and Dell Optiplex (desktop and tower computers previously supported to run server and desktop operating systems).
Security
Self-signed root certificate
In November 2015 it emerged that several Dell computers had shipped with an identical pre-installed root certificate known as "eDellRoot". This raised such security risks as attackers impersonating HTTPS-protected websites such as Google and Bank of America and malware being signed with the certificate to bypass Microsoft software filtering. Dell apologized and offered a removal tool.
Dell Foundation Services
Also in November 2015, a researcher discovered that customers with diagnostic program Dell Foundation Services could be digitally tracked using the unique service tag number assigned to them by the program. This was possible even if a customer enabled private browsing and deleted their browser cookies. Ars Technica recommended that Dell customers uninstall the program until the issue was addressed.
Commercial aspects
Organization
The board consists of nine directors. Michael Dell, the founder of the company, serves as chairman of the board and chief executive officer. Other board members include Don Carty, Judy Lewent, Klaus Luft, Alex Mandl, and Sam Nunn. Shareholders elect the nine board members at meetings, and those board members who do not get a majority of votes must submit a resignation to the board, which will subsequently choose whether or not to accept the resignation. The board of directors usually sets up five committees having oversight over specific matters. These committees include the Audit Committee, which handles accounting issues, including auditing and reporting; the Compensation Committee, which approves compensation for the CEO and other employees of the company; the Finance Committee, which handles financial matters such as proposed mergers and acquisitions; the Governance and Nominating Committee, which handles various corporate matters (including the nomination of the board); and the Antitrust Compliance Committee, which attempts to prevent company practices from violating antitrust laws.
Day-to-day operations of the company are run by the Global Executive Management Committee, which sets strategic direction. Dell has regional senior vice-presidents for countries other than the United States.
Marketing
Dell advertisements have appeared in several types of media including television, the Internet, magazines, catalogs, and newspapers. Some of Dell Inc's marketing strategies include lowering prices at all times of the year, free bonus products (such as Dell printers), and free shipping to encourage more sales and stave off competitors. In 2006, Dell cut its prices in an effort to maintain its 19.2% market share. This also cut profit margins by more than half, from 8.7 to 4.3 percent. To maintain its low prices, Dell continues to accept most purchases of its products via the Internet and through the telephone network, and to move its customer-care division to India and El Salvador.
A popular United States television and print ad campaign in the early 2000s featured the actor Ben Curtis playing the part of "Steven", a lightly mischievous blond-haired youth who came to the assistance of bereft computer purchasers. Each television advertisement usually ended with Steven's catch-phrase: "Dude, you're gettin' a Dell!"
A subsequent advertising campaign featured interns at Dell headquarters (with Curtis' character appearing in a small cameo at the end of one of the first commercials in this particular campaign).
In 2007, Dell switched advertising agencies in the US from BBDO to Working Mother Media. In July 2007, Dell released new advertising created by Working Mother to support the Inspiron and XPS lines. The ads featured music from the Flaming Lips and Devo who re-formed especially to record the song in the ad "Work it Out". Also in 2007, Dell began using the slogan "Yours is here" to say that it customizes computers to fit customers' requirements.
Beginning in 2011, Dell began hosting a conference in Austin, Texas, at the Austin Convention Center titled "Dell World". The event featured new technology and services provided by Dell and Dell's partners. In 2011, the event was held October 12–14. In 2012, the event was held December 11–13. In 2013, the event was held December 11–13. In 2014, the event was held November 4–6.
Dell partner program
In late 2007, Dell Inc. announced that it planned to expand its program to value-added resellers (VARs), giving it the official name of "Dell Partner Direct" and a new Website.
Dell India has started Online Ecommerce website with its Dell Partner www.compuindia.com GNG Electronics Pvt Ltd termed as Dell Express Ship Affiliate(DESA).
The main objective was to reduce the delivery time. Customers who visit Dell India official site are given the option to buy online which then will be redirected to Dell affiliate website compuindia.com.
Global analytics
Dell also operates a captive analytics division which supports pricing, web analytics, and supply chain operations. DGA operates as a single, centralized entity with a global view of Dell's business activities. The firm supports over 500 internal customers worldwide and has created a quantified impact of over $500 million.
Criticisms of marketing of laptop security
In 2008, Dell received press coverage over its claim of having the world's most secure laptops, specifically, its Latitude D630 and Latitude D830. At Lenovo's request, the (US) National Advertising Division (NAD) evaluated the claim, and reported that Dell did not have enough evidence to support it.
Retail
Dell first opened their retail stores in India.
United States
In the early 1990s, Dell sold its products through Best Buy, Costco and Sam's Club stores in the United States. Dell stopped this practice in 1994, citing low profit margins on the business, exclusively distributing through a direct-sales model for the next decade. In 2003, Dell briefly sold products in Sears stores in the US. In 2007, Dell started shipping its products to major retailers in the US once again, starting with Sam's Club and Wal-Mart. Staples, the largest office-supply retailer in the US, and Best Buy, the largest electronics retailer in the US, became Dell retail partners later that same year.
Kiosks
Starting in 2002, Dell opened kiosk locations in the United States to allow customers to examine products before buying them directly from the company. Starting in 2005, Dell expanded kiosk locations to include shopping malls across Australia, Canada, Singapore and Hong Kong. On January 30, 2008, Dell announced it would shut down all 140 kiosks in the US due to expansion into retail stores. By June 3, 2010, Dell had also shut down all of its mall kiosks in Australia.
Retail stores
, Dell products shipped to one of the largest office supply retailers in Canada, Staples Business Depot. In April 2008, Future Shop and Best Buy began carrying a subset of Dell products, such as certain desktops, laptops, printers, and monitors.
Since some shoppers in certain markets show reluctance to purchase technological products through the phone or the Internet, Dell has looked into opening retail operations in some countries in Central Europe and Russia. In April 2007, Dell opened a retail store in Budapest. In October of the same year, Dell opened a retail store in Moscow.
In the UK, HMV's flagship Trocadero store has sold Dell XPS PCs since December 2007. From January 2008 the UK stores of DSGi have sold Dell products (in particular, through Currys and PC World stores). As of 2008, the large supermarket chain Tesco has sold Dell laptops and desktops in outlets throughout the UK.
In May 2008, Dell reached an agreement with the office supply chain, Officeworks (part of Coles Group), to stock a few modified models in the Inspiron desktop and notebook range. These models have slightly different model numbers, but almost replicate the ones available from the Dell Store. Dell continued its retail push in the Australian market with its partnership with Harris Technology (another part of Coles Group) in November of the same year. In addition, Dell expanded its retail distributions in Australia through an agreement with the discount electrical retailer, The Good Guys, known for "Slashing Prices". Dell agreed to distribute a variety of makes of both desktops and notebooks, including Studio and XPS systems in late 2008. Dell and Dick Smith Electronics (owned by Woolworths Limited) reached an agreement to expand within Dick Smith's 400 stores throughout Australia and New Zealand in May 2009 (1 year since Officeworks—owned by Coles Group—reached a deal). The retailer has agreed to distribute a variety of Inspiron and Studio notebooks, with minimal Studio desktops from the Dell range. , Dell continues to run and operate its various kiosks in 18 shopping centers throughout Australia. On March 31, 2010, Dell announced to Australian Kiosk employees that they were shutting down the Australian/New Zealand Dell kiosk program.
In Germany, Dell is selling selected smartphones and notebooks via Media Markt and Saturn, as well as some shopping websites.
Competition
Dell's major competitors include Lenovo Hewlett-Packard (HP), Hasee, Acer, Fujitsu, Toshiba, Gateway, Sony, Asus,MSI, Panasonic, Samsung and Apple. Dell and its subsidiary, Alienware, compete in the enthusiast market against AVADirect, Falcon Northwest, VoodooPC (a subsidiary of HP), and other manufacturers. In the second quarter of 2006, Dell had between 18% and 19% share of the worldwide personal computer market, compared to HP with roughly 15%.
, Dell lost its lead in the PC business to Hewlett-Packard. Both Gartner and IDC estimated that in the third quarter of 2006, HP shipped more units worldwide than Dell did. Dell's 3.6% growth paled in comparison to HP's 15% growth during the same period. The problem got worse in the fourth quarter, when Gartner estimated that Dell PC shipments declined 8.9% (versus HP's 23.9% growth). As a result, at the end of 2006 Dell's overall PC market share stood at 13.9% (versus HP's 17.4%).
IDC reported that Dell lost more server market share than any of the top four competitors in that arena. IDC's Q4 2006 estimates show Dell's share of the server market at 8.1%, down from 9.5% in the previous year. This represents an 8.8% loss year-over-year, primarily to competitors EMC and IBM. As of 2021, Dell is the third-largest PC manufacturer after Lenovo and HP.
Partnership with EMC
In 2001, Dell and EMC entered into a partnership whereby both companies jointly design products, and Dell provided support for certain EMC products including midrange storage systems, such as fibre channel and iSCSI storage area networks. The relationship also promotes and sells OEM versions of backup, recovery, replication and archiving software. On December 9, 2008, Dell and EMC announced the multi-year extension, through 2013, of the strategic partnership with EMC. In addition, Dell expanded its product lineup by adding the EMC Celerra NX4 storage system to the portfolio of Dell/EMC family of networked storage systems and partnered on a new line of data deduplication products as part of its TierDisk family of data storage devices.
On October 17, 2011, Dell discontinued reselling all EMC storage products, ending the partnership 2 years early. Later Dell would acquire and merge with EMC in the largest tech merger to date.
Environmental record
Dell committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from its global activities by 40% by 2015, with the 2008 fiscal year as the baseline year. It is listed in Greenpeace's Guide to Greener Electronics that scores leading electronics manufacturers according to their policies on sustainability, climate and energy and how green their products are. In November 2011, Dell ranked 2nd out of 15 listed electronics makers (increasing its score to 5.1 from 4.9, which it gained in the previous ranking from October 2010).
Dell was the first company to publicly state a timeline for the elimination of toxic polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and brominated flame retardants (BFRs), which it planned to phase out by the end of 2009. It revised this commitment and now aims to remove toxics by the end of 2011 but only in its computing products.
In March 2010, Greenpeace activists protested at Dell offices in Bangalore, Amsterdam and Copenhagen calling for Dell's founder and CEO Michael Dell to "drop the toxics" and claiming that Dell's aspiration to be 'the greenest technology company on the planet' was "hypocritical". Dell has launched its first products completely free of PVC and BFRs with the G-Series monitors (G2210 and G2410) in 2009.
In its 2012 report on progress relating to conflict minerals, the Enough Project rated Dell the eighth-highest of 24 consumer electronics companies.
Green initiatives
Dell became the first company in the information technology industry to establish a product-recycling goal (in 2004) and completed the implementation of its global consumer recycling-program in 2006.
On February 6, 2007, the National Recycling Coalition awarded Dell its "Recycling Works" award for efforts to promote producer responsibility.
On July 19, 2007, Dell announced that it had exceeded targets in working to achieve a multi-year goal of recovering 275 million pounds of computer equipment by 2009. The company reported the recovery of 78 million pounds (nearly 40,000 tons) of IT equipment from customers in 2006, a 93-percent increase over 2005; and 12.4% of the equipment Dell sold seven years earlier.
On June 5, 2007, Dell set a goal of becoming the greenest technology company on Earth for the long term. The company launched a zero-carbon initiative that includes:
reducing Dell's carbon intensity by 15 percent by 2012
requiring primary suppliers to report carbon emissions data during quarterly business reviews
partnering with customers to build the "greenest PC on the planet"
expanding the company's carbon-offsetting program, "Plant a Tree for Me"
Dell reports its environmental performance in an annual Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Report that follows the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) protocol. Dell's 2008 CSR report ranked as "Application Level B" as "checked by GRI".
The company aims to reduce its external environmental impact through an energy-efficient evolution of products, and also reduce its direct operational impact through energy-efficiency programs.
Criticism
In the 1990s, Dell switched from using primarily ATX motherboards and PSU to using boards and power supplies with mechanically identical but differently wired connectors. This meant customers wishing to upgrade their hardware would have to replace parts with scarce Dell-compatible parts instead of commonly available parts. While motherboard power connections reverted to the industry standard in 2003, Dell remains secretive about their motherboard pin-outs for peripherals (such as MMC readers and power on/off switches and LEDs).
In 2005, complaints about Dell more than doubled to 1,533, after earnings grew 52% that year.
In 2006, Dell acknowledged that it had problems with customer service. Issues included call transfers
of more than 45% of calls and long wait times. Dell's blog detailed the response: "We're spending more than a $100 million—and a lot of blood, sweat, and tears of talented people—to fix this." Later in the year, the company increased its spending on customer service to $150 million. Since 2018, Dell has seen significant increase in consumer satisfaction. Moreover, their customer service has been praised for its prompt and accurate answers to most questions, especially those directed to their social media support.
On August 17, 2007, Dell Inc. announced that after an internal investigation into its accounting practices it would restate and reduce earnings from 2003 through to the first quarter of 2007 by a total amount of between $50 million and $150 million, or 2 cents to 7 cents per share. The investigation, begun in November 2006, resulted from concerns raised by the US Securities and Exchange Commission over some documents and information that Dell Inc. had submitted. It was alleged that Dell had not disclosed large exclusivity payments received from Intel for agreeing not to buy processors from rival manufacturer AMD. In 2010 Dell finally paid $100 million to settle the SEC's charges of fraud. Michael Dell and other executives also paid penalties and suffered other sanctions, without admitting or denying the charges.
In July 2009, Dell apologized after drawing the ire of the Taiwanese Consumer Protection Commission for twice refusing to honor a flood of orders against unusually low prices offered on its Taiwanese website. In the first instance, Dell offered a 19" LCD panel for $15. In the second instance, Dell offered its Latitude E4300 notebook at NT$18,558 (US$580), 70% lower than the usual price of NT$60,900 (US$1900). Concerning the E4300, rather than honor the discount taking a significant loss, the firm withdrew orders and offered a voucher of up to NT$20,000 (US$625) a customer in compensation. The consumer rights authorities in Taiwan fined Dell NT$1 million (US$31250) for customer rights infringements. Many consumers sued the firm for unfair compensation. A court in southern Taiwan ordered the firm to deliver 18 laptops and 76 flat-panel monitors to 31 consumers for NT$490,000 (US$15,120), less than a third of the normal price. The court said the event could hardly be regarded as mistakes, as the prestigious firm said the company mispriced its products twice in Taiwanese website within 3 weeks.
After Michael Dell made a $24.4 billion buyout bid in August 2013, activist shareholder Carl Icahn sued the company and its board in an attempt to derail the bid and promote his own forthcoming offer.
See also
List of computer system manufacturers
List of Dell ownership activities
Configurator
Mass customization
References
Further reading
Dell Company Information
Michael Dell, Catherine Fredman, Direct From Dell,
Dell as the seventh-most-admired computer company in the USA, eighth overall, and seventh worldwide. Fortune, Most Admired Companies 2006.
BBC News, August 21, 2003, Dell makes grab for market share
USA Today, January 20, 2001, Dell business model turns to muscle as rivals struggle
Ubuntu Forums, June 7, 2007, Dell's with Ubuntu called Dellbuntu
External links
Computer companies of the United States
Consumer electronics brands
American brands
Cloud computing providers
Display technology companies
Home computer hardware companies
Mobile phone manufacturers
Netbook manufacturers
Networking hardware companies
Online retailers of the United States
Multinational companies headquartered in the United States
Manufacturing companies based in Austin, Texas
Companies based in Round Rock, Texas
Computer companies established in 1984
Electronics companies established in 1984
1984 establishments in Texas
Companies formerly listed on the Nasdaq
Privately held companies based in Texas
Silver Lake (investment firm) companies
1980s initial public offerings |
36090978 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video%20door-phone | Video door-phone | Video door-phone (also known as video door entry or video intercom) is a stand-alone intercom system used to manage calls made at the entrance to a building (residential complex, detached family home, workplace, etc.) with access controlled by audiovisual communication between the inside and outside. The main feature of video door entry is that it enables the person indoors to identify the visitor and, if (and only if) they wish, engage in conversation and/or open the door to allow access to the person calling.
Equipment
Video door entry consists of both outside and indoor elements: an outdoor panel on the outside, an electronic lock release and an indoor monitor. The outdoor panel or street panel is installed beside the entrance door or gateway and incorporates different elements ready for use in any climate conditions: one or several pushbuttons to make the call (usually one per home or apartment), a micro camera adapted for night vision to capture the image of the caller, a microphone to pick up their voice and a speaker to reproduce the voice of the occupant indoors.
A video door entry panel may include push buttons to call the homes or offices and a camera to capture the street scene.
The video entry monitor allows the occupant to see who has called, talk to the visitor and open the door.
Installed indoors, the monitor consists of a screen showing the image of the person calling, a microphone and earpiece for conversation and a pushbutton to trigger the door lock release. The communication set up is full duplex. The electric door release is a device installed in the door lock and operated from inside the building to lift the latch and clear the way for the visitor.
Common equipment types
There are several variations on this basic format. In addition to outdoor panels with one pushbutton per apartment, it is possible to find others with a numeric keypad: in this case, designed for large residential installations, the homes are identified by codes. Others have built-in cardholders panels or even small screens to guide the user or facilitate entry for people with disabilities. Some video entry monitors have an earpiece similar to a telephone handset, while others are "hands-free". Other examples are monitors with memories which store an image every time someone calls at the door or touchscreen video entry systems.
Classification of video door phone(VDP)
Video door phone can be classified two possible classification :
1. Security layers :
a. Level 1 security – This is security layer added by VDP system at the community entrance. This
layer is given to the guard who will directly verify the entry of a visitor to the community. Such systems are only at a community level.
b. Level 2 Security : This is also known as the lobby security – This is to get access to your lobby of the apartment in such a case the visitor will have to dial the number of the flat and then the flat owner allows the access to a visitor from the lobby entrance itself.
c. Level 3 security : In this case the visitor communicates with the outdoor camera in front of house door or villa gate.
2. Technologies & classification :
a. Standalone – A standalone VDP is a device used in villas or by individual home owners.
Types of technology of standalone VDP –
i. Analog VDP – It is an analog display and camera.
ii. Connected digital VDP – This is a digital LCD display with Digital camera usually with image capture and video capturing ability when the bell is pressed. In this case normally some additional camera integration is also allowed.
iii. Wireless video door bell(VDB) : A camera units which gets connected to interned or router and allows communication with ones mobile or tablet top communicate with the visitor.
b. Multi-apartment- This is a solution where there is an mass housing scenario.
i. Analog Multi-apartment systems – This is an Analog VDP providing 3 tier security.
ii. IP VDP Multi-apartment system – This is IP VDP which is 3 tier security and integration with BMS (Building management system ), Security systems like intrusion , CCTV building security and in most cases even home automation.
Automatic operation
When a visitor presses one of the outdoor panel pushbuttons, the built-in camera is connected and the image captured outdoors appears on the monitor screen. Connection takes place automatically with no need to activate the equipment, which is one of the essential elements of video door entry. As of this point, the person inside the building can open the door if they wish or begin a conversation, which is usually secret (cannot be heard by other users of the same facility). The equipment also disconnects automatically after a set time has elapsed. The video entry system as a whole runs on low voltage energy from the building’s trunk
Extra functions
Many terminals currently on the market are ready to accept extensions, making the monitor into a small automatic function control centre. From here, the user can view one or several additional cameras installed at other access points, trigger light switches or open a second door, etc.
Video door entry systems with access control
Video door entry systems are commonly found integrated with different access control systems. This means that elements are installed in the same outdoor panel to allow certain previously authorised users to access the premises. The most common means are proximity cards, fingerprint readers, a keypad for secret numbers or even Bluetooth triggered by mobile phone.
Adaptive equipment
Different equipment sets are currently found on the market which make use more accessible for people with different disabilities. So, thinking of the visually impaired, the outdoor panel may include information in Braille alongside the pushbuttons, or a voice synthesiser can also be added which indicates when the door is opened. For people with hearing impairment, the outdoor panel may include a screen with icons signalling the communication status: if the user is calling, if someone is speaking from indoors or opening the door. Also with this type of user in mind, the monitor may be fitted with an inductive loop, an element which interacts with conventional hearing aids to facilitate conversation with the outside without their presence being noticed by other users. The kit also includes visual or audio call alerts.
See also
Door phone
Courtesy phone
Speaking tube
Fermax
Intercom
External links
List of mobile video intercoms
Access control |
5856847 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creekview%20High%20School%20%28Canton%2C%20Georgia%29 | Creekview High School (Canton, Georgia) | Creekview High School is a public high school located in the Macedonia community, east of Canton, Georgia, United States. The school was opened in August 2006 with 9th and 10th graders. For the 2007/2008 school year, 11th graders were added. The first senior class graduated in May 2009. The high school is directly across the road from Creekland Middle School.
In the first year of the high school, the ninth grade resided in one hall of the middle school. The following year, the students moved to the new building across the street and were joined by the rising freshmen.
Creekview was originally to be named Joseph E. Brown High School. However, the community preferred a nice-sounding name vaguely connected to the Creek Indian tribe. After a petition and protests, the school board agreed to send the issue to a naming committee, which recommended the name Creekview High School.
Creekview is part of the Cherokee County School District (CCSD). CCSD is a rural/metro district located approximately 40 miles north of Atlanta. The school district encompasses more than 423 square miles with Creekview being one of the six high schools serving the community. CCSD was one of the first districts to achieve District Accreditation as a Quality School System (SACS CASI). Creekview High School is accredited by the Georgia Accrediting Commission and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.
Creekview is currently rated as 52nd of the 420 Georgia High Schools, as ranked by SchoolDigger.
Administration
Dr. Michael Santoro, principal
Mark Vance, assistant principal
Jessica Whitley, assistant principal
Caroline Miley, assistant principal
Chris Bennett, assistant principal
Academics
2009 Platinum Award for Academic Achievement
2008 Bronze Award for Academic Achievement
Creekview ranked 24th among 380 Georgia high schools by the Georgia Public Policy Foundation.
Creekview was named the top high school in Cherokee County by Atlanta Magazine in January 2010.
Creekview's 2009 average SAT scores exceeded the county, state, and nation, and were the highest among Cherokee County schools.
Aeronautics Program
Involves approximately 35 students divided into five teams to learn about the exciting sport of model rocketry and aviation through Georgia's CTAE STEM initiative.
National Qualifier 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018
National Alternative Qualifier 2009
Finished 20th out of over 650 schools in the nation during the 2011 Team America Rocketry Competition.
Finished 66th out of over 700 schools in the nation during the 2013 Team America Rocketry Competition.
Finished 1st (Team 1) and 49th (Team 3) in the nation during the 2014 Team America Rocketry Competition.
2013 Georgia Model Aviators Open House and Airshow participants
May 20, 2014 - Creekview High School Aeronautic Team Day in Cherokee County.
Finished 1st in the nation during the 2018 Team America Rocketry Competition.
Educational partners include Las Palmas Mexican Restaurant and Georgia Model Aviators.
Governor's Honors Program
13 CHS students were selected for GHP in 2008 and 2009; this was the highest number among Cherokee County high schools.
Math Team
Cherokee County Math Tournament Champion 2008
State Qualifier 2008, 2009
The Unquiet Library
The Unquiet Library is the name of the Creekview High School Media Center. It opened in July 2006 and houses over 8,000 print titles and 200 reference books in its Gale Virtual Reference Library. As of February 2009, the library has a collection of over 13,000 circulating materials; the digital collection consists of several databases purchased by the library as well as materials accessible through GALILEO, Georgia's Virtual Library.
Fine arts
Art
Four students had work accepted in the 2009 All State Art Symposium.
Band
Symphonic and Concert Bands received straight superior ratings at the Georgia Festival (2009).
The band has earned all superior ratings at every competition (2009).
Creekview had the most Cherokee County students accepted into 2010 GMEA District Honor Band.
The marching band is the largest student organization in the school, with more than 200 members as of 2010.
It was named Grand Champion Marching Band at the South Georgia Sound Of Silver Band Competition (2012 and 2014).
Chorus
Multiple students consistently selected for All-State Chorus (2008, 2009, 2010)
GMEA Choral Festival Superior Ratings for ALL choral groups since 2008
Girls Trio Literary State Champions (2008, 2012, 2015, 2017)
Advanced Women's Chorus Cantori selected to perform at the Georgia Music Educator's In Service Conference (2014) and selected to perform at the Southern Division American Choral Director's Convention (2016)
Men's Chorus selected to perform at the Georgia Music Educator's In Service Conference (2016)
Drama
12 students selected for Region All-Star casts
5 Scheuler Hensley Award nominations
Athletics
Volleyball
2007 State Playoffs
2008 Region Champions
2008 Final Four
2009 Elite Eight
2017 State Playoffs
2018 Final Four
Baseball
Region Champs (2009, 2010)
State Playoffs (2009, 2010, 2013, 2015)
Competition cheerleading
State Playoffs (2007) (2008) (2016) (2017)
3rd in State (2017)
Football cheerleading
All-American Cheer qualifiers
Nikki Shotz (2014, 2016, 2017)
Cross country
Girls
State Runner-Up (2009, 2015, 2017)
State Third Place (2014, 2018)
Region First Place (2014, 2015, 2017)
Individual State Champion [Nyah Hernandez (2016) Makenna Gates (2017,2018)]
Boys
State Third Place (2009)
Region Runner-Up (2017)
Lacrosse
The school's team won the North Georgia Lacrosse League Championship in 2012, and finished with a record of 15-2. They started their first varsity season in the spring of 2013.
Football
As of its fourth year of existence, the Grizzly football team has had one losing season, posting a 7-3 record in its opening season of 2006 and a 9-1 in 2007. Unfortunately, they were playing a Non-Region/JV football schedule and were not eligible for the playoffs. During an official alignment year for the GHSA, 2008, Creekview was placed in Region 7-AAA after a debate of whether or not they should be put in Class AAAA or AAA's Region 6. Region 7-AAA was one of eight regions in the state to have a subregion system, Creekview being placed in subregion A. Creekview started the 2008 season 0-3, losing all three by a combined eight points. The fourth game of the season was their first subregion test in the school's history. The Grizzlies traveled to Gainesville to take on 2007 State Semi-Finalist North Hall. The Trojans, a perfect 10-0 in subregion play at the time, sent Creekview home with its fourth loss of the season. The Grizzlies soon bounced back, winning the last six regular season games and going 5-1 in the subregion, earning the final playoff spot in the tough 7-AAA.
2009 season
Overall record: (9-2)
7-AAA record: (7-1) 3rd - FINAL
League record: (5-1) 2nd - FINAL
The Creekview Grizzlies football team finished the 2009 season with an overall record of 9–2 and a league record of 5–1. The Grizzlies started the season off with strong wins over Class AAAA's Sequoyah and 2008 Class AAA Runner-Up Flowery Branch, as well as Region 7B-AAA's West Forsyth. The Grizzlies, with a 3-0 record and a Class AAA rank of 7th, had their next test of the season, hosting the North Hall Trojans. Most assumed that 2009 was the year North Hall was vulnerable and would give up its subregion dominance after three straight years and an undefeated subregion record. The Grizzlies were the team predicted to dethrone the Trojans in the subregion A opener, but North Hall had other plans. Creekview soon found themselves down 21-0 early in the second quarter and were outgained on offense nearly 4-1 en route to a 45-21 loss, their first of the season. Since then, Creekview has bounced back strong with six straight wins and will accompany the North Hall Trojans to the state playoffs for the second straight year. As the 3rd seed, Creekview traveled to Carrollton High School to battle the Trojans and were sent home as the only Region 7-AAA to be defeated in the 1st round. Creekview started their 2011 football season strong with a 24-17 win against rival Sequoyah at Creekview. This win was mostly due to the outstanding play of previously home-schooled senior Riley Davis, who had two touchdowns.
Former quarterback, Kyle Wilkie (2016) is now a baseball player at Clemson.
Golf
Region runner-up (2006)
Region Champions (2013)
State Tournament (2013, 2014)
Soccer
Girls State Finals (2010)
Girls Region Champions (2010, 2018)
Girls State Semifinals (2009)
Girls State playoffs (2008, 2017,2018,2019)
Girls playoff Elite 8 (2017, 2018)
Boys State playoffs (2008, 2009, 2010)
Softball
State Champions (2017)
State Runner-Up (2016)
Region Champs and State Quarter-finals (2009)
Region Champs and State Playoffs (2008)
Swimming
Individual State Qualifiers
Mitch Rolka 8th place (individual)
Tennis
Boys Region Runner-Up and State Playoffs (2009)
Girls Region Runner-Up and State Playoffs (2009)
Track and field
Individual Region Champions and State Qualifiers (2009, 2010)
Volleyball
Region Runner-up and State Quarter-finals (2009)
Region Champs and State Semifinals (2008)
State Playoffs (2009)
State Playoffs (2017)
State Playoffs (2018) Final Four AAAAAA
Wrestling
Six wrestlers qualified for state, with two placing (2008-2009).
Braden Johnson 2015, 2017, 2018 State Champion
Evan Gianfala 2018 State Champion
Joseph Sorrentino 2014 State Champion, 2013 Runner Up, 2012 Top 8.
First Creekview High School state champion in any sport
References
External links
Public high schools in Georgia (U.S. state)
Educational institutions established in 2005
Schools in Cherokee County, Georgia
2005 establishments in Georgia (U.S. state) |
6883111 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framework%20for%20integrated%20test | Framework for integrated test | Framework for Integrated Test, or "Fit", is an open-source (GNU GPL v2) tool for automated customer tests. It integrates the work of customers, analysts, testers, and developers.
Customers provide examples of how their software should work. Those examples are then connected to the software with programmer-written test fixtures and automatically checked for correctness. The customers' examples are formatted in tables and saved as HTML using ordinary business tools such as Microsoft Excel. When Fit checks the document, it creates a copy and colors the tables green, red, and yellow according to whether the software behaved as expected.
Fit was invented by Ward Cunningham in 2002. He created the initial Java version of Fit. As of June 2005, it has up-to-date versions for Java, C#, Python, Perl, PHP and Smalltalk.
Although Fit is an acronym, the word "Fit" came first, making it a backronym. Fit is sometimes italicized but should not be capitalized. In other words, "Fit" and "Fit" are appropriate usage, but "FIT" is not.
Fit includes a simple command-line tool for checking Fit documents. There are third-party front-ends available. Of these, FitNesse is the most popular. FitNesse is a complete IDE for Fit that uses a Wiki for its front end. As of June 2005, FitNesse had forked Fit, making it incompatible with newer versions of Fit, but plans were underway to re-merge with Fit.
See also
YatSpec - a Java testing framework that supersedes Fit
Concordion - a Java testing framework similar to Fit
Endly - a language agnostic and declarative end to end testing framework
References
R Mugridge & W Cunningham, Fit for Developing Software: Framework for Integrated Tests, Prentice Hall PTR (2005)
External links
Fit website
FitNesse website
PHPFIT is a PHP5 port of the Framework for Integrated Test (FIT)
Free software testing tools
Groupware
Software testing tools |
535930 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paeonia%20%28kingdom%29 | Paeonia (kingdom) | In antiquity, Paeonia or Paionia () was the land and kingdom of the Paeonians or Paionians ().
The exact original boundaries of Paeonia, like the early history of its inhabitants, are obscure, but it is known that it roughly corresponds to most of present-day North Macedonia and north-central parts of Greek Macedonia (i.e. probably the Greek municipalities of Paionia [excluding the village of Evropos], Almopia, Sintiki, Irakleia, and Serres), and a small part of south-western Bulgaria. Ancient authors placed it south of Dardania (an area corresponding to modern-day Kosovo and northern North Macedonia), west of the Thracian mountains, and east of the southernmost Illyrians. It was separated from Dardania by the mountains through which the Vardar river passes from the field of Scupi (modern Skopje) to the valley of Bylazora (near modern Sveti Nikole).
In the Iliad, the Paeonians are said to have been allies of the Trojans. During the Persian invasion of Greece the conquered Paeonians as far as the Lake Prasias, including the Paeoplae and Siropaiones, were deported from Paeonia to Asia.
In 355–354 BC, Philip II of Macedon took advantage of the death of King Agis of Paeonia and campaigned against them in order to conquer them. So the southern part of ancient Paeonia was annexed by the ancient kingdom of Macedon and was named "Macedonian Paeonia"; this section included the cities Astraion (later Stromnitsa), Stenae (near modern Demir Kapija), Antigoneia (near modern Negotino), etc.
Paeonian people
Tribes
The Paeonian tribes were:
Agrianes (also, Agriani and Agrii), it is also claimed that the tribe was Thracian.
Almopians (also Almopioi)
Laeaeans (also Laeaei and Laiai)
Derrones (also Derroni), it is also claimed that the tribe was Thracian.
Odomantes (also Odomanti), it is also claimed that the tribe was Thracian.
Paeoplae
Doberes
Siropaiones
Origin
Some modern scholars consider the Paeonians to have been of either Thracian, or of mixed Thraco-Illyrian origins. Some of the personal names of individual Paeonians are, however, definitely Hellenic (Lycceius, Ariston, Audoleon), although relatively little is known about them. Linguistically, the very small number of surviving words in the Paeonian language have been variously connected to its neighboring languages – Illyrian and Thracian (and every possible Thraco-Illyrian mix in between), as well as Hellenic and closely related to Greek but with a great deal of Illyrian and Thracian influence as a result of their proximity. Several eastern Paeonian tribes, including the Agrianes, clearly fell within the Thracian sphere of influence. Yet, according to the national legend, they were Teucrian colonists from Troy. Homer speaks of Paeonians from the Axios fighting on the side of the Trojans, but the Iliad does not mention whether the Paeonians were kin to the Trojans. Homer calls the Paeonian leader Pyraechmes (parentage unknown); later on in the Iliad (Book 21), Homer mentions a second leader, Asteropaeus, son of Pelagon.
Before the reign of Darius Hystaspes, they had made their way as far east as Perinthus in Thrace on the Propontis. At one time all Mygdonia, together with Crestonia, was subject to them. When Xerxes crossed Chalcidice on his way to Therma (later renamed Thessalonica), he is said to have marched through Paeonian territory. They occupied the entire valley of the Axios (Vardar) as far inland as Stobi, the valleys to the east of it as far as the Strymon and the country round Astibus and the river of the same name, with the water of which they anointed their kings. Emathia, roughly the district between the Haliacmon and Axios, was once called Paeonia; and Pieria and Pelagonia were inhabited by Paeonians. As a consequence of the growth of Macedonian power, and under pressure from their Thracian neighbors, their territory was considerably diminished, and in historical times was limited to the north of Macedonia from Illyria to the Strymon.
In Greek mythology, the Paeonians were said to have derived their name from Paeon the son of Endymion.
Paeonian Kingdom
In early times, the chief town and seat of the Paeonian kings was Bylazora (now Veles in North Macedonia) on the Vardar; later, the seat of the kings was moved to Stobi (near modern Gradsko).
Subjugation of the Paeonians happened as a part of Persian military operations initiated by Darius the Great (521–486) in 513 – after immense preparations – a huge Achaemenid army invaded the Balkans and tried to defeat the European Scythians roaming to the north of the Danube river. Darius' army subjugated several Thracian peoples, and virtually all other regions that touch the European part of the Black Sea, such as parts of nowadays Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, and Russia, before it returned to Asia Minor. Darius left in Europe one of his commanders named Megabazus whose task was to accomplish conquests in the Balkans. The Persian troops subjugated gold-rich Thrace, the coastal Greek cities, as well as defeating and conquering the powerful Paeonians.
At some point after the Greco-Persian Wars, the Paeonian princedoms coalesced into a kingdom centred in the central and upper reaches of the Axios and Strymon rivers, corresponding with today's northern part of North Macedonia and western Bulgaria. They joined with the Illyrians to attack the northern areas of the kingdom of Macedonia. The Illyrians, who had a culture of piracy, would have been cut off from some trade routes if movement through this land had been blocked. They unsuccessfully attacked the northern defences of Macedonian territory in an attempt to occupy the region. In 360–359 BC, southern Paeonian tribes were launching raids into Macedon, (Diodorus XVI. 2.5) in support of an Illyrian invasion.
The Macedonian Royal House was thrown into a state of uncertainty by the death of Perdiccas III, but his brother Philip II assumed the throne, reformed the army (providing phalanxes), and proceeded to stop both the Illyrian invasion and the Paeonian raids through the boundary of the "Macedonian Frontier", which was the northern perimeter which he intended to defend as an area of his domain. He followed Perdiccas's success in 358 BC with a campaign deep into the north, into Paeonia itself. This reduced the Paeonian kingdom (then ruled by Agis) to a semi-autonomous, subordinate status, which led to a process of gradual and formal Hellenization of the Paeonians, who, during the reign of Philip II, began to issue coins with Greek legends like the Macedonian ones. A Paeonian contingent, led by Ariston, was attached to Alexander the Great's army.
At the time of the Persian invasion, the Paeonians on the lower Strymon had lost, while those in the north maintained, their territorial integrity. The daughter of Audoleon, a king of Paeonia, was the wife of Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, and Alexander the Great wished to bestow the hand of his sister Cynane upon Langarus, king of the Agrianians, who had shown himself loyal to Philip II.
Kings
Agis (died 358 BC)
Lycceius (356–340 BC)
Patraus (340–315 BC)
Audoleon (315–285 BC), son of Patraus
Ariston (286–285 BC), son of Audoleon
Leon (278–250 BC)
Dropion (250–230 BC), son of Leon
Bastareus (?–? BC)
Main line
Agis: founded the Paeonian kingdom; pretender to the Macedonian throne in a time of instability.
Lycceius: joined anti-Macedonian coalition with Grabos II and Thrace in 356 BC.
Patraus
Audoleon: reduced to great straits by the Autariatae, but was succoured by Cassander.
Ariston
Leon of Paeonia: consolidated and restored lost lands after the Gallic Invasions in 280/279 BC.
Dropion: last known Paeonian king in 230 BC, of a dwindling kingdom.
Others
Pigres: one of the two tyrant brothers which in 511 BC persuaded Darius I to deport the coastal Paeonians to Asia.
Mantyes: one of the two tyrant brothers which in 511 BC persuaded Darius I to deport the coastal Paeonians to Asia.
Dokidan: of the Derrones; reigned during the 6th century BC.
Dokim: of the Derrones; reigned during the 6th century BC.
Euergetes: of the Derrones; reigned c. 480–465 BC, known only from his coinage.
Teutaos: reigned from c. 450–435 BC; known only from his coinage.
Bastareus: reigned from c. 400–380/78 BC, known only from his coinage.
Teutamado: reigned from 378 to 359 BC, known only from his coinage.
Symnon: great ally of Phillip II from 348 to 336 BC.
Nicharchos: reigned from 335 to 323 BC; son of Symon.
Langarus: of the Agrianes; invaded the territory of the Autariatae in 335 BC in coalition with Alexander the Great.
Dyplaios: of the Agrianes; reigned around 330 BC.
Didas: allied Philip V of Macedon with 4,000 warriors from 215 to 197 BC.
Foreign rulers
Persian
Darius I: subjugated Paeonia in 511/2 BC.
Xerxes: included Paeonians in vast Persian army of 481 BC, for the Invasion of Greece.
Thracian
Sitalces: included Agrianes and Laeaeans in his Macedonian campaign in 429 BC.
Culture
The Paeonians included several independent tribes, all later united under the rule of a single king. Little is known of their manners and customs. They adopted the cult of Dionysus, known amongst them as Dyalus or Dryalus, and Herodotus mentions that the Thracian and Paeonian women offered sacrifice to Queen Artemis (probably Bendis). They worshipped the sun in the form of a small round disk fixed on the top of a pole. A passage in Athenaeus seems to indicate the affinity of their language with Mysian. They drank barley beer and various decoctions made from plants and herbs. The country was rich in gold and a bituminous kind of wood (or stone, which burst into a blaze when in contact with water) called (or ).
The scanty remains of the Paeonian language do not allow a firm judgement to be made. On one side are Wilhelm Tomaschek and Paul Kretschmer, who claim it belonged to the Illyrian family, and on the other side is Dimitar Dečev, who claims affinities with Thracian. On the other hand, the Paeonian kings issued coins from the time of Philip II of Macedon onwards, bearing their names written in straightforward Greek. All the names of the Paeonian Kings that have come down to us are, in fact, explainable with and clearly related to Greek (Agis, Ariston, Audoleon, Lycceius, etc.), a fact that, according to Irwin L. Merker, puts into question the theories of Illyrian and Thracian connections.
The women were famous for their industry. In this connection Herodotus tells the story that Darius, having seen at Sardis a beautiful Paeonian woman carrying a pitcher on her head, leading a horse to drink, and spinning flax, all at the same time, inquired who she was. Having been informed that she was a Paeonian, he sent instructions to Megabazus, commander in Thrace, to deport two tribes of the nation without delay to Asia. An inscription, discovered in 1877 at Olympia on the base of a statue, states that it was set up by the community of the Paeonians in honor of their king and founder Dropion. Another king, whose name appears as Lyppeius on a fragment of an inscription found at Athens relating to a treaty of alliance, is no doubt identical with the Lycceius or Lycpeius of Paeonian coins.
Decline
In 280 BC, the Gallic invaders under Brennus ravaged the land of the Paeonians, who, being further hard pressed by the Dardani, had no alternative but to join the Macedonians. Despite their combined efforts, however, the Paeonians and Macedonians were defeated. Paeonia consolidated again but, in 217 BC, the Macedonian king Philip V of Macedon (220–179 BC), the son of Demetrius II, succeeded in uniting and incorporating into his empire the separate regions of Dassaretia and Paeonia. A mere 70 years later (in 168 BC), Roman legions conquered Macedon in turn, and a new and much larger Roman province bearing this name was formed. Paeonia around the Axios formed the second and third districts respectively of the newly constituted Roman province of Macedonia. Centuries later under Diocletian, Paeonia and Pelagonia formed a province called Macedonia Secunda or Macedonia Salutaris, belonging to the Praetorian prefecture of Illyricum.
See also
List of ancient Illyrian peoples and tribes
List of ancient tribes in Thrace
References
Bibliography
Pausanias, Description of Greece. W. H. S. Jones (translator). Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. (1918). Vol. 1. Books I–II: .
Smith, William, A dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology. London. Online at Perseus
Macedonia (ancient kingdom)
Achaemenid Empire |
28230973 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart%20TV | Smart TV | A smart TV, also known as a connected TV (CTV), is a traditional television set with integrated Internet and interactive Web 2.0 features, which allows users to stream music and videos, browse the internet, and view photos. Smart TVs are a technological convergence of computers, televisions, and digital media players. Besides the traditional functions of television sets provided through traditional broadcasting media, these devices can provide access to over-the-top media services such as streaming television and internet radio, along with home networking access.
Smart TV should not be confused with Internet TV, IPTV, or streaming television. Internet TV refers to receiving television content over the Internet instead of traditional systems such as terrestrial, cable, and satellite, regardless of how the Internet is delivered. IPTV is one of the Internet television technology standards for use by television broadcasters. Streaming television is a term used for programs created by a wide variety of companies and individuals for broadcast on Internet TV.
In smart TVs, the operating system is preloaded into the television set's firmware, which provides access to apps and other digital content. In contrast, traditional televisions primarily act as displays and are limited to vendor-specific customization. The software applications can be preloaded into the device or updated or installed on demand via an application store or marketplace, in a similar manner to how applications are integrated into modern smartphones.
The technology that enables smart TVs is also incorporated in external devices such as set-top boxes and some Blu-ray players, game consoles, digital media players, hotel television systems, smartphones, and other network-connected interactive devices that utilize television-type display outputs. These devices allow viewers to find and play videos, movies, TV shows, photos, and other content from the Web, cable or satellite TV channels, or a local storage device.
Definition
A Smart TV device is either a television set with integrated Internet capabilities or a set-top box for television that offers more advanced computing ability and connectivity than a contemporary basic television set. Smart TVs may be thought of as an information appliance or the computer system from a mobile device integrated within a television set unit. As such, a Smart TV often allows the user to install and run more advanced applications or plugins/addons based on a specific platform. Smart TVs run a complete operating system or mobile operating system software providing a platform for application developers.
Smart TV platforms or middleware have a public software development kit (SDK) and/or native development kit (NDK) for apps so third-party developers can develop applications for it, and an app store so the end-users can install and uninstall apps themselves. The public SDK enables third-party companies and other interactive application developers to "write" applications once and see them run successfully on any device that supports the Smart TV platform or middleware architecture it was written for, regardless of the hardware manufacturer.
Smart TVs deliver content (such as photos, movies and music) from other computers or network attached storage devices on a network using either a Digital Living Network Alliance / Universal Plug and Play media server or similar service program like Windows Media Player or Network-attached storage (NAS), or via iTunes. It also provides access to Internet-based services including traditional broadcast TV channels, catch-up services, video-on-demand (VOD), electronic program guide, interactive advertising, personalisation, voting, games, social networking, and other multimedia applications. Smart TV enables access to movies, shows, video games, apps and more. Some of those apps include Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, YouTube, and Amazon.
History
In the early 1980s, "intelligent" television receivers were introduced in Japan. The addition of an LSI chip with memory and a character generator to a television receiver enabled Japanese viewers to receive a mix of programming and information transmitted over spare lines of the broadcast television signal. A patent was filed in 1994 (and extended the following year) for an "intelligent" television system, linked with data processing systems, by means of a digital or analog network. Apart from being linked to data networks, one key point is its ability to automatically download necessary software routines, according to a user's demand, and process their needs.
The mass acceptance of digital television in the mid-late 2000s and early 2010s greatly improved Smart TVs. Major TV manufacturers have announced production of Smart TVs only, for their middle-end to high-end TVs in 2015. Smart TVs became the dominant form of television during the late 2010s. At the beginning of 2016, Nielsen reported that 29 percent of those with incomes over $75,000 a year had a Smart TV.
Typical features
Smart TV devices also provide access to user-generated content (either stored on an external hard drive or in cloud storage) and to interactive services and Internet applications, such as YouTube, many using HTTP Live Streaming (also known as HLS) adaptive streaming. Smart TV devices facilitate the curation of traditional content by combining information from the Internet with content from TV providers. Services offer users a means to track and receive reminders about shows or sporting events, as well as the ability to change channels for immediate viewing. Some devices feature additional interactive organic user interface / natural user interface technologies for navigation controls and other human interaction with a Smart TV, with such as second screen companion devices, spatial gestures input like with Xbox Kinect, and even for speech recognition for natural language user interface. Smart TV develops new features to satisfy consumers and companies, such as new payment processes. LG and PaymentWall have collaborated to allow consumers to access purchased apps, movies, games, and more using a remote control, laptop, tablet, or smartphone. This is intended for an easier and more convenient way for checkout.
Platforms
Smart TV technology and software is still evolving, with both proprietary and open source software frameworks already available. These can run applications (sometimes available via an 'app store' digital distribution platform), play over-the-top media services and interactive on-demand media, personalized communications, and have social networking features.
Android TV, Boxee, Firefox OS, Frog, Google TV, Horizon TV, Inview, Kodi Entertainment Center, Mediaroom, MeeGo, OpenTV, Plex, RDK (Reference Development Kit), Roku, Smart TV Alliance, ToFu Media Platform, Ubuntu TV, Vewd, and Yahoo! Smart TV are framework platforms managed by individual companies. HbbTV, provided by the Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV association, CE-HTML, part of Web4CE, OIPF, part of HbbTV, and Tru2way are framework platforms managed by technology businesses. Current Smart TV platforms used by vendors are Amazon, Apple, Google, Haier, Hisense, Hitachi, Insignia, LG, Microsoft, Netgear, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, TCL, TiVO, Toshiba, Sling Media, and Western Digital. Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, LG, and Roku TV are some platforms ranked under the best Smart TV platforms.
Sales
According to a report from research group NPD In-Stat, in 2012 only about 12 million U.S. households had their Web-capable TVs connected to the Internet, although an estimated 25 million households owned a set with the built-in network capability. In-Stat predicted that by 2016, 100 million homes in North America and western Europe would be using television sets blending traditional programming with internet content. By the end of 2019, the number of installed Connect TVs reached 1.26 billion worldwide.
The number of households using over-the-top television services has rapidly increased over the years. In 2015, 52% of U.S. households subscribed to Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Hulu Plus; 43% of pay-TV subscribers also used Netflix, and 43% of adults used some streaming video on demand service at least monthly. Additionally, 19% of Netflix subscribers shared their subscription with people outside of their households. Ten percent of adults at the time showed interest in HBO Now.
Use
Social networking
Some Smart TV platforms come prepackaged or can be optionally extended, with social networking technology capabilities. The addition of social networking synchronization to Smart TV and HTPC platforms may provide an interaction both with on-screen content and with other viewers than is currently available to most televisions, while simultaneously providing a much more cinematic experience of the content than is currently available with most computers.
Advertising
Some Smart TV platforms also support interactive advertising (companion ads), addressable advertising with local advertising insertion and targeted advertising, and other advanced advertising features such as ad telescoping using VOD and DVR, enhanced TV for consumer call-to-action, and audience measurement solutions for ad campaign effectiveness. The marketing and trading possibilities offered by Smart TVs are sometimes summarized by the term t-commerce. Taken together, this bidirectional data flow means Smart TVs can be and are used for clandestine observation of the owners. Even in sets that are not configured off-the-shelf to do so, default security measures are often weak and will allow hackers to easily break into the TV.
2019 research, "Watching You Watch: The Tracking Ecosystem of Over-the-Top TV Streaming Devices", conducted at Princeton and University of Chicago, demonstrated that a majority of streaming devices will covertly collect and transmit personal user data, including captured screen images, to a wide network of advertising and analytics companies, raising privacy concerns.
Digital marketing research firm eMarketer reported a 38 percent surgeto close to $7billion, a 10 percent television advertising market sharein advertising on connected TV like Hulu and Roku, to be underway in 2019, with market indicators that the figure would surpass $10billion in 2021.
Security
There is evidence that a Smart TV is vulnerable to attacks. Some serious security bugs have been discovered, and some successful attempts to run malicious code to get unauthorized access were documented on video. There is evidence that it is possible to gain root access to the device, install malicious software, access and modify configuration information for a remote control, remotely access and modify files on TV and attached USB drives, access camera and microphone.
There have also been concerns that hackers may be able to remotely turn on the microphone or webcam on a smart TV, being able to eavesdrop on private conversations. A common loop antenna may be set for a bidirectional transmission channel, capable of uploading data rather than only receiving. Since 2012, security researchers discovered a similar vulnerability present in more series of Smart Tvs, which allows hackers to get an external root access on the device.
Anticipating growing demand for an antivirus for a Smart TV, some security software companies are already working with partners in the digital TV field on the solution. It seems like there is only one antivirus for Smart TVs available: "Neptune", a cloud-based antimalware system developed by Ocean Blue Software in partnership with Sophos. However, antivirus company Avira has joined forces with digital TV testing company Labwise to work on software to protect against potential attacks. The privacy policy for Samsung's Smart TVs has been called Orwellian (a reference to George Orwell and the dystopian world of constant surveillance he depicted in 1984), and compared to Telescreens because of eavesdropping concerns.
Hackers have misused Smart TV's abilities such as operating source codes for applications and its unsecured connection to the Internet. Passwords, IP address data, and credit card information can be accessed by hackers and even companies for advertisement. A company caught in the act is Vizio. The confidential documents, codenamed Vault 7 and dated from 2013 to 2016, include details on CIA's software capabilities, such as the ability to compromise Smart TVs.
Restriction of access
Internet websites can block Smart TV access to content at will or tailor the content that will be received by each platform. Google TV-enabled devices were blocked by NBC, ABC, CBS, and Hulu from accessing their Web content since the launch of Google TV in October 2010. Google TV devices were also blocked from accessing any programs offered by Viacom’s subsidiaries.
Reliability
In 2017, high-end Samsung Smart TVs stopped working for at least seven days after a software update. Application providers are rarely upgrading Smart TV apps to the latest version; for example, Netflix does not support older TV versions with new Netflix upgrades.
See also
Automatic content recognition
10-foot user interface
Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA)
Digital media player
Enhanced TV
Home theater PC
Hotel television systems
Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV
Interactive television
List of mobile software distribution platforms
List of smart TV platforms and middleware software
Over-the-top media service (OTT)
PC-on-a-stick
Second screen
Smartphone
Space shifting
Telescreen
Tivoization
TV Genius
Video on demand
References
External links
Digital television
Film and video technology
Information appliances
Interactive television
Internet broadcasting
Internet of things
Streaming television
Japanese inventions
Multimedia
Streaming media systems
Television technology
Television terminology
Video on demand |
36172868 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slenfbot | Slenfbot | Slenfbot is the classification for a family of malicious software (malware), which infects files on Microsoft Windows systems. Slenfbot was first discovered in 2007 and, since then, numerous variants have followed; each with slightly different characteristics and new additions to the worm's payload, such as the ability to provide the attacker with unauthorized access to the compromised host. Slenfbot primarily spreads by luring users to follow links to websites, which contain a malicious payload. Slenfbot propagates via instant messaging applications, removable drives and/or the local network via network shares. The code for Slenfbot appears to be closely managed, which may provide attribution to a single group and/or indicate that a large portion of the code is shared amongst multiple groups. The inclusion of other malware families and variants as well as its own continuous evolution, makes Slenfbot a highly effective downloader with a propensity to cause even more damage to compromised systems.
Aliases
The majority of Antivirus (A/V) vendors use the following naming conventions when referring to this family of malware (the * at the end of the names is a wildcard for all the possible classifications and/or distinctions for this malware family):
Slenfbot
Stekct
Publicly Known Efforts
None publicly known.
Malware Profile
Summary
Slenfbot is a worm that spreads using links to websites containing malicious software (malware) via instant messaging programs, which may include MSN/Windows Live Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), Yahoo Messenger, Google Chat, Facebook Chat, ICQ and Skype. The worm propagates automatically via removable drives and shares, or on the local network through the Windows file sharing service (i.e., Server or LanmanServer service). Slenfbot also contains backdoor capabilities that allow unauthorized access to an affected machine. The code appears to be closely controlled, which may provide attribution to one group and/or that the malware authors share a significant portion of the code. Slenfbot has been seen in the wild since 2007, obtained new features and capabilities over time, and subsequent variants have systematically gained similar, if not the same, feature sets. Because of this, Slenfbot continues to operate as an effective infector and dynamic downloader of additional malware; thus, making it a highly functional delivery mechanism for other spyware, information stealers, spam bots as well as other malware.
Installation
When executed, Slenfbot copies a duplicate of the malicious payload to the %SYSTEM% folder with a filename, which varies per the particular variant and sets the attributes for the copy to read only, hidden and system to hide the contents in Windows Explorer. The worm then makes changes to the registry to maintain persistence so that the malware executes a duplicate copy on each subsequent startup of the system (e.g. copying the malicious executable to the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run subkey). Several variants may modify the registry during installation to add the malware to the list of applications that are authorized to access the Internet; thus, allowing the malware to communicate without raising Windows security alerts and run unimpeded by the Windows Firewall.
In some cases, variants may instead modify the registry to install the malicious payload as a debugger for the benign system file ctfmon.exe so that ctfmon.exe executes on system startup, which leads to the execution of the malware.
In most cases, Slenfbot will attempt to delete the original copy of the worm. Some variants may make additional modifications to the registry in order to delete the originally executed copy of the worm when the system restarts.
Some Slenfbot variants may, on initial execution, test to see if MSN/Windows Live Messenger is currently running by looking for a window with the class name "MSBLWindowClass". If the worm finds the window, the malware may display a fake error message.
If Slenfbot is launched from a removable drive, some variants may open Windows Explorer and display the contents of the affected drive. Certain Slenfbot variants may inject a thread into explorer.exe, which periodically checks for the presence of the malware in the System folder. If the file is not found, the malware downloads a new copy from a specified server and launches the new copy.
Method of Propagation
Instant Messaging
Slenfbot uses instant messaging as an attack vector to spread the worm to other accounts and contacts. The remote attacker may use the worm’s backdoor capabilities to instruct Slenfbot to spread via MSN/Windows Live Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), Yahoo Messenger, Google Chat, Facebook Chat, ICQ and Skype. The worm connects to a remote server and sends a copy of a URL, which contains a list of possible messages to send randomly; creates a ZIP archive, which contains a copy of the malware; and then sends the ZIP archive to other instant messaging client contacts. Following are some examples of the messages the worm may spread:
Are you serious...is this really you?
HAHA! this is funny! here, read this guys shirt.
Is this really a pic of you?
OMFG look at this!!!
This is my dream car right here!
The ZIP file includes a file name for the Slenfbot executable, and may also contain a URL for a file to download in situations where the attacker instructs the worm to send arbitrary file(s).
Removable Drives
Slenfbot may spread to removable drives by creating a directory called “RECYCLER” in the root directory of the removable drive. The malware will then create a subdirectory in the “RECYCLER” folder (e.g. “S-1-6-21-1257894210-1075856346-012573477-2315”), and copy the malicious payload to the directory using a different name for the executable (e.g. “folderopen.exe”). Slenfbot may also create an autorun.inf file in the root directory of the drive so that the worm may execute if the drive is connected to another system.
Certain variants may download an updated copy of Slenfbot from a location specified in the worm, and write the file to a directory (e.g. using the name “~secure”). For all the locations the worm copies itself to, Slenfbot sets the hidden and system attributes on the respective directories and files. In some circumstances due to a programming issue, Slenfbot may only create one directory rather than two (e.g. “E:\RECYCLERS-1-6-21-1257894210-1075856346-012573477-2315\folderopen.exe”).
File and Print Shares
Slenfbot may spread to accessible shares upon successful compromise of a system. The worm may also spread to file and print shares by exploiting known vulnerabilities such as MS06-040 or MS10-061, which pertain to issues with the Server and Print Spooler services, respectively. The attacker would have to instruct the worm to spread to the remote system via exploit or instant messaging in order to continue the propagation of Slenfbot.
Payload
Slenfbot attempts to connect to an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server via a particular TCP port (the IRC channel and port number may vary per the variant), joins a channel and then waits for commands; the attacker may then use the backdoor to perform additional actions on the compromised system such as delete the malware, join another IRC channel, download/execute arbitrary files and/or propagate to other instant messaging accounts
Slenfbot makes modifications to the hosts file by replacing %SYSTEM%\drivers\etc.\hosts with a file of its own; the modified host file may contain several entries to point various anti-virus and security related domains to localhost (i.e. 127.0.0.1) or to a random IP address, which obstruct the user from visiting the list of domains; the file may also contain numerous blank lines to give the appearance that the hosts file has not been modified
Slenfbot runs commands to delete files named *.zip and *.com in the current directory as well as the user's "Received Files" directory, which is the default location where Windows Messenger stores downloaded files; the latter may be to delete the original copy of the worm, which was received via Windows Messenger
Some Slenfbot variants may create a file (e.g. "RemoveMexxxx.bat") in the %TEMP% directory, which is a batch file that tries to delete the copy after execution to prevent detection
Slenfbot deletes various registry keys and any subkeys and values that they may contain in order to disable system restore, task manager, the use of the Windows Registry Editor and/or prevent the viewing of files with hidden attributes; the worm may also disable antivirus, firewall as well as attempt to disable Data Execution Prevention (DEP) by making other modifications to the system; some variants may periodically rewrite the changes in order to maintain persistence on the system
Slenfbot may terminate security-related processes as well as stop, disable and delete services on the compromised system in order to remain undetected and maintain persistence
Slenfbot may inject code into the Explorer process to "lock" the file in order to prevent the worm from being deleted and/or to reopen the payload upon process termination
Slenfbot may also be capable of hiding the malicious process from task manager
Slenfbot variants may create a mutex that differs according to variant
Slenfbot may execute additional commands after receiving data from another remote system; commands may include additional instructions to further modify the compromised system
Slenfbot may download and install additional malware to relay spam, steal information, install spyware toolbars as well as propagate other malicious campaigns; the initial Slenfbot payload serves as a first-stage downloader for the purpose of loading additional malware on the compromised host
Prevention
The following steps may help prevent infection:
Get the latest computer updates for all your installed software
Use up-to-date antivirus software
Limit user privileges on the computer
Have the sender confirm that they sent the link before clicking on it
Use caution when clicking on links to webpages
Use caution when opening attachments and accepting file transfers
Use online services to analyze files and URLs (e.g. Malwr, VirusTotal, Anubis, Wepawet, etc.)
Only run software from publishers you trust
Protect yourself against social engineering attacks
Use strong passwords and change passwords periodically
Recovery
Slenfbot uses stealth measures to maintain persistence on a system; thus, you may need to boot to a trusted environment in order to remove it. Slenfbot may also make changes to your computer such as changes to the Windows Registry, which makes it difficult to download, install and/or update your virus protection. Also, since many variants of Slenfbot attempt to propagate to available removable/remote drives and network shares, it is important to ensure the recovery process thoroughly detects and removes the malware from any and all known/possible locations.
One possible solution would be to use Microsoft’s Windows Defender Offline Beta to detect and remove Slenfbot from your system. For more information on Windows Defender Offline, go to:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/what-is-windows-defender-offline
See also
Computer virus
Botnet
References
Internet security
Multi-agent systems
Distributed computing projects
Spamming
Botnets |
17526722 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applications%20architecture | Applications architecture | In information systems, applications architecture or application architecture is one of several architecture domains that form the pillars of an enterprise architecture (EA).
An applications architecture describes the behavior of applications used in a business, focused on how they interact with each other and with users. It is focused on the data consumed and produced by applications rather than their internal structure. In application portfolio management, applications are mapped to business functions and processes as well as costs, functional quality and technical quality in order to assess the value provided.
The applications architecture is specified on the basis of business and functional requirements. This involves defining the interaction between application packages, databases, and middleware systems in terms of functional coverage. This helps identify any integration problems or gaps in functional coverage. A migration plan can then be drawn up for systems which are at the end of the software life cycle or which have inherent technological risks, a potential to disrupt the business as a consequence of a technological failure.
Applications architecture tries to ensure the suite of applications being used by an organization to create the composite architecture is scalable, reliable, available and manageable.
Applications architecture defines how multiple applications are poised to work together. It is different from software architecture, which deals with technical designs of how a system is built.
One not only needs to understand and manage the dynamics of the functionalities the composite architecture is implementing but also help formulate the deployment strategy and keep an eye out for technological risks that could jeopardize the growth and/or operations of the organization.
Strategy
Applications architecture strategy involves ensuring the applications and the integration align with the growth strategy of the organization. If an organization is a manufacturing organization with fast growth plans through acquisitions, the applications architecture should be nimble enough to encompass inherited legacy systems as well as other large competing systems.
Patterns
Applications can be classified in various types depending on the applications architecture pattern they follow.
A "pattern" has been defined as: "an idea that has been useful in one practical context and will probably be useful in others”.
To create patterns, one needs building blocks. Building blocks are components of software, mostly reusable, which can be utilized to create certain functions. Patterns are a way of putting building blocks into context and describe how to use the building blocks to address one or multiple architectural concerns.
An application is a compilation of various functionalities, all typically following the same pattern. This pattern defines the application's pattern.
Application patterns can describe structural (deployment/distribution-related) or behavioural (process flow or interaction/integration-related) characteristics and an application architecture may leverage one or a mix of patterns. The idea of patterns has been around almost since the beginning of computer science, but it was most famously popularized by the "Gang of Four" (GoF) though many of their patterns are "software architecture" patterns rather than "application architecture" patterns. In addition to the GoF, Thomas Erl is a well-known author of various types of patterns, and most of the large software tools vendors, such as Microsoft, have published extensive pattern libraries.
Despite the plethora of patterns that have been published, there are relatively few patterns that can be thought of as "industry standard". Some of the best-known of these include:
single-tier/thick client/desktop application (structural pattern): an application that exists only on a single computer, typically a desktop. One can, of course have the same desktop application on many computers, but they do not interact with one another (with rare exceptions).
client-server/2-tier (structural pattern): an application that consists of a front-end (user-facing) layer running as a rich client that communicates to a back-end (server) which provides business logic, workflow, integration and data services. In contrast to desktop applications (which are single-user), client-server applications are almost always multi-user applications.
n-tier (structural pattern): an extension of the client-server pattern, where the server functions are split into multiple layers, which are distributed onto different computers across a local-area network (LAN).
distributed (structural pattern): an extension of the n-tier pattern where the server functions are distributed across a wide-area network (WAN) or cloud. This pattern also include some behavioural pattern attributes because the server functions must be designed to be more autonomous and function in an asynchronous dialog with the other functions in order to deal with potentially-significant latency that can occur in WAN and cloud deployment scenarios.
horizontal scalability (structural pattern): a pattern for running multiple copies of server functions on multiple computers in such a way that increasing processing load can be spread across increasing numbers of instances of the functions rather than having to re-deploy the functions on larger, more powerful computers. Cloud-native applications are fundamentally-based on horizontal scalability.
event-driven architecture (behavioural pattern): Data events (which may have initially originated from a device, application, user, data store or clock) and event detection logic which may conditionally discard the event, initiate an event-related process, alert a user or device manager, or update a data store. The event-driven pattern is fundamental to the asynchronous processing required by the distributed architecture pattern.
ETL (behavioural pattern): An application process pattern for extracting data from an originating source, transforming that data according to some business rules, and then loading that data into a destination. Variations on the ETL pattern include ELT and ETLT.
Request-Reply (behavioural pattern): An application integration pattern for exchanging data where the application requests data from another application and waits for a reply containing the requested data. This is the most prominent example of a synchronous pattern, in contrast to the asynchronous processing referred to in previous pattern descriptions.
The right applications pattern depends on the organization's industry and use of the component applications.
An organization could have a mix of multiple patterns if it has grown both organically and through acquisitions.
Application architect
TOGAF describes both the skills and the role expectations of an Application architect. These skills include an understanding of application modularization/distribution, integration, high availability, and scalability patterns, technology and trends. Increasingly, an understanding of application containers, serverless computing, storage, data and analytics, and other cloud-related technology and services are required application architect skills. While a software background is a great foundation for an application architect, programming and software design are not skills required of an application architect (these are actually skills for a Software Architect, who is a leader on the computer programming team).
Knowledge domains
Application modeling Employs modeling as a framework for the deployment and integration of new or enhanced applications, uses modeling to find problems, reduce risk, improve predictability, reduce cost and time-to-market, tests various product scenarios, incorporating clients' nonfunctional needs/requirements, adds test design decisions to the development process as necessary, evaluates product design problems.
Competitive intelligence, business modeling, strategic analysis Understanding of the global marketplace, consumers, industries and competition, and how global business models, strategies, finances, operations and structures interrelate. Understanding of the competitive environment, including current trend in the market, industry, competition and regulatory environment, as well as understanding of how the components of business model (i.e. strategy, finances, operations) interrelate to make organization competitive in the marketplace. Understanding of organization's business processes, systems, tools, regulations and structure and how they interrelate to provide products and services that create value for customers, consumers and key stakeholders. Understanding of how the value create for customers, consumers and key stakeholders aligns with organization's vision, business, culture, value proposition, brand promise and strategic imperatives. Understanding of organization's past and present achievements and shortcomings to assess strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and risks in relation to the competitive environment.
Technology Understanding of IT strategy, development lifecycle and application/infrastructure maintenance; Understanding of IT service and support processes to promote competitive advantage, create efficiencies and add value to the business.
Technology standards Demonstrates a thorough understanding of the key technologies which form the infrastructure necessary to effectively support existing and future business requirements, ensures that all hardware and software comply with baseline requirements and standards before being integrated into the business environment, understands and is able to develop technical standards and procedures to facilitate the use of new technologies, develops useful guidelines for using and applying new technologies.
Tasks
An applications architect is a master of everything application-specific in an organization.
An applications architect provides strategic guidelines to the applications maintenance teams by understanding all the applications from the following perspectives:
Interoperability capability
Performance and scalability
Reliability and availability
Application lifecycle stage
Technological risks
Number of instances
The above analysis will point out applications that need a range of changes – from change in deployment strategy for fragmented applications to a total replacement for applications at the end of their technology or functionality lifecycle.
Functionality footprint
Understand the system process flow of the primary business processes. It gives a clear picture of the functionality map and the applications footprint of various applications across the map.
Many organizations do not have documentation discipline and hence lack detailed business process flows and system process flows. One may have to start an initiative to put those in place first.
Create solution architecture guidelines
Every organization has a core set of applications that are used across multiple divisions either as a single instance or a different instance per division. Create a solution architecture template for all the core applications so that all the projects have a common starting ground for designing implementations.
The standards in architecture world are defined in TOGAF, The Open Group Architecture Framework describes the four components of EA as BDAT (Business architecture, Data architecture, Application Architecture and Technical architecture,
There are also other standards to consider, depending on the level of complexity of the organization:
The Zachman Framework for EA
Federal enterprise architecture (FEA)
Gartner
See also
ISO/IEC 42010 Systems and software engineering — Architecture description is an international standard for architecture descriptions of systems and software.
IEEE 1471 a superseded IEEE Standard for describing the architecture of a "software-intensive system", also known as software architecture.
IBM Systems Application Architecture
Enterprise architecture planning
High-availability application architecture
References
Enterprise architecture |
22078147 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substrate%20analog | Substrate analog | Substrate analogs (substrate state analogues), are chemical compounds with a chemical structure that resemble the substrate molecule in an enzyme-catalyzed chemical reaction. Substrate analogs can act as competitive inhibitors of an enzymatic reaction. An example is phosphoramidate to the Tetrahymena group I ribozyme
As a competitive inhibitor, substrate analogs occupy the same binding site as its analog, and decrease the intended substrate’s efficiency. The Vmax remains the same while the intended substrate’s affinity is decreased. This means that less of the intended substrate will bind to the enzyme, resulting in less product being formed. In addition, the substrate analog may also be missing chemical components that allow the enzyme to go through with its reaction. This also causes the amount of product created to decrease.
Substrate analogs bind to the binding site reversibly. This means that the binding of the substrate analog to the enzyme’s binding site is non-permanent. The effect of the substrate analog can be nullified by increasing the concentration of the originally intended substrate.
Other examples of substrate analogs include:
5’-adenylyl-imidodiphosphate: substrate analog of ATP
3-acetylpyridine adenine dinucleotide: substrate analog of NADH
Some substrate analogs can still allow the enzyme to synthesize a product despite the enzyme’s inability to metabolize the substrate analog. These substrate analogs are known as gratuitous inducers.
Example of a substrate analog that is also a gratuitous inducer:
IPTG (isopropyl β-thiogalactoside: substrate analog and gratuitous inducer of β-galactosidase activity
There are even substrate analogs that bind to the binding site of an enzyme irreversibly. If this is the case, the substrate analog is called an inhibitory substrate analog, a suicide substrate, or even a Trojan horse substrate.
Example of a substrate analog that is also a suicide substrate/Trojan horse substrate:
Penicillin: substrate analog and suicide substrate/Trojan horse substrate of peptidoglycan
See also
Enzyme
Enzyme inhibitor
Suicide inhibitor
Structural analog, compounds with similar chemical structure
References
Enzyme kinetics
Chemical nomenclature |
1417253 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CeCILL | CeCILL | CeCILL (from CEA CNRS INRIA Logiciel Libre) is a free software license adapted to both international and French legal matters, in the spirit of and retaining compatibility with the GNU General Public License (GPL).
It was jointly developed by a number of French agencies: the Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique (Atomic Energy Commission), the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (National Centre for Scientific Research) and the Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique (National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control). It was announced on 5 July 2004 in a joint press communication of the CEA, CNRS and INRIA.
It has gained support of the main French Linux User Group and the Minister of Public Function, and was considered for adoption at the European level before the European Union Public Licence was created.
Terms
The CeCILL grants users the right to copy, modify, and distribute the licensed software freely. It defines the rights as passing from the copyright holder to a "Licensor", which may be the copyright holder or a further distributor, to the user or "Licensee". Like the GPL, it requires that modifications to the software be distributed under the CeCILL, but it makes no claim to work that executes in "separate address spaces", which may be licensed under terms of the licensee's choice. It does not grant a patent license (as some other common open-source licenses do), but rather includes a promise by the licensor not to enforce any patents it owns. In Article 9.4, the licensor agrees to provide "technical and legal assistance" if litigation regarding the software is brought against the licensee, though the extent of the assistance "shall be decided on a case-by-case basis...pursuant to a memorandum of understanding".
The disclaimers of warranty and liability are written in a manner different from other common open-source licenses in order to comply with French law. The CeCILL does not preclude the licensor from offering a warranty or technical support for its software, but requires that such services be negotiated in a separate agreement.
The license is compatible with the GPL through an explicit relicensing clause.
Article 13's explicit reference to French law and a French court does not limit users, who can still choose a jurisdiction of their choice by mutual agreement to solve any litigation they may experience. The explicit reference to a French court will be used only if mutual agreement is not possible; this immediately solves the problem of competence of laws (something that the GPL does not solve cleanly, except when all parties in a litigation are in the USA).
Versions
Version 2 was developed after consultations with the French-speaking Linux and Free Software Users' Association, the Association pour la Promotion et la Recherche en Informatique Libre, and the Free Software Foundation; it was released on 21 May 2005. According to the CeCILL FAQ there are no major differences in spirit, though there are in terms.
The most notable difference in CeCILL v2 is the fact that the English text was approved not as a draft translation (as in CeCILL v1) but as an authentic text, in addition to the equally authentic French version. This makes the CeCILL license much easier to enforce internationally, as the cost of producing an authentic translation in any international court will be lower with the help of a second authentic reference text. The second difference is that the reference to the GNU General Public License, with which CeCILL v2 is now fully compatible, is explicitly defined precisely using its exact title and the exact name of the Free Software Foundation, to avoid all possible variations of the terms of the GPL v2. Some additional definitions were added to more precisely define the terms with less ambiguity. With these changes, the CeCILL is now fully enforceable according to WIPO rules, and according to French law in courts, without the legal problems remaining in GPL version 2 outside the United States.
Version 2.1 was released in June 2013. It allows relicensing to the GNU Affero General Public License and the European Union Public License as well as the GPL, and clarifies the language that requires licensees to give access to the source code (which had previously caused rejection of version 2.0 by the Open Source Initiative).
International protection and approbation of the CeCILL licenses
Note that CeCILL v1 already allowed replacing a CeCILL v1 license by CeCILL v2, so all software previously licensed with CeCILL v1 in 2004 can be licensed with CeCILL v2, with legal terms enforceable as authentic not only in French but in English too.
The fact that it is protected by reputed public research centers (in France the INRIA, a founding member of the international W3 consortium, and the CEA working on atomic energy) which use them to publish their own open-source and free software, and by critical governmental organizations (which are also working in domains like military and defense systems) also gives much more security than using the GPL alone, as the license is supported officially by a government which is a full member of WIPO, and by an enforceable law. This also means that all international treaties related to the protection of intellectual rights do apply to CeCILL-licensed products, and so they are enforceable by law in all countries that signed any of the international treaties protected by WIPO. However, this also leaves open the possibility that the French government will make a future version of the CeCILL unfree and restricted.
The CeCILL license is approved as a "Free Software" license by the FSF with which the CeCILL project founders have worked. Since version 2.1, CeCILL is also approved by the Open Source Initiative as an "Open Source" license.
Other CeCILL licenses
The CeCILL project also adds two other licenses:
CeCILL-B, which is fully compatible with BSD-like licenses (BSD, X11, MIT) which have a strong attribution requirement (which goes much further than a simple copyright notice), a requirement normally not allowed by the GPL itself (which describes it as an advertising requirement), and so this license may be incompatible with the original CeCILL license, if BSD-like components are integrated, unless the software uses a dual-licensing scheme and conforms to the licensing terms of all embedded components.
CeCILL-C, for "component" software, which is fully compatible with the FSF's LGPL license.
These two licenses are also defined to make BSD-like and FSF's LGPL licenses enforceable internationally under WIPO rules.
Notable users
Brian (software)
G'MIC
MedinTux
Paradiseo
PhoX
Scilab
ScientificPython
SYNTAX
Yass (software)
Origins and general applicability
Although the three CeCILL licenses were developed and used for strategic French research systems (in the domain of defense, space launching systems, medical research, meteorology/climatology, and various domains of fundamental or applied physics), they are made to be usable also by the general public or any other commercial or non-profit organization, including from other governments, simply because these software component need and use (or are integrated with) component software or systems which were initially released with an open-source or free license, and they are operated by organizations that also have a commercial status.
Without these licenses, such systems could not have been built and used, and protected legally against various international patent claims. Due to the huge cost of these French strategic systems, a very strong licensing scheme was absolutely necessary to help protecting these investments against illegitimate claims by other commercial third parties, and one of the first needs was to make the well-known open-source and free licenses fully compatible and protected under the French law and the many international treaties ratified by France.
References
External links
CeCILL homepage
English version of the license
CEA CNRS INRIA Logiciel Libre
Computer law |
156166 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finder%20%28software%29 | Finder (software) | The Finder is the default file manager and graphical user interface shell used on all Macintosh operating systems. Described in its "About" window as "The Macintosh Desktop Experience", it is responsible for the launching of other applications, and for the overall user management of files, disks, and network volumes. It was introduced with the first Macintosh computer, and also exists as part of GS/OS on the Apple IIGS. It was rewritten completely with the release of Mac OS X in 2001.
In a tradition dating back to the Classic Mac OS of the 1980s and 1990s, the Finder icon is the smiling screen of a computer, known as the Happy Mac logo.
Features
The Finder uses a view of the file system that is rendered using a desktop metaphor; that is, the files and folders are represented as appropriate icons. It uses a similar interface to Apple's Safari browser, where the user can click on a folder to move to it and move between locations using "back" and "forward" arrow buttons. Like Safari, the Finder uses tabs to allow the user to view multiple folders; these tabs can be pulled off the window to make them separate windows. There is a "favorites" sidebar of commonly used and important folders on the left of the Finder window.
The classic Mac OS Finder uses a spatial metaphor quite different from the more browser-like approach of the modern macOS Finder. In the classic Finder, opening a new folder opens the location in a new window: Finder windows are 'locked' so that they would only ever display the contents of one folder. It also allows extensive customization, with the user being able to give folders custom icons matching their content. This approach emphasizes the different locations of files within the operating system, but navigating to a folder nested inside multiple other folders fills the desktop with a large number of windows that the user may not wish to have open. These must then be closed individually. Holding down the option key when opening a folder would also close its parent, but this trick was not discoverable and remained under the purview of power users.
The modern Finder uses macOS graphics APIs to display previews of a range of files, such as images, applications and PDF files. The Quick Look feature allows users to quickly examine documents and images in more detail from the finder by pressing the space bar without opening them in a separate application. The user can choose how to view files, with options such as large icons showing previews of files, a list with details such as date of last creation or modification, a Gallery View (replacing the previous Cover flow in macOS Mojave), and a "column view" influenced by macOS's direct ancestor NeXTSTEP.
The modern Finder displays some aspects of the file system outside its windows. Mounted external volumes and disk image files can be displayed on the desktop. There is a trash can on the Dock in macOS, to which files can be dragged to mark them for deletion, and to which drives can be dragged for ejection. When a volume icon is being dragged, the Trash icon in the Dock changes to an eject icon in order to indicate this functionality. Finder can record files to optical media on the sidebar.
From Yosemite onwards, the Finder is updated to include a refreshed user interface with updated typography and translucency, along with a new icon. Functionally, it also contains official support for extensions, allowing synchronization and cloud storage applications such as Dropbox to display sync status labels inside the Finder display.
macOS Big Sur introduces a complete graphical redesign of the Finder, along with the rest of the user interface, sporting the removal of the brushed metal interface elements, a full height sidebar and all new iconography. Big Sur also slightly modifies the Finder icon with rounded corners.
Reception
Stewart Alsop II in 1988 said "It is testimony to either the luck or vision of the original designers" of Finder that "the interface has been able to survive tremendous evolution without much essential damage" from 1984. He praised its spatial file manager as "probably a more complete definition of a PC-based universe than any" competitor, with users able to seamlessly use floppies, local and remote hard disks, and large and small file servers. Alsop said that even if Apple had stolen Xerox's technology for Finder, it was now very different. While criticizing the lack of a right mouse button and MultiFinder's clumsiness, he concluded that "Apple remains the king of user interfaces. Finder is the only interface with 1.5 million people sitting in front of it daily. Apple is spending tremendous amounts of money on both development and basic research to remain the leader".
Introducing Mac OS X in 2000, Steve Jobs criticized the original Finder, saying that it "generates a ton of windows, and you get to be the janitor."
Ars Technica columnist John Siracusa has been a long-standing defender of the spatial interface of the classic Mac OS Finder and a critic of the new design. Daring Fireball blog author John Gruber has voiced similar criticisms. In a 2005 interview he said that the Finder in version 10.3 of Mac OS X had become "worse than in 10.0" and that "the fundamental problem with the OS X Finder is that it's trying to support two opposing paradigms at once – the browser metaphor ... and the spatial metaphor from the original Mac Finder ... and it ends up doing neither one very well." Reviewing the same version of Mac OS X, Siracusa comments that the Finder "provides exactly the same self-destructive combination of spatial and browser-style features as all of its Mac OS X predecessors".
Finder replacements
Third-party macOS software developers offer Finder replacements that run as stand-alone applications, such as ForkLift, Path Finder, Xfile, and XtraFinder. These replacements are shareware or freeware and aim to include and supersede the functionality of the Finder. After Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger the UNIX command line file management tools understand resource forks and can be used for management of Mac files.
Timeline
There are minor differences between Finder versions and Classic OS to System 7. From System 6 onward, the version numbers are unified.
Since the introduction of Mac OS X, the largest rewrite of the Finder was with the 2009 release of Mac OS X 10.6, into the Cocoa API, though little change was visible to the user.
See also
Spatial file manager
Miller columns
List of file managers
Comparison of file managers
File Explorer
References
External links
Apple Macintosh before System 7
Ars Technica: About the Finder...
Ars Technica: Review of OS X 10.3 – discussing the lack of fundamental changes to the Finder
1984 software
File managers
Macintosh operating systems
Macintosh operating systems user interface |
3965 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill%20Joy | Bill Joy | William Nelson Joy (born November 8, 1954) is an American computer engineer and venture capitalist. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as Chief Scientist and CTO at the company until 2003.
He played an integral role in the early development of BSD UNIX while being a graduate student at Berkeley, and he is the original author of the vi text editor. He also wrote the 2000 essay "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us", in which he expressed deep concerns over the development of modern technologies.
Joy was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering (1999) for contributions to operating systems and networking software.
Early career
Joy was born in the Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills, Michigan, to William Joy, a school vice-principal and counselor, and Ruth Joy. He earned a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan and a Master of Science in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1979.
As a UC Berkeley graduate student, he worked for Fabry's Computer Systems Research Group CSRG on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) version of the Unix operating system. He initially worked on a Pascal compiler left at Berkeley by Ken Thompson, who had been visiting the university when Joy had just started his graduate work.
He later moved on to improving the Unix kernel, and also handled BSD distributions. Some of his most notable contributions were the ex and vi editors and the C shell. Joy's prowess as a computer programmer is legendary, with an oft-told anecdote that he wrote the vi editor in a weekend. Joy denies this assertion. A few of his other accomplishments have also been sometimes exaggerated; Eric Schmidt, CEO of Novell at the time, inaccurately reported during an interview in PBS's documentary Nerds 2.0.1 that Joy had personally rewritten the BSD kernel in a weekend.
According to a Salon article, during the early 1980s, DARPA had contracted the company Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) to add TCP/IP to Berkeley UNIX. Joy had been instructed to plug BBN's stack into Berkeley Unix, but he refused to do so, as he had a low opinion of BBN's TCP/IP. So, Joy wrote his own high-performance TCP/IP stack. According to John Gage:
Rob Gurwitz, who was working at BBN at the time, disputes this version of events.
Sun Microsystems
In 1982, after the firm had been going for six months, Joy was brought in with full co-founder status at Sun Microsystems. At Sun, Joy was an inspiration for the development of NFS, the SPARC microprocessors, the Java programming language, Jini/JavaSpaces, and JXTA.
In 1986, Joy was awarded a Grace Murray Hopper Award by the ACM for his work on the Berkeley UNIX Operating System.
On September 9, 2003, Sun announced Joy was leaving the company and that he "is taking time to consider his next move and has no definite plans".
Post-Sun activities
In 1999, Joy co-founded a venture capital firm, HighBAR Ventures, with two Sun colleagues, Andy Bechtolsheim and Roy Thiele-Sardiña. In January 2005 he was named a partner in venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. There, Joy has made several investments in green energy industries, even though he does not have any credentials in the field. He once said, "My method is to look at something that seems like a good idea and assume it's true".
In 2011, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum for his work on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix system and the co-founding of Sun Microsystems.
Technology concerns
In 2000, Joy gained notoriety with the publication of his article in Wired magazine, "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us", in which he declared, in what some have described as a "neo-Luddite" position, that he was convinced that growing advances in genetic engineering and nanotechnology would bring risks to humanity. He argued that intelligent robots would replace humanity, at the very least in intellectual and social dominance, in the relatively near future. He supports and promotes the idea of abandonment of GNR (genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics) technologies, instead of going into an arms race between negative uses of the technology and defense against those negative uses (good nano-machines patrolling and defending against Grey goo "bad" nano-machines). This stance of broad relinquishment was criticized by technologists such as technological-singularity thinker Ray Kurzweil, who instead advocates fine-grained relinquishment and ethical guidelines. Joy was also criticized by The American Spectator, which characterized Joy's essay as a (possibly unwitting) rationale for statism.
A bar-room discussion of these technologies with Ray Kurzweil started to set Joy's thinking along this path. He states in his essay that during the conversation, he became surprised that other serious scientists were considering such possibilities likely, and even more astounded at what he felt was a lack of consideration of the contingencies. After bringing the subject up with a few more acquaintances, he states that he was further alarmed by what he felt was the fact that although many people considered these futures possible or probable, that very few of them shared as serious a concern for the dangers as he seemed to. This concern led to his in-depth examination of the issue and the positions of others in the scientific community on it, and eventually, to his current activities regarding it.
Despite this, he is a venture capitalist, investing in technology companies. He has also raised a specialty venture fund to address the dangers of pandemic diseases, such as the H5N1 avian influenza and biological weapons.
Joy's law
In his 2013 book Makers, author Chris Anderson credited Joy with establishing "Joy's law" based on a quip: "No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else [other than you]." His argument was that companies use an inefficient process by not hiring the best employees, only those they are able to hire. His "law" was a continuation of Friedrich Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society" and warned that the competition outside of a company would always have the potential to be greater than the company itself.
See also
Joy's law (computing)
References
External links
An Introduction to Display Editing with Vi
Bill Joy, video clips at Big Picture TV
Excerpts from a 1999 Linux Magazine interview regarding the development of vi
NerdTV interview (video, audio, and transcript available) - 30 June 2005
The Six Webs, 10 Years On - speech at MIT Emerging Technologies conference, September 29, 2005
Bill Joy at Dropping Knowledge, his answers to the 100 questions at Dropping Knowledge's Table of Free Voices event in Berlin, 2006.
Computer History Museum, Sun Founders Panel, January 11, 2006
1954 births
Living people
People from Farmington Hills, Michigan
UC Berkeley College of Engineering alumni
University of Michigan College of Engineering alumni
American computer programmers
American computer scientists
American electrical engineers
BSD people
Computer systems researchers
Futurologists
Grace Murray Hopper Award laureates
Internet pioneers
Wired (magazine) people
Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering
American venture capitalists
Unix people
Sun Microsystems people
Kleiner Perkins people
Open source advocates |
55595165 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%20Mortician%27s%20Tale | A Mortician's Tale | A Mortician's Tale is a management video game developed by Laundry Bear Games. Players take control of a mortician working in a funeral home. The game was released for Windows and macOS in October 2017.
Gameplay
A Mortician's Tale is a management video game in which the player takes control of Charlie, who has just started work as a mortician at a funeral home.
Development and release
A Mortician's Tale was developed by Canadian indie game studio Laundry Bear Games. Inspiration for the game came from author and mortician Caitlin Doughty and death acceptance organisation The Order of the Good Death.
The game was released for Windows and macOS on 18 October 2017.
Reception
A Mortician's Tale was received positively by critics. Polygon ranked it 50th on their list of the 50 best games of 2017. The game was nominated for "Game, Special Class" at the National Academy of Video Game Trade Reviewers Awards, and for the Nuovo Award at the Independent Games Festival Competition Awards.
References
External links
2017 video games
IOS games
MacOS games
Video games developed in Canada
Windows games
Video games about death |
16235263 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboCop%20%281988%20video%20game%29 | RoboCop (1988 video game) | RoboCop is a beat 'em up/run-and-gun action game developed and published by Data East for arcades in 1988, based on the 1987 film of the same name. It was sub-licensed to Data East by Ocean Software, who obtained the rights from Orion Pictures at the script stage. Data East and Ocean Software subsequently adapted the arcade game for home computers.
The game was a critical and commercial success. The arcade game was the highest-grossing arcade game of 1988 in Hong Kong, and reached number-two on Japan's monthly Game Machine arcade charts. On home computers, the game sold over copies worldwide, and it was especially successful in the United Kingdom where it was the best-selling home computer game of the 1980s.
Gameplay
The gameplay is similar to Data East's arcade game Bad Dudes Vs. DragonNinja, released earlier the same year. Robocop includes elements from both beat 'em up and run and gun games.
Release
In 1988, Ocean adapted Data East's Robocop arcade game for 8-bit home computers, converting much of the arcade game while also adding original content to make it different to the arcade original. This version was produced for the Commodore 64, MSX, ZX Spectrum, Tandy Color Computer 3, Amstrad CPC, and IBM PC compatibles, meaning that home computers ended up with two different versions of Robocop for North American and European audiences.
Ports for the Apple II, IBM PC compatibles, Amiga, and Atari ST, NES, and Color Computer 3 followed in 1989. The Apple II and IBM PC ports were developed by Quicksilver Software, while the Amiga and Atari ST versions were developed directly by Ocean. The NES version was developed by Sakata SAS Co, and Ocean developed and published a version for the Game Boy in 1990. A port of the game for the Atari Jaguar was planned but never released.
Data East published the game in North America.
Reception
RoboCop was a commercial success in arcades, especially in Hong Kong where it was the highest-grossing arcade game of 1988. In Japan, Game Machine listed RoboCop on their February 1, 1989 issue as being the second most-successful table arcade unit of the month.
On home computers, the game sold over copies worldwide. It was especially successful in the United Kingdom, where it was the best-selling home computer game of the 1980s. The ZX Spectrum version in particular was the best-selling home video game of 1989. The ZX Spectrum RoboCop was one of the biggest selling games of all time on that platform and remained in the Spectrum software sales charts for over a year and a half; it entered the charts in December 1988 and was still in the top five in February 1991. It also topped the UK all-format charts for a record 36 weeks until it was knocked off the number one position by Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in August 1989.
The arcade game was critically well-received. The ZX Spectrum version also achieved critical acclaim, receiving a CRASH Smash award from CRASH, 94% in Sinclair User and Your Sinclair gave 8.8 out of 10, also placing it at number 94 in the Your Sinclair official top 100. The overall opinion was that it captures the original material, with smooth scrolling and animation, sampled speech and sound effects highlighted.
The readers of YS voted it the 9th best game of all time.
The title theme of the Ocean Software versions (composed by Jonathan Dunn) has become well known for its serene, calm tune, which heavily contrasted the tone of both the actual game and the source material; the version of the theme heard in the Game Boy port was later licensed by European kitchen appliance company Ariston for use in a series of TV adverts. The song was also used as the theme song for Charlie Brooker's documentary, How Videogames Changed the World, and was one of Brooker's selections on Desert Island Discs. It was also used as the music for the Internet short, "Dilbert 3" and was sampled in Lil B's song, "In Down Bad", from his mixtape "White Flame".
References
External links
Review in Compute!'s Gazette
Review in The Rainbow
Review in Info
1988 video games
Amiga 1200 games
Amstrad CPC games
Apple II games
Arcade video games
Atari ST games
Beat 'em ups
Cancelled Atari Jaguar games
Commodore 64 games
Data East arcade games
Data East video games
DOS games
Epic/Sony Records games
Game Boy games
MSX games
Multiplayer and single-player video games
Nintendo Entertainment System games
Ocean Software games
RoboCop (franchise)
Run and gun games
TRS-80 Color Computer games
Video games about police officers
Video games based on RoboCop
Video games developed in Japan
Video games developed in the United Kingdom
Video games set in Detroit
ZX Spectrum games |
23923327 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin%20Goetz | Martin Goetz | Martin A. Goetz (born April 22, 1930) was a pioneer in the development of the commercial software industry. He holds the first software patent, and was product manager of Autoflow from Applied Data Research (ADR), which is generally cited as the first commercial software application.
In the early 1960s, the status of software as a standalone industry was unclear. Software was generally custom-developed for a single customer, bundled with hardware, or given away free. Goetz and ADR played a substantial role in defining software as a standalone product, and clarifying that it could be protected by intellectual property laws.
In 2007, Computerworld cited Goetz as an "Unsung Innovator" in the computer industry. He was named the "Father of Third-Party Software" by mainframezone.com.
In late 2009, Goetz wrote an editorial in the patent blog Patently-O advocating software patents. Goetz argues that there is no principled difference between software and hardware patents and that truly patent-able software innovations require just as much ingenuity and advancement as any other kind of patentable subject matter.
First software patent
In 1964, Goetz attended a conference on software intellectual property issues. He subsequently decided that an improved data sorting algorithm he had developed was patentable.
Data sorting was an important issue for the mainframe computers of the day, many of which used magnetic tape for storage. A more efficient data sorting procedure could save substantial amounts of program execution time by reducing the numbers of read and write operations, and reducing the wait time for tape to rewind.
Goetz filed the patent application on April 9, 1965, and it was granted on April 23, 1968 as U.S. Patent No. 3,380,029. Computerworld Magazine reported the news as: "First Patent is Issued for Software, Full Implications Are Not Yet Known."
First commercial software product
The idea of software as a product category separate from computer hardware developed gradually in the 1950s and 1960s. The first independent software firms were consultancies that did custom programming for mainframe companies and their customers. Libraries of basic software programs were provided at no additional charge by mainframe manufacturers, and more complicated software was custom-tailored to each business that used it. The idea of off-the-shelf commercial software, with a standard feature set used in the same way across a wide range of customers, did not yet exist.
In 1965, Applied Data Research was one of those custom software development firms. It wrote a software program for RCA mainframes called Autoflow, designed to create flowcharts documenting the structure of other computer programs (such flowcharts were an important tool for documenting and maintaining software). RCA decided not to license the product. Other computer manufacturers also refused to license Autoflow, so in 1965 Goetz decided to market it directly to RCA mainframe users. This is generally cited as the first time that a software program was marketed and sold as a standalone product.
The RCA version of Autoflow sold only two licenses, but it became a commercial success in subsequent years as it was advertised, improved, and ported to other mainframes. The rise of Autoflow and other software products like Informatics' MARK IV (software), coupled with IBM's decision to unbundle software from its mainframes, helped facilitate the growth of the commercial software industry in the 1970s and beyond.
References
External links
Computer History Museum – How ADR Got Into the Software Products Business
SAP Business Experts – Martin A. Goetz on software patents and intellectual property
Oral history with Martin Goetz, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota.
American University Computing History Museum – History of software as a product and industry
The Guardian – Software patents 'a bit of a mess' says Martin Goetz, the first man to get one
History of software
Businesspeople in software
Software patent law
Living people
1930 births |
13905376 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EGroupware | EGroupware | EGroupware is free open-source groupware software intended for businesses from small to enterprises. Its primary functions allow users to manage contacts, appointments, projects and to-do lists.
The projects spreads its software under the terms of GNU General Public License (GPL).
It is used either via its native web-interface, making access platform-independent, or by using different supported groupware clients, such as Kontact, Novell Evolution, or Microsoft Outlook. It can also be used by mobile phone or PDA via SyncML.
It currently has translations for more than 25 languages, including right-to-left language support.
Features
EGroupware is developed in the script language PHP/TypeScript and is therefore platform-independent (Linux, Windows). Open source databases (MariaDB, PostgreSQL or also MySQL) can be used as databases. Authentication can be done against the own user accounts in SQL as well as LDAP, mail server, Active Directory (AD), CAS, SAML 2.0/Shibboleth/SimpleSAMLphp and others.
Comparable programs are proprietary groupware servers such as Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Domino.
EGroupware can manage mail servers (Dovecot, Cyrus). User administration, e-mail accounts, absence notes/filters(via Sieve), mail aliases, quotas and forwardings are directly administrable in EGroupware or can be set by the user. A suitable e-mail server is offered as an installation package.
History
EGroupware is the most current manifestation of a chain of projects. The original project was called webdistro. In 2000 development on the project phpgroupware began, which was based on webdistro; and in 2003 the EGroupware fork was born. EGroupware has a very pronounced community character compared with its predecessors.
There is an EGroupware constitution, adopted in 2005, which guarantees freedom and security to the community and establishes admin elections.
For a short time Tine 2.0 was an official subproject of EGroupware. The goal of the subproject was the development of future technologies for the EGroupware project. Due to internal disagreements, the projects EGroupware and Tine 2.0 had separated from each other in February 2008.
Since July 2009 the first professional Version of EGroupware is available. It is being sold as a software subscription. This product line, called „EGroupware Premium Line“ (EPL) includes a maintenance agreement for the source code and corresponding RPMs, that enables automatic updates.
Version 14.2 ist is available since December 2014. E-Share-Option: Since version 14.2 EGroupware Filemanager offers a filesharing option for an easy data exchange. It includes, for example, the option to send links to read or edit files to persons that do not use EGroupware. Beside that, files can be moved via drag and drop. Filemanager is used as an alternative to the filehosting service Dropbox. Home Screen: The Home Screen is a virtual pinboard, that makes important contacts, projects or tasks always available for the user. Mobile Template: The third update in 14.2 is the mobile template, that has been optimized for small screens and touch handling. It enables the usage of EGroupware on tablets and supports swipe gestures and an adaptation of the format while turning the device.
For 2016 the Release of version 16.1 is scheduled. It will for example include a new calendar and further improvements of the mobile template.
Version 20.1 was released on 12 August 2020. It integrated a new smallPART application for video-based learning & teaching. A push server was implemented and the source code was converted to TypeScript.
Even before the release of version 20.1, the video conferencing solution Jitsi and the web remote desktop solution Apache Guacamole were integrated due to the Corona pandemic.
Version 21.1 was released on 25 May 2021. The module smallPART (video-based learning tool) now supports tests and exams with single-choice, Multiple choice and open text questions. New additions include an integrated Kanban board and cloud telephone system integration (CTI). Further innovations: EGroupware Firewall Dark Mode, File sharing for internal users, EGroupware Mail server.
Applications and functions
Contact-manager using an SQL database or LDAP
Calendar (including support for scheduling of groups, resources and contacts)
Integrated IMAP webmail client (FelaMiMail)
Infolog, an application for tasks and notes
File manager
File sharing
Kanban board
Knowledge base
Element based project manager highly integrated with all other apps
Resources management (inventory) and booking tool integrated into EGroupware calendar
Wiki
SiteMgr: web based authoring system with fine granulated access control lists
CalDAV and CardDAV server
News
Time-tracker application
Bookmarks
Tracking system
Other included/connected applications:
Chat (Rocket.chat)
Video conference (Jitsi/BigBlueButton)
Remote desktop (Apache Guacamole)
Online office suite (Collabora Online)
smallPART
Characteristics/Qualities
EGroupware is being developed in PHP and therefore platform independent (Linux, Windows, BSD Server). Several open source databases (as MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL) are usable. Authentication can occur via private user accounts in SQL or LDAP, or an external system, for example Mailserver or Active Directory Server (ADS).
Comparable programmes are proprietary groupware servers such as Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Domino.
Synchronisation
EGroupware can be synchronised with Apple- and Android devices. Appointments, addressbook entries and tasks from Infolog application can be synchronised. ESync and CalDAV are thereby used as protocols.
See also
List of collaborative software#Open source software compares its features with others
List of project management software
Screenshots
Literature
Ralf Becker, Birgit Becker, Michaela Knotte, Ingo Kreißelmeyer: Manual EGroupware 1.4, English, Outdoor Unlimited Training GmbH, 1.Edition, January 2008,
Ralf Becker, Birgit Becker, M. Knotte, I. Kreißelmeyer: Benutzerhandbuch EGroupware 1.4, German, Outdoor Unlimited Training GmbH, 1. Edition, August 2007,
References
External links
EGroupware Community Edition
Groupware
Free groupware
Business software for Linux |
27222746 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture%20of%20Windows%209x | Architecture of Windows 9x | The Windows 9x series of operating systems refers to the kernel which lies at the heart of Windows 9x. Its architecture is monolithic.
The basic code is similar in function to MS-DOS. As a 16-/32-bit hybrid, it requires MS-DOS support to operate.
Critical files
Windows 95 boots using the following set of files:
32-bit shell and command line interpreter:
SHELL.DLL and SHELL32.DLL – Shell API
EXPLORER.EXE – Windows shell and file manager
COMMAND.COM – command line shell executable
Windows 95 Core:
KERNEL32.DLL and KRNL386.EXE – Windows API for Windows resources
ADVAPI32.DLL Functionality additional to the kernel. Includes functions for the Windows registry and shutdown and restart functions
GDI32.DLL and GDI.EXE - Graphic device interface
USER32.DLL and USER.EXE - GUI implementation
COMMCTRL.DLL and COMCTL32.DLL - Common controls (user interface)
DDEML.DLL Dynamic Data Exchange Management Library (DDEML) provides an interface that simplifies the task of adding DDE capability to an application
MSGSRV32.EXE Acts as a 32-bit message server and will never appear in the Windows task list
WIN.COM - responsible for loading the GUI and the Windows portion of the system
Registry and other configuration files:
SYSTEM.DAT, USER.DAT - contains the Windows Registry
MSDOS.SYS - contains some low-level boot settings and resources such as disabling double-buffering and the GUI logo
WIN.INI and SYSTEM.INI - configuration files from Windows 3.1, processed in Windows 9x also
Virtual Machine Manager and configuration manager:
VMM32.VXD - Virtual machine manager and default drivers. It takes over from io.sys as kernel
Installable file System Manager:
IFSHLP.SYS - enables Windows to make direct file system calls bypassing MS-DOS methods
IFSMGR.VXD - 32-bit driver for the installable file system
IOS.VXD I/O Supervisor that controls and manages all protected-mode file system and block device drivers
MPREXE.EXE MPRSERV.DLL and MPR.DLL - Multiple Provider Router, required for network authentication and user profiles
MSPWL32.DLL Password list management library
Device drivers:
IO.SYS - executable handling all of the basic functions, such as I/O routines and also serves as kernel until vmm32.vxd takes over
HIMEM.SYS - DOS device driver which allows DOS programs to store data in extended memory via the Extended Memory Specification
SYSTEM.DRV, MMSOUND.DRV, COMM.DRV , VGA.DRV, MOUSE.DRV, BIGMEM.DRV, KEYBOARD.DRV - 16-bit drivers
CP 1252.NLS, CP 437.NLS, UNICODE.NLS, LOCALE.NLS - keyboard layouts
RMM.PDR Real Mode Mapper Virtual Device
The system may also use CONFIG.SYS, which contains settings and commands executed before loading the command interpreter) and AUTOEXEC.BAT, which is a batch file automatically executed after loading COMMAND.COM. However, these two files are not critical to the boot process, as IO.SYS contains a default setting for both, in case of absence from the system. In Windows ME, CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT are not processed and LOGO.SYS may be used as a splash screen.
Boot sequence
The Windows 9x startup process consists of 6 phases. The first two of these steps are common to any operating system booting using the traditional combination of BIOS and Master Boot Record.
Phase 1 - The ROM BIOS bootstrap process
The ROM BIOS starts the execution at the physical memory address FFFF0h. During this phase, BIOS first executes the Power-on self-test, then checks for the existence of a boot disk on drive A. If it is not found in drive A, the ROM BIOS checks for a hard disk. If the computer has a Plug and Play BIOS, in addition, BIOS checks the RAM for I/O port addresses, interrupt lines and DMA channels for Plug and Play devices, disables found devices, creates maps of used and unused resources and re-enables devices.
Phase 2 - The master boot record and boot sector
The Master boot record is loaded at address 7C00h and loads the boot sector of the Windows Disk partition. The boot sector contains the disk boot program and BIOS Parameter Block table which searches for the location of the root directory and IO.SYS file, which then loads the IO.SYS file into memory.
Phase 3 - IO.SYS file initialization
IO.SYS initializes the minimal File Allocation Table driver and loads MSDOS.SYS into memory. It then displays "Starting Windows" depending on the BootDelay line in the MSDOS.SYS file. It then loads the LOGO.SYS file and displays a startup image on the screen. If the DRVSPACE.INI or DBLSPACE.INI file exists, it also loads drivers for compressed disks. Windows then attempts to open the registry file SYSTEM.DAT. If that fails, it attempts to open SYSTEM.DA0. If configured in MSDOS.SYS or in the registry, double buffering is also enabled.
Phase 4 - CONFIG.SYS and real mode configuration
Windows 95 to Windows 98 now analyze CONFIG.SYS and load MS-DOS real mode drivers. Windows ME ignores this.
If the CONFIG.SYS file does not exist, the IO.SYS file loads the drivers IFSHLP.SYS, HIMEM.SYS and SETVER.EXE. Windows reserves all upper memory blocks for Windows 95 operating system use or for expanded memory.
Windows 95 to Windows 98 execute COMMAND.COM to process AUTOEXEC.BAT. It loads terminate and stay resident programs into memory. Windows ME ignores this step, as Real Mode DOS support is disabled and TSRs being loaded can compromise system stability.
Phase 5 - initialize drivers
IO.SYS now runs WIN.COM. WIN.COM loads the VMM32.VXD file into memory or accesses it from the hard disk. This file contains the most important drivers and the 9x kernel.
The real-mode virtual device driver loader checks for duplicate virtual device drivers that exist both in the Windows\System\Vmm32 folder and the VMM32.VXD file. In a case of duplicates, the driver in the Windows\System\Vmm32 directory will be loaded.
Windows 95 to 98 now query real mode drivers calling INT 2Fh and search for drivers in registry entry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\VxD marked to be loaded as an external file. Vmm32 then analyzes the [386 Enh] section of the Windows\System.ini file and loads drivers listed there. Some important drivers are loaded even if they are not listed in the Windows Registry, SYSTEM.INI or in the Windows\System\Vmm32 directory.
Once the real-mode virtual device drivers are loaded, driver initialization on Windows 95 to Windows 98 occurs. Vmm32 then switches the CPU from real mode to protected mode.
The next step is the initialization of protected mode drivers, executed in three phases for each device: a critical part of initialization (while interrupts are disabled), device initialization (when file I/O is allowed) and InitComplete phase. After initialization of the display driver, Windows switches to graphical mode.
Phase 6 - Win32 initialization
Once all of the drivers are loaded, the Kernel32.dll, gdi32.dll, Gdi.exe, user32.dll, User.exe, shell32.dll and Explorer.exe files are loaded. The next step in the startup process is to load the network environment. The user is prompted to log on to the network that is configured. When a user logs on, their desktop settings are loaded from the registry, or the desktop configuration uses a default desktop. Windows then starts programs defined in the StartUp folder, WIN.INI and programs defined in registry keys Run, RunOnce, RunServices and RunServicesOnce inside the branches HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion and HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\. After each program in the RunOnce registry key is started, the program is removed from the key.
Kernel
The Windows 9x kernel is a 32-bit kernel with virtual memory. Drivers are provided by .VXD files or, since Windows 98, the newer WDM drivers can be used. However, the MS-DOS kernel stays resident in memory. Windows will use the old MS-DOS 16-bit drivers if they are installed, except on Windows Me. In Windows Me, DOS is still running, but Windows will ignore any attempt to load its device drivers when parsing the AUTOEXEC.BAT, and will move the environment variables that it still recognizes from the CONFIG.SYS into the Windows Registry.
See also
Architecture of Windows NT
Microsoft Windows
Caldera v. Microsoft
WinGlue
FreeWin95
References
Further reading
(xviii+856+vi pages, 3.5"-floppy) Errata:
(NB. Also on MS-DOS 7+ HMA usage and \WINDOWS\IOS.LOG.)
External links
Monolithic kernels
Windows 9x
Windows 95
Windows 98
Windows ME |
60408989 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism%20of%20Huawei | Criticism of Huawei | The Chinese multinational information technology and consumer electronics company Huawei has faced numerous criticisms for various aspects of its operations, particularly in regards to cybersecurity, intellectual property, and human rights violations.
Huawei has faced allegations, primarily from the United States and its allies, that its wireless networking equipment could contain backdoors enabling surveillance by the Chinese government. Huawei has stated that its products posed "no greater cybersecurity risk" than those of any other vendor, and that there was no evidence of the U.S. espionage claims. The company had also partnered with British officials to establish a laboratory to audit its products.
These concerns intensified with Huawei's involvement in the development of 5G wireless networks, and have led to some countries implementing or contemplating restrictions on the use of Chinese-made hardware in these networks. In March 2019, Huawei sued the U.S. government over a military spending bill that restricted the purchase of equipment from Huawei or ZTE by the government, citing that it had been refused due process. Huawei exited the U.S. market due to these concerns, which had also made U.S. wireless carriers reluctant to sell its products.
Huawei has also faced allegations that it has engaged in corporate espionage to steal competitors' intellectual property, and in 2019, was restricted from performing commerce with U.S. companies, over allegations that it willfully exported technology of U.S. origin to Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions. The company has also been accused of assisting in the mass-detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang re-education camps. and employing forced Uyghur labour in its supply chain.
Intellectual property and theft
Cisco patent lawsuit
In 2003 Cisco General Counsel Mark Chandler traveled to Shenzhen to confront Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei with evidence of Huawei's theft of Cisco IP. The evidence included typos from Cisco's technical manuals that also appeared in Huawei's, after being presented with the evidence Ren replied "coincidence".
In February 2003, Cisco Systems sued Huawei Technologies for allegedly infringing on its patents and illegally copying source code used in its routers and switches. According to a statement by Cisco, by July 2004 Huawei removed the contested code, manuals and command-line interfaces and the case was subsequently settled out of court. As part of the settlement Huawei admitted that it had copied some of Cisco's router software. Both sides claimed success—with Cisco asserting that "completion of lawsuit marks a victory for the protection of intellectual property rights", and Huawei's partner 3Com (which was not a part of lawsuit) noting that court order prevented Cisco from bringing another case against Huawei asserting the same or substantially similar claims. Although Cisco employees allegedly witnessed counterfeited technology as late as September 2005, in a retrospective Cisco's Corporate Counsel noted, "Cisco was portrayed by the Chinese media as a bullying multi-national corporation" and "the damage to Cisco's reputation in China outweighed any benefit achieved through the lawsuit".
Huawei's chief representative in the U.S. subsequently claimed that Huawei had been vindicated in the case, breaking a confidentiality clause of Huawei's settlement with Cisco. In response, Cisco revealed parts of the independent expert's report produced for the case which proved that Huawei had stolen Cisco code and directly copied it into their products. In a company blog post Cisco's Mark Chandler stated that the settled case had included allegations of "direct, verbatim copying of our source code, to say nothing of our command line interface, our help screens, our copyrighted manuals and other elements of our products" by Huawei and provided additional information to support those allegations. Prior to Cisco providing conclusive proof in 2012 the story of Huawei's blatant plagiarism had obtained the status of folklore within the routing and switching community.
T-Mobile smartphone testing robot
In September 2014, Huawei faced a lawsuit from T-Mobile US, which alleged that Huawei stole technology from its Bellevue, Washington, headquarters. T-Mobile claimed in its filed suit that Huawei's employees snuck into a T-Mobile lab during the period of 2012–2013 and stole parts of its smartphone testing robot Tappy. The Huawei employees then copied the operating software and design details, violating confidentiality agreements that both companies signed. Furthermore, Huawei is now using the stolen parts and data to build its own testing robot. A Huawei spokesman stated to The New York Times that there is some truth to the complaint, but that the two employees involved have been fired. T-Mobile has since stopped using Huawei as a supplier, which T-Mobile says could cost it tens of millions of dollars as it moves away from its handsets.
In May 2017, a jury agreed with T-Mobile that Huawei committed industrial espionage in United States, and Huawei was ordered to pay $4.8 milion in damages. Huawei responded to the lawsuit by arguing that Tappy was not a trade secret, and that it was made by Epson, not T-Mobile. According to Huawei, "T-Mobile's statement of the alleged trade secret is an insufficient, generic statement that captures virtually every component of its robot", and it had failed to point out any trade secret stolen with sufficient specificity. T-Mobile dismissed Huawei's arguments, and contended that Epson had provided only a component of the robot.
Motorola patent lawsuit
In July 2010, Motorola filed an amended complaint that named Huawei as a co-defendant in its case against Lemko for alleged theft of trade secrets.
Motorola–Nokia Siemens Networks sales dispute
In January 2011, Huawei filed a lawsuit against Motorola to prevent its intellectual property from being illegally transferred to Nokia Siemens Networks ("NSN") as part of NSN's US$1.2 billion acquisition of Motorola's wireless network business. In April 2011, Motorola and Huawei entered into an agreement to settle all pending litigation, with Motorola paying an undisclosed sum to Huawei for the intellectual property that would be part of the sale to NSN.
ZTE patent lawsuit
In a further move to protect its intellectual property, Huawei filed lawsuits in Germany, France and Hungary in April 2011 against ZTE for patent and trademark infringement. The following day, ZTE countersued Huawei for patent infringement in China.
Nortel
In 2012, Brian Shields, who was the senior cybersecurity analyst of the Canadian telecommunications company Nortel, alleged that state-directed Chinese networks had comprehensively penetrated the company's networks from at least 2000 until the company's bankruptcy in 2009. He alleged that Huawei (who had been a contract manufacturer for Nortel) was the primary beneficiary of the hack. As early as 2004, it was suspected that Huawei was copying Nortel's hardware and instruction manuals.
Circuit boards
In June 2004, a Huawei employee was caught diagramming and photographing circuit boards after-hours from a competitor booth at the SuperComm trade show. The employee denied the accusation, but was later dismissed.
Ahkan Semiconductor diamond glass
Huawei was under investigation by FBI in the United States for sending some diamond glass samples developed by the company Ahkan Semiconductor to China without authorization to test and destroy the product in order to steal intellectual property.
CNEX Labs
CNEX Labs claims that a Huawei executive, with the help of a Chinese university, attempted to steal CNEX's solid-state drive computer storage technology.
Espionage and security concerns
2000s
In the U.S., officials and politicians within the federal government have raised concerns that Huawei-made telecommunications equipment may be designed to allow unauthorised access by the Chinese government and the Chinese People's Liberation Army, given that Ren Zhengfei, the founder of the company, served as an engineer in the army in the early 1980s. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States scrutinized a deal by Bain Capital to acquire 3Com with Huawei as a minority investor, and an attempt to acquire the virtualization firm 3Leaf Systems, both due to security concerns (with concerns that China could gain access to U.S. military-grade technology in the case of the former). Both deals fell through. In 2010, Sprint Nextel blocked bids by Huawei on a supply contract, after the company was contacted by the Secretary of Commerce.
In the United Kingdom, the Conservative Party raised concerns about security over Huawei's bid for Marconi in 2005, and the company's equipment was mentioned as an alleged potential threat in a 2009 government briefing by Alex Allan, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. In November 2010, Huawei agreed to proactively allow local officials to perform cybersecurity examinations of its products, resulting in the opening of the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre (HCSEC). Its oversight board includes members of the National Cyber Security Centre and GCHQ.
In October 2009, the Indian Department of Telecommunications reportedly requested national telecom operators to "self-regulate" the use of all equipment from European, U.S. and Chinese telecoms manufacturers following security concerns. Earlier, in 2005, Huawei was blocked from supplying equipment to India's Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) cellular phone service provider. In 2010, the Indian Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) insisted on cancelling the rest of the Huawei contract with BSNL and pressed charges against several top BSNL officers regarding their "doubtful integrity and dubious links with Chinese firms". In June 2010, an interim solution was introduced that would allow the import of Chinese-made telecoms equipment to India if pre-certified by international security agencies such as Canada's Electronic Warfare Associates, U.S.-based Infoguard, and Israel's ALTAL Security Consulting.
Early 2010s
In a 2011 open letter, Huawei stated that the security concerns are "unfounded and unproven" and called on the U.S. government to investigate any aspect of its business. The U.S.-based non-profit organisation Asia Society carried out a review of Chinese companies trying to invest in the U.S., including Huawei. The organisation found that only a few investment deals were blocked following unfavorable findings by the CFIUS or had been given a recommendation not to apply. However, all large transactions had been politicised by groups including the U.S. media, members of Congress and the security community. However, another article unrelated to the report published by the Asia Society reported that, "fear that the P.R.C. government could strongarm private or unaffiliated Chinese groups into giving up cyber-secrets is reflected in the U.S. government's treatment of Chinese telecom company Huawei."
In December 2011, Bloomberg reported that the U.S. is invoking Cold War-era national security powers to force telecommunication companies including AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. to divulge confidential information about their networks in a hunt for Chinese cyber-spying. The U.S. House Intelligence Committee had said on 18 November that it would investigate foreign companies, and a spokesman for Huawei said that the company conducts its businesses according to normal business practices and actually welcomed the investigation. On 8 October 2012, the Committee issued a report concluding Huawei and ZTE were a "national security threat". However, a 2012 White House-ordered review found no concrete evidence to support the House report's espionage allegations.
In March 2012, Australian media sources reported that the Australian government had excluded Huawei from tendering for contracts with NBN Co, a government-owned corporation that is managing the construction of the National Broadband Network, following advice from the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation regarding security concerns. The Attorney-General's Department stated in response to these reports that the National Broadband Network is "a strategic and significant government investment, [and] we have a responsibility to do our utmost to protect its integrity and that of the information carried on it."
On 9 October 2012, a spokesperson for prime minister Stephen Harper indicated that the Canadian government invoked a national security exception to exclude Huawei from its plans to build a secure government communications network.
On 19 July 2013, Michael Hayden, former head of the U.S. National Security Agency and director of Motorola Solutions, claimed that he has seen hard evidence of backdoors in Huawei's networking equipment and that the company engaged in espionage and shared intimate knowledge of the foreign telecommunications systems with the Chinese government. Huawei and Motorola Solutions had previously been engaged in intellectual property disputes for a number of years. Huawei's global cybersecurity officer, John Suffolk, described the comments made by Hayden as "tired, unsubstantiated, defamatory remarks" and challenged him and other critics to present any evidence publicly.
In 2014, The New York Times reported, based upon documents leaked by Edward Snowden, that the U.S. National Security Agency has since 2007 been operating a covert program against Huawei. This involved breaking into Huawei's internal networks, including headquarter networks and founder Ren Zhengfei's communications. In 2014, Huawei reached a sponsorship deal with the NFL's Washington Redskins to install free public Wi-Fi at FedExField, but the agreement was abruptly shelved weeks after it was announced due to unofficial action by a U.S. government advisor.
In 2016, Canada's immigration department said it planned to deny permanent resident visas to three Chinese citizens who worked for Huawei over concerns the applicants are involved in espionage, terrorism, and government subversion.
Late 2010s
In 2018, an investigation by French newspaper Le Monde alleged that China had engaged in hacking the African Union headquarters in Ethiopia from 2012 to 2017. The building was built by Chinese contractors, including Huawei, and Huawei equipment has been linked to these hacks. The Chinese government denied that they bugged the building, stating that the accusations were "utterly groundless and ridiculous." Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn rejected the French media report. Moussa Faki Mahamat, head of the African Union Commission, said the allegations in the Le Monde report were false. "These are totally false allegations and I believe that we are completely disregarding them."
On 17 April 2018, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) held a preliminary, 5–0 vote on rules forbidding the use of government subsidies to purchase telecom equipment from companies deemed to be a risk to national security. A draft of the policy specifically named Huawei and ZTE as examples. The same day, the company revealed plans to downplay the U.S. market as part of its future business plans, citing the government scrutiny as having impeded its business there.
In August 2018, U.S. president Donald Trump signed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019, which contains a provision barring the U.S. government from purchasing hardware from Huawei or ZTE, under cybersecurity ground. In retaliation for the aforementioned campaigns and legislation targeting the company, Huawei sued the U.S. government in March 2019, alleging that it has "repeatedly failed to produce any evidence to support its restrictions", and that Congress failed to provide it due process.
In March 2019, the HCSEC Oversight Board published a report stating that it had "continued to identify concerning issues in Huawei's approach to software development bringing significantly increased risk to UK operators", and that it had "not yet seen anything to give it confidence in Huawei's capacity to successfully complete the elements of its transformation programme that it has proposed as a means of addressing these underlying defects". The report cited, in particular, use of outdated versions of VxWorks in its networking equipment and inconsistent checksums between OS images, and during a visit to a Huawei development centre in Shanghai, it was found that Huawei had been using an "unmanageable number" of OpenSSL revisions between individual products.
On 30 April 2019, Bloomberg News published a report alleging that between 2009 and 2011, Vodafone Italy had discovered several security vulnerabilities in its Huawei fixed-line network equipment, including unspecified backdoors in optical nodes and broadband gateways, and unsecured telnet on its home routers that could give Huawei access to Vodafone's network. The report claimed that despite having claimed to have patched them, some of them had persisted through 2012, and that the same vulnerabilities could be found in Huawei equipment used by other regional Vodafone subsidiaries. Both Huawei and Vodafone disputed Bloombergs allegations: Huawei stated that the alleged security vulnerabilities had been patched after they were discovered and reported, and described the alleged "backdoors" as "technical mistakes" that had been "put right". Historically telnet has been commonly used in the industry for remote operation. It is a standard text based interface to a remote host. Vodafone stated that the interface would not have been accessible from the internet, that it was "nothing more than a failure to remove a diagnostic function after development", and there was no evidence of any actual breaches.
On 15 May 2019, Trump issued the Executive Order on Securing the Information and Communications Technology and Services Supply Chain, which gives the government power to restrict any transactions with "foreign adversaries" that involve information and communications technology. The same day, also citing violations of economic sanctions against Iran, the U.S. Department of Commerce added Huawei and its affiliates to its Entity List under the Export Administration Regulations. This restricts U.S. companies from doing business with Huawei without government permission. On 19 May 2019, Reuters reported that Google had suspended Huawei's ability to use the Android operating system on its devices with licensed Google Mobile Services, due to these restrictions. The next day, it was reported that Intel, Qualcomm, and Xilinx had stopped supplying components to Huawei.
On 16 May 2019, Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant said Dutch intelligence agency AIVD was made aware of reports of backdoors on Huawei equipment belonging to a Dutch carrier. And that the reports came from unidentified intelligence sources. A spokesman for the AIVD said the agency would not comment on the Volkskrant report. The Dutch paper claimed AIVD was determining whether or not the situation were used for spying by the Chinese government
In 2019, a report commissioned by the Papua New Guinea (PNG) National Cyber Security Centre, funded by the Australian government, alleged that a data center built by Huawei for the PNG government contained exploitable security flaws. "It is assessed with high confidence that data flows could be easily intercepted," said the 2019 report on PNG's National Data Centre. The report noted the layout of the data centre did not match the intended design, opening up major security gaps. The project was part of a US$147 million digital support package from China to PNG which is also funding a national broadband network. Huawei told the AFR that the data centre project "conforms to appropriate industry standards and customer requirements". The AFR says that the firewalls had already reached their end of life in 2016—two years before the centre became operational. The paper quotes the security report as saying: "The main switches are not behind the firewalls. This means that remote access would not be detected by the security settings within the appliances." Huawei responded that the project "complies with appropriate industry standards and the requirements of the customer." The Government of Papua New Guinea has called the data centre a 'failed investment' and attempted to have the loan cancelled.
2020s
In June 2020, the head of France's cybersecurity agency, the Agence nationale de la sécurité des systèmes d'information, stated that he would encourage telecom operators not to use Huawei equipment while not outright banning Huawei.
On 28 August 2020, President Emmanuel Macron said, France will not formally exclude Chinese telecom giant Huawei for its upcoming 5G telecommunication networks, but favored European providers for security reasons. However all Huawei components used in 5G networks would have to be phased out by 2028 placing a de facto ban on Huawei.
On 15 April 2021, the Romanian government approved a law that aims to exclude Chinese group Huawei from the future 5G mobile network. According to the draft proposals, telecommunications companies may not be considered in Romania because of "risks, threats or vulnerabilities to national security".
On 15 August 2021, according to Engadget, Huawei was accused of pressuring an U.S. firm to install a data backdoor for a law enforcement safer-cities project in Lahore, Pakistan. The system supposedly gave Huawei access to a database that helped it collect sensitive citizen and government data "important to Pakistan's national security."
Chinese law requirement
In December 2018, Arne Schönbohm, head of Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), stated that the country had not yet seen evidence that Huawei had used its equipment to conduct espionage on behalf of China. That month, it was also reported that the Japanese government had ceased future procurement of Huawei and ZTE products.
The Czech Republic's cybersecurity agency issued a warning against Huawei and ZTE products, arguing that Chinese law required companies to "cooperate with intelligence services, therefore introducing them into the key state systems might present a threat". Huawei refuted the arguments, stating that it is not required to include backdoors in its products, nor has the company ever received any requests to do so. Shortly afterward, prime minister Andrej Babiš ordered that government offices cease using Huawei and ZTE products. However, the ban was reversed after the agency's claims were found to be without basis.
Huawei commissioned attorneys of the London-based law firm Clifford Chance and Beijing-based law firm Zhong Lun to review two Chinese bills commonly cited in these allegations (the 2017 National Intelligence Law, and the 2014 Counter-Espionage Law). The review concluded that there was no such requirement in Chinese law for backdoors to be included in telecom equipment, and that the laws were directed more towards the actual operators of telecom services, and not extraterritorial. The review was published in a Wired opinion piece by Zhou Hanhua. While Huawei has claimed the Clifford Chance review as "independent legal opinions", the review contains an explicit disclaimer from Clifford Chance that the material "should not be construed as constituting a legal opinion on the application of PRC law". Follow up reporting from Wired cast doubt on these findings, particularly because the Chinese "government doesn't limit itself to what the law explicitly allows" when it comes to national security. "All Chinese citizens and organisations are obliged to cooperate upon request with PRC intelligence operations—and also maintain the secrecy of such operations", as explicitly stipulated in Article 7 of the 2017 PRC national intelligence-gathering activities law.
5G networks
Four members of the Five Eyes international intelligence alliance—Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the U.S.—have declared the use of Huawei telecommunications equipment, particularly in 5G networks, poses "significant security risks", while Canada is carrying out its own security review; only Britain is permitting the company to participate in the rollout of the new technology. In late November 2018, the New Zealand signals intelligence agency Government Communications Security Bureau blocked telecommunications company Spark from using Huawei equipment in its planned 5G upgrade, claiming that it posed a "significant network security risk." The NZ ban followed a similar ban in Australia in August 2018.
In October 2018, BT Group announced that it had been phasing out Huawei equipment from "core" components of its wireless infrastructure (excluding parts such as phone mast antennas), including its 5G services, and the Emergency Services Network project.
In December 2018, Gavin Williamson, the UK's Defence Secretary, expressed "grave" and "very deep concerns" about the company providing technology to upgrade Britain's services to 5G. He accused Beijing of acting "sometimes in a malign way". Alex Younger, the head of MI6, also raised questions about Huawei's role.
On 11 January 2019, Poland announced that two people working on a 5G Huawei network had been arrested: Wang Weijing (a Huawei executive), and Piotr Durbaglo, a consultant having worked for Polish domestic security, but currently working for Orange on 5G network testing.
In November 2019, the Chinese ambassador to Denmark, in meetings with high-ranking Faroese politicians, directly linked Huawei's 5G expansion with Chinese trade, according to a sound recording obtained by Kringvarp Føroya. According to Berlingske, the ambassador threatened with dropping a planned trade deal with the Faroe Islands, if the Faroese telecom company Føroya Tele did not let Huawei build the national 5G network. Huawei said they did not knоw about the meetings.
Consumer electronics
In 2015, German cybersecurity company G Data Software alleged that phones from Huawei and several other Chinese manufacturers had been shipped with malware via infected versions of legitimate apps, that could record phone calls, access user data, and send premium SMS messages. A Huawei spokesperson told G Data these breaches were likely to have taken place further down the supply chain, outside the manufacturing process.
In January 2018, with the proposal of the Defending US Government Communications Act (which would ban the use of Huawei and ZTE products and equipment by U.S. government entities), calls for the FCC to investigate the company, as well as government pressure, it was reported that U.S. carrier AT&T had abruptly pulled out of an agreement to offer its Mate 10 Pro smartphone, while Verizon Communications had declined to carry any future Huawei products.
On 14 February 2018, heads of six U.S. intelligence agencies testified to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence against the use of Chinese telecom products by U.S. citizens, such as those of Huawei and ZTE. Christopher A. Wray, director of the FBI, stated that they were "deeply concerned about the risks of allowing any company or entity that is beholden to foreign governments that don't share our values to gain positions of power inside our telecommunications networks". Huawei responded to the allegations, arguing that its products "[pose] no greater cybersecurity risk than any ICT vendor, sharing as we do common global supply chains and production capabilities," and that it was "aware of a range of U.S. government activities seemingly aimed at inhibiting Huawei's business in the U.S. market". In March 2018, it was reported that Best Buy, the country's largest electronics store chain, would no longer sell Huawei products.
In May 2019 a Huawei Mediapad M5 belonging to a Canadian IT engineer living in Taiwan was found to be sending data to servers in China despite never being authorized to do so. The apps could not be disabled and continued to send sensitive data even after appearing to be deleted.
Security exploits
In July 2012, Felix Lindner and Gregor Kopf gave a conference at Defcon to announce that they uncovered several critical vulnerabilities in Huawei routers (models AR18 and AR29) which could be used to get remote access to the device. The researchers said that Huawei "doesn't have a security contact for reporting vulnerabilities, doesn't put out security advisories and doesn't say what bugs have been fixed in its firmware updates", and as a result, the vulnerabilities have not been publicly disclosed. Huawei replied that they were investigating the claims.
In January 2019, Huawei patched a security flaw that was discovered by Microsoft in the "PCManager" software bundled on its laptops, after detecting that the software used a driver with behavior similar to the DoublePulsar exploit.
In March 2019, the Oversight Board of United Kingdom government organization Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre found "serious and systematic defects" in Huawei software engineering and their cyber security competence, and cast doubt on Huawei's ability and competence to fix security problems that have been found, although they do not believe these flaws are caused by Chinese government interference.
In October 2019 a person named John Wu presented details regarding Huawei's Undocumented APIs which can poses security risk for Huawei clients (for example it let apps with Admin privileges install new system apps on the Mate 30). Those permissions are used by the "LZPlay" app to install the Google framework and services. Huawei has denied any involvement with the app or the "LZPlay" site.
In February 2020, The Wall Street Journal reported that Huawei has had the ability to covertly exploit backdoors intended for law enforcement officials since 2009. These backdoors are found on carrier equipment like antennas and routers. Huawei's equipment is widely used around the world due to its low cost.
U.S. business restrictions
In August 2018, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019 (NDAA 2019) was signed into law, containing a provision that banned Huawei and ZTE equipment from being used by the U.S. federal government, citing security concerns. Huawei filed a lawsuit over the act in March 2019, alleging it to be unconstitutional because it specifically targeted Huawei without granting it a chance to provide a rebuttal or due process.
On 15 May 2019, the Department of Commerce added Huawei and 70 foreign subsidiaries and "affiliates" to its entity list under the Export Administration Regulations, citing the company having been indicted for "knowingly and willfully causing the export, re-export, sale and supply, directly and indirectly, of goods, technology and services (banking and other financial services) from the United States to Iran and the government of Iran without obtaining a license from the Department of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)". This restricts U.S. companies from doing business with Huawei without a government license.
Various U.S.-based companies immediately froze their business with Huawei to comply with the regulation, including Google—which removes its ability to certify future devices and updates for the Android operating system with licensed Google Mobile Services (GMS) such as Google Play Store, as well as Broadcom, Intel, Qualcomm, Microsoft, Xilinx and Western Digital. The German chipmaker Infineon Technologies also voluntarily suspended its business with Huawei, pending "assessments". It was reported that Huawei did have a limited "stockpile" of U.S.-sourced parts, obtained prior to the sanctions.
On 17 May 2019, Huawei voluntarily suspended its membership to JEDEC, as a temporary measure, "until the restrictions imposed by the U.S. government are removed". Speaking to Chinese media, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei accused U.S. politicians of underestimating the company's strength, and explained that "in terms of 5G technologies, others won't be able to catch up with Huawei in two or three years. We have sacrificed ourselves and our families for our ideal, to stand on top of the world. To reach this ideal, sooner or later there will be conflict with the US."
Kevin Wolf, an international trade lawyer and former assistant secretary of commerce for export administration during the Obama administration, argued that Huawei could not even use the open source Android Open Source Project (AOSP) code, as it could fall under U.S. trade regulations as technology of U.S. origin because Google is the majority developer. In China, it is normal for Android phones (including those of Huawei) to not include Google Play Store or GMS, as Google does not do business in the region. Phones are typically bundled with an AOSP-based distribution built around an OEM's own software suite, including either a first-party app store run by the OEM (such as Huawei's own AppGallery) or a third-party service.
Google issued a statement assuring that user access to Google Play on existing Huawei devices would not be disrupted. Huawei made a similar pledge of continued support for existing devices, including security patches, but did not make any statements regarding the availability of future Android versions (such as Android 10). On 19 May 2019, the Department of Commerce granted Huawei a temporary, three-month license to continue doing business with U.S. companies for the purposes of maintaining its existing smartphone and telecom products without interruption, whilst long-term solutions are determined.
On 22 May 2019, Arm Holdings also suspended its business with Huawei, including all "active contracts, support entitlements, and any pending engagements". Although it is a Japanese-owned company based in the UK, Arm cited that its intellectual property contained technologies of U.S. origin that it believed were covered under the Department of Commerce order. This prevents Huawei from manufacturing chips that use the ARM architecture. It was also reported that several Asian wireless carriers, including Japan's SoftBank and KDDI, and Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom and Taiwan Mobile, had suspended the sale of upcoming Huawei devices such as the P30 Lite, citing uncertainties over the effects of the U.S. sanctions on the availability of the Android platform. NTT docomo similarly suspended pre-orders of new Huawei phones, without citing any reasoning.
On 23 May 2019, it was reported that the SD Association had removed Huawei from its list of members—implicating a revocation of its membership to the association. The same day, Toshiba briefly suspended all shipments to Huawei, as a temporary measure while determining whether or not they were selling U.S. made components or technologies to Huawei. Panasonic also stated that it had determined its business relationship to be in compliance with U.S. law, and would not suspend it. The next day, the Wi-Fi Alliance also "temporarily restricted" Huawei's membership.
On 24 May 2019, Huawei told Reuters that FedEx attempted to divert two packages sent from Japan and addressed to Huawei in China to the United States, and tried to divert two more packages sent from Vietnam to Huawei offices elsewhere in Asia, all without their authorization. At first, FedEx China claimed that "media reports are not true". On May 28, however, they apologized on their Chinese social media account for the fact that "a small number of Huawei shipments were misrouted", and claimed that "there are no external parties that require FedEx to ship these shipments".
On 29 May 2019, it was reported that Huawei was once again listed as member of JEDEC, the SD Association, and Wi-Fi Alliance. In addition, while the science organization IEEE had initially banned Huawei employees from peer-reviewing papers or handling papers as editors on 30 May 2019, citing legal concerns, that ban was also revoked on 3 June 2019.
On 31 May 2019, it was reported that Huawei had temporarily stopped its smartphone production lines. On 17 June 2019, it was reported that Huawei was preparing for a sales drop of US$30 Billion, selling 40 million to 60 million smartphones less than last year in overseas markets.
On 29 June 2019 at the G20 summit, Trump and Chinese president and general secretary Xi Jinping agreed to resume trade negotiations. Trump made statements implicating plans to ease the restrictions on U.S. companies doing business with Huawei, explaining that they had sold a "tremendous amount of products" to the company, that they "were not exactly happy that they couldn't sell", and that he was referring to "equipment where there's no great national security problem with it." BBC News considered this move to be a "significant concession".
On 25 October 2019, Arm Holdings stated that it would continue to allow Huawei to license its technology, as it determined that its recent architectures were sufficiently considered to be of British origin and not subject to the sanctions.
On 15 May 2020, the U.S. Department of Commerce extended its export restrictions to bar Huawei from producing semiconductors derived from technology or software of U.S. origin, even if the manufacturing is performed overseas.
Replacement operating systems
During the sanctions, it was noted that Huawei had been working on its own in-house operating system codenamed "HongMeng OS": in an interview with Die Welt, executive Richard Yu stated that an in-house OS could be used as a "plan B" if it were prevented from using Android or Windows as the result of U.S. action, but that he would "prefer to work with the ecosystems of Google and Microsoft". Efforts to develop an in-house OS at Huawei date back as far as 2012. Huawei filed trademarks for the names "Ark", "Ark OS", and "Harmony" in Europe, which were speculated to be connected to this OS.
In June 2019, Huawei communications VP Andrew Williamson told Reuters that the company was testing HongMeng in China, and that it could be ready "in months". However, in July 2019, chairman Liang Hua and senior vice president Catherine Chen stated that Hongmeng OS was not actually intended as a mobile operating system for smartphones, and was actually an embedded operating system designed for Internet of things (IoT) hardware.
On 19 August 2019, the BIS added 46 "non-U.S. affiliates of Huawei to the Entity List because they also pose a significant risk of involvement in activities contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States."
In September 2019, Huawei began offering the Chinese Linux distribution Deepin as an optional pre-loaded operating system on selected Matebook models in China, as an alternative to Windows.
Support for Huawei from business partners
In September 2019, Microsoft's top lawyer and president Brad Smith expressed concern about the continued U.S. ban of Huawei products and services. In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, he remarked that the ban should not be imposed without a "sound basis in fact, logic, and the rule of law". Microsoft Corporation, which supplies Windows 10 for Huawei PCs, says the allegations by the Trump administration that Huawei is a genuine national security threat to the U.S. are not supported by any evidence.
Human rights abuses
Huawei has been alleged to play a role in the Chinese government's persecution of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang and other ethnic and religious groups. It is also alleged to have forced labour by Uyghurs in its supply chain.
On 15 June 2020, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the country will impose VISA restrictions on Huawei employees as the Chinese company Huawei, provides material support to the Chinese government in carrying human rights abuses.
In December 2020, it was reported that Huawei assisted in creating facial recognition software for identifying Uyghurs. Later in the same month, French footballer Antoine Griezmann formally cut ties with the company, citing "strong suspicions that Huawei has contributed to the development of a 'Uighur alert. In response to this criticism, Huawei did not deny the existence of Uyghur recognition, instead referring to such software as "a test" that had "not seen real-world application." These claims have been contested however, as they rely solely on a single line in one of Huawei's patents, which due to the nature of Mandarin can be ambiguously translated. The patent reads "持离线文件维族告警", one possible translation of which is "support offline file Uyghur alert". However, as the line is found in a section of the patent detailing exception handling and file processing, another possible and potentially more accurate translation is "support exception handling for offline file grouping", wherein "维族" (Uighurs) is read separately as "维" (maintain) and "族" (ethnic group).
Opaque ownership
Huawei claims to be a privately held, employee-owned company: founder Ren Zhengfei retains approximately 1 percent of the shares of Huawei's holding company, Huawei Investment & Holding, with the remainder of the shares held by a trade union committee that also provides services for its staff. This is also due to a limitation in Chinese law preventing limited liability companies from having more than 50 shareholders (the employees' interest is treated as a single share via the union). Although employee shareholders receive dividends, their shares do not entitle them to any direct influence in management decisions. Ren has the power to veto any decision made by the board of directors.
A 2019 research paper published by Donald Clarke of George Washington University and Christopher Balding of Fulbright University Vietnam accused Huawei of being "effectively state-owned" due to this structure "if the trade union and its committee function as trade unions generally function in China" (being required to be associated with a labor federation tied to the Chinese Communist Party). They also claimed that the arrangement was only a profit-sharing arrangement and not actual ownership. Chief secretary of the board Jiang Xisheng disputed the paper, stating that its authors had "an incomplete understanding of Huawei's corporate policies and a limited knowledge of its ownership structure". Spalding defended the research, telling The Nikkei that "believing Huawei would defy Beijing defies credibility. With the Communist Party actively overseeing and enforcing regulations and state interests abroad, it simply does not match the facts of Chinese interest in promoting companies and interests abroad that Huawei could refuse to assist if asked."
Some Huawei employees initiated legal challenges against the company regarding the employee stock for the year 2003 on a Chinese court, however both the Shenzhen city Intermediate people's court and the Guangdong province High people's court ruled that their stock ownership are for reference only and there are no legal basis to employees' claims on their ownership of Huawei's stock.
On 7 October 2020, the U.K. Parliament's Defence Committee released a report claiming that there was evidence of collusion between Huawei and Chinese state and the Chinese Communist Party. The U.K. Parliament's Defence Committee said that the conclusion was evidenced by Huawei's ownership model and government subsidies it had received.
Treatment of workforce and customers
A U.S. Army Strategic Studies Institute report on Argentina published in September 2007 describes Huawei as "known to bribe and trap clients". The report details unfair business practices, such as customers framed by "full-paid trips" to China and monetary "presents" offered and later used by Huawei as "a form of extortion".
According to a WikiLeaks cable, in 2006, Michael Joseph, then-CEO of Safaricom Ltd, allegedly struggled to cancel a contract with Huawei due to poor after-sales experience, after which the Kenyan government pressured him to reinstate the contract. When questioned regarding this incident, Joseph replied, "It [the cable] is not a reflection of the truth as evidenced by Safaricom being a major purchaser of Huawei products including all 3G, switching and the recent OCS billing system upgraded over the weekend."
In May 2010, it was reported in The Times of India, that security agencies in India became suspicious of Chinese Huawei employees after learning that Indian employees allegedly did not have access to part of Huawei's Bangalore research and development (R&D) office building. Huawei responded that the company employs over 2,000 Indian engineers and just 30 Chinese engineers in the R&D center in Bangalore, and "both Indian and Chinese staff have equal access rights to all our information assets and facilities". According to The Times of India, the intelligence agencies also noted that Chinese employees of Huawei had extended their stay in Bangalore for many months. Huawei stated that many of these employees were on one-and-a-half-year international assignments to serve as a technical bridge between in-market teams and China, and that "all the Chinese employees had valid visas and did not overstay".
In October 2007, 7,000 Huawei employees resigned and were then rehired on short-term contracts, thereby apparently avoiding the unlimited contract provisions of the Labour Contract Law of the People's Republic of China. The company denied it was exploiting loopholes in the law, while the move was condemned by local government and trade unions.
Huawei's treatment of its workforce in Guangdong, Southern China, also triggered a media outcry after a 25-year-old software engineer, Hu Xinyu, died in May 2006 from bacterial encephalitis, as a result of what is believed to have been work-related fatigue.
In its 2010 Corporate Social Responsibility report, Huawei highlighted the importance of employee health and safety. In 2010, Huawei provided annual health checks to all full-time employees and performed 3,200 checks to employees exposed to occupational health risks.
In early 2018, Li Hongyuan was urged to resign by Huawei's HR in Shenzhen. Li asked for compensation based on the Labor Law of China. In late 2018, Huawei's HR transferred 300,000 yuan to Li via a personal account. Then Huawei reported to the police for racketeering and blackmailing because Huawei asserted that Li threatened to "report business fraud" as a condition of resignation. The police then detained Li on 16 December 2018 and arrested him on 22 January 2019. According to a secret recording tape provided by Li's wife, the two-hour negotiation between Li and Huawei's HR did not mention any Huawei's allegations. Li was released after 251 days in prison. In December 2019, The Guardian reported that police are commonly deployed against former employees, thereby raising questions on Huawei's links to the state. Reports and trending hashtags about the detentions have been censored in China, and the Communist Youth League of China posted an article online claiming that protesters in Hong Kong had passed information about Li's case to destabilise China after The Guardian reported the case.
State subsidy and dumping
According to a report, Huawei have been working closely with the China Development Bank in foreign markets since 2004.
Huawei has been reported to be a key recipient of Chinese state subsidies, having acquired land for facilities and employee housing at significantly below-market prices, receiving state grants for its R&D activities and being a key recipient of export financing with state loans being granted to overseas customers to fund their purchases of Huawei equipment. The Central Intelligence Agency has claimed that it is in possession of unreleased evidence that confirms that Huawei has been funded by China's military and intelligence agencies.
In year 2011, the U.S. Export-Import Bank President Fred Hochberg alleged the China Development Bank credit as one of the main reason behind Huawei's rapid growth, however Huawei rejected the claim as "fundamentally incorrect" despite admitting the existence of those credits.
In 2012, Huawei president Ren Zhengfei have stated that, "without government protection, Huawei would no longer be alive."
In 2013, European Union found that Huawei and ZTE have violated EU's anti-dumping and anti-subsidy guidelines, however Huawei denied the finding and claim they are always playing fairly.
In 2016, The Indian government found that Chinese telecommunication equipment makers including Huawei have been continually dumping equipment into the Indian market and causing injury to local companies. As a result, the Indian government applied an anti-dumping duty to equipment imported from Chinese equipment makers, including Huawei. The duties applied to Huawei were levied at a rate of 37.73%.
Alleged violation of economic sanctions and technology theft
Iran
On 25 October 2012, the Reuters news agency published a report, based on documents and interviews, alleging an Iranian-based seller of Huawei (Soda Gostar Persian Vista) tried to sell embargoed American antenna equipment (made by American company Andrew LLC) to an Iranian firm (MTN Irancell). Specifically, the Andrew antennas were part of a large order for Huawei telecommunications gear that MTN Irancell had placed through Soda Gostar, but the MTN Irancell says it cancelled the deal with Huawei when it learned the items were subject to sanctions and before any equipment was delivered. Vic Guyang, a Huawei spokesman, acknowledged that MTN Irancell had cancelled the order; Rick Aspan, a spokesman for CommScope, said the company was not aware of the aborted transaction.
In December 2012, Reuters reported the "deep links" existed as early as 2010 between Huawei through Meng Wanzhou (who was then CFO of the firm) and an Iranian telecom importer named Skycom. At least 1.3 million Euros worth of embargoed Hewlett-Packard computer equipment was sold to "Iran's largest mobile-phone operator in late 2010". The next month, Reuters detailed more Huawei behaviour, including direct governance by Meng of Skycom. Meanwhile, the U.S. had long-standing sanctions on Iran, including against the importation of U.S. technology goods into Iran. At some point in 2018, the U.S. Attorney-General filed charges in court against Huawei and, in particular, Meng.
In April 2018, it was reported that the U.S. Justice Department had joined the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, and the Department of Commerce, to investigate possible violations of economic sanctions by Huawei for its provision of equipment in Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Venezuela. The U.S. inquiry stems from an earlier sanctions-violation probe that ultimately led to penalties against ZTE.
On 1 December 2018, Huawei vice-chairwoman and CFO Meng Wanzhou, daughter of company founder Ren Zhengfei, was arrested in Canada at the request of U.S. authorities. She faces extradition to the United States on charges of violating sanctions against Iran. 22 August 2018 arrest warrant was issued by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.
Meng is "charged with conspiracy to defraud multiple international institutions", according to the prosecutor. The warrant was based on allegations of a conspiracy to defraud banks which were clearing money that was claimed to be for Huawei, but was actually for Skycom, an entity claimed to be entirely controlled by Huawei, which was said to be dealing in Iran, contrary to sanctions. None of the allegations have been proven in court. On 11 December 2018, Meng Wanzhou was released on bail.
On 28 January 2019, U.S. federal prosecutors formally indicted Meng Wanzhou and Huawei with thirteen counts of bank and wire fraud, obstruction of justice, and misappropriating trade secrets. The Department also filed a formal extradition request for Meng with Canadian authorities that same day. Huawei responded to the charges and that it "denies that it or its subsidiary or affiliate have committed any of the asserted violations", as well as asserted Meng was similarly innocent. The China Ministry of Industry and Information Technology believed the charges brought on by the United States were "unfair".
In May 2019, Chinese authorities arrested Canadian former diplomat Michael Kovrig and consultant Michael Spavor on charges of espionage. This was widely seen as a retaliatory move from the Chinese authorities, and other subsequent arrests were also questioned. These arrests have been viewed as hostage diplomacy, as has the subsequent arrest of Australian Yang Hengjun.
In November 2019, Huawei announced that it will pay RMB2 billion (US$286 million) in bonuses to its staff, and double their October salaries, as a reward for their efforts to counter the effect of recent U.S. trade sanctions on their supply chain.
"Canada is not the only one grappling with the Gordian knot of national security, global alliance and competitive market issues that Huawei represents," wrote the Financial Post in December 2019, noting that Australia and New Zealand have banned Huawei equipment, Britain is weighing its options, and the situation in the United States is "complicated".
On 27 May 2020, Meng lost her bid for freedom in the B.C. Supreme Court of Heather Holmes. She remained held in Vancouver on the extradition matter while her file was processed. The B.C. Supreme Court judge ruling that extradition proceedings against the Huawei executive should proceed, denying the claim of double criminality brought by Meng's defense team. It was noted that Meng could appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada and then finally to the Minister of Justice.
In June 2020, it came to light that more paper trail existed between Meng and Skycom, the Iranian importer of sanctioned U.S. technology. The paper trail purported to show how Meng attempted to insulate Huawei and herself by fig-leaf from clearly violating the sanctions regime. The charges against Meng include that she met the deputy head at HSBC of global banking for the Asia-Pacific region and that she made "numerous misrepresentations regarding Huawei's ownership and control of Skycom."
On 24 September 2021, the Department of Justice announced it had suspended its charges against Meng Wanzhou after she entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with them in which she conceded she helped misrepresent the relationship between Huawei and its subsidiary Skycom to HSBC in order to transact business with Iran, but did not have to plead guilty to the fraud charges. The Department of Justice will move to withdraw all the charges against Meng when the deferral period ends on 21 December 2022, on the condition that she is not charged with a crime before then.
Iraq
According to a report by Iraqi officials Huawei supplied "optic fibre and switching equipment" to the Iraqi military in 2001–2002 during the Ba'athist period when the country was ruled by Saddam Hussein, this was in violation of sanctions imposed by the United Nation on Iraq in 1991. Huawei denied the claims.
Syria
In 2019, Reuters reported that Huawei was linked to a suspicious front company in Mauritius which has conducted operations in Syria - despite Huawei's claim that they are unrelated.
Taliban
See #Taliban_2 section.
North Korea
In 2019, The Washington Post reported that Huawei was linked to a suspicious Chinese state-owned firm which has conducted operations in North Korea.
Link to surveillance program
China
Huawei have been reported as one of the key suppliers for China's Great Firewall of China internet censorship program. Huawei is also reported to have worked closely with the Chinese Communist Party to enable surveillance of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. In 2018, Huawei signed an agreement with the Xinjiang public security bureau for the creation of an "intelligent security industry" hub. In January 2021, it was reported that Huawei previously filed a patent with the China National Intellectual Property Administration for a technology to identify Uyghur pedestrians.
Iran
In October 2011, The Wall Street Journal reported that Huawei had become Iran's leading provider of telecommunications equipment, including monitoring technologies that could be used for surveillance. Huawei responded with a statement claiming the story misrepresented the company's involvement: "We have never been involved and do not provide any services relating to monitoring or filtering technologies and equipment anywhere in the world".
Russia
According to report, Russian telecom equipment manufacturer Bulat was in talk with Huawei to acquire technology to store user data when they are using the network.
Taliban
In 2001, it was alleged that Huawei Technologies India had developed telecommunications surveillance equipment for the Taliban in Afghanistan, and newspapers reported that the Indian government had launched a probe into the firm's operations. Huawei responded, stating that the company did not have "any link with the Taliban", as its only customers are telecommunications carriers and its facilities "always operate according to U.N. rules and the local laws of each country". On 15 December 2001, the Indian authorities announced that they had not found any evidence that Huawei India had any connection to the Taliban, although the U.S. remains suspicious.
Misleading marketing
Benchmark cheating
In September 2018, AnandTech reported that recent Huawei and Honor phones, including the Huawei P20 and Honor Play, had been configured to activate a high-performance mode when certain benchmarking software was detected, causing increased frame rates at the expense of efficiency and battery life. A Huawei executive admitted that the company was attempting to compete with domestic vendors, including one it accused of providing "unrealistic" scores. However, he also expressed an opinion that manufacturers should evaluate their phones on benchmarks that more accurately reflect real-world use, and that the company would vet its benchmark scores via third-parties before publishing them as promotional material.
After confirming the behavior with a version of its software that could not be easily detected, 3DMark delisted scores for several Huawei and Honor devices from its database. Huawei subsequently announced that it would add a "Performance Mode" feature to its EMUI 9 software, allowing users to enable this state on-demand to improve performance of apps such as games.
Cameras
On several occasions, Huawei has issued promotional materials promoting the camera capabilities on its smartphones, that were later found to have actually used professional DSLR cameras instead. In 2015, Huawei posted a promotional photo on Google+ featuring Ella Woodward bathed in a sunrise, asking readers to share their own photos of the sunrise taken with the Huawei P9—as aided by its low-light capabilities. It was pointed out that Exif metadata on the photo identified it as having been taken with a Canon EOS 5D Mark III, and the wording and intent of the post could potentially mislead readers into believing that the photo itself was also taken with a P9. Huawei pulled the post and apologized, stating that it was meant to "inspire our community", and that the caption should have been more clear.
In 2018, behind-the-scenes photos from the filming of a Nova 3 commercial by Huawei's Egyptian branch revealed that a DSLR had been used for certain scenes, implied to have been taken with the phone itself during the commercial. An actor was seen miming the taking of a selfie, without actually having a phone in his hand. It is not explicitly disclaimed in the ad.
In its promotion of the Huawei P30, the company was caught using stock photos on promotional posts for the device on Sina Weibo. The posts were later amended with fine print stating that they were for "reference" purposes only.
A new AI mode on the P30 is designed for taking photos of the moon, and states that it can "adequately capture the beauty of the moon along with fine details like moonbeams and shadows". However, it was later discovered that this mode merely composes existing imagery of the moon into the photo.
National politics
China
Huawei Mate 10 Islamic feature dispute
In November 2017, Chinese users discovered the Salah (Islamic prayer) notification feature in Huawei Mate 10 phone, on the company's website for Mainland China. It was viewed as an unjustified promotion of Islam given that Muslims are a minority religious group in Mainland China that make up only about 1–2% of the population. Significant backlash has formed on the Chinese internet and some have even tried to boycott Huawei phones for including such feature, and make fun of the phone by calling it "the first phone with a Halal prayer feature" and describe the event as the "Islamic conversion of Huawei".
Later, Huawei published an official statement via Sina Weibo, stating that the feature was only a personalized notification service designed for "certain overseas regions" that was not available in China. Netizens questioned why promotion of that feature was available on the company's Chinese website in the first place if that was not the intended area but those comments were deleted before getting any response. A Taoist priest commented that the mosque-finding service on the device was also available in mainland China, inconsistent with the official explanation about these religious features. After Huawei published the official statement, many news reports and discussions made on Chinese online media or Chinese discussion platforms were made inaccessible or removed from the internet.
Chou Tzu-yu Republic of China flag incident
In January 2016, people found out that Chou Tzu-yu, a Taiwanese artist performing in South Korea and endorsed the Huawei Y6 in advertisement beforehand, was displaying the flag of Republic of China in a Korean entertainment show and accused the artist's behavior as supporting Taiwanese independence. As a response to the discovery, Huawei announced on the official forum that the arrangement was decided by their South Korean carrier partner LG U+ and they have already told LG U+ to terminate their cooperation with Chou Tzu-yu and her agency company. However LG U+ rejected the statement and claim their contract with the artist are still valid despite disputes. Chinese netizens have called for boycotting Huawei phones as a form of protest.
P-series phones listing Taiwan as a separate country
In August 2019 Chinese netizens criticized Huawei because their P-series phones listed Taiwan as a separate country when set to use traditional Chinese characters. Chinese netizens called for a boycott of Huawei using the Weibo hashtag #HuaweiGetoutofChina (华为滚出中国) and accused the company of supporting separatism.
See also
Mass surveillance
List of government mass surveillance projects
Mass surveillance in the United States
Cisco Systems
Crypto AG
Mass surveillance in Australia
Mass surveillance in China
References
Huawei
Huawei |
33036348 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart%20Poettering | Lennart Poettering | Lennart Poettering (born October 15, 1980) is a German software engineer and the initial author of PulseAudio, Avahi, and systemd.
Life and career
Poettering was born in Guatemala City but grew up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Hamburg, Germany. Poettering has worked for Red Hat since at least 2008.
Since 2003, Poettering has worked on more than 40 projects, mostly written in C. He is the developer and maintainer of several free software projects which have been widely adopted by Linux distributions, including PulseAudio (2004), Avahi (2005), and systemd (2010).
Controversies
Poettering is known for having controversial technical and architectural positions regarding the Linux ecosystem.
His style has brought accusations that he is working against long-standing Unix philosophy, which he addressed in his blog post The Biggest Myths. For instance, Poettering has advocated speeding up Linux development at the expense of breaking compatibility with POSIX and other Unix-like operating systems such as the BSDs. He took this position because of his experience in writing some other low-level components in the desktop stack. He invites other developers to do the same. Poettering recommends also reading The Linux Programming Interface but ignoring the POSIX-specific parts.
In 2011 Poettering, one of the main developers of PulseAudio, praised the Windows and macOS audio stacks as "more advanced" and called Open Sound System "a simplistic 90's style audio stack" without relevance for a modern desktop.
Also in 2011, when asked why the Linux desktop hadn't been widely adopted by mainstream users, he answered that: "Linux is still too fragmented...[and] needs to be streamlined...". In 2014 Poettering published an essay criticising how software in Linux distros is commonly packaged, updated, and deployed; and laid out proposals that he, Kay Sievers, Harald Hoyer, Daniel Mack, Tom Gundersen and David Herrmann, had for how the architecture should be changed.
The controversy around systemd culminated in personal attacks and alleged death threats against Poettering. In October 2014 Poettering complained that the "Open Source community is full of assholes, and I probably more than most others am one of their most favourite targets." Poettering went on to put some blame on Linus Torvalds and other kernel developers for being bad role models for encouraging an abusive discussion culture on technical disagreements.
In 2017, Poettering received the Pwnie Award for Lamest Vendor Response to vulnerabilities reported in systemd.
See also
List of Red Hat employees
References
External links
1980 births
Free software programmers
Living people
Linux people
German computer programmers
People from Guatemala City
Red Hat employees |
49173931 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave%20%28web%20browser%29 | Brave (web browser) | Brave is a free and open-source web browser developed by Brave Software, Inc. based on the Chromium web browser. Brave is a privacy-focused browser, which automatically blocks online advertisements and website trackers in its default settings. It also provides users the choice to turn on optional ads that pay users for their attention in the form of Basic Attention Tokens (BAT) cryptocurrency. Users can then send contributions to websites and content creators, which support BAT in the form of tips along with the ability to keep the cryptocurrency they earned.
Brave Software's headquarters are in Santa Clara, CA.
As of December 2021, Brave has more than 50 million monthly active users, 15.5 million daily active users and a network of more than 1.3 million content creators.
History
On 28 May 2015, CEO Brendan Eich and CTO Brian Bondy founded Brave Software. On 20 January 2016, Brave Software launched the first version of Brave with ad-blocking capabilities and announced plans for a privacy-respecting ad platform.
In June 2018, Brave released a pay-to-surf test-version of the browser. This version of Brave came preloaded with approximately 250 ads and sent a detailed log of the user's browsing activity to Brave for the short-term purpose of testing this functionality. Brave announced that expanded trials would follow. Later that month, Brave added support for Tor in its desktop browser's private-browsing mode.
Until December 2018, Brave ran on a fork of Electron called Muon, which they marketed as a "more secure fork". Nevertheless, Brave developers moved to Chromium, citing a need to ease their maintenance burden. Brave Software released the final Muon-based version with the intention that it would stop working and instructed users to update as its end-of-life approached.
In June 2019, Brave started testing a new ad-blocking rule-matching algorithm implemented in Rust, replacing the previous C++ one. The uBlock Origin and Ghostery algorithms inspired the new logic, which Brave claims to be on average 69 times faster than the previous algorithm.
Brave launched its stable release, version 1.0, on 13 November 2019, while having 8.7 million monthly active users overall. At the time, it had approximately 3 million active users on a daily basis. Brave 1.0, running on Android, iOS, Windows 10, macOS, or Linux, integrated "almost all of Brave's marquee features across all platforms", according to Engadget.
In November 2020, Brave reported having 20 million monthly users, and, in September 2021, it passed 36 million monthly active users.
In March 2021, Brave built its search engine out of Tailcat, which it acquired earlier that year from Cliqz, a subsidiary of Hubert Burda Media based in Germany. Tailcat was designed to deliver search results without logging user activity or creating profiles.
In April 2021, Brave became the first browser to be added to the Epic Games Store.
In June 2021 the public beta for Brave Search, Brave Software's search engine, was launched. It is currently being developed.
Business model
Brave uses its Basic Attention Token (BAT) to drive revenue. Originally incorporated in Delaware as Hyperware Labs, Inc. in 2015, the company later changed its name to Brave Software, Inc. and registered in California, where it is headquartered.
By August 2016, the company had received at least US$7 million in angel investments from venture capital firms, including Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Propel Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, Foundation Capital, and the Digital Currency Group.
In November 2019, Brave launched Brave Ads, an ad network. Brave Software takes 30% of the ad revenue and the rest is given back to the users. As consumers browse, they are presented with advertisements.
Features
Guardian Firewall
Brave Firewall + VPN iOS is a premium browser based system wide traffic encryptor.
Brave Search
Brave Search is a search engine developed by Brave and released in Beta form in March 2021, following the acquisition of Tailcat, a privacy-focused search engine from Cliqz. Brave Search aims to use its independent index to generate search results. However, it does fall back to Google and Bing in cases where it cannot find results, although it claims this is done anonymously and still preserves privacy.
Brave claims it will eventually offer ad-supported free search as well as ad-free paid search options. It hopes to explore bringing BAT revenue sharing to these ads in a similar fashion to the Brave ads platform.
In October 2021, Brave Search was made the default search engine for the Brave browser users in the US, Canada, UK (replacing Google Search), France (replacing Qwant) and Germany (replacing DuckDuckGo and Ecosia).
Brave Wallet
Brave Wallet (Legacy)
Brave Wallet (Legacy) is a fork of MetaMask, which comes pre-installed with the Brave browser. This lets the browser interact with websites supporting the MetaMask API's to sign crypto transactions for supported Ethereum Virtual Machine networks.
Brave Wallet
Brave is planning to release a new wallet fully developed in house. This wallet aims to compete as a web based wallet with Ethereum API connections to websites. Much like competitors such as MetaMask, it plans to support multiple chains, NFT viewing and built in swaps through its "Brave Swap" aggregator. Following their roadmap update, the base of this wallet can be seen in the Nightly release of the browser.
Brave Swap
Brave Swap is an aggregator for cryptocurrency DEX's based on 0x. It lets users swap Ethereum tokens for other tokens from within the browser. Brave makes money off of this by taking a small "router" fee. It plans to return 20% of this fee to the user in the form of BAT tokens
Privacy
All user data is kept private on the user's device and is not accessible by any third party. The browsing data is not sent to Brave's servers, so only the user of the device can see the browsing data. A research study analyzing browser privacy by Professor Douglas J. Leith of the University of Dublin reported that Brave had the highest level of privacy of the browsers tested. Brave did not have, "any use of identifiers allowing tracking of IP address overtime, and no sharing of the details of web pages visited with backend servers."
To prevent browser fingerprinting, Brave uses Fingerprint Randomization, which makes the browser look different to websites over browser restart, to ensure Brave's users can not be uniquely identified or tracked periodically by using browser fingerprinting.
On October 15, 2021, Brave announced a new privacy feature dubbed Debouncing. The new feature is designed to disarm bounce tracking, a method of Internet tracking through intermediary domains that load when users click on a link. Debouncing will automatically recognize when users are about to visit a known tracking domain and renavigates the user to their intended destination, skipping the tracking site altogether.
Tests conducted by Digital Trends found Brave to be the only mainstream browser to pass the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Cover Your Tracks test.
Brave Shields
Brave Shields is an engine inspired by uBlock Origin and others, which blocks third-party ads and trackers, in a similar fashion to other extension based ad blockers. The advertisement blocking features are enabled by default. Users are given control to adjust ad blocking, script, and cookies settings in the Shields and Privacy section of the browser. As well as ads and cookie based trackers, Brave shields also protect against fingerprint tracking using a technique it calls "farbling", which allows each browser session to appear unique.
Brave Talk
A browser-based privacy-focused video conferencing tool based on Jitsi. It was integrated into Brave in September 2021.
Brave Rewards
Since April 2019, users of the Brave browser can opt in to the Brave Rewards feature, which sends BAT micropayments to websites and content creators. Site owners and creators must first register with Brave as a publisher. Users can either turn on auto-contribute, which automatically divides a specified monthly contribution in proportion to the time spent, or they can manually send a chosen amount (referred to as a tip) while visiting the site or creator.
Users can choose to earn BAT by viewing advertisements that are displayed as notifications by the operating system of their computer or device. Advertising campaigns are matched with users by inference from their browsing history; this targeting is carried out locally, with no transmission of personal data outside the browser. In addition or alternatively, users can buy or sell BAT through Brave's relationship with Uphold Inc., a digital currency exchange operator.
The first version of the micropayments feature, launched in 2016, was called Brave Payments and used Bitcoin. Advertisements were shown in a separate browser tab.
Other features
SugarCoat: A tool for increased protections of users’ private data
Tor: Brave offers Tor support in its desktop version. Users can switch to Tor-enabled browsing by clicking on the hamburger menu on the top right corner of the browser.
InterPlanetary File System (IPFS): In January 2021, Brave became one of the first web browsers to offer native integration with a peer-to-peer networking protocol.
Blockchain domain names: As of March 2021, Brave supports decentralized domains, namely the ones provided by Unstoppable Domains (.crypto etc.) and Ethereum Name Services (ENS).
News aggregator: In December 2020, Brave integrated a personalized news reader focused on user privacy into the browser. It was renamed from Brave Today to Brave News in 2021. As of June 2021, the news feed also includes promoted articles based upon the Brave ads platform.
Wayback Machine Integration: In February 2020, Brave integrated the Wayback Machine in to its browser. When hitting a 404 error, among other error codes, the browser is able to scan the Wayback Machine archive and recover a cached version of the page.
Brave Playlist: An iOS feature that lets users create playlists containing content from a variety of media sources, including both audio and video streams.
Basic Attention Token
The "Basic Attention Token" (BAT) is a cryptocurrency token based on Ethereum, created for use in an open-source, decentralized ad exchange platform and cryptocurrency. It is based on the ERC-20 standard.
In an initial coin offering on 31 May 2017, Brave Software International SEZC sold 1,000,000,000 BAT for a total of 156,250 Ethereum (US$35M) in less than 30 seconds. An additional 500,000,000 BAT was retained by the company, to be used to promote the adoption of the platform.
In early December 2017, the company disbursed the first round of its 'user growth pool' grants: a total of 300,000 BAT was distributed to new users on a first-come first-served basis.
Tokenomics
Basic attention token's tokenomics are based upon a cycle between the user, creator and advertiser. Advertisers must purchase BAT to show ads on the Brave Rewards platform (Brave facilitates USD-based ad purchases, but will then buy BAT on behalf of the advertiser). These ads are then shown to the user, where the user then receives the bat spent on the ad (with a 30% revenue going to Brave). Users can then either resupply this BAT back to the market to be re-bought by advertisers, or they can choose to tip to creators using the "Brave Creators" platform, where the creators may then sell. Creators being hosts of websites the user has visited, or literal creators on platforms such as YouTube.
In this scenario, BAT Price is expected to be supported by advertisers wanting to show ads on the platform and buying BAT, and users or creators selling their BAT at a certain price.
Inter-Chain Operability
Binance Smart Chain
In March 2021, BAT became available on BSC in the form of wrapped BAT. These tokens are wrapped by Binance and the original BAT is held in "Token Vaults" with Binance. The contract address for BEP-20 BAT is 0x101d82428437127bf1608f699cd651e6abf9766e
Partnerships
HTC: In December 2018, Brave partnered with HTC to make Brave Browser the default browser on the HTC Exodus 1.
Reception
In January 2016, in reaction to Brave Software's initial announcement, Sebastian Anthony of Ars Technica described Brave as a "cash-grab" and a "double dip". Anthony concluded, "Brave is an interesting idea, but generally it's rather frowned upon to stick your own ads in front of someone else's". TechCrunch, Computerworld, and Engadget termed Brave's ad replacement plans "controversial" in 2016.
In February 2016, Andy Patrizio of Network World reviewed a pre-release version of Brave. Patrizio criticized the browser's feature set as "mighty primitive", but lauded its performance: "Pages load instantly. I can't really benchmark page loads since they happen faster than I can start/stop the stopwatch".
In April 2016, the CEO of the Newspaper Association of America, David Chavern, said that Brave's proposed replacement of advertising "should be viewed as illegal and deceptive by the courts, consumers, and those who value the creation of content".
In April 2017, TechWorld praised Brave's "great speeds and advanced ad-tracking controls", but said that its "extension functionality is still lacking".
In November 2019, CNET reviewed the newly released 1.0 version of Brave. They praised the speed, saying "Brave is hands-down the fastest browser I've used this year on any operating system, for both mobile and desktop. Memory usage by the browser is far below most others, while website loading is far faster." They also said battery usage could be reduced by using the browser – "With less strain on resources comes less strain on your device's battery life as well." However, they had concerns that the user base is still far below Chrome, and thus it may not be able to build out its ad system fully yet, saying – "The browser will need more users, however, to truly build out its new ad system: while 8 million people is a good start, it will still need to compete with Google Chrome's billion-plus users."
In March 2021, The New York Times analyzed internet browsers and recommended Brave as the best privacy browser. Writer Brian X. Chen concluded, "My favorite websites loaded flawlessly, and I enjoyed the clean look of ad-free sites, along with the flexibility of opting in to see ads whenever I felt like it."
Controversies
Brave browser collecting donations on behalf of content creators
In December 2018, British YouTube content creator Tom Scott said that he had not received any donations collected on his behalf by Brave browser. In a tweet, he stated "So if you thought you'd donated to me through Brave, the money (or their pseudo-money [BAT]) will not reach me, and Brave's terms say that they may choose to just keep it for themselves. It looks like they're 'providing this service' for every creator on every platform. No opt-in, no consent." In response, Brave amended the interface with a disclaimer for each creator who hasn't signed up with Brave and promised to consider adding "an opt-out option for creators who do not wish to receive donations" and "switching the default so users cannot tip or donate to unverified creators". Critics stated that the system should be opt-in and not opt-out, that the disclaimer did not clearly state absence of any relation with the creators, and suggests that creator begun process of signing up with Brave. Two days after the complaint, Brave issued an update to "clearly indicate which publishers and creators have not yet joined Brave Rewards so users can better control how they donate and tip" and in January 2020 another update to change the behavior of contributions and tips. They are now held in the browser and transferred if the creator signs up within 90 days; otherwise, they are returned to the user. Tom Scott, the original complainant, tweeted in response: "These are good changes, and they fix the complaints I had!".
Insertion of referral codes
On 6 June 2020, a Twitter user pointed out that Brave inserts affiliate referral codes when users type a URL of Binance into the address bar, which earns Brave money. Further research revealed that Brave redirects the URLs of other cryptocurrency exchange websites, too. In response to the backlash from the users, Brave's CEO apologized and called it a "mistake" and said "we're correcting".
Two days later, Brave released a new version which they said disabled the auto-completion to partner links, followed by a blog post explaining the issue and apologizing.
"Private Window with Tor" DNS leaks
One privacy issue, promptly patched, appeared via a private disclosure on Brave's HackerOne bug bounty platform on 12 January 2021. The disclosure reported that Brave was sending DNS requests to ISP of the users instead of routing it through the TOR network, thus allowing ISPs to have knowledge of user's browsing sessions.
Brave fixed the issue in its Nightly channel soon after it was initially reported. Once the bug received public attention in mid-February from Twitter users verifying the vulnerability, the fix was soon uplifted to the Stable channel and landed in Brave 1.20.110.
Restriction on BAT Tokens
On 12 June 2019, Brave blocked forum Kiwi Farms from the Brave Rewards platform. Brave Software came under the impression that Kiwi Farms had infringed Section 5 of Terms of Service of Brave Software for BAT.
Comparison with other browsers
A February 2020 research report published by the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin tested six browsers and deemed Brave to be the most private of them, in terms of phoning home: "In the first (most private) group lies Brave, in the second Chrome, Firefox and Safari, and in the third (least private) group lie Edge and Yandex."
References
2016 software
Cross-platform web browsers
Free web browsers
Online advertising
MacOS web browsers
Software based on WebKit
Android web browsers
Linux web browsers
Windows web browsers
Free and open-source Android software |
32400141 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputing%20in%20Europe | Supercomputing in Europe | Several centers for supercomputing exist across Europe, and distributed access to them is coordinated by European initiatives to facilitate high-performance computing. One such initiative, the HPC Europa project, fits within the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), which was formed in 2002 as a consortium of eleven supercomputing centers from seven European countries. Operating within the CORDIS framework, HPC Europa aims to provide access to supercomputers across Europe.
Germany's JUWELS (booster module) is the fastest European supercomputer in 7th place (followed by Italian Eni company supercomputer) in November 2020, and Switzerland's Piz Daint was the fastest European supercomputer, in October 2016, ranked 3rd in the world with a peak of over 25 petaflops.
In June 2011, France's Tera 100 was certified the fastest supercomputer in Europe, and ranked 9th in the world at the time (has now dropped of the list). It was the first petascale supercomputer designed and built in Europe.
There are several efforts to coordinate European leadership in high-performance computing. The ETP4HPC Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) outlines a technology roadmap for exascale in Europe, with a key motivation being an increase in the global market share of the HPC technology developed in Europe. The Eurolab4HPC Vision provides a long-term roadmap, covering the years 2023 to 2030, with the aim of fostering academic excellence in European HPC research.
Pan-European HPC organisation
There have been several projects to organise supercomputing applications within Europe. The first was the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA). This ran from 2002–2011. The organisation of supercomputing has been taken over by the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE).
From 2018-2026 further supercomputer development is taking place under the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertakingwithin the Horizon 2020 framework. Under Horizon 2020, European HPC Centres of Excellence are being funded to promote Exascale capabilities and scale up existing parallel codes in the domains of renewable energy, materials modelling and design, molecular and atomic modeling, climate change, global system science, and bio-molecular research.
In addition to advances being shared with the HPC research community such as the “Putting the Ocean into the Center” visualization and progress on the “Digital Twin” that is already being used to run in silico clinical trials, EU countries are already beginning to directly benefit from work done by the Centres of Excellence under Horizon 2020: In summer 2021, software from a European Centre of Excellence was used to forecast ash clouds from the La Palma volcano. Additionally, EU Centres of Excellence are providing support throughout the Covid19 pandemic creating models to guide policy makers, expediting the discovery of possible treatments, and generally facilitating the sharing of research data during the race to understand the corona virus.
High performance computing tiers
PRACE provides "access to leading-edge computing and data management resources and services for large-scale scientific and engineering applications at the highest performance level". PRACE categorises European HPC facilities into 3 tiers: tier-0 are European Centres with petaflop machines, tier 1 are national centres, and tier 2 are regional centres. PRACE details that they have 7 tier-0 systems: Marconi (Italy), Hazel Hen (Germany), JUQUEEN (Germany), SuperMUC (Germany), Piz Daint (Switzerland), CURIE (France), and MareNostrum (Spain).
By country
Austria
The Vienna Scientific Cluster is a collaboration between several Austrian universities. The current flagship of the VSC family is VSC-4, a Linux cluster with approximately 790 compute nodes, 37,920 cores and a theoretical peak performance is 3.7 PFlop/s. The VSC-4 cluster was ranked 82nd in the Top-500 list in June 2019. VSC-4 was installed in summer 2019 at the Arsenal TU building in Vienna.
Belgium
On 25 October 2012, Ghent University (Belgium) inaugurated the first Tier 1 supercomputer of the Flemish Supercomputer Centre (VSC). The supercomputer is part of an initiative by the Flemish government to provide the researchers in Flanders with a very powerful computing infrastructure. The new cluster was ranked 163rd in the worldwide Top500 list of supercomputers in November 2012.
In 2014, a supercomputer started operating at Cenaero in Gosselies.
In 2016, VSC started operating the BrENIAC supercomputer (NEC HPC1816Rg, Xeon E5-2680v4 14C 2.4 GHz, Infiniband EDR) in Leuven. It has 16,128 cores providing 548,000 Gflops (Rmax) or 619,315 Gflops (Repack).
Bulgaria
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Sofia operates an IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer, which offers high-performance processing to the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Sofia University, among other organizations. The system was on the TOP500 list until November 2009, when it ranked as number 379. A second supercomputer, the "Discoverer", was installed in 2020 and ranked 91st in the TOP500 in 2021. "Discoverer", Bulgaria's supercomputer was the third launched under the program on October 21, 2021. Located on the territory of the Bulgarian Science and Technology Park "Sofia Tech Park" in Sofia, Bulgaria. The cost is co-financed by Bulgaria and EuroHPC JU with a joint investment of €11.5 million completed by Atos. Discoverer has a stable performance of 4.5 petaflops and a peak performance of 6 petaflops.
Croatia
The Center for Advanced Computing and Modelling (CNRM) in Rijeka was established in 2010 and conducts multidisciplinary scientific research through the use of advanced high-performance solutions based on CPU and GPGPU server technologies and technologies for data storage. They operate the supercomputer "Bura" which consists of 288 computing nodes and has a total of 6912 CPU cores, its peak performance is 233.6 teraflops and it ranked at 440th on the November 2015 TOP500 list.
Finland
CSC – IT Center for Science operated a Cray XC30 system called "Sisu" with 244 TFlop/s. In September 2014 the system was upgraded to Cray XC40, giving a theoretical peak of 1,688 TFLOPS. Sisu was ranked 37th in the November 2014 Top500 list, but had dropped to 107th by November 2017.
France
The Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA) operates the Tera 100 machine in the Research and Technology Computing Center in Essonne, Île-de-France. The Tera 100 has a peak processing speed of 1,050 teraflops, making it the fastest supercomputer in Europe in 2011. Built by Groupe Bull, it had 140,000 processors.
The National Computer Center of Higher Education (French acronym: CINES) was established in Montpellier in 1999, and offers computer services for research and higher education. In 2014 the Occigen system was installed, which was manufacturered by the Bull, Atos Group. It has 50,544 cores and a peak performance of 2.1 Petaflops.
Germany
In Germany, supercomputing is organized at two levels. The three national centers at Garching (LRZ), Juelich (JSC) and Stuttgart (HLRS) together form the Gauss Center for Supercomputing, and provide both the European Tier 0 level of HPC and the German national Tier 1 level. A number of medium-sized centers are also organized in the Gauss Alliance.
The Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) and the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing jointly owned the JUGENE computer at the Forschungszentrum Jülich in North Rhine-Westphalia. JUGENE was based on IBM's Blue Gene/P architecture, and in June 2011 was ranked the 12th fastest computer in the world by TOP500. It was replaced by the Blue Gene/Q system JUQUEEN on 31 July 2012.
The Leibniz-Rechenzentrum, a supercomputing center in Munich, houses the SuperMUC system, which began operations in 2012 at a processing speed of 3 petaflops. This was, at the time it entered service, the fastest supercomputer in Europe. The High Performance Computing Center in Stuttgart fastest computing system is Hawk with a peak performance of 26 petaflops, replacing Hazel Hen with a peak performance of more than 7.4 petaflops. Hazel Hen, which is based on Cray XC40 technology, was ranked the 8th fastest system worldwide.
Greece
Greece's main supercomputing institution is GRNET SA, a Greek state-owned company that is supervised by the General Secretariat for Research and Technology of the Ministry of Education, Research and Religious Affairs. GRNET's high-performance computing system is called ARIS (Advanced Research Information System) and during its introduction to the TOP500 list, in June 2015, it got the 467th place. ARIS infrastructure consists of four computing systems islets: thin nodes, fat nodes, GPU nodes and Phi Nodes. GRNET is the Greek member in the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe and ARIS is a Tier-1 PRACE node.
Ireland
The Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) is the national supercomputing centre and operates the "Kay" supercomputer, commissioned in August 2018. The system, which was provided by Intel, consists of a cluster of 336 high-performance servers with 13,440 CPU (Central Processing Unit) cores and 64 terabytes of memory for general purpose computations. Additional components aimed at more specialised requirements include 6 large memory nodes with 1.5 terabytes of memory per server, plus 32 accelerator nodes divided between Intel Xeon Phi and NVidia V100 GPUs (Graphics Processing Units). The network linking all of these components together is Intel's 100Gbit/s Omnipath technology and DataDirect Networks are providing 1 petabyte of high-performance storage over a parallel file system. Penguin Computing has integrated this hardware and provided the software management and user interface layers.
Italy
The main supercomputing institution in Italy is CINECA, a consortium of many universities and research institutions scattered throughout the country. As of 2021, the highest CINECA supercomputer in the TOP500 list (14th place) is Marconi-100, an accelerated cluster based on IBM Power9 processors and NVIDIA Volta GPUs, with 347,776 cores for 21,640.0 TFLOPS and 1,476 kW.
Due to the involvement of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) in the main experiments taking place at CERN, Italy also hosts some of the largest nodes of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, including one Tier 1 facility and 11 Tier 2 facilities out of 151 total nodes.
Luxembourg
The Luxembourg supercomputer Meluxina was officially launched on June 7, 2021 and is part of the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU). It is located at the LuxProvide data center in Bissen, Luxembourg. It is the second supercomputer to be launched after Vega of eight planned supercomputers (EuroHPC JU). The system was completed by company Atos. Luxembourg paid for two thirds of the project. The European Commission funded the other third, with 35% of the computing power to be made available to the 32 countries taking part in the EuroHPC joint venture. The value of the joint investment is €30.4 million euros. Meluxina has a stable performance of 10 petaflops and a peak performance of 15 petaflops.
Netherlands
The European Grid Infrastructure, a continent-wide distributed computing system, is headquartered at the Science Park in Amsterdam.
Norway
UNINETT Sigma2 AS maintains the national infrastructure for large-scale computational science in Norway and provides high-performance computing and data storage for all Norwegian universities and colleges, as well as other publicly funded organizations and projects. Sigma2 and its projects are financed by the Research Council of Norway and the Sigma2 consortium partners (the universities of Oslo, Bergen, and Tromsø, and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim) Its head office in Trondheim. Sigma2 operates three systems: Stallo and Fram (located in Tromsø) and Saga (in Trondheim). An additional machine (named Betzy after Elizabeth Stephansen) was inaugurated on 7 December 2020.
The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim operates the "Vilje" supercomputer, owned by NTNU and the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. "Vilje" is operating at 275 teraflops.
Decommissioned systems include Hexagon (2008-2017) at the University of Bergen; Gardar (2012 to 2015); and Abel (2012 to 2020) at the University of Oslo. The "Abel" supercomputer was named after the famous Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel (1802–1829). It operated at 258 teraflops through over 650 nodes and over 10000 cores (CPU's), where each node typically has 64GiB of RAM. It was ranked 96th in the TOP500 list in June 2012 when it was installed.
Poland
Currently, since 2015, the fastest supercomputer in Poland is "Prometheus" that belongs to the AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków. It provides 2399 teraflops of computing power and has 10 petabytes of storage. It currently holds 21st place in Europe, and was 77th in the world according to the November 2017 TOP500 list.
The Polish Grid Infrastructure PL-Grid was built between 2009 and 2011 as a nationwide computing infrastructure, and will remain within the PLGrid Plus project until 2014. At the end of 2012, it provided 230 teraflops of computing power and 3,600 terabytes of storage for the Polish scientific community.
The Galera computer cluster at the Gdańsk University of Technology was ranked 299th on the TOP500 list in November 2010. The Zeus computer cluster at the ACK Cyfronet AGH in Kraków was ranked 106th on the TOP500 list in November 2012, but had dropped to 386th by November 2015.
Russia
In November 2011, the 33,072-processor Lomonosov supercomputer in Moscow was ranked the 18th-fastest supercomputer in the world, and the third-fastest in Europe. The system was designed by T-Platforms, and used Xeon 2.93 GHz processors, Nvidia 2070 GPUs, and an Infiniband interconnect. In July 2011, the Russian government announced a plan to focus on constructing larger supercomputers by 2020. In September 2011, T-Platforms stated that it would deliver a water-cooled supercomputer in 2013.
Since 2016, Russia has had the most powerful military supercomputer in the world with a speed of 16 petaflops, called the NDMC Supercomputer.
Slovenia
The Slovenian supercomputer Vega was officially launched on April 20, 2021 and is part of the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU). It is located at the Institute of Information Science Maribor (IZUM) in Maribor, Slovenia. This is the first of eight planned supercomputers (EuroHPC JU). The system was completed by local company Atos. Vega supercomputer was jointly financed by EuroHPC JU through EU funds and the Institute of Information Science Maribor (IZUM). The value of the joint investment is €17.2 million euros. Vega has a stable performance of 6.9 petaflops and a peak performance of 10.1 petaflops.
The Slovenian National Grid Initiative (NGI) provides resources to the European Grid Initiative (EGI). It is represented in the EGI Council by ARNES. ARNES manages a cluster for testing computing technology where users can also submit jobs. The cluster consists of 2300 cores and is growing.
Arctur also provides computer resources on its Arctur-2 and previously Arctur-1 supercomputers to the Slovenian NGI and industry as the only privately owned HPC provider in the region.
The Jožef Stefan Institute has most of the HPC installations in Slovenia. They are not however a single uniform HPC system, but several dispersed systems at separate research departments (F-1, F-9 and R-4).
Spain
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center is located at the Technical University of Catalonia and was established in 2005. The center operates the Tier-0 11.1 petaflops MareNostrum 4 supercomputer and other supercomputing facilities. This centre manages the Red Española de Supercomputación (RES). The BSC is a hosting member of the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) HPC initiative. In Galicia CESGA established in 1993, operates the FinisTerrae II, a 328 TFlops supercomputer, which will be replaced by FinisTerrae III in 2021 with 1,9 PFlops. The Supercomputing and Visualization Center of Madrid (CeSViMa) at the Technical University of Madrid operates the 182,78 TFlops Magerit 3 supercomputer. The Spanish Supercomputing Network furthermore provides access to several supercomputers distributed across Spain.
Sweden
The National Supercomputer Centre in Sweden (NSC) is located in Linköping and operates the Triolith supercomputer which achieved 407.2 Teraflop/s on the Linpack benchmark which placed it 79th on the November 2013 TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. In mid-2018 "Triolith" will be superseded by "Tetralith", which will have an estimated maximum speed of just over 4 petaflops.
Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology operates the Beskow supercomputer, which consists of 53,632 processors and has achieved sustained 1.397 Petaflops/s.
Switzerland
The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre was founded in 1991 and is operated by ETH Zurich. It is based in Lugano, Ticino, and provides supercomputing services to national research institutions and Swiss universities, as well as the international CERN organisation and MeteoSchweiz, the Swiss weather service. In February 2011, the center placed an order for a Cray XMT massively parallel supercomputer.
The IBM Aquasar supercomputer became operational at ETH Zurich in 2010. It uses hot water cooling to achieve heat efficiency, with the computation-heated water used to heat the buildings of the university campus.
United Kingdom
The EPCC supercomputer center was established at the University of Edinburgh in 1990. The HECToR project at the University of Edinburgh provided supercomputing services using a 360-teraflop Cray XE6 system, the fastest supercomputer in the UK. In 2013, HECToR was replaced by ARCHER, a Cray XC30 system. In 2021, ARCHER was replaced by its successor ARCHER2, an HPE Cray EX system. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in Reading, Berkshire, operates a 100-teraflop IBM pSeries-based system. The Met Office has a 14 PFlops computer. The Atomic Weapons Establishment has two supercomputers, a 4.3 petaflop Bull Sequana X1000 supercomputer, and a 1.8 petaflop SGI IceX supercomputer. Both these platforms are used for running nuclear weaponry simulations, required after the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty was signed by the UK.
See also
Distributed computing
European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking
History of supercomputing
Quasi-opportunistic supercomputing
Science and technology in Europe
Supercomputer architecture
Supercomputing in China
Supercomputing in India
Supercomputing in Japan
Supercomputing in Pakistan
References
Supercomputer sites
Science and technology in Europe |
29015809 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security%20service%20%28telecommunication%29 | Security service (telecommunication) | Security service is a service, provided by a layer of communicating open systems, which ensures adequate security of the systems or of data transfers as defined by ITU-T X.800 Recommendation.
X.800 and ISO 7498-2 (Information processing systems – Open systems interconnection – Basic Reference Model – Part 2: Security architecture) are technically aligned. This model is widely recognized
A more general definition is in CNSS Instruction No. 4009 dated 26 April 2010 by Committee on National Security Systems of United States of America:
A capability that supports one, or more, of the security requirements (Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability). Examples of security services are key management, access control, and authentication.
Another authoritative definition is in W3C Web service Glossary adopted by NIST SP 800-95:
A processing or communication service that is provided by a system to give a specific kind of protection to resources, where said resources may reside with said system or reside with other systems, for example, an authentication service or a PKI-based document attribution and authentication service. A security service is a superset of AAA services. Security services typically implement portions of security policies and are implemented via security mechanisms.
Basic security terminology
Information security and Computer security are disciplines that are dealing with the requirements of Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability, the so-called CIA Triad, of information asset of an organization (company or agency) or the information managed by computers respectively.
There are threats that can attack the resources (information or devices to manage it) exploiting one or more vulnerabilities. The resources can be protected by one or more countermeasures or security controls.
So security services implement part of the countermeasures, trying to achieve the security requirements of an organization.
Basic OSI terminology
In order to let different devices (computers, routers, cellular phones) to communicate data in a standardized way, communication protocols had been defined.
The ITU-T organization published a large set of protocols. The general architecture of these protocols is defined in recommendation X.200.
The different means (air, cables) and ways (protocols and protocol stacks) to communicate are called a communication network.
Security requirements are applicable to the information sent over the network. The discipline dealing with security over a network is called Network security.
The X.800 Recommendation:
provides a general description of security services and related mechanisms, which may be provided by the Reference Model; and
defines the positions within the Reference Model where the services and mechanisms may be provided.
This Recommendation extends the field of application of Recommendation X.200, to cover secure communications between open systems.
According to X.200 Recommendation, in the so-called OSI Reference model there are 7 layers, each one is generically called N layer. The N+1 entity ask for transmission services to the N entity.
At each level two entities (N-entity) interact by means of the (N) protocol by transmitting Protocol Data Units (PDU).
Service Data Unit (SDU) is a specific unit of data that has been passed down from an OSI layer, to a lower layer, and has not yet been encapsulated into a PDU, by the lower layer. It is a set of data that is sent by a user of the services of a given layer, and is transmitted semantically unchanged to a peer service user .
The PDU at any given layer, layer 'n', is the SDU of the layer below, layer 'n-1'. In effect the SDU is the 'payload' of a given PDU. That is, the process of changing a SDU to a PDU, consists of an encapsulation process, performed by the lower layer. All the data contained in the SDU becomes encapsulated within the PDU. The layer n-1 adds headers or footers, or both, to the SDU, transforming it into a PDU of layer n-1. The added headers or footers are part of the process used to make it possible to get data from a source to a destination.
OSI security services description
The following are considered to be the security services which can be provided optionally within the framework of the OSI Reference Model. The authentication services require authentication information comprising locally stored information and data that is transferred (credentials) to facilitate the authentication:
Authentication
These services provide for the authentication of a communicating peer entity and the source of data as described below.
Peer entity authentication
This service, when provided by the (N)-layer, provides corroboration to the (N + 1)-entity that the peer entity is the claimed (N + 1)-entity.
Data origin authentication
This service, when provided by the (N)-layer, provides corroboration to an (N + 1)-entity that the source of the data is the claimed peer (N + 1)-entity.
Access control
This service provides protection against unauthorized use of resources accessible via OSI. These may be OSI or non-OSI resources accessed via OSI protocols. This protection service may be applied to various types of access to a resource (e.g., the use of a communications resource; the reading, the writing, or the deletion of an information resource; the execution of a processing resource) or to all accesses to a resource.
Data confidentiality
These services provide for the protection of data from unauthorized disclosure as described below
Connection confidentiality
This service provides for the confidentiality of all (N)-user-data on an (N)-connection
Connectionless confidentiality
This service provides for the confidentiality of all (N)-user-data in a single connectionless (N)-SDU
Selective field confidentiality
This service provides for the confidentiality of selected fields within the (N)-user-data on an (N)-connection or in a single connectionless (N)-SDU.
Traffic flow confidentiality
This service provides for the protection of the information which might be derived from observation of traffic flows.
Data integrity
These services counter active threats and may take one of the forms described below.
Connection integrity with recovery
This service provides for the integrity of all (N)-user-data on an (N)-connection and detects any modification, insertion, deletion or replay of any data within an entire SDU sequence (with recovery attempted).
Connection integrity without recovery
As for the previous one but with no recovery attempted.
Selective field connection integrity
This service provides for the integrity of selected fields within the (N)-user data of an (N)-SDU transferred over a connection and takes the form of determination of whether the selected fields have been modified, inserted, deleted or replayed.
Connectionless integrity
This service, when provided by the (N)-layer, provides integrity assurance to the requesting (N + 1)-entity. This service provides for the integrity of a single connectionless SDU and may take the form of determination of whether a received SDU has been modified. Additionally, a limited form of detection of replay may be provided.
Selective field connectionless integrity
This service provides for the integrity of selected fields within a single connectionless SDU and takes the form of determination of whether the selected fields have been modified.
Non-repudiation
This service may take one or both of two forms.
Non-repudiation with proof of origin
The recipient of data is provided with proof of the origin of data. This will protect against any attempt by the sender to falsely deny sending the data or its contents.
Non-repudiation with proof of delivery
The sender of data is provided with proof of delivery of data. This will protect against any subsequent attempt by the recipient to falsely deny receiving the data or its contents.
Specific security mechanisms
The security services may be provided by means of security mechanism:
Encipherment
Digital signature
Access control
Data integrity
Authentication exchange
Traffic padding
Routing control
Notarization
The table1/X.800 shows the relationships between services and mechanisms
Some of them can be applied to connection oriented protocols, other to connectionless protocols or both.
The table 2/X.800 illustrates the relationship of security services and layers:
Other related meanings
Managed security service
Managed security service (MSS) are network security services that have been outsourced to a service provider.
See also
Access control
Availability
Communication network
Communication protocol
Confidentiality
countermeasure
Data integrity
Digital signature
Exploit (computer security)
Information Security
Integrity
ITU-T
Managed security service
Network security
OSI model
Protocol (computing)
Protocol data unit
Protocol stack
Security control
Security Requirements Analysis
Service Data Unit
Threat (computer)
Vulnerability (computing)
References
External links
Term in FISMApedia
List of ITU-T Security Activities and Publications
Computer network security
Network protocols
ITU-T recommendations
ITU-T X Series Recommendations
ISO standards |
468887 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla%20Composer | Mozilla Composer | Mozilla Composer is the free and open-source HTML editor and web authoring module of the Mozilla Application Suite (the predecessor to SeaMonkey). It is used to create and to edit web pages, e-mail, and text documents easily. It is compatible with Windows, macOS and Linux. Composer is a graphical WYSIWYG HTML editor. One also can view, write and edit HTML source code with Composer.
In September 2008 Daniel Glazman announced a new WYSIWYG HTML editor, BlueGriffon, written from scratch and based on Mozilla Gecko and XULRunner.
SeaMonkey, the community-driven successor to Mozilla Suite, includes an HTML editor named Composer that is developed from the Mozilla Composer code contained in the original Mozilla Suite.
Nvu
Nvu (pronounced "N-view") is a WYSIWYG HTML editor, based on Mozilla Composer. It is intended to be an open-source alternative to proprietary software like Microsoft Expression Web and Adobe Dreamweaver. As a WYSIWYG editor, it is designed to be easy for novice users, and does not require any knowledge of HTML or CSS to use. It runs on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux and incorporates Cascading Style Sheets support and other improvements from software company Disruptive Innovations. Nvu was the brainchild of Kevin Carmony, CEO for Linspire, who wanted an easy-to-use, WYSIWYG HTML editor for Linux users. Under Carmony's direction, Linspire started and sponsored Nvu, hiring Daniel Glazman, former Netscape Communications Corporation employee, to be the lead developer.
Development
The original plan in June 2005 was to merge back the numerous changes into Mozilla Composer's source code tree. Since then the Mozilla Suite has been discontinued (then reintroduced as SeaMonkey), and no one has merged the Nvu code back into Composer.
Standards compliance
Nvu complies with the W3C's web standards. By default, pages are created in accordance to HTML 4.01 Transitional and use CSS for styling, but the user can change the settings and choose between:
Strict and transitional DTD's
HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0
CSS styling or the old <font> based styling.
The application includes a built-in HTML validator, which uploads pages to the W3C's HTML Validator and checks for compliance.
Release history
0.1 was released on February 4, 2004
0.20 was released on March 25, 2004
0.3 was released on June 11, 2004
0.4 was released on August 10, 2004
0.5 was released on October 6, 2004
0.6 (1.0b) was pre-released on November 26, 2004
0.7 (1.0b2) was pre-released on January 6, 2005
0.8 (1.0b3) was pre-released on February 2, 2005
0.81 was pre-released on February 9, 2005
0.90RC1 was released on March 4, 2005
0.90 was released on March 11, 2005
1.0PR was released on April 5, 2005
1.0 was released on June 28, 2005
Shift to KompoZer
Daniel Glazman, the lead developer of Nvu, announced on September 15, 2006, that he had stopped official development on Nvu and that he was developing a successor as a Mozilla.org project. It is written from scratch and based on Mozilla trunk Gecko 1.9 and XULRunner. PHP and CSS would be supported. A community-driven fork, KompoZer, maintains Nvu codebase and fixes bugs until a successor to Nvu is released. Glazman's project is called BlueGriffon.
KompoZer
KompoZer is a discontinued open source WYSIWYG HTML editor based on the Nvu. KompoZer was forked as a community-driven project with development coordinated through SourceForge.
KompoZer's WYSIWYG editing capabilities are one of the main attractions of the software. In addition, KompoZer allows direct code editing as well as a split code-graphic view.
The most recent version is KompoZer 0.8 beta 3, released February 2010, using Gecko 1.8.1. The stable version was 0.7.10, released in August 2007. The only regular developer said in June 2011 that development "is stalled at the moment".
As a 32-bit application, it is no longer supported on macOS Catalina and later versions.
Standards compliance
KompoZer complies with the W3C's web standards. By default, pages are created in accordance to HTML 4.01 Strict and use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for styling, but the user can change the settings and choose between:
Strict and transitional DTD's
HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0
CSS styling or the old <font> based styling.
The application can call on the W3C HTML validator, which uploads pages to the W3C Markup Validation Service and checks for compliance.
See also
Comparison of HTML editors
ActiveState Komodo
BlueGriffon (replaces Nvu)
KompoZer
SeaMonkey (includes the Gecko-based HTML editor that KompoZer derived from)
List of HTML editors
References
External links
Seamonkey Project
Daniel Glazman's BlueGriffon replacement for Mozilla Editor/Composer and NVU/KompoZer
Daniel Glazman about KompoZer and the new composer
nvu
Extensions and themes
Official KompoZer website
Project website on SourceForge
Development and User Forums
KompoZer and Nvu User Guide Contributed by Charles Cooke
Gin Up A Quick Web Page With Kompozer
Mozilla Application Suite
Free HTML editors |
36611381 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceWall%20SSO | IceWall SSO | IceWall SSO is a Web and Federated single sign-on software developed and marketed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise over the globe.
Overview
Released in 1997, IceWall SSO has evolved over the last 18 years.originally developed by HP Japan and marketed for the global markets, provides a highly convenient and comfortable yet highly secure environment. Since its first release in 1997, IceWall SSO has seen its adoption in intranet, B-to-C, B-to-B, and many other services globally with more than 40 million user licenses sold so far all over the world.
Its latest version, IceWall SSO 10.0, now provides support for new leading-edge technologies such as cloud and virtualization, and the IceWall SSO product line has been extended to include Windows support in addition to the existing HP-UX and Linux versions. Furthermore, the support services for IceWall SSO are planned to continue until 2024, making it a product that has a long and stable service life
Latest version available is 10.0. (as of August 2010)
Supported Platforms are Red Hat Enterprise Linux, HP-UX and Windows Server.
IceWall SSO mainly has Reverse Proxy type implementation, but it can be configured to work as an Agent type as well depending on the requirements.
Architecture
IceWall SSO mainly consists of two modules.
Forwarder
A CGI process which works as a Reverse Proxy. It accepts http/https requests from Web browser and forwards them to backend applications. Forwarder also handles loginprocess and authorizations by communicating with Authentication module mentioned below.
Authentication module
A daemon program which accepts requests from Forwarder and performs authentication by getting user information from Certification DB (Directory services or RDB).
ICP(IceWall Cert Protocol) is used between Forwarder and Authentication Module.
Contemporary products
Access Manager: Novell
Access Manager: Oracle
SiteMinder: CA Technologies
Tivoli Access Manager (TAM): IBM
WebSAM SECUREMASTER: NEC
See also
Hewlett-Packard Japan
Single sign-on
References
HP software
Middleware
Federated identity |
7377374 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley%20Automounter | Berkeley Automounter | In computing the Berkeley Automounter (or amd) is a computer automounter daemon which first appeared in 4.4BSD in 1994. The original Berkeley automounter was created by Jan-Simon Pendry in 1989 and was donated to Berkeley. After languishing for a few years, the maintenance was picked up by Erez Zadok, who has maintained it since 1993.
The am-utils package which comprises amd is included with FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. It is also included with a vast number of Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora Core, ASPLinux, Trustix, Mandriva, and others.
The Berkeley automounter has a large number of contributors, including several who worked on the original automounter with Jan-Simon Pendry.
It is one of the oldest and more portable automounters available today, as well as the most flexible and the most widely used.
Caveats
There are a few "side effects" that come with files that are mounted using automounter, these may differ depending on how the service was configured.
Access time of automounted directories is initially set to the time automounter was used to mount them, however after the directories are accessed, this statistic changes.
On some systems, directories are not visible until the first time they are used. This means commands such as ls will fail.
If mounted directories are not used for a period of time, directories are unmounted.
When automounter mounts directories, they are said to be owned by root until someone uses them, at that time the correct owner of the directory shows up.
References
External links
Am-utils Home Page (home of amd)
RPMs from rpmfind.net
Unix network-related software |
41975051 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%20Den%20%282013%20film%29 | The Den (2013 film) | The Den (released in some countries as Hacked) is a 2013 American slasher film by Zachary Donohue and his feature film directorial debut. The film was first released in Russia on December 23, 2013, and was given a simultaneous limited theatrical and VOD release on March 14, 2014 through IFC Midnight. It stars Melanie Papalia as a young woman who discovers a murder via webcam. The film is shot as a computer screen film.
The film explores the themes of social media, computer hacking, voyeurism, filmed deaths in the style of a snuff film, and kidnapping.
Plot
The film begins with Elizabeth logging into a webcam-based social media site known as The Den, which allows users to chat with random strangers across the world, similar to Chatroulette. For her graduate project in sociology, she proposes to chat with as many strangers as possible and calculate how many meaningful conversations she can accumulate. The graduate board reluctantly gives her a grant, with the help of Sally, one of her friends on the graduate board. Sally pushes for her approval. Elizabeth spends the next few months continuously chatting with strangers, much to the chagrin of her boyfriend, Damien, and friends Jenni and Max. Though most of her chats are quickly ended due to sexual content or scams, she accumulates plenty of data and is optimistic about the outcome of the project.
While in the company of Jenni and chatting with strangers, Elizabeth encounters a woman whose webcam appears to be broken. The stranger reacts aggressively to Jenni when Elizabeth is away from the webcam, and Jenni logs off. Afterwards, Elizabeth's account is hacked, and her webcam is repeatedly turned on without her permission. The stranger attempts to chat with Elizabeth again the next day while she is in a coffee shop, but logs off quickly when another customer approaches the webcam. That night, Damien surprises Elizabeth by showing up to her home in the middle of the night. Elizabeth's hacked webcam records the couple having sex, before the hacker sends the video to Elizabeth's graduate board.
Later, Elizabeth is prompted to chat with the stranger again; the stranger reveals that they witnessed Elizabeth having sex. Later still, their webcam turns on and reveals the account holder bound and gagged. She is murdered on-screen by a masked man. Elizabeth is shaken and immediately takes the video of the murder to the police. The police acknowledge that the video appears genuine, but advise her that such snuff films are usually faked. They also report that there is little they can do about it. Elizabeth later stumbles upon a disturbingly realistic depiction of a death during a game of Russian roulette, which turns out to be faked. Her friends, including the computer scientist Max, insist that the video is a hoax. Elizabeth remains unconvinced and is determined to solve the murder. However, both the police and other users of The Den turn out to be unhelpful. When she enlists Max to hack the account and to see where it originated, he finds that it has been routed through countless proxies. This makes the video untraceable.
Damien is abducted while chatting with Elizabeth. She has her back turned at the moment of his kidnapping, and does not realize that he is missing until later. She eventually receives a bizarre call from his computer, which depicts his house completely empty. Though Elizabeth implores the police to investigate, they tell her that there is nothing that they can do. Meanwhile, Jenni is lured to Elizabeth's house by the hacker, who pretends to be Elizabeth. The hacker abducts Jenni when she arrives.
While harried from trying to find a way to reach Damien, Elizabeth receives an angry call from Sally. Sally informs Elizabeth that the video of her and Damien having sex was sent to the entire graduate board. Sally does not believe Elizabeth, when the latter insists that she was hacked. Sally informs her that her grant is suspended until further notice. Later, while trying to reach Jenni, Elizabeth is lured to Jenni's house, where she finds the power cut. Seeing water flooding from the bathroom, Elizabeth enters to find Jenni in the bathtub, her wrists slashed in an apparent suicide attempt. Though Jenni is alive when Elizabeth finds her, she dies soon after. Elizabeth finds a suicide note emailed to her, ostensibly from the hacker posing as Jenni.
Elizabeth is further shaken when she receives a message showing the attackers stalking and entering a home owned by Lynn, Elizabeth's pregnant sister. Though Elizabeth notifies the police and calls Lynn to warn her, the message is garbled. The attackers bind Lynn and prepare to cut open her stomach. But then abruptly leave, hiding the camera as they do so. Later, when the house is surrounded by police, one of the attackers returns and picks up the camera. This reveals that they are either part of law enforcement or posing as a police officer. The attacker fixates on the father of Lynn's child, who she is separated from. The attacker leaves and gets into a car. He follows Elizabeth back to her home, where she is packing in preparation to keep her sister company. She receives a chat request from Max, which shows the lead detective entering Max's house, and being murdered on-screen while there. Elizabeth calls for help from the officer guarding her, but she finds him murdered as well. She is attacked by a hooded figure hidden in her closet, but she stabs him repeatedly and flees. She is then apprehended by another hooded attacker, who was waiting outside.
Elizabeth awakens in a room of a nightmarish, abandoned complex. She is chained to a wall, with a GoPro stapled to her forehead. A computer is in the room, forcing her to chat with the abducted Damien. He informs her that there are many other attackers. She is also shown a recorded video of Max being strangled with plastic wrap by the killers. Damien is then beaten and taken away to presumably be killed off-screen. Afterwards, another hooded man enters the room with Elizabeth, preparing to kill her. She overpowers him and strangles him with her chain. Unlocking her shackles with his keys, she attempts to escape the dark complex. She is only armed with a discarded hammer. She is chased by a number of killers, one of whom is a young man. She attacks this man, demanding to know where Damien is; he tells her that he is not there. She manages to escape to above ground, bludgeoning other attackers. She hijacks one of their cars, but crashes when blindsided by another member's car. She is removed from the wreck by the killers, and dragged back to the complex.
The film cuts to another woman, Brianne, on The Den who chatted with Elizabeth at the start of the project. Much like Elizabeth's first interaction with the killers, she is lured to chat when one of the attackers pretends Elizabeth's webcam is broken. Brianne then views a recording of Elizabeth being hanged almost to death and then shot in the head by the killers. It is then revealed that the video of Elizabeth's death is also being viewed by a man surfing a website. The website features snuff film "narratives" of victims lured by killers exploiting The Den. The man is preparing to pay for Brianne's "narrative", before being interrupted by his young son.
Cast
Melanie Papalia as Elizabeth "Liz" Benton
David Schlachtenhaufen as Damien
Adam Shapiro as Max
Anna Margaret Hollyman as Lynn Benton
Matt Riedy as Sgt. Tisbert
Katija Pevec as Jenni
Saidah Arrika Ekulona as Sally
Anthony Jennings as Officer Dawson
Victoria Hanlin as Brianne
Reception
On Rotten Tomatoes, The Den has a rating of 76% from 21 critics with an average of 6.28/10. Metacritic gives the film a weighted average of 48/100 based on 6 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews." Fearnet gave The Den a positive review, commenting that it "starts out a little rocky but if you're not completely fed up with 'found footage' filmmaking by now and you're willing to give a non-traditional visual presentation a fair shot, The Den has some pretty compelling things to say about the alleged safety of the internet." We Got This Covered also praised the movie, stating that it "[executed] on a strong gimmick at a speedy, flowing pace." In contrast, Shock Till You Drop panned the movie as it felt that it "lacks true scares, awesome kills or even the routine flash of nudity to warrant any sort of viewing. It panders a silly and over exaggerated message of the dangers of the anonymity of the internet and the “nature” of people. It uses a silly plot to carry a ridiculous camera technique and delivers nothing but angst and irritation." Fangoria criticized the film for many of the same reasons, as it felt that the movie began on a strong note but became "inauthentic and irritating" after the film depicted "Almost everyone, online or not, responds to [the main character's troubles] with immediate hostility or disbelief."
See also
Unfriended
List of films featuring surveillance
References
External links
2013 films
2013 horror films
2010s slasher films
Films about computer hacking
Films about kidnapping
Films about snuff films
Films about social media
Films set in abandoned buildings and structures
Found footage films
2013 directorial debut films
IFC Films films
Techno-horror films |
11949268 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education%20Conservancy | Education Conservancy | The Education Conservancy is an American educational non-profit organization headed by director Lloyd Thacker. It describes its goal as being "committed to improving college admission processes for students, colleges and high schools."
Criticism of college rankings
In May 2007, a movement criticizing the practice of college rankings was initiated by Thacker. It follows previous movements in the U.S. and Canada (by schools in the 1990s such as Reed College, Stanford University, and Alma College, as well as a number of universities in Canada in 2006) that have criticized the practice of college rankings.
The Presidents Letter (dated May 10, 2007), which was developed by Thacker, was sent to college and university presidents in the United States in May 2007. The letter does not ask for a full boycott but rather states:
Instead, it asks presidents not to participate in the "reputational survey" portion of the overall survey (this section accounts for 25% of the total rank and asks college presidents to give their subjective opinion of other colleges). The letter also asks presidents not to use the rankings as a form of publicity:
Twelve college and university presidents originally signed the letter in early May. The letter currently has 61 signatures, though others may be added at a later date.
Debate
A debate concerning the decision of the Annapolis Group to offer an alternative set of data as part of the movement challenging commercial college rankings was published as a podcast in the June 25, 2007, issue of Inside Higher Ed. The debate was between Thacker and U.S. News editor Brian Kelly. The debate was moderated by Inside Higher Ed reporter Scott Jaschik.
See also
List of colleges and universities which have signed the Presidents Letter
References
External links
Official Website
The Rankings Rebel - BusinessWeek
It Took Awhile, But Some Presidents Are Now Listening to Pleas for Admissions Reforms - Chronicle of Higher Education
Another way in:Ex-counselor working toward less-stressful college admissions - Boston Globe
Searchable Database of Every U.S. College
Educational organizations based in the United States |
2931262 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xubuntu | Xubuntu | Xubuntu () is a Canonical Ltd.–recognized, community-maintained derivative of the Ubuntu operating system. The name Xubuntu is a portmanteau of Xfce and Ubuntu, as it uses the Xfce desktop environment, instead of Ubuntu's GNOME desktop.
Xubuntu seeks to provide "a light, stable and configurable desktop environment with conservative workflows" using Xfce components. Xubuntu is intended for both new and experienced Linux users. Rather than explicitly targeting low-powered machines, it attempts to provide "extra responsiveness and speed" on existing hardware.
History
Xubuntu was originally intended to be released at the same time as Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger, 13 October 2005, but the work was not complete by that date. Instead the Xubuntu name was used for the xubuntu-desktop metapackage available through the Synaptic Package Manager which installed the Xfce desktop.
The first official Xubuntu release, led by Jani Monoses, appeared on 1 June 2006, as part of the Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake line, which also included Kubuntu and Edubuntu.
Cody A.W. Somerville developed a comprehensive strategy for the Xubuntu project named the Xubuntu Strategy Document. This document was approved by the Ubuntu Community Council in 2008.
In February 2009 Mark Shuttleworth agreed that an official LXDE version of Ubuntu, Lubuntu, would be developed. The LXDE desktop uses the Openbox window manager and, like Xubuntu, is intended to be a low-system-requirement, low-RAM environment for netbooks, mobile devices and older PCs and will compete with Xubuntu in that niche.
In November 2009, Cody A.W. Somerville stepped down as the project leader and made a call for nominations to help find a successor. Lionel Le Folgoc was confirmed by the Xubuntu community as the new project leader on 10 January 2010 and requested the formation of an official Xubuntu council. , discussions regarding the future of Xubuntu's governance and the role a council might play in it were still ongoing.
In March 2012 Charlie Kravetz, a former Xubuntu project leader, formally resigned from the project. Despite this, the project members indicated that Xubuntu 12.04 would go ahead as scheduled.
In the beginning of 2016, the Xubuntu team began the process to transition the project to become council run rather than having a single project leader. On 1 January 2017, an official post on the Xubuntu site's blog announced the official formation of the Xubuntu Council. The purpose of the council is not just to make decisions about the future of the project, but to make sure the direction of the project adheres to guidelines established in the Strategy Document.
Performance
The Xfce desktop environment is intended to use fewer system resources than the default Ubuntu GNOME desktop. In September 2010, the Xubuntu developers claimed that the minimum RAM Xubuntu could be run on was 128 MB, with 256 MB of RAM strongly recommended at that time.
Testing conducted by Martyn Honeyford at IBM in January 2007 on Xubuntu 6.10 concluded that it "uses approximately 25 MB less application memory, and also eats significantly less into buffers and cache (which may imply that there is less file activity) than Ubuntu."
Later testing showed that Xubuntu was at a disadvantage compared to Debian equipped with the Xfce desktop. Tests were conducted by DistroWatch on a Dell Dimension 4500 desktop machine, with an Intel 2 GHz processor and 384 MB of memory in April 2009, that compared Xubuntu 9.04 against an Xfce desktop version of Debian 5.0.1. These showed that Xubuntu used more than twice the RAM as Debian in simple tasks. Xubuntu also ran out of RAM doing everyday tasks, indicating that 384 MB of RAM was inadequate. The review concluded "It was obvious I had already run out of RAM and was starting to use swap space. Considering I wasn't doing very much, this was rather disappointing". Subsequent experimentation by Distrowatch concluded that the performance advantages observed in Debian were due to Xubuntu's inclusion of memory-hungry software not present in Debian's implementation of Xfce.
In a September 2009 assessment in Linux Magazine, Christopher Smart noted, "the Xfce desktop is very lightweight and well suited to machines with small amounts of memory and processing power, but Xubuntu's implementation has essentially massacred it. They've taken the beautifully lightweight desktop and strangled it with various heavyweight components from GNOME. In all fairness to the project however, they do not claim that Xubuntu is designed for older machines - that's just something the community has assumed on their own. It might be more lightweight than Ubuntu itself, but if so it's not by much."
Subsequent reviewers emphasized Xubuntu's perceived deficiencies in performance to highlight Lubuntu, a project with similar goals but using the LXDE desktop environment (now LXQt) as opposed to Xfce. For instance, Damien Oh of Make Tech Easier noted in May 2010, "So what about Xubuntu? isn't it supposed to be the lightweight equivalent of Ubuntu? Sadly, that is a thing of the past. The truth is, the supposed lightweight equivalent is not lightweight at all. While Xubuntu is using the lightweight XFCE desktop environment, it had been down by several heavyweight applications and also the integration with GNOME desktop also makes it lose its advantage."
However, another reviewer, Laura Tucker also from Make Tech Easier, in her 2016 article What OS Are You Using and Why? as survey of her writing team's computers, noted that Xubuntu is the favourite OS of one member of her team for her older desktop computer, as the writer reported, "because it is lightweight and works great." She also noted that it is easy to customize.
In July 2019, Jeff Mitchell of Make Tech Easier recommended Xubuntu as one option to speed up a Linux PC.
Releases
Xubuntu 6.06 LTS
The first official stand-alone release of Xubuntu was version 6.06 Long Term Support (LTS), which was made available on 1 June 2006.
It was introduced with the statement:
The version used Linux kernel 2.6.15.7 and Xfce 4.4 beta 1. Applications included the Thunar file manager, GDM desktop manager, Abiword word processor and Gnumeric spread sheet, Evince PDF document viewer, Xarchiver archive manager, Xfburn CD burner, Firefox 1.5.0.3 web browser, Thunderbird 1.5.0.2 email client and the GDebi package manager.
Caitlyn Martin reviewed Xubuntu 6.06 in June 2006. She singled out its "bare bones approach" to the applications included, indicating that she would rather add applications she wanted than clean out ones she didn't want. On her aging laptop Xubuntu 6.06 proved faster than Fedora Core 5. She stated that: "Under Fedora when I opened a couple of rather resource intensive applications, for example Open Office and Seamonkey, the system would begin to drag. While these apps still take a moment to get started on Xubuntu they are crisp and responsive and don't seem to slow anything else down. I never expected this sort of performance and that alone made Xubuntu an instant favorite of mine." She had praise for the Thunar file manager, as light and fast. She concluded: "Overall I am impressed and Xubuntu, for the moment anyway, is my favorite Linux distribution despite a few rough edges, probably largely due to the use of a beta desktop."
Xubuntu 6.10
Xubuntu 6.10 was released on 26 October 2006. This version used Xfce 4.4 beta 2 and included Upstart, the Firefox 2.0 web browser, the Gaim 2.0.0 beta 3.1 instant messaging client along with new versions of AbiWord and Gnumeric. The media player was gxine which replaced Xfmedia. The previous xffm4 file manager was replaced by Thunar. It introduced redesigned artwork for the bootup splash screen, the login window and the desktop theme.
The developers claimed that this version of Xubuntu could run on 64 MB of RAM, with 128 MB "strongly recommended".
Reviewer Caitlyn Martin tested Xubuntu on a four-year-old Toshiba Satellite 1805-S204 laptop, with a 1 GHz Celeron processor and 512 MB of RAM in December 2006. She noted that Xubuntu ran faster than GNOME or KDE, which she described as "sluggish" and rated it as one of the two fastest distributions on her limited test hardware, placing with Vector Linux. She found the graphical installer to be less than acceptable and the text-based installer better. She concluded:
Xubuntu 7.04
Xubuntu 7.04 was released on 19 April 2007. This release was based on Xfce 4.4.
Michael Larabel of Phoronix carried out detailed benchmark testing of betas for Ubuntu 7.04, Kubuntu 7.04 and Xubuntu 7.04 in February 2007 on two different computers, one with dual Intel Clovertown processors and the other with an AMD Sempron. After a series of gzip compression, LAME compilation, and LAME encoding tasks he concluded, "in these tests with the dual Clovertown setup we found the results to be indistinguishable. However, with the AMD Sempron, Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn Herd 4 had outperformed both Kubuntu and the lighter-weight Xubuntu. Granted on a slower system the lightweight Xubuntu should have a greater performance advantage."
In one Review Linux look at Xubuntu 7.04 it was faulted for not including OpenOffice.org. The reviewer noted: "If you do decide to keep the default software, it will cover your basic needs. Xubuntu comes with light weight desktop in XFCE 4.4 and also less tasking programs. If you are thinking that OpenOffice will come pre-installed on your desktop, you will be greatly surprised as AbiWord and Gnumeric are your default processor and spreadsheet program." He indicated though that installing applications from the repositories was easy and made for simple customization of an installation.
Xubuntu 7.10
Xubuntu 7.10 was released on 18 October 2007. It was based upon Xfce, 4.4.1 and added updated translations along with a new theme, MurrinaStormCloud, using the Murrine Engine.
Application updates included Pidgin 2.2.0, (Gaim was renamed Pidgin) and GIMP 2.4. This Xubuntu version allowed the installation of Firefox extensions and plug-ins through the Add/Remove Software interface.
The developers claimed that this version of Xubuntu could run on 64 MB of RAM, with 128 MB "strongly recommended".
In a review of the release candidate for Xubuntu 7.10 that was installed on a Pentium 2 300 Celeron with 256 MB of RAM, equipped with an nVidia GeForce 4 64 MB video card, Review Linux noted that "the system was very fast".
Review Linux positioned Xubuntu and its role, "The main difference between Xubuntu and Ubuntu is the fact that Xubuntu is a little lighter on system requirements and it uses Xfce as desktop. Xubuntu is perfect for that old computer just lying around in your basement."
Xubuntu 8.04 LTS
Xubuntu 8.04 Long Term Support (LTS) was made available on 24 April 2008. This version of Xubuntu used Xfce 4.4.2, Xorg 7.3 and Linux kernel 2.6.24. It introduced PolicyKit for permissions control, PulseAudio and a new printing manager. It also introduced Wubi, that allowed Windows users to install Xubuntu as a program on Windows.
Applications included were Firefox 3 Beta 5, Brasero CD/DVD burning application, Transmission BitTorrent client, Mousepad text editor, AbiWord word processor and Ristretto image viewer
Reviewer Christopher Dawson of ZDNet installed Xubuntu 8.04 on a Dell Latitude C400 with 512 MB of RAM, a 30GB hard drive and a 1 GHz Pentium III-M processor. He noted it provided better performance than the Windows XP Pro it replaced. He concluded: "This is where Xubuntu really shines... What it will do is take some very moderate hardware and provide a solid, reliable, and relatively snappy machine for a user with productivity needs or who accesses terminal services."
Xubuntu 8.10
Xubuntu 8.10 was released on 30 October 2008. This version of Xubuntu brought a new version of Abiword, version 2.6.4, the Listen Multimedia Player and introduced the Catfish desktop search application. It used Linux kernel 2.6.27, X.Org 7.4. There was an installation option of an encrypted private directory using ecryptfs-utils. The Totem media player was included.
Darren Yates, an Australian IT journalist, was very positive about Xubuntu 8.10, particularly for netbooks, which were at their peak of popularity then, dismissing "ubuntu itself is nothing flash". He said, "One of the disappointing things about the arrival of netbooks in Australia has been the decline of Linux in the face of an enslaught by Microsoft to push Windows XP Home Edition back into the market. It's sad because Xubuntu is the ideal Linux distro for these devices. While the latest Xubuntu 8.10 distro lacks drivers for WiFi wireless networking and in many cases also the built-in webcams, those drivers do exist and incorporating them inside Xubuntu would neither be difficult or take up much space."
Xubuntu 9.04
Version 9.04 was released on 23 April 2009. The development team advertised this release as giving improved boot-up times, "benefiting from the Ubuntu core developer team's improvements to boot-time code, the Xubuntu 9.04 desktop boots more quickly than ever. This means you can spend less time waiting, and more time being productive with your Xubuntu desktop."
Xubuntu 9.04 used Xfce 4.6, which included a new Xfce Settings Manager dialog, the new Xconf configuration system, an improved desktop menu and clock, new notifications, and remote file system application Gigolo.
This release also brought all new artwork and incorporated the Murrina Storm Cloud GTK+ theme and a new XFWM4 window manager theme. 9.04 also introduced new versions of many applications, including the AbiWord word processor, Brasero CD/DVD burner and Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client. It used X.Org server 1.6. The default file system was ext3, but ext4 was an option at installation.
In testing Xubuntu 9.04, Distrowatch determined that Xubuntu used more than twice the system memory as Debian 5.0.1 Xfce and that while loading the desktop the memory usage was ten times higher. DistoWatch attributed this to Xubuntu's use of Ubuntu desktop environment services, including the graphical package manager and updater, network manager, power manager, and proprietary driver manager. They provided a plan to strip it down and reduce its memory footprint.
DistroWatch concluded "Xubuntu is a great distribution, but its default selection of packages does not necessarily suit itself to low-memory systems."
In reviewing Xubuntu in May 2009, Linux.com writer Rob Reilly said, "The latest Xubuntu distribution has just about the right mix of speed and power" and concluded "for the new Linux user, Xubuntu is an easy to use version of Ubuntu that is fast, simple, and reliable. Experienced or "get it done" types will appreciate the minimalist approach, that can be beefed up to whatever degree that is needed."
Xubuntu 9.10
29 October 2009 saw the release of Xubuntu 9.10, which utilized Xfce 4.6.1, Linux kernel 2.6.31 and by default the ext4 file system and GRUB 2. This release included the Exaile 0.3.0 music player, the Xfce4 power manager replaced the Gnome Power Manager and improved desktop notifications using notify-osd. Upstart boot-up speed was improved.
The release promised "faster application load times and reduced memory footprint for a number of your favorite Xfce4 applications thanks to improvements in library linking provided by ld's --as-needed flag."
Dedoimedo gave Xubuntu a negative review, saying "When it comes to usability, Xubuntu has a lot to desire. While Xubuntu is based on Ubuntu, which is definitely one of the friendlier, simpler and more intuitive distros around, a core elements that has led to Ubuntu stardom, the integration of the Xfce desktop makes for a drastic change compared to stock edition. The usability is seriously marred, in several critical categories. And it gets worse. Losing functionality is one thing. Trying to restore it and ending with an unusable desktop is another." The review concluded "Sadly, Xubuntu is a no go. It's not what it ought to be. What more, it does injustice to the Ubuntu family, which usually delivers useful solutions, mainly to new Linux users. There were horrendous, glaring problems with Xubuntu that kicked me back to Linux not so usable 2005. I was taken by surprise, totally not expecting that an ultra-modern distro would pull such dirty, antiquated tricks up its sleeve."
Xubuntu 10.04 LTS
Xubuntu 10.04 Long Term Support (LTS) was released on 29 April 2010. It moved to PulseAudio and replaced the Xsane scanner utilities with Simple Scan. It also incorporated the Ubuntu Software Center, which had been introduced in Ubuntu 9.10, to replace the old Add/Remove Software utility. The included spreadsheet application, Gnumeric was updated to version 1.10.1 and new games were introduced. Because of incompatibilities in the gnome-screensaver screensaver application, it was replaced by xscreensaver. The default theme was an updated version of Albatross, designed by the Shimmer Team.
This version of Xubuntu officially required a 700 MHz x86 processor, 128 MB of RAM, with 256 MB RAM "strongly recommended" and 3 GB of disk space.
In reviewing Xubuntu 10.04 beta 1 in April 2010, Joey Sneddon of OMG Ubuntu, declared it "borderline irrelevant". He noted that it provided few performance advantages over Ubuntu. In testing it against Ubuntu and Lubuntu on a 1 GB RAM, 2 GHz Single core processor computer with a 128 MB video card, RAM usage with 3 tabs open in Firefox, 1 playing an HTML5 YouTube video was:
Ubuntu Beta 1: 222 MB
Xubuntu Beta 1: 215.8 MiB
Lubuntu Beta 1: 137 MB
Sneddon points out that from this testing that Xubuntu is barely more "lean" than Ubuntu and concludes "Xubuntu, whilst of interest to those who prefer the XFCE environment, remains an unremarkable spin from the Ubuntu canon that, for most users, is largely irrelevant."
Jim Lynch of Desktop Linux Reviews praised Xubuntu 10.04's fast boot time and its incorporation of the Ubuntu Software Center, but criticized the lack of inclusion of Ubuntu One.
Xubuntu 10.10
Xubuntu 10.10 was released on 10 October 2010. It included Parole, the Xfce4 media player, XFBurn CD/DVD writer in place of Brasero and Xfce4-taskmanager replaced Gnome-Task-Manager. These changes were all to lighten the release's memory footprint. AbiWord was updated to version 2.8.6 and Gnumeric to 1.10.8. This release also introduced the Bluebird theme, from the Shimmer Team.
This version of Xubuntu required 192 MB of RAM to run the standard live CD or to install it. The alternate installation CD required 64 MB of RAM to install Xubuntu. Either CD required 2.0 GB of free hard disk space. Once installed, Xubuntu 10.10 could run with as little as 128 MB of RAM, but the developers strongly recommended a minimum of 256 MB of RAM.
In reviewing Xubuntu 10.10 in October 2010, just after it was released, Jim Lynch of Eye on Linux said, "I had no problems using Xubuntu 10.10. My system was very stable; I didn't notice any application crashes or system burps. Xubuntu 10.10 is also very fast; applications opened and close very quickly. There was no noticeable system lag or sluggishness. The new theme Bluebird is attractive without being garish; it fits in well with Xubuntu's minimalist mission."
Christopher Tozzi, writing about Xubuntu 10.10 beta in August 2010, noted that the distribution was shedding its Gnome dependencies and adopting lighter weight alternatives. He noted "it's encouraging to see more uniqueness in the distribution, especially given the uncertain future of the Gnome-Ubuntu relationship as the release of Gnome 3.0 approaches."
Xubuntu 11.04
Xubuntu 11.04 was released on 28 April 2011. This version was based upon Xfce 4.8 and introduced editable menus using any menu editor that meets the freedesktop.org standards. This version also introduced a new Elementary Xubuntu icon theme, the Droid font by default and an updated installation slide show.
While Ubuntu 11.04 introduced the new default Unity interface, Xubuntu did not adopt Unity and instead retained its existing Xfce interface. Although the developers have decided to retain a minimalist interface, Xubuntu 11.04 has a new dock-like application launcher to achieve a more modern look.
Xubuntu 11.04 could be installed with one of 2 CDs. The Xubuntu 11.04 standard CD requires 4.4 GB of hard disk space and 256 MB of RAM to install, while the alternate CD, which uses a text-based installer, requires 64 MB of RAM and 2 GB of disk space for installation and provides additional options. Once installed, Xubuntu 11.04 can run with 256 MB of RAM, but 512 MB is "strongly recommended".
In reviewing Xubuntu 11.04, Jim Lynch of Desktop Linux Reviews faulted the release for its lack of LibreOffice, its dull default wallpaper and the default automatic hiding of the bottom panel. In praising the release he said "Xubuntu 11.04 is a good choice for minimalists who prefer a desktop environment not bogged down with pointless eye-candy. It should work well on older or slower hardware. It's also a good option for those who dislike Unity and want a different desktop environment. Xfce is simple, fast and doesn't get in your way when you are trying to quickly launch an application or otherwise find something. And those who decide to use Xubuntu still remain in the Ubuntu family without the headache of dealing with Unity. So if you're a Unity resister, you should definitely check out Xubuntu 11.04."
Joe Brockmeier of Linux.com in reviewing Xubuntu 11.04, praised the inclusion of AbiWord and Gnumeric over LibreOffice, as well as the Catfish file search utility. He added, "Though I've usually used the mainline Ubuntu release when I use Ubuntu, I have to say that I really like the latest iteration of Xubuntu. It does a great job of showcasing Xfce while providing a unique desktop that gives all the pluses of Ubuntu while still being a bit more like a traditional Linux desktop."
As of the Xubuntu 11.04 release the developers now "strongly recommend" 512 MB of RAM to use Xubuntu. However, at least 1 GB of memory is recommended to "get a smooth experience when running multiple applications parallel on the desktop".
Xubuntu 11.10
Xubuntu 11.10 was released on 13 October 2011, the same day that Ubuntu 11.10 was released.
In this release gThumb became the new image viewer/organizer, Leafpad replaced Mousepad as the default text editor and LightDM was introduced as the log-in manager. The release also incorporated pastebinit for cut and paste actions.
In reviewing Xubuntu 11.10 on the Acer eM350 netbook, Michael Reed of Linux Journal noted the extensive hardware support out of the box, attractive theme and good performance on 1 GB of RAM. He did remark on the inferior Adobe Flash performance compared to the Windows version of Flash, particularly in full screen mode, something common to all Linux Flash installations as well as the lack of native support for Samba networking, although he was quickly able to install this. Reed concluded "my overall assessment was that Xubuntu 11.10 was a better fit than Windows XP on this netbook. Being fair, one has to remember that XP is now ten years old. Xfce is going to get better and better, and it's already very comprehensive. There is a growing contingent of users for whom the direction that KDE4 and Gnome 3 have taken doesn't ring true, and increasingly, Xfce is going to be the first choice for them."
In reviewing 11.10, Brian Masinick of IT Toolbox praised its low RAM usage and said the "Xubuntu 11.10 release is a fresh relief for those who simply want a nice, functional system. Xubuntu 11.10 delivers, and excels in providing a functional, no frills or surprises, responsive, and usable desktop system."
Xubuntu 12.04 LTS
Xubuntu 12.04 was released on 26 April 2012. It was a Long Term Support release and was supported for three years, until April 2016. This contrasts with Edubuntu, Kubuntu and Ubuntu 12.04 which, while also LTS releases, were all supported for five years.
Xubuntu 12.04 incorporated many changes including some default shortcuts which were altered and new ones added, plus there were many appearance changes, including a new logo and wallpaper. Fixes were included for Greybird, Ubiquity, Plymouth, LightDM, and Terminal themes.
The release shipped with version 3.2.14 of the Linux kernel. Pavucontrol was introduced to replace xfce4-mixer as it did not support PulseAudio. The Alacarte menu editor was used by default.
The minimum system requirements for this release were 512 MiB of RAM, 5 GB of hard disk space, and a graphics card and monitor capable of at least 800×600 pixel resolution.
Whisker Menu, a new application launcher for Xubuntu, was introduced via a Personal Package Archive for Xubuntu 2014 LTS. It proved a popular option and later became the default launcher in Xubuntu 14.04 LTS.
Xubuntu 12.10
Xubuntu 12.10 was released on 18 October 2012. This release introduced the use of Xfce 4.10, as well as new versions of Catfish, Parole, LightDM, Greybird and the Ubiquity slideshow. The application menu was slightly reorganized, with settings-related launchers moved to the Settings Manager. The release also included updated artwork, new desktop wallpaper, a new look to the documentation and completely rewritten offline documentation. On 32 bit systems, hardware supporting PAE is required.
The release included one notable bug fix: "No more window traces or "black on black" in installer".
This release of Xubuntu does not support UEFI Secure Boot, unlike Ubuntu 12.10, which allows Ubuntu to run on hardware designed for Windows 8. It was expected that this feature would be included in the next release of Xubuntu.
Xubuntu 12.10 includes Linux kernel 3.5.5, Python 3.2 and OpenJDK7 as the default Java implementation.
The minimum system requirements for this release of Xubuntu are 512 MB of system memory (RAM), 5 GB of disk space and a graphics card and monitor capable of at least 800×600 pixels resolution.
Xubuntu 13.04
Xubuntu 13.04 was released on 25 April 2013. It was intended as a maintenance release with few new features. It incorporated updated documentation, a new version of Catfish (0.6.1), updates to the Greybird theme, GIMP and Gnumeric were reintroduced, a new version of Parole (0.5.0) and that duplicate partitions are no longer shown on desktop or in the Thunar file manager.
This was the first version of Xubuntu with a support period of 9 months for the interim (non-LTS) releases, instead of 18 months.
Starting with this release the Xubuntu ISO images will not fit on a CD as they now average 800 MB. The new image target media is at least a 1.0 GB USB device or DVD. The decision to change the ISO image size was based upon the amount of developer time spent trying to shrink the files to fit them on a standard size CD. This ISO size change also allowed the inclusion of two applications that had been previously dropped due to space constraints, Gnumeric and GIMP.
Xubuntu 13.10
Xubuntu 13.10 was released on 17 October 2013. This release included some improvements over the previous release, including a new version of xfce4-settings and a new dialog box for display settings. There was also a new color theme tool and gtk-theme-config was added as default. This release also included new wallpaper, new GTK+ themes, with Gtk3.10 support and the LightDM greeter. The official Xubuntu documentation was also updated.
In reviewing Xubuntu 13.10, Jim Lynch stated: "Xubuntu 13.10, like its cousin Lubuntu 13.10, is a great choice if you're a minimalist. It's fast, stable and offers many of the advantages of Ubuntu 13.10 without the Unity experience (or torture, depending on your perspective)."
Xubuntu 14.04 LTS
Xubuntu 14.04 LTS was released on 17 April 2014 and, being an LTS, featured three years of support. It incorporated the Xfdesktop 4.11, the Mugshot user account profile editor, the MenuLibre menu editor in place of Alacarte and the Light-locker screen lock to replace Xscreensaver. The Whisker Menu was introduced as the default application launching menu, having been formerly a Personal Package Archive option introduced in Xubuntu 12.04 LTS. It replaced the previous default menu system. The Xfdesktop also supported using different wallpapers on each workspace.
Jim Lynch reviewed Xubuntu 14.04 LTS and concluded: "I've always been a fan of Xubuntu as I tend to go for lightweight desktops versus ones with a lot more glitz and features. So I was quite pleased with Xubuntu 14.04. It's true that you aren't going to find tons of earth shattering features in this release, and that's fine because it's a long term support release anyway. I never expect new feature overload in LTS releases since the emphasis is on stability and polish. But Xubuntu 14.04 LTS is a definite improvement from the last version. The overall experience has been polished up significantly, and there are some small but useful features added like Mugshot, Light Locker and MenuLibre, and of course Whiskermenu."
Xubuntu 14.10
Xubuntu 14.10 was released on 23 October 2014. This release incorporated very few new features. Changed were a new Xfce Power Manager plugin added to the panel and that items in the new alt-tab dialog could be clicked with the mouse. To illustrate the customization of the operating system, 14.10 featured pink highlight colours, something that could easily be changed by users, if desired.
Silviu Stahie, writing for Softpedia stated: "Xubuntu releases are usually very quiet and we rarely see them overshadowing the Ubuntu base, but this is exactly what happened this time around. The devs have made a number of very important modifications and improvements, but they have also changed a very important aspect of the desktop, at least for the duration of the support of the distribution...The devs figured that it might be a good idea to show just how easy is to change things in the distribution...To be fair, this is the kind of change that you either love or hate, but fortunately for the users, it's very easy to return to default."
Xubuntu 15.04
Xubuntu 15.04 was released on 23 April 2015. This release featured Xfce 4.12 and included new colour schemes, with redundant File Manager (Settings) menu entries removed. Otherwise this release was predominantly a bug-fix and package upgrade release, with very few significant changes.
Marius Nestor of Softpedia noted, "The biggest feature of the newly announced Xubuntu 15.04 distro is the integration of the Xfce 4.12 desktop environment...Among other highlights...we can mention new and updated Xubuntu Light and Dark color schemes in the Mousepad and Terminal applications, but the former is now using the Xubuntu Light theme by default...Additionally, the distribution now offers better appearance for Qt applications, which will work out of the box using Xubuntu's GTK+ theme by default and removes the redundant File Manager (Settings) menu entry."
Xubuntu 15.10
Xubuntu 15.10 was released on 22 October 2015.
This release had only minimal changes over 15.04. It incorporated the Xfce4 Panel Switch for the backup and restoration of panels and included five preset panel layouts. Greybird accessibility icons were used for the window manager. Gnumeric and Abiword were replaced with LibreOffice Calc and LibreOffice Writer and a new default LibreOffice theme, libreoffice-style-elementary, was provided.
Joey Sneddon of OMG Ubuntu described Xubuntu 15.10 as incorporating only "a modest set of changes."
Xubuntu 16.04 LTS
Released on 21 April 2016, Xubuntu 16.04 is an LTS version, supported for three years until April 2019.
This release offered few new features. It included a new package of wallpapers and the replacement of the Ubuntu Software Center with Gnome Software, the same as in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Reviewer Jack Wallen said, "The truth of the matter is, the Ubuntu Software Center has been a horrible tool for a very long time. Making this move will greatly improve the Ubuntu experience for every user."
The selection of wallpapers available in Xubuntu 16.04 LTS was singled out by OMG Ubuntu as "all breathtakingly beautiful".
The first point release, 16.04.1, was released on 21 July 2016. The release of Xubuntu 16.04.2 was delayed a number of times, but it was eventually released on 17 February 2017. Xubuntu 16.04.3 was released on 3 August 2017. Xubuntu 16.04.4 was delayed from 15 February 2018 and released on 1 March 2018. Xubuntu 16.04.5 is scheduled for release on 2 August 2018.
Xubuntu 16.10
Xubuntu 16.10 was released on 13 October 2016.
This version of Xubuntu introduced very few new features. The official release notice stated, "This release has seen little visible change since April's 16.04, however much has been done towards supplying Xubuntu with Xfce packages built with GTK3, including the porting of many plugins and Xfce Terminal to GTK3."
Reviewer Joey Sneddon of OMG Ubuntu! noted, "Xubuntu 16.10 has only a modest change log version [over] its April LTS release".
In reviewing Xubuntu 16.10, Gary Newell of Everyday Linux said, "Xubuntu has always been one of my favourite distributions. It doesn't look as glamourous as some of the other Linux offerings out there and it certainly doesn't come with all the software you need pre-installed. The thing that Xubuntu gives you is a great base to start from...The truth is that nothing much really changes with Xubuntu. It is solid, steady and it doesn't need to change..." He did fault the installation of some software packages, which don't appear in the graphical software tools, but can be installed from the command line.
Xubuntu 17.04
Xubuntu 17.04 was released on 13 April 2017.
Joey Sneddon of OMG Ubuntu indicated that this release is mostly just bug fixes and has little in the way of new features.
Xubuntu 17.10
Xubuntu 17.10 was released on 19 October 2017.
This release included only minor changes including the GNOME Font Viewer included by default and that the client side decorations consume less space within the Greybird GTK+ theme.
Distrowatch noted that Xubuntu 17.10, "includes significant improvements to accelerated video playback on Intel video cards. The distribution also includes support for driverless printing and includes the GNOME Font Viewer by default."
Reviewer Joey Sneddon of OMG Ubuntu said of this release, "Xubuntu 17.10 is another iterative release, featuring only modest changes (if it ain't broke, don't fix it)."
Xubuntu 18.04 LTS
Xubuntu 18.04 is a long-term support version, released on 26 April 2018.
In this version, removed the GTK Theme Configuration, the Greybird GTK+ theme was upgraded to 3.22.8 version, including HiDPI support, Google Chrome GTK+ 3 styles and a new dark theme. Sound Indicator was replaced by the Xfce PulseAudio Plugin. The release introduced a new plugin for the panel, xfce4-notifyd. Also Evince was replaced by Atril, GNOME File Roller by Engrampa, and GNOME Calculator by MATE Calculator.
The recommended system requirements for this release are at least 1 GB of RAM and at least 20 GB of free hard disk space.
Igor Ljubuncic from Dedoimedo wrote review of Xubuntu 18.04:
Xubuntu 18.10
Xubuntu 18.10 was released on 18 October 2018. This release includes Xfce components at version 4.13 as the project moves towards a Gtk+3-only desktop, Xfce Icon Theme 0.13, Greybird 3.22.9, which improves the window manager appearance, a new purple wallpaper.
The recommended system requirements for this release remained as at least 1 GB of RAM and at least 20 GB of free hard disk space.
Igor Ljubuncic from Dedoimedo wrote a review in which he stated, "Xubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish is a pretty standard, run-of-the-mill distro, without any superb features or amazing wow effect. It kind of works, the defaults are somewhat boring, and you need to manually tweak things to get a lively, upbeat feel"
Xubuntu 19.04
Xubuntu 19.04 was released on 18 April 2019. Starting with this version, Xubuntu no longer offered 32-bit ISOs.
In this release, new default applications were included, such as GIMP, LibreOffice Impress. LibreOffice Draw and AptURL, and Orage was removed.
This release was predominantly a bug fix release with few changes, but also included new screenshot tools and updated Xfce 4.13 components, using components from the development branch for Xfce 4.14.
A review in Full Circle magazine concluded: "Xubuntu 19.04 is a strong release. It is pretty much flawless as a desktop OS, which really is to be expected for a 27th release. It provides a simple and elegant experience for users that allows them to get work done. No flash or splash, just a very mature distribution that gets incrementally better with each release"
Igor Ljubuncic wrote a review in Dedoimedo, in which he concluded, "Xubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo is a fairly decent release for the bi-annual non-LTS testbed. It's stable enough, sort of mature bordering on boring, fast when it needs to be, pretty when you make it, and gives a relatively rounded overall experience. But then, it also falls short in quite a few areas. These look more like nuggets of apathy than deliberate omissions - networking woes with Samba and Bluetooth, customization struggle, less than adequate battery life, some odd niggles here and there. It just feels like a tickbox exercise rather than a beautiful fruit of labor, passion and fun. It is somewhat better than Cosmic, but it's nowhere near as exciting as Xfce (or rather Xubuntu) used to be three years back. 7/10, and worth testing, but don't crank your adrenaline pump too high."
Xubuntu 19.10
This standard release was the last one before the next LTS release and arrived on 17 October 2019.
This release included Xfce 4.14, which was completed in August 2019 after nearly four and half years of development work. Other changes included the Xfce Screensaver replacing Light Locker for screen locking, new desktop keyboard shortcuts, the ZFS file system and logical volume manager included on an experimental basis for root.
In a lengthy review on DistroWatch, Jesse Smith wrote, "I feel I do not get to say this often enough: this distribution is boring in the best possible way. Even with new, experimental filesystem support and a complete shift in the libraries used to power the Xfce desktop, Xubuntu is beautifully stable, fast, and easy to navigate ... Perhaps what I appreciated most about Xubuntu was that it did not distract me or get in the way at all. I did not see a notification or a pop-up or welcome screen during my trial. The distribution just installed and got out of my way so I could start working ... On the whole I am impressed with Xubuntu 19.10. I found myself wishing this was an LTS release as I would like to put this version on several computers, particular those of family members who run Linux on laptops. Xubuntu is providing a great balance between new features, stability, performance, and options and I highly recommend it for almost any desktop scenario."
A review in Full Circle magazine in November 2019 criticized the window theming and the default wallpaper, terming it "dull and uninspired". The review also noted, "with 28 releases, Xubuntu is a very mature operating system. It provides users with a solid, stable, elegant desktop experience that is quick to learn and very easy to use. Mostly it lacks unnecessary flash and bling, and instead stays out of the way and lets users get work done and very efficiently, too. Xubuntu 19.10 is a release that brings small, incremental changes, with updates and polish that all bode very well for a good, solid spring 2020 LTS release."
Xubuntu 20.04 LTS
This release is a long-term support release and was released on 23 April 2020. Xubuntu 20.04.1 LTS was released on 6 August 2020.
As in common with LTS releases, this one introduced very few new features. A new dark-colored windowing theme was included, Greybird-dark, as were six new community-submitted wallpaper designs. The applications apt-offline and pidgin-libnotify were not included and Python 2 support was removed.
A review of this release in Debug Point concluded, "this release is another significant milestone for Xubuntu 20.04 LTS among other popular Ubuntu-based distributions. Xubuntu 20.04 managed to bring the latest to its users who are still using older hardware and devices with its offerings."
DistroWatch reviewer Jeff Siegel gave this release a positive review, noting that Xubuntu is often undervalued. He wrote, "Xubuntu has always been the quiet middle child in the Ubuntu family, the one that was always overlooked in favour of its older siblings, the glitzy Kubuntu and the rock star Ubuntu - and even for the younger ones, like the oh so retro Ubuntu MATE. All Xubuntu has ever done is offer a solid, dependable, mostly error-free, long-term release every two years. Given a world of Linux distro hoppers, Plasma desktop, and extras like the GNOME and MX Linux tweak tools, and the Zorin browser chooser, who needs something like Xubuntu? A lot of us. We value the distro's dependability and continuity, its lack of controversy, and that it just works, almost and always, straight out of the box. In this, Xubuntu 20.04, Focal Fossa, continues the distro's tradition."
Igor Ljubuncic from Dedoimedo reviewed the release in May 2020, writing: "Xubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa is not a release worth its long-term support badge. It's not exciting, it has ergonomic problems, it has bugs, and it offers a lethargic experience. There's really no sense of pride. Inertia only. If we look at dry facts, you get an average score across the board. Some problems in pretty much every aspect. Things work, but it's a bare minimum. The sweet momentum that was, back in 2017 or so, gone. Well, there you go. Hopefully, the results will improve over time, but I'm doubtful. I've not seen anything really cool or fresh in the Xfce desktop per se for a while now. Xubuntu could work for those looking for a very spartan XP-like experience."
A Full Circle review concluded, "Xubuntu 20.04 LTS is the Long Term Support release that Xubuntu fans have been waiting for. This 29th Xubuntu release is graceful in design, stable, and simple to use. New users will find that it comes with most of the software needed to get straight to productive work. Experienced Xubuntu users will find this LTS release very familiar, just an update without any unwelcome surprises, but with three year's worth of support. If it had some better default window themes it would be just about perfect."
Xubuntu 20.10
This standard release came out on 22 October 2020.
The Xubuntu developers transitioned their code base to GitHub for this release and otherwise there were no changes over Xubuntu 20.04 LTS.
On 23 October 2020, reviewer Sarvottam Kumar of FOSS Bytes noted of this release, "out of all Ubuntu flavors, Xubuntu 20.10 seems the least updated variant containing the same Xfce 4.14 desktop environment as long-term Xubuntu 20.04 has. This is because the next Xfce 4.16 is still under development, with the first preview released last month."
A Full Circle Magazine review concluded: "even though Xubuntu 20.10 is a solid release and works very well, it is difficult to recommend it to users already running Xubuntu 20.04 LTS due to the lack of any changes. Unless the user needs support for new hardware from the new Linux kernel or has a hot, burning desire to use LibreOffice 7 instead of 6, there really is no compelling reason to upgrade from Xubuntu 20.04 LTS. Comparing the support periods of nine months (until July 2021) for 20.10 versus three years (to April 2023) for 20.04 LTS, again, there isn't much to entice users to switch."
Igor Ljubuncic of Dedoimedo panned the release, writing, "Xubuntu 20.10 simply does not radiate pride, quality and attention to detail that would warrant investment from the user ... this feels like a system trapped in time and lethargy.".
Xubuntu 21.04
Xubuntu 21.04 is a standard release, made on 22 April 2021.
This release introduced Xfce 4.16 which exclusively uses GTK3. A new minimal installation option was available. It also included two new applications: the HexChat IRC client and the Synaptic package manager as well as some general user interface changes.
A review in Full Circle magazine concluded, "after making no changes in Xubuntu 20.10, it seems that the Xubuntu developers are not going to sit out this entire development cycle. Starting with 21.04, they have introduced some minor refinements. When you have a loyal user following, you need to proceed cautiously. Most Xubuntu users I know love the OS and don't want to see big changes. The result here, in Xubuntu 21.04, is a good solid release that will keep users happy on the road to the next LTS version."
Xubuntu 21.10
Xubuntu 21.10 is a standard release, and was released on October 14, 2021.
This release included the addition of GNOME Disk Analyzer, GNOME Disk Utility, and the media playback software Rhythmbox.
In a review in Softpedia, Vladimir Ciobica praised the inclusion of the new selection of applications in Xubuntu 21.10.
Applications
As of the 20.04 LTS release, Xubuntu includes the following applications by default:
Xubuntu includes the GNOME Software storefront which allows users to download additional applications from the Ubuntu repositories.
Table of releases
Xubuntu versions are released twice a year, coinciding with Ubuntu releases. Xubuntu uses the same version numbers and code names as Ubuntu, using the year and month of the release as the version number. The first Xubuntu release, for example, was 6.06, indicating June 2006.
Xubuntu releases are also given code names, using an adjective and an animal with the same first letter, e.g., "Dapper Drake" and "Intrepid Ibex". These are the same as the respective Ubuntu code names. Xubuntu code names are in alphabetical order, allowing a quick determination of which release is newer, although there were no releases with the letters "A" or "C". Commonly, Xubuntu releases are referred to by developers and users by only the adjective portion of the code name, for example Intrepid Ibex is often called just Intrepid.
Long Term Support (LTS) releases are supported for three years, while standard releases are supported for nine months.
Derivatives
Xubuntu has been developed into several new versions by third-party developers:
Element OS
A distribution for home theater PCs — discontinued in 2011.
Emmabuntüs
A distribution designed to facilitate the repacking of computers donated to Emmaüs Communities.
GalliumOS
A Linux distribution for Chrome OS devices.
OzOS
A now-defunct Linux distribution based on a severely stripped down version of Xubuntu. Focused on Enlightenment, e17, compiled directly from SVN source. Easy update of e17 is made from SVN updates, by a click on an icon or from CLI using morlenxus' script.
Black Lab Linux (previously OS4 and PC/OS)
A derivative of Xubuntu whose interface was made to look like BeOS. A 64 bit version was released in May 2009. In 2010 PC/OS moved to more unified look to its parent distribution and a GNOME version was released on 3 March 2010. Renamed Black Lab Linux on 19 November 2013.
UberStudent Linux
A discontinued education-use derivative of Xubuntu LTS releases
UserOS Ultra
A minimal Xubuntu variant was produced for Australia's PC User magazine.
Voyager
A French distribution which comes with the Avant Window Navigator.
ChaletOS
An English distribution similar to the Windows operating system in appearance.
See also
List of Ubuntu-based distributions
Open-source software
References
External links
2006 software
IA-32 Linux distributions
Operating system distributions bootable from read-only media
Ubuntu derivatives
X86-64 Linux distributions
Xfce
Linux distributions |
31063360 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starcrossed%20%28novel%29 | Starcrossed (novel) | Starcrossed is a young adult fantasy romance novel by American author Josephine Angelini. The story follows a girl named Helen Hamilton, who is gradually revealed to be a modern-day Helen of Troy. After discovering her heritage, Helen learns that a union with the boy she loves may trigger a new Trojan War. The novel was followed by the sequels Dreamless and Goddess, and received praise from critics and fantasy authors amidst its release.
Overview
Starcrossed follows a seventeen-year-old teenager named Helen Hamilton who lives in Nantucket. After having a series of mysterious dreams, along with hallucinations of three young girls who appear to be pained, Helen finds herself strongly romantically drawn to a teenage boy named Lucas. It is eventually revealed that Helen is a modern-day Helen of Troy, and that the women she sees are actually the Furies. Discovering that many of the people she has just met are actually Archetypes of Greek characters from the Trojan War that are reborn and reincarnated over and over again for unknown reasons. It is also discovered that a union between Lucas and Helen may initiate a new Trojan War. Amidst these revelations, Helen and Lucas seek a way to pursue their blossoming romance without endangering those around them.
Publication
The book was acquired by HarperCollins in early 2010, with foreign deals following at the Bologna Children's Book Fair. The novel was eventually given release dates of April 5, 2011 in Spain, May 15, 2011 in Germany, and May 31, 2011 in the United States. Prior to the novel's release, Angelini revealed that the first sequel of a planned trilogy would be entitled Dreamless.
Main characters
Helen "Lennie" Hamilton—The main protagonist of the novel. Helen is oblivious to her family ancestry since her mother abandoned her as a child, she lives with her single father on the island of Nantucket which is east of Massachusetts in the Atlantic. Her life was rather peaceful and normal until the Delos family comes to town. She has always had a crippling fear of attention and suffers from severe cramp-like symptoms any time she is the recipient of attention. Its is later revealed to have been caused by a curse her mom placed on her to protect her. Her known abilities include superhuman strength and speed, lightning control-and-manipulation, flying through the air, transforming her physical appearance via shape shifting, and world building (which gives her the ability to descend into the underworld and make her own world). She gains other abilities in the last novel that are central to the plot and conclusion of the story, such as being an Earthshaker a Shadowmaster and a Falsefinder. By the end of the novel she is Lucas's girlfriend.
Lucas Delos—The main romantic love interest, boyfriend, and dearly beloved of Helen, Lucas moves to town after his family disagrees with the practices of their extended relatives. He is the older brother of Cassandra and lives with his parents (Castor and Noel), his aunt (Pandora), his uncle (Pallas) and his three cousins (Hector, Jason and Ariadne). The known abilities he possesses are a hypnotically beautiful, melodious and angelic singing voice, physical fitness and features, superhuman strength, lie detection, superhuman speed, flying, shadow master and lightbending.
Orion Evander- The secondary love interest and friend of Helen and then the boyfriend of Cassandra the oracle and Lucas's sister. He is introduced in the second novel when he is the only other living being that Helen meets in Hell. He has a very traumatic and lonely past, due to his families split allegiances. He is an only child and lives away from his parents and attends a boarding school away from the other characters. His known abilities are being able to sway the hearts of others, sense emotions, open one way portals, super strength and speed, cause earthquakes and being able to breathe underwater.
Hector Delos—The older cousin of Lucas and Cassandra and the older brother of Jason and Ariadne. Hector is the main reason the family moved, as he came close to killing a cousin he disagreed with. Known abilities include superhuman strength, superhuman speed, breathing underwater, water-based combative fighting and hugs really well.
Ariadne Delos—The younger sister of Hector and twin sister of Jason. Known powers include super strength, speed and the ability to heal others.
Jason Delos—The younger brother of Hector and twin brother of Ariadne. Known magical abilities include super strength, speed, the ability to heal others and breathing underwater.
Cassandra "Cassie" Delos—Cassandra is Lucas' younger sister and a prophet of Apollo. She is the Oracle and the fates speak through her. Known powers include foresight.
Creon Delos—The main antagonist of the first novel. Heir to his household and cousin to the Delos children. Known powers are super strength, healing and speed and shadow-bending.
Claire Aoki— Claire is Helens charismatic, vivacious Japanese friend who is often at Helen's side throughout the trilogy. She is a human and has no Scion powers, yet knew something of Helens powers before Helen herself did, due to events when they were children. She was also present for an event in Helens youth when a man - presumed to be a pedophile - made several advances at Helen. To which she unknowingly used her lightning as a defence, although Claire nor Helen remember the lightning, they both do vividly recall the smell of burning. Claire is very intelligent - with an almost extensive knowledge of Greek mythology and history - and hopes to be top of her class and go to Harvard University. She is immediately concerned when the Delos family arrives and she sees how intelligent the boys - particularly Lucas - are and the competition she now has for the top of the class title. Throughout the later novels she develops a relationship with Jason and becomes active in the fight against the Gods.
Titans are the gods parents
Minor characters
Matt Millis—A mortal childhood friend of Helen and Claire. He is sweet and Helen sees him as a brother-figure, even though it seems he would like to be more. Revealed to be a Greek archetype in the last novel.
Jerry Hamilton—Helen's father. He owns a convenience store where Helen occasionally works. In the first novel he is oblivious to his daughters abilities.
Kate—A baker who co-owns the convenience store with Jerry. She is Jerry's love-interest and a mother-figure to Helen.
Noel Delos—Cassandra and Lucas' mortal mother who takes care of the entire Delos family.
Castor Delos—Cassandra and Lucas' Scion father.
Pallas Delos— Castor's brother and Hector, Jason and Ariadne's father. He spends most of the first book keeping watch over the extended family across the sea. He bears contempt towards Helen because she looks like Daphne Atreus, the woman who presumably killed his brother, Ajax.
Pandora "Dora" Delos— Castor's sister and Lucas, Cassandra, Hector, Jason and Ariadne's aunt. She stuck up for Helen when Pallas expressed his disdain towards her. However, in spite of her kindness and optimism, she has a vicious nature that she shows only towards her enemies.
Daphne Atreus/Beth Smith— Helen's mother. She was thought to have killed Ajax, but it was later revealed that Ajax's killer was in fact Tantalus. She weaves many webs of plans and allegiances.
Release
Publicity
Publishers Weekly reported on the Starcrossed series in March 2010, announcing that HarperCollins had made a "major pre-Bologna [Book Fair] acquisition". Coverage from Entertainment Weekly followed. In early 2011, Angelini announced that Demi Goddesses, a German musical group, would produce an English-language song inspired by the novel called "Where Do I Belong?", as well as an accompanying music video. Advance reader copies of Starcrossed were released for review by Book It Forward Tours.
Reception
An early review from Booklist stated, "The riveting plot twists and turns as the myth’s destiny translates into present-day terrors, dreams, and hopelessness, and its execution is seamless." Starcrossed has also received feedback from numerous fantasy authors. In an advance review, Lauren Kate gave particular praise to the romantic elements, and called the overall story "a gorgeous, haunting saga that completely swept me away." Kiersten White described the novel as "a dizzying tale of action, drama, and romance with just the right twist of humor and tragedy." Sophie Jordan lauded the novel as, "One of the most cinematic books I've ever read. Dramatic and intense! I can't tell you how many times I gasped while reading this book. Starcrossed plays out like a movie in your head."
While discussing Helen, Sonja Bolle of the Los Angeles Times stated, "Hers is a road I'm eager to travel; the second book in this series, Dreamless, is slated for May 2012—not soon enough, as far as I'm concerned." Kara Warner of MTV.com called the story "an empowering tale full of intrigue, mythology and self discovery". Kirkus Reviews writes, "A refreshingly strong heroine carries readers into the setup for book two."
Film adaptation
In 2010, Publishers Weekly reported that a possible film adaptation of Starcrossed was being handled by Rachel Miller of Tom Sawyer Entertainment.
Dreamless
Dreamless is a young adult fantasy romance novel by American author Josephine Angelini. Dreamless is the sequel to Starcrossed, is the second installment in a planned trilogy. The story picks up shortly after the events of the first book. Helen Hamilton, heartbroken and forbidden from being with Lucas must venture to the Underworld during her dreams in order to break the curse that keeps them apart. According to WorldCat, the book is held in 638 libraries as of July 2014.
Goddess
Goddess is the third book in the Starcrossed series by Josephine Angelini. The last installment of the trilogy, released on May 28, 2013. Follow Helen, Lucas and Orion as the face off against the newly released Greek gods and goddesses as they fight for control and attempt to stop the chaos that surrounds them as the world is thrown into unbalance.
References
2011 American novels
2011 fantasy novels
American fantasy novels
Young adult fantasy novels
HarperCollins books
Novels set during the Trojan War
Cultural depictions of Helen of Troy
Novels set on Cape Cod and the Islands
American romance novels |
519483 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON%20project | TRON project | TRON (acronym for The Real-time Operating system Nucleus) is an open architecture real-time operating system kernel design. The project was started by Professor Dr. Ken Sakamura of the University of Tokyo in 1984. The project's goal is to create an ideal computer architecture and network, to provide for all of society's needs.
The Industrial TRON (ITRON) derivative was one of the world's most used operating systems in 2003, being present in billions of electronic devices such as mobile phones, appliances and even cars. Although mainly used by Japanese companies, it garnered interest worldwide. However, a dearth of quality English documentation was said to hinder its broader adoption.
The TRON project was integrated into T-Engine Forum in 2010. Today, it is supported by popular Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) libraries such as wolfSSL.
Architecture
TRON does not specify the source code for the kernel, but instead is a "set of interfaces and design guidelines" for creating the kernel. This allows different companies to create their own versions of TRON, based on the specifications, which can be suited for different microprocessors.
While the specification of TRON is publicly available, implementations can be proprietary at the discretion of the implementer.
Sub-architectures
The TRON framework defines a complete architecture for the different computing units:
ITRON (Industrial TRON): an architecture for real-time operating systems for embedded systems; this is the most popular use of the TRON architecture
JTRON (Java TRON): a sub-project of ITRON to allow it to use the Java platform
BTRON (Business TRON): for personal computers, workstations, PDAs, mainly as the human–machine interface in networks based on the TRON architecture
CTRON (Central and Communications TRON): for mainframe computers, digital switching equipment
MTRON (Macro TRON): for intercommunication between the different TRON components.
STRON (Silicon TRON): hardware implementation of a real-time kernel.
Character encoding
TRON (encoding), a way that TRON represents characters (as opposed to Unicode).
History
In 1984, the TRON project was officially launched. In 1985, NEC announced the first ITRON implementation based on the ITRON/86 specification. In 1986, the TRON Kyogikai (unincorporated TRON Association) was established, Hitachi announced its ITRON implementation based on the ITRON/68K specification, and the first TRON project symposium is held. In 1987, Fujitsu announced an ITRON implementation based on the ITRON/MMU specification, Mitsubishi Electric announced an ITRON implementation based on the ITRON/32 specification, and Hitachi introduced the Gmicro/200 32-bit microprocessor based on the TRON VLSI CPU specification.
In 1988, BTRON computer prototypes were being tested in various schools across Japan as the planned standardized computer for education. The project was organized by both the Ministry of International Trade and Industry and the Ministry of Education. However, Scott Callon of Stanford University writes that the project ran into some issues, such as BTRON being incompatible with existing DOS-based PCs and software. At the time NEC controlled 80-90% of the education market with DOS infrastructure, so adopting BTRON would have meant getting rid of all existing infrastructure. The existing incompatible PC software had also been personally written by school personnel, who opposed BTRON for this incompatibility with their earlier projects. There was also no software yet for the brand new computer. The project was additionally at least a year behind schedule and didn't perform better than earlier systems although that had been promised, which was possibly affected by the OS having been made by a firm that hadn't written one before. Because of these reasons, at the end of 1988 the Ministry of Education decided that it would not support the project unless BTRON was also made compatible with DOS. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry had hoped to avoid supporting NEC's domination of the PC market with DOS. In April 1989, as the negotiations for the possible however difficult BTRON integration with the NEC DOS architecture were still ongoing, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative issued a preliminary report accusing BTRON which only functioned in Japan of being a trade barrier and asked the government not to make it standard in schools. TRON was included along with rice, semiconductors, and telecommunications equipment in an April 1989 list of items targeted by Super-301 (complete stop of import based on section 301 of the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988). It was removed from the list after the USTR inspection team visited the TRON Association in May. In June the Japanese government expressed their regret at U.S. intervention but accepted this request not to make it standard in schools, thus ending the BTRON project. Callon opines that the project had nevertheless run into such difficulties that the U.S. intervention allowed the government to save face from cancelling the project.
According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, in 1989 US officials feared that TRON could undercut American dominance in computers, but that in the end PC software and chips based on the TRON technology proved no match for Windows and Intel's processors as a global standard. In the 1980s Microsoft had at least once lobbied Washington about TRON until backing off, but Ken Sakamura himself believed Microsoft wasn't the impetus behind the Super-301 listing in 1989. Known for his off the cuff remarks, in 2004 governor of Tokyo Shintaro Ishihara mentioned in his column post concerning international trade policy that TRON was dropped because Carla Anderson Hills had threatened Ryutaro Hashimoto over it.
On 10 November 2017, TRON Forum, headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, which has been maintaining the TRON Project since 2010, has agreed with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, headquartered in the US, to transfer ownership of TRON µT-Kernel 2.0, the most recent version of ITRON, for free. Stephen Dukes, Standards Committee, vice chair, IEEE Consumer Electronics Society said that IEEE will "accelerate standards development and streamline global distribution" through the agreement. By the agreement, TRON Forum has become an IP licensee of embedded TRON.
Administration
The TRON project was administered by the TRON Association. It was integrated into T-Engine Forum in 2010 and subsequently the TRON project activities have been taken over and continued by the forum. As of 10 November 2017, TRON µT-Kernel 2.0 is jointly managed by the IEEE and the Forum.
T-Engine
T-Engine Forum is a non-profit organization which develops open specifications for ITRON, T-Kernel, and ubiquitous ID architecture.
The chair of T-Engine Forum is Dr. Ken Sakamura. In July 2011, there were 266 members in T-Engine forum. Executive committee members includes top Japanese giants like Fujitsu, Hitachi, NTT DoCoMo, and Denso. A-level members who are involved in design and development of specifications for T-Engine and T-Kernel, or of Ubiquitous ID technology include companies such as eSOL, NEC and Yamaha Corporation. B-level members who are involved in development of product using T-Engine specification and T-Kernel include companies like ARM, Freescale, MIPS Technologies, Mitsubishi, Robert Bosch GmbH, Sony Corporation, Toshiba, and Xilinx. The supporting members and academic members involved with the forum include many universities such as University of Tokyo in Japan and Dalian Maritime University in China.
See also
ITRON
T-Kernel
RTOS
References
External links
TRON project
TRON Web
TRON specifications in English
BTRON
B-Free in Japanese; Free BTRON OS project; archived
EOTA in Japanese; Free BTRON "EOTA"
BTRON introduction (pre-emptive multitasking feature mentioned amongst others)
Seiko Brainpad TiPO Plus (URL translated to English / PC Watch article / PDA running BTRON / launched 1998 / 640x240 4-grayscale LCD, IrDA, PCMCIA Type II, 170 × 100 × 20 mm)
Chokanji, aka Cho Kanji. From Personal Media Corporation (PMC) . A BTRON-specifications OS which runs on PC hardware. The PMC laptop "Cho Kanji Note W2B", announced on October 30, 2003, includes a Cho Kanji partition with a full suite of productivity applications, including a word processor, spreadsheet, drawing software, card database software, communications software, and an e-mailer and browser . Chokanji V screenshot with English language kit.
Pictures of laptops running Chokanji:
R1 (from 2003–04; Pentium III M, 866 MHz)
T2 (from 2003–06; Pentium M, 900 MHz)
W2B (from 2003–10; Pentium M, 1.0 GHz)
Y2C (from 2004-03; Pentium M, 1.2 GHz)
R3EG (from 2004–11; Pentium M, 1.1 GHz)
MTRON
T-Engine Forum in English
Ubiquitous ID Center in English; What is ubiquitous computing?
TOPPERS project
TOPPERS project in English
Real-time operating systems
Science and technology in Japan |
48968761 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United%20States%20Armed%20Forces%20Chess | United States Armed Forces Chess | United States Armed Forces Chess refers to the annual Armed Forces Chess Championship, or another separate tournament known as the "Inter-Services Chess Championship, or ISCC, held annually since 1960 by the United States Department of Defense and the United States Chess Federation. It also refers to the study of the game of chess by the United States Armed Forces for military applications.
Armed Forces Chess Championship
The first tournament was held in 1960, and continued uninterrupted until 1993, when the support of the United States Department of Defense was withdrawn. The United States Chess Federation and the US Chess Center supported the tournaments until 2001, when the support of the US Department of Defense was resumed. Emory Tate won the Armed Forces Chess Championship five times, in 1983, 1984, and three times in a row from 1987-1989, was an unequaled record. Robert Keough also won five times, in 1999, 2000, 2008, 2009, and in 2013. In 2018, Larry Larkins won his sixth Armed Forces Chess Championship.
The tournaments were:
1960, the first U.S. Armed Forces Chess Championship (USAFCC) was held at the American Legion Hall of Flags in Washington, D.C. There were 12 invited participants. Air Force Captain John Hudson and Army SP4 Arthur Feuerstein tied for 1st place. Feuerstein was four times New York state champion. Hudson was a bombardier-navigator on B-52 bombers and a former US Amateur champion.
1961, Captain John Hudson won the 2nd US Armed Forces championship. The tournament was sponsored by the US Chess Federation, the American Chess Foundation, and the USO.
1962, SP4 Roy Mallett won the 3rd US Armed Forces championship.
1963, Air Force Chief Master Sergeant Irwin Lyon won the 4th US Armed Forces championship. This was the first year that the Coast Guard was represented in this annual event.
1964, Air Force 1st Lieutenant Donato Rivera de Jesus won the 5th US Armed Forces championship. He played for Puerto Rico in the Varna Chess Olympiad in 1962.
1965, Air Force Airman David Lees (1943-1996) won the 6th US Armed Forces championship. He also won the Texas State Championship in 1965. The event was held at the American Legion's Hall of Flags in Washington, D. C.
1966, Army SP4 Chester Wozney won the 7th US Armed Forces championship.
1967, Army SP4 Michael Senkiewicz won the 8th US Armed Forces championship. He was also a world class Scrabble player, backgammon player, and poker player. He played for the British Virgin Islands in the 1988 chess Olympiad, scoring 9 out of 12. He was once ranked 35th in the nation in chess.
1968, Army Private First Class Charles "Charlie" Powell (1944-1991) won the 9th US Armed Forces championship. He was 7-time Virginia champion and beat Bobby Fischer in a simul.
1969, Army PFC Steven Hohensee won the 10th US Armed Forces championship.
1970, Air Force Major John Hudson won the 11th US Armed Forces championship.
1971, Air Force 1st Lieutenant Brendan Godfrey won the 12th US Armed Forces championship. Now Dr. Godfrey is Director of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
1972, Coast Guard Lieutenant Zaccarias Chavez won the 13th US Armed Forces championship. He appeared on the front cover of the December 1972 issue of Chess Life & Review.
1973, Air Force Sergeant Don Sutherland won the 14th US Armed Forces championship. He won the California State Chess Championship in 1965 and Colorado Championship in 1973.
1974, Air Force Sergeant Richard Bustamante won the 15th US Armed Forces championship.
1975, Air Force Sergeant Charles Unruh won the 16th US Armed Forces championship.
1976 Army E4 Russell Garber won the 17th US Armed Forces championship.
1977, Air Force Captain Robert Bond won the 18th US Armed Forces championship.
1978, Air Force Captain Robert Bond won the 19th US Armed Forces championship. The event was held at the
American Legion Hall of Flags in Washington, D.C. The event was sponsored by the American Chess Foundation.
1979, Army SP4 Michael Fletcher won the 20th US Armed Forces championship. He is a national master.
1980, Army SP4 Michael Fletcher won the 21st US Armed Forces championship.
1981, Airman 1st Class Timothy Brown won the 22nd US Armed Forces championship. He won the Arizona championship in 1976.
1982, Air Force Sergeant Timothy Brown won the 23rd US Armed Forces championship.
1983, Air Force Senior Airman Emory Tate, Jr. won the 24th US Armed Forces championship.
1984, Air Force Sergeant Emory Tate won the 25th US Armed Forces championship.
1985, Army SP4 Roberto Rodriquez and Air Force Sergeant Bobby Moore tied for 1st in the 26th US Armed Forces championship.
1986, Army Private Richard Russell won the 27th US Armed Forces championship.
1987, Air Force Staff Sergeant Emory Tate won the 28th US Armed Forces championship.
1988, Air Force Staff Sergeant Emory Tate won the 29th US Armed Forces championship.
1989, Air Force Staff Sergeant Emory Tate won the 30th US Armed Forces championship.
1990, Mario Murillo (Navy) won the 31st US Armed Forces championship.
1991, Mario Murillo (Navy) won the 32nd US Armed Forces championship.
1992, Donato Lacno (Navy) won the 33nd US Armed Forces championship.
1993, Air Force Sergeant Elvin Wilson won the 34th US Armed Forces championship.
1994, Robert Holling (Navy) won the 35th US Armed Forces championship.
1995, John Hanson and Brian Richardson tied for 1st in the 36th US Armed Forces championship.
1996, Army Captain David Hater won the 37th US Armed Forces championship.
1997, Army Major David Hater and Dwaine Roberts (Marines Corps) tied for 1st in the 38th annual U.S. Armed Forces Championship.
1998, Air Force Sergeant Elvin Wilson and Air Force Sergeant Peter Kurucz ties for 1st in the 39th US Armed Forces championship.
1999, Air Force Sergeant Robert Keough won the 40th annual U.S. Armed Forces Championship.
2000, Air Force Sergeant Robert Keough won the 41st annual U.S. Armed Forces Championship.
2001, Sgt Rudy Tia and Joseph Kruml tied for 1st in the 42nd annual U.S. Armed Forces Championship held at Ft. Meyer. In 2001, the US Armed Forces Chess Championship (USAFCC) was renamed the U.S. Interservice Chess Championship (ISCC).
2002, Sgt Rudy Tia won the 43rd annual U.S. Armed Forces Championship. The event took place in San Diego, CA.
2003, Air Force Sergeant Leroy Hill won the 44th annual U.S. Armed Forces Championship. The tournament was held at Kelly AFB in San Antonio, Texas.
2004, Narcisco Victoria and West Point Cadet David Jacobs tied for 1st in the 45th annual U.S. Armed Forces Championship.
2005, West Point Cadet David Jacobs won the 46th annual U.S. Armed Forces Championship. The tournament was held in Arlington, Virginia.
2006, West Point Cadet David Jacobs won the 47th annual U.S. Armed Forces Championship. The tournament was held at the Armed Forces Retirement Home in Washington, DC. As a special special speaker retired USAF Lt. General William Earl Brown, a chessplayer who was in one of the Tuskeegee Airman graduating classes in the late 1940s.
2007, Navy retiree Larry Larkins won the 48st annual U.S. Armed Forces Championship. The tournament was held in Arlington, Virginia.
2008, Army Specialist Jhonel Baniel won the interservice U.S. Armed Forces Championship. The tournament was held in Tucson, Arizona. Navy retiree Larry Larkins tied with Douglas Taffinder, Robert Keough, Edward Pablan, and Dale Szpisjak. The 49st annual U.S. Armed Forces Championship in 2008 was held in Bethesda, MD. Source: US Chess MSA http://www.uschess.org/msa/XtblMain.php?200810134931.0-12541588
2009, Army PFC Pieta Garrett won the interservice U.S. Armed Forces Championship, USAF TSgt Robert Keough won the 50th annual U.S. Armed Forces Championship. The games were held at Gettysburg PA. Source: US Chess MSA http://www.uschess.org/msa/XtblMain.php?200910120301-12541588
2010, Navy retiree Larry Larkins won the 51st annual U.S. Armed Forces Championship. The tournament was held at Joint Base Andrews MD.
2011, the 52nd U.S. Armed Forces Open, held in Arlington, Virginia, was won by Air Force retiree Dan Ranario. The top active duty player was Air Force Senior Airman Kiel Russell. The Air Force Academy won the Commander-in-Chief trophy as the top academy team.
2012, the 53rd U.S. Armed Forces Open Chess Championships was held on board of the USS Wasp in Norfolk, Virginia. This was the first time the event was held on a ship. Dan Ranario (2128) won the event.
2013, the 54th U.S. Armed Forces Open Chess Championships was held at the U.S. Army Transportation Museum at Fort Eustis, Virginia. Dan Ranario, Robert Keough, Gordon Randall, and Jon Middaugh tied for 1st place.
2014, US Army Nicholas Oblak won the 55th U.S. Armed Forces Open Chess Championships held at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.
2015, Navy retiree Larry R. Larkins won the 56th U.S. Armed Forces Championship held at Fort Belvoir, Virginia USO Center.
2016, Navy retiree Larry Larkins won the 57th U.S. Armed Forces championship held at US Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD.
2017, the 58th U.S. Armed Forces Open Chess Championship was hosted at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and sponsored by the US Chess Trust and US Chess president, Mike Hoffpauir, a former US Army brigade commander. US Air Force Technical sergeant Leroy Hill, Jr., won the event. Hill also won the Inter-Service Championship in 2003.
2018, Navy retiree Larry Larkins won on tiebreaks the 59th U.S. Armed Forces Championship held at Joint Base Andrews,MD.
2019, Airforce First LT and National Chess Master Eigen Wang wins the 60th U.S. Armed Forces Championship held in Camp Lejeune, NC.
2020, Navy Second Class Petty Officer Andrew Peraino wins the 61st U.S. Armed Forces Championship held in Virginia Beach, VA. Peraino also won the U2200 section of the San Diego Open previously in the year.
Armed Forces Chess Research
The United States Armed Forces has studied chess in a number of different applications, from the understanding of psychology, game theory, problem solving, tactical decision making, risk taking and leadership, not to mention in computer programs, artificial intelligence and algorithms.
The Defense Technical Information Center lists over 1,500 civilian, contractor and military reports dealing with chess, chess theory and other applications of chess research.
References
Bibliography
"Check Chess Out." Army Times. October 1990. Volume 51 (9), page 2.
Accession Number: ADA225613. The Game of Chess. Descriptive Note : Technical rept. Corporate Author : CARNEGIE-MELLON UNIV PITTSBURGH PA ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND PSYCHOLOGY PROJECT. Personal Author(s) : Simon, Herbert A.; Schaeffer, Jonathan. Full Text: http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-doc/pdf?AD=ADA225613. Report Date : 17 DEC 1990. Pagination or Media Count: 21. Abstract : We have seen that the theory of games that emerges from this research is quite remote in both its concerns and its findings from the von Neumann Morgenstern theory. To arrive at actual strategies for the play of games as complex as chess, the game must be considered in extensive form, and its characteristic function is of no interest. The task is not to characterize optimality or substantive rationality, but to define strategies for finding good moves—procedural rationality. What is emerging, from research on games like chess, is a computational theory of games: A theory of what it is reasonable to do when it is impossible to determine what is best—a theory of bounded rationality. The lessons taught by this research may be of considerable value for understanding and dealing with situations in real life that are even more complex that the situations we encounter in chess—in dealing, say, with large organizations, with the economy, or with relations among nations. The game of chess has sometimes been referred to as the Drosophila of artificial intelligence and cognitive science research - a standard task that serves as a test bed for ideas about the nature of intelligence.
Larkins Wins 56th Armed Forces Open.
Hater, David A. 2016. "Officers Pay Double: Larry Larkins wins 56th Armed Forces Championship, and our correspondent examines how Chess helped our overseas forces." January 2016. Pages 38–42.
Kmoch, Hans. Chess Games of the First Thomas Emery Armed Forces Tournament; An Analysis and Study. New York: American Chess Foundation, 1961. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/7081745.
Newell, Allen and Herbert A. Simon. 1964. Accession Number: AD0619386. Title: AN EXAMPLE OF HUMAN CHESS PLAY IN THE LIGHT OF CHESS PLAYING PROGRAMS. Corporate Author: CARNEGIE INST OF TECH PITTSBURGH PA. Personal Author(s): Newell, Allen; Simon, Herbert A. Full Text: http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-doc/pdf?AD=AD0619386. Report Date: AUG 1964. Pagination or Media Count: 92. Abstract: This paper is concerned with the use of chess programs to study human thinking. The work on chess programs has produced a collection of mechanisms sufficient to play chess of modest caliber. Independently of their detailed characteristics, they help understand what must be done in order to play chess. The approach used was to examine in some detail the behavior of a man deciding what move to make in a specific middle game position. Having available a protocol, a transcript of the verbal behavior of the man while he is analysing the board and making his decision. Previous work with protocols in other tasks (proving theorems, guessing sequences, learning concepts) has aimed at constructing computer programs that match the behavior in detail. In this paper the authors undertake only the first stages of such an analysis, laying bare the reasoning the subject employed, by examining his protocol in detail. The analysis draws upon ones general knowledge about reasoning mechanisms and how to organize
United States, and National Audiovisual Center. USAF Sports and Recreation 1964. U.S. Dept. of the Air Force, 1965. Reviews Air Force team and individual 1964 tournament championships, including bowling, volleyball, basketball, bobsledding, curling, chess, judo, track and field, tennis, softball, golf, and model airplane flying. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/5597606.
Wilkins, David Edward. [www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a076872.pdf Using Patterns and Plans to Solve Problems and Control Search.] Stanford Artificial Intelligrance Laboratory. Memo AIM-329. July 1979. Abstract: The type of reasoning done by human chess masters has not been done by computer programs. The purpose of this research is to Investigate the extent to which knowledge can replace and support search In selecting a chess move and to delineate the issues involved. This has been carried out by constructing a program, PARADISE (PAttern Recognition Applied to Directing SEarch), which finds the best move in tactically sharp middle game positions from the games of chess masters.
Young, Franklin Knowles. Chess Strategetics; Illustrated. Military Art and Science Adapted to the Chessboard. Boston: Little, Brown and Co, 1900. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/3259721.
External links
https://www.facebook.com/MilitaryChess
https://www.facebook.com/2015-US-Armed-Forces-Chess-Open-1490506127850061/
U.S. Armed Forces chess champions
http://www.chessmaniac.com/armed-forces-chess/ Armed Forces Chess
Chess in the United States
Computer chess
Chess competitions |
54088366 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burst%20buffer | Burst buffer | In the high-performance computing environment, burst buffer is a fast intermediate storage layer positioned between the front-end computing processes and the back-end storage systems. It bridges the performance gap between the processing speed of the compute nodes and the Input/output (I/O) bandwidth of the storage systems. Burst buffers are often built from arrays of high-performance storage devices, such as NVRAM and SSD. It typically offers from one to two orders of magnitude higher I/O bandwidth than the back-end storage systems.
Use cases
Burst buffers accelerate scientific data movement on supercomputers. For example, scientific applications' life cycles typically alternate between
computation phases and I/O phases. Namely, after each round of computation (i.e., computation phase), all the computing processes concurrently write their intermediate data
to the back-end storage systems (i.e., I/O phase), followed by another round of computation and data movement operations. With the deployment of burst buffer, processes can quickly write their data to burst buffer after one round of computation instead of writing to the slow hard disk based storage systems, and immediately proceed to the next round of computation without waiting for the data to be moved to the back-end storage systems; the data are then asynchronously
flushed from burst buffer to the storage systems at the same time with the next round of computation. In this way, the long I/O time spent in moving data to the storage systems is hidden behind the computation time. In addition, buffering data in burst buffer also gives applications plenty of opportunities to reshape the data traffic to the back-end storage systems for efficient bandwidth utilization of the storage systems. In another common use case, scientific applications can stage their intermediate
data in and out of burst buffer without interacting with the slower storage systems. Bypassing the storage systems allows applications to realize most of the
performance benefit from burst buffer.
Representative burst buffer architectures
There are two representative burst buffer architectures in the high-performance computing environment: node-local burst buffer and remote shared burst buffer. In the node-local burst buffer architecture, burst buffer storage is located on
the individual compute node, so the aggregate burst buffer bandwidth grows linearly with the compute node count. This scalability benefit has been well-documented in recent literature. It also comes with the demand for a scalable metadata management strategy to maintain a global namespace for data distributed across all the burst buffers. In the remote shared burst buffer architecture, burst buffer storage resides on a fewer number of I/O nodes positioned between the compute nodes and the back-end storage systems. Data movement between the compute nodes and burst buffer needs to go through the network. Placing burst buffer on the I/O nodes facilitates the independent development, deployment and maintenance of the burst buffer service. Hence, several well-known commercialized software products have been developed to manage this type of burst buffer, such as DataWarp and Infinite Memory Engine. As supercomputers are deployed with multiple heterogeneous burst buffer layers, such as NVRAM on the compute nodes, and SSDs on the dedicated I/O nodes, there is a need to transparently move data across multiple storage layers.
Supercomputers deployed with burst buffer
Due to its importance, burst buffer has been widely deployed on the leadership-scale supercomputers. For example, node-local burst buffer has been installed on DASH supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Tsubame supercomputers at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Theta and Aurora supercomputers at the Argonne National Laboratory, Summit supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Sierra supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, etc. Remote shared burst buffer has been adopted by Tianhe-2 supercomputer at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, Trinity supercomputer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Cori supercomputer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and ARCHER2 supercomputer at Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre.
References
External links
Cray DataWarp, a production burst buffer system developed by Cray.
Infinite Memory Engine, a production burst buffer system developed by Data Direct Network.
Theta supercomputer, a supercomputer hosted in the Argonne National Laboratory.
Summit supercomputer, a supercomputer hosted in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Sierra supercomputer, a supercomputer hosted in the Lawrence National National Laboratory.
Trinity supercomputer, a supercomputer hosted in the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Cori supercomputer, a supercomputer hosted in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Supercomputers
Non-volatile memory
Distributed file systems
Cluster computing
Big data |
2405502 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email%20privacy | Email privacy | Email privacy is a broad topic dealing with issues of unauthorized access to, and inspection of, electronic mail, or unauthorized tracking when a user reads an email. This unauthorized access can happen while an email is in transit, as well as when it is stored on email servers or on a user's computer, or when the user reads the message. In countries with a constitutional guarantee of the secrecy of correspondence, whether email can be equated with letterstherefore having legal protection from all forms of eavesdroppingis disputed because of the very nature of email. As more communication occurs via email, as compared to postal mail, this is considered to be an important debate.
An email has to go through potentially untrustworthy intermediate computers (email servers, ISPs) before reaching its destination, and there is no way to verify if it was accessed by an unauthorized entity. Through the process of information being sent from the user's computer to the email service provider, data acquisition is taking place, most of the time without the user knowing. There are certain data collection methods (routers) that are used for data privacy concerns, but there are others that can be harmful to the user. This is different from a letter sealed in an envelope, where, by close inspection of the envelope, it might be possible to determine if it had been previously opened. In that sense, an email is much like a postcard, the contents of which are visible to anyone who handles it.
There are certain technological workarounds that make unauthorized access to email difficult, if not impossible. However, since email messages frequently cross national boundaries, and different countries have different rules and regulations governing who can access an email, email privacy is a complicated issue.
Companies may have email policies requiring employees to refrain from sending proprietary information and company classified information through personal emails or sometimes even work emails. Co-workers are restricted from sending private information such as company reports, slide show presentations with confidential information, or email memos.
Technological workarounds
There are some technical workarounds to ensure better privacy of email communication. Although it is possible to secure the content of the communication between emails, protecting the metadata, for instance who sent email to whom, is fundamentally difficult. Even though certain technological measures exist, the widespread adoption is another issue because of reduced usability.
Encryption
According to Hilarie Orman, mail encryption was first developed about 30 years ago. She states that mail encryption is a powerful tool that protects one's email privacy. Although it is widely available, it is rarely used, with the majority of email sent at risk of being read by third parties. In general, encryption provides protection against malicious entities. However, a court order might force the responsible parties to hand over decryption keys, with a notable example being Lavabit. Encryption can be performed at different levels of the email protocol.
Transport level encryption
With the original design of email protocol, the communication between email servers was plain text, which posed a huge security risk. Over the years, various mechanisms have been proposed to encrypt the communication between email servers. One of the most commonly used extension is STARTTLS. It is a TLS (SSL) layer over the plaintext communication, allowing email servers to upgrade their plaintext communication to encrypted communication. Assuming that the email servers on both the sender and the recipient side support encrypted communication, an eavesdropper snooping on the communication between the mail servers cannot see the email contents. Similar extensions exist for the communication between an email client and the email server.
End to end encryption
In end-to-end encryption, the data is encrypted and decrypted only at the end points. In other words, an email sent with end-to-end encryption would be encrypted at the source, unreadable to email service providers in transit, and then decrypted at its endpoint. Crucially, the email would only be decrypted for the end user on their computer and would remain in the encrypted, unreadable form to an email service, which wouldn't have the keys available to decrypt it. Some email services integrate end-to-end encryption automatically.
OpenPGP is a data encryption standard that allows end-users to encrypt the email contents. There are various software and email-client plugins that allow users to encrypt the message using the recipient's public key before sending it. At its core, OpenPGP uses a Public Key Cryptography scheme where each email address is associated with a public/private key pair.
OpenPGP provides a way for the end users to encrypt the email without any support from the server and be sure that only the intended recipient can read it. However, there are usability issues with OpenPGP — it requires users to set up public/private key pairs and make the public keys available widely. Also, it protects only the content of the email, and not metadata — an untrusted party can still observe who sent an email to whom. A general downside of end-to-end encryption schemes—where the server does not have decryption keys—is that it makes server side search almost impossible, thus impacting usability.
Architectural impact
The architecture of the system also affects the privacy guarantees and potential venues for information leakage. The email protocol was originally designed for email clients — programs that periodically download email from a server and store it on the user's computer. However, in recent years, webmail usage has increased due to the simplicity of usage and no need for the end users to install a program. Secure messaging is in use where an entity (hospitals, banks, etc.) wishes to control the dissemination of sensitive information. Secure messaging functions similarly to webmail, in that the user must log on to a websiteoperated by the company or entity in questionto read received messages.
With both secure messaging and webmail, all email data is stored on the email provider's servers and thus subject to unauthorized access, or access by government agencies. However, in the case of email clients, it is possible to configure the client such that the client downloads a copy of the message as it arrives, which is deleted from the server. Although there is no way to guarantee whether a server has deleted its copy of an email, it still provides protection against situations where a benign email server operator is served with a court order.
Other workarounds
Although encryption provides for a way to protect the contents of the message, it still fails to protect the metadata. Theoretically, mix networks can be used to protect the anonymity of communication (who contacted whom).
Another workaround that has been used is to save a message as a draft in a webmail system, and share the webmail login credentials with an intended recipient. As an example of a dead drop, this method defeats any kind of monitoring based on the actual email sent. However, this method infamously failed to protect the privacy of the participants in the Petraeus scandal; after coming under investigation for unrelated activities, communication between the parties was accessed by the FBI.
Legal standing
United States
Constitutional protection
Protection under the United States constitution
The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that “[T]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” This Amendment guarantees the privacy, dignity, and security of persons against certain arbitrary and invasive acts by officers of the government or those acting at their direction. The Fourth Amendment is often invoked to protect individual privacy rights against government activities.
In the case of employer emails, although the words “the people” may appear to be broad and to include any employee, this amendment (or any other part of the United States constitution) has not been interpreted to protect the privacy interest of private-sector employees. By contrast, public-sector employees of federal, state, and local governments usually have privacy protection under the United States Constitution.
The protection under the fourth Amendment is not unlimited. For example, in O'Connor v. Ortega, the officials at a State Hospital, after placing Dr. Magno Ortega on administrative leave pending an investigation into possible workplace improprieties, searched his office. Dr. Ortega filed an action against the hospital alleging that the search violated his Fourth Amendment rights. The district court found that the search was proper, but on appeal the circuit court found that the search did violate Dr. Ortega's Fourth Amendment rights. The Supreme Court disagreed with both the lower courts. The Court's decision was based on consideration of two factors (i) whether Dr. Ortega had a reasonable expectation of privacy, and (ii) whether the search of Dr. Ortega's office was reasonable. The Court held that because Dr. Ortega had a private office, he had a reasonable expectation of privacy. However, the Court also found the search of his office to be reasonable because it was work-related. It considered the government's need to ensure efficient operation of the workplace as outweighing an employee's expectation of privacy, even if the privacy expectation is reasonable. Since work environments vary, a public-sector employee's expectation of privacy must be determined on a case-by-case basis. Factors the Court considered included (i) notice to employees, (ii) exclusive possession by an employee of keys to a desk or file cabinet, (iii) the government's need for access to documents, and (iv) the government's need to protect records and property.
In view of the Ortega decision, the extent of constitutional protection with respect to emails is unclear. Unlike a locked desk or file cabinet, emails are not locked; the employer has access to all messages on the system. Thus, it may be argued that with respect to email, the public-sector employee's legitimate expectations of privacy are diminished.
In some cases, the US constitutional protection can also extend to private-sector employees. This is possible when a private-sector employee can demonstrate "involved sufficient government action".
Protection under state constitutions
State constitutions in at least 10 states (Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Montana, South Carolina and Washington) grant individuals an explicit right to privacy. The privacy protections afforded by some of these states mirrors the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution but often add more specific references to privacy. Further, general constitutional provisions in other states have also been interpreted by courts to have established privacy rights of various types. Like the rights under the US constitution, the privacy rights under state constitutions also usually extend to protection from the actions of state governments, not private organizations.
In 1972, California amended Article I, Section 1 of its state constitution to include privacy protections. A California appellate court then held that the state's right of privacy applied to both public and private sector interests. Further, in Soroka v. Dayton Hudson Corp., the California Court of Appeals reaffirmed this view and held that an employer may not invade the privacy of its employees absent a "compelling interest".
In August 2014, Missouri became the first state to provide explicit constitutional (art. I, § 15) protection from unreasonable searches and seizures for electronic communications or data, such as that found on cell phones and other electronic devices.
Statutory protection
Federal statutes
The real-time interception of the contents of electronic communication is prohibited under the wiretap act, while the Pen Register Act provides protection from the interception of the non-content part of the electronic communication. The "From" and "To" fields along with the IP address of the sender/receiver have been considered as non-content information, while the subject has been considered as part of the content. Once the email is stored on a computer (email server/user computer), it is protected from unauthorized access under the Stored Communications Act (Title II of Electronic Communications Privacy Act).
After 180 days in the US, email messages stored on a third party server lose their status as a protected communication under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and become just another database record. After this time has passed, a government agency needs only a subpoena—instead of a warrant—in order to access email from a provider. However, if the emails are stored on a user's personal computer instead of a server, then that would require the police to obtain a warrant first to seize the contents. This has been criticized to be an obsolete law; at the time this law was written, extremely high-capacity storage on webmail servers was not available. In 2013, members of the US Congress proposed to reform this procedure.
An exception to these laws, however, is for email service providers. Under the provider exception, the laws do not apply to "the person or entity providing a wire or electronic communications service." This exception, for example, allows various free of charge email providers (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, etc.) to process user emails to display contextual advertising.
Another implication of the provider exception is access by employers. Email sent by employees through their employer's equipment has no expectation of privacy, as the employer may monitor all communications through their equipment. According to a 2005 survey by the American Management Association, about 55% of US employers monitor and read their employees' email. Attorney–client privilege is not guaranteed through an employer's email system, with US courts rendering contradictory verdicts on this issue. Generally speaking, the factors courts use to determine whether companies can monitor and read personal emails in the workplace include: (i) the use of a company email account versus a personal email account and (ii) the presence of a clear company policy notifying employees that they should have no expectation of privacy when sending or reading emails at work, using company equipment, or when accessing personal accounts at work or on work equipment.
State statutes
Privacy protections of electronic communications vary from state to state. Most states address these issues through either wiretapping legislation or electronic monitoring legislation or both.
Unlike the EPCA, most state statutes do not explicitly cover email communications. In these states a plaintiff may argue that the courts should interpret these statutes to extend protection to email communications. A plaintiff can argue that the wiretapping statutes reflect the general intent of the legislature to protect the privacy of all communications that travel across the telephone line (including emails). Further, the plaintiff may argue that email communications may be analogized to telegraphic communications, which are explicitly protected under most state statutes.
Generally, such efforts are not effective in protecting email privacy. For example, in Shoars vs. Epson America, Inc. case (Cal. Sup. Ct. filed
July 30, 1990) a California superior court refused to find employee email privacy protection in California's criminal code. California Penal Code Section 631 prohibits wire-tapping without the consent of all parties involved, adding that a person may not "read or attempt to read, learn the contents or meaning of any message, report, or communication while the same is in tran- sit or passing over any such wire, line, or cable, or is being sent from, or received at any place within the state." The court dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that Section 631 did not apply since the legislation did not specifically refer to email communication.
State common law protection
The protection of email privacy under the state common law is evolving through state court decisions. Under the common law the email privacy is protected under the tort of invasion of privacy and the causes of action related to this tort. Four distinct torts protect the right of privacy. These are (i) unreasonable intrusion upon the seclusion of another, (ii) misappropriation of others name and likeliness; (iii) unreasonable publicity given to another's private life and (iv) publicity that unreasonably places another in a false light before the public. Of these the tort of "unreasonable intrusion upon the seclusion of another" is most relevant to the protection of email privacy. "Unreasonable intrusion upon seclusion of another" states that the invasion was intended to be private and the invasion was offensive to an individual.
European Union
The fifty-five article long Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union grants certain fundamental rights such as "right to be left alone" and "respect for private life" to both the European Union citizens and the residents. According to article 7 of the charter, everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home, and communications. The charter came into full legal effect when the Lisbon Treaty was signed on 1 December 2009.
The individual member states cannot enforce local laws that are contradictory to what they have already agreed upon as a European Union member. It was established in Costa v ENEL that the European Union law is placed above the laws of its individual member states.
Email privacy concerns (US)
Email at work
Most employers make employees sign an agreement that grants the right to monitor their email and computer usage. Signing this agreement normally deprives an employee of any reasonable expectation of privacy which means that employer can legally search through employee emails. Even without an agreement, courts have rarely found that the employee had a reasonable expectation of privacy to their email at work for a variety of reasons. For example, one court held that emails used in a business context are simply a part of the office environment, the same as a fax or copy machine, in which one does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Another court found that by corresponding with other people at work, work email was inherently work-related, and thus there could be no reasonable expectation of privacy.
Employers usually do not have very many obstacles preventing them from searching employee emails. Employers may take the position that employees are sending communications from their equipment that could affect their business; this is usually considered to be a sufficient justification to search through employee emails. Employers may also monitor work emails to ensure the email system is being used appropriately for work purposes. Furthermore, as workplace harassment lawsuits are prevalent, one way for employers to protect themselves from liability is to monitor and attempt to prevent any harassment in the first place. Many employers run software that searches for offensive words and highlights problematic emails. The other main concern with liability is that old emails may be used against the employer in a lawsuit.
Beyond the lack of privacy for employee email in a work setting, there is the concern that a company's proprietary information, patents, and documents could be leaked, intentionally or unintentionally. This concern is seen in for-profit businesses, non-profit firms, government agencies, and other sorts of start-ups and community organizations. Firms usually ask employees or interns to not send work-related material to personal emails or through social media accounts, for example. Even within the firm's email network and circle of connections, important information could still be leaked or stolen by competitors. In order to remedy this, many firms hold training sessions for employees that go over common unethical practices, what employees should do in order to share files/send emails, and how employees can report incidences where company information is in jeopardy. This way of training employees enables employees to understand email privacy and know what type of information can be shared and what documents and information cannot be shared with others. The information privacy agreement that states an employee cannot send proprietary information to others applies not just to people outside the firm but also other employees in the firm. Most firms, for example, don't allow employees to exchange slide show presentations or slide decks that contain proprietary information through personal emails.
Government employees and email
Government employees have further reduced privacy than the private sector employees. Under various public records acts and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the public can gain access to almost anything a government employee writes down. Government employees may also have their personal emails subject to disclosure if the email pertains to government business. Due to the nature of their job, courts are typically unwilling to find that government employees had a reasonable right to privacy in the first place.
Email from home/personal accounts
Unlike work emails, personal email from one's personal email account and computer is more likely to be protected as there is a much more reasonable expectation of privacy, but even personal emails may not be fully protected. Because emails are stored locally, at the ISP, and on the receiving end, there are multiple points at which security breakers or law enforcement can gain access to them. While it may be difficult for law enforcement to legally gain access to an individual's personal computer, they may be able to gain access to the person's emails easily from the ISP.
ISPs are also increasingly creating End User Service Agreements that users must agree to abide by. These agreements reduce any expectation of privacy, and often include terms that grant the ISP the right to monitor the network traffic or turn over records at the request of a government agency.
Global surveillance
From the documents leaked by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden, it became well known that various governments have been running programs to tap all kinds of communication at massive scales, including email. While the legality of this is still under question, it is clear that the email of citizens with no ties to a terrorist organization have been intercepted and stored. Whistleblower and former National Security Agency (NSA) employee William Binney has reported that the NSA has collected over 20 trillion communications via interception, including many email communications, representing one aspect of the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy.
A lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations alleges that Verizon illegally gave the US government unrestricted access to its entire Internet traffic without a warrant and that AT&T had a similar arrangement with the National Security Agency. While the FBI and NSA maintain that all their activities were and are legal, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA) granting AT&T and Verizon immunity from prosecution.
Spy pixels
Spy pixels, which report private details (IP address, time of reading the email, event of reading the email) to the sender of the email without the recipient's conscious approval to send the information, were described as "endemic" in February 2021. The "Hey" email service, contacted by BBC News, estimated that it blocked spy pixels in about 600,000 out of 1,000,000 messages per day.
See also
Spy pixel
Anonymous remailer
Dark Mail Alliance
Data privacy
Email encryption
email tracking
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008
Industrial espionage
Internet privacy
Secure communication
Secure email
Secure Messaging
STARTTLS – opportunistic transport layer security
United States v. Councilman
Email Privacy Act
References
External links
Andy Yen: Think your email's private? Think again
Company email lacks reasonable expectation of privacy (Smyth v. Pillsbury)
Workplace e-mail privacy from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (Australia)
"Investigating Employees' E-Mail Use", Morning Edition, National Public Radio, June 18, 2008
Software That Tracks E-Mail Is Raising Privacy Concerns, New York Times, November 22, 2000
Email
Privacy of telecommunications
Terms of service |
12177870 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null%20encryption | Null encryption | In modern cryptography, null encryption (or selecting null cipher or NONE cipher) is choosing not to use encryption in a system where various encryption options are offered. When this option is used, the text is the same before and after encryption, which can be practical for testing/debugging, or authentication-only communication. In mathematics such a function is known as the identity function.
Examples of this are the "eNULL" and "aNULL" cipher suite in OpenSSL, and the "NULL Encryption Algorithm" in IPSec.
See also
: "The NULL Encryption Algorithm and Its Use With IPsec"
References
Ciphers |
15982175 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realtek%20Remote%20Control%20Protocol | Realtek Remote Control Protocol | The Realtek Remote Control Protocol (RRCP), developed by Realtek, is an application layer protocol, running directly over Ethernet frames. The main idea behind this protocol is to allow direct access to the internal register of an Ethernet switch controller (ASIC) over an Ethernet network itself. This approach allows to avoid cost of including a processor, RAM, flash memory, etc. in a managed Ethernet switch. Instead, all "intelligence" is targeted to reside in a nearby computer, running special RRCP-aware Ethernet switch management software.
All RRCP packets are transmitted as Ethernet frames with EtherType 0x8899. Details on the RRCP protocol are listed in the datasheets of some Realtek ASICs with RRCP support, including RTL8324BP and
RTL8326. RRCP packet types are the following:
Hello – used to initiate a scan for RRCP-capable switches in a network segment, and to fetch some of their parameters.
Hello reply – sent by an RRCP-capable switch as a response to a valid "Hello" packet. Contains some their parameters, such as IDs, and MAC addresses.
Get – used to fetch the value from an internal register of the switch controller.
Get reply – sent by an RRCP-capable switch as a response to a valid Get packet. Contains requested register number and value, that was read from it.
Set – used to set an internal switch controller's register to a certain value. Contains register number and a value to be written to register. No acknowledgment is generated by a switch.
Loop Detect packet – not a part of RRCP protocol itself, but is closely associated, being an underlying mechanism for a simplified Spanning tree protocol substitute in RRCP-capable switch controllers.
Echo request – not a part of RRCP protocol itself, but is closely associated, being an underlying mechanism for a Layer-2 analog of ICMP Echo request (Type 8) message in RRCP-capable switch controllers.
Echo reply – not a part of RRCP protocol itself, but is closely associated, being an underlying mechanism for a Layer-2 analog of ICMP Echo reply (Type 0) message in RRCP-capable switch controllers.
Currently, RRCP protocol is officially working on Realtek's RTL8316BP, RTL8318P and RTL8324P switch controller chips. Unofficially, it also found to be working on RTL8316B, RTL8324, RTL8326 and RTL8326S.
There are two software suites that are able to communicate with RRCP-capable switches. First is Realtek's own WinSmart utility and Vendor-derived variants from it. Second is the OpenRRCP open-source project. Additionally, tcpdump has an interpreter for RRCP packets.
External links
OpenRRCP project
References
Internet protocols
Application layer protocols |
12987827 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music%20software | Music software | Music software is software used for musical composition, digital recording, the creation of electronic music, and other musical applications. Music software has been around for nearly 40 years. It has been seen to have profound impacts on education involving music and creative expression. Musical software has become an outlet for people who do not bond with traditional musical instruments, giving people new and easier ways to compose and perform music in ways that has never been seen before.
History
Music software development dates back to the 1960s and 70s. While this software was at best primitive, it nonetheless helped lay the foundation for the future development of the software and synthetic musical production. The early music software was run on large computers at several universities such as Stanford and Penn State. Much of what development came to music software came as a result of the continuous improvement to computers over time. Chain of development is seen clearly in 1978 when nearly 50 music programs came out as a result of MIDI technology, a form of computer communication still used today. MIDI technology provided the key link in hardware for musical software, giving a person a tactile control of an instrument and playing directly into the software in the computer and allowing for maximum control of the production. Fourth generation music software came out in the early 1990s. The largest improvement with this software was the addition of more detailed displays allowing the music software to show more on the screen making the program much easier to use and understand. Today, there are many different music making software packages.
Effects
The effects of music software are seen in almost every song heard today in one way or another. More than ever before, songs are being recorded into DAWs (digital audio workstations) because of their ease of use and their ability to easily manipulate audio files. Much of what used to take a team of professionals to do in a recording studio can now be done on a single computer.
Education
Music software has led to new ways of education in relation to music. New and emerging science and studies are proving that music software is an effective way in making students more creative at a younger age by providing them with all of the instruments they could ever want within one, streamlined music program. With live loop and sample playing DAWS that can play multiple samples of audio or midi files live with a controller triggering these samples, a new breed of instruments are available to students, allowing them to express themselves in ways never before seen.
Various schools and colleges have emerged with courses in Music Production and more so in electronic music production. Every Continent has at-least one such notable institute with The North American and European continents leading the way forward.
The future
Computers have now been made that can improvise music scores on their own, using complex algorithms. While functioning on a mathematical algorithm, it is nevertheless producing notes of its own without human instruction. Educators are beginning to recognize that computers hold the future of music. The software being developed for these machines will take music to new and startling heights with the help of computer-based production.
Components of Music Software
Components of musical software typically include: Sampling, Audio Editing features, effects, and in most cases voice and instrument recording. Some more features include:
Adjusting audio clips on the Arranger timeline
There are tools, or just use gestures with one tool for most functions
Working in the Detail Editor Panel with audio events & expressions
Warping audio with Stretch expressions
Slice In Place, to easily edit events within each audio clip
Gain & Pan expressions, freely drawn or snapping (for better techno)
There are too many features included in musical software too cover on one Wikipedia article.
See also
List of music software
References
Audio software
Music technology |
36181283 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft%20Surface | Microsoft Surface | Microsoft Surface is a series of touchscreen-based personal computers, tablets and interactive whiteboards designed and developed by Microsoft, running the Microsoft Windows operating system, apart from the Surface Duo, which runs on Android. The devices are manufactured by original equipment manufacturers, including Pegatron, and are designed to be premium devices that set examples to Windows OEMs. It comprises seven generations of hybrid tablets, 2-in-1 detachable notebooks, a convertible desktop all-in-one, an interactive whiteboard, and various accessories all with unique form factors. The majority of the Surface lineup features Intel processors and are compatible with Microsoft's Windows 10 or Windows 11 operating system.
Devices
The Surface family features ten main lines of devices:
The Surface line of tabletop computers, which featured PixelSense technology to recognize objects placed on the screen.
The Surface Go line of hybrid tablets, with optional detachable keyboard accessories and optional stylus pen. The latest model is the Surface Go 3.
The Surface Pro line of hybrid tablets, with similar, optional detachable keyboard accessories and optional stylus pen. The two latest models are the Surface Pro 8 and the Surface Pro X, which has the Microsoft SQ2 ARM SoC (a custom version of the Snapdragon 8cx.)
The Surface Laptop Go, introduced by Microsoft in October 2020, the Laptop Go is marketed as a more affordable alternative to the brand's premium laptops.
The Surface Laptop, a notebook with a 13.5-inch or 15-inch non-detachable touchscreen. The original device runs Windows 10 S by default; however, it can be upgraded to Windows 10 Pro. Starting with the Surface Laptop 2, the regular Home and Pro editions are used.
The Surface Book, a notebook with a detachable tablet screen. The base is configurable with or without discrete graphics and an independently operable tablet screen, on which the optional stylus pen functions. The stylus pen is sold separately from the latest Surface Book model.
The Surface Laptop Studio, a laptop that can adjust into a digital drafting table.
The Surface Studio, a 28-inch all-in-one desktop that adjusts into a digital drafting table with stylus and on-screen Surface Dial support.
The Surface Hub, a touch screen interactive whiteboard designed for collaboration.
The Surface Neo, an upcoming dual-screen touch screen device of which both screens are nine inches, which was originally planned to run Windows 10X until this OS was discontinued by Microsoft. At this time, it is unknown which OS the Surface Neo will run.
The Surface Duo, a dual-screen touch screen device of which both screens are 5.6 inches and can be used as a phone that runs Android.
History
Microsoft first announced Surface at an event on June 18, 2012, presented by former CEO Steve Ballmer in Milk Studios Los Angeles. Surface was the first major initiative by Microsoft to integrate its Windows operating system with its own hardware, and is the first PC designed and distributed solely by Microsoft.
The first Surface device in the Surface line, was marketed as "Surface for Windows RT" at the time was and was announced by Steven Sinofsky, former President of Windows and Windows Live. The second Surface line, based on the Intel architecture was spearheaded with Surface Pro, marketed as "Surface for Windows 8 Pro" at the time, and was demoed by Michael Angiulo, a corporate VP.
Sinofsky initially stated that pricing for the first Surface would be comparable to other ARM devices and pricing for Surface Pro would be comparable to current ultrabooks. Later, Ballmer noted the "sweet spot" for the bulk of the PC market was $300 to $800. Microsoft revealed the pricing and began accepting preorders for the 2012 Surface tablet, on October 16, 2012 "for delivery by 10/26". The device was launched alongside the general availability of Windows 8 on October 26, 2012. Surface Pro became available the following year on February 9, 2013. The devices were initially available only at Microsoft Stores retail and online, but availability was later expanded into other vendors.
In November 2012, Ballmer described the distribution approach to Surface as "modest" and on November 29 of that year, Microsoft revealed the pricing for the 64 GB and 128 GB versions of Surface with Windows 8 Pro. The tablet would go on sale on February 9, 2013, in the United States and Canada. A launch event was set to be held on February 8, 2013, but was cancelled at the last minute due to the February 2013 nor'easter. The 128GB version of the tablet sold out on the same day as its release. Though there was less demand for the 64GB version because of the much smaller available storage capacity, supplies of the lower cost unit were almost as tight.
On September 23, 2013, Microsoft announced the Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2, which feature hardware and software updates from the original. The Surface 2 launched October 22, 2013, alongside the Surface Pro 2, four days after the general availability of Windows 8.1. Later, Microsoft launched a variation of the Surface 2 with LTE connectivity for the AT&T network on March 18, 2014. Microsoft then announced the redesigned Surface Pro 3 on May 20, 2014, which went on sale on June 20, 2014.
The following year, on March 30, 2015, it announced the Surface 3, a more compact version of the Surface Pro 3. On September 8, 2015, Microsoft announced the "Surface Enterprise Initiative", a partnership between Accenture, Avanade, Dell Inc., and HP, to "enable more customers to enjoy the benefits of Windows 10." As part of the partnership, Dell will resell Surface Pro products through its business and enterprise channels, and offer its existing enterprise services (including Pro Support, warranty, and Configuration and Deployment) for Surface Pro devices it sells.
Microsoft announced the next generation Surface Pro 4 and the all new Surface Book, a hybrid laptop, at Microsoft October 2015 Event in New York on October 10, 2015. Microsoft began shipping Surface Hub devices on March 25, 2016. In June 2016, Microsoft confirmed production of the Surface 3 would stop in December of that year. No replacement product has been announced. Reports suggest this may be a consequence of Intel discontinuing the Broxton iteration of the Atom processor. On October 26, 2016, at Microsoft's event, a Surface Studio and Surface Book with Performance Base was announced. A wheel accessory, the Surface Dial, was announced as well, and became available on November 10, 2016.
Immediately following the announcement of the Surface Laptop at the #MicrosoftEDU event on May 2, 2017, and the Microsoft Build 2017 developer conference, Microsoft announced the fifth-generation Surface Pro at a special event in Shanghai on May 23, 2017.
On October 17, 2017, Microsoft announced Surface Book 2 adding a 15 in model to the line, and updating internal components.
On May 15, 2018, Microsoft announced the Surface Hub 2, featuring a new rotating hinge and the ability to link multiple Hubs together.
In June 2018, Microsoft announced the Surface Go, a $400 Surface tablet with a 10-inch screen and 64 or 128 GB of storage.
On October 2, 2019, Microsoft announced the Surface Pro 7, the Surface Laptop 3, and the Surface Pro X. Both the Surface Pro 7 and the Surface Laptop 3 come with a USB-C port. The Surface Pro X comes with the Microsoft SQ1 ARM processor. Microsoft also teased upcoming products: the Surface Neo, a dual screen tablet originally planned to run Windows 10X; and the Surface Duo, a dual screen mobile phone that runs Android. Both products were initially announced to be released in 2020, though reports suggest the release of the Surface Neo will be delayed until 2021. The Surface Duo was released on September 10, 2020.
On September 22, 2021, Microsoft announced the Surface Pro 8, the Surface Duo 2 and the Surface Laptop Studio. The Surface Pro 8 departs from the design established by the Surface Pro 3, instead resembling the Surface Pro X, with thinner bezels, rounded corners and two Thunderbolt 4 ports (replacing the USB-A ports in previous generations). The Surface Laptop Studio is seen as a successor to the Surface Book line, forgoing the detachable screen and opting for a new hinge design that allows the screen to be positioned in three different orientations, exactly like the Sony VAIO multi-flip line and VAIO Z Flip. All three products were released on October 5, 2021, coinciding with the release of Windows 11.
Hardware
Screen and input
The first two generations of both Surface lines feature ClearType Full HD display with 16:9 aspect ratio. With the release of the third generation Surface and Surface Pro, Microsoft increased the screen sizes to and respectively, each with a 3:2 aspect ratio, designed for a comfort use in a portrait orientation. The fourth generation increased the screen further to . The screens feature a multi-touch technology with 10 touch-points and scratch-resistance Gorilla Glass. All generations of the Surface Pro and third generation of the Surface also features an active pen, but it is not included in the box with all models.
The display responds to other sensors: an ambient light sensor to adjust screen brightness and a 3-axis accelerometer to sense Surface orientation and switch between portrait and landscape orientation modes. The Surface's built-in applications support screen rotation in all four directions, including upside-down.
There are three buttons on the first three generation of Surface, including a capacitive Windows button near the display that opens the Start Screen, and two physical buttons on the sides: power and volume. The fourth generation removed the capacitive windows button on the screen.
All Surfaces and Surface Pros have front and rear cameras as well as microphones.
Processor
The first generation Surface uses a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 of the ARM architecture, as opposed to the Intel x64 architecture and therefore shipped with Windows RT, which was written for the ARM architecture. The second generation Surface 2 added an Nvidia Tegra 4. The architecture limited Surface and Surface 2 to only apps from the Windows Store recompiled for ARM. With the release of the Surface 3, Microsoft switched the Surface line to the Intel x64 architecture, the same architecture found in the Surface Pro line. Surface 3 uses the Braswell Atom X7 processor.
With the Surface Pro line, Microsoft uses the Intel x64 architecture which can run most software designed for Microsoft Windows. Both Surface Pro and Surface Pro 2 had one processor variant, the Core i5, though the Surface Pro runs the Ivy Bridge iteration, and the Surface Pro 2 runs the Haswell iteration. The Surface Pro 3 added the Haswell Core i3 and Core i7 variants.
The 2019 Surface Pro X uses a custom ARM64 SOC, the Microsoft SQ1. The latest model uses an updated version of the SOC, known as Microsoft SQ2.
Storage
The Surface devices are released in six internal storage capacities: 32, 64, 128, 256, 512 GB and 1 TB. With the release of the third generation, the 32 GB model was discontinued. All models except the Surface Pro X also feature a microSDXC card slot, located behind the kickstand, which allow for the use of memory cards up to 200 GB.
Surface devices have a different amount of non-replaceable RAM, ranging from 2 to 32 GB, attached to the motherboard.
Microsoft's Surface/Storage site revealed that the 32 GB Surface RT has approximately 16 GB of user-available storage and the 64 GB Surface RT has roughly 45 GB.
External ports
On the left or right side of most Surface tablets, there is a full-size USB Type A port (except the Surface Pro X and Surface Go), and a 3.5 mm headphone/microphone jack (except the Surface Pro X). Older devices commonly had a Mini DisplayPort (or a micro-HDMI port on even older models), however these ports have been replaced with USB C ports since the 7th Surface Pro generation and Surface Go. All surface devices except the Surface 3 have Microsoft's magnetic Surface Connect port, for charging and data, and come with Surface Connect power cables, although devices that have them can also be charged over their USB C ports. All the devices have an accessory spine/Cover Port along the bottom that has not changed in dimensions. The ports have been moved in different locations throughout the various generations of Surface Pros/Surfaces, and beginning with the Surface Pro 3, Microsoft moved to a fin-style Surface Connect port.
Cellular connectivity
While all Surface devices come in the Wi-Fi only models, some generations also feature the Wi-Fi with a cellular support. The cellular variants, however, do not support circuit-switched voice calls and texts, allowing only data connectivity. The cellular models have a micro-SIM slot at the bottom of the device, next to the Type Cover connecting pins.
External color and kickstand
The exterior of the earlier generations of Surface (2012 tablet, Pro, and Pro 2) is made of VaporMg magnesium alloy giving a semi-glossy black durable finish that Microsoft calls "dark titanium". Originally, the design of Surface was to feature a full "VaporMg" design, but the production models ditched this and went with a "VaporMg" coating. Later devices moved towards a matte gray finish showing the actual magnesium color through the semi-transparent top coating. The Surface Laptop is available in four colors: platinum, graphite gold, burgundy, and cobalt blue.
The Surface and Surface Pro lines feature a kickstand which flips out from the back of the device to prop it up, allowing the device to be stood up at an angle hands-free. According to Microsoft, this is great for watching movies, video chatting, and typing documents. According to some reviewers, this kickstand is uncomfortable to use in one's lap and means the device won't fit on shallow desks. The first generation has a kickstand that can be set to a 22 degrees angle position. The second generation added a 55 degrees angle position which according to Microsoft makes the device more comfortable to type on the lap. The Surface 3 features three angle positions: 22, 44, and 60 degrees. The Surface Pro 3 is the first device to have a continuous kickstand that can be set at any angles between 22 and 150 degrees. With the fifth-generation Surface Pro, Microsoft added an additional 15 degrees of rotation to the hinge bringing the widest possible angle to 165 degrees, or what Microsoft calls "Studio Mode".
Surface Book
On October 6, 2015, Microsoft unveiled the Surface Book, a 2-in-1 detachable with a mechanically attached, durable hardware keyboard. It became the first Surface device to be marketed as a laptop instead of a tablet. The device has a teardrop design.
The Surface Book has what Microsoft calls a "dynamic fulcrum hinge" which allows the device to support the heavier notebook/screen portion.
Another unique aspect of the Surface Book is an available discrete graphics adapter, contained in the keyboard module. This module can then be detached while the Surface Book is running, in which case the system automatically switches to the integrated graphics in the tablet unit.
On October 26, 2016, Microsoft unveiled an additional configuration, called the Surface Book with Performance Base, which has an upgraded processor and a longer battery life.
The second generation Surface Book 2 was announced on October 17, 2017, introducing an upgraded ceramic hinge for stability, and lighter overall weight distribution. A 15-inch model was added to the line.
On May 6, 2020, the third generation Surface Book 3 was announced, featuring 10th-generation Intel processors, improved battery life, and faster SSD storage.
Surface Laptop
On May 3, 2017, Microsoft unveiled the Surface Laptop, a non-detachable version of the Surface Book claiming to have the thinnest touch-enabled LCD panel of its kind. Its permanently attached hardware keyboard comes in four colors and uses the same kind of fabric as the Type Cover accessories for the tablets. The device comes with the newly announced Windows 10 S operating system, which enables faster boot times at the expense of the ability to download and install programs from the web instead of the Microsoft Store. Users can switch to a fully enabled version of Windows 10 for free.
Surface Studio
On October 26, 2016, Microsoft announced a 28-inch all-in-one desktop PC, the Surface Studio. The device claims to have the thinnest LCD ever made in an all-in-one PC. All its components, including the processor and a surround-sound system, are located in a compact base on which the screen is mounted upon via a flexible, four-point hinge. The design allows the screen to fold down to a 20-degree angle for physical interaction with the user. It comes with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update preinstalled, but is optimized for the Windows 10 Creators Update released in April 2017.
Surface Hub
On January 21, 2015, Microsoft introduced a new device category under the Surface family: the Surface Hub. It is an 84-inch 120 Hz 4K or 55-inch 1080p multi-touch, multi-pen, wall-mounted all-in-one device, aimed for collaboration and videoconferencing use of businesses. The device runs a variant of the Windows 10 operating system.
Surface Neo
On October 2, 2019, Microsoft unveiled the Surface Neo, an upcoming dual-screen tablet. The device is a folio with two 9-inch displays that can be used in various configurations ("postures"), including a laptop-like form where a Bluetooth keyboard is attached to the bottom screen. Depending on its position, the remainder of the touchscreen can be used for different features; the keyboard can be attached at the top to use the bottom as a touchpad, or at the bottom to display a special area above the keyboard (the "wonderbar"), which can house tools such as emojis. The device was originally planned to run a new Windows 10 edition known as Windows 10X, which was designed specifically for this class of devices. However, Microsoft eventually discontinued Windows 10X. At this time, it is unknown which version of Windows it will run. It is possible it may run Windows 11.
Surface Duo
Alongside the Surface Neo, Microsoft also unveiled the Surface Duo, a dual-screen Android smartphone with a similar design.
Software
Surface devices sold since July 29, 2015 ship with the Windows 10 operating system. Also, up to July 2016, older models which shipped with Windows 8.1 were eligible for a free upgrade to Windows 10.
The original Surface and Surface 2 models use Windows RT, a special version of Windows 8 designed for devices with ARM processors and cannot be upgraded to Windows 10. However, there were several major updates made available after its initial release that include Windows RT 8.1, RT 8.1 Update 1, RT 8.1 August update, and RT 8.1 Update 3. These older, ARM-based models of Surface are not compatible with Windows 10, but received several new features including a new Start menu similar to that found in early preview builds of Windows 10.
From Surface Pro 4 and onward, all Surface devices support Windows Hello facial biometric authentication out of the box through its cameras and IR-sensors. The Surface Pro 3 can utilize the Surface Pro 4 Type Cover with Fingerprint ID to gain Windows Hello support.
The Surface Duo runs Android.
Tablet mode
The Windows 10 user interface has two modes: desktop mode and tablet mode. When a keyboard is connected to the Surface, Windows 10 runs in desktop mode; when it is removed or folded around the back, Windows 10 runs in tablet mode.
When running in tablet mode, the start menu and all the apps run in full screen. All running apps are hidden from the taskbar and a back button appears. Swiping from the top closes the app while swiping from the left evokes the Task View and swiping from the right evokes the Action Center.
Apps
Several of the included apps updated with Windows 10 are: Mail, People, Calendar, Camera, Microsoft Edge, Xbox app, OneNote, Photos, Voice Recorder, Phone Companion, Calculator, Scan, Alarms & Clock, and the Microsoft Store. Other apps include Maps, Movies & TV, Groove Music, Microsoft Solitaire Collection and the MSN apps: Money, News, Weather, and Sports.
Surface devices come preinstalled with the OneNote app for taking handwritten notes. Windows 10 also features a text input panel with handwriting recognition which automatically converts handwriting to text.
The Microsoft Edge browser features an inking function which allows handwritten annotations directly on webpages.
Microsoft has ported its Office suite for use on Windows 10 devices, including the Surface devices running Windows 10. As the screen size on these devices exceed 10 inches, the apps require an Office 365 subscription to edit documents, although it is not needed to view and print them.
Surface devices have an internal microphone and speakers optimized for the Cortana personal assistant feature included on Windows 10 devices.
Third-party applications that have been designed with the pen and touch interaction of Surface in mind include Drawboard PDF and Sketchable.
Specialized software
Prior to the release of Windows 10, on Surface Pro 3 Microsoft made the Surface Hub app available, which allowed the adjustment of Pen pressure sensitivity and button functions. The Surface Hub app was renamed "Surface" following the launch of the Surface Hub device. Additionally, toggles to control sound quality and to disable the capacitive Windows button on the Surface 3 and Pro 3 devices were included.
With Surface Pro 3 and the Surface Pen based on N-Trig technology, Microsoft added the capability to launch OneNote from the lock screen without logging in by pressing the purple button at the top of the pen. Microsoft added sections to Windows 10 settings that have the ability to control the functions of the buttons on the Surface Pen. One such function is to launch OneNote with the press of the top button of the Surface Pro 4 pen. With the introduction of the Surface Dial, Microsoft added a Wheel settings section to the Settings app in Windows 10 under Devices. The Windows 10 Anniversary Update added the ability to adjust the shortcuts of each of the Pen's buttons performed.
Accessories
Microsoft offer several Surface accessories, most of which are Bluetooth connected devices. Among these are the Surface Pen, the keyboard covers, and the Surface Dial.
There are two main versions of the keyboard covers that connect via the Accessory Spine on the Surface tablets. The now discontinued Touch Cover, and the ever-evolving Type Cover. They feature a multi-touch touchpad, and a full QWERTY keyboard (with pre-defined action keys in place of the function row, though the function row is still accessible via the function button). The covers are made of various soft-touch materials and connect to the Surface with a polycarbonate spine with pogo pins.
Microsoft sells the Surface Pen, an active-digitzer pen, separate of Surface, but included it in all Surface tablets until the fifth-generation Surface Pro where it was removed. The Surface Pen is designed to integrate with inking capabilities on Windows including OneNote and Windows Ink Workspace.
The Surface Dial was introduced alongside the Surface Studio, and is a computer wheel designed to work on-screen with the Surface Studio and fifth-generation Surface Pro. Previous Surface Pro devices were updated to support it as well.
Remix project
In 2013, Microsoft announced that they were going to design other covers for the Surface accessory spine (code named "blades") based on the Touch Cover 2's sensors. The only product that was shipped was the Surface Music Cover and the Surface Music Kit app.
Model comparison
Surface and Surface Go line
Surface Pro line
Surface Book line
Surface Laptop line
Surface Studio line
Promotion
Television commercial
In October 2012, Microsoft aired its first commercial, directed by Jon Chu, for the Surface product line. The first 30-second commercial is the Surface Movement which focus on Windows RT version of the first generation of Surface with detachable keyboard and kickstand. It first aired during Dancing with the Stars commercial break.
Partnership with NFL
In 2014, Microsoft announced a five-year, $400 million deal with the National Football League, in which Surface became the official tablet computer brand of the NFL. As part of the partnership, special, ruggedized Surface Pro 2 devices were issued to teams for use on the sidelines, allowing coaches and players view and annotate footage of previous plays. The partnership was initially hampered by television commentators, who erroneously referred to the devices as being an "iPad" on several occasions. Microsoft has since stated that it "coached" commentators on properly referring to the devices on-air.
Designed on Surface
On January 11, 2016, Microsoft announced a collaboration with POW! WOW!. It includes a group of artists from around the world that utilizes various Surface devices, such as the Surface Pro 4 and the Surface Book, to create a total of 17 murals. The artists are filmed using their Surface devices and explain how they integrate Surface into their workflow. The final products are then posted to YouTube that accompanies a post on the Microsoft Devices blog.
United States Department of Defense
On February 17, 2016, Microsoft announced that alongside the US Department of Defense's plans to upgrade to Windows 10, that it has approved Surface devices and certified them for use through the Defense Information Systems Agency Unified Capabilities Approved Products List. Surface Book, Surface Pro 4, Surface Pro 3, and Surface 3 have all been approved as Multifunction Mobile Devices, thus meeting the necessary requirements for security and compatibility with other systems.
Reception
Reviews of the first-generation Surface RT by critics ranged broadly. The hardware received mostly positive reviews, while the software and overall experience were mixed. Wired reviewer Mathew Honan stated that while "This is one of the most exciting pieces of hardware I’ve ever used. It is extremely well-designed; meticulous even," the tablets are "likely to confuse many of Microsoft’s longtime customers". TechCrunch, Matt Buchanan at BuzzFeed, and Gizmodo recommended against purchasing the tablet. Gizmodo mentioned issues such as the high price tag and described it as similar but inferior to the iPad, but also praised the hardware saying, "You'll appreciate it every time you pick it up and turn it on. It's a simple, joyful experience." David Pogue at The New York Times praised the hardware but criticized the software. The Verge described the technology as fulfilling the role of a laptop or tablet "half as well as other devices on the market," adding "the whole thing is honestly perplexing." Warner Crocker from Gotta Be Mobile described it as "frustratingly confusing." Farhad Manjoo of Slate noted that the "shortcomings are puzzling" given how much time Microsoft spent developing the device. Neil McAllister has noted the lack of a compelling case to switch from the iPad to a Windows RT device at the same price point, because Apple already has a strong network effect from their app developers and few Windows developers have ported their offerings over to the ARM processor. The Surface RT had worse battery life than similar devices. The first-generation Surface Pro has shorter battery life than the original ARM-based Surface due in part to its full HD screen and Intel Core i5 processor.
The Surface Pro 3 has received positive reviewers. David Pogue suggested "The upshot is that, with hardly any thickness or weight penalty, the kickstand and the Type Cover let you transform your 1.8-pound tablet into an actual, fast, luxury laptop". Pogue said that the Surface Pro 3's form factor works well as a tablet, in contrast to the Surface Pro 2, whose bulk and weight limited its appeal as a tablet. Pogue also stated that the new multi-stage kickstand, 3:2 screen aspect ratio, and new Type Cover 3 detachable keyboard made it a competent laptop. Another advantage of the Surface Pro 3 is that it is considered a tablet by the FAA and TSA, despite its hardware which makes it capable of running all x86 Windows programs. This is advantageous in air travel, since a tablet can be used during takeoff or landing, and a tablet can be left in a bag when going through a TSA scanner machine, neither of which apply to a laptop. It has been suggested that the Surface Pro 3 comes closest to the Microsoft Tablet PC concept that company founder Bill Gates announced in 2001, being the first Surface to become a credible laptop replacement. Time magazine included Microsoft Surface Pro 3 in the list of the 25 best inventions of 2014.
The Surface 3 (non-Pro) received generally positive reviews from computer critics. They praised Microsoft's shift from ARM architecture toward x86, and therefore from Windows RT to a regular Windows OS. Most noted a well designed chassis and accessories produced of quality materials, and overall premium feeling of use. While less powerful, the Surface 3 was a lighter and cheaper alternative to the Surface Pro 3. More importantly, the Surface 3 could compete at the high-end of Android and iPad tablets, with the advantage of being a device running a full desktop OS instead of a mobile OS for a similar price. Reviewers also note that 37 GB of the total storage space in the low-end Surface 3 is available to the user, while its close competitor, the low-end iPad Air 2, has only 12.5 GB of user-available storage space for the same price. The most common downsides are relatively low battery life, slower performance compared to devices with Intel Core processors and a high price since accessories like Surface Pen and Type Cover are not included.
Industry response
When Surface was first announced, critics noted that the device represented a significant departure for Microsoft, as the company had previously relied exclusively on third-party OEMs to produce devices running Windows, and began shifting towards a first-party hardware model with similarities to that of Apple. Steve Ballmer said that like Xbox, Surface was an example of the sort of hardware products Microsoft will release in the future.
Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), whose products have traditionally run Microsoft operating systems, have had positive responses to the release of Surface. HP, Lenovo, Samsung, and Dell applauded Microsoft's decision to create its own Tablet PC and said that relationships with Microsoft have not changed. John Solomon, senior vice president of HP, said that "Microsoft was basically making a leadership statement and showing what's possible in the tablet space". Acer founder Stan Shih said that he believed Microsoft only introduced its own hardware in order to establish the market and would then withdraw in favor of its OEMs.
However, others believe that OEMs were left sidelined by the perception that Microsoft's new tablet would replace their products. Acer chairman JT Wang advised Microsoft to "please think twice". Microsoft has acknowledged that Surface may "affect their commitment" of partners to the Windows platform.
The need for the Surface to market an ARM-compatible version of Windows was questioned by analysts because of recent developments in the PC industry; both Intel and AMD introduced x86-based system-on-chip designs for Windows 8, Atom "Clover Trail" and "Temash" respectively, in response to the growing competition from ARM licensees. In particular, Intel claimed that Clover Trail-based tablets could provide battery life rivaling that of ARM devices; in a test by PC World, Samsung's Clover Trail-based Ativ Smart PC was shown to have battery life exceeding that of the first gen ARM-based Surface. Peter Bright of Ars Technica argued that Windows RT had no clear purpose, since the power advantage of ARM-based devices was "nowhere near as clear-cut as it was two years ago", and that users would be better off purchasing Office 2013 themselves because of the removed features and licensing restrictions of Office RT.
Sales
Sales of the first generation Surface did not meet Microsoft's expectations, which led to price reductions and other sales incentives.
In March 2013, Bloomberg reported from inside sources that Surface sales were behind expectations, particularly of the ARM-based Surface model. Microsoft had originally projected sales of 2 million Surface units during the final quarter of 2012, a total of 1.5 million Surface devices had been sold since launch with Surface Pro accounting for 400,000 of these sales. The more expensive Surface Pro, with its Intel CPU that makes it a full-fledged Windows laptop PC, despite its compromises, was successful compared to other OEMs' first-generation Windows 8 Ultrabook hybrids which were larger and/or more expensive.
In July 2013, Steve Ballmer revealed that the Surface hasn't sold as well as he hoped. He reported that Microsoft had made a loss of due to the lackluster Surface sales. Concurrently, Microsoft cut the price of first-gen Surface RT worldwide by 30%, with its U.S. price falling to . This was followed by a further price cut in August after it was revealed that even the marketing costs had exceed the sales. On August 4, 2013, the cost of Surface Pro was cut by $100 giving it an entry price of $799. Several law firms sued Microsoft, accusing the company of misleading shareholders about sales of the first-gen ARM based Surface tablet, calling it an "unmitigated disaster". In the first two years of sales, Microsoft lost almost two billion dollars.
The poor sales of the ARM-based Surface tablet had been credited to the continuing market dominance of Microsoft's competitors in the tablet market. Particularly, Apple's iPad retained its dominance due its App store offering the most tablet-optimized applications. Most OEMs opted to produce tablets running Google Android, which came in a wide variety of sizes and prices (albeit with mixed success among most OEMs), and Google Play had the second-largest selection of tablet applications. By contrast there was a limited amount of software designed specifically for Surface's operating system, Windows RT, the selection which was even weaker than Windows Phone. Indeed, OEMs reported that most customers felt Intel-based tablets were more appropriate for use in business environments, as they were compatible with the much more widely available x86 programs while Windows RT was not. Microsoft's subsequent efforts have been focused upon refining the Surface Pro and making it a viable competitor in the premium ultra-mobile PC category, against other Ultrabooks and the MacBook Air, while discontinuing development of ARM-powered Surface devices as the Surface 3 (non-Pro) had an Intel x86 CPU (albeit with lower performance than the Surface Pro 3).
The resultant Surface Pro 3 succeeded in garnering a great interest in the Surface line, making Surface business profitable for the first time in fiscal year Q1 2015. Later in Q2, the Surface division's sales topped $1 billion. Surface division scored $888 million for Q4 2015 despite an overall loss of $2.1 billion for Microsoft, a 117% year-over-year growth thanks to the steady commercial performance of Surface Pro 3 and the launch of mainstream model Surface 3. In the first quarter of fiscal year 2018 the Surface division posted its best earnings performance to date.
Reported issues
Users on Microsoft's support forum reported that some Touch Covers were splitting at the seam where it connects to the tablet, exposing its wiring. A Microsoft spokesperson stated that the company was aware of the issue, and would offer free replacements for those who have been affected by the defect. Other users reported issues with audio randomly stuttering or muting on the Surface tablet while in use. Wi-Fi connectivity issues were also reported. Firmware updates that attempted to fix the problem were released, but some users still reported problems like blue screen errors while watching video and crash of display driver. Microsoft has acknowledged a bug in the Windows key that does not always work, but has promised a fix. The latest update, which promised to fix the issue, was not able to fix it.
With the original Surface Pro, Microsoft acknowledged issues encountered by some users with its stylus pen, including intermittent pen failures, and with older applications that do not have complete pen support due to the different APIs used by Surface Pro's stylus drivers. In the latter case, Microsoft has indicated that it is working with software vendors to ensure better compatibility. As for later models beginning with the Surface Pro 3, the N-Trig digital pen digitizer system has attained high pen compatibility with older applications thanks to a regularly updated, optional WinTab driver. Issues had also been experienced with slow Wi-Fi connectivity, and the device not properly returning from standby.
iFixit has awarded the Surface Pro its worst ever repairability rating, but CEO Kyle Wiens claims that it is due to incompetence rather than deliberate design choices.
Timeline
See also
Microsoft PixelSense, a product line launched in 2007 and formerly called Microsoft Surface
Comparison of tablet computers
Microsoft Lumia
References
External links
Building of Surface
Tablet computers introduced in 2012
Windows RT devices
Microsoft Surface |
46647675 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON%20Web%20Token | JSON Web Token | JSON Web Token (JWT, pronounced , same as the word "jot") is a proposed Internet standard for creating data with optional signature and/or optional encryption whose payload holds JSON that asserts some number of claims. The tokens are signed either using a private secret or a public/private key.
For example, a server could generate a token that has the claim "logged in as administrator" and provide that to a client. The client could then use that token to prove that it is logged in as admin. The tokens can be signed by one party's private key (usually the server's) so that party can subsequently verify the token is legitimate. If the other party, by some suitable and trustworthy means, is in possession of the corresponding public key, they too are able to verify the token's legitimacy. The tokens are designed to be compact, URL-safe, and usable especially in a web-browser single-sign-on (SSO) context. JWT claims can typically be used to pass identity of authenticated users between an identity provider and a service provider, or any other type of claims as required by business processes.
JWT relies on other JSON-based standards: JSON Web Signature and JSON Web Encryption.
Structure
The three parts are encoded separately using Base64url Encoding , and concatenated using periods to produce the JWT:
const token = base64urlEncoding(header) + '.' + base64urlEncoding(payload) + '.' + base64urlEncoding(signature)
The above data and the secret of "secretkey" creates the token:
This resulting token can be easily passed into HTML and HTTP.
Use
In authentication, when the user successfully logs in using their credentials, a JSON Web Token will be returned and must be saved locally (typically in local or session storage, but cookies can also be used), instead of the traditional approach of creating a session in the server and returning a cookie. For unattended processes the client may also authenticate directly by generating and signing its own JWT with a pre-shared secret and pass it to a OAuth compliant service like so:POST /oauth2/token?
Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
grant_type=urn:ietf:params:oauth:grant-type:jwt-bearer&assertion=eyJhb...If the client passes a valid JWT assertion the server will generate an access_token valid for making calls to the application and pass it back to the client:{
"access_token": "eyJhb...",
"token_type": "Bearer",
"expires_in": 3600
}When the client wants to access a protected route or resource, the user agent should send the JWT, typically in the Authorization header using the Bearer schema. The content of the header might look like the following:
Authorization: Bearer eyJhbGci...<snip>...yu5CSpyHI
This is a stateless authentication mechanism as the user state is never saved in server memory. The server's protected routes will check for a valid JWT in the Authorization header, and if it is present, the user will be allowed to access protected resources. As JWTs are self-contained, all the necessary information is there, reducing the need to query the database multiple times.
Standard fields
Implementations
JWT implementations exist for many languages and frameworks, including but not limited to:
.NET (C# VB.Net etc)
C
Clojure
Common Lisp
Dart
Elixir
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lua
Node.js
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
PowerShell
Python
Racket
Raku
Ruby
Rust
Scala
Swift
Vulnerabilities
JSON web tokens may contain session state. But if project requirements allow session invalidation before JWT expiration, services can no longer trust token assertions by the token alone. To validate that the session stored in the token is not revoked, token assertions must be checked against a data store. This renders the tokens no longer stateless, undermining the primary advantage of JWTs.
Security consultant Tim McLean reported vulnerabilities in some JWT libraries that used the alg field to incorrectly validate tokens, most commonly by accepting a alg=none token. While these vulnerabilities were patched, McLean suggested deprecating the alg field altogether to prevent similar implementation confusion. Still, new alg=none vulnerabilities are still being found in the wild, with four CVEs filed in the 2018-2021 period having this cause.
With proper design, developers can address algorithm vulnerabilities by taking precautions:
Never let the JWT header alone drive verification
Know the algorithms (avoid depending on the field alone)
Use an appropriate key size
See also
Access token
References
External links
jwt.io – specialized website about JWT with tools and documentation, maintained by Auth0
Spring Boot JWT Auth – Integrating JWT authentication with Spring framework
JWT Security – JWT Security e-Book PDF (Polish language)
Why do we need JWT in the modern web - a detailed article on the topic with some historical considerations
How To install JWT Auth in laravel - Article with installation steps of JWT Auth
Computer access control
Identity management
Federated identity
Identity management systems
Metadata standards
JSON |
12941228 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software%20parametric%20models | Software parametric models | A parametric model is a set of related mathematical equations that incorporates variable parameters. A scenario is defined by selecting a value for each parameter. Software project managers use software parametric models and parametric estimation tools to estimate their projects' duration, staffing and cost.
In the early 1980s refinements to earlier models, such as PRICE S and SLIM, and new models, such as SPQR, Checkpoint, ESTIMACS, SEER-SEM or COCOMO and its commercial implementations PCOC, Costimator, GECOMO, COSTAR and Before You Leap emerged.
The prime advantage of these models is that they are objective, repeatable, calibrated and easy to use, although calibration to previous experience may be a disadvantage when applied to a significantly different project.
These models were highly effective for waterfall model, version 1 software projects of the 1980s and highlighted the early achievements of parametrics. As systems became more complex and new languages emerged, different software parametric models emerged that employed new cost estimating relationships, risk analyzers, software sizing, nonlinear software reuse, and personnel continuity.
References
Business software
Software project management
Project management software
Software metrics |
513990 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserActive | LaserActive | The is a converged device and fourth-generation home video game console capable of playing LaserDiscs, Compact Discs, console games, and LD-G karaoke discs. It was released by Pioneer Corporation in 1993. In addition to LaserActive games, separately sold add-on modules (called "PACs" by Pioneer) accept Mega Drive/Genesis and PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 ROM cartridges and CD-ROMs.
Pioneer released the LaserActive model CLD-A100 in Japan on August 20, 1993 at a cost of ¥89,800, and in the United States on September 13, 1993 at a cost of $970. An NEC-branded version of the LaserActive player known as the LD-ROM² System, or model PCE-LD1, was released on December 1993, which was priced identically to the original system and also accepted Pioneer's PAC modules. The LaserActive has no regional lockout, allowing software from any region to be played on any system.
Accessories
PAC modules
In the headings below, the Japanese model number occurs first, followed by the North American model number.
Mega LD PAC (PAC-S1 / PAC-S10)
Pioneer Electronics (USA) and Sega Enterprises released this module that allows users to play 8-inch and 12-inch LaserActive Mega LD discs, in addition to standard Sega CD discs and Genesis cartridges, as well as CD+G discs. It was the most popular add-on bought by the greater part of the LaserActive owners, costing roughly US $600. It comes with a LaserActive-branded version of Sega's 6-button control pad (CPD-S1).
LD-ROM² PAC (PAC-N1 / PAC-N10)
Pioneer Electronics (USA) and NEC Home Electronics released this module that allows users to play 8-inch and 12-inch LaserActive LD-ROM² discs, as well as CD-ROM² and Super CD-ROM² discs, HuCards and CD+G discs. The Japanese version of the PAC can also run Arcade CD-ROM² discs through the use of an Arcade Card Duo. The retail price was US $600. It came with a LaserActive-branded version of NEC's Turbo Pad (CPD-N1/CPD-N10). An NEC branded version of the LD-ROM² PAC known as the PC Engine PAC (model PCE-LP1) was also released. Due to the unpopularity of the TurboGrafx-16 in North America, very few PAC-N10 units were produced, resulting in their scarcity compared to its Sega counterpart.
Karaoke PAC (PAC-K1 / PAC-K10)
This PAC allows the CLD-A100 to use all NTSC LaserKaraoke titles. The front panel has two microphone inputs with separated volume controls, as well as tone control. The retail price was US $350.
Computer Interface PAC (PAC-PC1)
The Computer Interface PAC has an RS-232 port, enabling the CLD-A100 to be controlled by a custom software developed for a home computer. The PAC came with a 33-button infrared remote control providing more functionality than the 24-button remote included with the CLD-A100. It also included a computer program called LaserActive Program Editor on floppy disk for DOS and classic Mac OS. The floppy disks had some sample programs created with the editor for use with the first five LaserDiscs in the Tenchi Muyo! anime series.
LaserActive 3-D Goggles
The LaserActive 3-D Goggles (model GOL-1) employ an active shutter 3D system compatible with at least six 3D-ready LD-ROM software titles: 3-D Museum (1994), Vajra 2 (1994), Virtual Cameraman 2 (1994), Dr. Paolo No Totteoki Video (1994), Goku (1995), and 3D Virtual Australia (1996), the last software title published for the LaserActive.
The goggles are also compatible with the Sega Master System, and are interchangeable with the SegaScope 3-D Glasses. They can also be used to view 3-D images from autostereograms.
A goggle adapter (model ADP-1), packaged and sold separately from the 3-D Goggles, enables the user to connect one or two pairs of goggles to the CLD-A100.
Games
The standard LaserActive games were on LaserDisc encoded as an LD-ROM. An LD-ROM had a capacity of 540 MB (where digital audio would have normally been stored) with 60 minutes of analog audio and video.
Contemporary devices
In the early 1990s, a number of consumer electronics manufacturers designed converged devices around CD-ROM technology. At the time, CD-ROM systems were expensive. The LaserActive was one of several multipurpose, multi-format, upmarket home entertainment systems with software stored on optical discs. These systems were premised on early conceptions of multimedia entertainment.
Some comparable systems are the Commodore CDTV, Philips CD-i, 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, and Tandy Video Information System.
Reception
Computer Gaming World in January 1994 stated that although LaserActive was "a better product in many ways" than 3DO, it lacked software and the NEC and Sega control packs were too expensive.
See also
LD-ROM
Edutainment
Multimedia PC
References
External links
Pioneer LaserActive at Computer Closet
Pioneer LaserActive at laserdiscarchive.co.uk
LaserActive Preservation Project
Pioneer Corporation products
CD-ROM-based consoles
Fourth-generation video game consoles
Home video game consoles
Karaoke
LaserDisc
LaserDisc video games
Sega Genesis
TurboGrafx-16
Products introduced in 1993
1990s toys |
8078610 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database%20administration | Database administration | Database administration is the function of managing and maintaining database management systems (DBMS) software. Mainstream DBMS software such as Oracle, IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server need ongoing management. As such, corporations that use DBMS software often hire specialized information technology personnel called database administrators or DBAs.
Responsibilities
Installation, configuration and upgrading of Database server software and related products.
Evaluate Database features and Database related products.
Establish and maintain sound backup and recovery policies and procedures.
Take care of the Database design and implementation.
Implement and maintain database security (create and maintain users and roles, assign privileges).
Database tuning and performance monitoring.
Application tuning and performance monitoring.
Setup and maintain documentation and standards.
Plan growth and changes (capacity planning).
Work as part of a team and provide 24/7 support when required.
Do general technical troubleshooting and give cons.
Database recovery
Types
There are three types of DBAs:
Systems DBAs (also referred to as physical DBAs, operations DBAs or production Support DBAs): focus on the physical aspects of database administration such as DBMS installation, configuration, patching, upgrades, backups, restores, refreshes, performance optimization, maintenance and disaster recovery.
Development DBAs: focus on the logical and development aspects of database administration such as data model design and maintenance, DDL (data definition language) generation, SQL writing and tuning, coding stored procedures, collaborating with developers to help choose the most appropriate DBMS feature/functionality and other pre-production activities.
Application DBAs: usually found in organizations that have purchased 3rd party application software such as ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) systems. Examples of such application software includes Oracle Applications, Siebel and PeopleSoft (both now part of Oracle Corp.) and SAP. Application DBAs straddle the fence between the DBMS and the application software and are responsible for ensuring that the application is fully optimized for the database and vice versa. They usually manage all the application components that interact with the database and carry out activities such as application installation and patching, application upgrades, database cloning, building and running data cleanup routines, data load process management, etc.
While individuals usually specialize in one type of database administration, in smaller organizations, it is not uncommon to find a single individual or group performing more than one type of database administration.
Automation of database administration
The degree to which the administration of a database is automated dictates the skills and personnel required to manage databases. On one end of the spectrum, a system with minimal automation will require significant experienced resources to manage; perhaps 5-10 databases per DBA. Alternatively an organization might choose to automate a significant amount of the work that could be done manually therefore reducing the skills required to perform tasks. As automation increases, the personnel needs of the organization splits into highly skilled workers to create and manage the automation and a group of lower skilled "line" DBAs who simply execute the automation.
Database administration work is complex, repetitive, time-consuming and requires significant training. Since databases hold valuable and mission-critical data, companies usually look for candidates with multiple years of experience. Database administration often requires DBAs to put in work during off-hours (for example, for planned after hours downtime, in the event of a database-related outage or if performance has been severely degraded). DBAs are commonly well compensated for the long hours.
One key skill required and often overlooked when selecting a DBA is database recovery (a part of disaster recovery). It is not a case of “if” but a case of “when” a database suffers a failure, ranging from a simple failure to a full catastrophic failure. The failure may be data corruption, media failure, or user induced errors. In either situation the DBA must have the skills to recover the database to a given point in time to prevent a loss of data.
Database administration tools
Often, the DBMS software comes with certain tools to help DBAs manage the DBMS. Such tools are called native tools. For example, Microsoft SQL Server comes with SQL Server Management Studio and Oracle has tools such as SQL*Plus and Oracle Enterprise Manager/Grid Control. In addition, 3rd parties such as BMC, Quest Software, Embarcadero Technologies, patchVantage and SQL Maestro Group offer GUI tools to monitor the DBMS and help DBAs carry out certain functions inside the database more easily.
Another kind of database software exists to manage the provisioning of new databases and the management of existing databases and their related resources. The process of creating a new database can consist of hundreds or thousands of unique steps from satisfying prerequisites to configuring backups where each step must be successful before the next can start. A human cannot be expected to complete this procedure in the same exact way time after time - exactly the goal when multiple databases exist. As the number of DBAs grows, without automation the number of unique configurations frequently grows to be costly/difficult to support. All of these complicated procedures can be modeled by the best DBAs into database automation software and executed by the standard DBAs. Software has been created specifically to improve the reliability and repeatability of these procedures such as Stratavia's Data Palette and GridApp Systems Clarity.
The impact of IT and cloud automation
Automated Database operations has grown since 2009, following Amazon Web Services introduction of AWS RDS, providing automated and managed database as a service. Microsoft Azure launched a similar automated database as a service in 2010, with SQL Azure, providing automated backups, with geo-replication and high availability. The introduction of docker (software) containers has enhanced support for fast delivery of containerized database instances, and both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure have enhanced automated support for containers in their respective services.
Third party support for database container images has grown, including MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL from Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server from Microsoft, and from independent port's of docker (software) from Windocks Kubernetes, and the development of the Kubernetes Operator pattern by CoreOS, further extended the ability to orchestrate database container. Kubernetes Operators have been used by third parties to enable the ability to automate database administration, including deployment of instances of a database, upgrade database versions, or perform backups.
Newer technologies such as Stratavia's Data Palette suite and GridApp Systems Clarity have begun to increase the automation of databases causing the reduction of database related tasks. However at best this only reduces the amount of mundane, repetitive activities and does not eliminate the need for DBAs. The intention of DBA automation is to enable DBAs to focus on more proactive activities around database architecture, deployment, performance and service level management.
Every database requires a database owner account that can perform all schema management operations. This account is specific to the database and cannot log into Data Director. You can add database owner accounts after database creation. Data Director users must log in with their database-specific credentials to view the database, its entities, and its data or to perform database management tasks. Database administrators and application developers can manage databases only if they have appropriate permissions and roles granted to them by the organization administrator. The permissions and roles must be granted on the database group or on the database, and they only apply within the organization in which they are granted.
Learning database administration
There are several education institutes that offer professional courses, including late-night programs, to allow candidates to learn database administration. Also, DBMS vendors such as Oracle, Microsoft and IBM offer certification programs to help companies to hire qualified DBA practitioners. College degree in Computer Science or related field is helpful but not necessarily a prerequisite.
See also
Column-oriented DBMS
Data warehouse
Directory service
Distributed database management system
Hierarchical model
Navigational database
Network model
Object model
Object database (OODBMS)
Object–relational database (ORDBMS)
Run Book Automation (RBA)
Relational model (RDBMS)
Comparison of relational database management systems
Comparison of database tools
SQL is a language for database management
References
External links
Database management systems
Data management |
760639 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List%20of%20file%20systems | List of file systems | The following lists identify, characterize, and link to more thorough information on Computer file systems.
Many older operating systems support only their one "native" file system, which does not bear any name apart from the name of the operating system itself.
Disk file systems
Disk file systems are usually block-oriented. Files in a block-oriented file system are sequences of blocks, often featuring fully random-access read, write, and modify operations.
ADFS – Acorn's Advanced Disc filing system, successor to DFS.
AdvFS – Advanced File System, designed by Digital Equipment Corporation for their Digital UNIX (now Tru64 UNIX) operating system.
APFS – Apple File System is a next-generation file system for Apple products.
AthFS – AtheOS File System, a 64-bit journaled filesystem now used by Syllable. Also called AFS.
BFS – the Boot File System used on System V release 4.0 and UnixWare.
BFS – the Be File System used on BeOS, occasionally misnamed as BeFS. Open source implementation called OpenBFS is used by the Haiku operating system.
Byte File System (BFS) - file system used by z/VM for Unix applications
Btrfs – is a copy-on-write file system for Linux announced by Oracle in 2007 and published under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
CFS – The Cluster File System from Veritas, a Symantec company. It is the parallel access version of VxFS.
CP/M file system — Native filesystem used in the CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) operating system which was first released in 1974.
DOS 3.x – Original floppy operating system and file system developed for the Apple II.
Extent File System (EFS) – an older block filing system under IRIX.
ext – Extended file system, designed for Linux systems.
ext2 – Second extended file system, designed for Linux systems.
ext3 – A journaled form of ext2.
ext4 – A follow up for ext3 and also a journaled filesystem with support for extents.
ext3cow – A versioning file system form of ext3.
FAT – File Allocation Table, initially used on DOS and Microsoft Windows and now widely used for portable USB storage and some other devices; FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32 for 12-, 16- and 32-bit table depths.
VFAT – Optional layer on Microsoft Windows FAT system to allow long (up to 255 character) filenames instead of only the 8.3 filenames allowed in the plain FAT filesystem.
FATX – A modified version of Microsoft Windows FAT system that is used on the original Xbox console.
FFS (Amiga) – Fast File System, used on Amiga systems. This FS has evolved over time. Now counts FFS1, FFS Intl, FFS DCache, FFS2.
FFS – Fast File System, used on *BSD systems
Fossil – Plan 9 from Bell Labs snapshot archival file system.
Files-11 – OpenVMS file system; also used on some PDP-11 systems; supports record-oriented files
Flex machine file system
HAMMER — clustered DragonFly BSD filesystem, production-ready since DragonFly 2.2 (2009)
HAMMER2 — recommended as the default root filesystem in DragonFly since 5.2 release in 2018
HFS – Hierarchical File System in IBM's z/OS; not to be confused with Apple's HFS. HFS is still supported but IBM's stated direction is zFS.
HFS – Hierarchical File System, in use until HFS+ was introduced on Mac OS 8.1. Also known as Mac OS Standard format. Successor to Macintosh File System (MFS) & predecessor to HFS+; not to be confused with IBM's HFS provided with z/OS
HFS+ – Updated version of Apple's HFS, Hierarchical File System, supported on Mac OS 8.1 & above, including macOS. Supports file system journaling, enabling recovery of data after a system crash. Also referred to as 'Mac OS Extended format or HFS Plus
HPFS – High Performance File System, used on OS/2
HTFS – High Throughput Filesystem, used on SCO OpenServer
ISO 9660 – Used on CD-ROM and DVD-ROM discs (Rock Ridge and Joliet are extensions to this)
JFS – IBM Journaling file system, provided in Linux, OS/2, and AIX. Supports extents.
LFS – 4.4BSD implementation of a log-structured file system
MFS – Macintosh File System, used on early Classic Mac OS systems. Succeeded by Hierarchical File System (HFS).
Next3 – A form of ext3 with snapshots support.
MFS – TiVo's Media File System, a proprietary fault tolerant format used on TiVo hard drives for real time recording from live TV.
Minix file system – Used on Minix systems
NILFS – Linux implementation of a log-structured file system
NTFS – (New Technology File System) Used on Microsoft's Windows NT-based operating systems
NetWare File System – The original NetWare 2.x–5.x file system, used optionally by later versions.
NSS – Novell Storage Services. This is a new 64-bit journaling file system using a balanced tree algorithm. Used in NetWare versions 5.0-up and recently ported to Linux.
OneFS – One File System. This is a fully journaled, distributed file system used by Isilon. OneFS uses FlexProtect and Reed–Solomon encodings to support up to four simultaneous disk failures.
OFS – Old File System, on Amiga. Good for floppies, but fairly useless on hard drives.
OS-9 file system
PFS – and PFS2, PFS3, etc. Technically interesting file system available for the Amiga, performs very well under a lot of circumstances. Very simple and elegant.
ProDOS – Operating system and file system successor to DOS 3.x, for use on Apple's computers prior to the Macintosh & Lisa computers, the Apple series, including the IIgs
Qnx4fs – File system that is used in QNX version 4 and 6.
ReFS (Resilient File System) – New file system by Microsoft that is built on the foundations of NTFS (but cannot boot, has a default cluster size of 64 KB and does not support compression) and is intended to be used with the Windows Server 2012 operating system.
ReiserFS – File system that uses journaling
Reiser4 – File system that uses journaling, newest version of ReiserFS
Reliance – Datalight's transactional file system for high reliability applications
Reliance Nitro – Tree-based transactional file system developed for high-performance embedded systems, from Datalight
RFS – Native filesystem for RTEMS
SkyFS – Developed for SkyOS to replace BFS as the operating system's main file system. It is based on BFS, but contains many new features.
SFS – Smart File System, journaling file system available for the Amiga platforms.
Soup (Apple) – the "file system" for Apple Newton Platform, structured as a shallow database
Tux3 – An experimental versioning file system intended as a replacement for ext3
UDF – Packet-based file system for WORM/RW media such as CD-RW and DVD, now supports hard drives and flash memory as well.
UFS – Unix File System, used on Solaris and older BSD systems
UFS2 – Unix File System, used on newer BSD systems
VxFS Veritas file system, first commercial journaling file system; HP-UX, Solaris, Linux, AIX, UnixWare
VTOC (Volume Table Of Contents) - Data structure on IBM mainframe direct-access storage devices (DASD) such as disk drives that provides a way of locating the data sets that reside on the DASD volume.
XFS – Used on SGI IRIX and Linux systems
zFS – z/OS File System; not to be confused with other file systems named zFS or ZFS.
zFS - an IBM research project to develop a distributed, decentralized file system; not to be confused with other file systems named zFS or ZFS.
ZFS a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems
File systems with built-in fault-tolerance
These file systems have built-in checksumming and either mirroring or parity for extra redundancy on one or several block devices:
Bcachefs – It's not yet upstream, full data and metadata checksumming, bcache is the bottom half of the filesystem.
Btrfs – A file system based on B-Trees, initially designed at Oracle Corporation.
HAMMER and HAMMER2 – DragonFly BSD's primary filesystems, created by Matt Dillon.
NOVA – The "non-volatile memory accelerated" file system for persistent main memory.
ReFS (Resilient File System) – A file system by Microsoft with built-in resiliency features.
Reliance – A transactional file system with CRCs, created by Datalight.
Reliance Nitro – A tree-based transactional file system with CRCs, developed for high performance and reliability in embedded systems, from Datalight.
WekaFS – a shared parallel filesystem that delivers extreme performance at any scale and is optimized for NVMe and the hybrid cloud.
ZFS – Has checksums for all data; important metadata is always redundant, additional redundancy levels are user-configurable; copy-on-write and transactional writing ensure metadata consistency; corrupted data can be automatically repaired if a redundant copy is available. Created by Sun Microsystems for use on Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris, ported to FreeBSD 7.0, NetBSD (as of August 2009), Linux and to FUSE (not to be confused with the two zFSes from IBM)
File systems optimized for flash memory, solid state media
Solid state media, such as flash memory, are similar to disks in their interfaces, but have different problems. At low level, they require special handling such as wear leveling and different error detection and correction algorithms. Typically a device such as a solid-state drive handles such operations internally and therefore a regular file system can be used. However, for certain specialized installations (embedded systems, industrial applications) a file system optimized for plain flash memory is advantageous.
APFS – Apple File System is a next-generation file system for Apple products.
CHFS – a NetBSD filesystem for embedded systems optimised for raw flash media.
exFAT – Microsoft proprietary system intended for flash cards (see also XCFiles, an exFAT implementation for Wind River VxWorks and other embedded operating systems).
ExtremeFFS – internal filesystem for SSDs.
F2FS – Flash-Friendly File System. An open source Linux file system introduced by Samsung in 2012.
FFS2 (presumably preceded by FFS1), one of the earliest flash file systems. Developed and patented by Microsoft in the early 1990s.
JFFS – original log structured Linux file system for NOR flash media.
JFFS2 – successor of JFFS, for NAND and NOR flash.
LSFS – a Log-structured file system with writable snapshots and inline data deduplication created by StarWind Software. Uses DRAM and flash to cache spinning disks.
LogFS – intended to replace JFFS2, better scalability. No longer under active development.
NILFS – a log-structured file system for Linux with continuous snapshots.
Non-Volatile File System – the system for flash memory introduced by Palm, Inc.
NOVA – the "non-volatile memory accelerated" file system for persistent main memory.
OneFS – a filesystem utilized by Isilon. It supports selective placement of meta-data directly onto flash SSD.
Segger Microcontroller Systems emFile – filesystem for deeply embedded applications which supports both NAND and NOR flash. Wear leveling, fast read and write, and very low RAM usage.
SPIFFS – SPI Flash File System, a wear-leveling filesystem intended for small NOR flash devices.
TFAT – a transactional version of the FAT filesystem.
TrueFFS – internal file system for SSDs, implementing error correction, bad block re-mapping and wear-leveling.
UBIFS – successor of JFFS2, optimized to utilize NAND and NOR flash.
Write Anywhere File Layout (WAFL) – an internal file system utilized by NetApp within their DataONTAP OS, originally optimized to use non-volatile DRAM. WAFL uses RAID-DP to protect against multiple disk failures and NVRAM for transaction log replays.
YAFFS – a log-structured file system designed for NAND flash, but also used with NOR flash.
LittleFS – a little fail-safe filesystem designed for microcontrollers.
JesFS – Jo's embedded serial FileSystem. A very small footprint and robust filesystem, designed for very small microcontroller (16/32 bit). Open Source and licensed under GPL v3.
Record-oriented file systems
In record-oriented file systems files are stored as a collection of records. They are typically associated with mainframe and minicomputer operating systems. Programs read and write whole records, rather than bytes or arbitrary byte ranges, and can seek to a record boundary but not within records. The more sophisticated record-oriented file systems have more in common with simple databases than with other file systems.
CMS file system – The native file system of the Conversational Monitor System component of VM/370
Files-11 – early versions were record-oriented; support for "streams" was added later
Michigan Terminal System (MTS) – provides "line files" where record lengths and line numbers are associated as metadata with each record in the file, lines can be added, replaced, updated with the same or different length records, and deleted anywhere in the file without the need to read and rewrite the entire file.
OS4000 for GEC's OS4000 operating system, on the GEC 4000 series minicomputers
A FAT12 and FAT16 (and FAT32) extension to support database-like file types random file, direct file, keyed file and sequential file in Digital Research FlexOS, IBM 4680 OS and Toshiba 4690 OS. The record size is stored on a file-by-file basis in special entries in the directory table.
Sequential access methods for IBM's z/OS and z/VSE mainframe operating systems: Basic Sequential Access Method (BSAM), Basic Partitioned Access Method (BPAM) and Queued Sequential Access Method (QSAM); see Access methods and Data set (IBM mainframe) for more examples
Pick Operating System – A record-oriented filesystem and database that uses hash-coding to store data.
Shared File System (SFS) for IBM's VM
Virtual Storage Access Method (VSAM) for IBM's z/OS and z/VSE mainframe operating systems
Shared-disk file systems
Shared-disk file systems (also called shared-storage file systems, SAN file system, Clustered file system or even cluster file systems) are primarily used in a storage area network where all nodes directly access the block storage where the file system is located. This makes it possible for nodes to fail without affecting access to the file system from the other nodes. Shared-disk file systems are normally used in a high-availability cluster together with storage on hardware RAID. Shared-disk file systems normally do not scale over 64 or 128 nodes.
Shared-disk file systems may be symmetric where metadata is distributed among the nodes or asymmetric with centralized metadata servers.
CXFS (Clustered XFS) from Silicon Graphics (SGI). Available for Linux, Mac, Windows, Solaris, AIX and IRIX,. Asymmetric.
Dell Fluid File System (formerly ExaFS) proprietary software sold by Dell. Shared-disk system sold as an appliance providing distributed file systems to clients. Running on Intel based hardware serving NFS v2/v3, SMB/CIFS and AFP to Windows, macOS, Linux and other UNIX clients.
Blue Whale Clustered file system (BWFS) from Zhongke Blue Whale. Asymmetric. Available for Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS.
SAN File System (SFS) from DataPlow. Available for Windows, Linux, Solaris, and macOS. Symmetric and Asymmetric.
EMC Celerra HighRoad from EMC. Available for Linux, AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, Solaris and Windows. Asymmetric.
Files-11 on VMSclusters, released by DEC in 1983, now from HP. Symmetric.
GFS2 (Global File System) from Red Hat. Available for Linux under GPL. Symmetric (GDLM) or Asymmetric (GULM).
IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS) Windows, Linux, AIX . Parallel
Nasan Clustered File System from DataPlow. Available for Linux and Solaris. Asymmetric.
Oracle ACFS from Oracle Corporation. Available for Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 only). Symmetric.
OCFS2 (Oracle Cluster File System) from Oracle Corporation. Available for Linux under GPL. Symmetric.
QFS from Sun Microsystems. Available for Linux (client only) and Solaris (metadata server and client). Asymmetric.
ScoutFS from Versity. Available for Linux under the GPL. Symmetric.
StorNext File System from Quantum. Asymmetric. Available for AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, Linux, macOS, Solaris and Windows. Interoperable with Xsan. Formerly known as CVFS.
Veritas Storage Foundation from Symantec. Available for AIX, HP-UX, Linux and Solaris. Asymmetric.
Xsan from Apple Inc. Available for macOS. Asymmetric. Interoperable with StorNext File System.
VMFS from VMware/EMC Corporation. Available for VMware ESX Server. Symmetric.
Distributed file systems
Distributed file systems are also called network file systems. Many implementations have been made, they are location dependent and they have access control lists (ACLs), unless otherwise stated below.
9P, the Plan 9 from Bell Labs and Inferno distributed file system protocol. One implementation is v9fs. No ACLs.
Amazon S3
Andrew File System (AFS) is scalable and location independent, has a heavy client cache and uses Kerberos for authentication. Implementations include the original from IBM (earlier Transarc), Arla and OpenAFS.
Avere Systems has AvereOS that creates a NAS protocol file system in object storage.
DCE Distributed File System (DCE/DFS) from IBM (earlier Transarc) is similar to AFS and focus on full POSIX file system semantics and high availability. Available for AIX and Solaris under a proprietary software license.
File Access Listener (FAL) is an implementation of the Data Access Protocol (DAP) which is part of the DECnet suite of network protocols created by Digital Equipment Corporation.
Magma, developed by Tx0.
MapR FS is a distributed high-performance file system that exhibits file, table and messaging APIs.
Microsoft Office Groove shared workspace, used for DoHyki
NetWare Core Protocol (NCP) from Novell is used in networks based on NetWare.
Network File System (NFS) originally from Sun Microsystems is the standard in UNIX-based networks. NFS may use Kerberos authentication and a client cache.
OS4000 Linked-OS provides distributed filesystem across OS4000 systems.
Self-certifying File System (SFS), a global network file system designed to securely allow access to file systems across separate administrative domains.
Server Message Block (SMB) originally from IBM (but the most common version is modified heavily by Microsoft) is the standard in Windows-based networks. SMB is also known as Common Internet File System (CIFS). SMB may use Kerberos authentication.
Distributed fault-tolerant file systems
Distributed fault-tolerant replication of data between nodes (between servers or servers/clients) for high availability and offline (disconnected) operation.
Coda from Carnegie Mellon University focuses on bandwidth-adaptive operation (including disconnected operation) using a client-side cache for mobile computing. It is a descendant of AFS-2. It is available for Linux under the GPL.
Distributed File System (Dfs) from Microsoft focuses on location transparency and high availability. Available for Windows under a proprietary software license.
HAMMER and HAMMER2 – DragonFly BSD's filesystems for clustered storage, created by Matt Dillon.
InterMezzo from Cluster File Systems uses synchronization over HTTP. Available for Linux under GPL but no longer in development since the developers are working on Lustre.
LizardFS a networking, distributed file system based on MooseFS
Moose File System (MooseFS) is a networking, distributed file system. It spreads data over several physical locations (servers), which are visible to a user as one resource. Works on Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris and macOS. Master server and chunkservers can also run on Solaris and Windows with Cygwin.
Scality is a distributed fault-tolerant filesystem.
Tahoe-LAFS is an open source secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant filesystem utilizing encryption as the basis for a least-authority replicated design.
A FAT12 and FAT16 (and FAT32) extension to support automatic file distribution across nodes with extra attributes like local, mirror on update, mirror on close, compound on update, compound on close in IBM 4680 OS and Toshiba 4690 OS. The distribution attributes are stored on a file-by-file basis in special entries in the directory table.
Distributed parallel file systems
Distributed parallel file systems stripe data over multiple servers for high performance. They are normally used in high-performance computing (HPC).
Some of the distributed parallel file systems use an object storage device (OSD) (in Lustre called OST) for chunks of data together with centralized metadata servers.
Lustre is an open-source high-performance distributed parallel file system for Linux, used on many of the largest computers in the world.
Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS, PVFS2, OrangeFS). Developed to store virtual system images, with a focus on non-shared writing optimizations. Available for Linux under GPL.
Distributed parallel fault-tolerant file systems
Distributed file systems, which also are parallel and fault tolerant, stripe and replicate data over multiple servers for high performance and to maintain data integrity. Even if a server fails no data is lost. The file systems are used in both high-performance computing (HPC) and high-availability clusters.
All file systems listed here focus on high availability, scalability and high performance unless otherwise stated below.
In development:
zFS from IBM (not to be confused with ZFS from Sun Microsystems or the zFS file system provided with IBM's z/OS operating system) focus on cooperative cache and distributed transactions and uses object storage devices. Under development and not freely available.
HAMMER/ANVIL by Matt Dillon
PNFS (Parallel NFS) – Clients available for Linux and OpenSolaris and back-ends from NetApp, Panasas, EMC Highroad and IBM GPFS
Coherent Remote File System (CRFS) – requires Btrfs
Parallel Optimized Host Message Exchange Layered File System (POHMELFS) and Distributed STorage (DST). POSIX compliant, added to Linux kernel 2.6.30
Peer-to-peer file systems
Some of these may be called cooperative storage cloud.
Cleversafe uses Cauchy Reed–Solomon information dispersal algorithms to separate data into unrecognizable slices and distribute them, via secure Internet connections, to multiple storage locations.
Scality is a distributed filesystem using the Chord peer-to-peer protocol.
IPFS InterPlanetary File System is p2p, worldwide distributed content-addressable, file-system.
Special-purpose file systems
aufs an enhanced version of UnionFS stackable unification file system
AXFS (small footprint compressed read-only, with XIP)
Barracuda WebDAV plug-in. Secure Network File Server for embedded devices.
Boot File System is used on UnixWare to store files necessary for its boot process.
cdfs (reading and writing of CDs)
Compact Disc File System (reading and writing of CDs; experimental)
cfs (caching)
Cramfs (small footprint compressed read-only)
Davfs2 (WebDAV)
Freenet – Decentralized, censorship-resistant
FTPFS (FTP access)
GmailFS (Google Mail File System)
GridFS – GridFS is a specification for storing and retrieving files that exceed the BSON-document size limit of 16 MB for MongoDB.
lnfs (long names)
LTFS (Linear Tape File System for LTO and Enterprise tape)
MVFS – MultiVersion File System, proprietary, used by Rational ClearCase.
romfs
SquashFS (compressed read-only)
UMSDOS, UVFAT – FAT file systems extended to store permissions and metadata (and in the case of UVFAT, VFAT long file names), used for Linux
UnionFS – stackable unification file system, which can appear to merge the contents of several directories (branches), while keeping their physical content separate
Venti – Plan 9 de-duplicated storage used by Fossil.
WBFS – Wii Backup FileSystem
Pseudo file systems
devfs – a virtual file system in Unix-like operating systems for managing device nodes on-the-fly
procfs – a pseudo-file system, used to access kernel information about processes
tmpfs – in-memory temporary file system (on Unix-like platforms)
sysfs – a virtual file system in Linux holding information about buses, devices, firmware, filesystems, etc.
debugfs – a virtual file system in Linux for accessing and controlling kernel debugging
configfs – a writable file system used to configure various kernel components of Linux
sysctlfs – allow accessing sysctl nodes via a file system; available on NetBSD via PUFFS, FreeBSD kernel via a 3rd-party module, and Linux as a part of Linux procfs.
kernfs – a file system found on some BSD systems (notably NetBSD) that provides access to some kernel state variables; similar to sysctlfs, Linux procfs and Linux sysfs.
wikifs – a server application for Plan 9's virtual, wiki, file system
Encrypted file systems
eCryptfs – a stacked cryptographic file system in the Linux kernel since 2.6.19
Secure Shell File System (SSHFS) – locally mount a remote directory on a server using only a secure shell login.
EncFS, GPL Encrypted file system in user-space
Rubberhose filesystem
EFS – an encrypted file system for Microsoft Windows systems and AIX. An extension of NTFS
ZFS, with encryption support.
File system interfaces
These are not really file systems; they allow access to file systems from an operating system standpoint.
FUSE (file system in userspace, like LUFS but better maintained)
LUFS (Linux userland file system – seems to be abandoned in favour of FUSE)
PUFFS (Userspace filesystem for NetBSD, including a compatibility layer called librefuse for porting existing FUSE-based applications)
VFS Virtual Filesystem
See also
Shared file access
Comparison of file systems
Filing OSID
Computer storage
References
External links
File Systems
File systems |
522923 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache%20Lucene | Apache Lucene | Apache Lucene is a free and open-source search engine software library, originally written in Java by Doug Cutting. It is supported by the Apache Software Foundation and is released under the Apache Software License. Lucene is widely used as a standard foundation for non-research search applications.
Lucene has been ported to other programming languages including Object Pascal, Perl, C#, C++, Python, Ruby and PHP.
History
Doug Cutting originally wrote Lucene in 1999. Lucene was his fifth search engine, having previously written two while at Xerox PARC, one at Apple, and a fourth at Excite. It was initially available for download from its home at the SourceForge web site. It joined the Apache Software Foundation's Jakarta family of open-source Java products in September 2001 and became its own top-level Apache project in February 2005. The name Lucene is Doug Cutting's wife's middle name and her maternal grandmother's first name.
Lucene formerly included a number of sub-projects, such as Lucene.NET, Mahout, Tika and Nutch. These three are now independent top-level projects.
In March 2010, the Apache Solr search server joined as a Lucene sub-project, merging the developer communities.
Version 4.0 was released on October 12, 2012.
In March 2021, Lucene changed its logo, and Apache Solr became a top level Apache project again, independent from Lucene.
Features and common use
While suitable for any application that requires full text indexing and searching capability, Lucene is recognized for its utility in the implementation of Internet search engines and local, single-site searching.
Lucene includes a feature to perform a fuzzy search based on edit distance.
Lucene has also been used to implement recommendation systems. For example, Lucene's 'MoreLikeThis' Class can generate recommendations for similar documents. In a comparison of the term vector-based similarity approach of 'MoreLikeThis' with citation-based document similarity measures, such as co-citation and co-citation proximity analysis, Lucene's approach excelled at recommending documents with very similar structural characteristics and more narrow relatedness. In contrast, citation-based document similarity measures tended to be more suitable for recommending more broadly related documents, meaning citation-based approaches may be more suitable for generating serendipitous recommendations, as long as documents to be recommended contain in-text citations.
Lucene-based projects
Lucene itself is just an indexing and search library and does not contain crawling and HTML parsing functionality. However, several projects extend Lucene's capability:
Apache Nutch – provides web crawling and HTML parsing
Apache Solr – an enterprise search server
Compass – the predecessor to Elasticsearch
CrateDB – open source, distributed SQL database built on Lucene
DocFetcher – a multiplatform desktop search application
Elasticsearch – an enterprise search server released in 2010
Kinosearch – a search engine written in Perl and C and a loose port of Lucene. The Socialtext wiki software uses this search engine, and so does the MojoMojo wiki. It is also used by the Human Metabolome Database (HMDB) and the Toxin and Toxin-Target Database (T3DB).
MongoDB Atlas Search – a cloud-native enterprise search application based on MongoDB and Apache Lucene
OpenSearch – an open source enterprise search server based on a fork of Elasticsearch 7
Swiftype – an enterprise search startup based on Lucene
See also
Enterprise search
Information extraction
List of information retrieval libraries
Text mining
References
Bibliography
External links
Lucene
Free search engine software
Java (programming language) libraries
C Sharp libraries
Cross-platform software
Software using the Apache license
Search engine software
Pascal (programming language) software
1999 software |
8724110 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic%20Independent%20Surveillance%20%E2%80%93%20Privacy | Automatic Independent Surveillance – Privacy | Automatic Independent Surveillance - Privacy (AIS-P) is a data packet protocol for the TailLight system of aircraft Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS), wherein a single Mode S 64 microsecond message is transmitted by an aircraft ATCRBS or Mode S transponder, and received by aircraft and Air Traffic Control on the ground. This is an augmentation to aircraft transponders, which report aircraft position and velocity in such a way as to minimize interference with any other avionics system, maximize the possible number of participating aircraft, while not relying on any equipment on the ground, and protecting aircraft from potential attack. AIS-P and ADS-B are competing protocols for aircraft based surveillance of traffic, a replacement technology for Mode S radar and TCAS.
AIS-P as an alternative to ADS-B
TailLight implemented as a free addition inside General Aviation ATCRBS transponders, such as the AT-155, utilizes the AIS-P protocol to achieve all intended ADS-B advertised collision avoidance benefits in the airport terminal and en route airspace. It does not interfere with any other avionic systems, produces a system capacity of up to 335,000 aircraft within line-of-sight of each other, and provides interoperability with the other collision avoidance systems, without exposing the aircraft to potential attack.
The AIS-P protocol is an alternative to the ADS-B and Mode S based TCAS protocols, and solves the problems of frequency congestion, by eliminating a requirement for multiple packet messages, or new longer packet definitions for ADS-B not established by international treaty, and by eliminating the 24 bit overhead for named identity in each packet of the message (required to tie multiple packets together into a message). One packet encodes latitude and longitude, altitude, direction, and speed (full position and velocity), handles error detection and recovery, along with channel use arbitration, in the AIS-P protocol. This reduces verbose overhead unnecessary for collision avoidance purposes.
The AIS-P protocol is not meant for purposes of billing and targeting. Additionally, one of the requirements satisfied by the AIS-P protocol is that a missile with an ADS-B type target homer aimed at the unnamed aircraft alone in the sky would miss.
See also
ADS-B
References
External links
What is Wrong With ATC Transponders, And How to Fix Them For Just About Free, B. Keith Peshak, Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation and CIGTF 21st Guidance Test Symposium, 2002
Avionics |
1032180 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture%20Transfer%20Protocol | Picture Transfer Protocol | Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) is a protocol developed by the International Imaging Industry Association to allow the transfer of images from digital cameras to computers and other peripheral devices without the need of additional device drivers. The protocol has been standardized as ISO 15740.
It is further standardized for USB by the USB Implementers Forum as the still image capture device class. USB is the default network transport media for PTP devices. USB PTP is a common alternative to the USB mass-storage device class (USB MSC), as a digital camera connection protocol. Some cameras support both modes.
Description
PTP specifies a way of creating, transferring and manipulating objects which are typically photographic images such as a JPEG file. While it is common to think of the objects that PTP handle as files, they are abstract entities identified solely by a 32-bit object ID. These objects can however have parents and siblings so that a file-system–like view of device contents can be created.
History
Until the standardization of PTP, digital camera vendors used different proprietary protocols for controlling digital cameras and transferring images to computers and other host devices. The term "Picture Transfer Protocol" and the acronym "PTP" were both coined by Steve Mann, summarizing work on the creation of a Linux-friendly way of transferring pictures to and from home-made wearable computers, at a time when most cameras required the use of Microsoft Windows or Mac OS device drivers to transfer their pictures to a computer.
PTP was originally standardized as PIMA 15470 in 2000, while it was developed by the IT10 committee. Key contributors to the standard included Tim Looney and Tim Whitcher (Eastman Kodak Company) and Eran Steinberg (Fotonation).
Storage
PTP does not specify a way for objects to be stored – it is a communication protocol. Nor does it specify a transport layer. However, it is designed to support existing standards, such as Exif, TIFF/EP, DCF, and DPOF, and is commonly implemented over the USB and FireWire transport layers.
Images on digital cameras are generally stored as files on a mass storage device, such as a memory card, which is formatted with a file system, most commonly FAT12, FAT16 or FAT32, which may be laid out as per the Design rule for Camera File system (DCF) specification. But none of these are required as PTP abstracts from the underlying representation.
By contrast, if a camera is mounted via USB MSC, the physical file system and layout are exposed to the user.
Device control
Many modern digital cameras from Canon and Nikon can be controlled via PTP from a USB host enabled computing device (Smartphone, PC or Arduino for example). As is the norm for PTP, the communication takes place over a USB connection. When interacting with the camera in this manner, it is expected that the USB endpoints are in (synchronous) Bulk Transfer Mode, for getting/setting virtually all the camera's features/properties (such as ISO, Aperture, Shutter speed and focus). Events raised by the camera, in response to specific actions performed by the host device, are sent back to the host via the USB asynchronous Interrupt endpoint.
In addition to changing the camera's settings and operating mode, it is possible to receive a through-the-lens view using "Live View". As described above, the storage objects of the camera's memory cards can be manipulated too.
By controlling a camera in this way it is possible to augment its capabilities. For example, if the controlling software was running on a Smartphone with GPS functionality, it would be possible to add the GPS coordinates to an image's Exif data, at the time of image capture - even if the camera itself had no GPS functionality.
Extensions
A number of protocols have been developed that extend PTP. PTP/IP, developed by FotoNation and first implemented in a round of Wi-Fi digital cameras by Nikon, Canon, and Eastman Kodak, allows data transfer over any IP-based network.
Media Transfer Protocol (MTP), developed by Microsoft, allows for transfer over wireless or wired networks based in part on FotoNation's PTP/IP, but also allows users to transfer other media aside from pictures, as well as for tagging objects with extended metadata (such as title, artist and similar).
Operating system support
Microsoft Windows has supported PTP from Windows ME onwards (excluding Windows CE). Microsoft implements PTP on Windows through Windows Image Acquisition. A disadvantage of PTP on Windows as compared to USB mass storage is that Windows does not assign drive letters to PTP devices, so image files on them cannot be manipulated by scripts or standard Windows programs, only by Windows Explorer or applications with specially written PTP support. Also, Windows Explorer does not display file modification timestamps (though these are available via the file Properties popup).
PTP on Linux and other free and open-source operating systems is supported by a number of libraries, such as libgphoto and libptp, used by applications such as digiKam and F-Spot. As on Microsoft Windows there is no native support on Linux, but by means of GVfs the devices can easily be mounted and made available to applications that use standard POSIX commands and library functions.
Android has PTP support, although as with MTP, a limitation is that when transferring photos from one's computer to the Android device, file timestamps are replaced with the time of the copy (with copies in the other direction, from device to computer, timestamps are preserved).
The Poseidon USB stack on Amiga includes ptp.class.
Version 1.1
PTP v1.1 (ISO15740:2008) is an update to PTP published by ISO.
This updated version of PTP is fully backward-compatible with PTP v1.0, and offers optional performance, compatibility, and feature enhancements including:
A mechanism for handling streaming content
A mechanism to support multiple vendor extension sets
Support for objects larger than the 4GiB size limit set by PTP v1.0, by requiring 64 bits (8 bytes) for object size
Support for retrieval of ObjectHandles in enumerated chunks. This may reduce long response times for some devices that possess large numbers of objects
Support for arbitrary resizing prior to image transmission (responder scaling). In PTP v1.0, image sizes might be requested in full-resolution or thumbnail size only
Support for arrays of datasets. This can be used to reduce the number of required transactions necessary for device characterization from being a function of the number of objects on the device down to one
A fast file characterization operation that exploits dataset arrays to request, in a single transaction, only the minimum data required to characterize a typical filesystem
A new standard ObjectFormatCode to support the Digital Negative (DNG) file format
Drawbacks
Renaming file objects directly is not possible without copying or rewriting them
Modification of file contents is not supported (the file needs to be re-transferred completely)
Some drawbacks are OS-specific — see
See also
Design rule for Camera File system
PictBridge
References
External links
PTP transport over USB specifications, USB.org.
Microsoft and FotoNation Team to Support the Media Transfer Protocol For Wireless Digital Still Cameras, Microsoft News Center.
Free software with PTP support
Digital photography
Network protocols |
31093 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing%20Award | Turing Award | The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions "of lasting and major technical importance to the computer field". It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science and is known as or often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computing".
The award is named after Alan Turing, who was a British mathematician and reader in mathematics at the University of Manchester. Turing is often credited as being the key founder of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. From 2007 to 2013, the award was accompanied by an additional prize of US$250,000, with financial support provided by Intel and Google. Since 2014, the award has been accompanied by a prize of US$1 million, with financial support provided by Google.
The first recipient, in 1966, was Alan Perlis, of Carnegie Mellon University. The first female recipient was Frances E. Allen of IBM in 2006.
Recipients
See also
List of ACM Awards
List of computer science awards
List of prizes known as the Nobel of a field
List of prizes named after people
IEEE John von Neumann Medal
Turing Lecture
Nobel Prize
Schock Prize
Nevanlinna Prize
Kanellakis Award
Millennium Technology Prize
References
External links
ACM Chronological listing of Turing Laureates
Visualizing Turing Award Laureates
ACM A.M. Turing Award Centenary Celebration
ACM A.M. Turing Award Laureate Interviews
Celebration of 50 Years of the ACM A.M. Turing Award
Alan Turing
Association for Computing Machinery
Awards established in 1966
Computer science awards
Systems sciences awards
International awards |
8361138 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FrameForge%203D%20Studio | FrameForge 3D Studio | FrameForge Storyboard Studio (formerly FrameForge Previz Studio) is previsualization storyboard software used by directors, cinematographers, VFX Supervisor and other creatives in the fields of filmmaking, television production, filmed advertising, industrial videos and other filmed or video content.
The software creates virtual sets and locations using simulated cameras, actors and objects in photo-accurate 3D scaled sets for previsualization. FrameForge creates data-rich Storyboards and exports these sequences for use at all stages of production for both traditional 2D shoots and, with the introduction of version 3, stereographic 3D shoots too. It won a Technical Achievement Emmy from the National Academy of Arts and Sciences. for the program's "proven track record of saving productions time and money through virtual testing."
It also won a Lumiere Award from the Advanced Imaging Society (previously the International 3D Society) for the program's support of Stereo 3D filmmaking.
Background
The program was designed by filmmaker Ken Schafer and his San Diego-based software company Innoventive Software, LLC. A graduate of New York University's film program, Schafer started software programming in the 1980s by creating an extensive system of macros for WordPerfect that automatically formatted text into screenplay format. He packaged these macros and sold them under the name Script Perfection. The macros evolved into the stand-alone program called ScriptThing and was eventually exclusively licensed for sale by Screenplay Systems under the name of Movie Magic Screenwriter. Schafer followed up with other software designs including the program FrameForge Storyboard Studio.
Awards
Technical Achievement Emmy from the National Academy of Arts and Sciences in the Pre-production Previsualization System Category. One of the key criteria for this Emmy was that the pre-visualization capability of this software allows the user to test and solve real-world production issues during pre-production, with a proven track record of saving productions time and money by eliminating the requirement to perform physical tests on-set until convinced of the final design.
Lumiere Statuette from the Advanced Imaging Society given to honor FrameForge's technological achievement in the stereoscopic medium, and recognize the significant impact the program has had on the advancement of stereoscopic arts and technologies.
References
External links
Innoventive Software website
Wikibooks Movie Manual on Storyboarding
Wikiversity - Lesson on 3D Storyboarding
Film production software |
24397133 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME%20Disks | GNOME Disks | GNOME Disks is a graphical front-end for udisks included in the "gnome-disk-utility" package. It can be used for partition management, S.M.A.R.T. monitoring, benchmarking, and software RAID (until v. 3.12). An introduction is included in the GNOME Documentation Project.
Disks used to be known as GNOME Disk Utility or palimpsest Disk Utility. Udisks was named DeviceKit-disks in earlier releases. DeviceKit-disks is part of DeviceKit which was planned to replace certain aspects of HAL. HAL and DeviceKit have been deprecated.
GNOME Disks has been included by default in several Linux distributions including Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Trisquel, Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and CentOS.
See also
List of disk partitioning software
System monitor
Comparison of S.M.A.R.T. tools
GParted – another alternative
Disk utility
References
External links
Releases at freedesktop.org
Palimpsest Disk Utility Manual at gnome.org
udisks and gnome-disk-utility - past, present and future by David Zeuthen
Udisks Improvements at fedoraproject.org
Devicekit at fedoraproject.org
Free software programmed in C
GNOME Core Applications
Red Hat software
Software that uses GTK
Software that uses Meson
Free partitioning software
Linux file system-related software |
41036912 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013%E2%80%9314%20Troy%20Trojans%20men%27s%20basketball%20team | 2013–14 Troy Trojans men's basketball team | The 2013–14 Troy Trojans men's basketball team represented Troy University during the 2013–14 NCAA Division I men's basketball season. The Trojans, led by first year head coach Phil Cunningham, played their home games at Trojan Arena and were members of the Sun Belt Conference. They finished the season 11–20, 6–12 in Sun Belt play to finish in eighth place. They lost in the first round of the Sun Belt Conference Tournament to Arkansas–Little Rock.
Roster
Schedule
|-
!colspan=9 style="background:#960018; color:#808080;"| Exhibition
|-
!colspan=9 style="background:#960018; color:#808080;"| Regular season
|-
!colspan=9 style="background:#960018; color:#808080;"| Sun Belt Tournament
References
Troy Trojans men's basketball seasons
Troy
2013 in sports in Alabama
2014 in sports in Alabama |
14448893 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manny%20Lehman%20%28computer%20scientist%29 | Manny Lehman (computer scientist) | Meir "Manny" Lehman, FREng (24 January 1925 – 29 December 2010) was a professor in the School of Computing Science at Middlesex University. From 1972 to 2002 he was a Professor and Head of the Computing Department at Imperial College London. His research contributions include the early realisation of the software evolution phenomenon and the eponymous Lehman's laws of software evolution.
Career
Lehman was born in Germany on 24 January 1925 and emigrated to England in 1931. He studied mathematics as an undergraduate at Imperial College London where he was involved in the design of the Imperial College Computing Engine's Digital Computer Arithmetic Unit. He spent a year at Ferranti in London before working at Israel's Ministry of Defense from 1957 to 1964. From 1964 to 1972 he worked at IBM's research division in Yorktown Heights, NY where he studied program evolution with Les Belady. The study of IBM's programming process gave the foundations for Lehman's laws of software evolution. In 1972 he returned to Imperial College where he was Head of Section and later Head of Department (1979–1984). Lehman remained at Imperial for some thirty years until 2002 when he moved to the School of Computing Science at Middlesex University.
After retiring from Middlesex he moved to Jerusalem, Israel, where he died on 29 December 2010.
Awards and honours
Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (1989)
Fellow of the ACM (1994)
Harlan D. Mills Award (2001)
References
M.M. Lehman. "Programs, life cycles, and laws of software evolution", Proceedings of the IEEE, pages 1060–1076, September 1980
Laszlo Belady, M. M. Lehman: A Model of Large Program Development. IBM Systems Journal 15(3): 225–252 (1976)
External links
FEAST Publications
IEEExplore
A unified theory of software evolution, Salon.com, 2002.
Manny Lehman's Home Page
Lehman's official academic archive
1925 births
2010 deaths
Academics of Middlesex University
Academics of the Department of Computing, Imperial College London
British computer scientists
British software engineers
Software engineering researchers |
27245127 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clytus%20%28mythology%29 | Clytus (mythology) | In Greek mythology, Clytus (Ancient Greek: Κλύτος) is a name that may refer to:
Clytus, a Trojan soldier who killed three Greeks in the Trojan War.
Clytus, a warrior killed by Perseus in the battle against Phineus.
Clytus, a son of Aegyptus who was killed by the Danaid Autodice.
Clytus, a son of Temenus and his successor as king of Argos.
Clytus, a son of the Athenian Pallas, who, together with his brother Butes, is sent alongside Cephalus to Aeacus to ask for assistance against Minos.
Notes
References
Gaius Julius Hyginus, Fabulae from The Myths of Hyginus translated and edited by Mary Grant. University of Kansas Publications in Humanistic Studies. Online version at the Topos Text Project.
Publius Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses translated by Brookes More (1859-1942). Boston, Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library.
Publius Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses. Hugo Magnus. Gotha (Germany). Friedr. Andr. Perthes. 1892. Latin text available at the Perseus Digital Library.
Trojans
Characters in Greek mythology
Mythology of Argos |
1065362 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end%20encryption | End-to-end encryption | End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is a system of communication where only the communicating users can read the messages. In principle, it prevents potential eavesdroppers – including telecom providers, Internet providers, malicious state bodies, and even the provider of the communication service – from being able to access the cryptographic keys needed to decrypt the conversation.
End-to-end encryption is intended to prevent data being read or secretly modified, other than by the true sender and recipient(s). The messages are encrypted by the sender but the third party does not have a means to decrypt them, and stores them encrypted. The recipients retrieve the encrypted data and decrypt it themselves.
Because no third parties can decipher the data being communicated or stored, for example, companies that provide end-to-end encryption are unable to hand over texts of their customers' messages to the authorities.
In 2022, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office - the government body responsible for enforcing online data standards - stated that opposition to E2EE was misinformed and the debate too unbalanced, with too little focus on benefits, since E2EE "helped keep children safe online" and law enforcement access to stored data on servers was "not the only way" to find abusers.
E2EE and privacy
In many messaging systems, including email and many chat networks, messages pass through intermediaries and are stored by a third party, from which they are retrieved by the recipient. Even if the messages are encrypted, they are only encrypted 'in transit', and are thus accessible by the service provider, regardless of whether server-side disk encryption is used. Server-side disk encryption simply prevents unauthorized users from viewing this information. It does not prevent the company itself from viewing the information, as they have the key and can simply decrypt this data.
This allows the third party to provide search and other features, or to scan for illegal and unacceptable content, but also means they can be read and misused by anyone who has access to the stored messages on the third party system, whether this is by design or via a backdoor. This can be seen as a concern in many cases where privacy is very important, such as businesses whose reputation depends on their ability to protect third party data, negotiations and communications that are important enough to have a risk of targeted 'hacking' or surveillance, and where sensitive subjects such as health, and information about minors are involved.
It is important to note that E2EE alone does not guarantee privacy or security. For example, data may be held unencrypted on the user's own device, or be accessible via their own app, if their login is compromised.
Etymology of the term
The term "end-to-end encryption" originally only meant that the communication is never decrypted during its transport from the sender to the receiver.
For example, around 2003, E2EE has been proposed as an additional layer of encryption for GSM or TETRA, in addition to the existing radio encryption protecting the communication between the mobile device and the network infrastructure. This has been standardised by SFPG for TETRA. Note that in TETRA E2EE, the keys are generated by a Key Management Centre (KMC) or a Key Management Facility (KMF), not by the communicating users.
Later, around 2014, the meaning of "end-to-end encryption" started to evolve when WhatsApp encrypted a portion of its network, requiring that not only the communication stays encrypted during transport, but also that the provider of the communication service is not able to decrypt the communications either by having access to the private key, or by having the capability to undetectably inject an adversarial public key as part of a man-in-the-middle attack. This new meaning is now the widely accepted one.
Modern usage
As of 2016, typical server-based communications systems do not include end-to-end encryption. These systems can only guarantee the protection of communications between clients and servers, meaning that users have to trust the third parties who are running the servers with the sensitive content. End-to-end encryption is regarded as safer because it reduces the number of parties who might be able to interfere or break the encryption. In the case of instant messaging, users may use a third-party client or plugin to implement an end-to-end encryption scheme over an otherwise non-E2EE protocol.
Some non-E2EE systems, such as Lavabit and Hushmail, have described themselves as offering "end-to-end" encryption when they did not. Other systems, such as Telegram and Google Allo, have been criticized for not having end-to-end encryption, which they do offer, enabled by default. Telegram did not enable end-to-end encryption by default on VoIP calls while users were using desktop software version, but that problem was fixed quickly. However, as of 2020, Telegram still features no end-to-end encryption by default, no end-to-end encryption for group chats, and no end-to-end encryption for its desktop clients.
Some encrypted backup and file sharing services provide client-side encryption. The encryption they offer is here not referred to as end-to-end encryption, because the services are not meant for sharing messages between users. However, the term "end-to-end encryption" is sometimes incorrectly used to describe client-side encryption.
Challenges
Man-in-the-middle attacks
End-to-end encryption ensures that data is transferred securely between endpoints. But, rather than try to break the encryption, an eavesdropper may impersonate a message recipient (during key exchange or by substituting their public key for the recipient's), so that messages are encrypted with a key known to the attacker. After decrypting the message, the snoop can then encrypt it with a key that they share with the actual recipient, or their public key in case of asymmetric systems, and send the message on again to avoid detection. This is known as a man-in-the-middle attack (MITM).
Authentication
Most end-to-end encryption protocols include some form of endpoint authentication specifically to prevent MITM attacks. For example, one could rely on certification authorities or a web of trust. An alternative technique is to generate cryptographic hashes (fingerprints) based on the communicating users’ public keys or shared secret keys. The parties compare their fingerprints using an outside (out-of-band) communication channel that guarantees integrity and authenticity of communication (but not necessarily secrecy), before starting their conversation. If the fingerprints match, there is in theory, no man in the middle.
When displayed for human inspection, fingerprints usually use some form of Binary-to-text encoding. These strings are then formatted into groups of characters for readability. Some clients instead display a natural language representation of the fingerprint. As the approach consists of a one-to-one mapping between fingerprint blocks and words, there is no loss in entropy. The protocol may choose to display words in the user's native (system) language. This can, however, make cross-language comparisons prone to errors.
In order to improve localization, some protocols have chosen to display fingerprints as base 10 strings instead of more error prone hexadecimal or natural language strings. An example of the base 10 fingerprint (called safety number in Signal and security code in WhatsApp) would be:
37345 35585 86758 07668
05805 48714 98975 19432
47272 72741 60915 64451
Other applications such as Telegram, instead, encode fingerprints using emojis.
Modern messaging applications can also display fingerprints as QR codes that users can scan off each other's devices.
Endpoint security
The end-to-end encryption paradigm does not directly address risks at the communications endpoints themselves. Each user's computer can still be hacked to steal his or her cryptographic key (to create a MITM attack) or simply read the recipients’ decrypted messages both in real time and from log files. Even the most perfectly encrypted communication pipe is only as secure as the mailbox on the other end. Major attempts to increase endpoint security have been to isolate key generation, storage and cryptographic operations to a smart card such as Google's Project Vault. However, since plaintext input and output are still visible to the host system, malware can monitor conversations in real time. A more robust approach is to isolate all sensitive data to a fully air gapped computer. PGP has been recommended by experts for this purpose: However, as Bruce Schneier points out, Stuxnet developed by US and Israel successfully jumped air gap and reached Natanz nuclear plant's network in Iran. To deal with key exfiltration with malware, one approach is to split the Trusted Computing Base behind two unidirectionally connected computers that prevent either insertion of malware, or exfiltration of sensitive data with inserted malware.
Backdoors
A backdoor is usually a secret method of bypassing normal authentication or encryption in a computer system, a product, or an embedded device, etc. Companies may also willingly or unwillingly introduce backdoors to their software that help subvert key negotiation or bypass encryption altogether. In 2013, information leaked by Edward Snowden showed that Skype had a backdoor which allowed Microsoft to hand over their users' messages to the NSA despite the fact that those messages were officially end-to-end encrypted.
Following terrorist attacks in San Bernardino in 2015 and Pensacola in 2019, the FBI requested backdoors to Apple's iPhone software. The company, however, refused to create a backdoor for the government, citing concern that such a tool could pose risk for its consumer's privacy.
Compliance and regulatory requirements for content inspection
While E2EE can offer privacy benefits that make it desirable in consumer-grade services, many businesses have to balance these benefits with their regulatory requirements. For example, many organizations are subject to mandates that require them to be able to decrypt any communication between their employees or between their employees and third parties.
This might be needed for archival purposes, for inspection by Data Loss Prevention (DLP) systems, for litigation-related eDiscovery or for detection of malware and other threats in the data streams. For this reason, some enterprise-focused communications and information protection systems might implement encryption in a way that ensures all transmissions are encrypted with the encryption being terminated at their internal systems (on-premises or cloud-based) so can have access to the information for inspection and processing.
See also
Comparison of instant messaging protocols
– a table overview of VoIP clients that offer end-to-end encryption
Diffie–Hellman key exchange
End-to-end auditable voting systems
Point-to-point encryption
References
Further reading
Cryptography
Telecommunications
Secure communication
Internet privacy |
26896058 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pwn2Own | Pwn2Own | Pwn2Own is a computer hacking contest held annually at the CanSecWest security conference. First held in April 2007 in Vancouver, the contest is now held twice a year, most recently in April 2021. Contestants are challenged to exploit widely used software and mobile devices with previously unknown vulnerabilities. Winners of the contest receive the device that they exploited and a cash prize. The Pwn2Own contest serves to demonstrate the vulnerability of devices and software in widespread use while also providing a checkpoint on the progress made in security since the previous year.
History
Origins
The first contest in 2007 was conceived and developed by Dragos Ruiu in response to his frustration with Apple Inc.'s lack of response to the Month of Apple Bugs and the Month of Kernel Bugs, as well as Apple's television commercials that trivialized the security built into the competing Windows operating system. At the time, there was a widespread belief that, despite these public displays of vulnerabilities in Apple products, OS X was significantly more secure than any other competitors. On March 20, roughly three weeks before CanSecWest that year, Ruiu announced the Pwn2Own contest to security researchers on the DailyDave mailing list. The contest was to include two MacBook Pros that he would leave on the conference floor hooked up to their own wireless access point. Any conference attendee that could connect to this wireless access point and exploit one of the devices would be able to leave the conference with that laptop. There was no monetary reward. The name "Pwn2Own" was derived from the fact that contestants must "pwn" or hack the device in order to "own" or win it.
On the first day of the conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Ruiu asked Terri Forslof of the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) to participate in the contest. ZDI has a program which purchases zero-day attacks, reports them to the affected vendor and turns them into signatures for their own network intrusion detection system, increasing its effectiveness. The vulnerabilities sold to ZDI are made public only after the affected vendor has issued a patch for it. Forslof agreed to have ZDI offer to purchase any vulnerabilities used in the contest for a flat price of $10,000. The first contest subsequently exposed a high-profile Quicktime flaw, which was disclosed to Apple on April 23 and patched in early May. In 2008 the scope of the Pwn2Own contest was expanded. Targets included three laptops running the default installation of Windows Vista, OS X, or Ubuntu Linux. Mobile devices were added in 2009.
For 2012 the rules were changed to a capture-the-flag style competition with a point system, At and Chrome was successfully exploited for the first time, by regular competitor VUPEN. After withdrawing from the contest that year due to new disclosure rules, in 2013 Google returned as a sponsor and the rules were changed to require full disclosure of exploits and techniques used. Google ceased to be a sponsor of Pwn2Own in 2015.
Recent years
In 2015, every web browser tested was successfully hacked and every prize won, totaling $557,500. Other prizes such as laptops were also given to winning researchers. In 2018, the conference was much smaller and sponsored primarily by Microsoft, after China banned its security researchers from participating in the contest.
Pwn2Own continues to be sponsored by Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative, with ZDI reporting vulnerabilities to vendors before going public with the hacks. "One of the largest hacking contests in the world" according to TechCrunch, as of 2019 the contest continues to be held several times a year. Pwn2Own Tokyo was held November 6 to November 7 in Tokyo, Japan, and was expected to hand out $750,000 in cash and prizes. Hacks focus on browsers, virtual machines, computers, and phones. In 2019, the contest added cars for the first time, with $900,000 offered for hacks exploiting Tesla software. In 2019, the contest added industrial control systems.
Award system
Winners of the contest receive the device that they exploited and a cash prize. Winners also receive a "Masters" jacket celebrating the year of their win.
List of successful exploits
This list of notable hacks is incomplete.
Yearly contests
2007
The contest took place from Thursday, April 18 to Saturday, April 20, 2007 in Vancouver. The first contest was intended to highlight the insecurity of Apple's Mac OS X operating system since, at the time, there was a widespread belief that OS X was far more secure than its competitors. Concerning rules, only two MacBook Pro laptops, one 13" and one 15", were left on the conference floor at CanSecWest and joined to a separate wireless network. Only certain attacks were allowed and these restrictions were progressively loosened over the three days of the conference. Day 1 allowed remote attacks only, day 2 had browser attacks included, while day 3 allowed local attacks, where contestants could connect with a USB stick or Bluetooth. In order to win the 15" MacBook Pro, contestants would be required to further escalate their privileges to root after gaining access with their initial exploit.
The laptops were not hacked on the first day. After the $10,000 prize was announced by ZDI, Shane Macaulay called up former co-worker Dino Dai Zovi in New York and urged him to compete in the second day. In one night, Dai Zovi found and exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in a QuickTime library loaded by Safari. The following morning, Dai Zovi sent his exploit code to Macaulay, who placed it on a website and e-mailed the contest organizers a link to it. When clicked, the link gave Macauley control of the laptop, winning the contest by proxy for Dai Zovi, who gave Macaulay the 15" MacBook Pro. Dai Zovi separately sold the vulnerability to ZDI for the $10,000 prize.
2008
Pwn2Own 2008 took place from Thursday, March 26 to Saturday, March 28, 2008. After the successful 2007 contest, the scope of the contest expanded to include a wider array of operating systems and browsers. The contest would demonstrate the widespread insecurity of all software in widespread use by consumers. Dragos refined the contest with the help of a wide panel of industry experts and the contest was administered by ZDI, who would again offer to purchase the vulnerabilities after their demonstration. As with all the vulnerabilities that ZDI purchases, the details of the vulnerabilities used in Pwn2Own would be provided to the affected vendors and public details would be withheld until a patch was made available. All contestants who successfully demonstrated exploits at the contest could sell their vulnerabilities to ZDI for prizes of $20,000 on the first day, $10,000 on the second day, and $5,000 on the third day. As in the previous year's contest, only certain attacks were allowed on each day. Targets included three laptops running the default installation of Windows Vista Ultimate SP1, Mac OS X 10.5.2, or Ubuntu Linux 7.10. Day 1 saw remote attacks only; contestants had to join the same network as the target laptop and perform their attack without user interaction and without authentication. Day 2 had browser and Instant messaging attacks included, as well as malicious website attacks with links sent to organizers to be clicked. Day 3 had third-party client applications included. Contestants could target popular third-party software such as browsers, Adobe Flash, Java, Apple Mail, iChat, Skype, AOL, and Microsoft Silverlight.
Concerning outcome, the laptop running OS X was exploited on the second day of the contest with an exploit for the Safari browser co-written by Charlie Miller, Jake Honoroff and Mark Daniel of Independent Security Evaluators. Their exploit targeted an open-source subcomponent of the Safari browser. The laptop running Windows Vista SP1 was exploited on the third day of the contest with an exploit for Adobe Flash co-written by Shane Macaulay, Alexander Sotirov, and Derek Callaway. After the contest, Adobe disclosed that they had co-discovered the same vulnerability internally and had been working on a patch at the time of Pwn2Own. The laptop running Ubuntu was not exploited.
2009
Pwn2Own 2009 took place over the three days of CanSecWest from Thursday, March 18 to Saturday, March 20, 2009. After having considerably more success targeting web browsers than any other category of software in 2007, the third Pwn2Own focused on popular browsers used on consumer desktop operating systems. It added another category of mobile devices which contestants were challenged to hack via many remote attack vectors including email, SMS messages, and website browsing. All contestants who demonstrated successful exploits at the contest were offered rewards for the underlying vulnerabilities by ZDI, $5,000 for browser exploits and $10,000 for mobile exploits.
Concerning web browser rules, browser targets were Internet Explorer 8, Firefox, and Chrome installed on a Sony Vaio running Windows 7 Beta and Safari and Firefox installed on a MacBook running Mac OS X. All browsers were fully patched and in default configurations on the first day of the contest. As in previous years, the attack surface contest expanded over the three days. On day 1, contestants had to target functionality in the default browser without access to any plugins. On day 2, Adobe Flash, Java, Microsoft .NET Framework, and QuickTime were included. On day 3, other popular third party plugins were included like Adobe Reader. Multiple winners per target were allowed, but only the first contestant to exploit each laptop would get it. Mobile device targets included BlackBerry, Android, Apple iPhone 2.0 (T-Mobile G1), Symbian (Nokia N95) and Windows Mobile (HTC Touch) phones in their default configurations.
As with the browser contest, the attack surface available to contestants expanded over three days. In order to prove that they were able to successfully compromise the device, contestants had to demonstrate they could collect sensitive data from the mobile device or incur some type of financial loss from the mobile device owner. On day 1, the device could receive SMS, MMS, and e-mail but messages could not be read. Wifi (if on by default), Bluetooth (if on by default), and radio stack were also in-scope. On day 2, SMS, MMS, and e-mail could be opened and read. Wifi was turned on and Bluetooth could be turned on and paired with a nearby headset (additional pairing disallowed). Day 3 allowed one level of user interaction with the default applications. Multiple winners per device were allowed, but only the first contestant to exploit each mobile device would get it (along with a one-year phone contract).
Concerning outcome, based on the increased interest in competing in 2009, ZDI arranged a random selection to determine which team went first against each target. The first contestant to be selected was Charlie Miller. He exploited Safari on OS X without the aid of any browser plugins. In interviews after winning the contest, Miller stressed that while it only took him minutes to run his exploit against Safari it took him many days to research and develop the exploit he used. A researcher identified only as Nils was selected to go after Miller. Nils successfully ran an exploit against Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7 Beta. In writing this exploit, Nils had to bypass anti-exploitation mitigations that Microsoft had implemented in Internet Explorer 8 and Windows 7, including Data Execution Protection (DEP) and Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR). Nils continued trying the other browsers. Although Miller had already exploited Safari on OS X, Nils exploited this platform again, then moved on to exploit Firefox successfully. Near the end of the first day, Julien Tinnes and Sami Koivu (remote) successfully exploited Firefox and Safari on OS X with a vulnerability in Java. At the time, OS X had Java enabled by default which allowed for reliable exploitation against that platform. However, due to having reported the vulnerabilities to the vendor already, Tinnes' participation fell outside the rules of the contest and was unable to be rewarded. The next days of the contest did not attract any additional contestants. Chrome, as well as all of the mobile devices, went unexploited in Pwn2Own 2009.
2010
The competition started at March 24, 2010 and had a total cash prize pool of US$100,000. On March 15—nine days before the contest was to begin—Apple released sixteen patches for WebKit and Safari. Concerning software to exploit, $40,000 of the $100,000 was reserved for web browsers, where each target is worth $10,000. Day 1 included Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7, Mozilla Firefox 3.6 on Windows 7, Google Chrome 4 on Windows 7, and Apple Safari 4 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Day 2 included Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 on Windows Vista, Mozilla Firefox 3 on Windows Vista, Google Chrome 4 on Windows Vista, and Apple Safari 4 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Day 3 included Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP, Mozilla Firefox 3 on Windows XP, Google Chrome 4 on Windows XP, and Apple Safari 4 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard. $60,000 of the total $100,000 cash prize pool was allotted to the mobile phone portion of the contest, each target was worth $15,000. These included Apple iPhone 3GS, RIM BlackBerry Bold 9700, Nokia E72 device running Symbian, and HTC Nexus One running Android.
The Opera web browser was left out of the contests as a target: The ZDI team argued that Opera had a low market share and that Chrome and Safari are only included "due to their default presence on various mobile platforms". However, Opera's rendering engine, Presto, is present on millions of mobile platforms.
Among successful exploits were when Charlie Miller successfully hacked Safari 4 on Mac OS X. Nils hacked Firefox 3.6 on Windows 7 64-bit by using a memory corruption vulnerability and bypass ASLR and DEP, after which Mozilla patched the security flaw in Firefox 3.6.3. Ralf-Philipp Weinmann and Vincenzo Iozzo hacked the iPhone 3GS by bypassing the digital code signatures used on the iPhone to verify that the code in memory is from Apple. Peter Vreugdenhil exploited Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7 by using two vulnerabilities that involved bypassing ASLR and evading DEP.
2011
The 2011 contest took place between March 9 until 11th during the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver. The web browser targets for the 2011 contest included Microsoft Internet Explorer, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome. New to the Pwn2Own contest was the fact that a new attack surface was allowed for penetrating mobile phones, specifically over cellphone basebands. The mobile phone targets were Dell Venue Pro running Windows Phone 7, iPhone 4 running iOS, BlackBerry Torch 9800 running BlackBerry OS 6.0, and Nexus S running Android 2.3. Several teams registered for the desktop browser contest. For Apple Safari, registered competitors included VUPEN, Anon_07, Team Anon, Charlie Miller. Mozilla Firefox included Sam Thomas and Anonymous_1. Microsoft Internet Explorer teams included Stephen Fewer, VUPEN, Sam Thomas, and Ahmed M Sleet. Google Chrome teams included Moatz Khader, Team Anon, and Ahmed M Sleet. For the mobile browser category, the following teams registered. For the Apple iPhone hack attempt, teams included Anon_07, Dion Blazakis and Charlie Miller, Team Anon, Anonymous_1, and Ahmed M Sleet. To hack the RIM Blackberry the teams wereAnonymous_1, Team Anon, and Ahmed M Sleet. To hack the Samsung Nexus S, teams included Jon Oberheide, Anonymous_1, Anon_07, and Team Anonymous. To hack the Dell Venue Pro, teams included George Hotz, Team Anonymous, Anonymous_1, and Ahmed M Sleet.
During the first day of the competition, Safari and Internet Explorer were defeated by researchers. Safari was version 5.0.3 installed on a fully patched Mac OS X 10.6.6. French security firm VUPEN was the first to attack the browser. Internet Explorer was a 32-bit version 8 installed on 64-bit Windows 7 Service Pack 1. Security researcher Stephen Fewer of Harmony Security was successful in exploiting IE. This was demonstrated Just as with Safari. In day 2 the iPhone 4 and Blackberry Torch 9800 were both exploited. The iPhone was running iOS 4.2.1, however the flaw exists in version 4.3 of the iOS. Security researchers Charlie Miller and Dion Blazakis were able to gain access to the iPhone's address book through a vulnerability in Mobile Safari by visiting their exploit ridden webpage. The Blackberry Torch 9800 phone was running BlackBerry OS 6.0.0.246. The team of Vincenzo Iozzo, Willem Pinckaers, and Ralf Philipp Weinmann took advantage of a vulnerability in the Blackberry's WebKit based web browser by visiting their previously prepared webpage. Firefox, Android, and Windows Phone 7 were scheduled to be tested during day 2, but the security researchers that had been chosen for these platforms did not attempt any exploits. Sam Thomas had been selected to test Firefox, but he withdrew stating that his exploit was not stable. The researchers that had been chosen to test Android and Windows Phone 7 did not show up. No teams showed up for day three. Chrome and Firefox were not hacked.
2012
For 2012 the rules were changed to a capture-the-flag style competition with a point system. The new format caused Charlie Miller, successful at the event in past years, to decide not to attend, as it required "on-the-spot" writing of exploits that Miller argued favored larger teams. Hackers went against the four major browsers.
At Pwn2Own 2012, Chrome was successfully exploited for the first time. VUPEN declined to reveal how they escaped the sandbox, saying they would sell the information. Internet Explorer 9 on Windows 7 was successfully exploited next. Firefox was the third browser to be hacked using a zero day exploit.
Safari on Mac OS X Lion was the only browser left standing at the conclusion of the zero day portion of pwn2own. Versions of Safari that were not fully patched and running on Mac OS X Snow Leopard were compromised during the CVE portion of pwn2own. Significant improvements in the security mitigations within Mac OS X were introduced in Lion.
Controversy with Google
Google withdrew from sponsorship of the event because the 2012 rules did not require full disclosure of exploits from winners, specifically exploits to break out of a sandboxed environment and demonstrated exploits that did not "win". Pwn2Own defended the decision, saying that it believed that no hackers would attempt to exploit Chrome if their methods had to be disclosed. Google offered a separate "Pwnium" contest that offered up to $60,000 for Chrome-specific exploits. Non-Chrome vulnerabilities used were guaranteed to be immediately reported to the appropriate vendor. Sergey Glazunov and a teenager identified as "PinkiePie" each earned $60,000 for exploits that bypassed the security sandbox. Google issued a fix to Chrome users in less than 24 hours after the Pwnium exploits were demonstrated.
2013
In 2013, Google returned as a sponsor and the rules were changed to require full disclosure of exploits and techniques used. The Mobile Pwn2Own 2013 contest was held November 13–14, 2013, during the PacSec 2013 Conference in Tokyo. Web browsers Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox, along with Windows 8 and Java, were exploited. Adobe also joined the contest, adding Reader and Flash. Apple Safari on Mountain Lion was not targeted as no teams showed up.
French security firm VUPEN has successfully exploited a fully updated Internet Explorer 10 on Microsoft Surface Pro running a 64-bit version of Windows 8 and fully bypassed Protected Mode sandbox without crashing or freezing the browser. The VUPEN team then exploited Mozilla Firefox, Adobe Flash, and Oracle Java . Pinkie Pie won $50,000, and Google released Chrome updates on November 14 to address the vulnerabilities exploited. Nils and Jon from MWRLabs were successful at exploiting Google Chrome using WebKit and Windows kernel flaws to bypass Chrome sandbox and won $100,000. George Hotz exploited Adobe Acrobat Reader and escaped the sandbox to win $70,000. James Forshaw, Joshua Drake, and Ben Murphy independently exploited Oracle Java to win $20,000 each.
The mobile contest saw contestants winning $117,500 out of a prize pool of $300,000.
2014
At Pwn2Own 2014 in March was held in Vancouver at the CanSecWest Conference and sponsored by Hewlett-Packard. All four targeted browsers fell to researchers, and contestants overall won $850,000 of an available pool of $1,085,000. VUPEN successfully exploited fully updated Internet Explorer 11, Adobe Reader XI, Google Chrome, Adobe Flash, and Mozilla Firefox on a 64-bit version of Windows 8.1, to win a total of $400,000—the highest payout to a single competitor to date. The company used a total of 11 distinct zero-day vulnerabilities.
Among other successful exploits in 2014, Internet Explorer 11 was exploited by Sebastian Apelt and Andreas Schmidt for a prize of $100,000. Apple Safari on Mac OS X Mavericks and Adobe Flash on Windows 8.1 were successfully exploited by Liang Chen of Keen Team and Zeguang Zhao of team509. Mozilla Firefox was exploited three times on the first day, and once more on the second day, with HP awarding researchers $50,000 for each disclosed Firefox flaw that year. Both Vupen and an anonymous participant exploited Google Chrome. Vupen earned $100,000 for the crack, while he anonymous entrant had their prize of $60,000 reduced, as their attack relied on a vulnerability revealed the day before at Google's Pwnium contest. Also, Nico Joly of the VUPEN team took on the Windows Phone (the Lumia 1520), but was unable to gain full control of the system. In 2014, Keen Lab hacked Windows 8.1 Adobe Flash in 16 seconds, as well as the OSX Mavericks Safari system in 20 seconds.
2015–2017
Every single prize available was claimed in 2015 in March in Vancouver, and all browsers were hacked for a total in $557,500 and other prizes. The top hacker proved to be Jung Hoon Lee, who took out "IE 11, both the stable and beta versions of Google Chrome, and Apple Safari" and earned $225,000 in prize money. Other hacks included Team509 and KeenTeem breaking into Adobe Flash, and other breaks in Adobe Reader. Overall, there were 5 bugs in the Windows operating system, 4 in Internet Explorer 11, 3 in Firefox, Adobe Reader, and Adobe Flash, 2 in Safari, and 1 in Chrome. Google ceased to be a sponsor of Pwn2Own in 2015.
At the contest in March 2016, "each of the winning entries was able to avoid the sandboxing mitigations by leveraging vulnerabilities in the underlying OSs." In 2016, Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Safari were all hacked. According to Brian Gorenc, manager of Vulnerability Research at HPE, they had chosen not to include Firefox that year as they had "wanted to focus on the browsers that [had] made serious security improvements in the last year". In 2016, Qihoo360 successfully hacked into a Pixel in under 60 seconds.
In March 2017 in Vancouver, for the first time hackers broke into VMWare's virtual machine sandbox. In 2017, Chrome did not have any successful hacks (although only one team attempted to target Chrome), the subsequent browsers that best fared were, in order, Firefox, Safari and Edge. Mobile Pwn2Own was held on November 1 and 2 in 2017. Representatives from Apple, Google and Huawei were at the contest. Various smartphones, including ones using Apple's iOS 11.1 software, were also successfully hacked. The "11 successful attacks" were against the iPhone 7, the Huawei Mate 9 Pro and the Samsung Galaxy S8. Google Pixel was not hacked. Overall, ZDI that year awarded $833,000 to uncover 51 zero-day bugs. The team Qihoo 360 won the top prize in 2017.
2018
In 2018, the conference was much smaller and sponsored primarily by Microsoft. China had banned its security researchers from participating in the contest, despite Chinese nationals winning in the past, and banned divulging security vulnerabilities to foreigners. In particular, Tencent's Keen Labs and Qihoo 360's 360Vulcan teem did not enter, nor any other Chinese nationals. A Tianfu Cup was subsequently designed to be a "Chinese version of Pwn2Own", also taking place twice a year. Also, shortly before the 2018 conference, Microsoft had patched several vulnerabilities in Edge, causing many teams to withdraw. Nevertheless, certain openings were found in Edge, Safari, Firefox and more. No hack attempts were made against Chrome, although the reward offered was the same as for Edge. Hackers were ultimately awarded $267,000. While many Microsoft products had large rewards available to anyone who was able to gain access through them, only Edge was successfully exploited, and also Safari and Firefox.
2019
A March 2019 contest took place in Vancouver at the CanSecWest conference, with categories including VMware ESXi, VMware Workstation, Oracle VirtualBox, Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox, as well as Tesla. Tesla entered its new Model 3 sedan, with a pair of researchers earning $375,000 and the car they hacked after finding a severe memory randomization bug in the car's infotainment system. It was also the first year that hacking of devices in the home automation category was allowed.
In October 2019, Politico reported that the next edition of Pwn2Own had added industrial control systems. Pwn2Own Tokyo was held November 6 to November 7, and was expected to hand out $750,000 in cash and prizes. Facebook Portal was entered, as was the Amazon Echo Show 5, a Google Nest Hub Max, an Amazon Cloud Cam and a Nest Cam IQ Indoor. Also entered was the Oculus Quest virtual reality kit. In 2019, a team won $60,000 hacking into an Amazon Echo Show 5. They did so by hacking into the "patch gap" that meshed older software patched onto other platforms, as the smart screen used an old version of Chromium. The team shared the findings with Amazon, which said it was investigating the hack and would take "appropriate steps."
2020
A new edition of the Pwn2Own contest took place on January 21-23, 2020, in Miami at the S4 conference, with industrial control system and SCADA targets only. Contestants were awarded more than $250,000 over the three day event as hackers demonstrated a multiple exploits in many leading ICS platforms. Steven Seeley and Chris Anastasio, a hacker duo calling themselves Team Incite, were awarded the title of Master of Pwn with winnings of $80,000 and 92.5 Master of Pwn points. Overall, the contest had 14 winning demonstrations, nine partial wins due to bug collisions, and two failed entries.
The spring edition of Pwn2Own 2020 occurred on March 18-19, 2020. Tesla again returned as a sponsor and had a Model 3 as an available target. Due to COVID-19, the conference moved to a virtual event. The Zero Day Initiative decided to allow remote participation. This allowed researchers to send their exploits to the program prior to the event. ZDI researchers then ran the exploits from their homes and recorded the screen as well as the Zoom call with the contestant. The contest saw six successful demonstrations and awarded $270,000 over the two-day event while purchasing 13 unique bugs in Adobe Reader, Apple Safari and macOS, Microsoft Windows, and Oracle VirtualBox. The duo of Amat Cama and Richard Zhu (Team Fluoroacetate) was crowned Master of Pwn with earnings of $90,000.
The fall edition on Pwn2Own, normally referred to as Pwn2Own Tokyo, was held on November 5-7, 2020. With the lockdown from COVID-19 continuing, the contest was again held virtually and titled Pwn2Own Tokyo (Live From Toronto). ZDI researchers in Toronto ran the event, with others connecting from home. This contest also saw the inclusion of storage area network (SAN) servers as a target. The event had eight winning entries, nine partial wins due to bug collisions, and two failed attempts. Overall, the contest awarded $136,500 for 23 unique bugs. The Flashback Team (Pedro Ribeiro and Radek Domanski) earned the Master of Pwn title with two successful Wide Area Network (WAN) router exploits.
2021
On April 6-8, 2021, the Pwn2Own contest took place in Austin and virtually. This year’s event expanded by adding the Enterprise Communications category, which includes Microsoft Teams and Zoom Messenger. The first day of the contest saw Apple Safari, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Teams, Windows 10, and Ubuntu all compromised. Zoom Messenger was compromised on the second day of the contest with a zero-click exploit. Parallels Desktop, Google Chrome, and Microsoft Edge were also successfully exploited during the contest. Over $1,200,000 USD was awarded for 23 unique 0-days. Master of Pwn was a three way tie between Team DEVCORE, OV, and the team of Daan Keuper & Thijs Alkemade. This year's contest also saw the first ever female participant, Alisa Esage.
See also
Competitive programming
White hat (computer security)
Zero Day Initiative
DEF CON
References
External links
CanSecWest Applied Security Conference
Web browsers
Annual events in Canada
Computer security conferences
Programming contests |
44740784 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive%20Hack%20Days | Positive Hack Days | Positive Hack Days (PHDays) is a computer security conference held every year in Moscow. The first conference was held in 2011. The conference addresses such topics as zero-day attacks and digital investigations, cryptography and cyberwarfare, the security of a person and a state in the cyberworld. Attendance fee is required. Free tickets are available for winners of special hacking contests and for students who participated in the Positive Education program.
PHDays is aimed at a wide range of audience, from hackers and technical experts to businessmen and politicians. Presentations are given in Russian and English.
PHDays 2011: Who will Win — Them or Us?
The first conference was held on May 19, 2011.
Reports and workshops covered such topics as government control of information security in Russia, internet banking system safety, secure connection in VoIP, protection of data in the cloud, virtualization system security. The keynote speaker of the event was Dmitry Sklyarov.
During the conference, a capture the flag (CTF) competition was held among information security specialists from different countries. The U.S. team PPP was the winner.
There were other hacking contests, and during one of them a participant detected a zero-day vulnerability in Safari for Windows.
Among other speakers were experts from Kaspersky Lab, Russian Agricultural Bank, VimpelCom, Rostelecom, Cisco Systems, Leta IT-Company, Positive Technologies, PwC. About 500 people attended the one-day event.
PHDays 2012: Future Now
The second conference was conducted during May 30 and 31, 2012 at the Digital October center of new technologies. Along with six parallel streams of presentations and workshops, a CTF competition and security-related contests were held again.
Topics were divided into two areas: technical (exploiting radio noise, password protection, telecom security, usage of sqlmap) and business (internet banking security, data leakage in government, seeking specialists in information security).
The conference featured Bruce Schneier, an American cryptographer, the author of Applied Cryptography, Datuk Mohd Noor Amin (from IMPACT, UN), and Alexander Peslyak (known as Solar Designer), the creator of the password cracking tool John the Ripper.
Significant events include: demonstration of zero-day vulnerabilities in Windows XP and FreeBSD 8.3, cracking iPhone 4S, and contests in taking control over AR.Drone and analyzing internet banking system security.
Young School, a competition of young scientists' research papers, took place for the first time.
Among the conference's participants were representatives of Kaspersky Lab, National Agency for Computer Security of Tunisia, Cisco Systems, Eset, Openwall Project, Highload Lab, and other companies. PHDays 2012 gathered 2,000 people.
PHDays III: From Both Sides of the Barricade
The third conference was held on May 23 and 24 at the World Trade Center. Among main topics: ICS protection, web application and mobile application security, preventing attacks against banking systems, cooperation between government, researchers and information society.
Marc "van Hauser" Heuse, the creator of THC-Hydra, Amap and SuSEFirewall and the founder of The Hacker Choice, became the leading speaker.
Significant events include: a report from SCADA Strangelove about the security of Siemens SIMATIC software, a workshop on hacking ATM, a workshop from The Open Organisation Of Lockpickers (experts in nondestructive lock opening), a model railroad controlled by real industrial systems, the Labyrinth's rooms with laser field and motion detectors.
George Hotz (geohot) participated in the CTF contest as a member of PPP. He was the first to unlock iPhone, which allowed using it with other providers besides AT&T. George Hotz also won 2drunk2hack, a contest, where participants should hack web applications and have a strong drink when fail.
Specialists from Kaspersky Lab, Cisco Systems, Nokia, RSA, IPONWEB, Qualys visited the conference. PHDays III saw about 2,500 attendees.
A movie about preparation for the conference was released in 2013.
PHDays IV: IT Gazes You
The conference took place on May 21 and 22, 2014 at Digital October. Among main topics: protection of ICS and critical infrastructure components, internet banking system security, the internet of things, regulation of the information security industry, cyberwarfare.
Alisa Shevchenko detected several zero-day vulnerabilities in Indusoft Web Studio 7.1 during a contest in analyzing ICS security. Significant events include: a contest in identifying threats of a smart home, discussion of the security of telecommunications companies and the lack of really smart grids in the power industry.
During a security-related competition, its participants managed to withdraw money from a banking system that had been developed especially for the competition and filled with vulnerabilities that commonly occur in real internet banking systems.
Specialists from Kaspersky Lab, Cisco Systems, ReVuln, TOOOL, Parameter Security took part in the conference. PHDays IV drew more than 2,500 attendees.
PHDays V: Singular Point
The conference was held from 26 to 27 May 2015 at World Trade Center, Moscow, Russia.
PHDays VI: The Standoff
The conference was held from 17 to 18 May 2016 at World Trade Center, Moscow, Russia.
PHDays VIII: Enemy Inside
The conference was held from 23 to 24 May 2017 at World Trade Center, Moscow, Russia.
PHDays VIII: Digital Bet
The conference was held from 15 to 16 May 2018 at 12 Krasnopresnenskaya Embankment, Moscow, Russia.
PHDays IX: Breaking the Constant
The conference was held from 21 to 22 May 2019 at the Crocus Expo International Exhibition Center, Moscow, Russia.
Features
Technical reports, workshops, competitions, discussions about regulation of the IT industry and about business development are commonly held during PHDays. However, the feature of the conference is providing special activities that are aimed at creating an open and cyberpunk atmosphere. The conference always ends with live performances of popular Russian rock bands. In 2014, cyberpunk movies were played during the night between the two days of the conference.
References
External links
Computer security conferences
Recurring events established in 2011
2011 establishments in Russia |
44872305 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Download%20Valley | Download Valley | Download Valley is a cluster of software companies in Israel, producing and delivering adware to be installed alongside downloads of other software. The primary purpose is to monetize shareware and downloads. These software items are commonly browser toolbars, adware, browser hijackers, spyware, and malware. Another group of products are download managers, possibly designed to induce or trick the user to install adware, when downloading a piece of desired software or mobile app from a certain source.
Although the term references Silicon Valley, it does not refer to a specific valley or any geographical area. Many of the companies are located in Tel Aviv and the surrounding region. It has been used by Israeli media as well as in other reports related to IT business.
Download managers from Download Valley companies have been used by major download portals and software hosts, including Download.com by CNET, Softonic.com and SourceForge.
Economy
The smaller adware companies SweetPacks and SmileBox were purchased by the larger company Perion Networks for $41 million and $32 million. iBario claimed to be worth $100 million in early 2014. Conduit was valued at $1.4 billion by JP Morgan in 2012.
Revenues are frequently near $100 million to several $100 million for large companies (Perion: $87 million in 2013, Conduit: claimed $500 million in 2012), with much lower operating and net income (Perion: $3.88 million operating, $310.000 net income in 2013).
All these numbers are highly volatile, since technical and legal preconditions quickly change profit opportunities. In 2013 and 2014, changes in web browsers to prevent unwanted toolbar installs and a new policy by Microsoft towards advertising lead to the expectation that the main profit methods of the companies would soon work no longer. The Perion stock lost roughly two thirds of its value during 2014, from over $13.25 in January to $4.53 on December 29.
Adware
Many of the products may be designed in a way to install while not being solicited by the user who downloads the desired product, and to create revenue from software usually distributed as free. For this, they may use invasive and harmful techniques.
To achieve installs, such installers may:
not show information on potentially harmful actions, or hide it in fine print and EULAs, where they are overlooked by most users expecting only their desired program.
use deceptive menus, suggesting the adware to be the main program or part of it, or pretending to show the main program's EULA, to obtain an "accept" click to install unwanted software.
request rights for full system access, suggesting to be necessary for the main program's installation.
install unwanted software without asking or although the user rejected an install.
use hacks and exploits for unauthorized access to confidential data and system modifications.
Installed adware frequently attempts to hide its identity, prevent disabling, removal or restoring of previous settings, spy on the user's system and browsing habits, download and install further, unwanted software or open backdoors for possibly malicious attacks.
Many security software vendors list these products in the category of potentially unwanted programs (PUP, also PUS or PUA) or grayware and offer detection and removal. This category is distinct from genuine malware and used for software from companies who can, as opposed to criminal underground programmers, threaten with or practice litigation.
In 2013, the Download Valley company iBario was accused, by security software vendor Trend Micro, of distributing the Sefnit/Mevade malware through an installer and being related to a Ukrainian company considered immediately responsible for the malware.
Security software circumvention
An unnamed Download Valley executive admitted to the Wall Street Journal that some companies employ teams of up to 15 developers to break through security suites that try to block their software.
Companies linked to the term
Babylon (software), translation software, toolbars and redirected search engines.
Conduit (company)/Perion Network , a DIY mobile app platform. Conduit and Perion merged in 2013.
Genieo Innovation, user tracking software and adware. Installer used automated clicks by to bypass security permission dialogs. Acquired by Somoto Israel Ltd. in 2014.
iBario, responsible for InstallBrain downloader/installer and accused of having spread the Sefnit/Mevade malware (see above).
IronSource, being responsible for the InstallCore and MobileCore download managers, as well as numerous adware products distributed through them, such as Funmoods and FoxTab.
Somoto
SimilarWeb, founded in Tel Aviv in 2007, acquired the popular open-source browser extension Stylish in 2017 and added spyware which collected the browsing history and personal information of its 1.8 million users, resulting in the extension being removed and blocked as a security risk by Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.
Superfish, advertising company that ceased operating under this name in 2015 after a controversy about its product as pre-installed on Lenovo laptops, during which the United States Department of Homeland Security advised uninstalling it and its associated Root certificate, because they made computers vulnerable to serious cyberattacks.
See also
Adware
Browser hijacking
Freeware
Malware
Silicon Wadi
Spamming
Spyware
References
Adware
Spyware companies
Software companies of Israel
Online advertising |
23685094 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List%20of%20unusual%20units%20of%20measurement | List of unusual units of measurement | An unusual unit of measurement is a unit of measurement that does not form part of a coherent system of measurement, especially because its exact quantity may not be well known or because it may be an inconvenient multiple or fraction of a base unit.
This definition is not exact since it includes units such as the week or the light-year, which are quite "usual" in the sense that they are often used, but can be "unusual" if taken out of their common context, as demonstrated by the furlong-firkin-fortnight (FFF) system of units.
Many of the unusual units of measurements listed here are colloquial measurements, units devised to compare a measurement to common and familiar objects.
Length
Hammer unit
Valve's Source game engine uses the Hammer unit as its base unit of length. This unit refers to Sources's official map creation software, Hammer. The exact definition varies from game to game, but a Hammer unit is usually defined as a sixteenth of a foot (16 Hammer units = 1 foot). This means that one Hammer unit is equal to exactly 0.01905 meters.
Rack unit
One rack unit (U) is and is used to measure rack-mountable audiovisual, computing and industrial equipment. Rack units are typically denoted without a space between the number of units and the 'U'. Thus a 4U server enclosure (case) is high, or more practically, built to occupy a vertical space seven inches high, with sufficient clearance to allow movement of adjacent hardware.
Hand
The hand is a non-SI unit of length equal to exactly . It is normally used to measure the height of horses in some English-speaking countries, including Australia, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Light-nanosecond
The light-nanosecond is defined as exactly 29.9792458 cm. It was popularized in information technology as a unit of distance by Grace Hopper as the distance which a photon could travel in one billionth of a second (roughly 30 cm or one foot): "The speed of light is one foot per nanosecond."
Metric feet
A metric foot, defined as ), has been used occasionally in the UK but has never been an official unit.
A Chinese foot is defined as around one third of a meter, depending on jurisdiction.
Horse
Horses are used to measure distances in horse racing – a horse length (shortened to merely a length when the context makes it obvious) equals roughly . Shorter distances are measured in fractions of a horse length; also common are measurements of a full or fraction of a head, a neck, or a nose.
Boat length
In rowing races such as the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, the margin of victory and of defeat is expressed in fractions and multiples of boat lengths. The length of a rowing eight is about . A shorter distance is the canvas, which is the length of the covered part of the boat between the bow and the bow oarsman. The Racing Rules of Sailing also makes heavy use of boat lengths.
Football field (length)
A football field is often used as a comparative measurement of length when talking about distances that may be hard to comprehend when stated in terms of standard units.
An American football field is usually understood to be long, though it is technically when including the two long end zones. The field is wide.
An association football pitch may vary within limits of in length and in width. The usual size of a football pitch is , the dimensions used for matches in the UEFA Champions League.
A Canadian football field is wide and long, including two long end zones.
Block
In most US cities, a city block is between . In Manhattan, the measurement "block" usually refers to a north–south block, which is . Sometimes people living in places (like Manhattan) with a regularly spaced street grid will speak of long blocks and short blocks. Within a typical large North American city, it is often only possible to travel along east–west and north–south streets, so travel distance between two points is often given in the number of blocks east–west plus the number north–south (known to mathematicians as the Manhattan Metric).
Earth
Radius
The radius of Earth, generally given as 6,371 kilometers (3,959 miles) is often employed as a unit of measure to intuitively compare objects of planetary size.
Circumference
The circumference of a great circle of the Earth (about ) is often compared to large distances. For example, one might say that a large number of objects laid end-to-end at the equator "would circle the Earth four and a half times". According to WGS-84, the circumference of a circle through the poles (twice the length of a meridian) is and the length of the equator is . Despite the fact that the difference (0.17%) between the two is insignificant at the low precision that these quantities are typically given to, it is nevertheless often specified as being at the equator.
The definitions of both the nautical mile and the kilometre were originally derived from the Earth's circumference as measured through the poles. The nautical mile was defined as a minute of arc of latitude measured along any meridian. A circle has 360 degrees, and each degree is 60 minutes, so the nautical mile was defined as of the Earth's circumference, or about 1,852.22 metres. However, by international agreement, it is now defined to be exactly .
The metre was originally defined as of the distance from a pole to the equator, or as of the Earth's circumference as measured through the poles. This standard made the historical metre 0.0197% longer than the modern standard metre, which is calculated based on the distance covered by light in a vacuum in a set amount of time.
Earth–Moon distance
The distance between the Earth's and the Moon's surfaces is, on average, approximately . This distance is sometimes used in the same manner as the circumference of the Earth; that is, one might say that a large number of objects laid end-to-end "would reach all the way to the Moon and back two-and-a-half times".
The abbreviation for the Earth–Moon distance is "LD" which stands for "Lunar Distance", used in astronomy to express close approaches of Earth by minor planets.
Siriometer
The siriometer is a rarely used astronomical measure equal to one million astronomical units, i.e., one million times the average distance between the Sun and Earth. This distance is equal to about 15.8 light-years, 149.6 Pm, or 4.8 parsecs, and is about twice the distance from Earth to the star Sirius.
Area
Barn
One barn is 10−28 square meters, about the cross-sectional area of a uranium nucleus. The name probably derives from early neutron-deflection experiments, when the uranium nucleus was described, and the phrases "big as a barn" and "hit a barn door" were used. Barn are typically used for cross sections in nuclear and particle physics. Additional units include the microbarn (or "outhouse") and the yoctobarn (or "shed").
Brass
One brass is exactly area (used in measurement of work done or to be done, such as plastering, painting, etc.). It is also equal, however, to of estimated or supplied loose material, such as sand, gravel, rubble, etc. This unit is prevalent in construction industry in India.
Square
The square is an Imperial unit of area that is used in the construction industry in North America, and was historically used in Australia by real estate agents. One square is equal to . A roof's area may be calculated in square feet, then converted to squares.
Cow's grass
In Ireland, before the 19th century, a "cow's grass" was a measurement used by farmers to indicate the size of their fields. A cow's grass was equal to the amount of land that could produce enough grass to support a cow.
Football field (area)
A football pitch, or field, can be used as a man-in-the-street unit of area. The standard FIFA football pitch is long by wide (); FIFA allows for a variance of up to in length and in width in either direction (and even larger discretions if the pitch is not used for international competition), which generally results in the association football pitch generally only being used for order of magnitude comparisons.
An American football field, including both end zones, is , or (). A Canadian football field is wide and long with end zones adding a combined to the length, making it or .
An Australian rules football field may be approximately (or more) long goal to goal and (or more) wide, although the field's elliptical nature reduces its area to a certain extent. A football field has an area of approximately , twice the area of a Canadian football field and three times that of an American football field.
Morgen
A morgen ("morning" in Dutch and German) was approximately the amount of land tillable by one man behind an ox in the morning hours of a day. This was an official unit of measurement in South Africa until the 1970s, and was defined in November 2007 by the South African Law Society as having a conversion factor of 1 morgen = . This unit of measure was also used in the Dutch colonial province of New Netherland (later New York and parts of New England).
Countries, regions, and cities
The area of a familiar country, state or city is often used as a unit of measure, especially in journalism.
Wales
Equal to 20,779 km2 (8,023 sq mi), the country of Wales is used in phrases such as "an area the size of Wales" or "twice the area of Wales". England is 6.275 times the size of Wales, and Scotland is roughly four times the size of Wales. Ireland is four times larger than Wales, and France is about twenty-five times larger.
The British comedy show The Eleven O'Clock Show parodied the use of this measurement, by introducing a news article about an earthquake in Wales, stating that an area the size of Wales was affected. The Radio 4 programme More or Less introduced the idea of "kilowales" – an area 1,000 times the size of Wales. The Register introduced the nanowales (20.78 m2).
The measurement has been adopted by rainforest conservation charity Size of Wales, aiming to conserve an area of rainforest equating to the area of Wales. On 1 March 2013, the charity announced that they had succeeded in conserving an area of rainforest the size of Wales and will continue to operate to sustain and increase the protected area.
United States
In the United States, the area of the smallest state, Rhode Island (); the largest of the contiguous 48 states, Texas (); and less commonly Alaska (), the largest of all 50 states, are used in a similar fashion. For example, Antarctica's Larsen B ice shelf was approximately the size of Rhode Island until it broke up in 2002. Other areas may be described like this, too, like in the 1979 movie The China Syndrome when radiation is expected to contaminate "an area the size of Pennsylvania".
The US Central Intelligence Agency uses Washington, D.C. () as a comparison for city-sized objects.
Other countries
In the Netherlands, its smallest province, Utrecht (), is often used as a comparison for regions in general.
The country of Belgium () has also often been used when comparing areas, to the point where it has been regarded as a meme and where there is a website dedicated to notable areas which have been compared to that of Belgium.
The Isle of Wight (), an island off the south coast of mainland England, is commonly used to define smaller areas. It has sometimes been used in attempts to examine whether a certain amount of a given object or group would fit in a space its size; in 2018, it was estimated that approximately 2.6 billion people could fit on the Isle of Wight, at a population density of six people per square metre.
In Denmark, the island of Bornholm (588 square kilometers) is often used to describe the size of an area.
In Germany, the Saarland () is often used to define areas.
In Brazil, it is common to compare relatively small areas to the state of Sergipe (), the smallest in the country. Smaller areas are sometimes compared to the cities of São Paulo () or Rio de Janeiro ().
Volume
Metric ounce
A metric ounce is an approximation of the imperial ounce, US dry ounce, or US fluid ounce. These three customary units vary. However, the metric ounce is usually taken as 25 or 30 ml when volume is being measured, or grams when mass is being measured.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) defines the "food labeling ounce" as 30 ml, slightly larger than the 29.6 ml fluid ounce.
Several Dutch units of measurement have been replaced with informal metric equivalents, including the ons or ounce. It originally meant of a pound, or a little over 30 grams depending on which definition of the pound was used, but was redefined as 100 grams when the country metricated.
Shot
The shot is a liquid volume measure that varies from country to country and state to state depending on legislation. It is routinely used for measuring strong liquor or spirits when the amount served and consumed is smaller than the more common measures of alcoholic "drink" and "pint". There is a legally defined maximum size of a serving in some jurisdictions. The size of a "single" shot is . The smaller "pony" shot is . According to Encyclopædia Britannica Almanac 2009, a pony is 0.75 fluid ounces of liquor. According to Wolfram Alpha, one pony is 1 U.S. fluid ounce. "Double" shots (surprisingly not always the size of two single shots, even in the same place) are . In the UK, spirits are sold in shots of either 25 ml (approximating the old fluid ounce) or 35 ml.
Board foot or super foot
A board foot is a United States and Canadian unit of volume, used for lumber. It is equivalent to (). It is also found in the unit of density pounds per board foot. In Australia and New Zealand the terms super foot or superficial foot were formerly used for this unit.
A board foot is an inconsistent measurement unit that may refer to nominal or actual dimensions.
Hoppus foot
A system of measure for timber in the round (standing or felled), now largely superseded by the metric system except in measuring hardwoods in certain countries. Its purpose is to estimate the value of sawn timber in a log, by measuring the unsawn log and allowing for wastage in the mill. Following the so-called "quarter-girth formula" (the square of one quarter of the circumference in inches multiplied by of the length in feet), the notional log is four feet in circumference, one inch of which yields the hoppus board foot, 1 foot yields the hoppus foot, and 50 feet yields a hoppus ton. This translates to a hoppus foot being equal to . The hoppus board foot, when milled, yields about one board foot. The volume yielded by the quarter-girth formula is 78.54% of cubic measure (i.e. 1 ft3 = 0.7854 h ft; 1 h ft = 1.273 ft3).
Cubic ton
A cubic ton is an antiquated measure of volume, varying based on the commodity from about . It is now only used for lumber, for which one cubic ton is equivalent to .
Cord and rick
The cord is a unit of measure of dry volume used in Canada and the United States to measure firewood and pulpwood. A cord is the amount of wood that, when "ranked and well stowed" (arranged so pieces are aligned, parallel, touching and compact), occupies a volume of . This corresponds to a well-stacked woodpile, 4 feet deep by 4 feet high by 8 feet wide , or any other arrangement of linear measurements that yields the same volume. A more unusual measurement for firewood is the "rick" or face cord. It is stacked deep with the other measurements kept the same as a cord, making it of a cord; however, regional variations mean that its precise definition is non-standardized.
Twenty-foot equivalent unit
The twenty-foot equivalent unit is the volume of the smallest standard shipping container. It is equivalent to . Larger intermodal containers are commonly described in multiples of TEU, as are container ship capacities.
Acre-foot
An acre-foot is a unit of volume commonly used in the United States in reference to large-scale water resources, such as reservoirs, aqueducts, canals, sewer flow capacity, irrigation water and river flows. It is defined by the volume of one acre of surface area to a depth of one foot. .
Casual units
Many well-known objects are regularly used as casual units of volume. They include:
Double-decker bus. The approximate volume of a double-decker bus, abbreviated to DDB, has been used informally to describe the size of hole created by a major sewer collapse. For example, a report might refer to "a 4 DDB hole".
Olympic-size swimming pool. For larger volumes of liquid, one measure commonly used in the media in many countries is the Olympic-size swimming pool. A Olympic swimming pool, built to the FR3 minimum depth of would hold . The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines the Olympic swimming pool as 1 million litres, which is the approximate volume of the smaller FR2 pool.
Royal Albert Hall. The Royal Albert Hall, a large concert hall, is sometimes used as a unit of volume in the UK, for example when referring to volumes of rubbish placed in landfill. It is famously used in the line "Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall." in The Beatles song "A Day in the Life". The volume of the auditorium is between 3 and 3.5 million cubic feet (between 85,000 and 99,000 cubic metres).
Melbourne Cricket Ground. A common measure of volume in Australia, and in the state of Victoria in particular, is the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the largest stadium in Australia and 13th largest in the world. The volume of the Melbourne Cricket Ground is 1,574,000 cubic metres, or about 630 Olympic swimming pools. The seating capacity of the Melbourne Cricket Ground (100,000 ) is also used as a unit measure of the number of people.
Sydney Harbour or Sydharb. A unit of volume used in Australia for water. One Sydney Harbour is the amount of water in Sydney Harbour: approximately 562 gigalitres (562,000,000 cubic metres, or 0.562 of a cubic kilometre); or in terms of the more unusual measures above, about 357 Melbourne Cricket Grounds, 238,000 Olympic Swimming pools, or 476,000 acre-feet.
The Grand Canyon. With a volume measure approximately 4 orders of magnitude greater than a Sydharb, the volume of the Grand Canyon may be used to visualize even larger things, like the magma chamber underneath Yellowstone and other things. According to the National Park Service, the volume of the Grand Canyon is which is ().
Flow rate
Miner's inch
The volume of water which flows in one unit of time through an orifice of one square inch area. The size of the unit varies from one place to another.
Mass
Bag of cement and bag mix
The mass of an old bag of cement was one hundredweight ~ 112 lb, approximately 50 kg. The amount of material that, say, an aircraft could carry into the air is often visualised as the number of bags of cement that it could lift. In the concrete and petroleum industry, however, a bag of cement is defined as 94 pounds (~ 42.6 kg), because it has an apparent volume close to . When ready-mix concrete is specified, a "bag mix" unit is used as if the batching company mixes 5 literal bags of cement per cubic yard (or cubic metre) when a "5 bag mix" is ordered.
Grave
In 1793, the French term "grave" (from "gravity") was suggested as the base unit of mass for the metric system. In 1795, however, the name "kilogramme" was adopted instead.
Jupiter
When reporting on the masses of extrasolar planets, astronomers often discuss them in terms of multiples of Jupiter's mass ( = 1.9 kg). For example, "Astronomers recently discovered a planet outside our Solar System with a mass of approximately 3 Jupiters." Furthermore, the mass of Jupiter is nearly equal to one thousandth of the mass of the Sun.
Sun
Solar mass ( = ) is also often used in astronomy when talking about masses of stars or galaxies; for example, Alpha Centauri A has the mass of 1.1 suns, and the Milky Way has a mass of approximately .
Solar mass also has a special use when estimating orbital periods and distances of 2 bodies using Kepler's laws: a3 = MtotalT2, where a is length of semi-major axis in AU, T is orbital period in years and Mtotal is the combined mass of objects in . In case of planet orbiting a star, Mtotal can be approximated to mean the mass of the central object. More specifically in the case of Sun and Earth the numbers reduce to Mtotal ~ 1, a ~ 1 and T ~ 1.
Time
Light-distance
George Gamow discussed measurements of time such as the "light-mile" and "light-foot", the time taken for light to travel the specified unit distance, defined by "reversing the procedure" used in defining a light-year. A light-foot is roughly one nanosecond.
Shake
In nuclear engineering and astrophysics contexts, the shake is sometimes used as a conveniently short period of time. 1 shake is defined as 10 nanoseconds.
Jiffy
In computing, the jiffy is the duration of one tick of the system timer interrupt. Typically, this time is 0.01 seconds, though in some earlier systems (such as the Commodore 8-bit machines) the jiffy was defined as of a second, roughly equal to the vertical refresh period (i.e. the field rate) on NTSC video hardware (and the period of AC electric power in North America).
Microfortnight
One unit derived from the FFF system of units is the microfortnight, one millionth of the fundamental time unit of FFF, which equals 1.2096 seconds. This is a fairly representative example of "hacker humor", and is occasionally used in operating systems; for example, the OpenVMS TIMEPROMPTWAIT parameter is measured in microfortnights.
Sidereal day
The sidereal day is based on the Earth's rotation rate relative to fixed stars, rather than the Sun. A sidereal day is approximately 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.0905 SI seconds.
Decimal time systems
The measurement of time is unique in SI in that while the second is the base unit, and measurements of time smaller than a second use prefixed units smaller than a second (e.g. microsecond, nanosecond, etc.), measurements larger than a second instead use traditional divisions, including the sexagesimal-based minute and hour as well as the less regular day and year units.
SI allows for the use of larger prefixed units based on the second, a system known as metric time, but this is seldom used, since the number of seconds in a day (86,400 or, in rare cases, 86,401) negate one of the metric system's primary advantages: easy conversion by multiplying or dividing by powers of ten.
There have been numerous proposals and usage of decimal time, most of which were based on the day as the base unit, such that the number of units between any two events that happen at the same time of day would be equal to the number of days between them multiplied by some integer power of ten. In dynastic China, the kè was a unit that represented of a day (it has since been refined to of a day, or 15 minutes). In France, a decimal time system in place from 1793 to 1805 divided the day into 10 hours, each divided into 100 minutes, in turn each divided into 100 seconds; the French Republican Calendar further extended this by assembling days into ten-day "weeks".
Ordinal dates and Julian days, the latter of which has seen use in astronomy as it is not subject to leap year complications) allow for the expression of a decimal portion of the day. In the mid-1960s, to defeat the advantage of the recently introduced computers for the then popular rally racing in the Midwest, competition lag times in a few events were given in centids ( day, 864 seconds, 14.4 minutes), millids ( day, 86.4 seconds), and centims ( minute, 0.6 seconds) the latter two looking and sounding a bit like the related units of minutes and seconds. Decimal time proposals are frequently used in fiction, often in futuristic works.
In addition to decimal time, there also exist binary clocks and hexadecimal time.
Sol
The United States-based NASA, when conducting missions to the planet Mars, has typically used a time of day system calibrated to the mean solar day on that planet (known as a "sol"), training those involved on those missions to acclimate to that length of day, which is 88,775 SI seconds, or 2,375 seconds (about 39 minutes) longer than the mean solar day on Earth. NASA's Martian timekeeping system (instead of breaking down the sol into 25×53×67 or 25×67×53 SI second divisions) slows down clocks so that the 24-hour day is stretched to the length of that on Mars; Martian hours, minutes and seconds are thus 2.75% longer than their SI-compatible counterparts.
The Darian calendar is an arrangement of sols into a Martian year. It maintains a seven-sol week (retaining Sunday through Saturday naming customs), with four weeks to a month and 24 months to a Martian year, which contains 668 or 669 sols depending on leap years. The last Saturday of every six months is skipped over in the Darian calendar.
Dog year
There are two diametrically opposed definitions of the dog year, primarily used to approximate the equivalent age of dogs and other animals with similar life spans. Both are based upon a popular myth regarding the aging of dogs that states that a dog ages seven years in the time it takes a human to age one year.
One seventh of a year, or approximately 52 days. When this definition is used, a standard calendar year is known as a "human year".
A standard (365-day) calendar year of a dog's life, whereas a "human year" is the period of a dog's (or other animal's) life that is claimed to be equivalent to a year of a human being's life (or seven calendar years).
In fact, the aging of a dog varies by breed (larger breeds tend to have shorter lifespans than small and medium-sized breeds); dogs also develop faster and have longer adulthoods relative to their total life span than humans. Most dogs are sexually mature by 1 year old, which corresponds to perhaps 13 years old in humans. Giant dog breeds and bulldogs tend to have the strongest linear correspondence to human aging, with longer adolescences and shorter overall lifespans; such breeds typically age about nine times as fast as humans throughout their lives.
Galactic year
The galactic year, GY, is the time it takes the solar system to revolve once around the galactic core, approximately 250 million years (megaannum or "Ma"). It is a convenient unit for long-term measurements. For example, oceans appeared on Earth after 4 GY, life is detectable at 5 GY, and multicellular organisms first appeared at 15 GY. The age of the Earth is estimated at about 20 GY. This use of GY is not to be confused with Gyr for gigayear or Gy for Gray (unit).
KerMetric time
KerMetric time is a concept that divides the day into 100 equal parts called Kermits. Each Kermit is equivalent to 14.4 minutes. More precise time can be counted by dividing by 1000 or even 10000. The name Kermit came from a combination of the surname of the president of the National Research Council in 1983 (Dr. Larkin Kerwin). The original working model of KerMetric time as conceived by W. Thayer of NRC was assembled by the designated Clock Construction Team of John Phillips, Ron Hawkins, Les Moore and Willie Thayer in 1983.
Moment
A moment was a medieval unit of time. The movement of a shadow on a sundial covered 40 moments in a solar hour. An hour in this case meant one twelfth of the period between sunrise and sunset. The length of a solar hour depended on the length of the day, which in turn varied with the season, so the length of a moment in modern seconds was not fixed, but on average, a moment corresponded to 90 seconds.
Thirds, fourths
The term "minute" usually means of an hour, coming from "a minute division of an hour". The term "second" comes from "the second minute division of an hour", as it is of a minute, or of of an hour. While usually sub-second units are represented with SI prefixes on the second (e.g. milliseconds), this system can be extrapolated further, such that a "Third" would mean of a second, and a "Fourth" would mean of a third, etc. These units are occasionally used in astronomy to denote angles.
Angular measure
Furman
The Furman is a unit of angular measure equal to of a circle, or just under 20 arcseconds. It is named for Alan T. Furman, the American mathematician who adapted the CORDIC algorithm for 16-bit fixed-point arithmetic sometime around 1980. 16 bits give a resolution of 216 = 65,536 distinct angles.
Binary degree, binary radian, brad
A related unit of angular measure equal to of a circle, represented by 8 bits, has found some use in machinery control where fine precision is not required, most notably crankshaft and camshaft position in internal combustion engine controllers, and in video game programming. There is no consensus as to its name, but it has been called the 8-Bit Furman, the Small Furman, the Furboy and more recently, the miFurman, (milli-binary-Furman). These units are convenient because they form cycles: for the 8-bit unit, the value overflows from 255 to 0 when a full circle has been traversed, so binary addition and subtraction work as expected. Measures are often made using a Gray code, which is trivially converted into more conventional notation. Its value is equivalent to Tau/256 radians, or about 0.0245436926 radians.
Grade (also grad, gradian, gon)
Coordinates were measured in grades on official French terrestrial ordnance charts from the French revolution well into the 20th century. 1 grade (or in modern symbology, 1 gon) = 0.9° or 0.01 right angle. One advantage of this measure is that the distance between latitude lines 0.01 gon apart at the equator is almost exactly 1 kilometer (and would be exactly 1 km if the original definition of 1 meter = quarter-meridian had been adhered to). One disadvantage is that common angles like 30° and 60° are expressed by fractional values (33 and 66 respectively) so this "decimal" unit failed to displace the "sexagesimal" units equilateral-vertex – degree – minute – second invented by Babylonian astronomers.
Mils, strecks
Mils and strecks are small units of angle used by various military organizations for range estimation and translating map coordinates used for directing artillery fire. The exact size varies between different organizations: there are 6400 NATO mils per turn (1 NATO mil = 0.982 mrad), or 6000 Warsaw pact mils per turn (1 Warsaw pact mil = 1.047 mrad). In the Swedish military, there are 6300 strecks per turn (1 streck = 0.997 mrad).
MERU (Milli Earth Rate Unit)
The MERU, or Milli Earth Rate Unit, is an angular velocity equal to 1/1000 of Earth's rotation rate. It was introduced by MIT's Instrumentation Laboratories (now Draper Labs) to measure the performance of inertial navigation systems. One MERU = or about 0.2625 milliradians/hour.
Energy
Electronvolt mass
It is common in particle physics, where mass and energy are often interchanged, to use eV/c2, where eV (electronvolt) is the kinetic energy of an electron accelerated over one volt ( joules), c is the speed of light in a vacuum (from E = mc2). This definition is useful for a linear particle accelerator when accelerating electrons.
1 Da = 931.46 MeV/c2
More frequently the system of natural units where c=1, and eV was used as a unit of mass.
Gasoline gallon equivalent
In 2011, the United States Environmental Protection Agency introduced the gallon gasoline equivalent as a unit of energy because their research showed most U.S. citizens do not understand the standard units. The gallon gasoline equivalent is defined as 33.7 kWh, or about 1.213 joules.
Efficiency / fuel economy can be given as miles per gallon gasoline equivalent.
Tons of TNT equivalent
The energy of various amounts of the explosive TNT (kiloton, megaton, gigaton) is often used as a unit of explosion energy, and sometimes of asteroid impacts and violent explosive volcanic eruptions. One ton of TNT produces 4.184 joules, or (by arbitrary definition) exactly thermochemical calories (approximately 3.964 BTU). This definition is only loosely based on the actual physical properties of TNT.
Hiroshima bomb and Halifax explosion
The energy released by the Hiroshima bomb explosion (about 15 kt TNT equivalent, or 6 J) is often used by geologists as a unit when describing the energy of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and asteroid impacts.
Prior to the detonation of the Hiroshima bomb, the size of the Halifax Explosion (about 3 kt TNT equivalent, or 1.26 J), was the standard for this type of relative measurement. Each explosion had been the largest known artificial detonation to date.
Quad
A quad is a unit of energy equal to BTUs, or approximately 1.055 J (slightly over one exajoule). It is suitably large to quantify energy usage by nations or by the planet as whole using everyday numbers. For example, in 2004, US energy consumption was about 100 Q/year, while demand worldwide was about 400 Q/year.
Foe
A foe is a unit of energy equal to joules (≈9.478 BTU) that was coined by physicist Gerry Brown of Stony Brook University. To measure the staggeringly immense amount of energy produced by a supernova, specialists occasionally use the "foe", an acronym derived from the phrase [ten to the power of] fifty-one ergs, or ergs. This unit of measure is convenient because a supernova typically releases about one foe of observable energy in a very short period of time (which can be measured in seconds).
Other metric-compatible scales
Power: Ton of refrigeration
The rate at which heat is removed by melting of ice in 24 hours is called a ton of refrigeration, or even a ton of cooling. This unit of refrigeration capacity came from the days when large blocks of ice were used for cooling, and is still used to describe the heat-removal capabilities of refrigerators and chillers today. One ton of refrigeration is exactly equal to 12,000 BTU/h, or 3.517 kW.
Luminous flux: watt equivalent
With the phaseout of the incandescent lamp in the United States and European Union in the early 21st century, manufacturers and sellers of more energy-efficient lamps have compared the visible light output of their lamps to commonly used incandescent lamp sizes with the watt equivalent or watt incandescent replacement (usually with a lowercase w as a unit symbol, as opposed to capital W for the actual wattage). 1 watt incandescent replacement corresponds to 15 lumens. Thus, a 72-watt halogen lamp, a 23-watt compact fluorescent lamp and a 14-watt light-emitting diode lamp, all of which emit 1500 lumens of visible light, are all marketed as "100 watt incandescent replacement" (100w).
Flow: Amazon River
The volume of discharge of the Amazon River sometimes used to describe large volumes of water flow such as ocean currents. The unit is equivalent to 216,000 m3/s.
Flow: Sverdrup
One Sverdrup (Sv) is equal to 1,000,000 cubic metres per second (264,000,000 USgal/s). It is used almost exclusively in oceanography to measure the volumetric rate of transport of ocean currents.
Energy intensity
The langley (symbol Ly) is used to measure solar radiation or insolation. It is equal to one thermochemical calorie per square centimetre (4.184 J/m2 or ≈3.684 BTU/sq ft) and was named after Samuel Pierpont Langley. Its symbol should not be confused with that for the light-year, ly.
Kinematic viscosity
One of the few CGS units to see wider use, one stokes (symbol S or St) is a unit of kinematic viscosity, defined as 1 cm2/s, i.e., 10−4 m2/s (≈1.08×10−3 sq ft/s).
Angular velocity
MERU (Milli Earth Rate Unit), an angular velocity equal to of Earth's rotation rate: 1 MERU = 0.015 degrees/hour ≈ 0.072921 microradian/second. Sometimes used to measure the angular drift rate of an inertial navigation system.
Electromagnetic flux
In radio astronomy, the unit of electromagnetic flux is the jansky (symbol Jy), equivalent to 10−26 watts per square metre per hertz (= 10−26 kg/s2 in base units, about 8.8×10−31 BTU/ft2). It is named after the pioneering radio astronomer Karl Jansky. The brightest natural radio sources have flux densities of the order of one to one hundred jansky.
Metre of water equivalent
A material-dependent unit used in nuclear and particle physics and engineering to measure the thickness of shielding, for example around a nuclear reactor, particle accelerator, or radiation or particle detector. 1 mwe of a material is the thickness of that material that provides the equivalent shielding of one metre (≈39.4 in) of water.
This unit is commonly used in underground science to express the extent to which the overburden (usually rock) shields an underground space or laboratory from cosmic rays. The actual thickness of overburden through which cosmic rays must traverse to reach the underground space varies as a function of direction due to the shape of the overburden, which may be a mountain, or a flat plain, or something more complex like a cliff side. To express the depth of an underground space in mwe (or kmwe for deep sites) as a single number, the convention is to use the depth beneath a flat overburden at sea level that gives the same overall cosmic ray muon flux in the underground location.
Strontium unit: radiation dose
The strontium unit, formerly known as the Sunshine Unit (symbol S.U.), is a unit of biological contamination by radioactive substances (specifically strontium-90). It is equal to one picocurie of Sr-90 per gram of body calcium. Since about 2% of the human body mass is calcium, and Sr-90 has a half-life of 28.78 years, releasing 6.697+2.282 MeV per disintegration, this works out to about 1.065 grays per second. The permissible body burden was established at 1,000 S.U.
Banana equivalent dose
Bananas, like most organic material, naturally contain a certain amount of radioactive isotopes—even in the absence of any artificial pollution or contamination. The banana equivalent dose, defined as the additional dose a person will absorb from eating one banana, expresses the severity of exposure to radiation, such as resulting from nuclear weapons or medical procedures, in terms that would make sense to most people. This is approximately 78 nanosieverts – in informal publications one often sees this estimate rounded up to 0.1 μSv.
Molar mass of cellulose
In the pulp and paper industry, molar mass is traditionally measured with a method where the intrinsic viscosity (dL/g) of the pulp sample is measured in cupriethylenediamine (Cuen). The intrinsic viscosity [η] is related to the weight-average molar mass (in daltons) by the Mark-Houwink equation: [η] = 0.070 Mw0.70. However, it is typical to cite [η] values directly in dL/g, as the "viscosity" of the cellulose, confusingly as it is not a viscosity.
Iodine, bromine and kappa number
In measuring unsaturation in fatty acids, the traditional method is the iodine number. Iodine adds stoichiometrically to double bonds, so their amount is reported in grams of iodine spent per 100 grams of oil. The standard unit is a dimensionless stoichiometry ratio of moles double bonds to moles fatty acid. A similar quantity, bromine number, is used in gasoline analysis.
In pulp and paper industry, a similar kappa number is used to measure how much bleaching a pulp requires. Potassium permanganate is added to react with the unsaturated compounds (lignin and uronic acids) in the pulp and back-titrated. Originally with chlorine bleaching the required quantity of chlorine could be then calculated, although modern methods use multiple stages. Since the oxidizable compounds are not exclusively lignin and the partially pulped lignin does not have a single stoichiometry, the relation between the kappa number and the precise amount of lignin is inexact.
Temperature: Gas Mark
Gas Mark is a temperature scale, predominantly found on British ovens, that scales linearly with Celsius above 135 °C (Gas Mark 1) and scales with the log of Celsius below 135 °C.
Demography and epidemiology
Demography and quantitative epidemiology are statistical fields that deal with counts or proportions of people, or rates of change in these. Counts and proportions are technically dimensionless, and so have no units of measurement, although identifiers such as "people", "births", "infections" and the like are used for clarity. Rates of change are counts per unit of time and strictly have inverse time dimensions (per unit of time). In demography and epidemiology expressions such as "deaths per year" are used to clarify what is being measured.
Prevalence, a common measure in epidemiology is strictly a type of denominator data, a dimensionless ratio or proportion. Prevalence may be expressed as a fraction, a percentage or as the number of cases per 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 in the population of interest.
Micromort
A micromort is a unit of risk measuring a one-in-a-million probability of death (from micro- and mortality). Micromorts can be used to measure riskiness of various day-to-day activities. A microprobability is a one-in-a million chance of some event; thus a micromort is the microprobability of death. For example, smoking 1.4 cigarettes increases one's death risk by one micromort, as does traveling by car.
Numbers of people: Stadium capacities
The large numbers of people involved in demography are often difficult to comprehend. A useful visualisation tool is the audience capacity of large sports stadiums (often about 100,000). Often the capacity of the largest stadium in a region serves as a unit for a large number of people. For example, Uruguay's Estadio Centenario is often used in Uruguay, while in parts of the United States, Michigan Stadium is used in this manner. In Australia, the capacity of the Melbourne Cricket Ground (about 100,000) is often cited in this manner. Hence the Melbourne Cricket Ground serves as both a measure of people and a unit of volume.
Struck by lightning
"Struck by lightning" is often used to put highly infrequent events into perspective. Among the roughly 300 million people in the United States, there are roughly 300 people struck by lightning annually and roughly 30 killed, making a lightning strike a one in a million event and a death a one in ten million event; given a mean life expectancy of slightly over 75 years, the chances of an American ever being struck in their lifetime is about 1-in-13,000. For example: "A person is about 15 times more likely to be struck by lightning in a given year than to be killed by a stranger with a diagnosis of schizophrenia or chronic psychosis".
Computer and information science
The growth of computing has necessitated the creation of many new units, several of which are based on unusual foundations.
Data volume
Volume or capacity of data is often compared to works of literature or large collections of writing. Popular units include the Bible, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, phone books, the complete works of Shakespeare, and the Library of Congress.
When the Compact Disc began to be used as a data storage device as the CD-ROM, journalists often described the disc capacity (650 megabytes) by using the number of Christian Bibles that can be stored. The King James Version of the Bible in uncompressed plain 8-bit text contains about 4.5 million characters, so a CD-ROM can store about 150 Bibles.
The print version of the Encyclopædia Britannica is another common data volume metric. It contains approximately 300 million characters, so two copies would fit onto a CD-ROM and still have 50 megabytes (or about 11 bibles) left over.
The term Library of Congress is often used. It refers to the US Library of Congress. Information researchers have estimated that the entire print collections of the Library of Congress represent roughly 10 terabytes of uncompressed textual data.
Nibble
A measure of quantity of data or information, the "nibble" (sometimes spelled "nybble" or "nybl") is normally equal to 4 bits, or one half of the common 8-bit byte. The nibble is used to describe the amount of memory used to store a digit of a number stored in binary-coded decimal format, or to represent a single hexadecimal digit. Less commonly, 'nibble' may be used for any contiguous portion of a byte of specified length, e.g. "6-bit nibble"; this usage is most likely to be encountered in connection with a hardware architecture in which the word length is not a multiple of 8, such as older 36-bit minicomputers.
FLOPS
In computing, FLOPS (FLoating point Operations Per Second) is a measure of a computer's computing power. It is also common to see measurements of kilo, mega, giga, and teraFLOPS.
It is also used to compare the performance of computers in practice.
BogoMips
A measure to determine the CPU speed. It was invented by Linus Torvalds and is nowadays present on every Linux operating system. However, it is not a meaningful measure to assess the actual CPU performance.
KLOC
A computer programming expression, the K-LOC or KLOC, pronounced kay-lok, standing for "kilo-lines of code", i.e., thousand lines of code. The unit was used, especially by IBM managers, to express the amount of work required to develop a piece of software. Given that estimates of 20 lines of functional code per day per programmer were often used, it is apparent that 1 K-LOC could take one programmer as long as 50 working days, or 10 working weeks. This measure is no longer in widespread use because different computer languages require different numbers of lines to achieve the same result (occasionally the measure "assembly equivalent lines of code" is used, with appropriate conversion factors from the language actually used to assembly language).
Error rates in programming are also measured in "Errors per K-LOC", which is called the defect density. NASA's SATC is one of the few organizations to claim zero defects in a large (>500K-LOC) project, for the space shuttle software.
An alternative measurement was defined by Pegasus Mail author David Harris: the "WaP" is equivalent to 71,500 lines of program code, because that number of lines is the length of one edition of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace.
Ticks
The "tick" is the amount of time between timer interrupts generated by the timer circuit of a CPU. The amount of time is processor-dependent.
Purchasing power parity
Big Mac Index
The Economist's Big Mac Index compares the purchasing power parity of countries in terms of the cost of a Big Mac hamburger. This was felt to be a good measure of the prices of a basket of commodities in the local economy including labour, rent, meat, bread, cardboard, advertising, lettuce, etc.
A similar system used in the UK is the 'Mars bar'. Tables of prices in Mars bars have intermittently appeared in newspapers over the last 20 years, usually to illustrate changes in wages or prices over time without the confusion caused by inflation.
Coffee/latte
The cost of a cup of coffee (or sometimes latte) from a coffeehouse or cafe is often used as a measurement of two vectors: the relatively diminutive expense of something frivolous, versus the power of collective contributions towards something important. Campaigns implore something to the effect of, "for the cost of a cup of coffee, you can help stamp out diabetes."
Other
Centipawn
Chess software frequently uses centipawns internally or externally as a unit measuring how strong each player's situation position is, and hence also by how much one player is beating the other, and how strong a possible move is. 100 centipawns = the value of 1 pawn – more specifically, something like the average value of the pawns at the start of the game, as the actual value of pawns depends on their position. Loss of a pawn will therefore typically lose that player 100 centipawns. The centipawn is often used for comparing possible moves, as in a given position, chess software will often rate the better of two moves within a few centipawns of each other.
Garn
The garn is NASA's unit of measure for symptoms resulting from space adaptation syndrome, the response of the human body to weightlessness in space, named after US Senator Jake Garn, who became exceptionally spacesick during an orbital flight in 1985. If an astronaut is completely incapacitated by space adaptation syndrome, he or she is under the effect of one garn of symptoms.
Mother Cow Index
Formerly used in real estate transactions in the American Southwest, it was the number of pregnant cows an acre of a given plot of land could support. It acted as a proxy for the agricultural quality, natural resource availability, and arability of a parcel of land.
Nines
Numbers very close to, but below one are often expressed in "nines" (N – not to be confused with the unit newton), that is in the number of nines following the decimal separator in writing the number in question. For example, "three nines" or "3N" indicates 0.999 or 99.9%, "four nines five" or "4N5" is the expression for the number 0.99995 or 99.995%.
Typical areas of usage are:
The reliability of computer systems, that is the ratio of uptime to the sum of uptime and downtime. "Five nines" reliability in a continuously operated system means an average downtime of no more than approximately five minutes per year (there is no relationship between the number of nines and minutes per year, it is pure coincidence that "five nines" relates to five minutes per year.) (See high availability for a chart.)
The purity of materials, such as gases and metals.
Pain
The dol (from the Latin word for pain, dolor) is a unit of measurement for pain. James D. Hardy, Herbert G. Wolff, and Helen Goodell of Cornell University proposed the unit based on their studies of pain during the 1940s and 1950s. They defined one dol to equal to "just noticeable differences" (jnd's) in pain. The unit never came into widespread use and other methods are now used to assess the level of pain experienced by patients.
The Schmidt sting pain index and Starr sting pain index are pain scales rating the relative pain caused by different hymenopteran stings. Schmidt has refined his Schmidt Sting Pain Index (scaled from 1 to 4) with extensive anecdotal experience, culminating in a paper published in 1990 which classifies the stings of 78 species and 41 genera of Hymenoptera. The Starr sting pain scale uses the same 1-to-4 scaling.
Pepper heat
ASTA pungency unit
The ASTA (American Spice Trade Association) pungency unit is based on a scientific method of measuring chili pepper "heat". The technique utilizes high-performance liquid chromatography to identify and measure the concentrations of the various compounds that produce a heat sensation. Scoville units are roughly the size of pungency units while measuring capsaicin, so a rough conversion is to multiply pungency by 15 to obtain Scoville heat units.
Scoville heat unit
The Scoville scale is a measure of the hotness of a chili pepper. It is the degree of dilution in sugar water of a specific chili pepper extract when a panel of 5 tasters can no longer detect its "heat". Pure capsaicin (the chemical responsible for the "heat") has 16 million Scoville heat units.
Proof: alcohol concentration
Up to the 20th century, alcoholic spirits were assessed in the UK by mixing with gunpowder and testing the mixture to see whether it would still burn; spirit that just passed the test was said to be at 100° proof. The UK now uses percentage alcohol by volume at 20 °C (68 °F), where spirit at 100° proof is approximately 57.15% ABV; the US uses a "proof number" of twice the ABV at 60 °F (15.5 °C).
Savart
The Savart is an 18th-century unit for measuring the frequency ratio of two sounds. It is equal to of a decade (not to be confused with the time period equal to 10 years). The cent is preferred for musical use.
Telecommunications traffic volume
The erlang, named after A. K. Erlang, as a dimensionless unit is used in telephony as a statistical measure of the offered intensity of telecommunications traffic on a group of resources. Traffic of one erlang refers to a single resource being in continuous use, or two channels being at fifty percent use, and so on, pro rata. Much telecommunications management and forecasting software uses this.
Waffle House Index
Waffle House Index is used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to determine the impact of a storm and the likely scale of assistance required for disaster recovery. The measure is based on the reputation of the Waffle House restaurant chain for staying open during extreme weather. This term was coined by FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate.
X-ray intensity
The crab is defined as the intensity of X-rays emitted from the Crab Nebula at a given photon energy up to 30 kiloelectronvolts. The Crab Nebula is often used for calibration of X-ray telescopes. For measuring the X-ray intensity of a less energetic source, the milliCrab (mCrab) may be used.
One crab is approximately 24 pW/m2.
See also
Conversion of units
GNU Units, a unit conversion program, which supports many uncommon units
Hair's breadth
History of measurement
List of humorous units of measurement
List of obsolete units of measurement
Muggeseggele
Unit of measurement
References
Bibliography
Unusual units of measurement
Unusual units of measurement
Measurement |
40866168 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London%20Packet%20%281791%20ship%29 | London Packet (1791 ship) | London Packet was a merchant vessel launched on the Thames in 1791. She served the Royal Navy as a Hired armed ship from 31 March 1793 to at least 30 September 1800, and despite some records, apparently for a year or more beyond that. She then returned to sailing as a merchant man until an American privateer captured her in May 1814.
Merchantman
London Packet entered Lloyd's Register (LR) in 1791.
Hired armed ship
London Packet was commissioned in April 1793
under Lieutenant J.E. Douglas. Then from May 1794 or so, Lieutenant James Fegan (or Fogan) was captain, with A. Hill as master, at least in 1799.
On 27 February 1795 Lloyd's List (LL) reported that the armed ship London Packet had recaptured Monmouth, Blackburn, master. Monmouth had been sailing from Jamaica to London when the French had captured her. Unfortunately, Monmouth was then lost on the rocks at the Isles of Scilly with two of her crew members being drowned.
London Packet otherwise appears to have had a relatively uneventful career on the Liverpool to Channel station, escorting convoys until at least late 1801. In October 1801 she had left Plymouth for Liverpool with 100 French prisoners. Although, or despite having heard in Falmouth of the pending peace treaty with France the prisoners attempted to take over the ship. Lieutenant Fegan and the officers were able to suppress the uprising within minutes without injury to officers or crew, but with some injuries among the prisoners. The news of the treaty had caused the British to relax their precautions and the prisoners had decided to take advantage of this.
Merchantman
At the resumption of war with France in 1803 the Royal Navy did not rehire London Packet. Instead the ship London Packet returned to mercantile service. The Register of Shipping for 1804 showed her with J.Toone, master and owner, and trade London–Cadiz.
Captain Thomas Quertis acquired a letter of marque on 29 October 1803.
Captain Richard Rabey acquired a letter of marque on 30 April 1805.
London Packet reappeared in LR in 1807 with R.Raby, master, Moulen, owner, and trade Hull-Guernsey.
The Register of Shipping (RS) for 1811 showed London Packet with R. Raby, master, Moulden, owner, and trade Hull–Baltic. This entry continued unchanged through the 1813 volume.
Captain Thomas Domaille acquired a letter of marque on 5 April 1811. LR for 1811 showed her trade as London–Guernsey. LR for 1813 showed her master as Raby, changing to Domville.
Fate
An American privateer captured London Packet, of Guernsey, Domaille, master, on 19 April 1814, as she was sailing from Valencia to Rio de Janeiro.
Citations and references
Citations
References
Schomberg, Isaac (1815) Naval Chronology: Or An Historical Summary of Naval and Maritime Events... From the Time of the Romans, to the Treaty of Peace of Amiens... (T. Egerton).
1791 ships
Age of Sail merchant ships of England
Hired armed vessels of the Royal Navy
Captured ships |
19602815 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turku%20Centre%20for%20Computer%20Science | Turku Centre for Computer Science | Turku Centre for Computer Science (abbr. TUCS, , ) is a joint department of University of Turku and Åbo Akademi University. TUCS was founded on March 21, 1994. The mission of TUCS is to coordinate the education, research and societal interaction of the affiliate Universities in the field of ICT. The TUCS office facilities are located in Turku in the Turku Science Park area.
Departments involved in TUCS
University of Turku
Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences
Department of Information Technology.
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Turku School of Economics
The Institute of Information Systems Sciences
Åbo Akademi University
Faculty of Natural Sciences and Technology
Computer Science
Computer Engineering
'''Faculty of Social Sciences, Business and Economics
Information Systems
Organization
Turku Centre for Computer Science coordinates education and research Computer Science (understood in a broad sense) in Turku. TUCS is governed by a board. The Director of TUCS is Prof. Ion Petre.
TUCS boasts a long history of high-level achievements of its affiliated researchers, in terms of articles in high-level journals and conferences, high number of citations, invitations to speak in the most important conferences in the field, and memberships in editorial boards of many high-level international journals. TUCS has been a Center of Excellence of Research of the Academy of Finland in the very first round of such centers in Finland, 1995-1999. A unit of TUCS, the Centre for Reliable Software Technology (CREST), has also been a Center of Excellence during 2002-2007. Two Academy Professors, as well as three FIDIPRO professors have been / are affiliated with TUCS.
The research in TUCS is focused on TUCS Research Programmes. Currently the research programmes are:
Combinatorics, Complex Systems and Computability (Com3) - director Prof. Jarkko Kari
From Computational Biology and Medical Informatics to Health and Wellbeing (BioHealth) - directors Prof. Tapio Salakoski and Prof. Ion Petre
Resilient IT Infrastructures (RITES) - directors Prof. Ivan Porres and Dr. Juha Plosila
Turku Information Systems Research Alliance (TISRA) - directors Prof. Emer. Christer Carlsson and Prof. Jukka Heikkilä
The research is carried out in 17 research units.
TUCS organises the TUCS Distinguished Lecture Series, a forum for public lectures delivered by outstanding national and international scientists and innovators in all aspects of computing. They come from diverse backgrounds from academia, as well as from industry. The purpose is to facilitate contacts between young scientists and top research groups as well as inform and inspire wider audiences about recent developments and future visions in ICT-related theory and practice. The lectures are recorded and published on YouTube channel.
TUCS coordinates the master- and doctoral-level education in computer science, computer engineering, mathematics, and information systems between the two universities in Turku, helping to provide the educational programs of both universities to all students. This is made possible by the joint campus of the two universities.
Cooperation with other universities and colleges
TUCS is an affiliate partner of EIT ICT Labs of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology.
TUCS is a member of the European Education Forum (abbr. EEF). There are seven research centers in EEF in Denmark, Netherlands, Finland, Italy, Germany and United Kingdom.
TUCS is a member of the Finnish state wide INFORTE-programme for ICT professionals, which is designed to offer networking and education events to professionals working in Finnish companies, polytechnics and public administration.
References
Further information
TUCS website
TUCS Page in Facebook
University of Turku TUCS Collection in Doria service
Research institutes in Finland
University of Turku |
38095864 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreCAD | LibreCAD | LibreCAD is a computer-aided design (CAD) application for 2D design. It is free and open-source, and available for Linux, macOS, and Windows operating systems.
Most of the interface and handle concepts are analogous to AutoCAD, making it easier to use for users with experience in this type of commercial CAD application.
History
Around 2010, the QCAD Community Edition v2.0.5.0 was forked to start the development of what is now known as LibreCAD. Originally, the GUI was based on Qt3 libraries.
Currently, the GUI of LibreCAD is based on Qt5 libraries, so it can run on several platforms in the same way.
Features
LibreCAD is available in over 30 languages. It uses the AutoCAD DXF file format internally for import and save files, as well as allowing export to many other file formats.
File formats
As of version 2.2.0, LibreCAD is capable of reading and writing the following file formats:
Open File or Import Block:
CAD : DXF, DWG, JWW
CAD font : LFF, CXF
Import Image:
Vector image : SVG, SVGZ
Bitmap image : BMP, CUR, GIF, ICNS, ICO, JPEG, JPG, PBM, PGM, PNG, PPM, TGA, TIF, TIFF, WBMP, WEBP, XBM, XPM
Save File:
CAD : DXF (2007), DXF, (2004), DXF (2000), DXF (R14), DXF (R12)
CAD font : LFF, CXF
Export:
PDF
Vector image : SVG, CAM (Plain SVG)
Bitmap image : BMP, CUR, ICNS, ICO, JPG, PBM, PGM, PNG, PPM, TIF, WBMP, WEBP, XBM, XPM
GPLv3 vs GPLv2 controversy
The GNU LibreDWG library is released under GPLv3, so it cannot be used by GPLv2-licensed LibreCAD (and FreeCAD) because their licenses are incompatible. A request also went to the FSF to relicense GNU LibreDWG as GPLv2, which was rejected. This controversy has been resolved by writing a new GPLv2-licensed library called libdxfrw, with more complete DWG support.
See also
Comparison of computer-aided design software
References
External links
LibreCAD User Manual
2011 software
Computer-aided design software for Windows
Computer-aided design software for Linux
MacOS computer-aided design software
Software that uses Qt
Engineering software that uses Qt
Free computer-aided design software
Software using the GPL license
Free software programmed in C++ |
1615947 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%20Major%20BBS | The Major BBS | The Major BBS (sometimes MajorBBS or MBBS) was bulletin board software (a bulletin board system server) developed between 1986 and 1999 by Galacticomm. In 1995 it was renamed Worldgroup Server and bundled with a user client interface program named Worldgroup Manager for Microsoft Windows. Originally DOS-based, two of the versions were also available as a Unix-based edition, and the last versions were also available for Windows NT-based servers.
History
The Major BBS was developed by Tim Stryker and launched in 1986 by Stryker's company, Galacticomm, Inc., as a demonstration of the abilities of the Galacticomm Software Breakthrough Library (or GSBL). The GSBL was a powerful set of assembler routines written for IBM and compatible PCs that allowed up to 32 simultaneous serial port or dialup connections to a single software instance without the need for an external multitasker. The "breakthrough" was that the library polled the serial ports, rather than allowing them to interrupt the processor, which was the against the accepted wisdom of the time, and through use of polling and making use of the FIFO buffers that were by this time standard on UART chips, an - at the time - unheard of number of serial ports could be attached to a PC. Because interrupts were not used, there were no issues relating to interrupt conflicts on PC hardware of the day.
The GSBL was licensed to developers for varied uses, such as communications systems, bank systems, and real estate systems. Eventually, The Major BBS was enhanced enough that it became a marketable product in its own right. By late 1987, Galacticomm was licensing more copies of The Major BBS than the GSBL by itself. The GSBL continued to be enhanced, expanding to 64 users by 1988, then 256 by 1992, with The Major BBS's line capacity expanding as a result.
Because it was one of the few multi-line bulletin board systems, MBBS software was known for fostering online communities and an interactive online experience where users were able to interact with each other via Teleconference (chat rooms) and multiplayer games. This flexibility spawned a small industry of Independent Software Vendors (ISV) who began developing MBBS add-ons, which ranged from shopping malls (what would now be called shopping cart software) to online role playing games.
The Major BBS allowed incoming connections via modems on telephone lines, IPX networks, and X.25 packet-switched networks. In the mid-1990s, the offering expanded to include TCP/IP by the ISV Vircom, a Canadian company that has since become well known for its anti-spam/anti-virus software, shortly followed by Galacticomm's own TCP/IP add-on, the Internet Connection Option (ICO), which was derived from another ISV's offering.
In 1992, the Major BBS was selected by the National Library of Medicine as the access mechanism for the Grateful Med medical journal system, just prior to universal access via the World Wide Web.
Worldgroup
Seeking to compete with America Online, Galacticomm extended The Major BBS software to communicate in a client–server model with a custom program. The MBBS software was renamed Worldgroup Server, and released in 1995 with the version number restarting at 1.0; the included user-side client software was named Worldgroup Manager (but sometimes known as Worldgroup Client) and ran in Microsoft Windows.
Version 3.0 in 1997, the first 32-bit version of Worldgroup Server, was released for Windows NT. Other versions, like the DOS compatible version continued in development simultaneously. Version 3.0 finally focused on an active HTML web community, after three years of concentrating on the original client–server strategy. Version 3.1 was the final version of the Worldgroup Server to support DOS.
Demise
Although Worldgroup initially had some success, the initial proprietary client/server model was an unfortunate strategic choice, as the world wide web was just emerging as a dominant phenomenon. The popularity of the text-terminal-based BBSes, as well as America Online's proprietary client model, faded as online use became web-oriented. Galacticomm's slow response in adapting to the web-based online model probably was fatal.
Founder Tim Stryker committed suicide on August 6, 1996, in Colorado, and the company was sold by his widow Christine to a group headed by Yannick Tessier, owner of Tessier Technologies, who developed software as an ISV. As Galacticomm Technologies, Inc., Tessier and Peter Berg led the company toward an initial public offering, which failed in 1998. The company discontinued operations in 1999 and was foreclosed upon by their primary lender; the lender acquired the company's assets through the foreclosure in 2002. The company's assets were purchased by an ISV from the bank in 2005.
Timeline
1986: MajorBBS 1.0 — not released
1986: MajorBBS 2.0 — shareware
1987: MajorBBS 3.0 — commercial software
1988: MajorBBS 5.0
1989: MajorBBS 5.07
1990: MajorBBS 5.2
1991: MajorBBS 5.3 — includes Novell NetWare support
1992: MajorBBS 6.0 — included Phar Lap protected mode capability
1993: MajorBBS 6.1 — multilingual
1994: MajorBBS 6.25 — Internet Connection Option (ICO) TCP/IP; Unix version available
1995: Worldgroup 1.0 — introduced Microsoft Windows client; final Unix server version
1996: Worldgroup 2.0 — included plug-in for Netscape
1997: Worldgroup 3.0 — first server version for 32-bit Windows NT
1999: Galacticomm ends operations after failed IPO
2002: Galacticomm assets foreclosed upon by lender
2005: Galacticomm assets sold by lender to a current ISV
Technical information
Software
Initially, a system's linecount depended on the user limit of the GSBL purchased with the BBS. The GSBL (and thus the BBS) was offered in 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, or 64 user editions. Later, with the release of version 6, the concept of user six-packs was introduced. System operators (SysOps) purchased as many packs as they needed to add additional lines, up to 256.
Due to a limitation of the 16-bit architecture of MS-DOS, Major BBS was limited to a maximum of 255 incoming lines (plus one 'local console'). In practice, it was extremely difficult to scale to this level due to the 16MB RAM limitation of the Phar Lap 286 memory extender in use, as well as the physical limitations on connecting 255 modems to a single computer.
Developers were sold development kits that allowed add-ons to be written in C/C++
All data files were stored using a Btrieve format.
It was necessary for the system to go down for maintenance each evening in order to re-index data files as well as running the cleanup routines for the main system and its addons.
Hardware
MBBS ran on standard Intel PC hardware. However it relied on serial ports the number of which was limited to 4 by the standard PC/MS-DOS architecture. Therefore, Galacticomm provided some of their own hardware to increase the number of communication channels.
multi-line modem cards
Galactiboard - an 8-port serial interface for connecting external modems
Galactibox - a 16 slot extender that could house multiple Galactiboards and/or internal modem cards
Add-on software
Connection add-ons
Vircom TCP/IP — allowed the system to link to the Internet, provide both inbound and outbound FTP and Telnet services, and provide e-mail service. The add-on also allowed MajorBBS to provide dialup Internet access via SLIP and PPP. Vircom later went on to produce software solutions to combat spam.
Vircom RADIUS — a RADIUS server which allowed MajorBBS to act as the central authentication and billing server for any number of applications such as Internet services.
Games
Flash Attack
Fazuul by Tim Stryker
Quest for Magic by Scott Brinker and Tim Stryker (copyright held by Elwynor Technologies, source was previously released)
Quest for Sorcery by Scott Brinker (source code missing, but rights held by Elwynor Technologies)
Quest for Sorcery II by Scott Brinker (source code missing, but rights held by Elwynor Technologies)
Quest of the Alchemists by Scott Brinker (currently owned by Elwynor Technologies)
Kyrandia by Scott Brinker and Richard Skurnick
Alchemy II: The Hangover by Scott Brinker (currently owned by Elwynor Technologies)
Infinity Complex by Steve Neal (currently owned by Elwynor Technologies)
MajorMUD by West Coast Creations (currently owned by Metropolis Gameport)
Tele-Arena by Sean Ferrell
Sub Striker by Tim Stark / Mark Enriquez [Magicomm]
Tournament Backgammon by Mark Enriquez [Magicomm]
Tele-Arena/II by Sean Ferrell (currently owned by Elwynor Technologies)
Swords of Chaos by Mark Peterson (currently owned by Metropolis Gameport)
Mutants by Majorware Inc.(currently owned by Metropolis Gameport)
Phantasia by Ewe-Nique Creations (Bil Simser, based on Edward Estes UNIX version)
Sceptre by Ewe-Nique Creations (Bil Simser)
Trivia Party and Word Party by Ewe-Nique Creations (Bil Simser)
Galactic Empire by Mike Murdock (DOS version maintained by Bil Simser)
Galactiwars by Don Arnel/Logicom (currently owned by Elwynor Technologies)
War of Worlds by Richard Skurnick (currently owned by Elwynor Technologies)
Crossroads of the Elements by High Velocity Software
Trade Wars 2002 by High Velocity Software and Martech/EIS
Farwest Trivia/Tele-Trivia (currently owned by Datasafe (only DOS version owned by Metropolis Gameport))
Lords of Cyberspace (currently owned by metropolis Gameport)
Wilderlands/II by Wilderland Software (currently owned by Elwynor Technologies)
Androids by Tim Stryker
Hangman's Secret Cove by Galacticomm
Super Nova by Galacticomm
T-LORD by Robinson Technologies Inc
Oltima 2000 by Tessier Technologies Inc
Swords & Sorcery by Logicom Inc
BladeMaster by Logicom Inc
CyberTank by InfiNetwork
Foodfight by Jabberwocky Inc
Teleconference Trivia by Jabberwocky Inc
RingMasters by InfiNetwork
Archery by GWW
The Casino by Logicom Inc
Forbidden Lands Book I: The City of Falchon by Computel
Forbidden Lands Book II: The Vale of Grimyre by Computel
Forbidden Lands Book III: The Islands of Dawn by Computel
International Versions
German
A german version of The Major BBS was published by ONLINE STORE AG in Liechtenstein
A german version of Worldgroup was published by ONLINE STORE AG in Liechtenstein
Spanish
A spanish version of The Major BBS was published
References
External links
Elwynor Technologies — largest active ISV for Major BBS/Worldgroup; actively locating old TPD/ISV people and acquiring their software
The Major BBS Restoration Project — dedicated to preserving the history of Galacticomm, The Major BBS/Worldgroup, and the TPD/ISV add-on software
Swords of Chaos FOREVER! BBS - dedicated to preserving and restoring Swords of Chaos and its userbase
Dialsoft - one of the few remaining active ISVs for Worldgroup
Universal Interactive — ISV for Worldgroup releated software (ISV code: UII); active
The MajorBBS for Unix — archive of only known MajorBBS for Unix material, maintained by one of the MBBS-for-Unix developers
The MajorBBS Emulation Project — An emulator that allows running MajorBBS & Worldgroup Modules on modern Linux, Windows and OSX
SEC EDGAR filings for Galacticomm Technologies Inc (CIK# 0001043003). U.S. government-required filings concerning failed 1998 stock offering
Bulletin board system software
DOS software
Proprietary software
Windows file sharing software |
45258386 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marietta%20Brambilla | Marietta Brambilla | Maria Teresa Rebecca Brambilla better known as Marietta Brambilla (6 June 1807 – 6 November 1875) was an Italian contralto who sang leading roles in the opera houses of Europe from 1827 until her retirement from the stage in 1848. She is best known today for having created the roles of Maffio Orsini in Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia and Pierotto in his Linda di Chamounix, but she also created several other roles in lesser-known works. She was the elder sister of the opera singers Teresa and Giuseppina Brambilla and the aunt of Teresina Brambilla who was also an opera singer.
Life and career
Brambilla was born in Cassano d'Adda, the daughter of Gerolamo and Angela (née Columbo) Brambilla. She was the eldest of five sisters, all of whom became opera singers. Teresa (1813–1895) was a soprano who created the role of Gilda in Rigoletto. Giuseppina sang both contralto and soprano roles and was married to the tenor Corrado Miraglia. Both had very prominent careers. Annetta (1812–?) and Lauretta (1823–1881) were both sopranos who had lesser careers, appearing primarily in provincial Italian opera houses.
Marietta Brambilla studied at the Milan Conservatory and made her stage debut in 1827 at Her Majesty's Theatre in London as Arsace in Rossini's Semiramide. She sang in several other operas in London that season as well as giving recitals in other English cities. She returned to Italy in 1828 where she sang at La Fenice in the world premiere of Pietro Generali's Francesca da Rimini. Brambilla made her debut at La Scala in the 1833 world premiere of Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia as Maffio Orsini, a role he had written expressly for her. He also composed Pierotto in Linda di Chamounix for her and adapted the tenor role of Armando di Gondì in Maria di Rohan for her voice when the opera had its first Paris performance in 1843.
Brambilla retired from the stage in 1848, after which she taught singing in Milan and composed several albums of songs and vocal exercises. She married Count Francesco Furga-Gornini in 1857. The marriage ended with his death four years later. She died of cancer in Milan at the age of 68 and was buried in Cassano d'Adda.
Roles created
Brambilla created the following roles, the majority of which were male characters performed en travesti. She was also the contralto soloist in the first performance of In morte di Maria Malibran de Bériot, a cantata in memory of Maria Malibran jointly composed by Gaetano Donizetti, Giovanni Pacini, Saverio Mercadante, Nicola Vaccai, and Pietro Antonio Coppola which took place at La Scala on 17 March 1837.
Paolo in Pietro Generali's Francesca da Rimini, La Fenice, Venice, 27 December 1828
Arturo in Carlo Coccia's Rosmunda d'Inghilterra, La Fenice, Venice, 28 February 1829
Maffio Orsini in Gaetano Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia, La Scala, Milan, 26 December 1833
Enrico Pontigny in Luigi Ricci's Un'avventura di Scaramuccia, La Scala, Milan, 8 March 1834
Bianca in Saverio Mercadante's Il giuramento, La Scala, Milan, 11 March 1837
Guiscarda Obonello in Federico Ricci's Corrado d'Altamura, La Scala, Milan, 16 November 1841
Pierotto in Gaetano Donizetti's Linda di Chamounix, Kärntnertor Theater, Vienna, 19 May 1842
Irene in 's Irene, Teatro San Carlo, Naples, 26 December 1847
Notes
References
Operatic contraltos
1807 births
1875 deaths
19th-century Italian women opera singers
Deaths from cancer in Lombardy
Italian contraltos |
34147 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X%20Window%20System | X Window System | The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems.
X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting with a mouse and keyboard. X does not mandate the user interfacethis is handled by individual programs. As such, the visual styling of X-based environments varies greatly; different programs may present radically different interfaces.
X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at version 11 (hence "X11") since September 1987. The X.Org Foundation leads the X project, with the current reference implementation, X.Org Server, available as free and open-source software under the MIT License and similar permissive licenses.
Purpose and abilities
X is an architecture-independent system for remote graphical user interfaces and input device capabilities. Each person using a networked terminal has the ability to interact with the display with any type of user input device.
In its standard distribution it is a complete, albeit simple, display and interface solution which delivers a standard toolkit and protocol stack for building graphical user interfaces on most Unix-like operating systems and OpenVMS, and has been ported to many other contemporary general purpose operating systems.
X provides the basic framework, or primitives, for building such GUI environments: drawing and moving windows on the display and interacting with a mouse, keyboard or touchscreen. X does not mandate the user interface; individual client programs handle this. Programs may use X's graphical abilities with no user interface. As such, the visual styling of X-based environments varies greatly; different programs may present radically different interfaces.
Unlike most earlier display protocols, X was specifically designed to be used over network connections rather than on an integral or attached display device. X features network transparency, which means an X program running on a computer somewhere on a network (such as the Internet) can display its user interface on an X server running on some other computer on the network. The X server is typically the provider of graphics resources and keyboard/mouse events to X clients, meaning that the X server is usually running on the computer in front of a human user, while the X client applications run anywhere on the network and communicate with the user's computer to request the rendering of graphics content and receive events from input devices including keyboards and mice.
The fact that the term "server" is applied to the software in front of the user is often surprising to users accustomed to their programs being clients to services on remote computers. Here, rather than a remote database being the resource for a local app, the user's graphic display and input devices become resources made available by the local X server to both local and remotely hosted X client programs who need to share the user's graphics and input devices to communicate with the user.
X's network protocol is based on X command primitives. This approach allows both 2D and (through extensions like GLX) 3D operations by an X client application which might be running on a different computer to still be fully accelerated on the X server's display. For example, in classic OpenGL (before version 3.0), display lists containing large numbers of objects could be constructed and stored entirely in the X server by a remote X client program, and each then rendered by sending a single glCallList(which) across the network.
X provides no native support for audio; several projects exist to fill this niche, some also providing transparent network support.
Software architecture
X uses a client–server model: an X server communicates with various client programs. The server accepts requests for graphical output (windows) and sends back user input (from keyboard, mouse, or touchscreen). The server may function as:
an application displaying to a window of another display system
a system program controlling the video output of a PC
a dedicated piece of hardware
This client–server terminologythe user's terminal being the server and the applications being the clientsoften confuses new X users, because the terms appear reversed. But X takes the perspective of the application, rather than that of the end-user: X provides display and I/O services to applications, so it is a server; applications use these services, thus they are clients.
The communication protocol between server and client operates network-transparently: the client and server may run on the same machine or on different ones, possibly with different architectures and operating systems. A client and server can even communicate securely over the Internet by tunneling the connection over an encrypted network session.
An X client itself may emulate an X server by providing display services to other clients. This is known as "X nesting". Open-source clients such as Xnest and Xephyr support such X nesting.
Remote desktop
To run an X client application on a remote machine, the user may do the following:
on the local machine, open a terminal window
use command to connect to the remote machine
request a local display/input service (e.g., export DISPLAY=[user's machine]:0 if not using SSH with X forwarding enabled)
The remote X client application will then make a connection to the user's local X server, providing display and input to the user.
Alternatively, the local machine may run a small program that connects to the remote machine and starts the client application.
Practical examples of remote clients include:
administering a remote machine graphically (similar to using remote desktop, but with single windows)
using a client application to join with large numbers of other terminal users in collaborative workgroups
running a computationally intensive simulation on a remote machine and displaying the results on a local desktop machine
running graphical software on several machines at once, controlled by a single display, keyboard and mouse
User interfaces
X primarily defines protocol and graphics primitivesit deliberately contains no specification for application user-interface design, such as button, menu, or window title-bar styles. Instead, application softwaresuch as window managers, GUI widget toolkits and desktop environments, or application-specific graphical user interfacesdefine and provide such details. As a result, there is no typical X interface and several different desktop environments have become popular among users.
A window manager controls the placement and appearance of application windows. This may result in desktop interfaces reminiscent of those of Microsoft Windows or of the Apple Macintosh (examples include GNOME 2, KDE, Xfce) or have radically different controls (such as a tiling window manager, like wmii or Ratpoison). Some interfaces such as Sugar or Chrome OS eschew the desktop metaphor altogether, simplifying their interfaces for specialized applications. Window managers range in sophistication and complexity from the bare-bones (e.g., twm, the basic window manager supplied with X, or evilwm, an extremely light window-manager) to the more comprehensive desktop environments such as Enlightenment and even to application-specific window-managers for vertical markets such as point-of-sale.
Many users use X with a desktop environment, which, aside from the window manager, includes various applications using a consistent user-interface. Popular desktop environments include GNOME, KDE Plasma and Xfce. The UNIX 98 standard environment is the Common Desktop Environment (CDE). The freedesktop.org initiative addresses interoperability between desktops and the components needed for a competitive X desktop.
Implementations
The X.Org implementation is the canonical implementation of X. Owing to liberal licensing, a number of variations, both free and open source and proprietary, have appeared. Commercial Unix vendors have tended to take the reference implementation and adapt it for their hardware, usually customizing it and adding proprietary extensions.
Up until 2004, XFree86 provided the most common X variant on free Unix-like systems. XFree86 started as a port of X to 386-compatible PCs and, by the end of the 1990s, had become the greatest source of technical innovation in X and the de facto standard of X development. Since 2004, however, the X.Org Server, a fork of XFree86, has become predominant.
While it is common to associate X with Unix, X servers also exist natively within other graphical environments. VMS Software Inc.'s OpenVMS operating system includes a version of X with Common Desktop Environment (CDE), known as DECwindows, as its standard desktop environment. Apple originally ported X to macOS in the form of X11.app, but that has been deprecated in favor of the XQuartz implementation. Third-party servers under Apple's older operating systems in the 1990s, System 7, and Mac OS 8 and 9, included Apple's MacX and White Pine Software's eXodus.
Microsoft Windows is not shipped with support for X, but many third-party implementations exist, as free and open source software such as Cygwin/X, and proprietary products such as Exceed, MKS X/Server, Reflection X, X-Win32 and Xming.
There are also Java implementations of X servers. WeirdX runs on any platform supporting Swing 1.1, and will run as an applet within most browsers. The Android X Server is an open source Java implementation that runs on Android devices.
When an operating system with a native windowing system hosts X in addition, the X system can either use its own normal desktop in a separate host window or it can run rootless, meaning the X desktop is hidden and the host windowing environment manages the geometry and appearance of the hosted X windows within the host screen.
X terminals
An X terminal is a thin client that only runs an X server. This architecture became popular for building inexpensive terminal parks for many users to simultaneously use the same large computer server to execute application programs as clients of each user's X terminal. This use is very much aligned with the original intention of the MIT project.
X terminals explore the network (the local broadcast domain) using the X Display Manager Control Protocol to generate a list of available hosts that are allowed as clients. One of the client hosts should run an X display manager.
A limitation of X terminals and most thin clients is that they are not capable of any input or output other than the keyboard, mouse, and display. All relevant data is assumed to exist solely on the remote server, and the X terminal user has no methods available to save or load data from a local peripheral device.
Dedicated (hardware) X terminals have fallen out of use; a PC or modern thin client with an X server typically provides the same functionality at the same, or lower, cost.
Limitations and criticism
The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) devoted a full chapter to the problems of X. Why X Is Not Our Ideal Window System (1990) by Gajewska, Manasse and McCormack detailed problems in the protocol with recommendations for improvement.
User interface issues
The lack of design guidelines in X has resulted in several vastly different interfaces, and in applications that have not always worked well together. The Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual (ICCCM), a specification for client interoperability, has a reputation for being difficult to implement correctly. Further standards efforts such as Motif and CDE did not alleviate problems. This has frustrated users and programmers. Graphics programmers now generally address consistency of application look and feel and communication by coding to a specific desktop environment or to a specific widget toolkit, which also avoids having to deal directly with the ICCCM.
X also lacks native support for user-defined stored procedures on the X server, in the manner of NeWSthere is no Turing-complete scripting facility. Various desktop environments may thus offer their own (usually mutually incompatible) facilities.
Computer accessibility related issues
Systems built upon X may have accessibility issues that make utilization of a computer difficult for disabled users, including right click, double click, middle click, mouse-over, and focus stealing. Some X11 clients deal with accessibility issues better than others, so persons with accessibility problems are not locked out of using X11. However, there is no accessibility standard or accessibility guidelines for X11. Within the X11 standards process there is no working group on accessibility, however, accessibility needs are being addressed by software projects to provide these features on top of X.
The Orca project adds accessibility support to the X Window System, including implementing an API (AT-SPI). This is coupled with GNOME's ATK to allow for accessibility features to be implemented in X programs using the GNOME/GTK APIs. KDE provides a different set of accessibility software, including a text-to-speech converter and a screen magnifier. The other major desktops (LXDE, Xfce and Enlightenment) attempt to be compatible with ATK.
Network
An X client cannot generally be detached from one server and reattached to another unless its code specifically provides for it (Emacs is one of the few common programs with this ability). As such, moving an entire session from one X server to another is generally not possible. However, approaches like Virtual Network Computing (VNC), NX and Xpra allow a virtual session to be reached from different X servers (in a manner similar to GNU Screen in relation to terminals), and other applications and toolkits provide related facilities. Workarounds like x11vnc (VNC :0 viewers), Xpra's shadow mode and NX's nxagent shadow mode also exist to make the current X-server screen available. This ability allows the user interface (mouse, keyboard, monitor) of a running application to be switched from one location to another without stopping and restarting the application.
Network traffic between an X server and remote X clients is not encrypted by default. An attacker with a packet sniffer can intercept it, making it possible to view anything displayed to or sent from the user's screen. The most common way to encrypt X traffic is to establish a Secure Shell (SSH) tunnel for communication.
Like all thin clients, when using X across a network, bandwidth limitations can impede the use of bitmap-intensive applications that require rapidly updating large portions of the screen with low latency, such as 3D animation or photo editing. Even a relatively small uncompressed 640x480x24 bit 30 fps video stream (~211 Mbit/s) can easily outstrip the bandwidth of a 100 Mbit/s network for a single client. In contrast, modern versions of X generally have extensions such as MESA allowing local display of a local program's graphics to be optimized to bypass the network model and directly control the video card, for use of full-screen video, rendered 3D applications, and other such applications.
Client–server separation
X's design requires the clients and server to operate separately, and device independence and the separation of client and server incur overhead. Most of the overhead comes from network round-trip delay time between client and server (latency) rather than from the protocol itself: the best solutions to performance issues depend on efficient application design. A common criticism of X is that its network features result in excessive complexity and decreased performance if only used locally.
Modern X implementations use Unix domain sockets for efficient connections on the same host. Additionally shared memory (via the MIT-SHM extension) can be employed for faster client–server communication. However, the programmer must still explicitly activate and use the shared memory extension. It is also necessary to provide fallback paths in order to stay compatible with older implementations, and in order to communicate with non-local X servers.
Competitors
Some people have attempted writing alternatives to and replacements for X. Historical alternatives include Sun's NeWS and NeXT's Display PostScript, both PostScript-based systems supporting user-definable display-side procedures, which X lacked. Current alternatives include:
macOS (and its mobile counterpart, iOS) implements its windowing system, which is known as Quartz. When Apple Inc. bought NeXT, and used NeXTSTEP to construct Mac OS X, it replaced Display PostScript with Quartz. Mike Paquette, one of the authors of Quartz, explained that if Apple had added support for all the features it wanted to include into X11, it would not bear much resemblance to X11 nor be compatible with other servers anyway.
Android, which runs on the Linux kernel, uses its own system for drawing the user interface known as SurfaceFlinger. 3D rendering is handled by EGL.
Wayland is being developed by several X.Org developers as a prospective replacement for X. It works directly with the GPU hardware, via DRI. Wayland can run an X server as a Wayland compositor, which can be rootless. A proprietary port of the Wayland backend to the Raspberry Pi was completed in 2013. The project reached version 1.0 in 2012. Like Android, Wayland is EGL-based.
Mir was a project from Canonical Ltd. with goals similar to Wayland. Mir was intended to work with mobile devices using ARM chipsets (a stated goal was compatibility with Android device-drivers) as well as x86 desktops. Like Android, Mir/UnityNext were EGL-based. Backwards compatibility with X client-applications was accomplished via Xmir. The project has since moved to being a Wayland compositor instead of being an alternative display server.
Other alternatives attempt to avoid the overhead of X by working directly with the hardware; such projects include DirectFB. (The Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI), which aims to provide a reliable kernel-level interface to the framebuffer, might make these efforts redundant.)
Additional ways to achieve a functional form of the "network transparency" feature of X, via network transmissibility of graphical services, include:
Virtual Network Computing (VNC), a very low-level system which sends compressed bitmaps across the network; the Unix implementation includes an X server
Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), which is similar to VNC in purpose, but originated on Microsoft Windows before being ported to Unix-like systems; cf NX, GotoMyPc, etc.
Citrix XenApp, an X-like protocol and application stack for Microsoft Windows
Tarantella, which provides a Java-based remote-gui-client for use in web browsers
History
Predecessors
Several bitmap display systems preceded X. From Xerox came the Alto (1973) and the Star (1981). From Apollo Computer came Display Manager (1981). From Apple came the Lisa (1983) and the Macintosh (1984). The Unix world had the Andrew Project (1982) and Rob Pike's Blit terminal (1982).
Carnegie Mellon University produced a remote-access application called Alto Terminal, that displayed overlapping windows on the Xerox Alto, and made remote hosts (typically DEC VAX systems running Unix) responsible for handling window-exposure events and refreshing window contents as necessary.
X derives its name as a successor to a pre-1983 window system called W (the letter preceding X in the English alphabet). W ran under the V operating system. W used a network protocol supporting terminal and graphics windows, the server maintaining display lists.
Origin and early development
The original idea of X emerged at MIT in 1984 as a collaboration between Jim Gettys (of Project Athena) and Bob Scheifler (of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science). Scheifler needed a usable display environment for debugging the Argus system. Project Athena (a joint project between DEC, MIT and IBM to provide easy access to computing resources for all students) needed a platform-independent graphics system to link together its heterogeneous multiple-vendor systems; the window system then under development in Carnegie Mellon University's Andrew Project did not make licenses available, and no alternatives existed.
The project solved this by creating a protocol that could both run local applications and call on remote resources. In mid-1983 an initial port of W to Unix ran at one-fifth of its speed under V; in May 1984, Scheifler replaced the synchronous protocol of W with an asynchronous protocol and the display lists with immediate mode graphics to make X version 1. X became the first windowing system environment to offer true hardware independence and vendor independence.
Scheifler, Gettys and Ron Newman set to work and X progressed rapidly. They released Version 6 in January 1985. DEC, then preparing to release its first Ultrix workstation, judged X the only windowing system likely to become available in time. DEC engineers ported X6 to DEC's QVSS display on MicroVAX.
In the second quarter of 1985, X acquired color support to function in the DEC VAXstation-II/GPX, forming what became version 9.
A group at Brown University ported version 9 to the IBM RT PC, but problems with reading unaligned data on the RT forced an incompatible protocol change, leading to version 10 in late 1985. By 1986, outside organizations had begun asking for X. X10R2 was released in January 1986, then X10R3 in February 1986. Although MIT had licensed X6 to some outside groups for a fee, it decided at this time to license X10R3 and future versions under what became known as the MIT License, intending to popularize X further and, in return, hoping that many more applications would become available. X10R3 became the first version to achieve wide deployment, with both DEC and Hewlett-Packard releasing products based on it. Other groups ported X10 to Apollo and to Sun workstations and even to the IBM PC/AT. Demonstrations of the first commercial application for X (a mechanical computer-aided engineering system from Cognition Inc. that ran on VAXes and remotely displayed on PCs running an X server ported by Jim Fulton and Jan Hardenbergh) took place at the Autofact trade show at that time. The last version of X10, X10R4, appeared in December 1986. Attempts were made to enable X servers as real-time collaboration devices, much as Virtual Network Computing (VNC) would later allow a desktop to be shared. One such early effort was Philip J. Gust's SharedX tool.
Although X10 offered interesting and powerful functionality, it had become obvious that the X protocol could use a more hardware-neutral redesign before it became too widely deployed, but MIT alone would not have the resources available for such a complete redesign. As it happened, DEC's Western Software Laboratory found itself between projects with an experienced team. Smokey Wallace of DEC WSL and Jim Gettys proposed that DEC WSL build X11 and make it freely available under the same terms as X9 and X10. This process started in May 1986, with the protocol finalized in August. Alpha testing of the software started in February 1987, beta-testing in May; the release of X11 finally occurred on 15 September 1987.
The X11 protocol design, led by Scheifler, was extensively discussed on open mailing lists on the nascent Internet that were bridged to USENET newsgroups. Gettys moved to California to help lead the X11 development work at WSL from DEC's Systems Research Center, where Phil Karlton and Susan Angebrandt led the X11 sample server design and implementation. X therefore represents one of the first very large-scale distributed free and open source software projects.
The MIT X Consortium and the X Consortium, Inc.
By the late 1980s X was, Simson Garfinkel wrote in 1989, "Athena's most important single achievement to date". DEC reportedly believed that its development alone had made the company's donation to MIT worthwhile. Gettys joined the design team for the VAXstation 2000 to ensure that X—which DEC called DECwindows—would run on it, and the company assigned 1,200 employees to port X to both Ultrix and VMS. In 1987, with the success of X11 becoming apparent, MIT wished to relinquish the stewardship of X, but at a June 1987 meeting with nine vendors, the vendors told MIT that they believed in the need for a neutral party to keep X from fragmenting in the marketplace. In January 1988, the MIT X Consortium formed as a non-profit vendor group, with Scheifler as director, to direct the future development of X in a neutral atmosphere inclusive of commercial and educational interests.
Jim Fulton joined in January 1988 and Keith Packard in March 1988 as senior developers, with Jim focusing on Xlib, fonts, window managers, and utilities; and Keith re-implementing the server. Donna Converse, Chris D. Peterson, and Stephen Gildea joined later that year, focusing on toolkits and widget sets, working closely with Ralph Swick of MIT Project Athena. The MIT X Consortium produced several significant revisions to X11, the first (Release 2 X11R2) in February 1988. Jay Hersh joined the staff in January 1991 to work on the PEX and X113D functionality. He was followed soon after by Ralph Mor (who also worked on PEX) and Dave Sternlicht. In 1993, as the MIT X Consortium prepared to depart from MIT, the staff were joined by R. Gary Cutbill, Kaleb Keithley, and David Wiggins.
In 1993, the X Consortium, Inc. (a non-profit corporation) formed as the successor to the MIT X Consortium. It released X11R6 on 16 May 1994. In 1995 it took on the development of the Motif toolkit and of the Common Desktop Environment for Unix systems. The X Consortium dissolved at the end of 1996, producing a final revision, X11R6.3, and a legacy of increasing commercial influence in the development.
The Open Group
In January 1997, the X Consortium passed stewardship of X to The Open Group, a vendor group formed in early 1996 by the merger of the Open Software Foundation and X/Open.
The Open Group released X11R6.4 in early 1998. Controversially, X11R6.4 departed from the traditional liberal licensing terms, as the Open Group sought to assure funding for the development of X, and specifically cited XFree86 as not significantly contributing to X. The new terms would have made X no longer free software: zero-cost for noncommercial use, but a fee otherwise. After XFree86 seemed poised to fork, the Open Group relicensed X11R6.4 under the traditional license in September 1998. The Open Group's last release came as X11R6.4 patch 3.
X.Org and XFree86
XFree86 originated in 1992 from the X386 server for IBM PC compatibles included with X11R5 in 1991, written by Thomas Roell and Mark W. Snitily and donated to the MIT X Consortium by Snitily Graphics Consulting Services (SGCS). XFree86 evolved over time from just one port of X to the leading and most popular implementation and the de facto standard of X's development.
In May 1999, The Open Group formed X.Org. X.Org supervised the release of versions X11R6.5.1 onward. X development at this time had become moribund; most technical innovation since the X Consortium had dissolved had taken place in the XFree86 project. In 1999, the XFree86 team joined X.Org as an honorary (non-paying) member, encouraged by various hardware companies interested in using XFree86 with Linux and in its status as the most popular version of X.
By 2003, while the popularity of Linux (and hence the installed base of X) surged, X.Org remained inactive, and active development took place largely within XFree86. However, considerable dissent developed within XFree86. The XFree86 project suffered from a perception of a far too cathedral-like development model; developers could not get CVS commit access and vendors had to maintain extensive patch sets. In March 2003, the XFree86 organization expelled Keith Packard, who had joined XFree86 after the end of the original MIT X Consortium, with considerable ill feeling.
X.Org and XFree86 began discussing a reorganisation suited to properly nurturing the development of X. Jim Gettys had been pushing strongly for an open development model since at least 2000. Gettys, Packard and several others began discussing in detail the requirements for the effective governance of X with open development.
Finally, in an echo of the X11R6.4 licensing dispute, XFree86 released version 4.4 in February 2004 under a more restrictive license which many projects relying on X found unacceptable. The added clause to the license was based on the original BSD license's advertising clause, which was viewed by the Free Software Foundation and Debian as incompatible with the GNU General Public License. Other groups saw it as against the spirit of the original X. Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD, for instance, threatened to fork XFree86 citing license concerns. The license issue, combined with the difficulties in getting changes in, left many feeling the time was ripe for a fork.
The X.Org Foundation
In early 2004, various people from X.Org and freedesktop.org formed the X.Org Foundation, and the Open Group gave it control of the x.org domain name. This marked a radical change in the governance of X. Whereas the stewards of X since 1988 (including the prior X.Org) had been vendor organizations, the Foundation was led by software developers and used community development based on the bazaar model, which relies on outside involvement. Membership was opened to individuals, with corporate membership being in the form of sponsorship. Several major corporations such as Hewlett-Packard currently support the X.Org Foundation.
The Foundation takes an oversight role over X development: technical decisions are made on their merits by achieving rough consensus among community members. Technical decisions are not made by the board of directors; in this sense, it is strongly modelled on the technically non-interventionist GNOME Foundation. The Foundation employs no developers.
The Foundation released X11R6.7, the X.Org Server, in April 2004, based on XFree86 4.4RC2 with X11R6.6 changes merged. Gettys and Packard had taken the last version of XFree86 under the old license and, by making a point of an open development model and retaining GPL compatibility, brought many of the old XFree86 developers on board.
While X11 had received extensions such as OpenGL support during the 1990s, its architecture had remained fundamentally unchanged during the decade. In the early part of the 2000s, however, it was overhauled to resolve a number of problems that had surfaced over the years, including a "flawed" font architecture, a 2-d graphics system "which had always been intended to be augmented and/or replaced", and latency issues.
X11R6.8 came out in September 2004. It added significant new features, including preliminary support for translucent windows and other sophisticated visual effects, screen magnifiers and thumbnailers, and facilities to integrate with 3D immersive display systems such as Sun's Project Looking Glass and the Croquet project. External applications called compositing window managers provide policy for the visual appearance.
On 21 December 2005, X.Org released X11R6.9, the monolithic source tree for legacy users, and X11R7.0, the same source code separated into independent modules, each maintainable in separate projects. The Foundation released X11R7.1 on 22 May 2006, about four months after 7.0, with considerable feature improvements.
XFree86 development continued for a few more years, 4.8.0 being released on 15 December 2008.
Nomenclature
The proper names for the system are listed in the manual page as X; X Window System; X Version 11; X Window System, Version 11; or X11.
The term "X-Windows" (in the manner of the subsequently released "Microsoft Windows") is not officially endorsed with X Consortium release manager Matt Landau stating in 1993, "There is no such thing as 'X Windows' or 'X Window', despite the repeated misuse of the forms by the trade rags" though it has been in common informal use since early in the history of X and has been used deliberately for provocative effect, for example in the Unix-Haters Handbook.
Key terms
The X Window System has nuanced usage of a number of terms when compared to common usage, particularly "display" and "screen", a subset of which is given here for convenience:
device A graphics device such as a computer graphics card or a computer motherboard's integrated graphics chipset.
monitor A physical device such as a CRT or a flat screen computer display.
screen An area into which graphics may be rendered, either through software alone into system memory as with VNC, or within a graphics device, some of which can render into more than one screen simultaneously, either viewable simultaneously or interchangeably. Interchangeable screens are often set up to be notionally left and right from one another, flipping from one to the next as the mouse pointer reaches the edge of the monitor.
virtual screen Two different meanings are associated with this term:
A technique allowing panning a monitor around a screen running at a larger resolution than the monitor is currently displaying.
An effect simulated by a window manager by maintaining window position information in a larger coordinate system than the screen and allowing panning by simply moving the windows in response to the user.
display A collection of screens, often involving multiple monitors, generally configured to allow the mouse to move the pointer to any position within them. Linux-based workstations are usually capable of having multiple displays, among which the user can switch with a special keyboard combination such as control-alt-function-key, simultaneously flipping all the monitors from showing the screens of one display to the screens in another.
The term "display" should not be confused with the more specialized jargon "Zaphod display". The latter is a rare configuration allowing multiple users of a single computer to each have an independent set of display, mouse, and keyboard, as though they were using separate computers, but at a lower per-seat cost.
Release history
On the prospect of future versions, the X.org website states:
See also
Bitstream Speedo Fonts
Cairo (graphics)
DESQview/X
DirectFB
General Graphics Interface
History of the graphical user interface
List of Unix commands
Microwindows (Nano-X)
rio – the windowing system for Plan 9
SVGALib
VirtualGL
X/GEM
X11 color names
Xgl
Xmark
Notes
References
James Gettys, Philip L. Karlton, Scott A. McGregor, "The X Window System, Version 11" (PDF), Software: Practice and Experience (10 December 1990)
Hania Gajewska, Mark S. Manasse and Joel McCormack, "Why X Is Not Our Ideal Window System" (PDF), Software Practice & Experience vol 20, issue S2 (October 1990)
Linda Mui and Eric Pearce, X Window System Volume 8: X Window System Administrator's Guide for X11 Release 4 and Release 5, 3rd edition (O'Reilly and Associates, July 1993; softcover )
The X-Windows Disaster (UNIX-HATERS Handbook)
Robert W. Scheifler and James Gettys: X Window System: Core and extension protocols: X version 11, releases 6 and 6.1, Digital Press 1996,
The Evolution of the X Server Architecture (Keith Packard, 1999)
The means to an X for Linux: an interview with David Dawes from XFree86.org (Matthew Arnison, CAT TV, June 1999)
Lessons Learned about Open Source (Jim Gettys, USENIX 2000 talk on the history of X)
On the Thesis that X is Big/Bloated/Obsolete and Should Be Replaced (Christopher B. Browne)
Open Source Desktop Technology Road Map (Jim Gettys, 9 December 2003)
X Marks the Spot: Looking back at X11 Developments of Past Year (Oscar Boykin, OSNews, 25 February 2004)
Getting X Off The Hardware (Keith Packard, July 2004 Ottawa Linux Symposium talk)
Why Apple didn't use X for the window system (Mike Paquette, Apple Computer)
X Man Page (Retrieved on 2 February 2007)
X Window System interface in the z/OS Communications Server environment (Retrieved on 19 July 2021)
External links
Free windowing systems
Massachusetts Institute of Technology software
Open Group standards
Remote desktop
Software using the MIT license
Unix windowing system-related software |
5769249 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information%20International%2C%20Inc. | Information International, Inc. | Information International, Inc., commonly referred to as Triple-I or III, was an early computer technology company.
Background
The company was founded by Edward Fredkin in 1962 in Maynard, Massachusetts. It then moved (serially) to Santa Monica, Culver City, and Los Angeles California. Triple-I merged with Autologic, Inc. in 1996, becoming Autologic Information International Inc. (AIII). The combined company was purchased by Agfa-Gevaert in 2001.
In the early 1960s, Information International Inc. contributed several articles by Ed Fredkin, Malcolm Pivar, and Elaine Gord, and others, in a major book on the programming language LISP and its applications.
Triple-I's commercially successful technology was centered around very high precision CRTs, capable of recording to film; which for a while were the publishing industry's gold standard for digital-to-film applications. The company also manufactured film scanners using special cameras fitted with photomultiplier tubes as the image sensor, for digitizing existing films and paper documents. One such successful product of theirs using their precision CRT technology was their FR-80 film recorder introduced in 1968. It was capable of recording black and white (and later color as an option) digital imagery to motion picture or still transparency film at a maximum resolution of 16384x16384, making it an ideal system for generating either Computer Output Microfilm (COM), computer-to-film negatives for making printing plates, and other computer-generated graphics.
However, Triple-I is most notable for its commercially unsuccessful ventures; a number of one-or-two of a kind systems which included CRT based computer displays used at the Stanford AI Lab, an OCR system based on PDP-10's (two were sold), and The Foonly F-1 - which was used for movie special effects.
OCR Systems
Triple-I had a very ambitious OCR group which used their core film scanning technology, graphic displays, and a custom binary image processor (BIP); all interfaced to a PDP-10 timesharing computer with much custom software. Although it was continuously under development over a period of over ten years, only two actual systems were ever sold.
The first (circa 1974) was a paper-to-digital-to-paper system for reworking U.S. Navy aircraft maintenance manuals, which involved filming and scanning paper manuals, capturing the many diagrams in digital form, and reading the accompanying text. The second was a hand-print recognition system sold to the British DHSS in 1976, which captured data from benefit forms.
While none of the OCR research had any lasting impact, the use of PDP-10's directly enabled Triple-I's involvement with computer animation.
Computer animation
Triple-I's work in computer animation done by the Motion Pictures Product Group, is probably the most notable first from Triple-I, at least if measured by the eventual success of the technology. They created some of the first computer-generated special effects for major motion pictures, and employed a number of computer graphics pioneers.
Computer animators Gary Demos and John Whitney Jr. began using equipment at Triple-I in the early 1970s for animation, including the first use of computer imaging in a feature film — the "android vision" effect in Westworld. In 1974, Demos and Whitney convinced Triple-I to establish the Motion Pictures Product Group. In 1976, they scanned and animated Peter Fonda's head for Futureworld, the first appearance of 3D computer graphics in a film. They created an early demo animation called "Adam Powers, The Juggler"; this animation was later used in Miramar's short film All Shapes and Sizes as well as referenced by Pixar's short film Red's Dream. They were also responsible for effects in the film Looker, and animation tests for films such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars.
Circa 1976, prior to becoming an artist-in-residence at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, pioneering computer artist David Em spent nights at Triple-I for eighteen months, learning to use their systems and create his first 3D, shaded, digital imagery.
When Disney began production of the film Tron, they hired four companies to create the computer graphics — Triple-I, MAGI, Robert Abel and Associates, and Digital Effects. Triple-I and MAGI were responsible for the majority of the roughly thirty minutes of computer animation. Triple-I created the Master Control Program, the Solar Sailer, and Sark's Carrier. Whitney and Demos left before the end of work on Tron, to found Digital Productions. Partly due to their departure, Triple-I was unable to complete as much of the effects as planned, and MAGI took over some of the work.
Triple-I sponsored the construction of the Foonly F-1, the fastest PDP-10 ever made. Jim Blinn, Frank Crow, and others developed the company's rendering software TRANEW for the Foonly. Craig Reynolds created the Actor/Scriptor Animation System (ASAS), a procedural animation language based on LISP, at the MIT Architecture Machine Group, and then at Triple-I integrated it into their Digital Scene Simulation System. Larry Malone developed 3D modeling software for the Tektronix 4014 display. Tom McMahon developed a memory-mapped thousand line RGB framebuffer for the Foonly, one of the earliest framebuffers in that class.
In 1982, the management of Triple-I decided to shut down the Motion Pictures Product Group.
Electronic pre-press
Triple-I was also heavily involved in electronic pre-press systems. Its Automated Illustrated Documentation System, or AIDS, produced technical documents, initially for the aerospace industry. The company manufactured a variety of output devices that could create entire pages with graphic to Microfiche, 16 or 35mm films or truesize film. Later this technology was adopted by Time and Newsweek magazines.
In 1982, this technology produced another first for Triple-I when the Pasadena Star-News became the first newspaper to produce full pages electronically, a process of pagination that is now universal among large dailies worldwide. The system was renamed NPS, for Newspaper Publishing System, which The Wall Street Journal later used an adapted version to produce the first "direct to plate" system, whereby computer technology produced printing plates that could be mounted on newspaper presses. But Triple-I missed several technology changes which caused its downturn in the 1990s.
References
External links
Chilton-computing.org: Brochure for Triple-I's FR-80 Graphic Film Recorder
Archive.org: Document describing the software used by Triple-I's Motion Pictures Product Group for their computer animation
Defunct computer companies based in California
Defunct software companies of the United States
Defunct technology companies based in California
Computer animation
Visual effects companies
Cold type foundries
Software companies based in California
Technology companies based in Greater Los Angeles
Companies based in Los Angeles
Companies based in Culver City, California
Companies based in Santa Monica, California
Computer companies established in 1962
Software companies established in 1962
Technology companies established in 1962
Computer companies disestablished in 1996
Technology companies disestablished in 1996
1962 establishments in Massachusetts
1996 disestablishments in California
Defunct companies based in Greater Los Angeles |
3765818 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwestern%20High%20School%20%28Hyattsville%2C%20Maryland%29 | Northwestern High School (Hyattsville, Maryland) | Northwestern High School is a public comprehensive and magnet high school. It is located in Hyattsville, Maryland, United States in Prince George's County, less than a mile from the University of Maryland, College Park in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. It is part of the Prince George's County Public Schools system.
Established in 1951 at its current location off Adelphi Road, the original building was demolished in the summer of 2000, and a modern facility now stands in its place. Opening in August 2000, at and a capacity of 2,700 students, Northwestern is the second largest high school in the state of Maryland when measured by total square footage. It was the first of the county's current high schools to be replaced with a new facility.
Northwestern became the school district's second Center for the Visual and Performing Arts (CVPA) magnet high school, with the program commencing for the 2013–14 school year. The CVPA program is a highly selective, rigorous four-year specialized program that offers college prep and professional career prep study in the visual arts and performing arts. Admission to the program is through a competitive, two-stage application process. Northwestern's CVPA program operates as a "school-within-a-school" model, and is a replication of the program that has been in existence at Suitland High School since 1986. However, currently Northwestern's program only draws students from a limited attendance-area.
In December 2009, Northwestern was recognized as a Silver Medal School among "America's Best High Schools" by U.S. News & World Report. In 2005, The Washington Post cited Northwestern as being the second highest ranking high school, among all district high schools, for students' scores on the nationally administered AP tests.
Northwestern is accredited by the Commission on Secondary Schools, a division of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools.
The late Jim Henson, creator of The Muppets, graduated from Northwestern in 1954. On October 5, 2002, during an official building dedication ceremony attended by Jane and Heather Henson (Jim’s widow and daughter, respectively), as well as representatives from the Jim Henson Legacy, Northwestern was given permission to rename the arts building at Northwestern, to the Jim Henson School of Arts, Media and Communications.
History
E. Carlene Murray is the current principal at Northwestern, joining the faculty in the Fall of 2015. Murray replaced Edgar Batenga, who was principal from 2011 until 2014. Batenga replaced Jerome Thomas, who served as principal from 2004 until 2011. Thomas was a long-time vice principal at Northwestern, and had succeeded former principal William T. Ritter, who was the school's Dean of Students until 2000, when then-principal Kevin M. Maxwell left the Prince George's County Public Schools system to head Walter Johnson High School in Montgomery County. Maxwell was currently serving as superintendent of schools for the Anne Arundel County Public Schools system, also in Maryland, until June 2013. William Ritter himself was eventually appointed head of the Region 5 District in 2004 (and later, head of the school system's FIRST-Financial Incentive Rewards for Supervisors & Teachers program), where Jerome Thomas (who was a longtime vice principal at Northwestern)took his position. On Thursday, June 28, 2013, it was confirmed by the county executive, Rushern Baker, that Maxwell had been chosen to permanently lead the Prince George's County Public Schools system beginning in August 2013, as the new chief executive officer, replacing Alvin Crawley.
Northwestern houses an Evening High School for the northern half of the county, as well as a Saturday High School program. Northwestern hosts the very popular Saturday-run ISP Flea Market, sponsored by the school's International Studies Program.
Northwestern currently serves as the school district's northern host school for the annual Band & Orchestra Festival, which showcases county bands and orchestras who are adjudicated by renowned music directors from around the country. Northwestern once served as a host school for the district's' Middle School & High School Chorus Festival. It is currently used as a secondary site for the Superiors Concert, the district festival for all choirs rated "superior during" county assessments. Northwestern also served as host for Gateway Music Festival's Washington, DC national choir competition in 2003, and hosted the 2004 Maryland All-State Band Festival.
Building and facilities
Northwestern Campus (1951-2000)
Northwestern Senior High School was founded in 1951 as a public secondary school. It was the consolidation of three schools: Hyattsville, Greenbelt, and Mount Rainier High Schools. Beginning in the 1960s, several additions were built, in stages, including what was called the new art wing. By the year 2000, Northwestern consisted of a long main wing with three wings branching out. These were referred to as the A-wing, B-wing, and C-wing. The cafeteria was located at the rear of the school on the second floor and attached to the C-wing.
The boys' gymnasium, girls' auxiliary gymnasium, and band, choir, and orchestra rooms were all located at the rear of the building. The C-wing was accessible to the B-wing by a long suspended enclosed bridge that could only be reached from the second floor.
A large field located between wings B and C was dubbed "The Senior Courtyard." Originally reserved exclusively for seniors to converge during lunch, this courtyard was eventually opened to the entire student body. Northwestern was one of the few schools to allow students outside during lunch, as most schools didn't have the proper accommodations to allow this.
The Justice Memorial Auditorium was part of the A-wing, and was the final addition to the original building.
The A-wing was the only section of the old facility that had air conditioning.
Northwestern was converted from a grades 10-12 "senior high school" to a grades 9-12 "high school" configuration in 1981.
The new building
By the mid-1990s, Northwestern was beginning to show its age. A plan to replace the structure with a brand new $45 million facility was proposed. Prince George's County Public Schools contracted the SHW Group LLP to design and build the new school. Construction began in late summer of 1998, with the new facility located directly behind the old building. Students attended classes in the old building while construction took place only yards away. The new school was physically connected to the old building at the rear (stage area) of the auditorium. The new building officially opened to students and staff in August 2000, just in time for the school year. It was the first new high school constructed in Prince George's County since Eleanor Roosevelt High School was completed in 1976.
While it took two years to construct the new facility, the building was not actually fully finished until midway through the 2001–02 school year. Classes commenced at the new Northwestern before the former facility had been torn down. The large bus lot in front of the new building, and the main parking lot, had yet to be paved prior to the opening of the new building, because the old facility stood where these new areas were to be made. A few exterior portions of the new facility weren't finalized until 2002. Except for the auditorium, which was retained from the old building and was completely overhauled and transformed into the D-Wing of the new school, the old Northwestern was razed while classes were ongoing in the new building. The main parking lot for the new school lies where the former facility once stood.
Northwestern Campus (2000-present)
At , Northwestern High School has a capacity of 2,700 students, with a Fall 2013 enrollment of approximately 2,217. Northwestern's largest enrollment was reached during the 2006–2007 school year, with over 3,000 students. Northwestern had over twenty portable classrooms to accommodate the over-enrollment. Ironically, the school had never had portable trailers until after the new facility was built. Even though Northwestern's 2013-14 enrollment was under capacity, the school then housed twenty portable classrooms. The additional space was primarily needed to accommodate the expansive course offerings and programs available at the school.
Until 2006, Northwestern was officially the largest high school in Maryland when measured by square footage, a distinction that has since been given up to the new . Dr. Henry A. Wise, Jr. High School. However, with Wise having a capacity of 2,600 students and Northwestern having a capacity of 2,700, Northwestern is still the largest high school in the county in terms of capacity.
There was controversy for a time for the distinction of what was then physically the largest high school in Maryland, between Northwestern and neighboring Montgomery Blair High School in Montgomery County. Both had been designed by the same architectural firm, around the same time (Blair in 1998; Northwestern in 2000); both share a similar design inside and out; and they are of similar size. Blair was constructed at originally and Northwestern at. Through certain technicalities, Blair's total square footage was upped to around . It was decided that Northwestern, with the addition of its greenhouse to the second floor of the A-Wing in 2001, retains its slightly larger physical size over Blair, despite Blair having a larger maximum student capacity.
Northwestern's campus features three courtyards between the four wings of the building. The school has a total of five parking lots: the large main parking lot (located in front of the facility, where the former facility once stood) designated for staff and visitors; an adjacent lot located in front of the auditorium, reserved for staff and students; two smaller lots at the rear of the facility, reserved for staff or visitors attending athletic events; and a large bus bay capable of accommodating 44 school buses, located in front of the facility, which doubles as another lot for staff and visitors, during and after the regular school day.
The school has six tennis courts located just outside the auditorium to the east of the building and it has several basketball courts located at the rear of the building outside the food court, which have been decommissioned and now serves as an area which houses several of the school's portable classrooms. There are three athletic fields in the rear of the building: the football/soccer stadium, which also encompasses the running track which surrounds the football/soccer field; a softball field, and a baseball field.
Northwestern is divided into four distinct "sub-schools": the A-Wing, B/G-Wing, C-Wing, and D/E/F-Wing. Each can house between 600 and 700 students. The original plan was to physically divide the school into four smaller schools, hence the design theme of the building. Sub-School A was intended to be the "School of Fine, Creative, and Performing Arts"; Sub-School B was to be the "School of Career and Consumer Education"; Sub-School C was to be a general facility that housed mainly elective courses, in addition the school's main offices, security office, and health center; and Sub-School D was to be "The School of Intensive and Specialized Instruction," which would house the school's honors and advanced placement program as well as the school's ESOL (English Speakers of Other Languages) program and Vocational Development (Special Education) program. Students were not to be permitted to interact with students from other sub-schools, and were to be isolated within their sub-school for the majority of the school day. Due to scheduling conflicts and feasibility issues with this concept, the idea was dropped before the new building ever opened, while the idea of smaller learning communities was retained and revised to become less restrictive and isolating.
The sub-schools are connected by a large, unique main hallway called the skywalk, which features a tiered three-story design. A person overlooking the third floor skywalk can see straight down to the first floor main hallway. The building features an artistic, colorful design theme using multiple variations of the colors blue, purple, teal, gray, and white. These were inspired largely by the official school colors, navy blue and white.
The four main academic sections of the building house specialized programs as part of Northwestern's initiative to provide smaller learning environments in which students can specialize in specific areas of study, similar to a college. Across the main hallway from the sub-buildings are other facilities encompassing the H, J, & K-Wings (there is no "I-Wing"), which includes the main gymnasium, auxiliary gymnasium, main cafeteria/food court (H-Wing), NJROTC unit and Child Development wing (K-Wing), and library/media center. The H, J, and K-Wings are not separate buildings like Wings A-F.
Another unique design feature of Northwestern is its three satellite cafeterias or commissaries, which supplement the main food court. There are commissaries in Wings A, B/G, and D/E/F. These were generally intended for seniors only, but students of all grade levels use the facilities.
Northwestern has three lecture halls with stadium seating which resemble classrooms typically found at large universities. These can seat 30-50 students. The auditorium, which constitutes the entire portion of the building referred to as the D-Wing, has a maximum capacity of 1,100.
Northwestern also has two high-capacity elevators restricted for personnel use only.
Northwestern is a technologically advanced school and has over six computer labs in addition to the media center. It currently has over 1,100 computers, the most of any high school in Maryland. Each classroom at Northwestern has a bank of at least five computers with internet access.
All of the lavatories at Northwestern feature automatic flush toilets, automatic on/off sinks, and automatic hand dryers. As an energy conservation effort, the lighting in the hallways has an auto-on/off feature, where sensors will automatically shut off the lights if movement is not detected within a certain period of time, and conversely will turn on the lights when movement is detected.
Athletic facilities
Northwestern was planned with an enhanced emphasis on athletics. The football and soccer stadium (previously known as the Prince George's County Memorial Stadium) can accommodate the entire student population and features a modern, air-conditioned press box.
There are also two softball/baseball fields (one at either side of the football field) and six tennis courts. The new baseball field was dedicated to longtime baseball coach, football coach, gym teacher, athletic director and alumnus Martin "Marty" Gallagher. This honor was organized by Coach Gallagher's former athletes from the 60s, 70s and 80s.
The gymnasium is currently the second largest in Prince George's County; it is able to seat over half the school's population. When the bleachers are retracted, the gymnasium can provide three full-sized basketball courts for practice and play.
It was rumored that the new school was to feature, among other things, an indoor swimming pool, but this did not come to fruition.
Northwestern Health & Wellness Center
The Health & Wellness Center is a joint venture between Northwestern High School and the Prince George's Hospital Center in Cheverly, Maryland. When the original Health & Wellness Center was founded in the mid-90s in the old building, it was the first of its kind in PGCPS. Three other centers have since been established, more recently, in other area schools.
The Health Center is located across from the Main Administrative Offices (Room C207) and combines the Health and Wellness Center and the Health Suite. The center provides basic health, counseling, education and prevention services in support of Northwestern students' academic and social success. Services include physical examinations, laboratory testing and treatment for infections and transmittable diseases, immunizations, gynecological care, dental care, and mental health counseling. All students, as well as the infants and toddlers of teen parents enrolled in the Adolescent Teen Parenting Program, are eligible to receive confidential primary health care services and treatment. The emphasis is on health promotion, disease prevention and self-care. Services are provided at no direct charge to students or parents/guardians, except when appropriate to bill enrollees' insurance companies or medical assistance.
Demographics
As of Fall 2013, Northwestern High School has an enrollment of approximately 2,217 students. The demographics of the student body (as of 2009) were 96.5% minority, of which 44.2% were African-American/Black, including those from African or Caribbean nations; 45.04% Hispanic; 6.8% Asian; and 3.4 Caucasian. Of these students, 1270 are male and 1183 are female. About 400 students are "Limited English Proficient" (LEP) or ESOL and over 200 are in Special Education. More than half of Northwestern's students qualify for Free and Reduced Meal status.
Feeder patterns and admissions
Admissions
With the implementation of the Center for the Visual and Performing Arts (CVPA) magnet program, Northwestern presently has two separate admissions processes. General admission into the main comprehensive program requires no special procedures. Students who live in the designated zoned attendance area for Northwestern, as defined by the school district, can attend the school. In 8th grade, incoming freshman complete a pre-registration form which reflects which of the Northwestern academy programs they are interested in enrolling in. Certain academies have specific requirements that students must satisfy in order to apply.
The admissions procedure for the CVPA magnet program is a competitive and selective audition-only entrance process. Students vying for a spot have specific audition requirements. Acceptance into the program is through a two-stage application process. The first stage involves an actual application which factors in current GPA, plus two teacher recommendations, after which qualified students undergo an audition related to their intended arts major. Currently, only students living in a limited boundary area are eligible to audition for placement into the CVPA Academy. They must either be in the zoned attendance area for Northwestern, or have been enrolled in the Creative and Performing Arts magnet program at Hyattsville Middle School, where Northwestern now serves as the high school continuity program.
Communities served by Northwestern
Northwestern High School serves students from:
Most of the city of Hyattsville; all of the city of Mount Rainier; the towns of Brentwood, North Brentwood, and University Park; and the communities of Avondale, Lewisdale and West Hyattsville. Students from portions of the city of College Park, a section of the Town of Riverdale Park, and some parts of Chillum and Adelphi census-designated places, also attend Northwestern. It was not until 1965 that Northwestern received its first multi-cultural students who were bused in from the adjacent area of Bladensburg.
Northwestern feeder schools
Hyattsville is fed directly by Hyattsville Middle School and Nicholas Orem Middle School, both in Hyattsville. Elementary schools which feed into Northwestern include Carole Highlands, César Chávez, Chillum, Edward M. Felegy, Hyattsville, Lewisdale, Mount Rainier, Rosa L. Parks, Ridgecrest, Riverdale, Thomas S. Stone, and University Park.
Dress code
In 2005, Northwestern was the first high school in Prince George's County to implement a mandatory school uniform policy. The uniform consists of a white polo shirt, and navy/dark blue khaki pants, shorts, or skirt. There is no restriction on footwear.
Academics
Sub-schools and academy programs
As part of adopting a "smaller learning communities" program of instruction, Northwestern High School offers several specialized programs in addition to the core curriculum mandated by the Prince George's County Public Schools system. A career academy operates as a "school-within-a-school" model, that provides a college preparatory curriculum with a career-related theme. The curriculum organizes instruction in academic subjects around an industry or career theme and enables students to fulfill requirements for college entrance in addition to acquiring work-related knowledge and skill.
All students are provided a core set, or curricula, and experiences in the ninth and tenth grades. Ninth graders become a part of the Ninth Grade Academy to provide greater structure and focus with the goal of enhancing basic skills and preparing them for more intensive study after their selection of a career academy by the end of sophomore year. During eleventh and twelfth grades, students are exposed to more specific or specialized instruction and participate in various work-based learning experiences. Since all students take a core foundation of academic courses, career pathways overlap enough to allow the flexibility to change academies, if interests change or new knowledge and skills are acquired.
Northwestern has identified nearly a dozen career clusters, organized around broad career fields. Of those career clusters, Northwestern has implemented four sub-schools. Each wing at Northwestern hosts at least one sub-school and one or more academy programs. The various programs are:
The Jim Henson Center for the Visual and Performing Arts Academy
Vocal Music major
Instrumental Music major
Interactive Media Production major
Visual Arts major
Dance major
Drama major
School of Business Management and Finance
Academy of Business Management
National Academy of Finance
School of Human Resource Services
International Studies Program (ISP)
NJROTC Academy of Military Science
School of Manufacturing, Engineering, and Technology
Project Lead the Way Academy of Engineering
Northwestern also features the America's Choice School Design Signature Program, a whole-school program which promotes reading and the language arts.
Academy of Arts, Media and Communications
The Jim Henson School of Arts, Media, and Communications offers academies in three arts disciplines: Arts & Humanities, Performing Arts, and Visual Arts. The vocal and instrumental music programs at Northwestern, as well as the Advanced Placement Art program, have collectively received numerous awards throughout the years for their work.
Project Lead the Way Academy of Engineering
The Project Lead The Way (PLTW) Academy of Engineering educates high school students in the principles of engineering, and provides content in the fields of electronics, biotechnology, aerospace, civil engineering, and architecture. The Academy of Engineering is a partnership with PLTW and the STEM Academy. The program is a four-year sequence of courses which, when combined with traditional mathematics and science courses in high school, introduces students to the scope, rigor and discipline of engineering prior to entering college. Students in the Academy of Engineering take specialized courses specific to the academy, such as Principles of Engineering, Introduction to Engineering Design, and Digital Electronics. Specialization courses include Computer Integrated Manufacturing, Biotechnical Engineering, Civil Engineering and Architecture, Aerospace Engineering, and Capstone Course: Engineering Design and Development.
Academy of Finance
The National Academy of Finance connects high school students with the world of financial services, offering a curriculum that covers banking and credit, financial planning, international finance, securities, insurance, accounting, and economics. The AOF is a national program that was established to develop students with the skills and knowledge to succeed in this fast-paced growth area of business.
The NJROTC Academy of Military Science
The Naval Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (NJROTC) Academy of Military Science, provides secondary school students the opportunity to become informed, responsible citizens prepared for high school graduation. Program highlights include a focus on academics, including United States military history; exploration of national security issues; the study of meteorology and astronomy; communications and advanced technologies employed by the armed services; navigation and survival skills; healthy lifestyles and physical fitness; organizational skills and financial management; career exploration in a wide variety of fields (both military and nonmilitary); and the foundations of responsible leadership. Cadets learn and develop leadership skills and application of military courtesies and customs as they complete each year of their NJROTC programs. The curriculum is structured for success in high school and beyond. Through the demonstration of discipline, honor, self-respect, and commitment, cadets gain increasing responsibilities within their programs.
NJROTC cadets and units must complete civic action projects and community service. The program also provides field trips to historical military sites and institutions, and visits to colleges, universities and military academies to increase awareness and opportunities. Participation on one of the various drill teams could include travels to neighboring counties, states, and possibly competitions held nationwide. The programs provide college scholarships and military academy appointment opportunities for qualified cadets. With the completion of specific requirements, several courses within the NJROTC curriculum can earn cadets college credits through the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Students who successfully complete a minimum of three years of the NJROTC program and qualify to enter active-duty military service, receive pay/rank increases of two grades above non-NJROTC recruits.
International Studies Academy
The International Studies Academy (also known as the International Studies Program) is an interdisciplinary honors program which affords students the opportunity to choose a curriculum offering a focus in global education and technology. ISP students are encouraged to participate in international travel. This component of the ISP greatly enhances participating students’ understanding of their world and enriches their ability to interact successfully with a broad range of peoples and regions. Similarly, the experiences offered within ISP reinforce students’ capacity for viewing career paths in technology-related professions, as well as in foreign policy, international affairs, and foreign exchange.
The Jim Henson Center for the Visual and Performing Arts Academy
The Jim Henson Center for the Visual and Performing Arts Academy is a selective specialized program, and students are only admitted to the program through a competitive audition process. The school was granted the exclusive rights to use Jim Henson's name, by Henson's family. This is the largest sub-school at Northwestern, and is an extension of the original Academy of Arts, Media, and Communications.
The CVPA is a rigorous four-year arts program that offers artistically talented high school students educational opportunities designed to prepare them artistically for college, professional study, or career options in the arts. Students in this program may major in six specific arts concentrations, which include vocal music, instrumental music, interactive media production (television production), visual arts, dance, and drama (theatre).
CVPA students take a required "zero period" course, which has them start their school day 45 minutes earlier than the general student body.
The CVPA program is open to students in a limited attendance area, and all students who are enrolled in the Creative and Performing Arts program at Hyattsville Middle School can apply to the program at Northwestern. Eventually, it is anticipated that the boundaries will be expanded to include the entire northern half of the county, while Suitland's CVPA program will draw students from the southern half. Northwestern provides the continuity arts program for K-8th grade students enrolled in the Creative and Performing Arts programs at both Edward M. Felegy Elementary School and Hyattsville Middle School.
Vocal Music major
Students who want to continue their musical training can audition for placement into either guitar, piano, or voice (choral) majors. Within each major, students receive advanced-level instruction via private lessons, as well as their participation in larger ensembles. In-school juried assessments of students' level of development in sensing, playing, and performing, are required as a component of being a vocal music major. Students also have a chance for exposure to music technology and composition, through an arts integration approach. Vocal Music majors take a required "zero period" Applied Music course, which incorporates advanced private voice lessons.
Instrumental Music major
Instrumental Music majors have the option of completing a concentration in either band or orchestral performance. Regardless of their major, all instrumental students receive advanced-level instruction on their major instrument via private lessons and additional music theory training. These are provided with the aim of making the participant more college- and career-ready. A requirement of either major is participation in large and small ensemble performances, as well as in-school juried assessments.
Interactive Media Production major
The emphasis of this major (formerly "Television Production") is hands-on experience in television, radio, digital arts and film. Students are exposed to current principles and practices of multimedia standards, computer graphics, software application, developmental techniques, and media ethics. Students may take courses such as Media Scriptwriting and Mass Media.
Visual Arts major
Visual Arts majors are exposed to studio processes, and learn the history of the materials and techniques used in these processes. Students use integrated technology throughout the program, take foundation courses, and in their junior and senior years select two areas of concentration per year. The concentrations allow majors to receive instruction in drawing and painting, sculpture, photography, and computer graphics.
Dance major
Students electing to major in the field of Dance undergo rigorous instruction in various genres, with an emphasis on ballet, jazz, and modern dance. Students are provided opportunities to participate in collegiate, regional, national workshops, competitions, and enrichment opportunities.
Drama major
Students in this strand are exposed to acting, directing, playwriting, set/scene design, costume design, make-up, audio/visual, lighting, writing, and performing original poetry and monologues. Students may select from specialized courses such as Technical Theatre, Theatre Production, and Acting Studio.
General academics
Northwestern students generally undertake a college preparatory curriculum that follows the graduation requirement guidelines set forth by the state of Maryland, which includes four years of English; three years of mathematics, science, and social studies (U.S. History, L/S/N Government, and World History are required); one credit in fine arts and Foundations of Technology; and a ½ credit of Personal Fitness (Physical Education) and Health. Students choose from a variety of "completer electives", as well as a combination of ways they can earn those elective credits. Two credits of a foreign language (of the same language) are required, as well as three credits is miscellaneous electives. Optionally, a student may elect to complete two credits in Advanced Technology Education and three credits in miscellaneous electives. As another option, a student could complete a state-approved technology program and any remaining credits in electives.
Northwestern students can also choose from 20 Advanced Placement courses, with at least one AP course offered in every major humanities discipline.
Northwestern students enrolled in the School of Business Management have a variety of completer courses to choose from. Academy of Finance electives include Introduction to Financial Services 1/2; Banking & Credit; Business Law; College Accounting; Introduction to Investment & Insurance; Financial Planning; International Finance; Economics & World of Finance; Computer Applications; and Advanced Accounting. Academy of Business Management electives include Entrepreneurship 1 and Entrepreneurship 2 courses. Other completer courses available to students in both academies include Principles of Business Administration; Financial Management; and Accounting 1.
Northwestern students enrolled in the PLTW Academy of Engineering can choose from a variety of completer courses such as Introduction to Engineering Design; Principles of Engineering; Digital Electronics; Civil Engineering & Architecture; and Engineering Design & Development.
There are a host of other academy-specific electives offered at Northwestern, such as Career Research & Development courses; NJROTC courses; Child Growth & Development courses; Television Production courses; and Computer Graphics courses.
Northwestern offers foreign language course offerings in French, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish. Advanced Placement foreign language offerings include AP French Language 5, AP Italian Language and Culture, AP Japanese Language and Culture, AP Spanish Language 5, AP Spanish Literature 6.
Students interested in computer graphics can choose from courses such as Computer Graphics 1, Computer Graphics 2, and AP Computer Graphics.
Northwestern students are required to complete a biology course before graduation. Non-traditional science courses include Integrating the Sciences; Anatomy & Physiology; Microbiology; Introduction to Environmental Relationships & Problems; Plants & People; Forensic Lab Science 1/2; and Medical Science.
A wide array of electives are offered in the humanities, including African American Studies, African Area Studies, Drama, Economic Issues, Practical Law, Journalism/Yearbook, Psychology, Public Policy Issues, SAT Preparation, Social Studies Research Seminar, and Student Government.
Northwestern's award-winning music program offers students twelve performance ensembles ranging from marching band and Steel Drum band to concert choir. Non-performance elective courses include Music Survey, Musicianship and AP Music Theory.
Release-time/work study program
Northwestern has three groups of 12th grade students who have an abbreviated class schedule. Most of these students take two classes per day before leaving school. These groups include:
Released time students
Marketing work study students
COE/Government Connection Work Study students
Released time students are allowed to leave prior to the end of the normal school day to pursue a non-credit program of activities which approved, but not sponsored or supervised, by the school. Most leave after their second period class. While released time students have school privileges, such as participation in athletic and other extracurricular activities, they must exit the school building at the conclusion of their normal day and return at the time their scheduled activity begins. Guidance counselors discuss the terms of release time with students, and students and their parents must complete the necessary paperwork.
Marketing work study students are seniors participating in the Marketing Completer program. They take their scheduled classes and, in most cases, are dismissed from school at the end of second period. They are not permitted to leave school before the conclusion of their second period class. While these students have jobs, their work schedules should not conflict with their normal school day.
The Cooperative Office Experience (COE)/Government Connection Work Study students participate in a school sponsored work-based learning experience in partnership with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in Washington, DC. Students must report to their work site by a specified time. Prince George's County school buses transport these students to the Prince George's Plaza Metro Station.
Daycare
In 2011 the school was one of two in the county with an on-site daycare; it also had classes for new parents. That year almost 40 students at the school had children.
Advanced Placement program rankings
Northwestern offers one of the largest AP programs in Prince George's County, with courses such as AP Calculus, AP Physics, AP U.S. History, AP English Literature, AP Studio Art, and AP Spanish.
Northwestern High School was cited in The Washington Post for its achievements in its Advanced Placement (AP) program in 2005. Northwestern was ranked second in the county (out of 24 high schools) for students scoring highest on the nationally administered Advanced Placement Tests, by College Board, the association which governs AP programs and its related courses throughout the country.
In January 2006, the College Board reported that 17.9% of Northwestern's 2005 graduates earned a passing score of 3 or higher, (the highest being a 5) which is above the national average of 14.1%. This achievement ranked Northwestern behind only the county's leading high school, Eleanor Roosevelt, which has consistently ranked first in the county due largely in part to its specialized Science and Technology Center magnet program. This was the first time Northwestern had achieved this distinction. Northwestern's closest contender in the county is the academically notable Bowie High School, which received a rating of 13.2%.
University of Maryland Collaborative Project magnet program
During the 1990s and extending into the 21st century, Northwestern housed the University of Maryland Collaborative Project continuation magnet program, for students who were enrolled in a middle school Science, Mathematics, and Technology Magnet Program, primarily serving students from the magnet at Nicholas Orem Middle School. The educational programs within the magnet were also open to all attendance-area students at Northwestern. It was a highly challenging program, focusing on preparating of students to achieve success in AP coursesand for entry into college. The magnet included differentiated instruction and a competency-based curriculum, and served as an educational partnership linking the personnel and resources of the University of Maryland, College Park and Northwestern. Students had access to Pre-Advanced Placement courses and AP Government at the ninth grade level; major emphasis on analytical writing in English classes, computer-intensive mathematics classes; scientific research in trigonometry and calculus classes; and a host of other magnet-exclusive instructional methods. Due to the court-ordered restructuring of PGCPS magnet programs, several magnets were eliminated in between 2003 and 2004, including the programs at Northwestern and Nicholas Orem.
Extracurricular activities
Band
The Northwestern High School Instrumental Music Program has been rated "Superior" and received first place, as well as grand championship rankings, at local, state, and national levels. The band went to Nationals several times (a competition/event for the best bands in the country).
Choir
The vocal music program has become a nationally and internationally recognized program. It consists of three main performance ensembles, and other smaller extra-curricular groups. For the 2013–14 school year, the main ensembles were the VPA magnet Advanced Chorus, and the non-magnet Concert Choir, and Mixed Chorus. Over the years, there have been other numerous vocal music groups at the school. The Concert, Advanced, Women's, and Gospel Choirs have received numerous superior ratings at the local and state level, as well as national and international venues.
In the Fall of 2010, the Choir formed the Friends of the Northwestern Choral Society, a legal non-profit organization that serves as the managerial and operating division of the choir. The FNCS is primarily responsible for the fundraising endeavors of the choir, managing expenditures and finances, and promoting the choir and its events.
The largest choir has typically been the Concert Choir. Enrollment in this Choir has been as high as 130 members, and currently has approximately 100.
The vocal music program at Northwestern is not considered extra-curricular. All choirs at Northwestern are offered as credit courses during the academic school day.
The Mixed Chorus was begun in the 2013–14 school year. It is open to all students in grades nine through twelve, and is intended to be the beginning-level choir for those students with little to no prior experience in vocal music performance.
The Concert Choir is the intermediate-level choir and the main vocal performing group at Northwestern, for students in grades nine through twelve. It has open enrollment. Students sing in many genres, such as classical, spiritual, international, secular, sacred, jazz, and show tunes. The choir has performed classical works, from Mozart and Schubert, to challenging spirituals by William L. Dawson and Moses Hogan.
The Advanced Ensemble is an auditioned, select choir, and members must be enrolled in the school's Center for the Visual and Performing Arts magnet program. It is the primary touring/performing choir at Northwestern. The Advanced Ensemble performs music of the same genre as the main Concert Choir, but the music tends to be more challenging, with more foreign-language repertoire. The Advanced Ensemble travels and performs the most extensively of all the performing groups. The Advanced Ensemble underwent their first international tour in July 2013, when they traveled to South Africa to participate in a two-week concert tour, as part of the prestigious Ihlombe South African Choral Festival. They visited the cities of Johannesburg, Pretoria, Soweto, and Cape Town. The group achieved international notoriety and media coverage during their tour, when they performed outside of the Mediclinic Heart Hospital, the facility where revered former president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, was being treated for illness.
The Gospel Choir is currently taught as an after-school ensemble. It has performed gospel music works from contemporary gospel greats such as Kirk Franklin, Hezekiah Walker, and Donnie McClurkin.
The Women's Choir is a beginning to intermediate-level, all-female SSA ensemble. This group is the equivalent of the main Concert Choir.
Encore! is a new a cappella jazz tunes and pop variety choir, formed from members of the Advanced Ensemble. Encore! performs at the more prestigious events the choirs are requested to participate in.
The choirs participate yearly in nationwide and international choral competitions, consistently bringing home multiple first place/Superior honors for eight of the last twelve years. The Concert Choir was awarded the highest honor, a "Superior" rating, at the 2011 Festival of Gold invitational in New York City. The choirs have also had a prominent presence at the state-level Maryland All-State Chorus Festival.
The choirs have been featured on the national television network NBC; a PBS network broadcast special, Celebrate America with Tim Janis; and the University of Maryland television network;. They have performed with the Towson State University Choir and the University of Maryland Chamber Singers. The Advanced Ensemble was featured in news stories on three of the four major Washington, DC-area television news networks (WRC-TV/NBC 4, WTTG/FOX 5, and WUSA TV 9, in addition to being featured in The Washington Post three times.
The choirs have performed two world premiers - Many Voices, One World with original poetry by Northwestern students, and Undisclosed Locations with Northwestern's award-winning Jazz Band. Both collaboration projects were in conjunction with the University of Maryland School of Music, with songs written exclusively for the choir by the late composer Christopher Patton.
Performance-based ensembles
Concert Choir – a beginning- to intermediate-level mixed choir; open enrollment; all grade levels; non-magnet
Visual and Performing Arts Choir – a selective, advanced-level SATB choir; audition required; all grade levels; CVPA Magnet Ensemble
Encore! – a small jazz/pop variety mixed ensemble; semi-selective; all grade levels; CVPA Magnet Ensemble
Concert band – a beginning/intermediate-level concert band; open enrollment; all grade levels
Marching band – an intermediate/advanced-level marching band; semi-selective; all grade level
Jazz Ensemble – a small intermediate/advanced-level jazz ensemble; audition required; grades 10–12
Percussion Ensemble – a small, intermediate-level percussion ensemble; semi-selective; grades 10–12
Wind Ensemble – a small, advanced-level, instrumental chamber ensemble; audition required; grades 10–12
Flute Choir – a small, intermediate/advanced-level, instrumental chamber ensemble; audition required; grades 9–12
Full Orchestra – a large instrumental group consisting of the combined Concert Band and String Orchestra
String Orchestra – a multi-skill level, string ensemble; open enrollment; grades 9–12
String Ensemble – a small chamber orchestra, primarily consisting of string instruments; audition required; grades 10–12
Athletics
Northwestern High School sports teams are called the Wildcats. The teams compete in the Prince George's Athletic Conference North Division, and are a part of the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association (MPSSAA). Northwestern is a class 4A school, which are those in the upper one-fourth of schools in the state by enrollment.
Over the years, Northwestern teams have produced 13 team state championships, and numerous lower-level championships. The Wildcats' official flag was designed in 1965 via a competition judged by the art department.
State championships
1956: Boys' basketball
1957: Boys' track & field
1958: Boys' track & field
1965: Boys' golf
1967: Boys' basketball
1968: Boys' basketball
1973: Boys' cross country
1973: Boys' soccer
1979: Girls' basketball
1987: Boys' basketball
1987: Girls' indoor track
1995: Boys' Soccer
1999: Boys' track & field
2004: Boys' basketball
2021: Boys' Soccer
Sports offered
Fall
Cheerleading‡
Cross country
Football‡
Pom-pons
Soccer (boys' and girls')‡
Volleyball
Winter
Basketball (boys' and girls')‡
Indoor track & field (boys' & girls')
Swimming
Wrestling
Spring
Baseball‡
Golf
Outdoor track & field (boys')
Softball‡
Tennis (co-ed)
‡indicates a sport with both junior varsity and varsity divisions
Clubs and organizations
Northwestern has as an eclectic array of extracurricular clubs, organizations, and activities. The following list is current as of August 2011.
Academy of Finance
Anime
Art Honors Society
Band (select ensembles)
Best Buddies
Bio Med
Chess Club
Choir (select ensembles)
Drama
ESOL Homework
Environmental Action
Fashion Club
FBLA
Forensics
International Studies Program (ISP)
Mentor Cares
Latin Dance
Manga
Math Club
Mock Trial
National Honor Society
Physical Fitness
Poetry Club
Speech and Debate
Student Government Association (SGA)
Television Production
Notable alumni
Len Bias – college basketball player; drafted by the Boston Celtics
William J. Boarman – 26th Public Printer of the United States
Leigh Bodden (1999) – NFL former defensive back
Steve Charnovitz – law professor
Jimmy Earl (1975) – bass guitarist
G.B. Edwards – entomologist
John Fahey – guitarist
Jermaine Fowler - Actor/Comedian
Harold Fox – NBA player for the Buffalo Braves
Jeff Green (2004) – NBA player for the Washington Wizards
Jim Henson (1954) – creator of The Muppets
Sharmba Mitchell (1988) – boxer, former WBA and IBF Light Welterweight Champion
Chadwick Nkang (2003) – NFL player for the Jacksonville Jaguars
Carol Padden (1973) – an American academic, author, and lecturer
Arnold Resnicoff (1964) – rabbi, Navy Chaplain, Special Assistant (Values and Vision) to the Secretary and Chief of Staff, United States Air Force
Joel Resnicoff (1966) – artist and fashion illustrator
Larry Michael Spriggs – NBA player for the Los Angeles Lakers (1981–1986)
Greg Toler – NFL defensive back for the Arizona Cardinals
John Johnson - NFL safety for the Los Angeles Rams
References
External links
Northwestern High School's official website
The Northwestern High School Choir website
Public high schools in Maryland
Hyattsville, Maryland
Schools in Prince George's County, Maryland
Art schools in Maryland
Magnet schools in Maryland
Schools of the performing arts in the United States
Educational institutions established in 1951
1951 establishments in Maryland
Middle States Commission on Secondary Schools |
22774498 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EIOffice | EIOffice | EIOffice, also known as Evermore Integrated Office, is a proprietary Office suite by Evermore Software. In 2010, Evermore changed their name to Yozosoft.
Supported operating systems include Microsoft Windows and Linux. It is marketed internationally in multiple languages. Dell Japan sells the Office suite in partnership with E Frontier, Inc. as an optional package for their Ubuntu Linux netbooks. The EIOffice supports Office Open XML document file formats.
See also
Office Open XML
References
External links
Yozosoft homepage
Office suites for Linux
Office suites
Portable software
Java platform software |
51007744 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MultigrainMalware | MultigrainMalware | A new sophisticated point-of-sale or memory-scraping malware called "Multigrain" was discovered on April 17, 2016 by the FireEye Inc. security company. Multigrain malware comes under the family of NewposThings Malware. This malware is similar to the NewposThings, FrameworkPOS and BernhardPOS malware which were known previously as notorious malware.
Process of Multigrain malware
Multigrain uses the Luhn algorithm to validate the credit and debit card details. This POS malware then infects the computer and blocks Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http) and file transfer protocol (ftp) traffic which monitors the data exfiltration. It exfiltrates the scraped information of credit and debit card via Domain Name Server (DNS). Then it sends the collected payment card information to a 'command and control server' server.
Targets one POS platform
Multigrain targets specifically the Windows point of sale system, which has a multi.exe executable file. If Multigrain gets into a POS system that does not have multi.exe then it deletes itself without leaving any trace.
See also
Point-of-sale malware
Cyber electronic warfare
List of cyber attack threat trends
Malware
Cyber security standards
References
Cyberwarfare
Windows trojans
Carding (fraud) |
2014576 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SX-Window | SX-Window | SX-Window is a graphic user interface (GUI) operating system for the Sharp X68000 series of computers, which were popular in Japan. It was first released in 1989 and had its last update in 1993.. It runs on top of the Human68k disk operating system, similarly to how Windows 3.1 runs on top of MS-DOS.
History
SX-Window was introduced for X68000 in 1989, and came preinstalled on the X68000 EXPERT model. It was developed by Hudson. The final release was 3.1 in 1993. In 2000, Sharp released the system software for the X68000 into the public domain, including SX-Window.
Technical details
The look and feel of the GUI is like that of the NeXTSTEP operating system, and its API is similar to the Macintosh Toolbox. It uses non-preemptive multitasking with the event-driven paradigm. It has a garbage collection system without MMU of MPU, but it was difficult to program because all pointers derived from handles become invalid once any API is called. The X68000 was very powerful for game software, but this GUI could be slow, as no hardware acceleration card was supported. Only a few applications and games were developed for this system.
References
Windowing systems |
16746437 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certisign | Certisign | Certisign Certificadora Digital S.A. is a Brazilian company based in São Paulo that provides PKI-based solutions to financial institutions, governments, and enterprises that increasingly utilize unsecured IP networks to link business processes, exchange information, and conduct banking and commerce transactions. Certisign also provides a variety of security and consulting services ranging from digital certificates, authentication, and managed Digital Identity.
History
In 1995, two Brazilian IT professionals, Paulo Wollny and Eduardo Rosemberg, saw a niche market and begun at home. In 1996, the two accepted partners who invested money with the initial mission of providing digital certificates for the growing internet market around the world. The new company served as a certificate authority. Two years after its foundation, Certisign completes first sale to the financial services industry – Brazilian bank incorporate PKI.
As concepted, Certisign was aimed to grow the same way Thawte did. But the original investors had other strategies, and so, in 2000 Certisign became the exclusive Brazilian affiliate of VeriSign, while Thawte where acquired by VeriSign, and two years later VeriSign invests on Certisign, with the actual shareholders completing the investment.
By that time the company initiates a new role: Provide trust for the Internet and Electronic Commerce through Digital Authentication services and products."
On October 2002, Certisign is accredited by ICP Brazil, the Government Institution for PKI Products and Services Standards. This is a turning point on Certisign history – The Retail strategy begins to be drawn and Brazilian Public and Private institutions started to prepare its infra-structure to the new technology.
In 2004, Certisign begins invest on Research and Development efforts and one year after that acquires KMS Software, a leading company on Identity Management solutions. At the same time that Franklin Templeton / Darby and Intel Capital Invests in Certisign. In 2005, the company put in practice the retail strategy & international expansion.
Certisign now has more than 1,500,000 certificates in operation for everything from military to financial services and retail applications, making it the largest CA in Brazil. Certisign has regional presence all over the Country, and strong partnerships through Latin America and Europe. Its consolidated partnership with VeriSign is well known for the VeriSign Secured Seal - Certisign Validation Seal, and for the Authentication and Fraud Prevention systems offered combined with Certisign Certificates and Consulting Services.
Products and services
Products: Certisign products and services includes:
• Systems: the industry’s broadest line of PKI platforms and technologies, including VeriSign, Brazil PKI and private label.
• Software: Certisign offers software for managing PKI systems.
Certisign offers a wide range of products and services anchored on its PKI technology.
• Identity Management System (IMS): allows corporate clients to manage key backup and recovery services while also integrating with Microsoft Active Directory (AD). With IMS, corporations have full control of the certificate revocation process, users' crypto hardware, and certificate management. IMS integrates with Certisign IPS (see below).
• Certisign’s Credential Issuer Server: processing center software to issue multiple identities to end users. Current CIS are Verisign Integrated CA, Certisign’s JAVA CA, and Time-Stamping Authority CA.
Services: Including comprehensive planning, implementation and integration, and management and support services.
• Solutions: documented, field-proven solutions that combine Certisign and partner products and services.
Online financial services companies of Brazil
Companies based in São Paulo
Financial services companies established in 1996 |
3093706 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit%20nibbler | Bit nibbler | A bit nibbler, or nibbler, is a computer software program designed to copy data from a floppy disk one bit at a time. It functions at a very low level directly interacting with the disk drive hardware to override a copy protection scheme that the floppy disk's data may be stored in. In most cases the nibbler software still analyses the data on a byte level, only looking to the bit level when dealing with synchronization marks (syncs), zero-gaps and other sector & track headers. When possible, nibblers will work with the low-level data encoding format used by the disk system, being Group Coded Recording (GCR - Apple, Commodore), Frequency Modulation (FM - Atari), or Modified Frequency Modulation (MFM - Amiga, Atari, IBM PC).
Overview
Software piracy began to be a problem when floppy disks became the common storage media. The ease of copying depended on the system; Jerry Pournelle wrote in BYTE in 1983 that "CP/M doesn't lend itself to copy protection" so its users "haven't been too worried" about it, while "Apple users, though, have always had the problem. So have those who used TRS-DOS, and I understand that MS-DOS has copy protection features". Apple and Commodore 64 copy protection schemes were extremely varied and creative because most of the floppy disk reading and writing was controlled by software (or firmware), not by hardware.
Pournelle disliked copy protection and, except for games, refused to review software that used it. He did not believe that it was useful, writing "For every copy protection scheme there's a hacker ready to defeat it. Most involve so-called nybble copiers, which try to analyze the original disk and then make a copy". By 1980, the first 'nibble' copier, Locksmith, was introduced for the Apple II. These copiers reproduced copy protected floppy disks an entire track at a time, ignoring how the sectors were marked. This was harder to do than it sounds for two reasons: firstly, Apple disks did not use the index hole to mark the start of a track; their drives could not even detect the index hole. Tracks could thus start anywhere, but the copied track had to have this "write splice", which always caused some bits to be lost or duplicated due to speed variations, roughly in the same (unused for payload data) place as the original, or it would not work. Secondly, Apple used special "self-sync" bytes to achieve agreement between drive controller and computer about where any byte ended and the next one started on the disk. These bytes were written as normal data bytes followed by a slightly longer than normal pause, which was notoriously unreliable to detect on read-back; still, you had to get the self-sync bytes roughly right as without them being present in the right places, the copy would not work, and with them present in too many places, the track would not fit on the destination disk.
Apple II
Locksmith copied Apple II disks by taking advantage of the fact that these sync fields between sectors almost always consisted of a long string of FF (hex - all '1' bits) bytes. It found the longest string of FFs, which usually occurred between the last and first sectors on each track, and began writing the track in the middle of that; also it assumed that any long string of FF bytes was a sync sequence and introduced the necessary short pauses after writing each of them to the copy. Ironically, Locksmith would not copy itself. The first Locksmith measured the distance between sector 1 of each track. Copy protection engineers quickly figured out what Locksmith was doing and began to use the same technique to defeat it. Locksmith countered by introducing the ability to reproduce track alignment and prevented itself from being copied by embedding a special sequence of nibbles, that if found, would stop the copy process. Henry Roberts (CTO of Nalpeiron), a graduate student in computer science at the University of South Carolina, reverse engineered Locksmith, found the sequence and distributed the information to some of the 7 or 8 people producing copy protection at the time.
For some time, Locksmith continued to defeat virtually all of the copy protection systems in existence. The next advance came from Henry Roberts' thesis on software copy protection, which devised a way of replacing Apple’s sync field of FFs with random appearing patterns of bytes. Because the graduate student had frequent copy protection discussions with Apple’s copy protection engineer, Apple developed a copy protection system which made use of this technique. Henry Roberts then wrote a competitive program to Locksmith, Back It UP. He devised several methods for defeating that, and ultimately a method was devised for reading self sync fields directly, regardless of what nibbles they contained. The back and forth struggle between copy protection engineers and nibble copiers continued until the Apple II became obsolete and was replaced by the IBM PC and its clones.
Commodore 64
Part of the Fast Hack'em disk copy software was a nibbler used to produce copies of copy protected Commodore 64 commercial software. When using the nibbler, disk copying was done on a very low level, bit-by-bit rather than using standard Commodore DOS commands. This effectively nullified the efficacy of deliberate disk errors, non-standard track layouts, and related forms of copy prevention. Copying a protected disk took approximately 60 seconds if being copied directly to another disk drive, or 3 minutes (plus several disk swaps) if performed using a single disk drive.
Super Kit/1541 was sold by Prism Software around 1986 written by Joe Peter who also did Wrap Speed and some of the VMax copy protection. It included many different copiers like a Normal Copier, Nibbler, File Copier, Super Nibbler, Disk Surgeon, and disk Editors. There was also parameters on Side-B (see the list below). 2 Drives could also be daisy chained and once programmed the computer itself could be disconnected and let the drives do the copying by checking the disk insertion key in around 20 seconds.
Interesting fact is that the program could make a copy of itself, BUT could not make a copy of the copy because the sync length of the original was shorter than the copy made and the loader checked for this length and the copy would have a much longer sync. V3 was later released to PD by the author.
NIBtools is a modern (circa 2006) open source software that performs the same function, intended mainly for archiving data from old floppies that may be copyright-protected or damaged. Instead of reading bit-by-bit, one can also read many 1.25 KB stretches and then assemble them together in a way akin to shotgun sequencing, an approach necessary for using slow connections on the Commodore 1541.
Rapidlok was a copy protection scheme used widely by many companies and all versions of it never were successfully copied. They used a $00 value in between sectors which caused copiers to become "flaky" as it was an illegal GCR value.
References
Utility software
Floppy disk computer storage
Copy protection |
1675459 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIS%2B | NIS+ | NIS+ is a directory service developed by Sun Microsystems to replace its older 'NIS' (Network Information Service). It is designed to eliminate the need for duplication across many computers of configuration data such as user accounts, host names and addresses, printer information and NFS disk mounts on individual systems, instead using a central repository on a master server, simplifying system administration. NIS+ client software has been ported to other Unix and Unix-like platforms.
Prior to the release of Solaris 9 in 2002, Sun announced its intent to remove NIS+ from Solaris in a future release and now recommends that customers instead use an LDAP-based lookup scheme.
NIS+ was present in Solaris 9 and 10 (although both releases include tools to migrate NIS+ data to an LDAP server) and it has been removed from Solaris 11.
NIS vs. NIS+
NIS and NIS+ are similar only in purpose and name, otherwise, they are completely different implementations. They differ in the following ways:
NIS+ is hierarchical.
NIS+ is based around Secure RPC (servers must authenticate clients and vice versa).
NIS+ may be replicated (replicas are read-only).
NIS+ implements permissions on directories, tables, columns and rows.
NIS+ also implements permissions on operations, such as being able to use to transfer changed data from a master to a replica.
The problem of managing network information
In the 1970s, when computers were expensive, and networks consisted of a small number of nodes, administering network information was manageable, and a centralized system was not needed. As computers became cheaper and networks grew larger, it became increasingly difficult to maintain separate copies of network configurations on individual systems.
For example, when a new user was added to the network, the following files would need to be updated on every existing system:
Likewise, would have needed updating every time a new group was added and would have needed updating every time a new computer was added to the network.
If a new user with a new system was added to a network of 20 existing systems, the UNIX administrator would need to modify 5 files on 21 machines - 105 files in all. With NIS+, adding users and machines to the network requires changes only to the NIS+ server's maps and the new host’s /etc/nsswitch.conf needs to point to the NIS+ server. When a user logs into any other machine, that host (the NIS+ client), knowing who the NIS+ server is, queries it for the username and password to identify and authenticate the user.
NIS+ also manages several other types of data: NFS mounts (auto_master, auto_home), network booting and other parameters (bootparams, ethers, netmasks, netgroup, networks, protocols, rpc, services), security access (cred), aliases, and time zone.
An installation of NIS+ comes with such table structures predefined. There are facilities available to create other tables as needed.
Alternatives
Other alternative schemes for storing network information exist, such as the LDAP standard maintained by the IETF, including Microsoft’s LDAP implementation, Active Directory. LDAP can be configured to handle more general information, such as corporate employee structures, phone numbers, address, etc. so it requires more thought and planning. Many organizations require all the features of NIS+, LDAP, and Active Directory and run them all simultaneously.
Another alternative that has been popular in certain environments is the Hesiod name service, which is based on the DNS protocols.
NIS+ client/server model
Unlike NIS, NIS+ uses a hierarchical structure of multiple domains. A NIS+ domain can, and should, be serviced by multiple servers. The primary server is known as the master server, and backup servers are known as replica servers. Both types hold copies of the NIS+ tables. Changes are first committed to the master server and then propagated to replica servers in increments.
NIS+ table permissions determine a user's level of access to the table's contents.
See also
client–server model
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)
Network Information Service (NIS)
References
External links
Resources on how to replace NIS and NIS+ can be found at the NIS Migration Resource Site
Unix network-related software
Sun Microsystems software
Network management
Directory services |
1878645 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenbak-1 | Kenbak-1 | The Kenbak-1 is considered by the Computer History Museum and the American Computer Museum to be the world's first "personal computer", invented by John V. Blankenbaker (born 1929) of Kenbak Corporation in 1970, and first sold in early 1971. Only 50 machines were ever built using Bud Industries enclosures as its housing. The system first sold for US$750. Today, only 14 machines are believed to exist worldwide, in the hands of various collectors. Production of the Kenbak-1 stopped in 1973 as Kenbak failed, and was taken over by CTI Education Products, Inc. CTI rebranded the inventory and renamed it the H5050, though sales remained elusive.
Since the Kenbak-1 was invented before the first microprocessor, the machine didn't have a one-chip CPU but instead was based purely on small-scale integration TTL chips. The 8-bit machine offered 256 bytes of memory, implemented on Intel's type 1404 silicon gate MOS shift registers. The instruction cycle time was 1 microsecond (equivalent to an instruction clock speed of 1 MHz), but actual execution speed averaged below 1000 instructions per second due to architectural constraints such as slow access to serial memory.
The machine was programmed in pure machine code using an array of buttons and switches. Output consisted of a row of lights.
Internally, the Kenbak-1 has a serial computer architecture, processing one bit at a time.
See also
Datapoint 2200, a contemporary machine with alphanumeric screen and keyboard, suitable to run non-trivial application programs.
Mark-8 The Mark-8 was designed by graduate student Jonathan A. Titus and announced as a 'loose kit' in the July 1974 issue of Radio-Electronics magazine.
Altair 8800, a very popular 1975 microcomputer that provided the inspiration for starting Microsoft.
References
External links
KENBAK-1 Computer Article
KENBAK-1 Computer – Official Kenbak-1 website at www.kenbak-1.net
KENBAK-1 Series 2 – Official Kenbak-1 reproduction kit at www.kenbakkit.com
Kenbak-1 Emulator – Online Kenbak-1 Emulator
Kenbak-1 Emulator – Kenbak-1 Emulator download
The Kenbak 1 - The first Personal Computer – At the Computer Museum of Nova Scotia
Kenbak 1 – Images and information at www.vintage-computer.com
Kenbak documentation at bitsavers.org
KENBAK-uino Hardware-based Kenbak-1 Emulator
Recreating the First PC article about KENBAK-uino at hackaday.com
KENBAK-1 Emulator/Trainer, RetroWiki.es (Invalid, 2015-02-10)
The Kenbak-1 Prototype, Official Kenbak-1 prototype website at www.thefirstpc.com
Early microcomputers
Computer-related introductions in 1971
Serial computers
8-bit computers |
1903056 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESTsoft | ESTsoft | Founded in 1993, ESTsoft is a South Korean application software development company. Its software ranges from desktop to business software for enterprises.
Products
There are several products marketed under the "ALTools" product line. In Korea, "Al" means "egg", and numerous products under this category have egg-themed icons and mascots. ALTools products include:
ALZip - A compression and archiving utility, supporting several archiving formats, including ISO
ALFTP - An FTP client and server
ALSee - An image viewer and photo editor
ALPass - A password manager for web sites (update service end)
ALGIF - A GIF animation program (update end)
ALSong - An MP3 player which supports online content
ALShow - A media player
ALMap - A family of digital map viewers and GPS (both software and hardware) (update end)
ALX - Digital rights management software
ALToolbar - A toolbar for Internet Explorer
ALYac - An antivirus based on BitDefender engine
Other ESTsoft products include:
InternetDISK - Online storage solution
iDisk - A version of InternetDISK designed for ISPs to host larger amounts of data
iMan - Instant Messaging software
Cabal Online - A Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game
Cabal 2 - A Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game
HeroesGo (also known as Howling Sword) - A Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game that has similar core gameplay to DFO/Rusty Hearts/Elsword
References
External links
ESTsoft site
Companies established in 1993
Software companies of South Korea
South Korean brands |
1456 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWK | AWK | AWK (awk) is a domain-specific language designed for text processing and typically used as a data extraction and reporting tool. Like sed and grep, it is a filter, and is a standard feature of most Unix-like operating systems.
The AWK language is a data-driven scripting language consisting of a set of actions to be taken against streams of textual data – either run directly on files or used as part of a pipeline – for purposes of extracting or transforming text, such as producing formatted reports. The language extensively uses the string datatype, associative arrays (that is, arrays indexed by key strings), and regular expressions. While AWK has a limited intended application domain and was especially designed to support one-liner programs, the language is Turing-complete, and even the early Bell Labs users of AWK often wrote well-structured large AWK programs.
AWK was created at Bell Labs in the 1970s, and its name is derived from the surnames of its authors: Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan. The acronym is pronounced the same as the bird auk, which is on the cover of The AWK Programming Language. When written in all lowercase letters, as awk, it refers to the Unix or Plan 9 program that runs scripts written in the AWK programming language.
History
AWK was initially developed in 1977 by Alfred Aho (author of egrep), Peter J. Weinberger (who worked on tiny relational databases), and Brian Kernighan. AWK takes its name from their respective initials. According to Kernighan, one of the goals of AWK was to have a tool that would easily manipulate both numbers and strings.
AWK was also inspired by Marc Rochkind's programming language that was used to search for patterns in input data, and was implemented using yacc.
As one of the early tools to appear in Version 7 Unix, AWK added computational features to a Unix pipeline besides the Bourne shell, the only scripting language available in a standard Unix environment. It is one of the mandatory utilities of the Single UNIX Specification, and is required by the Linux Standard Base specification.
AWK was significantly revised and expanded in 1985–88, resulting in the GNU AWK implementation written by Paul Rubin, Jay Fenlason, and Richard Stallman, released in 1988. GNU AWK may be the most widely deployed version because it is included with GNU-based Linux packages. GNU AWK has been maintained solely by Arnold Robbins since 1994. Brian Kernighan's nawk (New AWK) source was first released in 1993 unpublicized, and publicly since the late 1990s; many BSD systems use it to avoid the GPL license.
AWK was preceded by sed (1974). Both were designed for text processing. They share the line-oriented, data-driven paradigm, and are particularly suited to writing one-liner programs, due to the implicit main loop and current line variables. The power and terseness of early AWK programs – notably the powerful regular expression handling and conciseness due to implicit variables, which facilitate one-liners – together with the limitations of AWK at the time, were important inspirations for the Perl language (1987). In the 1990s, Perl became very popular, competing with AWK in the niche of Unix text-processing languages.
Structure of AWK programs
An AWK program is a series of pattern action pairs, written as:
condition { action }
condition { action }
...
where condition is typically an expression and action is a series of commands. The input is split into records, where by default records are separated by newline characters so that the input is split into lines. The program tests each record against each of the conditions in turn, and executes the action for each expression that is true. Either the condition or the action may be omitted. The condition defaults to matching every record. The default action is to print the record. This is the same pattern-action structure as sed.
In addition to a simple AWK expression, such as foo == 1 or /^foo/, the condition can be BEGIN or END causing the action to be executed before or after all records have been read, or pattern1, pattern2 which matches the range of records starting with a record that matches pattern1 up to and including the record that matches pattern2 before again trying to match against pattern1 on future lines.
In addition to normal arithmetic and logical operators, AWK expressions include the tilde operator, ~, which matches a regular expression against a string. As handy syntactic sugar, /regexp/ without using the tilde operator matches against the current record; this syntax derives from sed, which in turn inherited it from the ed editor, where / is used for searching. This syntax of using slashes as delimiters for regular expressions was subsequently adopted by Perl and ECMAScript, and is now common. The tilde operator was also adopted by Perl.
Commands
AWK commands are the statements that are substituted for action in the examples above. AWK commands can include function calls, variable assignments, calculations, or any combination thereof. AWK contains built-in support for many functions; many more are provided by the various flavors of AWK. Also, some flavors support the inclusion of dynamically linked libraries, which can also provide more functions.
The print command
The print command is used to output text. The output text is always terminated with a predefined string called the output record separator (ORS) whose default value is a newline. The simplest form of this command is:
print
This displays the contents of the current record. In AWK, records are broken down into fields, and these can be displayed separately:
print $1
Displays the first field of the current record
print $1, $3
Displays the first and third fields of the current record, separated by a predefined string called the output field separator (OFS) whose default value is a single space character
Although these fields ($X) may bear resemblance to variables (the $ symbol indicates variables in Perl), they actually refer to the fields of the current record. A special case, $0, refers to the entire record. In fact, the commands "print" and "print $0" are identical in functionality.
The print command can also display the results of calculations and/or function calls:
/regex_pattern/ {
# Actions to perform in the event the record (line) matches the above regex_pattern
print 3+2
print foobar(3)
print foobar(variable)
print sin(3-2)
}
Output may be sent to a file:
/regex_pattern/ {
# Actions to perform in the event the record (line) matches the above regex_pattern
print "expression" > "file name"
}
or through a pipe:
/regex_pattern/ {
# Actions to perform in the event the record (line) matches the above regex_pattern
print "expression" | "command"
}
Built-in variables
Awk's built-in variables include the field variables: $1, $2, $3, and so on ($0 represents the entire record). They hold the text or values in the individual text-fields in a record.
Other variables include:
NR: Number of Records. Keeps a current count of the number of input records read so far from all data files. It starts at zero, but is never automatically reset to zero.
FNR: File Number of Records. Keeps a current count of the number of input records read so far in the current file. This variable is automatically reset to zero each time a new file is started.
NF: Number of Fields. Contains the number of fields in the current input record. The last field in the input record can be designated by $NF, the 2nd-to-last field by $(NF-1), the 3rd-to-last field by $(NF-2), etc.
FILENAME: Contains the name of the current input-file.
FS: Field Separator. Contains the "field separator" used to divide fields in the input record. The default, "white space", allows any sequence of space and tab characters. FS can be reassigned with another character or character sequence to change the field separator.
RS: Record Separator. Stores the current "record separator" character. Since, by default, an input line is the input record, the default record separator character is a "newline".
OFS: Output Field Separator. Stores the "output field separator", which separates the fields when Awk prints them. The default is a "space" character.
ORS: Output Record Separator. Stores the "output record separator", which separates the output records when Awk prints them. The default is a "newline" character.
OFMT: Output Format. Stores the format for numeric output. The default format is "%.6g".
Variables and syntax
Variable names can use any of the characters [A-Za-z0-9_], with the exception of language keywords. The operators + - * / represent addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, respectively. For string concatenation, simply place two variables (or string constants) next to each other. It is optional to use a space in between if string constants are involved, but two variable names placed adjacent to each other require a space in between. Double quotes delimit string constants. Statements need not end with semicolons. Finally, comments can be added to programs by using # as the first character on a line.
User-defined functions
In a format similar to C, function definitions consist of the keyword function, the function name, argument names and the function body. Here is an example of a function.
function add_three (number) {
return number + 3
}
This statement can be invoked as follows:
(pattern) {
print add_three(36) # Outputs '''39'''
}
Functions can have variables that are in the local scope. The names of these are added to the end of the argument list, though values for these should be omitted when calling the function. It is convention to add some whitespace in the argument list before the local variables, to indicate where the parameters end and the local variables begin.
Examples
Hello World
Here is the customary "Hello, world" program written in AWK:
BEGIN { print "Hello, world!" }
Note that an explicit exit statement is not needed here; since the only pattern is BEGIN, no command-line arguments are processed.
Print lines longer than 80 characters
Print all lines longer than 80 characters. Note that the default action is to print the current line.
length($0) > 80
Count words
Count words in the input and print the number of lines, words, and characters (like wc):
{
words += NF
chars += length + 1 # add one to account for the newline character at the end of each record (line)
}
END { print NR, words, chars }
As there is no pattern for the first line of the program, every line of input matches by default, so the increment actions are executed for every line. Note that words += NF is shorthand for words = words + NF.
Sum last word
{ s += $NF }
END { print s + 0 }
s is incremented by the numeric value of $NF, which is the last word on the line as defined by AWK's field separator (by default, white-space). NF is the number of fields in the current line, e.g. 4. Since $4 is the value of the fourth field, $NF is the value of the last field in the line regardless of how many fields this line has, or whether it has more or fewer fields than surrounding lines. $ is actually a unary operator with the highest operator precedence. (If the line has no fields, then NF is 0, $0 is the whole line, which in this case is empty apart from possible white-space, and so has the numeric value 0.)
At the end of the input the END pattern matches, so s is printed. However, since there may have been no lines of input at all, in which case no value has ever been assigned to s, it will by default be an empty string. Adding zero to a variable is an AWK idiom for coercing it from a string to a numeric value. (Concatenating an empty string is to coerce from a number to a string, e.g. s "". Note, there's no operator to concatenate strings, they're just placed adjacently.) With the coercion the program prints "0" on an empty input, without it, an empty line is printed.
Match a range of input lines
NR % 4 == 1, NR % 4 == 3 { printf "%6d %s\n", NR, $0 }
The action statement prints each line numbered. The printf function emulates the standard C printf and works similarly to the print command described above. The pattern to match, however, works as follows: NR is the number of records, typically lines of input, AWK has so far read, i.e. the current line number, starting at 1 for the first line of input. % is the modulo operator. NR % 4 == 1 is true for the 1st, 5th, 9th, etc., lines of input. Likewise, NR % 4 == 3 is true for the 3rd, 7th, 11th, etc., lines of input. The range pattern is false until the first part matches, on line 1, and then remains true up to and including when the second part matches, on line 3. It then stays false until the first part matches again on line 5.
Thus, the program prints lines 1,2,3, skips line 4, and then 5,6,7, and so on. For each line, it prints the line number (on a 6 character-wide field) and then the line contents. For example, when executed on this input:
Rome
Florence
Milan
Naples
Turin
Venice
The previous program prints:
1 Rome
2 Florence
3 Milan
5 Turin
6 Venice
Printing the initial or the final part of a file
As a special case, when the first part of a range pattern is constantly true, e.g. 1, the range will start at the beginning of the input. Similarly, if the second part is constantly false, e.g. 0, the range will continue until the end of input. For example,
/^--cut here--$/, 0
prints lines of input from the first line matching the regular expression ^--cut here--$, that is, a line containing only the phrase "--cut here--", to the end.
Calculate word frequencies
Word frequency using associative arrays:
BEGIN {
FS="[^a-zA-Z]+"
}
{
for (i=1; i<=NF; i++)
words[tolower($i)]++
}
END {
for (i in words)
print i, words[i]
}
The BEGIN block sets the field separator to any sequence of non-alphabetic characters. Note that separators can be regular expressions. After that, we get to a bare action, which performs the action on every input line. In this case, for every field on the line, we add one to the number of times that word, first converted to lowercase, appears. Finally, in the END block, we print the words with their frequencies. The line
for (i in words)
creates a loop that goes through the array words, setting i to each subscript of the array. This is different from most languages, where such a loop goes through each value in the array. The loop thus prints out each word followed by its frequency count. tolower was an addition to the One True awk (see below) made after the book was published.
Match pattern from command line
This program can be represented in several ways. The first one uses the Bourne shell to make a shell script that does everything. It is the shortest of these methods:
#!/bin/sh
pattern="$1"
shift
awk '/'"$pattern"'/ { print FILENAME ":" $0 }' "$@"
The $pattern in the awk command is not protected by single quotes so that the shell does expand the variable but it needs to be put in double quotes to properly handle patterns containing spaces. A pattern by itself in the usual way checks to see if the whole line ($0) matches. FILENAME contains the current filename. awk has no explicit concatenation operator; two adjacent strings concatenate them. $0 expands to the original unchanged input line.
There are alternate ways of writing this. This shell script accesses the environment directly from within awk:
#!/bin/sh
export pattern="$1"
shift
awk '$0 ~ ENVIRON["pattern"] { print FILENAME ":" $0 }' "$@"
This is a shell script that uses ENVIRON, an array introduced in a newer version of the One True awk after the book was published. The subscript of ENVIRON is the name of an environment variable; its result is the variable's value. This is like the getenv function in various standard libraries and POSIX. The shell script makes an environment variable pattern containing the first argument, then drops that argument and has awk look for the pattern in each file.
~ checks to see if its left operand matches its right operand; !~ is its inverse. Note that a regular expression is just a string and can be stored in variables.
The next way uses command-line variable assignment, in which an argument to awk can be seen as an assignment to a variable:
#!/bin/sh
pattern="$1"
shift
awk '$0 ~ pattern { print FILENAME ":" $0 }' "pattern=$pattern" "$@"
Or You can use the -v var=value command line option (e.g. awk -v pattern="$pattern" ...).
Finally, this is written in pure awk, without help from a shell or without the need to know too much about the implementation of the awk script (as the variable assignment on command line one does), but is a bit lengthy:
BEGIN {
pattern = ARGV[1]
for (i = 1; i < ARGC; i++) # remove first argument
ARGV[i] = ARGV[i + 1]
ARGC--
if (ARGC == 1) { # the pattern was the only thing, so force read from standard input (used by book)
ARGC = 2
ARGV[1] = "-"
}
}
$0 ~ pattern { print FILENAME ":" $0 }
The BEGIN is necessary not only to extract the first argument, but also to prevent it from being interpreted as a filename after the BEGIN block ends. ARGC, the number of arguments, is always guaranteed to be ≥1, as ARGV[0] is the name of the command that executed the script, most often the string "awk". Also note that ARGV[ARGC] is the empty string, "". # initiates a comment that expands to the end of the line.
Note the if block. awk only checks to see if it should read from standard input before it runs the command. This means that
awk 'prog'
only works because the fact that there are no filenames is only checked before prog is run! If you explicitly set ARGC to 1 so that there are no arguments, awk will simply quit because it feels there are no more input files. Therefore, you need to explicitly say to read from standard input with the special filename -.
Self-contained AWK scripts
On Unix-like operating systems self-contained AWK scripts can be constructed using the shebang syntax.
For example, a script that prints the content of a given file may be built by creating a file named print.awk with the following content:
#!/usr/bin/awk -f
{ print $0 }
It can be invoked with: ./print.awk <filename>
The -f tells AWK that the argument that follows is the file to read the AWK program from, which is the same flag that is used in sed. Since they are often used for one-liners, both these programs default to executing a program given as a command-line argument, rather than a separate file.
Versions and implementations
AWK was originally written in 1977 and distributed with Version 7 Unix.
In 1985 its authors started expanding the language, most significantly by adding user-defined functions. The language is described in the book The AWK Programming Language, published 1988, and its implementation was made available in releases of UNIX System V. To avoid confusion with the incompatible older version, this version was sometimes called "new awk" or nawk. This implementation was released under a free software license in 1996 and is still maintained by Brian Kernighan (see external links below).
Old versions of Unix, such as UNIX/32V, included awkcc, which converted AWK to C. Kernighan wrote a program to turn awk into C++; its state is not known.
BWK awk, also known as nawk, refers to the version by Brian Kernighan. It has been dubbed the "One True AWK" because of the use of the term in association with the book that originally described the language and the fact that Kernighan was one of the original authors of AWK. FreeBSD refers to this version as one-true-awk. This version also has features not in the book, such as tolower and ENVIRON that are explained above; see the FIXES file in the source archive for details. This version is used by, for example, Android, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, macOS, and illumos. Brian Kernighan and Arnold Robbins are the main contributors to a source repository for nawk: .
gawk (GNU awk) is another free-software implementation and the only implementation that makes serious progress implementing internationalization and localization and TCP/IP networking. It was written before the original implementation became freely available. It includes its own debugger, and its profiler enables the user to make measured performance enhancements to a script. It also enables the user to extend functionality with shared libraries. Some Linux distributions include gawk as their default AWK implementation.
gawk-csv. The CSV extension of gawk provides facilities for handling input and output CSV formatted data.
mawk is a very fast AWK implementation by Mike Brennan based on a bytecode interpreter.
libmawk is a fork of mawk, allowing applications to embed multiple parallel instances of awk interpreters.
awka (whose front end is written atop the mawk program) is another translator of AWK scripts into C code. When compiled, statically including the author's libawka.a, the resulting executables are considerably sped up and, according to the author's tests, compare very well with other versions of AWK, Perl, or Tcl. Small scripts will turn into programs of 160–170 kB.
tawk (Thompson AWK) is an AWK compiler for Solaris, DOS, OS/2, and Windows, previously sold by Thompson Automation Software (which has ceased its activities).
Jawk is a project to implement AWK in Java, hosted on SourceForge. Extensions to the language are added to provide access to Java features within AWK scripts (i.e., Java threads, sockets, collections, etc.).
xgawk is a fork of gawk that extends gawk with dynamically loadable libraries. The XMLgawk extension was integrated into the official GNU Awk release 4.1.0.
QSEAWK is an embedded AWK interpreter implementation included in the QSE library that provides embedding application programming interface (API) for C and C++.
libfawk is a very small, function-only, reentrant, embeddable interpreter written in C
BusyBox includes an AWK implementation written by Dmitry Zakharov. This is a very small implementation suitable for embedded systems.
CLAWK by Michael Parker provides an AWK implementation in Common Lisp, based upon the regular expression library of the same author.
Books
See also
Data transformation
Event-driven programming
List of Unix commands
sed
References
Further reading
– Interview with Alfred V. Aho on AWK
AWK – Become an expert in 60 minutes
External links
The Amazing Awk Assembler by Henry Spencer.
awklang.org The site for things related to the awk language
1977 software
Cross-platform software
Free compilers and interpreters
Pattern matching programming languages
Scripting languages
Domain-specific programming languages
Standard Unix programs
Text-oriented programming languages
Unix SUS2008 utilities
Unix text processing utilities
Plan 9 commands
Programming languages created in 1977 |
8190035 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designer%20Castles | Designer Castles | Designer Castles was a software title for the BBC Micro and later Acorn Archimedes (RISC OS based) range of computers.
The software produced by Data Design in Barnsley, England, UK allowed its users to design a medieval style- castle by means of a WIMP based design environment. In the design environment a number of pre-defined components, (For example, towers, walls and keeps) could be linked and manipulated to form a castle design. The components of the castle could then be printed (along with wall elevations and plans) so that a card model of the designed castle could be assembled.
The paper, glue and model making tools required for assembly were not supplied with any version of the package, although assembly instructions for components were provided in the extensive manual.
BBC Micro version
Designer Castles was first released in 1988 for BBC B/Master 128. The WIMP environment supported keyboard input and also allowed use of the mouse (such as AMX Mouse). The package consisted of a software disc together with a ring bound manual and ROM cartridge containing WIMP and dot-matrix printer support routines. Data Design targeted with the application educational market. Review in BBC Acorn User magazine praised features of Designer Castles, but criticized its high price.
The support ROM was named the PRINTWARE Support ROM. The term PRINTWARE was created by Peter Downs as a trade mark to cover the concept of software that was developed to enable designs to be sent to printers as 'nets' that could be cut out and folded to construct models.
Acorn Archimedes (RISC OS) version
A version of Designer Castles was released in 1991 for the Acorn Archimedes systems using RISC OS. Unlike the BBC Micro version, the program utilizes the existing RISC OS Wimp environment and printer routines without need for a separate support module. Archimedes release also introduced several enhancements of the user interface (colourful environment instead of black and white), on the other hand it was no longer possible to print small simplified view of the castle like in the BBC Micro version.
Additional spin-off titles
As well as Castles, the design environment was later adapted in a separate software title "Medieval Villages" to allow construction of medieval villages. Castle designs could be added to designs produced by this program.
A second additional title "Designer Environment" utilized the design environment for modern buildings, although it was not possible to add Castle designs to "villages" created with this software.
Data Design also released "Designer Logic" for drawing of logic gates.
The people behind Designer Castles
The Designer Castles idea was the brainchild of Peter Downs and the late Keith Swift . The original idea was to develop a "design, print, cut-out and assemble gymkhana". since both Peter and Keith had daughters it seemed a great idea, when they presented the idea to a commercial software company they were told that girls didn't use computers nearly as much as boys and, if they were to develop a similar product for boys, then the firm would be interested in discussing it further. So they set to work, and designed the first (never released) version of Designer Castles, when they presented this, the commercial company was highly critical. Peter and Keith set up Data Design, brought on board R Fry as programmer and Vic Wright (primarily to write the content of the exceptional manual) which Peter then produced. The business recruited Carol Duffy who was massively responsible for working with the key publications and writers (such as Chris Drage and Nick Evans), to create a tremendous amount of publicity leading to the software becoming one of the best selling educational software products in its time.
Current situation
As of 2006 there have been no attempts to revive the program for modern PC systems, despite the porting of other programs originally Acorn based, such as BBC Basic and Tabs.
References
Acorn Computers
RISC OS software |
4523981 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan%20Graham | Susan Graham | Susan Graham (born July 23, 1960 in Roswell, New Mexico) is an American mezzo-soprano.
Life and career
Raised in Midland, Texas, Graham is a graduate of Texas Tech University and the Manhattan School of Music. Her teachers have included Cynthia Hoffmann and Marlena Malas. She studied the piano for 13 years. She was a winner in the Metropolitan Opera's National Council Auditions, and also a recipient of the Schwabacher Award from the Merola Program of San Francisco Opera.
Graham made her international début at Covent Garden in 1994, playing Massenet's Chérubin. She has also premièred several roles in contemporary operas, including John Harbison's The Great Gatsby (Jordan Baker), Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking (Sister Helen Prejean), and Tobias Picker's An American Tragedy (Sondra Finchley).
Graham is a noted champion of the French song repertoire and of songs by contemporary American composers, including Ned Rorem and Lowell Liebermann. Graham made her Carnegie Hall recital debut in April 2003, and a recording of this recital was later released.
Graham sang "Bless This House" at George W. Bush's second inauguration on January 20, 2005, and Schubert's "Ave Maria" at the nationally televised funeral mass for Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts on August 29, 2009. She is a US delegate for UNESCO.
Opera roles
Her operatic roles include:
Dominick Argento
The Aspern Papers (Sonia) 1990; (Tina) 2013
Samuel Barber
Vanessa (Erika)
Alban Berg
Lulu (Countess Geschwitz) Metropolitan Opera 2015
Hector Berlioz
Béatrice et Bénédict (Béatrice) 1997
La damnation de Faust (Marguerite) La Scala, Metropolitan Opera November 2008
Les Troyens (Didon) Théâtre du Châtelet, (Paris); Metropolitan Opera; San Francisco Opera
Marc Blitzstein
Regina (Regina Giddens) 2018
Christoph Willibald Gluck
Iphigénie en Tauride (Iphigénie)
Alexander Goehr
Arianna (Arianna)
Charles Gounod
Roméo et Juliette (Stephano) Seattle Opera
George Frideric Handel
Alcina (Ruggerio)
Xerxes (Serse – Title Role), San Francisco Opera
Ariodante Houston Grand Opera, San Francisco Opera
John Harbison
The Great Gatsby (Jordan Baker) 1999
Jake Heggie
Dead Man Walking (Sister Helen Prejean)
Three Decembers (Madeline Mitchell), Opera San Jose
Franz Lehár
The Merry Widow Hanna Glawari (the title character)
Jules Massenet
Werther (Charlotte)
Chérubin Royal Opera House
Claudio Monteverdi
L'incoronazione di Poppea (Poppea)
Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (Minerva)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Così fan tutte (Dorabella)
Don Giovanni (Donna Elvira) Lyric Opera of Chicago
Idomeneo (Idamante) Houston Grand Opera, Palais Garnier, Paris
La clemenza di Tito (Sesto) Opéra National de Paris and concert performances
Le nozze di Figaro (Cherubino) Metropolitan Opera
Lucio Silla (Cecilio), Santa Fe Opera
Tobias Picker
An American Tragedy (Sondra Finchley) Metropolitan Opera world première
Henry Purcell
Dido and Aeneas (Sorceress, Dido)
Gioachino Rossini
Il barbiere di Siviglia (Rosina)
Richard Strauss
Ariadne auf Naxos (Composer) Metropolitan Opera, Royal Opera House, and Glyndebourne
Der Rosenkavalier (Octavian)
Giuseppe Verdi
Falstaff (Meg Page)
Awards
2001 Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters (Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres)
June 2005 Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters
Musical America 2004 Vocalist of the Year
2004 Grammy Award for Best Classical Vocal Performance, for her album Ives: Songs (The Things Our Fathers Loved; The Housatonic At Stockbridge, Etc.)
2005 Opera News Award
September 5, 2006 Midland, Texas first annual "Susan Graham Day"
May 2008, Honorary Doctorate, Manhattan School of Music
Some of the recordings have also received awards. See below.
Recordings
1992
Pulcinella (Stravinsky) Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz (conductor) Delos Records 3100
1995
Scenes from Goethe's Faust (Schumann) Bryn Terfel, Karita Mattila, Jan-Hendrik Rootering, Barbara Bonney, Endrik Wottrich, Iris Vermillion, Brigitte Poschner-Klebel, Susan Graham, Hans Peter Blochwitz, Harry Peeters, Berliner Philharmoniker, Claudio Abbado (conductor). Sony Classical 66308
1996
Roméo et Juliette (Charles Gounod) Plácido Domingo, Ruth Ann Swenson, Miles, Kurt Ollmann, Susan Graham, Alain Vernhes, Paul Charles Clarke; Bayerischen Rundfunkorchester und chor, Münchner Rundfunkorchester, Leonard Slatkin (conductor). RCA 68440
1997
Béatrice et Bénédict (Berlioz). Catherine Robbin (Ursule), Gabriel Bacquier (Somarone), Gilles Cachemaille (Claudio), Jean-Luc Viala (Bénédict), Philippe Magnant (Léonato), Susan Graham (Béatrice), Sylvia McNair (Héro), Vincent le Texier (Don Pedro), Lyon Opera Orchestra and Chorus, John Nelson (conductor). MusiFrance 2292
The Gold & Silver Gala Graham duets with Plácido Domingo in "Là ci darem la mano". EMI Classics 56337
Les nuits d'été and Opera Arias (Berlioz) Les nuits d'été Op. 7 and songs from La Damnation De Faust Op. 24, Benvenuto Cellini, Les Troyens, Béatrice et Bénédict. Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, John Nelson (conductor) Sony 62730
1998
La Belle Époque – The Songs of Reynaldo Hahn (Hahn) Roger Vignoles (piano) Sony. Awards: Winner of Performance Today "Critic's Choice" Award; the 1999 Caecilia Prize; Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik critic's award; Choc du Monde de la Musique; Opera International's Timbre de Platine. Sony 60168
Debussy La Damoiselle élue. Sylvia McNair, Susan Graham, Boston Symphony Orchestra Seiji Ozawa. Philips 446682 (with Ravel: Shéhérazade and Britten Les illuminations).
2000
Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier Act 1 – closing scene; Act 3 – Trio and finale; Arabella Act 1 duet; Capriccio – closing scene. Renée Fleming (Marschallin), Barbara Bonney, Susan Graham (Octavian), Vienna PO, Christoph Eschenbach (conductor) Decca 466 314-2
Songs of Ned Rorem (Rorem) Malcolm Martineau (piano) Rorem's settings of poems by Paul Goodman, Theodore Roethke, Witter Bynner, Tennyson, Walt Whitman and others. Erato 80222
Alcina (Handel) Renée Fleming, Susan Graham, Natalie Dessay, Kathleen Kuhlmann, Timothy Robinson, Laurent Naouri, Juanita Lascarro, Michael Loughlin-Smith, Maurizio Rossano, Laurent Collobert, Eric Demarteau, Les Arts Florissants, William Christie (conductor). Erato 80233
Berlioz: L'enfance du Christ; Three Irlande songs; Sara la baigneuse Susan Graham, François Le Roux, John Mark Ainsley, Montreal SO and Chorus, Dutoit. Decca
2001
Il tenero momento (Mozart and Gluck). Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Harry Bicket (conductor) Erato Best Recital Disc in 2001 (The Gramophone), German Echo Klassik award, Prix Gabriel Fauré and the Grand Prix (Académie du disque)
2002
Dead Man Walking (Heggie) Susan Graham, Catherine Cook, Robert Orth, Frederica von Stade, Nicolle Foland, David Harper, San Francisco Opera Orchestra, Patrick Summers (conductor). Erato 86238-2
C'est ça la vie, c'est ça l'amour (Songs by Moïse Simons, Messager, Maurice Yvain, Honegger, Hahn, and Mahler) City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Yves Abel (conductor). Erato 42106
2003
At Carnegie Hall (Songs by Brahms, Debussy, Berg, Poulenc, Messager, Moïse Simons, Hahn, Mahler, and Ben Moore.) Malcolm Martineau (piano) Erato 2564 60295-2
2004
Songs (Ives) 2005 Grammy Award for Best Classical Vocal Performance. Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano), Emmanuel Pahud (flute), Tabea Zimmermann (viola). Warner Classics 2564 60297-2 (with Concord Sonata)
Vanessa (Barber). Susan Graham (Erika), Christine Brewer (Vanessa), William Burden (Anatol), Michael Davis, Neal Davies (The Old Doctor), Catherine Wyn-Rogers (Old Baroness), Simon Birchall (Nicholas), Stephen Charlesworth (Footman), BBC Singers (Servants, Guests, Peasants), Anthony Legge (conductor), BBC Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Slatkin (conductor). Chandos CHSA 5032
Les Troyens (Berlioz) – DVD. Susan Graham (Didon), Gregory Kunde (Énée), Laurent Naouri (Narbal), Lydia Korniordou (Andromaque), Mark Padmore (Iopas), Topi Lehtipuu (Hylas/Hélénus), Fernand Bernardi (Ghost of Hector), Danielle Bouthillon (Hécube), Nicolas Courjal (Trojan Guard), Benjamin Davies (Trojan soldier), Frances Jellard (Polyxène), Anna Caterina Antonacci (Cassandre), Ludovic Tézier (Chorèbe), Renata Pokupić (Anna), Quentin Gac (Astyanax), Stéphanie d'Oustrac (Ascagne), Nicolas Testé (Panthée), René Schirrer (Priam), Laurent Alvaro (Trojan Guard), Robert Davies (Greek Captain), Simon Davies (Priest of Pluto), Monteverdi Choir, Chœur du Théâtre du Châtelet, Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, John Eliot Gardiner (conductor). Opus Arte OA 0900 D
Dido and Aeneas (Purcell) Susan Graham (Dido), Ian Bostridge (Aeneas), Camilla Tilling (Belinda), Felicity Palmer (Sorceress), David Daniels (Spirit), Cécile de Boever (Second Woman), Paul Agnew (A Sailor), Emmanuelle Haïm (conductor), European Voices, Le Concert d'Astrée. Virgin Veritas 45605. Grammy Award nomination. Maria Callas award from the Académie du Disque Lyrique
2005
Poèmes de l'amour – Chausson Poème de l'amour et de la mer; Ravel Shéhérazade; Debussy orch. Adams Songs from Le Livre De Baudelaire BBC Symphony Orchestra, Yan Pascal Tortelier Warner Classics 2564 619382 (CD)
Sacred Songs Renée Fleming (soprano), London Voices, RPO/Delfs. Decca 475 6925. Graham sings a duet with Fleming in "Abends will ich schlafen gehn" from Engelbert Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel.
2006
La clemenza di Tito (Mozart). Christoph Prégardien (Tito), Susan Graham (Sesto), Catherine Naglestad (Vitellia), Ekaterina Siurina (Servillia), Hannah Esther Minutillo (Annio), Roland Bracht (Publio). Opus Arte OA 0942 DVD
Werther (Massenet) – DVD Thomas Hampson (Werther), Susan Graham (Charlotte), Sandrine Piau, Stéphane Degout (Albert), Michel Plasson (conductor), Châtelet Opera, Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse. Virgin Classics
2008
Berlioz La mort de Cléopâtre Berliner Philharmoniker, Sir Simon Rattle EMI 2162240
Un Frisson Français: A Century of French Song Songs by Georges Bizet, César Franck, Édouard Lalo, Charles Gounod, Camille Saint-Saëns, Emmanuel Chabrier, Émile Paladilhe, Ernest Chausson, Alfred Bachelet, Henri Duparc, Maurice Ravel, André Caplet, Albert Roussel, Olivier Messiaen, Claude Debussy, Gabriel Fauré, Reynaldo Hahn, Erik Satie, Arthur Honegger, Joseph Canteloube, Manuel Rosenthal, and Francis Poulenc. Malcolm Martineau (piano) Onyx Classics ONYX4030
2010
Susan Graham – French Songs Ideale Audience International: 3079128 (DVD)
Mahler: Songs with Orchestra, Susan Graham, Thomas Hampson, San Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas Avie: 82193600362
Passing By - Songs by Jake Heggie Avie: AV2198 (singing "A lucky child" from At the Statue of Venus, and "Motherwit" and "Mother in the mirror" from Facing Forward/Looking Back)
References
External links
Susan Graham Operabase
The New York Times Susan Graham news
1960 births
Living people
American women pianists
Manhattan School of Music faculty
Operatic mezzo-sopranos
People from Roswell, New Mexico
People from Midland, Texas
Grammy Award winners
Texas Tech University alumni
Commandeurs of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
Singers from Texas
Singers from New Mexico
20th-century American women opera singers
20th-century American pianists
21st-century American women opera singers
Classical musicians from Texas
21st-century American pianists
Women music educators
Erato Records artists
American women academics |
46405381 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaotic%20cryptology | Chaotic cryptology | Chaotic cryptology is the application of the mathematical chaos theory to the practice of the cryptography, the study or techniques used to privately and securely transmit information with the presence of a third-party or adversary. Since first being investigated by Robert Matthews in 1989, the use of chaos in cryptography has attracted much interest. However, long-standing concerns about its security and implementation speed continue to limit its implementation.
Chaotic cryptology consists of two opposite processes: Chaotic cryptography and Chaotic cryptanalysis. Cryptography refers to encrypting information for secure transmission, whereas cryptanalysis refers to decrypting and deciphering encoded encrypted messages.
In order to use chaos theory efficiently in cryptography, the chaotic maps are implemented such that the entropy generated by the map can produce required Confusion and diffusion. Properties in chaotic systems and cryptographic primitives share unique characteristics that allow for the chaotic systems to be applied to cryptography. If chaotic parameters, as well as cryptographic keys, can be mapped symmetrically or mapped to produce acceptable and functional outputs, it will make it next to impossible for an adversary to find the outputs without any knowledge of the initial values. Since chaotic maps in a real life scenario require a set of numbers that are limited, they may, in fact, have no real purpose in a cryptosystem if the chaotic behavior can be predicted.
One of the most important issues for any cryptographic primitive is the security of the system. However, in numerous cases, chaos-based cryptography algorithms are proved insecure. The main issue in many of the cryptanalyzed algorithms is the inadequacy of the chaotic maps implemented in the system.
Types
Chaos-based cryptography has been divided into two major groups:
Symmetric chaos cryptography, where the same secret key is used by sender and receiver.
Asymmetric chaos cryptography, where one key of the cryptosystem is public. Some of the few proposed systems have been broken.
The majority of chaos-based cryptographic algorithms are symmetric. Many use discrete chaotic maps in their process.
Applications
Image encryption
Bourbakis and Alexopoulos in 1991 proposed supposedly the earliest fully intended digital image encryption scheme which was based on SCAN language. Later on, with the emergence of chaos-based cryptography hundreds of new image encryption algorithms, all with the aim of improving the security of digital images were proposed. However, there were three main aspects of the design of an image encryption that was usually modified in different algorithms (chaotic map, application of the map and structure of algorithm). The initial and perhaps most crucial point was the chaotic map applied in the design of the algorithms. The speed of the cryptosystem is always an important parameter in the evaluation of the efficiency of a cryptography algorithm, therefore, the designers were initially interested in using simple chaotic maps such as tent map, and the logistic map. However, in 2006 and 2007, the new image encryption algorithms based on more sophisticated chaotic maps proved that application of chaotic map with higher dimension could improve the quality and security of the cryptosystems.
Hash function
Chaotic behavior can generate hash functions.
Random number generation
The unpredictable behavior of the chaotic maps can be used in the generation of random numbers. Some of the earliest chaos-based random number generators tried to directly generate random numbers from the logistic map.
References
Chaos theory
Cryptography |
679207 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraph%20code | Telegraph code | A telegraph code is one of the character encodings used to transmit information by telegraphy. Morse code is the best-known such code. Telegraphy usually refers to the electrical telegraph, but telegraph systems using the optical telegraph were in use before that. A code consists of a number of code points, each corresponding to a letter of the alphabet, a numeral, or some other character. In codes intended for machines rather than humans, code points for control characters, such as carriage return, are required to control the operation of the mechanism. Each code point is made up of a number of elements arranged in a unique way for that character. There are usually two types of element (a binary code), but more element types were employed in some codes not intended for machines. For instance, American Morse code had about five elements, rather than the two (dot and dash) of International Morse Code.
Codes meant for human interpretation were designed so that the characters that occurred most often had the fewest elements in the corresponding code point. For instance, Morse code for E, the most common letter in English, is a single dot (), whereas Q is . These arrangements meant the message could be sent more quickly and it would take longer for the operator to become fatigued. Telegraphs were always operated by humans until late in the 19th century. When automated telegraph messages came in, codes with variable-length code points were inconvenient for machine design of the period. Instead, codes with a fixed length were used. The first of these was the Baudot code, a five-bit code. Baudot has only enough code points to print in upper case. Later codes had more bits (ASCII has seven) so that both upper and lower case could be printed. Beyond the telegraph age, modern computers require a very large number of code points (Unicode has 21 bits) so that multiple languages and alphabets (character sets) can be handled without having to change the character encoding. Modern computers can easily handle variable-length codes such as UTF-8 and UTF-16 which have now become ubiquitous.
Manual telegraph codes
Optical telegraph codes
Prior to the electrical telegraph, a widely used method of building national telegraph networks was the optical telegraph consisting of a chain of towers from which signals could be sent by semaphore or shutters from tower to tower. This was particularly highly developed in France and had its beginnings during the French Revolution. The code used in France was the Chappe code, named after Claude Chappe the inventor. The British Admiralty also used the semaphore telegraph, but with their own code. The British code was necessarily different from that used in France because the British optical telegraph worked in a different way. The Chappe system had moveable arms, as if it were waving flags as in flag semaphore. The British system used an array of shutters that could be opened or closed.
Chappe code
The Chappe system consisted of a large pivoted beam (the regulator) with an arm at each end (the indicators) which pivoted around the regulator on one extremity. The angles these components were allowed to take was limited to multiples of 45° to aid readability. This gave a code space of 8×4×8 code points, but the indicator position inline with the regulator was never used because it was hard to distinguish from the indicator being folded back on top of the regulator, leaving a code space of . Symbols were always formed with the regulator on either the left- or right-leaning diagonal (oblique) and only accepted as valid when the regulator moved to either the vertical or horizontal position. The left oblique was always used for messages, with the right oblique being used for control of the system. This further reduced the code space to 98, of which either four or six code points (depending on version) were control characters, leaving a code space for text of 94 or 92 respectively.
The Chappe system mostly transmitted messages using a code book with a large number of set words and phrases. It was first used on an experimental chain of towers in 1793 and put into service from Paris to Lille in 1794. The code book used this early is not known for certain, but an unidentified code book in the Paris Postal Museum may have been for the Chappe system. The arrangement of this code in columns of 88 entries led Holzmann & Pehrson to suggest that 88 code points might have been used. However, the proposal in 1793 was for ten code points representing the numerals 0–9, and Bouchet says this system was still in use as late as 1800 (Holzmann & Pehrson put the change at 1795). The code book was revised and simplified in 1795 to speed up transmission. The code was in two divisions, the first division was 94 alphabetic and numeric characters plus some commonly used letter combinations. The second division was a code book of 94 pages with 94 entries on each page. A code point was assigned for each number up to 94. Thus, only two symbols needed to be sent to transmit an entire sentence – the page and line numbers of the code book, compared to four symbols using the ten-symbol code.
In 1799, three additional divisions were added. These had additional words and phrases, geographical places, and names of people. These three divisions required extra symbols to be added in front of the code symbol to identify the correct book. The code was revised again in 1809 and remained stable thereafter. In 1837 a horizontal only coding system was introduced by Gabriel Flocon which did not require the heavy regulator to be moved. Instead, an additional indicator was provided in the centre of the regulator to transmit that element of the code.
Edelcrantz code
The Edelcrantz system was used in Sweden and was the second largest network built after that of France. The telegraph consisted of a set of ten shutters. Nine of these were arranged in a 3×3 matrix. Each column of shutters represented a binary-coded octal digit with a closed shutter representing "1" and the most significant digit at the bottom. Each symbol of telegraph transmission was thus a three-digit octal number. The tenth shutter was an extra-large one at the top. Its meaning was that the codepoint should be preceded by "A".
One use of the "A" shutter was that a numeral codepoint preceded by "A" meant add a zero (multiply by ten) to the digit. Larger numbers could be indicated by following the numeral with the code for hundreds (236), thousands (631) or a combination of these. This required fewer symbols to be transmitted than sending all the zero digits individually. However, the main purpose of the "A" codepoints was for a codebook of predetermined messages, much like the Chappe codebook.
The symbols without "A" were a large set of numerals, letters, common syllables and words to aid code compaction. Around 1809, Edelcrantz introduced a new codebook with 5,120 codepoints, each requiring a two-symbol transmission to identify.
There were many codepoints for error correction (272, error), flow control, and supervisory messages. Usually, messages were expected to be passed all the way down the line, but there were circumstances when individual stations needed to communicate directly, usually for managerial purposes. The most common, and simplest situation was communication between adjacent stations. Codepoints 722 and 227 was used for this purpose, to get the attention of the next station towards, or away from the sun respectively. For more remote stations codepoints 557 and 755 respectively were used, followed by the identification of the requesting and target stations.
Wig-wag
Flag signalling was widely used for point-to-point signalling prior to the optical telegraph, but it was difficult to construct a nationwide network with hand-held flags. The much larger mechanical apparatus of the semaphore telegraph towers was needed so that a greater distance between links could be achieved. However, an extensive network with hand-held flags was constructed during the American Civil War. This was the wig-wag system which used the code invented by Albert J. Myer. Some of the towers used were enormous, up to 130 feet, to get a good range. Myer's code required only one flag using a ternary code. That is, each code element consisted of one of three distinct flag positions. However, the alphabetical codepoints required only two positions, the third position only being used in control characters. Using a ternary code in the alphabet would have resulted in shorter messages because fewer elements are required in each codepoint, but a binary system is easier to read at long distance since fewer flag positions need to be distinguished. Myer's manual also describes a ternary-coded alphabet with a fixed length of three elements for each codepoint.
Electrical telegraph codes
Cooke and Wheatstone and other early codes
Many different codes were invented during the early development of the electrical telegraph. Virtually every inventor produced a different code to suit their particular apparatus. The earliest code used commercially on an electrical telegraph was the Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph five needle code (C&W5). This was first used on the Great Western Railway in 1838. C&W5 had the major advantage that the code did not need to be learned by the operator; the letters could be read directly off the display board. However, it had the disadvantage that it required too many wires. A one needle code, C&W1, was developed that required only one wire. C&W1 was widely used in the UK and the British Empire.
Some other countries used C&W1, but it never became an international standard and generally each country developed their own code. In the US, American Morse code was used, whose elements consisted of dots and dashes distinguished from each other by the length of the pulse of current on the telegraph line. This code was used on the telegraph invented by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail and was first used commercially in 1844. Morse initially had code points only for numerals. He planned that numbers sent over the telegraph would be used as an index to a dictionary with a limited set of words. Vail invented an extended code that included code points for all the letters so that any desired word could be sent. It was Vail's code that became American Morse. In France, the telegraph used the Foy-Breguet telegraph, a two-needle telegraph that displayed the needles in Chappe code, the same code as the French optical telegraph, which was still more widely used than the electrical telegraph in France. To the French, this had the great advantage that they did not need to retrain their operators in a new code.
Standardisation—Morse code
In Germany in 1848, Friedrich Clemens Gerke developed a heavily modified version of American Morse for use on German railways. American Morse had three different lengths of dashes and two different lengths of space between the dots and dashes in a code point. The Gerke code had only one length of dash and all inter-element spaces within a code point were equal. Gerke also created code points for the German umlaut letters, which do not exist in English. Many central European countries belonged to the German-Austrian Telegraph Union. In 1851, the Union decided to adopt a common code across all its countries so that messages could be sent between them without the need for operators to recode them at borders. The Gerke code was adopted for this purpose.
In 1865, a conference in Paris adopted the Gerke code as the international standard, calling it International Morse Code. With some very minor changes, this is the Morse code used today. The Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph needle instruments were capable of using Morse code since dots and dashes could be sent as left and right movements of the needle. By this time, the needle instruments were being made with end stops that made two distinctly different notes as the needle hit them. This enabled the operator to write the message without looking up at the needle which was much more efficient. This was a similar advantage to the Morse telegraph in which the operators could hear the message from the clicking of the relay armature. Nevertheless, after the British telegraph companies were nationalised in 1870 the General Post Office decided to standardise on the Morse telegraph and get rid of the many different systems they had inherited from private companies.
In the US, telegraph companies refused to use International Morse because of the cost of retraining operators. They opposed attempts by the government to make it law. In most other countries, the telegraph was state controlled so the change could simply be mandated. In the US, there was no single entity running the telegraph. Rather, it was a multiplicity of private companies. This resulted in international operators needing to be fluent in both versions of Morse and to recode both incoming and outgoing messages. The US continued to use American Morse on landlines (radiotelegraphy generally used International Morse) and this remained the case until the advent of teleprinters which required entirely different codes and rendered the issue moot.
Transmission speed
The speed of sending in a manual telegraph is limited by the speed the operator can send each code element. Speeds are typically stated in words per minute. Words are not all the same length, so literally counting the words will get a different result depending on message content. Instead, a word is defined as five characters for the purpose of measuring speed, regardless of how many words are actually in the message. Morse code, and many other codes, also do not have the same length of code for each character of the word, again introducing a content-related variable. To overcome this, the speed of the operator repeatedly transmitting a standard word is used. PARIS is classically chosen as this standard because that is the length of an average word in Morse.
In American Morse, the characters are generally shorter than International Morse. This is partly because American Morse uses more dot elements, and partly because the most common dash, the short dash, is shorter than the International Morse dash—two dot elements against three dot elements long. In principle, American Morse will be transmitted faster than International Morse if all other variables are equal. In practice, there are two things that detract from this. Firstly, American Morse, with around five coding elements was harder to get the timings right when sent quickly. Inexperienced operators were apt to send garbled messages, an effect known as hog Morse. The second reason is that American Morse is more prone to intersymbol interference (ISI) because of the larger density of closely spaced dots. This problem was particularly severe on submarine telegraph cables, making American Morse less suitable for international communications. The only solution an operator had immediately to hand to deal with ISI was to slow down the transmission speed.
Language character encodings
Morse code for non-Latin alphabets, such as Cyrillic or Arabic script, is achieved by constructing a character encoding for the alphabet in question using the same, or nearly the same code points as used in the Latin alphabet. Syllabaries, such as Japanese katakana, are also handled this way (Wabun code). The alternative of adding more code points to Morse code for each new character would result in code transmissions being very long in some languages.
Languages that use logograms are more difficult to handle due to the much larger number of characters required. The Chinese telegraph code uses a codebook of around 9,800 characters (7,000 when originally launched in 1871) which are each assigned a four-digit number. It is these numbers that are transmitted, so Chinese Morse code consists entirely of numerals. The numbers must be looked up at the receiving end making this a slow process, but in the era when telegraph was widely used, skilled Chinese telegraphers could recall many thousands of the common codes from memory. The Chinese telegraph code is still used by law enforcement because it is an unambiguous method of recording Chinese names in non-Chinese scripts.
Automatic telegraph codes
Baudot code
Early printing telegraphs continued to use Morse code, but the operator no longer sent the dots and dashes directly with a single key. Instead they operated a piano keyboard with the characters to be sent marked on each key. The machine generated the appropriate Morse code point from the key press. An entirely new type of code was developed by Émile Baudot, patented in 1874. The Baudot code was a 5-bit binary code, with the bits sent serially. Having a fixed length code greatly simplified the machine design. The operator entered the code from a small 5-key piano keyboard, each key corresponding to one bit of the code. Like Morse, Baudot code was organised to minimise operator fatigue with the code points requiring the fewest key presses assigned to the most common letters.
Early printing telegraphs required mechanical synchronisation between the sending and receiving machine. The Hughes printing telegraph of 1855 achieved this by sending a Morse dash every revolution of the machine. A different solution was adopted in conjunction with the Baudot code. Start and stop bits were added to each character on transmission, which allowed asynchronous serial communication. This scheme of start and stop bits was followed on all the later major telegraph codes.
Murray code
On busy telegraph lines, a variant of the Baudot code was used with punched paper tape. This was the Murray code, invented by Donald Murray in 1901. Instead of directly transmitting to the line, the keypresses of the operator punched holes in the tape. Each row of holes across the tape had five possible positions to punch, corresponding to the five bits of the Murray code. The tape was then run through a tape reader which generated the code and sent it down the telegraph line. The advantage of this system was that multiple messages could be sent to line very fast from one tape, making better use of the line than direct manual operation could.
Murray completely rearranged the character encoding to minimise wear on the machine since operator fatigue was no longer an issue. Thus, the character sets of the original Baudot and the Murray codes are not compatible. The five bits of the Baudot code are insufficient to represent all the letters, numerals, and punctuation required in a text message. Further, additional characters are required by printing telegraphs to better control the machine. Examples of these control characters are line feed and carriage return. Murray solved this problem by introducing shift codes. These codes instruct the receiving machine to change the character encoding to a different character set. Two shift codes were used in the Murray code; figure shift and letter shift. Another control character introduced by Murray was the delete character (DEL, code 11111) which punched out all five holes on the tape. Its intended purpose was to remove erroneous characters from the tape, but Murray also used multiple DELs to mark the boundary between messages. Having all the holes punched out made a perforation which was easy to tear into separate messages at the receiving end. A variant of the Baudot–Murray code became an international standard as International Telegraph Alphabet no. 2 (ITA 2) in 1924. The "2" in ITA 2 is because the original Baudot code became the basis for ITA 1. ITA 2 remained the standard telegraph code in use until the 1960s and was still in use in places well beyond then.
Computer age
The teleprinter was invented in 1915. This is a printing telegraph with a typewriter-like keyboard on which the operator types the message. Nevertheless, telegrams continued to be sent in upper case only because there was not room for a lower case character set in Baudot–Murray or ITA 2 codes. This changed with the arrival of computers and the desire to interface computer-generated messages or word processor composed documents with the telegraph system. An immediate problem was the use of shift codes which caused a difficulty with computer storage of text. If a part of a message, or only one character, was retrieved, it was not possible to tell which encoding shift should be applied without searching back through the rest of the message for the last shift control. This led to the introduction of the 6-bit TeleTypeSetter (TTS) code. In TTS, the additional bit was used to store the shift state, thus obviating the need for shift characters. TTS was also of some benefit to teleprinters as well as computers. Corruption of a TTS transmitted letter code just resulted in one wrong letter being printed, which could probably be corrected by the receiving user. On the other hand, corruption of an shift character resulted in all the message from that point onwards being garbled until the next shift character was sent.
ASCII
By the 1960s, improving teleprinter technology meant that longer codes were nowhere near as significant a factor in teleprinter costs as they once were. The computer users' wanted lowercase characters and additional punctuation and both teleprinter and computer manufacturers wished to get rid of ITA 2 and its shift codes. This led the American Standards Association to develop a 7-bit code, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). The final form of ASCII was published in 1964 and it rapidly became the standard teleprinter code. ASCII was the last major code developed explicitly with telegraphy equipment in mind. Telegraphy rapidly declined after this and was largely replaced by computer networks, especially the Internet in the 1990s.
ASCII had several features geared to aid computer programming. The letter characters were in numerical order of code point, so an alphabetical sort could be achieved simply by sorting the data numerically. The code point for corresponding upper and lower case letters differed only by the value of bit 6, allowing a mix of cases to be sorted alphabetically if this bit was ignored. Other codes were introduced, notably IBM's EBCDIC derived from the punched card method of input, but it was ASCII and its derivatives that won out as the lingua franca of computer information exchange.
ASCII extension and Unicode
The arrival of the microprocessor in the 1970s and the personal computer in the 1980s with their 8-bit architecture led to the 8-bit byte becoming the standard unit of computer storage. Packing 7-bit data into 8-bit storage is inconvenient for data retrieval. Instead, most computers stored one ASCII character per byte. This left one bit over that was not doing anything useful. Computer manufacturers used this bit in extended ASCII to overcome some of the limitations of standard ASCII. The main issue was that ASCII was geared to English, particularly American English, and lacked the accented vowels used in other European languages such as French. Currency symbols for other countries were also added to the character set. Unfortunately, different manufacturers implemented different extended ASCIIs making them incompatible across platforms. In 1987, the International Standards Organisation issued the standard ISO 8859-1, for an 8-bit character encoding based on 7-bit ASCII which was widely taken up.
ISO 8859 character encodings were developed for non-Latin scripts such as Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek. This was still problematic if a document or data used more than one script. Multiple switches between character encodings was required. This was solved by the publication in 1991 of the standard for 16-bit Unicode, in development since 1987. Unicode maintained ASCII characters at the same code points for compatibility. As well as support for non-Latin scripts, Unicode provided code points for logograms such as Chinese characters and many specialist characters such as astrological and mathematical symbols. In 1996, Unicode 2.0 allowed code points greater than 16-bit; up to 20-bit, and 21-bit with an additional private use area. 20-bit Unicode provided support for extinct languages such as Old Italic script and many rarely used Chinese characters.
International Code of Signals (radiotelegraph)
In 1931, the International Code of Signals, originally created for ship communication by signalling using flags, was expanded by adding a collection of five-letter codes to be used by radiotelegraph operators.
Comparison of codes
Comparison of flag codes
Table 1 notes
Comparison of needle codes
Table 2 notes
An alternative representation of needle codes is to use the numeral "1" for needle left, and "3" for needle right. The numeral "2", which does not appear in most codes represents the needle in the neutral upright position. The codepoints using this scheme are marked on the face of some needle instruments, especially those used for training.
Comparison of dot-dash codes
Table 3 notes
When used with a printing telegraph or siphon recorder, the "dashes" of dot-dash codes are often made the same length as the "dot". Typically, the mark on the tape for a dot is made above the mark for a dash. An example of this can be seen in the 1837 Steinheil code, which is nearly identical to the 1849 Steinheil code, except that they are represented differently in the table. International Morse code was commonly used in this form on submarine telegraph cables.
Comparison of binary codes
Table 4 notes
See also
Commercial code (communications)
Great Western Railway telegraphic codes
References
Bibliography
Beauchamp, Ken, History of Telegraphy, IET, 2001 .
Bouchet, Olivier, Wireless Optical Communications, Wiley, 2012 .
Bright, Charles Tilston, Submarine Telegraphs, London: Crosby Lockwood, 1898 .
Burns, Russel W., Communications: An International History of the Formative Years, IEE, 2004 .
Calvert, James B., "The Electromagnetic Telegraph", accessed and archived 13 October 2019.
Chesnoy, Jose, Undersea Fiber Communication Systems, Academic Press, 2002 .
Coe, Lewis, The Telegraph: A History of Morse's Invention and Its Predecessors in the United States, McFarland, 2003 .
Edelcrantz, Abraham Niclas, Afhandling om Telegrapher ("A Treatise on Telegraphs"), 1796, as translated in ch. 4 of Holzmann & Pehrson.
Gerke, Friedrich Clemens, Der praktische Telegraphist, oder, Die electro-magnetische Telegraphie, Hoffmann und Campe, 1851 .
Gillam, Richard, Unicode Demystified, Addison-Wesley Professional, 2003 .
Gollings, Gus, "Multilingual Script Encoding", ch. 6 in, Cope, Bill; Gollings, Gus, Multilingual Book Production, Common Ground, 2001 .
Guillemin, Amédée, The Applications of Physical Forces, Macmillan and Company, 1877 .
Hallas, Stuart, M., "The Single Needle Telegraph", accessed and archived 5 October 2019.
Highton, Edward, The Electric Telegraph: Its History and Progress, J. Weale, 1852 .
Holzmann, Gerard J.; Pehrson, Björn, The Early History of Data Networks, Wiley, 1995 .
Huurdeman, Anton A., The Worldwide History of Telecommunications, John Wiley & Sons, 2003 .
Johnson, Rossiter (ed), Universal Cyclopædia and Atlas, vol. 10, D. Appleton and Company, 1901 .
Kieve, Jeffrey L., The Electric Telegraph: A Social and Economic History, David and Charles, 1973 .
King, Thomas W., Modern Morse Code in Rehabilitation and Education, Allyn and Bacon, 2000 .
Lyall, Francis, International Communications: The International Telecommunication Union and the Universal Postal Union, Routledge, 2016 .
Maver, William, Jr., American Telegraphy and Encyclopedia of the Telegraph, Maver Publishing Company, 1909 .
Mullaney, Thomas S., "Semiotic Sovereignty: The 1871 Chinese Telegraph Code in Historical Perspective", pp. 153–184 in, Jing Tsu; Elman, Benjamin A. (eds), Science and Technology in Modern China, 1880s–1940s, BRILL, 2014 .
Myer, Albert J., A New Sign Language for Deaf Mutes, Jewett, Thomas & Co., 1851 .
Myer, Albert J., A Manual of Signals, D. van Nostrand, 1866 .
Myer, Albert J., A Manual of Signals, D. van Nostrand, 1872 .
Noll, A. Michael, The Evolution of Media, Rowman & Littlefield, 2007 .
Raykoff, Ivan, "Piano, telegraph, typewriter: Listening to the language of touch", ch. 8 in, Colligan, Colette (ed); Linley, Margaret (ed), Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century, Routledge, 2016 .
Salomon, David, Data Compression: The Complete Reference, Springer Science & Business Media, 2007 .
Shaffner, Taliaferro Preston, The Telegraph Manual, Pudney & Russell, 1859 .
Shiers, George, The Electric Telegraph: An Historical Anthology, Arno Press, 1977 , including reprints of parts of,
Smithsonian Institution, Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, 1878, Smithsonian Institution, 1879 .
Toncich, Dario J., Data Communications and Networking for Manufacturing Industries, Chrystobel Engineering, 1993 .
Wrixon, Fred B., Codes, Ciphers, Secrets and Cryptic Communication, Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2005 .
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External links
Single-needle telegraph instrument with Cooke and Wheatstone code marked on the dial and two-note endstops
Cooke and Wheatstone style single-needle instrument with Morse code marked on the dial
James B. Calvert, The Electromagnetic Telegraph, shows several encodings including Schilling (1820), Gauss and Weber (1833), Steinheil (1837), C&W1 (1846), C&W2 (1843), Bregeut (1844), Russian Morse, and a comparison chart of Morse type codes including the Bain code.
Telegraphy |
30890362 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode | LiveCode | LiveCode (formerly Revolution and MetaCard) is a cross-platform rapid application development runtime system inspired by HyperCard. It features the LiveCode Script (formerly MetaTalk) programming language which belongs to the family of xTalk scripting languages like HyperCard's HyperTalk.
The environment was introduced in 2001. The "Revolution" development system was based on the MetaCard engine technology which Runtime Revolution later acquired from MetaCard Corporation in 2003. The platform won the Macworld Annual Editor's Choice Award for "Best Development Software" in 2004. "Revolution" was renamed "LiveCode" in the fall of 2010. "LiveCode" is developed and sold by Runtime Revolution Ltd., based in Edinburgh, Scotland. In March, 2015, the company was renamed "LiveCode Ltd.", to unify the company name with the product. In April 2013 a free/open source version 'LiveCode Community Edition 6.0' was published after a successful crowdfunding campaign at Kickstarter. The code base was re-licensed and made available as free and open source software with a version in April 2013.
LiveCode runs on iOS, Android, OS X, Windows 95 through Windows 10, Raspberry Pi and several variations of Unix, including Linux, Solaris, and BSD. It can be used for mobile, desktop and server/CGI applications. The iOS (iPhone and iPad) version was released in December 2010. The first version to deploy to the Web was released in 2009. It is the most widely used HyperCard/HyperTalk clone, and the only one that runs on all major operating systems.
A developer release of v.8 was announced in New York on March 12, 2015. This major enhancement to the product includes a new, separate development language, known as "LiveCode Builder", which is capable of creating new object classes called "widgets". In earlier versions, the set of object classes was fixed, and could be enhanced only via the use of ordinary procedural languages such as C. The new language, which runs in its own IDE, is a departure from the transitional x-talk paradigm in that it permits typing of variables. But the two environments are fully integrated, and apart from the ability to create new objects, development in LiveCode proceeds in the normal way, within the established IDE.
A second crowdfunding campaign to Bring HTML5 to LiveCode reached funding goals of nearly US$400,000 on July 31, 2014. LiveCode developer release 8.0 DP4 (August 31, 2015) was the first to include a standalone deployment option to HTML5.
On 31 August 2021, starting with version 9.6.4, LiveCode Community edition, licensed under GPL, was discontinued.
Description
The LiveCode software creates applications that run in many supported environments, using a compile-free workflow. The same computer code in LiveCode can play across multiple devices and platforms. LiveCode uses a high level, English-like programming language called Transcript that is dynamically typed. Transcript and compile-free workflow generates code that is self-documenting and easy for casual programmers to comprehend. For example, if the following script was executed when the system clock was at 9:00:00 AM:
repeat ten times
put "Hello world at" && the long time & return after field 1
wait 1 second
end repeat
Ten lines will be loaded into the first text field. (denoted as "field 1"), and seen as:
Hello world at 9:00:00 AM
Hello world at 9:00:01 AM
Hello world at 9:00:02 AM
...
Notes:
(and the associated ) is a control structure, illustrated here in just one of its various forms.
is a command
is a literal
is a function that calls the system time
is a constant equal to ASCII character 10 (linefeed)
is a keyword that is involved with an extremely powerful and intuitive system known as "chunking", a hallmark of xTalk languages.
is an object reference, here denoted by the layer number of a text field. Almost all standard object classes are supported, and may be referred to in several, highly-intuitive ways.
LiveCode's natural English-like syntax is easy for beginners to learn. Variables are typeless, and are typed at compile time based purely on context. This makes the language simple to read and maintain, with relatively minimal loss of speed. The language contains advanced features including associative arrays, regular expressions, multimedia, support for a variety of SQL databases, and TCP/IP libraries. The LiveCode engine supports several common image formats (including BMP, PNG, GIF, and JPEG,), anti-aliased vector graphics, HTML-style text hyperlinks, chained behaviors and embedded web browsers. Accessing these higher-level functions is designed to be straightforward.
Examples
To load the source code of a web page into a variable takes one line of code:
put url "http://www.wikipedia.com" into MyVariable
Uploading a file to an FTP server uses similar syntax:
put url "binfile:picture.jpg" into url "ftp://john:[email protected]:2121/picture.jpg"
Depth
LiveCode has around 2,950 built-in language terms and keywords, which may be extended by external libraries written in C and other lower level languages.
Outcomes
LiveCode project files are binary-compatible across platforms. They inherit each platform's look-and-feel and behaviors. Buttons, scroll bars, progress bars and menus behave as expected on the target platform without any intervention on the part of the one authoring a LiveCode application.
Compiling a LiveCode "standalone" produces a single, executable file (minimum size ~1.5MB) for each platform targeted. There is no separate runtime necessary.
The Wikipedia article on HyperCard contains a more detailed discussion about the basics of a similar development environment and scripting language. Modern LiveCode is a vast superset of the former HyperCard yet retains its simplicity. LiveCode includes a number of features missing from the original HyperCard program, including multiple platform deployment, communication with external devices and many fundamental language extensions. The LiveCode toolkit, as compared to HyperCard, has the ability to access internet-based text and media resources, which allows the creation of internet-enabled desktop applications.
Compatibility
iOS and Android targets are available in some versions.
Note: Complete Linux requirements for 4.5.x-6.x are the following:
32-bit installation, or a 64-bit linux distribution that has a 32-bit compatibility layer
2.4.x or later kernel
X11R5 capable Xserver running locally on a 24-bit display
glibc 2.3.2 or later
gtk/gdk/glib (optional – required for native theme support)
pango/xft (optional – required for pdf printing, anti-aliased text and unicode font support)
lcms (optional – required for color profile support in JPEGs and PNGs)
gksu (optional – required for elevate process support)
See also
MetaCard, Runtime Revolution acquired the MetaCard technology, on which its development system is based, in 2003.
HyperCard, Progenitor of all xTalk languages.
References
Bibliography
Lavieri, Edward. LiveCode Mobile Development HOTSHOT
Holgate, Colin. LiveCode Mobile Development Beginner's Guide
Schonewille, Mark. Programming LiveCode for the Real Beginner
Shafer, Dan. Revolution: Software At The Speed Of Thought, Volume 1 (Runtime Revolution Ltd, 2003)
Wang, Wallace. Beginning Programming For Dummies, 4th Edition
External links
Cross-platform software
Formerly free software
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17339 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kendall%20Square%20Research | Kendall Square Research | Kendall Square Research (KSR) was a supercomputer company headquartered originally in Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1986, near Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It was co-founded by Steven Frank and Henry Burkhardt III, who had formerly helped found Data General and Encore Computer and was one of the original team that designed the PDP-8. KSR produced two models of supercomputer, the KSR1 and KSR2. It went bankrupt in 1994.
Technology
The KSR systems ran a specially customized version of the OSF/1 operating system, a Unix variant, with programs compiled by a KSR-specific port of the Green Hills Software C and FORTRAN compilers. The architecture was shared memory implemented as a cache-only memory architecture or "COMA". Being all cache, memory dynamically migrated and replicated in a coherent manner based on the access pattern of individual processors. The processors were arranged in a hierarchy of rings, and the operating system mediated process migration and device access. Instruction decode was hardwired, and pipelining was used. Each KSR1 processor was a custom 64-bit reduced instruction set computing (RISC) CPU clocked at 20 MHz and capable of a peak output of 20 million instructions per second (MIPS) and 40 million floating-point operations per second (MFLOPS). Up to 1088 of these processors could be arranged in a single system, with a minimum of eight. The KSR2 doubled the clock rate to 40 MHz and supported over 5000 processors. The KSR-1 chipset was fabricated by Sharp Corporation while the KSR-2 chipset was built by Hewlett-Packard.
Software
Besides the traditional scientific applications, KSR with Oracle Corporation, addressed the massively parallel database market for commercial applications. The KSR-1 and -2 supported Micro Focus COBOL and C/C++ programming languages, and the Oracle database and the MATISSE OODBMS from ADB, Inc. Their own product, the KSR Query Decomposer, complemented the functions of the Oracle product for SQL uses. The TUXEDO transaction monitor for OLTP was also provided. The KAP program (Kuck & Associate Preprocessor) provided for pre-processing for source code analysis and parallelization. The runtime environment was termed PRESTO, and was a POSIX compliant multithreading manager.
Hardware
The KSR-1 processor was implemented as a four-chip set in 1.2 micrometer complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS). These chips were: the cell execution unit, the floating point unit, the arithmetic logic unit, and the external I/O unit (XIO). The CEU handled instruction fetch (two per clock), and all operations involving memory, such as loads and stores. 40-bit addresses were used, going to full 64-bit addresses later. The integer unit had 32, 64-bit-wide registers. The floating point unit is discussed below. The XIO had the capacity of 30 MB/s throughput to I/O devices. It included 64 control and data registers.
The KSR processor was a 2-wide VLIW, with instructions of 6 types: memory reference (load and store), execute, control flow, memory control, I/O, and inserted. Execute instructions included arithmetic, logical, and type conversion. They were usually triadic register in format. Control flow refers to branches and jumps. Branch instructions were two cycles. The programmer (or compiler) could implicitly control the quashing behavior of the subsequent two instructions that would be initiated during the branch. The choices were: always retain the results, retain results if branch test is true, or retain results if branch test is false. Memory control provided synchronization primitives. I/O instructions were provided. Inserted instructions were forced into a flow by a coprocessor. Inserted load and store were used for direct memory access (DMA) transfers. Inserted memory instructions were used to maintain cache coherency. New coprocessors could be interfaced with the inserted instruction mechanism. IEEE standard floating point arithmetic was supported. Sixty-four 64-bit wide registers were included.
The following example of KSR assembly performs an indirect procedure call to an address held in the procedure's constant block, saving the return address in register c14. It also saves the frame pointer, loads integer register zero with the value 3, and increments integer register 31 without changing the condition codes. Most instructions have a delay slot of 2 cycles and the delay slots are not interlocked, so must be scheduled explicitly, else the resulting hazard means wrong values are sometimes loaded.
finop ; movb8_8 %i2,%c10
finop ; cxnop
finop ; cxnop
add8.ntr 75,%i31,%i31 ; ld8 8(%c10),%c4
finop ; st8 %fp,504(%sp)
finop ; cxnop
movi8 3, %i0 ; jsr %c14,16(%c4)
In the KSR design, all of the memory was treated as cache. The design called for no home location- to reduce storage overheads and to software transparently, dynamically migrate/replicate memory based on where it was be utilized; A Harvard architecture, separate bus for instructions and memory was used. Each node board contained 256 kB of I-cache and D-cache, essentially primary cache. At each node was 32 MB of memory for main cache. The system level architecture was shared virtual memory, which was physically distributed in the machine. The programmer or application only saw one contiguous address space, which was spanned by a 40-bit address. Traffic between nodes traveled at up to 4 gigabytes per second. The 32 megabytes per node, in aggregate, formed the physical memory of the machine.
Specialized input/output processors could be used in the system, providing scalable I/O. A 1088 node KSR1 could have 510 I/O channels with an aggregate in excess of 15 GB/s. Interfaces such as Ethernet, FDDI, and HIPPI were supported.
History
As the company scaled up quickly to enter production, they moved in the late 1980s to 170 Tracer Lane, Waltham, Massachusetts.
KSR refocused its efforts from the scientific to the commercial marketplace, with emphasis on parallel relational databases and OLTP operations. It then got out of the hardware business, but continued to market some of its data warehousing and analysis software products.
The first KSR1 system was installed in 1991. With new processor hardware, new memory hardware and a novel memory architecture, a new compiler port, a new port of a relatively new operating system, and exposed memory hazards, early systems were noted for frequent system crashes. KSR called their cache-only memory architecture (COMA) by the trade name Allcache; reliability problems with early systems earned it the nickname Allcrash, although memory was not necessarily the root cause of crashes. A few KSR1 models were sold, and as the KSR2 was being rolled out, the company collapsed amid accounting irregularities involving the overstatement of revenue.
KSR used a proprietary processor because 64-bit processors were not commercially available. However, this put the small company in the difficult position of doing both processor design and system design. The KSR processors were introduced in 1991 at 20 MHz and 40 MFlops. At that time, the 32-bit Intel 80486 ran at 50 MHz and 50 MFlops. When the 64-bit DEC Alpha was introduced in 1992, it ran at up to 192 MHz and 192 MFlops, while the 1992 KSR2 ran at 40 MHz and 80 MFlops.
One customer of the KSR2, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a United States Department of Energy facility, purchased an enormous number of spare parts, and kept their machines running for years after the demise of KSR.
KSR, along with many of its competitors (see below), went bankrupt during the collapse of the supercomputer market in the early 1990s. KSR went out of business in February 1994, when their stock was delisted from the stock exchange.
Competition
KSR's competitors included MasPar Computer Corporation, Thinking Machines, Meiko Scientific, and various old-line (and still surviving) companies like IBM and Intel.
References
Further reading
"BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY; Pools of Memory, Waves of Dispute" John Markoff, The New York Times - 29 January 1992
Supercomputers
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Companies based in Massachusetts
Defunct computer companies based in Massachusetts |
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