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10406 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion | Emotion | Emotions are mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioural responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is currently no scientific consensus on a definition. Emotions are often intertwined with mood, temperament, personality, disposition, or creativity.
Research on emotion has increased over the past two decades with many fields contributing including psychology, medicine, history, sociology of emotions, and computer science. The numerous theories that attempt to explain the origin, function and other aspects of emotions have fostered more intense research on this topic. Current areas of research in the concept of emotion include the development of materials that stimulate and elicit emotion. In addition, PET scans and fMRI scans help study the affective picture processes in the brain.
From a mechanistic perspective, emotions can be defined as "a positive or negative experience that is associated with a particular pattern of physiological activity." Emotions produce different physiological, behavioral and cognitive changes. The original role of emotions was to motivate adaptive behaviors that in the past would have contributed to the passing on of genes through survival, reproduction, and kin selection.
In some theories, cognition is an important aspect of emotion. Other theories, however, claim that emotion is separate from and can precede cognition. Consciously experiencing an emotion is exhibiting a mental representation of that emotion from a past or hypothetical experience, which is linked back to a content state of pleasure or displeasure. The content states are established by verbal explanations of experiences, describing an internal state.
Emotions are complex. There are various theories on the question of whether or not emotions cause changes in our behaviour. On the one hand, the physiology of emotion is closely linked to arousal of the nervous system. Emotion is also linked to behavioral tendency. Extroverted people are more likely to be social and express their emotions, while introverted people are more likely to be more socially withdrawn and conceal their emotions. Emotion is often the driving force behind motivation. On the other hand, emotions are not causal forces but simply syndromes of components, which might include motivation, feeling, behaviour, and physiological changes, but none of these components is the emotion. Nor is the emotion an entity that causes these components.
Emotions involve different components, such as subjective experience, cognitive processes, expressive behavior, psychophysiological changes, and instrumental behavior. At one time, academics attempted to identify the emotion with one of the components: William James with a subjective experience, behaviorists with instrumental behavior, psychophysiologists with physiological changes, and so on. More recently, emotion is said to consist of all the components. The different components of emotion are categorized somewhat differently depending on the academic discipline. In psychology and philosophy, emotion typically includes a subjective, conscious experience characterized primarily by psychophysiological expressions, biological reactions, and mental states. A similar multi-componential description of emotion is found in sociology. For example, Peggy Thoits described emotions as involving physiological components, cultural or emotional labels (anger, surprise, etc.), expressive body actions, and the appraisal of situations and contexts.
Etymology
The word "emotion" dates back to 1579, when it was adapted from the French word émouvoir, which means "to stir up". The term emotion was introduced into academic discussion as a catch-all term to passions, sentiments and affections. The word "emotion" was coined in the early 1800s by Thomas Brown and it is around the 1830s that the modern concept of emotion first emerged for the English language. "No one felt emotions before about 1830. Instead they felt other things – 'passions', 'accidents of the soul', 'moral sentiments' – and explained them very differently from how we understand emotions today."
Some cross-cultural studies indicate that the categorization of "emotion" and classification of basic emotions such as "anger" and "sadness" are not universal and that the boundaries and domains of these concepts are categorized differently by all cultures. However, others argue that there are some universal bases of emotions (see Section 6.1). In psychiatry and psychology, an inability to express or perceive emotion is sometimes referred to as alexithymia.
History
Human nature and the following bodily sensations have been always part of the interest of thinkers and philosophers. Far most extensively, this interest has been of great interest by both Western and Eastern societies. Emotional states have been associated with the divine and the enlightenment of the human mind and body. The ever-changing actions of individuals and its mood variations have been of great importance by most of the Western philosophers (Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Aquinas, Hobbes) that lead them to propose vast theories; often competing theories, that sought to explain the emotion and the following motivators of human action and its consequences.
In the Age of Enlightenment Scottish thinker David Hume proposed a revolutionary argument that sought to explain the main motivators of human action and conduct. He proposed that actions are motivated by "fears, desires, and passions". As he wrote in his book Treatise of Human Nature (1773): "Reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will… it can never oppose passion in the direction of the will… The reason is, and ought to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them". With these lines Hume pretended to explain that reason and further action will be subjected to the desires and experience of the self. Later thinkers would propose that actions and emotions are deeply interrelated to social, political, historical, and cultural aspects of reality that would be also associated with sophisticated neurological and physiological research on the brain and other parts of the physical body & its nature.
Definitions
The Lexico definition of emotion is "A strong feeling deriving from one's circumstances, mood, or relationships with others." Emotions are responses to significant internal and external events.
Emotions can be occurrences (e.g., panic) or dispositions (e.g., hostility), and short-lived (e.g., anger) or long-lived (e.g., grief). Psychotherapist Michael C. Graham describes all emotions as existing on a continuum of intensity. Thus fear might range from mild concern to terror or shame might range from simple embarrassment to toxic shame. Emotions have been described as consisting of a coordinated set of responses, which may include verbal, physiological, behavioral, and neural mechanisms.
Emotions have been categorized, with some relationships existing between emotions and some direct opposites existing. Graham differentiates emotions as functional or dysfunctional and argues all functional emotions have benefits.
In some uses of the word, emotions are intense feelings that are directed at someone or something. On the other hand, emotion can be used to refer to states that are mild (as in annoyed or content) and to states that are not directed at anything (as in anxiety and depression). One line of research looks at the meaning of the word emotion in everyday language and finds that this usage is rather different from that in academic discourse.
In practical terms, Joseph LeDoux has defined emotions as the result of a cognitive and conscious process which occurs in response to a body system response to a trigger.
Components
According to Scherer's Component Process Model (CPM) of emotion, there are five crucial elements of emotion. From the component process perspective, emotional experience requires that all of these processes become coordinated and synchronized for a short period of time, driven by appraisal processes. Although the inclusion of cognitive appraisal as one of the elements is slightly controversial, since some theorists make the assumption that emotion and cognition are separate but interacting systems, the CPM provides a sequence of events that effectively describes the coordination involved during an emotional episode.
Cognitive appraisal: provides an evaluation of events and objects.
Bodily symptoms: the physiological component of emotional experience.
Action tendencies: a motivational component for the preparation and direction of motor responses.
Expression: facial and vocal expression almost always accompanies an emotional state to communicate reaction and intention of actions.
Feelings: the subjective experience of emotional state once it has occurred.
Differentiation
Emotion can be differentiated from a number of similar constructs within the field of affective neuroscience:
Feeling; not all feelings include emotion, such as the feeling of knowing. In the context of emotion, feelings are best understood as a subjective representation of emotions, private to the individual experiencing them.
Moods are diffuse affective states that generally last for much longer durations than emotions, are also usually less intense than emotions and often appear to lack a contextual stimulus.
Affect is used to describe the underlying affective experience of an emotion or a mood.
Purpose and value
One view is that emotions facilitate adaptive responses to environmental challenges. Emotions have been described as a result of evolution because they provided good solutions to ancient and recurring problems that faced our ancestors. Emotions can function as a way to communicate what's important to individuals, such as values and ethics. However some emotions, such as some forms of anxiety, are sometimes regarded as part of a mental illness and thus possibly of negative value.
Classification
A distinction can be made between emotional episodes and emotional dispositions. Emotional dispositions are also comparable to character traits, where someone may be said to be generally disposed to experience certain emotions. For example, an irritable person is generally disposed to feel irritation more easily or quickly than others do. Finally, some theorists place emotions within a more general category of "affective states" where affective states can also include emotion-related phenomena such as pleasure and pain, motivational states (for example, hunger or curiosity), moods, dispositions and traits.
Basic emotions
For more than 40 years, Paul Ekman has supported the view that emotions are discrete, measurable, and physiologically distinct. Ekman's most influential work revolved around the finding that certain emotions appeared to be universally recognized, even in cultures that were preliterate and could not have learned associations for facial expressions through media. Another classic study found that when participants contorted their facial muscles into distinct facial expressions (for example, disgust), they reported subjective and physiological experiences that matched the distinct facial expressions. Ekman's facial-expression research examined six basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise.
Later in his career, Ekman theorized that other universal emotions may exist beyond these six. In light of this, recent cross-cultural studies led by Daniel Cordaro and Dacher Keltner, both former students of Ekman, extended the list of universal emotions. In addition to the original six, these studies provided evidence for amusement, awe, contentment, desire, embarrassment, pain, relief, and sympathy in both facial and vocal expressions. They also found evidence for boredom, confusion, interest, pride, and shame facial expressions, as well as contempt, relief, and triumph vocal expressions.
Robert Plutchik agreed with Ekman's biologically driven perspective but developed the "wheel of emotions", suggesting eight primary emotions grouped on a positive or negative basis: joy versus sadness; anger versus fear; trust versus disgust; and surprise versus anticipation. Some basic emotions can be modified to form complex emotions. The complex emotions could arise from cultural conditioning or association combined with the basic emotions. Alternatively, similar to the way primary colors combine, primary emotions could blend to form the full spectrum of human emotional experience. For example, interpersonal anger and disgust could blend to form contempt. Relationships exist between basic emotions, resulting in positive or negative influences.
Jaak Panksepp carved out seven biologically inherited primary affective systems called SEEKING (expectancy), FEAR (anxiety), RAGE (anger), LUST (sexual excitement), CARE (nurturance), PANIC/GRIEF (sadness), and PLAY (social joy). He proposed what is known as "core-SELF" to be generating these affects.
Multi-dimensional analysis
Psychologists have used methods such as factor analysis to attempt to map emotion-related responses onto a more limited number of dimensions. Such methods attempt to boil emotions down to underlying dimensions that capture the similarities and differences between experiences. Often, the first two dimensions uncovered by factor analysis are valence (how negative or positive the experience feels) and arousal (how energized or enervated the experience feels). These two dimensions can be depicted on a 2D coordinate map. This two-dimensional map has been theorized to capture one important component of emotion called core affect. Core affect is not theorized to be the only component to emotion, but to give the emotion its hedonic and felt energy.
Using statistical methods to analyze emotional states elicited by short videos, Cowen and Keltner identified 27 varieties of emotional experience: admiration, adoration, aesthetic appreciation, amusement, anger, anxiety, awe, awkwardness, boredom, calmness, confusion, craving, disgust, empathic pain, entrancement, excitement, fear, horror, interest, joy, nostalgia, relief, romance, sadness, satisfaction, sexual desire and surprise.
Pre-modern history
In Buddhism, emotions occur when an object is considered as attractive or repulsive. There is a felt tendency impelling people towards attractive objects and impelling them to move away from repulsive or harmful objects; a disposition to possess the object (greed), to destroy it (hatred), to flee from it (fear), to get obsessed or worried over it (anxiety), and so on.
In Stoic theories, normal emotions (like delight and fear) are described as irrational impulses which come from incorrect appraisals of what is 'good' or 'bad'. Alternatively, there are 'good emotions' (like joy and caution) experienced by those that are wise, which come from correct appraisals of what is 'good' and 'bad'.
Aristotle believed that emotions were an essential component of virtue. In the Aristotelian view all emotions (called passions) corresponded to appetites or capacities. During the Middle Ages, the Aristotelian view was adopted and further developed by scholasticism and Thomas Aquinas in particular.
In Chinese antiquity, excessive emotion was believed to cause damage to qi, which in turn, damages the vital organs. The four humours theory made popular by Hippocrates contributed to the study of emotion in the same way that it did for medicine.
In the early 11th century, Avicenna theorized about the influence of emotions on health and behaviors, suggesting the need to manage emotions.
Early modern views on emotion are developed in the works of philosophers such as René Descartes, Niccolò Machiavelli, Baruch Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes and David Hume. In the 19th century emotions were considered adaptive and were studied more frequently from an empiricist psychiatric perspective.
Western theological
Christian perspective on emotion presupposes a theistic origin to humanity. God who created humans gave humans the ability to feel emotion and interact emotionally. Biblical content expresses that God is a person who feels and expresses emotion. Though a somatic view would place the locus of emotions in the physical body, Christian theory of emotions would view the body more as a platform for the sensing and expression of emotions. Therefore emotions themselves arise from the person, or that which is "imago-dei" or Image of God in humans. In Christian thought, emotions have the potential to be controlled through reasoned reflection. That reasoned reflection also mimics God who made mind. The purpose of emotions in human life are therefore summarized in God's call to enjoy Him and creation, humans are to enjoy emotions and benefit from them and use them to energize behavior.
Evolutionary theories
19th century
Perspectives on emotions from evolutionary theory were initiated during the mid-late 19th century with Charles Darwin's 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Darwin argued that emotions served no evolved purpose for humans, neither in communication, nor in aiding survival. Darwin largely argued that emotions evolved via the inheritance of acquired characters. He pioneered various methods for studying non-verbal expressions, from which he concluded that some expressions had cross-cultural universality. Darwin also detailed homologous expressions of emotions that occur in animals. This led the way for animal research on emotions and the eventual determination of the neural underpinnings of emotion.
Contemporary
More contemporary views along the evolutionary psychology spectrum posit that both basic emotions and social emotions evolved to motivate (social) behaviors that were adaptive in the ancestral environment. Emotion is an essential part of any human decision-making and planning, and the famous distinction made between reason and emotion is not as clear as it seems. Paul D. MacLean claims that emotion competes with even more instinctive responses, on one hand, and the more abstract reasoning, on the other hand. The increased potential in neuroimaging has also allowed investigation into evolutionarily ancient parts of the brain. Important neurological advances were derived from these perspectives in the 1990s by Joseph E. LeDoux and Antonio Damasio.
Research on social emotion also focuses on the physical displays of emotion including body language of animals and humans (see affect display). For example, spite seems to work against the individual but it can establish an individual's reputation as someone to be feared. Shame and pride can motivate behaviors that help one maintain one's standing in a community, and self-esteem is one's estimate of one's status.
Somatic theories
Somatic theories of emotion claim that bodily responses, rather than cognitive interpretations, are essential to emotions. The first modern version of such theories came from William James in the 1880s. The theory lost favor in the 20th century, but has regained popularity more recently due largely to theorists such as John T. Cacioppo, Antonio Damasio, Joseph E. LeDoux and Robert Zajonc who are able to appeal to neurological evidence.
James–Lange theory
In his 1884 article William James argued that feelings and emotions were secondary to physiological phenomena. In his theory, James proposed that the perception of what he called an "exciting fact" directly led to a physiological response, known as "emotion." To account for different types of emotional experiences, James proposed that stimuli trigger activity in the autonomic nervous system, which in turn produces an emotional experience in the brain. The Danish psychologist Carl Lange also proposed a similar theory at around the same time, and therefore this theory became known as the James–Lange theory. As James wrote, "the perception of bodily changes, as they occur, is the emotion." James further claims that "we feel sad because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and either we cry, strike, or tremble because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be."
An example of this theory in action would be as follows: An emotion-evoking stimulus (snake) triggers a pattern of physiological response (increased heart rate, faster breathing, etc.), which is interpreted as a particular emotion (fear). This theory is supported by experiments in which by manipulating the bodily state induces a desired emotional state. Some people may believe that emotions give rise to emotion-specific actions, for example, "I'm crying because I'm sad," or "I ran away because I was scared." The issue with the James–Lange theory is that of causation (bodily states causing emotions and being a priori), not that of the bodily influences on emotional experience (which can be argued and is still quite prevalent today in biofeedback studies and embodiment theory).
Although mostly abandoned in its original form, Tim Dalgleish argues that most contemporary neuroscientists have embraced the components of the James-Lange theory of emotions.
Cannon–Bard theory
Walter Bradford Cannon agreed that physiological responses played a crucial role in emotions, but did not believe that physiological responses alone could explain subjective emotional experiences. He argued that physiological responses were too slow and often imperceptible and this could not account for the relatively rapid and intense subjective awareness of emotion. He also believed that the richness, variety, and temporal course of emotional experiences could not stem from physiological reactions, that reflected fairly undifferentiated fight or flight responses. An example of this theory in action is as follows: An emotion-evoking event (snake) triggers simultaneously both a physiological response and a conscious experience of an emotion.
Phillip Bard contributed to the theory with his work on animals. Bard found that sensory, motor, and physiological information all had to pass through the diencephalon (particularly the thalamus), before being subjected to any further processing. Therefore, Cannon also argued that it was not anatomically possible for sensory events to trigger a physiological response prior to triggering conscious awareness and emotional stimuli had to trigger both physiological and experiential aspects of emotion simultaneously.
Two-factor theory
Stanley Schachter formulated his theory on the earlier work of a Spanish physician, Gregorio Marañón, who injected patients with epinephrine and subsequently asked them how they felt. Marañón found that most of these patients felt something but in the absence of an actual emotion-evoking stimulus, the patients were unable to interpret their physiological arousal as an experienced emotion. Schachter did agree that physiological reactions played a big role in emotions. He suggested that physiological reactions contributed to emotional experience by facilitating a focused cognitive appraisal of a given physiologically arousing event and that this appraisal was what defined the subjective emotional experience. Emotions were thus a result of two-stage process: general physiological arousal, and experience of emotion. For example, the physiological arousal, heart pounding, in a response to an evoking stimulus, the sight of a bear in the kitchen. The brain then quickly scans the area, to explain the pounding, and notices the bear. Consequently, the brain interprets the pounding heart as being the result of fearing the bear. With his student, Jerome Singer, Schachter demonstrated that subjects can have different emotional reactions despite being placed into the same physiological state with an injection of epinephrine. Subjects were observed to express either anger or amusement depending on whether another person in the situation (a confederate) displayed that emotion. Hence, the combination of the appraisal of the situation (cognitive) and the participants' reception of adrenaline or a placebo together determined the response. This experiment has been criticized in Jesse Prinz's (2004) Gut Reactions.
Cognitive theories
With the two-factor theory now incorporating cognition, several theories began to argue that cognitive activity in the form of judgments, evaluations, or thoughts were entirely necessary for an emotion to occur. One of the main proponents of this view was Richard Lazarus who argued that emotions must have some cognitive intentionality. The cognitive activity involved in the interpretation of an emotional context may be conscious or unconscious and may or may not take the form of conceptual processing.
Lazarus' theory is very influential; emotion is a disturbance that occurs in the following order:
Cognitive appraisal – The individual assesses the event cognitively, which cues the emotion.
Physiological changes – The cognitive reaction starts biological changes such as increased heart rate or pituitary adrenal response.
Action – The individual feels the emotion and chooses how to react.
For example: Jenny sees a snake.
Jenny cognitively assesses the snake in her presence. Cognition allows her to understand it as a danger.
Her brain activates the adrenal glands which pump adrenaline through her blood stream, resulting in increased heartbeat.
Jenny screams and runs away.
Lazarus stressed that the quality and intensity of emotions are controlled through cognitive processes. These processes underline coping strategies that form the emotional reaction by altering the relationship between the person and the environment.
George Mandler provided an extensive theoretical and empirical discussion of emotion as influenced by cognition, consciousness, and the autonomic nervous system in two books (Mind and Emotion, 1975, and Mind and Body: Psychology of Emotion and Stress, 1984)
There are some theories on emotions arguing that cognitive activity in the form of judgments, evaluations, or thoughts are necessary in order for an emotion to occur. A prominent philosophical exponent is Robert C. Solomon (for example, The Passions, Emotions and the Meaning of Life, 1993). Solomon claims that emotions are judgments. He has put forward a more nuanced view which responds to what he has called the 'standard objection' to cognitivism, the idea that a judgment that something is fearsome can occur with or without emotion, so judgment cannot be identified with emotion. The theory proposed by Nico Frijda where appraisal leads to action tendencies is another example.
It has also been suggested that emotions (affect heuristics, feelings and gut-feeling reactions) are often used as shortcuts to process information and influence behavior. The affect infusion model (AIM) is a theoretical model developed by Joseph Forgas in the early 1990s that attempts to explain how emotion and mood interact with one's ability to process information.
Perceptual theory
Theories dealing with perception either use one or multiples perceptions in order to find an emotion. A recent hybrid of the somatic and cognitive theories of emotion is the perceptual theory. This theory is neo-Jamesian in arguing that bodily responses are central to emotions, yet it emphasizes the meaningfulness of emotions or the idea that emotions are about something, as is recognized by cognitive theories. The novel claim of this theory is that conceptually-based cognition is unnecessary for such meaning. Rather the bodily changes themselves perceive the meaningful content of the emotion because of being causally triggered by certain situations. In this respect, emotions are held to be analogous to faculties such as vision or touch, which provide information about the relation between the subject and the world in various ways. A sophisticated defense of this view is found in philosopher Jesse Prinz's book Gut Reactions, and psychologist James Laird's book Feelings.
Affective events theory
Affective events theory is a communication-based theory developed by Howard M. Weiss and Russell Cropanzano (1996), that looks at the causes, structures, and consequences of emotional experience (especially in work contexts). This theory suggests that emotions are influenced and caused by events which in turn influence attitudes and behaviors. This theoretical frame also emphasizes time in that human beings experience what they call emotion episodes –\ a "series of emotional states extended over time and organized around an underlying theme." This theory has been utilized by numerous researchers to better understand emotion from a communicative lens, and was reviewed further by Howard M. Weiss and Daniel J. Beal in their article, "Reflections on Affective Events Theory", published in Research on Emotion in Organizations in 2005.
Situated perspective on emotion
A situated perspective on emotion, developed by Paul E. Griffiths and Andrea Scarantino, emphasizes the importance of external factors in the development and communication of emotion, drawing upon the situationism approach in psychology. This theory is markedly different from both cognitivist and neo-Jamesian theories of emotion, both of which see emotion as a purely internal process, with the environment only acting as a stimulus to the emotion. In contrast, a situationist perspective on emotion views emotion as the product of an organism investigating its environment, and observing the responses of other organisms. Emotion stimulates the evolution of social relationships, acting as a signal to mediate the behavior of other organisms. In some contexts, the expression of emotion (both voluntary and involuntary) could be seen as strategic moves in the transactions between different organisms. The situated perspective on emotion states that conceptual thought is not an inherent part of emotion, since emotion is an action-oriented form of skillful engagement with the world. Griffiths and Scarantino suggested that this perspective on emotion could be helpful in understanding phobias, as well as the emotions of infants and animals.
Genetics
Emotions can motivate social interactions and relationships and therefore are directly related with basic physiology, particularly with the stress systems. This is important because emotions are related to the anti-stress complex, with an oxytocin-attachment system, which plays a major role in bonding. Emotional phenotype temperaments affect social connectedness and fitness in complex social systems. These characteristics are shared with other species and taxa and are due to the effects of genes and their continuous transmission. Information that is encoded in the DNA sequences provides the blueprint for assembling proteins that make up our cells. Zygotes require genetic information from their parental germ cells, and at every speciation event, heritable traits that have enabled its ancestor to survive and reproduce successfully are passed down along with new traits that could be potentially beneficial to the offspring.
In the five million years since the lineages leading to modern humans and chimpanzees split, only about 1.2% of their genetic material has been modified. This suggests that everything that separates us from chimpanzees must be encoded in that very small amount of DNA, including our behaviors. Students that study animal behaviors have only identified intraspecific examples of gene-dependent behavioral phenotypes. In voles (Microtus spp.) minor genetic differences have been identified in a vasopressin receptor gene that corresponds to major species differences in social organization and the mating system. Another potential example with behavioral differences is the FOCP2 gene, which is involved in neural circuitry handling speech and language. Its present form in humans differed from that of the chimpanzees by only a few mutations and has been present for about 200,000 years, coinciding with the beginning of modern humans. Speech, language, and social organization are all part of the basis for emotions.
Formation
Neurobiological explanation
Based on discoveries made through neural mapping of the limbic system, the neurobiological explanation of human emotion is that emotion is a pleasant or unpleasant mental state organized in the limbic system of the mammalian brain. If distinguished from reactive responses of reptiles, emotions would then be mammalian elaborations of general vertebrate arousal patterns, in which neurochemicals (for example, dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin) step-up or step-down the brain's activity level, as visible in body movements, gestures and postures. Emotions can likely be mediated by pheromones (see fear).
For example, the emotion of love is proposed to be the expression of Paleocircuits of the mammalian brain (specifically, modules of the cingulate cortex (or gyrus)) which facilitate the care, feeding, and grooming of offspring. Paleocircuits are neural platforms for bodily expression configured before the advent of cortical circuits for speech. They consist of pre-configured pathways or networks of nerve cells in the forebrain, brainstem and spinal cord.
Other emotions like fear and anxiety long thought to be exclusively generated by the most primitive parts of the brain (stem) and more associated to the fight-or-flight responses of behavior, have also been associated as adaptive expressions of defensive behavior whenever a threat is encountered. Although defensive behaviors have been present in a wide variety of species, Blanchard et al. (2001) discovered a correlation of given stimuli and situation that resulted in a similar pattern of defensive behavior towards a threat in human and non-human mammals.
Whenever potentially dangerous stimuli is presented additional brain structures activate that previously thought (hippocampus, thalamus, etc). Thus, giving the amygdala an important role on coordinating the following behavioral input based on the presented neurotransmitters that respond to threat stimuli. These biological functions of the amygdala are not only limited to the "fear-conditioning" and "processing of aversive stimuli", but also are present on other components of the amygdala. Therefore, it can referred the amygdala as a key structure to understand the potential responses of behavior in danger like situations in human and non-human mammals.
The motor centers of reptiles react to sensory cues of vision, sound, touch, chemical, gravity, and motion with pre-set body movements and programmed postures. With the arrival of night-active mammals, smell replaced vision as the dominant sense, and a different way of responding arose from the olfactory sense, which is proposed to have developed into mammalian emotion and emotional memory. The mammalian brain invested heavily in olfaction to succeed at night as reptiles slept – one explanation for why olfactory lobes in mammalian brains are proportionally larger than in the reptiles. These odor pathways gradually formed the neural blueprint for what was later to become our limbic brain.
Emotions are thought to be related to certain activities in brain areas that direct our attention, motivate our behavior, and determine the significance of what is going on around us. Pioneering work by Paul Broca (1878), James Papez (1937), and Paul D. MacLean (1952) suggested that emotion is related to a group of structures in the center of the brain called the limbic system, which includes the hypothalamus, cingulate cortex, hippocampi, and other structures. More recent research has shown that some of these limbic structures are not as directly related to emotion as others are while some non-limbic structures have been found to be of greater emotional relevance.
Prefrontal cortex
There is ample evidence that the left prefrontal cortex is activated by stimuli that cause positive approach. If attractive stimuli can selectively activate a region of the brain, then logically the converse should hold, that selective activation of that region of the brain should cause a stimulus to be judged more positively. This was demonstrated for moderately attractive visual stimuli and replicated and extended to include negative stimuli.
Two neurobiological models of emotion in the prefrontal cortex made opposing predictions. The valence model predicted that anger, a negative emotion, would activate the right prefrontal cortex. The direction model predicted that anger, an approach emotion, would activate the left prefrontal cortex. The second model was supported.
This still left open the question of whether the opposite of approach in the prefrontal cortex is better described as moving away (direction model), as unmoving but with strength and resistance (movement model), or as unmoving with passive yielding (action tendency model). Support for the action tendency model (passivity related to right prefrontal activity) comes from research on shyness and research on behavioral inhibition. Research that tested the competing hypotheses generated by all four models also supported the action tendency model.
Homeostatic/primordial emotion
Another neurological approach proposed by Bud Craig in 2003 distinguishes two classes of emotion: "classical" emotions such as love, anger and fear that are evoked by environmental stimuli, and "homeostatic emotions" – attention-demanding feelings evoked by body states, such as pain, hunger and fatigue, that motivate behavior (withdrawal, eating or resting in these examples) aimed at maintaining the body's internal milieu at its ideal state.
Derek Denton calls the latter "primordial emotions" and defines them as "the subjective element of the instincts, which are the genetically programmed behavior patterns which contrive homeostasis. They include thirst, hunger for air, hunger for food, pain and hunger for specific minerals etc. There are two constituents of a primordial emotion – the specific sensation which when severe may be imperious, and the compelling intention for gratification by a consummatory act."
Emergent explanation
Emotions are seen by some researchers to be constructed (emerge) in social and cognitive domain alone, without directly implying biologically inherited characteristics.
Joseph LeDoux differentiates between the human's defense system, which has evolved over time, and emotions such as fear and anxiety. He has said that the amygdala may release hormones due to a trigger (such as an innate reaction to seeing a snake), but "then we elaborate it through cognitive and conscious processes".
Lisa Feldman Barrett highlights differences in emotions between different cultures, and says that emotions (such as anxiety) are socially constructed (see theory of constructed emotion). She says that they "are not triggered; you create them. They emerge as a combination of the physical properties of your body, a flexible brain that wires itself to whatever environment it develops in, and your culture and upbringing, which provide that environment." She has termed this approach the theory of constructed emotion.
Disciplinary approaches
Many different disciplines have produced work on the emotions. Human sciences study the role of emotions in mental processes, disorders, and neural mechanisms. In psychiatry, emotions are examined as part of the discipline's study and treatment of mental disorders in humans. Nursing studies emotions as part of its approach to the provision of holistic health care to humans. Psychology examines emotions from a scientific perspective by treating them as mental processes and behavior and they explore the underlying physiological and neurological processes, e.g., cognitive behavioral therapy. In neuroscience sub-fields such as social neuroscience and affective neuroscience, scientists study the neural mechanisms of emotion by combining neuroscience with the psychological study of personality, emotion, and mood. In linguistics, the expression of emotion may change to the meaning of sounds. In education, the role of emotions in relation to learning is examined.
Social sciences often examine emotion for the role that it plays in human culture and social interactions. In sociology, emotions are examined for the role they play in human society, social patterns and interactions, and culture. In anthropology, the study of humanity, scholars use ethnography to undertake contextual analyses and cross-cultural comparisons of a range of human activities. Some anthropology studies examine the role of emotions in human activities. In the field of communication studies, critical organizational scholars have examined the role of emotions in organizations, from the perspectives of managers, employees, and even customers. A focus on emotions in organizations can be credited to Arlie Russell Hochschild's concept of emotional labor. The University of Queensland hosts EmoNet, an e-mail distribution list representing a network of academics that facilitates scholarly discussion of all matters relating to the study of emotion in organizational settings. The list was established in January 1997 and has over 700 members from across the globe.
In economics, the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services, emotions are analyzed in some sub-fields of microeconomics, in order to assess the role of emotions on purchase decision-making and risk perception. In criminology, a social science approach to the study of crime, scholars often draw on behavioral sciences, sociology, and psychology; emotions are examined in criminology issues such as anomie theory and studies of "toughness," aggressive behavior, and hooliganism. In law, which underpins civil obedience, politics, economics and society, evidence about people's emotions is often raised in tort law claims for compensation and in criminal law prosecutions against alleged lawbreakers (as evidence of the defendant's state of mind during trials, sentencing, and parole hearings). In political science, emotions are examined in a number of sub-fields, such as the analysis of voter decision-making.
In philosophy, emotions are studied in sub-fields such as ethics, the philosophy of art (for example, sensory–emotional values, and matters of taste and sentimentality), and the philosophy of music (see also music and emotion). In history, scholars examine documents and other sources to interpret and analyze past activities; speculation on the emotional state of the authors of historical documents is one of the tools of interpretation. In literature and film-making, the expression of emotion is the cornerstone of genres such as drama, melodrama, and romance. In communication studies, scholars study the role that emotion plays in the dissemination of ideas and messages. Emotion is also studied in non-human animals in ethology, a branch of zoology which focuses on the scientific study of animal behavior. Ethology is a combination of laboratory and field science, with strong ties to ecology and evolution. Ethologists often study one type of behavior (for example, aggression) in a number of unrelated animals.
History
The history of emotions has become an increasingly popular topic recently, with some scholars arguing that it is an essential category of analysis, not unlike class, race, or gender. Historians, like other social scientists, assume that emotions, feelings and their expressions are regulated in different ways by both different cultures and different historical times, and the constructivist school of history claims even that some sentiments and meta-emotions, for example schadenfreude, are learnt and not only regulated by culture. Historians of emotion trace and analyze the changing norms and rules of feeling, while examining emotional regimes, codes, and lexicons from social, cultural, or political history perspectives. Others focus on the history of medicine, science, or psychology. What somebody can and may feel (and show) in a given situation, towards certain people or things, depends on social norms and rules; thus historically variable and open to change. Several research centers have opened in the past few years in Germany, England, Spain, Sweden, and Australia.
Furthermore, research in historical trauma suggests that some traumatic emotions can be passed on from parents to offspring to second and even third generation, presented as examples of transgenerational trauma.
Sociology
A common way in which emotions are conceptualized in sociology is in terms of the multidimensional characteristics including cultural or emotional labels (for example, anger, pride, fear, happiness), physiological changes (for example, increased perspiration, changes in pulse rate), expressive facial and body movements (for example, smiling, frowning, baring teeth), and appraisals of situational cues. One comprehensive theory of emotional arousal in humans has been developed by Jonathan Turner (2007: 2009). Two of the key eliciting factors for the arousal of emotions within this theory are expectations states and sanctions. When people enter a situation or encounter with certain expectations for how the encounter should unfold, they will experience different emotions depending on the extent to which expectations for Self, other and situation are met or not met. People can also provide positive or negative sanctions directed at Self or other which also trigger different emotional experiences in individuals. Turner analyzed a wide range of emotion theories across different fields of research including sociology, psychology, evolutionary science, and neuroscience. Based on this analysis, he identified four emotions that all researchers consider being founded on human neurology including assertive-anger, aversion-fear, satisfaction-happiness, and disappointment-sadness. These four categories are called primary emotions and there is some agreement amongst researchers that these primary emotions become combined to produce more elaborate and complex emotional experiences. These more elaborate emotions are called first-order elaborations in Turner's theory and they include sentiments such as pride, triumph, and awe. Emotions can also be experienced at different levels of intensity so that feelings of concern are a low-intensity variation of the primary emotion aversion-fear whereas depression is a higher intensity variant.
Attempts are frequently made to regulate emotion according to the conventions of the society and the situation based on many (sometimes conflicting) demands and expectations which originate from various entities. The expression of anger is in many cultures discouraged in girls and women to a greater extent than in boys and men (the notion being that an angry man has a valid complaint that needs to be rectified, while an angry women is hysterical or oversensitive, and her anger is somehow invalid), while the expression of sadness or fear is discouraged in boys and men relative to girls and women (attitudes implicit in phrases like "man up" or "don't be a sissy"). Expectations attached to social roles, such as "acting as man" and not as a woman, and the accompanying "feeling rules" contribute to the differences in expression of certain emotions. Some cultures encourage or discourage happiness, sadness, or jealousy, and the free expression of the emotion of disgust is considered socially unacceptable in most cultures. Some social institutions are seen as based on certain emotion, such as love in the case of contemporary institution of marriage. In advertising, such as health campaigns and political messages, emotional appeals are commonly found. Recent examples include no-smoking health campaigns and political campaigns emphasizing the fear of terrorism.
Sociological attention to emotion has varied over time. Émile Durkheim (1915/1965) wrote about the collective effervescence or emotional energy that was experienced by members of totemic rituals in Australian aborigine society. He explained how the heightened state of emotional energy achieved during totemic rituals transported individuals above themselves giving them the sense that they were in the presence of a higher power, a force, that was embedded in the sacred objects that were worshipped. These feelings of exaltation, he argued, ultimately lead people to believe that there were forces that governed sacred objects.
In the 1990s, sociologists focused on different aspects of specific emotions and how these emotions were socially relevant. For Cooley (1992), pride and shame were the most important emotions that drive people to take various social actions. During every encounter, he proposed that we monitor ourselves through the "looking glass" that the gestures and reactions of others provide. Depending on these reactions, we either experience pride or shame and this results in particular paths of action. Retzinger (1991) conducted studies of married couples who experienced cycles of rage and shame. Drawing predominantly on Goffman and Cooley's work, Scheff (1990) developed a micro sociological theory of the social bond. The formation or disruption of social bonds is dependent on the emotions that people experience during interactions.
Subsequent to these developments, Randall Collins (2004) formulated his interaction ritual theory by drawing on Durkheim's work on totemic rituals that was extended by Goffman (1964/2013; 1967) into everyday focused encounters. Based on interaction ritual theory, we experience different levels or intensities of emotional energy during face-to-face interactions. Emotional energy is considered to be a feeling of confidence to take action and a boldness that one experiences when they are charged up from the collective effervescence generated during group gatherings that reach high levels of intensity.
There is a growing body of research applying the sociology of emotion to understanding the learning experiences of students during classroom interactions with teachers and other students (for example, Milne & Otieno, 2007; Olitsky, 2007; Tobin, et al., 2013; Zembylas, 2002). These studies show that learning subjects like science can be understood in terms of classroom interaction rituals that generate emotional energy and collective states of emotional arousal like emotional climate.
Apart from interaction ritual traditions of the sociology of emotion, other approaches have been classed into one of six other categories:
evolutionary/biological theories
symbolic interactionist theories
dramaturgical theories
ritual theories
power and status theories
stratification theories
exchange theories
This list provides a general overview of different traditions in the sociology of emotion that sometimes conceptualise emotion in different ways and at other times in complementary ways. Many of these different approaches were synthesized by Turner (2007) in his sociological theory of human emotions in an attempt to produce one comprehensive sociological account that draws on developments from many of the above traditions.
Psychotherapy and regulation
Emotion regulation refers to the cognitive and behavioral strategies people use to influence their own emotional experience. For example, a behavioral strategy in which one avoids a situation to avoid unwanted emotions (trying not to think about the situation, doing distracting activities, etc.). Depending on the particular school's general emphasis on either cognitive components of emotion, physical energy discharging, or on symbolic movement and facial expression components of emotion different schools of psychotherapy approach the regulation of emotion differently. Cognitively oriented schools approach them via their cognitive components, such as rational emotive behavior therapy. Yet others approach emotions via symbolic movement and facial expression components (like in contemporary Gestalt therapy).
Cross-cultural research
Research on emotions reveals the strong presence of cross-cultural differences in emotional reactions and that emotional reactions are likely to be culture-specific. In strategic settings, cross-cultural research on emotions is required for understanding the psychological situation of a given population or specific actors. This implies the need to comprehend the current emotional state, mental disposition or other behavioral motivation of a target audience located in a different culture, basically founded on its national, political, social, economic, and psychological peculiarities but also subject to the influence of circumstances and events.
Computer science
In the 2000s, research in computer science, engineering, psychology and neuroscience has been aimed at developing devices that recognize human affect display and model emotions. In computer science, affective computing is a branch of the study and development of artificial intelligence that deals with the design of systems and devices that can recognize, interpret, and process human emotions. It is an interdisciplinary field spanning computer sciences, psychology, and cognitive science. While the origins of the field may be traced as far back as to early philosophical enquiries into emotion, the more modern branch of computer science originated with Rosalind Picard's 1995 paper on affective computing. Detecting emotional information begins with passive sensors which capture data about the user's physical state or behavior without interpreting the input. The data gathered is analogous to the cues humans use to perceive emotions in others. Another area within affective computing is the design of computational devices proposed to exhibit either innate emotional capabilities or that are capable of convincingly simulating emotions. Emotional speech processing recognizes the user's emotional state by analyzing speech patterns. The detection and processing of facial expression or body gestures is achieved through detectors and sensors.
The effects on memory
Emotion affects the way autobiographical memories are encoded and retrieved. Emotional memories are reactivated more, they are remembered better and have more attention devoted to them. Through remembering our past achievements and failures, autobiographical memories affect how we perceive and feel about ourselves.
Notable theorists
In the late 19th century, the most influential theorists were William James (1842–1910) and Carl Lange (1834–1900). James was an American psychologist and philosopher who wrote about educational psychology, psychology of religious experience/mysticism, and the philosophy of pragmatism. Lange was a Danish physician and psychologist. Working independently, they developed the James–Lange theory, a hypothesis on the origin and nature of emotions. The theory states that within human beings, as a response to experiences in the world, the autonomic nervous system creates physiological events such as muscular tension, a rise in heart rate, perspiration, and dryness of the mouth. Emotions, then, are feelings which come about as a result of these physiological changes, rather than being their cause.
Silvan Tomkins (1911–1991) developed the affect theory and script theory. The affect theory introduced the concept of basic emotions, and was based on the idea that the dominance of the emotion, which he called the affected system, was the motivating force in human life.
Some of the most influential deceased theorists on emotion from the 20th century include Magda B. Arnold (1903–2002), an American psychologist who developed the appraisal theory of emotions; Richard Lazarus (1922–2002), an American psychologist who specialized in emotion and stress, especially in relation to cognition; Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001), who included emotions into decision making and artificial intelligence; Robert Plutchik (1928–2006), an American psychologist who developed a psychoevolutionary theory of emotion; Robert Zajonc (1923–2008) a Polish–American social psychologist who specialized in social and cognitive processes such as social facilitation; Robert C. Solomon (1942–2007), an American philosopher who contributed to the theories on the philosophy of emotions with books such as What Is An Emotion?: Classic and Contemporary Readings (2003); Peter Goldie (1946–2011), a British philosopher who specialized in ethics, aesthetics, emotion, mood and character; Nico Frijda (1927–2015), a Dutch psychologist who advanced the theory that human emotions serve to promote a tendency to undertake actions that are appropriate in the circumstances, detailed in his book The Emotions (1986); Jaak Panksepp (1943–2017), an Estonian-born American psychologist, psychobiologist, neuroscientist and pioneer in affective neuroscience.
Influential theorists who are still active include the following psychologists, neurologists, philosophers, and sociologists:
Michael Apter – (born 1939) British psychologist who developed reversal theory, a structural, phenomenological theory of personality, motivation, and emotion
Lisa Feldman Barrett – (born 1963) neuroscientist and psychologist specializing in affective science and human emotion
John T. Cacioppo – (born 1951) from the University of Chicago, founding father with Gary Berntson of social neuroscience
Randall Collins – (born 1941) American sociologist from the University of Pennsylvania developed the interaction ritual theory which includes the emotional entrainment model
Antonio Damasio (born 1944) – Portuguese behavioral neurologist and neuroscientist who works in the US
Richard Davidson (born 1951) – American psychologist and neuroscientist; pioneer in affective neuroscience
Paul Ekman (born 1934) – psychologist specializing in the study of emotions and their relation to facial expressions
Barbara Fredrickson – Social psychologist who specializes in emotions and positive psychology.
Arlie Russell Hochschild (born 1940) – American sociologist whose central contribution was in forging a link between the subcutaneous flow of emotion in social life and the larger trends set loose by modern capitalism within organizations
Joseph E. LeDoux (born 1949) – American neuroscientist who studies the biological underpinnings of memory and emotion, especially the mechanisms of fear
George Mandler (born 1924) – American psychologist who wrote influential books on cognition and emotion
Konstantinos V. Petrides – Greek-British psychologist who specializes in emotion, personality, psychometrics, and philosophy of mind. professor of psychology and psychometrics at University College London
Jesse Prinz – American philosopher who specializes in emotion, moral psychology, aesthetics and consciousness
James A. Russell (born 1947) – American psychologist who developed or co-developed the PAD theory of environmental impact, circumplex model of affect, prototype theory of emotion concepts, a critique of the hypothesis of universal recognition of emotion from facial expression, concept of core affect, developmental theory of differentiation of emotion concepts, and, more recently, the theory of the psychological construction of emotion
Klaus Scherer (born 1943) – Swiss psychologist and director of the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences in Geneva; he specializes in the psychology of emotion
Ronald de Sousa (born 1940) – English–Canadian philosopher who specializes in the philosophy of emotions, philosophy of mind and philosophy of biology
Jonathan H. Turner (born 1942) – American sociologist from the University of California, Riverside, who is a general sociological theorist with specialty areas including the sociology of emotions, ethnic relations, social institutions, social stratification, and bio-sociology
Dominique Moïsi (born 1946) – authored a book titled The Geopolitics of Emotion focusing on emotions related to globalization
See also
Affect measures
Affective forecasting
Emotion and memory
Emotion Review
Emotional intelligence
Emotional isolation
Emotions in virtual communication
Facial feedback hypothesis
Fuzzy-trace theory
Group emotion
Moral emotions
Social sharing of emotions
Two-factor theory of emotion
References
Further reading
Dana Sugu & Amita Chaterjee "Flashback: Reshuffling Emotions", International Journal on Humanistic Ideology, Vol. 3 No. 1, Spring–Summer 2010.
Cornelius, R. (1996). The science of emotion. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
González, Ana Marta (2012). The Emotions and Cultural Analysis. Burlington, VT : Ashgate.
Ekman, P. (1999). "Basic Emotions". In: T. Dalgleish and M. Power (Eds.). Handbook of Cognition and Emotion. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Sussex, UK:.
Frijda, N.H. (1986). The Emotions. Maison des Sciences de l'Homme and Cambridge University Press
Hogan, Patrick Colm. (2011). What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hordern, Joshua. (2013). Political Affections: Civic Participation and Moral Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
LeDoux, J.E. (1986). The neurobiology of emotion. Chap. 15 in J.E. LeDoux & W. Hirst (Eds.) Mind and Brain: dialogues in cognitive neuroscience. New York: Cambridge.
Mandler, G. (1984). Mind and Body: Psychology of emotion and stress. New York: Norton. Wayback Machine
Nussbaum, Martha C. (2001) Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Plutchik, R. (1980). A general psychoevolutionary theory of emotion. In R. Plutchik & H. Kellerman (Eds.), Emotion: Theory, research, and experience: Vol. 1. Theories of emotion (pp. 3–33). New York: Academic.
Roberts, Robert. (2003). Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Solomon, R. (1993). The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
Wikibook Cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience
Dror Green (2011). "Emotional Training, the art of creating a sense of a safe place in a changing world". Bulgaria: Books, Publishers and the Institute of Emotional Training.
External links
Limbic system
Subjective experience |
4321536 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM%20Basic%20Assembly%20Language%20and%20successors | IBM Basic Assembly Language and successors | Basic Assembly Language (BAL) is the commonly used term for a low-level programming language used on IBM System/360 and successor mainframes. Originally, "Basic Assembly Language" applied only to an extremely restricted dialect designed to run under control of IBM Basic Programming Support (BPS/360) on systems with only 8 KB of main memory, and only a card reader, a card punch, and a printer for input/output — thus the word "Basic". However, the full name and the initialism "BAL" almost immediately attached themselves in popular use to all assembly-language dialects on the System/360 and its descendants. BAL for BPS/360 was introduced with the System/360 in 1964.
Assemblers on other System/360 operating systems through System/370, System/390, and System z, as well as the UNIVAC Series 90 mainframes made by Sperry Corporation, and the BS2000 Mainframes currently made by Fujitsu, inherited and extended its syntax. The latest derived language is known as the IBM High-Level Assembler (HLASM). Programmers utilizing this family of assemblers also refer to them as ALC, (for Assembly Language Coding), or simply "assembler".
BAL is also the mnemonic of the "Branch And Link" instruction.
General characteristics
The architecture of IBM mainframes has undergone several extensions over the years, including System/360, System/370, System/370 XA, ESA/370, ESA/390, and z/Architecture. Each of these architectures has retained compatibility with most of the features of its predecessor. BAL uses the native instruction set of these machines. It is thus closer to the hardware than third-generation languages such as COBOL.
The instruction set consists of the low-level operations supported by the hardware, such as:
The extreme simplicity of these operations means that the source code of a program written in assembler will usually be much longer than an equivalent program in, say, COBOL or Fortran. In the past, the speed of hand-coded assembler programs was often felt to make up for this drawback, but with the advent of optimizing compilers, C for the mainframe, and other advances, assembler has lost much of its appeal. IBM continues to upgrade the assembler, however, and it is still used when the need for speed or very fine control is paramount. However, all of the IBM successors to BAL have included a sophisticated macro facility that allows writing much more compact source code.
Another reason to use assembler is that not all operating system functions can be accessed in high level languages. The application program interface of mainframe operating systems is defined as a set of assembly language "macro" instructions, that typically invoke Supervisor Call (SVC) [on z/OS] or Diagnose (DIAG) [on z/VM] hardware instructions to invoke operating system routines. It is possible to use operating system services from programs written in high-level languages by use of assembler subroutines.
Assembler Statement Format
The format of assembler language statements reflects the layout of an 80-column punched card, though successive versions have relaxed most of the restrictions.
The optional statement label or name is one to six alphanumeric characters beginning in column 1. The first character has to be alphabetic. Later versions added @, #, and $ to the legal characters used in labels, and increased the size to eight characters, then to almost unlimited lengths.`
The operation code or "mnemonic" can begin in any column to the right of column 1, separated from the statement label by a blank. The operation code would be only a machine instruction (macros were not available), making it usually 1, 2, 3, or rarely 4 letters.. The operation code was enhanced to allow up to eight characters, then later to effectively unlimited lengths.
The operand field can begin in any column to the right of the operation code, separated from the operation code by at least one blank. Blanks are invalid in operands except in character constants. The operand field, consisting of one or more operands, is optional depending on the operation code.
Optional comments can appear to the right of the operand field, separated by at least one blank.
Basic Assembly Language does not allow statement continuation. Later versions of the assembler indicate continuation by the appearance of any non-blank character in column 72 of the statement being continued. Basic Assembly Language requires that column 72 be blank.
A "full-card comment" is indicated by an asterisk (*) in column 1.
Card columns 73–80, called the identification-sequence field can be used by the programmer for any purpose, but usually contain sequence numbers for resorting a jumbled card deck.
Basic Assembly language also permits an alternate statement format with the statement starting in column 25, allowing the assembled instruction to be punched into the same card beginning in column 1. This option was not continued in later versions of the assembler.
Types of instructions
Three main types of instructions are found in the source code of a program written in assembler.
Machine instructions (mnemonic)
There is a one-to-one relationship with machine instructions. The full mnemonic instruction set is described in the Principles of Operation manual for each processor.
Examples:
* This is a comment line
* Load the fullword integer stored at the
* location labeled 'ZIGGY' into general register 3:
L 3,ZIGGY
SLA 4,5 shift the value in general register 4 left by 5 bits
MVC TARGET,SOURCE move characters from location 'SOURCE' to 'TARGET'
AP COUNT,=P'1' add 1 to value in memory location 'COUNT' (packed decimal format)
B NEXT unconditional branch to label 'NEXT'
HERE EQU * This is a label
CLC TARGET,=C'ADDRESS' Compare memory location 'TARGET' to string 'ADDRESS'
BE THERE branch if equal to program label 'THERE'
Generally accepted standards, although by no means mandatory, include the identification of general purpose registers with mnemonics. Unlike assemblers for some other systems, such as X86 assembly language, register mnemonics are not reserved symbols but are defined through EQU statements elsewhere in the program. This improves readability of assembler language programs and provides a cross-reference of register usage. Thus typically you may see the following in an assembler program:
R3 EQU 3
...
L R3,ZIGGY
Some notable instruction mnemonics are BALR for a call storing the return address in a register before stacks were used, SVC, DIAG, and ZAP. The latter inspired the name of the SuperZAP utility by a programmer using the pseudonym WAMOZART, cf. .
System/360 machine instructions are one, two, or three halfwords in length (two to 6 bytes). Originally there were four instruction formats, designated by the first two bits of the operation code field; z/Architecture added additional formats.
Assembler instructions
Assembler instructions, sometimes termed directives on other systems, are requests to the assembler to perform various operations during the code generation process. For instance, CSECT means "start a section of code here"; DC defines a constant to be placed in the object code.
Macros and conditional assembly
Basic assembler language does not support macros.
Later assembler versions allow the programmer to group instructions together into macros and add them to a library, which can then be invoked in other programs, usually with parameters, like the preprocessor facilities in C and related languages. Macros can include conditional assembler instructions, such as AIF (an ‘if’ construct), used to generate different code according to the chosen parameters. That makes the macro facility of this assembler very powerful. While multiline macros in C are an exception, macro definitions in assembler can easily be hundreds of lines.
Operating system macros
Most programs will require services from the operating system, and the OS provides standard macros for requesting those services. These are analogous to Unix system calls. For instance, in MVS (later z/OS), STORAGE (with the OBTAIN parameter) dynamically allocates a block of memory, and GET retrieves the next logical record from a file.
Unlike Unix system calls, macros are not standardized across operating systems though. Even something as simple as writing a "sequential file" is coded differently e.g. in Z/OS than in Z/VSE.
Examples
The following fragment shows how the logic "If SEX = 'M', add 1 to MALES; else, add 1 to FEMALES" would be performed in assembler.
CLI SEX,C'M' Male?
BNE IS_FEM If not, branch around
L 7,MALES Load current value of MALES into register 7
LA 7,1(7) add 1
ST 7,MALES store back the result
B GO_ON Finished with this portion
IS_FEM EQU * A label
L 7,FEMALES Load current value in FEMALES into register 7
LA 7,1(7) add 1
ST 7,FEMALES store back the result
GO_ON EQU * - rest of program -
*
MALES DC F'0' Counter for MALES (initially=0)
FEMALES DC F'0' Counter for FEMALES (initially=0)
The following is the ubiquitous Hello world program, and would, executing under an IBM operating system such as OS/VS1 or MVS, display the words 'Hello World' on the operator's console:
HELLO CSECT The name of this program is 'HELLO'
* Register 15 points here on entry from OPSYS or caller.
STM 14,12,12(13) Save registers 14,15, and 0 thru 12 in caller's Save area
LR 12,15 Set up base register with program's entry point address
USING HELLO,12 Tell assembler which register we are using for pgm. base
LA 15,SAVE Now Point at our own save area
ST 15,8(13) Set forward chain
ST 13,4(15) Set back chain
LR 13,15 Set R13 to address of new save area
* -end of housekeeping (similar for most programs) -
WTO 'Hello World' Write To Operator (Operating System macro)
*
L 13,4(13) restore address to caller-provided save area
XC 8(4,13),8(13) Clear forward chain
LM 14,12,12(13) Restore registers as on entry
DROP 12 The opposite of 'USING'
SR 15,15 Set register 15 to 0 so that the return code (R15) is Zero
BR 14 Return to caller
*
SAVE DS 18F Define 18 fullwords to save calling program registers
END HELLO This is the end of the program
WTO is an assembler macro that generates an operating system call. Because of saving registers and later restoring and returning, this small program is usable as a batch program invoked directly by the operating system Job control language (JCL) like this:
// EXEC PGM=HELLO
or, alternatively, it can be CALLed as a subroutine from such a program:
CALL 'HELLO'
Versions
With the exception of the assemblers for the IBM System/360 Model 20, the IBM assemblers were largely upward-compatible. The differences were mainly in the complexity of expressions allowed and in macro processing. OS/360 assemblers were originally designated according to their memory requirements.
7090/7094 Support Package assembler
This cross-assembler runs on a 7090 or 7094 system and was used while System/360 was in development.
Basic Programming Support assembler
The assembler for BPS is the true "basic assembler." It was intended to be loaded from cards and would run on an 8 KB System/360 (except Model 20). It has no support for macro instructions or extended mnemonics (such as BH in place of BC 2 to branch if condition code 2 indicates a high compare). It can assemble only a single control section and does not allow dummy sections (structure definitions). Parenthesized expressions are not allowed and expressions are limited to three terms with the only operators being '+', '-', and '*'.
Basic Operating System assembler
The Basic Operating System has two assembler versions. Both require 16 KB memory, one is tape resident and the other disk.
Assembler D
Assembler D was the DOS/360 assembler for machines with a memory size of 16 KB. It came in two versions: A 10 KB variant for machines with the minimum 16 KB memory, and a 14 KB variant for machines with 24 KB. An F-level assembler was also available for DOS machines with 64 KB or more. D assemblers offered nearly all the features of higher versions.
Assembler E and F
Assembler E was designed to run on an OS/360 system with a minimum of 32 KB of main storage, with the assembler itself requiring 15 KB. Assembler F can run under either DOS/360 or OS/360 on a system with a 64 KB memory, with the assembler requiring 44 KB. These assemblers are a standard part of OS/360; the version that was generated was specified at system generation (SYSGEN).
Model 44 Programming System Assembler
"With certain exceptions, the IBM System/360 Model 44 Programming System Assembler Language is a selected subset of the languages available in the IBM System/360 programming support." Most significantly the Model 44 assembler lacked support for macros and continuation statements. On the other hand it had a number of features not found in other System/360 assemblers—notably instructions to update a card image source dataset, named common, and implicit definition of SETA assembler variables.
Assembler G
"Assembler G" is a set of modifications made to Assembler F in the 1970s by the University of Waterloo (Assembler F was/is open source). Enhancements are mostly in better handling of input/output and improved buffering which speed up assemblies considerably. "Assembler G" was never an IBM product.
Assembler H
Assembler H Version 2 was announced in 1981 and includes support for Extended Architecture (XA), including the AMODE and RMODE directives. It was withdrawn from marketing in 1994 and support ended in 1995. It was replaced by High Level Assembler.
Assembler XF
Assembler XF is an upgrade of Assembler F which includes the new System/370 architecture instructions. This version provides a common assembler for OS/VS and DOS/VS systems. Other changes include relaxing restrictions on expressions and macro processing. Assembler XF requires a minimum partition/region size of 64 KB (virtual). Recommended size is 128 KB.
High Level Assembler
High Level Assembler (HLASM), announced in 1992 as a licensed program "becomes the default translator for System/370 (TM) and System/390 (TM) operating environments." The assembler supports the MVS, VSE, and VM operating systems and successors. As of Release 6 it now is able to run under Linux on IBM Z and generate ELF or COFF object files. It features a long list of mostly usability enhancements, and incorporates the SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator) modifications to Assembler H. Among features added were an indication of CSECT/DSECT for location counter, a list of "using" registers currently active, an indication of whether a variable is read or written in the cross-reference, and allowing mixed-case symbol names. The RSECT directive (Read-only Control Section) allows the assembler to check reentrancy on a per-section basis. RSECT was previously "undocumented and inconsistently implemented in Assembler H." HLASM is the current assembler for IBM mainframe systems as of 2012.
Specialized versions
IBM System/360 Model 44 PS assembler
The IBM System/360 Model 44 Programming System Assembler processes a language that is a "selected subset" of OS/360 and DOS/360 assembler language. It has no support for storage-to-storage (SS) instructions or the convert to binary (CVB), convert to decimal (CVD), read direct (RDD) and write direct (WRD) instructions. It does include four instructions unique to the Model 44: Change Priority Mask (CHPM), Load PSW Special (LPSX), Read Direct Word (RDDW), and Write Direct Word (WRDW). It also includes directives to update the source program, a function performed by utility programs in other systems (SKPTO, REWND, NUM, OMIT and ENDUP). It provides named common and implicitly defined &SETA symbols, but has some restrictions as well.
IBM System/360 TSS assembler
The assembler for the System/360 Model 67 Time Sharing System has a number of differences in directives to support unique TSS features. The PSECT directive generates a Prototype Control Section containing relocatable address constants and modifiable data used by the program.
Non-IBM assemblers
There have been several IBM-compatible assemblers for special environments.
The Univac 90/60, 90/70 and 90/80 series from Unisys was designed to accept IBM-format assembler, as the machine series was a workalike to the S/360 and S/370.
The Fujitsu BS2000 series was also built as a 370 workalike from the same resource as Univac, and is still in use in some parts of Europe.
Dignus LLC Systems/ASM is an HLASM-compatible assembler that can run natively on IBM systems or as a cross-assembler.
Freeware PC/370, written by Don Higgins, was later purchased by Micro Focus.
z390 is an assembler and System 390 emulator also written by Don Higgins and is programmed in Java. It is open source and available from http://www.z390.org/
Penn State University authored a package called ASSIST, which includes a System 370 assembler and interpreter.
Tachyon Software LLC markets the Tachyon Assembler Workbench which runs on Windows, Linux/x86, Linux for S/390 and zSeries, AIX and Solaris.
GNU Assembler (gas) is part of the GNU Compiler Collection (gcc) for Linux on OS/390 and IBM Z. This assembler has a unique syntax that is incompatible with other assemblers for IBM architectures.
See also
IBM System/360
Assembly language
ASSIST assembler
PC-based IBM-compatible mainframes – list of compatible machines or virtual machines
Disassembler – reverse process of Assembly, reconstructing assembly-like source from machine code
References
Notes
Rudd, Anthony. An Illustrated Guide for z/Architecture Assembler Programmers. Create Space (2012).
External links
A Programmer's Introduction to IBM System/360 Assembler Language (Student Text)
High Level Assembler for z/OS & z/VM & z/VSE Language Reference
The Punctilious Programmer: IBM Mainframe Assembler
Basic IBM Mainframe Assembly Language Programming
OS/390 Assembler Programming Introduction
Web enabled IBM Assembler F compiler for small experiments
ASSIST – Assembler System for Student Instruction & Systems Teaching
Basic assembly language
Assembly languages
Assembly language software
Assembly language Basic |
266356 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List%20of%20The%20Hitchhiker%27s%20Guide%20to%20the%20Galaxy%20characters | List of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy characters | The following is an alphabetical list of the characters in the various versions of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. The descriptions of the characters are accompanied by information on details about appearances and references to the characters. Major characters (Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox, Marvin the Paranoid Android, Trillian and Slartibartfast) are listed but described in their own articles.
Main characters
Arthur Dent
Along with Ford Prefect, Arthur Dent barely escapes the Earth's destruction as it is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Arthur spends the next several years, still wearing his dressing gown, helplessly launched from crisis to crisis while trying to straighten out his lifestyle. He rather enjoys tea, but seems to have trouble obtaining it in the far reaches of the galaxy. In time, he learns how to fly and carves a niche for himself as a sandwich-maker. He is also worried about "everything".
Ford Prefect
Ford Prefect is Arthur Dent's friend – and rescuer, when the Earth is unexpectedly demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass at the start of the story. Although his heart is in the right place and he is shown to be highly intelligent, resourceful and even brave, Ford is essentially a dilettante when it comes to causes such as the search for the question to the ultimate answer of "life, the universe and everything". Ford takes a more existential view on the universe, sometimes bordering on joyful nihilism. He is eccentric and endlessly broad-minded – no doubt due to his vast experience of roughing it around the galaxy – and possesses of an off-key and often very dark sense of humour.
Zaphod Beeblebrox
Zaphod Beeblebrox is a "semi-half-cousin" of Ford Prefect. He is hedonistic and irresponsible, narcissistic, and often extremely insensitive to the feelings of those around him. Zaphod invented the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. Zaphod wears unique clothing that contains a mixture of bright and contrasting colours to make him stand out and be the centre of attention wherever he goes. He was voted "Worst Dressed Sentient Being in the Known Universe" seven consecutive times. He's been described as "the best Bang since the Big One" by Eccentrica Gallumbits, and as "one hoopy frood" by others. He was briefly the President of the Galaxy and is the only man to have survived the Total Perspective Vortex.
Marvin the Paranoid Android
Marvin the Paranoid Android is the ship's robot aboard the starship Heart of Gold. Originally built as one of many failed prototypes of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's GPP (Genuine People Personalities) technology, Marvin is afflicted with severe depression and boredom, in part because he has a "brain the size of a planet" which he is seldom, if ever, given the chance to use. Indeed, the true horror of Marvin's existence is that no task he could be given would occupy even the tiniest fraction of his vast intellect. Marvin claims he is 50,000 times more intelligent than a human.
Trillian
Trillian - Tricia McMillan is a mathematician and astrophysicist whom Arthur Dent attempted to talk to at a party in Islington. She and Arthur next meet six months later on the spaceship Heart of Gold, shortly after the Earth has been destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass.
Slartibartfast
Slartibartfast is a Magrathean, and a designer of planets. His favourite part of the job is creating coastlines, the most notable of which are the fjords found on the coast of Norway on planet Earth, for which he won an award. When Earth Mk. II is being made, Slartibartfast is assigned to the continent of Africa. He is unhappy about this because he has begun "doing it with fjords again" (arguing that they give a continent a lovely baroque feel), but has been told by his superiors that they are "not equatorial enough". In relation to this, he expresses the view that he would "far rather be happy than right any day."
Minor characters
Agrajag
Agrajag is a piteous creature that is continually reincarnated and subsequently killed, each time unknowingly, by Arthur Dent. Agrajag is first identified in , but it is revealed that several of Arthur's encounters in the first and second novels (and in previous chapters of the third) were with previous incarnations of Agrajag. The first occurs in , when a bowl of petunias is suddenly yanked into existence miles above the planet Magrathea in place of one of the missiles targeting the Heart of Gold after its Improbability Drive is used, and begins falling, having only time to think "Oh, no, not again" before crashing to the ground. The Guide states that "many speculate that if we knew exacly why the bowl thought that, we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now". The reason behind the bowl's lament is revealed in , when Agrajag identifies the bowl of petunias as one of his prior incarnations, and tells Arthur that he had seen his face in a spaceship window as he fell to his doom. In another incarnation, Agrajag was a rabbit on prehistoric Earth (during the time period recounted in ) who was killed by Arthur for breakfast and whose skin was fashioned into a pouch, which is then used to swat a fly who also happened to be Agrajag. In yet another, near the beginning of , Agrajag is an old man who dies of a heart attack after seeing Arthur and Ford materialise, seated on a Chesterfield sofa, in the midst of a match at Lord's Cricket Ground.
Eventually, Agrajag wishes to take revenge on Arthur Dent, diverting his teleportation to a Cathedral of Hate. However, in the process of explaining his reasons for hating Arthur he mentions "Stavromula Beta", where Arthur had ducked to avoid a shot fired by an assassin, which then had killed Agrajag instead. Arthur, having never been to Stavromula Beta, has no idea what Agrajag is talking about, and Agrajag realises that he's brought Arthur to the cathedral too early. He tries to kill Arthur anyway, and once again dies at Arthur's hands while Arthur is defending himself, but not before setting off the explosives intended to kill Arthur by triggering a massive rockfall. Arthur escapes the rockfall unharmed.
For the next few years Arthur travels the universe, secure in his knowledge that, no matter what happens, he cannot die at least until after he survives his assassination attempt at Stavromula Beta. In Arthur's daughter Random Frequent Flyer Dent holds him hostage in a London club. When she fires her weapon Arthur dodges, causing the bolt to pass over his head and hit the man standing behind him. Earlier the victim (Agrajag) had dropped a book of matches which revealed the owner of the nightclub to be Stavro Mueller, and the name of the club to be Beta. Thus, what Arthur believed to be the name of a planet was actually the name of the nightclub, and Agrajag has died once again. Because of this, Arthur is now able to die as well, which, thanks to the Vogons, he supposedly does a few seconds later.
In , Douglas Adams plays Agrajag, having recorded the part for an audiobook version of . Producer Dirk Maggs added a suitable voice treatment, and Simon Jones as Arthur Dent recorded his lines opposite the pre-recorded Adams. Adams was thus able to "reincarnate" to participate in the new series.
At the end of , Arthur Dent's extreme bad luck in life coupled with cosmic balance mean that as he materialises on a planet shortly before Vogons are due to destroy it, Agrajag wakes up from a coma after six months having won the lottery and been recognised by a long lost love whilst on "Celebrity Coma". This event presumably leads to cosmic balance ruining his other lives for the benefit of Arthur Dent.
In the 2017 second season of the television adaptation of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency a dog is named Agrajag with expected consequences.
Mrs Alice Beeblebrox
Alice Beeblebrox is Zaphod's favourite mother, lives at 108 Astral Crescent, Zoovroozlechester, Betelgeuse V, and guards the true story of Zaphod's visit to the Frogstar, waiting for "the right price." She is referenced in .
The Allitnils
As their names were written to suggest, every Allitnil is an anti-clone of a Lintilla. They were created by the cloning company to eliminate the billions of cloned Lintillas flooding out of a malfunctioning cloning machine. Being anti-clones, when an Allitnil comes into physical contact with a Lintilla, they both wink out of existence in a puff of unsmoke.
Along with Poodoo and Varntvar the Priest, three Allitnils arrived on Brontitall to get the three Lintillas there to "agree to cease to be". Two of the clones eliminate their corresponding Lintillas, but Arthur shoots the third Allitnil, so that one Lintilla survives.
Appearing only in , every one of the Allitnils is voiced by David Tate.
The Allitnils, like the Lintillas, do not appear in the novels nor in the BBC television series.
Almighty Bob
The Almighty Bob is a deity worshipped by the people of Lamuella. Old Thrashbarg is one of the priests who worships Almighty Bob; however, Thrashbarg is often ignored by the villagers of Lamuella. The Almighty Bob appears in the fifth book, .
Anjie
Anjie was a woman, on the brink of retirement, on whose behalf a raffle was being held in order to buy her a kidney machine. An unnamed woman (played by June Whitfield on the radio) convinces Arthur Dent to buy raffle tickets while he and Fenchurch are in a railway pub, attempting to have lunch. Arthur won an album of bagpipe music.
Referred to in:
Arcturan Megafreighter crew
The captain and first officer were the only crew of an Arcturan Megafreighter carrying a larger number of copies of Playbeing magazine than the mind can comfortably conceive. They brought Zaphod Beeblebrox to Ursa Minor Beta, after he had escaped from the Haggunenon flagship. Zaphod was let on board by the Number One, who was cynical about the Guide's editors becoming soft. He admired the fact that Zaphod was "hitching the hard way".
They only appear in , where the captain is played by David Tate, and his number one by Bill Paterson. However, some of their dialogue was given to other characters in .
Aseed
Leader of the cheese-worshipping Tyromancers on the planet Nano. Appears in .
Barmen
Three different barmen appear during the series.
Barman of the Horse and Groom
In , in , and the film, Ford and Arthur quickly down three pints each – at lunchtime – to calm their muscles before using the teleport to escape on the Vogon ship. Being told the world is about to end he calls "last orders, please." The Red Lion Inn at Chelwood Gate, East Sussex, was used during the TV series, and referenced in the dialogue (Adams himself can be seen in the background of this scene); Steve Conway played the character on TV. This barman was played by David Gooderson in the original radio series and Stephen Moore in the LP recording. In the 2005 motion picture, Albie Woodington portrayed the barman.
Barman in Old Pink Dog Bar
Ford visits the Old Pink Dog Bar in Han Dold City, orders a round for everyone and then tries to use an American Express card to pay for it, fails, is threatened by a disembodied hand and so offers a Guide write-up instead. This happens in . In the radio adaptation of this novel, the barman was played by Arthur Smith.
Barman in the Domain of the King
Another barman takes a galactic sized tip for Elvis from Ford on his Hitchhiker's corporate Dine-O-Charge credit card in an attempt to bankrupt InfiniDim Enterprises in and the final radio series. This bartender was played by Roger Gregg.
BBC department head
When Arthur returns to Earth in he calls his department head to explain why he was absent from work the last six months: "I've gone mad." His superior is very relaxed about it and asks when Arthur will return to work, and is quite satisfied by the reply "When do hedgehogs stop hibernating?" In the fourth radio series the part was played by Geoffrey Perkins, who had produced the first two radio series and who had been the BBC TV head of comedy from 1995 to 2001.
Blart Versenwald III
In the epilogue of , Blart Versenwald III was a top genetic engineer, and a man who could never keep his mind on the job at hand. When his homeworld was under threat from an invading army, he was tasked with creating an army of super-soldiers to fight them. Instead, he created (among other things) a remarkable new breed of superfly that could distinguish between solid glass and an open window, and also an off-switch for children. Fortunately, because the invaders were only invading because they couldn't cope with things back home, they too were impressed with Blart's creations, and a flurry of economic treaties rapidly secured peace.
Bodyguard
The strong silent type, an unnamed bodyguard is seen guarding the late Hotblack Desiato in . His face, according to the book "had the texture of an orange and the colour of an apple, but there the resemblance to anything sweet ended." In he is portrayed by actor David Prowse, Star Wars Darth Vader, as a man of few words who can lift Ford Prefect clean off the floor. In the LP adaptation of the radio series, the character was voiced by David Tate.
Caveman
Arthur attempts to play Scrabble with a caveman, who is not even able to spell "Grunt" and "Agh", and "he's probably spelt library with one R again". However, he does spell "forty-two", giving Arthur the idea to pull out letters from the letters bag at random to attempt to find the ultimate question; this results in the unhelpful "What do you get when you multiply six by nine?" which does not match the answer (except in base-13).
Appears in played by David Jason, , and .
Colin
Colin (a.k.a. part #223219B) is a small, round, melon-sized, flying security robot which Ford Prefect enslaves to aid in his escape from the newly re-organized Guide offices in . "Its motion sensors are the usual Sirius Cybernetics garbage." Ford captures Colin by trapping the robot with his towel and re-wiring the robot's pleasure circuits, inducing a cyber-ecstasy trip.
Ford uses Colin's cheerfulness to break into the Guide's corporate accounting software in order to plant a Trojan Horse module that will automatically pay anything billed to his InfiniDim Enterprises credit card. Colin also saves Ford's life when the Guide's new security force, the Vogons, fire at him with a rocket launcher after Ford feels the need to jump out of the window. Colin was last seen being sent (at the risk of possible lonely incineration) to look after the delivery of the Guide Mark II to Arthur Dent in the Vogon postal system.
Colin was named after a dog which belonged to a girl, Emily Saunders, of whom Ford had fond memories. Colin appears in , and in the radio series he was played by Andrew Secombe.
Constant Mown
Crew member on the Vogon ship commanded by Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz, and Jeltz's son. Notable for his very un-Vogon-like emotions, ethics and agility, all of which he attempts to keep hidden (with varying degrees of success) from his father and crewmates, lest he be demoted to more unpleasant (even for a Vogon) duties or killed outright for aberrant behavior. Appears in .
Dr. Dan Streetmentioner
Author of Time Traveller's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations which is handy for those travelling through time, and especially to Milliways. His guide is more complete than The Guide itself, which ignores the time travel tense topic – other than pointing out that the term 'future perfect' has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be. He is also mentioned in the third radio series, which gives many examples of his tense forms.
Deep Thought
Deep Thought is a computer that was created by a pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent species of beings (whose three-dimensional protrusions into our universe are ordinary white mice) to come up with the Answer to The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Deep Thought is the size of a small city. When, after seven and a half million years of calculation, the answer finally turns out to be 42, Deep Thought admonishes Loonquawl and Phouchg (the receivers of the Ultimate Answer) that "[she] checked it very thoroughly, and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you is that you've never actually known what the question was."
Deep Thought does not know the ultimate question to Life, the Universe and Everything, but offers to design an even more powerful computer, Earth, to calculate it. After ten million years of calculation, the Earth is destroyed by Vogons five minutes before the computation is complete.
Appears in:
On radio, Deep Thought was voiced by Geoffrey McGivern. On television and in the LP re-recording of the radio series, it was voiced by Valentine Dyall. In the feature film Deep Thought's voice was provided by actress Helen Mirren.
In the television series, Deep Thought was shaped like a massive black metal trapezoid with a yellow rectangular display that blinked on and off in time with the computer's speaking. The timing of the light's flashing was done on set by author Douglas Adams. Valentine Dyall's voice was dubbed in later.
In the feature film, it appears as a large, vaguely humanoid computer, with a gigantic head supported, as if in bored repose, by two arms and has a female voice (provided by actress Helen Mirren). This particular version of Deep Thought likes to watch television in her spare time and late in the film can also be seen to have the Apple Computer logo above her eye. This is a reference to Adams being a fan and advocate of the Apple Macintosh. It is also revealed that, in the intervening time, Deep Thought was commissioned by the Consortium of Angry Housewives to create the Point of View Gun.
IBM's chess-playing computer Deep Thought was named in honour of this fictional computer.
Deep Thought can be seen inscribed on a computer in the NORAD VI area of the 1992 computer game The Journeyman Project.
Regarding the name, Douglas Adams was quoted as saying "The name is a very obvious joke" (it is a reference to the film Deep Throat).
Dionah Carlinton Housney
Dionah appears in And Another Thing... by Eoin Colfer. Dionah is one of Zaphod Beeblebrox's favorite singer/prostitutes. She appears out of nowhere in the 'Heart of Gold' starship and sings Zaphod a cryptic song about the entrance to the planet Asgard. Zaphod does not understand the song. She vanishes after saying "oh for Zark's sake" and then turns into an ice sculpture of herself. The sculpture soon melts into water, the water droplets rise up into the ceiling and every drop disappears after making a 'oh' sound. Zaphod later comments "That girl always could sing".
Disaster Area's chief research accountant
As Disaster Area's earnings require hypermathematics, their chief research accountant was named Professor of Neomathematics at the University of Maximegalon and in his Special Theories of Tax Returns he proves that space-time is "not merely curved, it is, in fact, totally bent." The Guide shows a graphic indicating that most of the earnings ends up with the accountant.
Referred to in:
Dish of the Day
The quadruped Dish of the Day is an Ameglian Major Cow, a ruminant specifically bred to not only have the desire to be eaten, but to be capable of saying so quite clearly and distinctly. When asked if he would like to see the Dish of the Day, Zaphod replies, "We'll meet the meat." The Major Cow's quite vocal and emphatic desire to be consumed by Milliways' patrons is the most revolting thing that Arthur Dent has ever heard, and the Dish is nonplussed by a queasy Arthur's subsequent order of a green salad, since it knows "many vegetables that are very clear" on the point of not wanting to be eaten – which was part of the reason for the creation of the Ameglian Major Cow in the first place. After Zaphod orders four rare steaks, the Dish announces that it is nipping off to the kitchen to shoot itself. Though it states, "I'll be very humane," this does not comfort Arthur at all.
Several years later, the principal characters encounter a herd of Ameglian Major Cows on the planet Nano, a colony planet established for exceedingly rich refugees from the destroyed Earth. Ford and Arthur (who is now far more open-minded after years spent traversing the galaxy) seriously consider the Cows' offering themselves as a meal, only to be interrupted by the arrival of the Norse thunder god Thor and his subsequent duel with Bowerick Wowbagger. However, the lightning display accompanying Thor's arrival kills and chars several Major Cows (while their still-living herdmates curse their fellows' luck), and Ford and Arthur take the opportunity to sample the cooked meat. Later, a Major Cow is shown offering itself to Thor at the thunder god's victory party.
Appears in:
The character is not present in the original radio series, but does make a cameo appearance in the finale of the fifth radio series. The first appearance of it was in a stage adaptation in 1980 at the Rainbow Theatre. Since then it appeared in , and . In the TV series, it was played by Peter Davison, who was at that time both Sandra Dickinson's husband and the newly announced fifth Doctor. Dickinson played Trillian in the television series (and "Tricia McMillan" in the final radio series), and suggested casting Davison, who was a fan of the radio series.
East River Creature
As Ford Prefect travels through space in a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation spaceship, he has a dream in which he encounters a strange creature made of slime from the East River in New York who has just come into existence. After asking Ford a series of questions about life, and Ford's recommendation of finding love on 7th Avenue, the creature leaves Ford to talk to a nearby policeman on his status in life.
Appearances:
In , the East River character was played by American comedian Jackie Mason.
Eccentrica Gallumbits
Known as "The Triple-Breasted Whore of Eroticon Six", Eccentrica Gallumbits, the author of The Big Bang Theory – A Personal View, is mentioned in all six of the novels. She is first mentioned in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when Arthur looks up Earth for the first time in the guide. The entry for Earth follows that for Eccentrica Gallumbits. She is heard about again during a newscast that Zaphod Beeblebrox tunes into shortly after stealing the spaceship Heart of Gold. The newsreader quotes Eccentrica describing Zaphod as "The best bang since the Big One." It was also reported in that Zaphod had delivered a presidential address from her bedroom on at least one occasion. Commentary on Zaphod in intimates that one reason for his acquiring a third arm is the ability to fondle all of Eccentrica's breasts at the same time.
Pears Gallumbit, a dessert which has several things in common with her, is available at Milliways.
Some people say her erogenous zones start some four miles from her actual body; Ford Prefect disagrees, saying five.
She is referenced in an issue of the Legion of Super Heroes.
She is again mentioned in after a wheel of cheese appears above the Nanites: "This sudden and most unexpected apparition shifted the crowd's focus faster than the appearance of Eccentrica Gallumbits wearing a neon T-shirt flashing the slogan Freebie Friday would shift the focus of the crowd at a VirginNerd convention on a Friday."
Eddie
Eddie is the name of the shipboard computer on the starship Heart of Gold. Like every other system on the spaceship, it has a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Genuine People Personality. Thus, Eddie is over-excitable, quite talkative, over-enthused and extremely ingratiating, or alternatively a coddling, school matron-type as a back-up personality. Shipboard networking interconnects Eddie with everything on the Heart of Gold; at one point, the whole ship is effectively crippled by Arthur Dent's request for tea from the Nutrimatic drinks dispenser; the computation of which nearly crashed Eddie and everything connected to him.
On one occasion when certain destruction seems quite imminent, Eddie sings "You'll Never Walk Alone" in a particularly cheesy and upbeat tone.
Appears in:
He is voiced in the first two radio series and on television by David Tate. In the television version, Eddie has lights on his case that flash when he speaks. Douglas Adams read in Eddie's lines during filming to operate the lights.
In the 2004–2005 radio series, he is voiced by Roger Gregg and in the 2005 feature film by Thomas Lennon.
Effrafax of Wug
A sciento-magician who bet his life that he could make an entire mountain invisible within a year. Having wasted most of the period of time failing to create a cloaking device, he hired a company to simply remove the mountain, though this course of action lost him the bet, and his life. This was all due in part to the sudden and rather suspicious presence of an extra moon, and in addition, the fact that you could never touch anything when you walked near the supposed invisible mountain. It is remarked that he should have established a simple Somebody Else's Problem field, which would make the mountain totally invisible even if it were to be painted bright pink.
Referenced in: .
Elders of Krikkit
The Elders of Krikkit were, in , under influence of the remains of the supercomputer Hactar, which æons previously had been blown to dust, but retained a measure of consciousness, and determined to destroy the entire universe using the supernova bomb they had built. Trillian used her feminine charm and smart rhetoric in an attempt to dissuade the elders, but failed to stop them deploying the ultimate weapon, which simply dented the council chamber very badly.
Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley is a real-life singer, who died in 1977. It has been popularly suggested that he has been abducted by aliens, or that he is actually an alien who faked his own death so he could return to his home planet.
In , Elvis is discovered by Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent working as a bar singer on an alien planet, and owning a large pink spaceship. Ford, having become a huge fan of Elvis while he was stranded on Earth, watched the performance intently for its entire duration. Presley is not actually named, however his identity is easy to determine from the facts that the bar is called "The Domain of The King," the "EP" initials in the pink spaceship which Ford and Arthur buy from him, and the accent in which he sings. He tells Ford that, contrary to popular belief, he was not abducted by aliens; he went with them of his own free will.
Ford's irreplaceable blue suede shoes, one of which is destroyed during the events in the early part of , are a tribute to his Elvis fandom.
In the radio adaptation of , , it has been indicated that in the alternate Earth which is the focus of the story, Elvis never died, and there is mention of an album "Elvis sings Oasis". He appears (but is not directly named) in , voiced by Philip Pope.
Emperor of the Galaxy
Many millennia prior to the events of the series, the final Emperor of the Galactic Empire (in the Hitchhiker's universe) was placed into a stasis field during his dying moments: thus leaving the Empire with a technically ruling, but actually near-dead Emperor, with all his heirs long since dead. And so today, an Imperial President, elected by the Galactic Assembly, has all the trappings of power, without actually wielding any. This was the office held by Yooden Vranx and Zaphod Beeblebrox.
Mentioned in:
Mrs Enid Kapelsen
An old woman from Boston who rediscovers purpose in life by seeing Arthur and Fenchurch flying (and performing "other activities") outside the aeroplane within which she is flying to Heathrow. Witnessing this, she became enlightened, and realized that everything she had ever been taught was varyingly incorrect. She annoys the flight attendants by continually pressing her call button for reasons such as "the child in front was making milk come out of his nose." Later she ends up seated next to Arthur and Fenchurch on another aeroplane en route from Los Angeles to London (though in the original radio series, she flies with Arthur and Fenchurch on a flight from London to Los Angeles).
Appears in:
She was played by Margaret Robertson in during the Quandary Phase.
Eric Bartlett
In , it is gardener Eric Bartlett who discovers that space-aliens have landed on Tricia's lawn and haven't cut her grass.
Fenchurch
Fenchurch is Arthur Dent's soulmate in the fourth book of the Hitchhiker "trilogy", . Fenchurch was named after the Fenchurch Street railway station where she was conceived in the ticket queue. Adams revealed in an interview that it was really the ticket queues at Paddington Station that made him think of conceiving a character there, but chose Fenchurch to avoid complications with Paddington Bear.
She first appears as the unnamed girl in the café on the first page of ; she is the girl referred to as "sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth." In , when the Earth and everyone including Fenchurch had mysteriously reappeared, a romantic relationship blooms between her and Arthur Dent. He teaches her to fly, before a first aerial sexual encounter, and a second with Sony Walkmen.
At the beginning of , Fenchurch is referred to as having vanished abruptly during a hyperspace jump on their first intergalactic holiday. Douglas Adams later said that he wanted to get rid of the character as she was getting in the way of the story. Much of this is evident from the self-referential prose surrounding Arthur and Fenchurch's relationship.
In , she is revealed to have been working as a waitress at Milliways since she vanished, and is reunited with Arthur Dent.
In to and Fenchurch is played by actress Jane Horrocks.
She appears in the television series played by an uncredited actress for the "girl in a café in Rickmansworth" segment from the second episode. Her appearance corresponds to the one described in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.
In the computer of the Tanngrisnir takes the form of Fenchurch in its programmed attempts to live out the sub-conscious desires of the ship's occupiers. While in this form she and Arthur talk and ponder together extensively, exacerbated by the effects of the ship's dark matter travel on people's emotions. Later in the book Arthur encounters another form of Fenchurch during a travel in hyperspace only to dematerialize, similar to his Fenchurch, across a plural zone into a different part of the universe.
Appears in:
(unnamed cameo)
(only mentioned in passing)
Fenchurch Everris, mentioned in Destiny 1 and 2, was likely inspired by Fenchurch.
Frankie and Benjy Mouse
Frankie and Benjy are the mice that Arthur (et al.) encounter on Magrathea. Frankie and Benjy wish to extract the final readout data from Arthur's brain to get the Ultimate Question. Frankie and Benjy are, after all, part of the pan-dimensional race that created the Earth as a supercomputer successor to Deep Thought in order to find out the question to which the answer was 42.
In the first version, the radio series, they offered Arthur and Trillian a large amount of money if they could tell them what the Question is. In later versions this was changed – unfortunately for Arthur, they claim the only way to do this is to remove his brain and prepare it, apparently by dicing it. They promise to replace it with a simple computer brain, which, suggested Zaphod, would only have to say things like "What?", "I don't understand" and "Where's the tea?". Arthur objects to this ("What?" he says. "See!" says Zaphod), and escapes with the help of his friends. Frankie says:
In , they are in fact the manifestations of Lunkwill and Fook, the pan-dimensional beings who designed and built Deep Thought, and were killed by Arthur Dent when they attempted to remove his brain.
Appear in:
On radio, David Tate played Benjy Mouse and Peter Hawkins voiced Frankie Mouse. They appeared in . They also appeared in , where they were voiced by David Tate and Stephen Moore.
Frat Gadz
Frat Gadz wrote the handbook titled Heavily Modified Face Flannels, which is described by The Guide as "an altogether terser work for masochists" in .
Frogstar Prisoner Relations Officer
In the Frogstar Prisoner Relations Officer (referred to in the scripts as the "FPRO") does his best to annoy Zaphod by hosing him down, letting him think that he escaped to an Ursa Minor robot disco by body debit card, asking him for an autograph and teleporting away whilst Zaphod helps him with his respiratory problem – that he is breathing.
Gag Halfrunt
Gag Halfrunt is the private brain care specialist of Zaphod Beeblebrox and Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. Halfrunt describes Beeblebrox as "Just this guy, you know?"
In and , he is responsible for the order to destroy Earth, reasoning that if the ultimate question is revealed, everybody would be happy and psychiatrists would be put out of business. When he learns of two escaped Earth people (Arthur and Trillian), he orders the Vogons to attack the Heart of Gold, at around the same time that Arthur unwittingly sabotages the ship's computers by asking them to make a cup of tea.
Halfrunt was played by Gil Morris in the TV show and by Jason Schwartzman in . In both these versions he only appears briefly.
Gail Andrews
In , Gail Andrews is an astrologer who is interviewed by Tricia McMillan about the impact that the discovery of the planet Persephone, or Rupert will have on astrology. She is an advisor to the President of the United States, President Hudson, but denies having recommended the bombing of Damascus.
In the radio series, she appears in , and is voiced by Lorelei King.
Gargravarr
Gargravarr, the disembodied mind and custodian of the Total Perspective Vortex on Frogstar World B ("the most totally evil place in the galaxy"), suffers from real-life dualism and is therefore having trial separation with his body, which has taken his forename Pizpot. The dispute arose over whether sex is better than fishing or not, a disastrous attempt at combining the two activities, and his body going out partying too late.
Since he has no physical form that can be seen, he leads those condemned to the Total Perspective Vortex by humming various morose tunes so that the condemned can follow the sound of his voice.
Appears in:
Gargravarr was voiced on radio by Valentine Dyall. He appears in .
Garkbit
Garkbit is the Head Waiter at Milliways, the impossible "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe". He is professionally unfazed by Arthur, Ford, Zaphod, and Trillian's unruly arrival. He has a fine sales patter and a very dry sense of humour.
Appears in:
In the radio series Garkbit is played by Anthony Sharp, and appears in . In the television series, he is portrayed by Jack May and appears in .
The book describes Garkbit as being a methane breather, with a life support system strapped discreetly to his thigh.
Genghis Temüjin Khan
Son of Yesügei, Genghis Khan is both a distant ancestor of Mr Prosser and was called "a wanker, a tosspot, a very tiny piece of turd" by Wowbagger, the Infinitely Prolonged in "The Private Life of Genghis Khan", originally based on a sketch written by Adams and Graham Chapman. The short story also appears in some editions of The Salmon of Doubt.
Girl with a Master's degree
After leaving the Old Pink Dog Bar (in ) Ford Prefect discovers his life's work has been undeleted. He shares this discovery and some Ol' Janx Spirit with a working girl who has "a Master's degree in Social Economics and can be very convincing". Engrossed in his own writing, she leaves Ford and leaves with a client in a steel grey Han Dold limousine. Ford later overhears her saying "It's OK, honey, it's really OK, you got to learn to feel good about it. Look at the way the whole economy is structured...".
God
Aside from being the favourite subject of author Oolon Colluphid (Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes, Who is this God Person Anyway? and Well That About Wraps it Up for God), God also makes a disappearance in the Guide's entry for the Babel Fish ("I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing". "But," says man, "The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.").
Majikthise worries about philosophers sitting up half the night arguing that there may (or may not) be a God if Deep Thought can give His phone number the next morning. Arthur, Fenchurch and Marvin visit God's Final Message to His Creation in .
At least six other characters have the status of a god: Almighty Bob, the Great Green Arkleseizure, Thor, Rob McKenna, who is unknowingly a rain god, Gaia, the Greek goddess who personifies the Earth, and Cthulhu, who is one of the Great Old Ones from the Cthulhu Mythos. Gaia, Thor, and Cthulhu are among the deities interviewed by Hillman Hunter for the job of God of the Earth-refugee planet of Nano, with Thor being selected.
Gogrilla Mincefriend
An enterprising chap who addressed the problem of elevators refusing to operate because they had been afforded a degree of prescience (to facilitate their operation by allowing them to be waiting for you before you've even decided you want to go up or down a floor) but consequently became terrified of the future, and so taken to hiding in basements. Mincefriend became very wealthy when he patented and successfully marketed a device he had seen in a history book: the staircase.
Golgafrinchans
The Golgafrinchans first appear in . In the novel series, their appearances are all in and they appear in . In all formats, the story is essentially the same. Following their adventures at Milliways, Arthur and Ford teleport onto an "Ark Ship" containing a number of Golgafrinchans. This particular group consists of the Wodehousian "middle class" who have common, middle-management types of occupations. They were sent away from their planet under false pretences by the (upper class) "thinkers" and (working class) "doers" of their society, who deemed them useless. They were told that the entire society had to move to a new planet, with a variety of thin excuses, and that it was necessary for them to go first to prepare the new planet for their occupation. However, it turns out that one of the middle-men was necessary for survival, and as a result, the rest of the Golgafrinchan society died off (see below). They arrive on Earth, where they become the ancestors of modern humans, except in the novel Life, The Universe, and Everything, in which in the beginning it is mentioned that they ended up dying out instead of the cavemen.
Agda and Mella
Agda and Mella are Golgafrinchan girls that Arthur and Ford hit on. On Golgafrincham, Agda used to be a junior personnel officer and Mella an art director. Agda is taller and slimmer and Mella shorter and round-faced. Mella and Arthur become a couple, as do Agda and Ford. In a way Mella is very relieved because she has been saved from a life of looking at moodily lit tubes of toothpaste. Agda dies a few weeks later from a chain of events that Ford unknowingly starts by throwing the Scrabble letter Q into a privet bush: it startles a rabbit, which runs away and is eaten by a fox, who chokes on the rabbit and dies, contaminating a stream that Agda drinks from upon which she falls ill—it is said that the only moral that one could possibly learn from these occurrences is not to throw the letter Q into a privet bush. Agda and Mella only appear in the novel.
Captain
The Captain of the Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B likes to bathe with his rubber duck (he spent practically the entire time he was captain of the B Ark and as much of his time on Earth, a total time of over three years, as has been documented in the bath) and has got a very relaxed attitude towards everything. The Captain also has a fondness for a drink called "jynnan tonnyx". His personality was based on Douglas Adams' habit of taking extraordinarily long baths as a method of procrastination to avoid writing.
He was voiced by David Jason in the radio series and by Frank Middlemass in the LP album adaptation. On television, he was played by Aubrey Morris.
Great Circling Poets of Arium
These rock throwing poets can be seen in the Guide graphics in , heard about in and read about in . They are original inhabitants of Golgafrincham, one of whose descendants inspire the stories that caused the creation of the "'B' Ark" that Arthur and Ford find themselves on. The first part of their songs tell of how five princes with four horses from the City of Vassilian travel widely in distant lands, and the latter – and longer – part of the songs is about which of them is going to walk back.
Hairdresser
One of the Golgafrinchans on the prehistoric Earth, the hairdresser was put in charge of the fire development sub-committee. They gave him a couple of sticks to rub together, but he made them into a pair of scissors in the radio series, or curling tongs in the television and book series.
He was played by Aubrey Woods in the radio series, by Stephen Greif in the LP album adaptation, and by David Rowlands on television.
Management consultant
The Golgafrinchans' management consultant tried to arrange the meetings of the colonization committee along the lines of a traditional committee structure, complete with a chair and an agenda. He was also in charge of fiscal policy, and decided to adopt the leaf as legal tender, making everyone immensely rich. In order to solve the inflation problem this caused, he planned a major deforestation campaign to effectively revalue the leaf by burning down all the forests.
He was played by Jonathan Cecil in the radio series, by David Tate in the LP album adaptation, and by Jon Glover on television.
Marketing girl
Another Golgafrinchan on prehistoric Earth, the marketing girl assisted the hairdresser's fire development sub-committee in researching what consumers want from fire and how they relate to it and if they want it fitted nasally. She also tried to invent the wheel, but had a little difficulty deciding what colour it should be.
She was played by Beth Porter both in the radio series and on television and by Leueen Willoughby in the LP album adaptation.
Number One
Number One is the First officer in the Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B. He is not very smart, having difficulty tying up his shoelaces, but is regarded by the captain as a nice chap. His only function to appear in the series is to offer Ford and Arthur drinks.
He was voiced by Jonathan Cecil in the radio series and by David Tate in the LP album adaptation. On television, the character was renamed Number Three and played by Geoffrey Beevers.
Number Two
Number Two is a militaristic officer in the Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B. He belongs to the Golgafrinchan 3rd Regiment. He captures Arthur and Ford and interrogates them. When they land on Earth, Number Two declares a war on another, uninhabited continent, leaving an "open-ended ultimatum", blows up some trees which he claims are "potential military installations," and 'interrogates' a gazelle. He likes shouting a lot, and thinks the Captain is an idiot.
He is played by Aubrey Woods in the radio series and by Stephen Greif in the LP album adaptation. On television, the character was divided into two different characters: Number Two played by David Neville on the planet Earth, and Number One played by Matthew Scurfield on the B Ark.
Telephone Sanitizer
The Golgafrinchan telephone sanitizer is in . By tragic coincidence, after all the telephone sanitizers were sent away with the rest of the "useless" Golgafrinchans, the rest of the society died off from an infectious disease contracted from an "unexpectedly dirty" telephone.
Googleplex Starthinker
In the scripts for , the first programmer asks Deep Thought if it is not "a greater analyst than the Googleplex Starthinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a five-week Aldebaran sand blizzard?", which the great computer dismisses because he has already "contemplated the very vectors of the atoms in the Big Bang itself". The Googleplex Starthinker also appears in and .Note the much later use (but same spelling) of Googleplex for the Google corporate headquarters, another homage to the number googolplex.
Great Green Arkleseizure
The creator of the universe, according to the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI. Their legend has it that the universe was sneezed out of the nose of the Great Green Arkleseizure, and they thus "live in perpetual fear of the time they call 'The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief.'"
In the movie, Humma Kavula, played by John Malkovich, is a missionary of the Great Green Arkleseizure religion on Viltvodle VI, ending his sermons with a simple "Bless you".
The Jatravartid's God appears (conceptually) in , , and .
Great Hyperlobic Omnicognate Neutron Wrangler
A great computer, which according to Deep Thought, can "talk all four legs off an Arcturian Megadonkey" (although Deep Thought could allegedly persuade said Megadonkey to go for a walk afterwards), from .
Grunthos the Flatulent
Grunthos the Flatulent was the poetmaster of the Azgoths of Kria, writers of the second worst poetry in the universe, just between Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings and the Vogons.
The guide recites a tale of how, during a reading of his poem "Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning", "four of the audience died of internal hemorrhaging and the president of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived only by gnawing one of his own legs off."
Reportedly "disappointed" by the reception of his poem, Grunthos then prepared to read his 12-book epic, My Favourite Bathtime Gurgles (or Zen and the Art of Going to the Lavatory in ). He was prevented from doing so when his small intestine leapt up his neck and throttled his brain in a desperate bid to save civilization, killing him.
Excerpt from "Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning", taken from the TV series graphics:
Putty. Putty. Putty.
Green Putty – Grutty Peen.
Grarmpitutty – Morning!
Pridsummer – Grorning Utty!
Discovery..... Oh.
Putty?..... Armpit?
Armpit..... Putty.
Not even a particularly
Nice shade of green.
Excerpt from "Zen And The Art Of Going To The Lavatory", also taken from the TV series
Relax mind
Relax body
Relax bowels
Relax.
Do not fall over.
You are a cloud.
You are raining.
Do not rain
While train
Is standing at a station.
Move with the wind.
Apologise where necessary.
Appears in:
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Guide Mark II
In the fifth novel, the Guide Mark II is used by the Vogons to help them destroy all the many Earths that appear in the novels. By using reverse temporal engineering throughout the book, the Guide Mark II – which takes on the appearance of a bird with Unfiltered perception – cajoles the cast to their final destination at Club Beta on Earth to first re-meet Agrajag and then be destroyed by the Vogons.
Hactar
Flexible and imaginative, Hactar was the first computer whose individual components reflected the pattern of the whole. Hactar is assembled and programmed by the Silastic Armourfiends, who then order him to assemble an "Ultimate Weapon." Hactar, receiving no other guidance from the Armourfiends, takes the request literally and builds a supernova bomb which would connect every major sun in the universe through hyperspace, thus causing every star to go supernova. Deciding that he could find no circumstance where such a bomb would be justified, Hactar builds a small defect into it. After discovering the defect, the Armourfiends pulverize Hactar.
Rather than being destroyed, Hactar is merely crippled. He can still manipulate matter, but even a simple item takes millennia to manufacture. Over æons Hactar moves and recombines to become a dark cloud surrounding Krikkit, isolating the inhabitants. Deciding that the decision not to destroy the universe was not his to make, he uses his influence to make them build their first space ship and discover the universe; he then manipulates them into the same rage which the Armourfiends possessed, urging that they destroy all other life; Hactar has reassembled the supernova bomb, this time in working condition.
After an incredibly long and bloody galactic war, Judiciary Pag banishes Krikkit to an envelope of "Slo-Time" to be released after the rest of the universe ends. At the end of , after his scheme fails, Hactar slips the cricket-ball-shaped supernova bomb to Arthur Dent, who trips while trying to bowl it at Lord's Cricket Ground; he ends up flying over the pitch and is able to throw the bomb aside without setting it off, thus saving the universe.
Appears in:
He is played on radio first by Geoffrey McGivern, in a flashback for which McGivern is not credited during . He is then voiced by Leslie Phillips, appearing again in .
Haggunenon Underfleet Commander
The Underfleet Commander reports directly to the Haggunenon Admiral. The admiral had gone off for a quick meal at Milliways, where Ford and Zaphod attempted to steal his/her/its/their flagship. But as it had a pre-set return course, it resumed its place at the front of about a hundred thousand horribly be-weaponed black battle cruisers. But because the Haggunenons have very unstable DNA and change their shape/appearance at random and often inconvenient times, the Underfleet Commander mistakenly assumes that Zaphod and Trillian are, in fact, actually the admiral.
The Underfleet Commander only appears in , voiced by Aubrey Woods. The Haggunenons were written out of subsequent versions, as they were originally co-written with John Lloyd, although they did appear in some stage adaptations.
Haggunenons are greatly inconvenienced by their genetic instability and so have vowed to wage terrible war against all "filthy, rotten, stinking, same-lings."
A similar creature appears on the BBC TV series Red Dwarf.
There is a shapeshifting Dungeons & Dragons monster called a "hagunemnon."
Heimdall
Keeper of the gate into Asgard. Appears in .
Hig Hurtenflurst
Hig Hurtenflurst "only happens to be" the risingest young executive in the Dolmansaxlil Shoe Corporation. During , he is on Brontitall. What he is doing there is something of a mystery, as the Shoe Event Horizon was reached long ago and the survivors of the famine have long since evolved into bird people and set up home inside a fifteen-mile high statue of Arthur Dent. His foot-warriors capture Arthur Dent and three Lintilla clones, who are threatened by Hurtenflurst to be "revoked. K-I-L-L-E-D, revoked". He then proceeds to show them a film about the activities of the Dolmansaxlil Shoe Corporation, which is interrupted by Marvin, who has cut the power in order to rescue Arthur and the Lintillas.
He appeared in played by Marc Smith. He has not appeared in any versions after this.
Hillman Hunter
Hillman Hunter is an Irish property developer from Earth who has been tricked by Zaphod into moving to a planet created by Magrathea. He interviews various gods, as he is keen to employ Thor to keep the society he has created on the planet devoutly controlled. He acts as a "stereotype Paddy from a bygone era" using phrases such as Bejaysus and invoking leprechauns. He is a major character in . He has considerable problems with the Tyromancers from an alternative reality who have also settled on the planet. Like Ford Prefect, whose name derived from the Ford Prefect automobile, Hillman Hunter's name derives from an automobile sold in the United Kingdom in the 1960s. In the radio series Hexagonal Phase, Hunter was played by Ed Byrne.
Hotblack Desiato
Hotblack Desiato is the guitar keyboard player of the plutonium rock group Disaster Area, claimed to be the loudest band in the universe, and in fact the loudest noise of any kind, anywhere. So loud is this band that the audience usually listens from the safe distance of thirty seven miles away in a well-built concrete bunker. Disaster Area's lavish performances went so far as to crash a space ship into the sun to create a solar flare. Pink Floyd's lavish stage shows were the inspiration for Disaster Area. In the book he is described as being connected to a "death support system" and communicates only by supernatural means. At the time when the main characters meet him, in , Hotblack is spending a year dead "for tax reasons". This is likely a spoof of the prominent UK performers who lived outside the country as tax exiles during the 1970s due to the laws that could result in a marginal tax rate over 90% for high income earners. Such tax exiles included singers Cat Stevens, David Bowie and Shirley Bassey; members of the rock groups Pink Floyd and Bad Company; and actor Michael Caine.
The character is named after an estate agency based in Islington, with branches throughout North London. Adams said he was struggling to find a name for the character and, spotting a Hotblack Desiato sign while driving, liked the name so much he "nearly crashed the car" and eventually telephoned to ask permission to use the firm's name for a character. Apparently, the firm later received phone calls telling them they had a nerve naming their company after Adams's character.
The Disaster Area sub-plot was first heard in the LP album adaptations and later in . It replaces the Haggunenon material from . The character appears in , and his ship in . He does not have any lines (due to being technically dead), and is played by Barry Frank Warren.
The B-side of the 7-inch single of the Hitchhiker's Guide TV Series theme music featured a performance of a song entitled "Only The End of the World Again", credited to 'Disaster Area'.
Humma Kavula
Humma Kavula is a semi-insane missionary living amongst the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI, and a former space pirate. (It was presumably during his time as a pirate that he lost his legs and had them replaced with telescoping mechanical spider appendages). He wears thick glasses, which make his eyes appear normal when worn; however, when he removes the glasses, he appears to have shrunken black pits where his eyes should be. He seems to be a religious leader on that planet, preaching about the Coming of the Great White Handkerchief. Hence, his sermons end with the words "Bless You" rather than "Amen" as all the Jatravartids sneeze stimultaneously at the end of a 'prayer'. (See Jatravartids).
He also ran against Zaphod Beeblebrox in the campaign for President of the Galaxy with the campaign slogan "Don't Vote For Stupid," but lost, and has remained bitter about it ever since. In the film he is seeking the point-of-view gun to further his religion's acceptance (presumably), and he takes one of Zaphod's two heads and one of his three arms (though its removal is not shown, Zaphod says while attempting to avoid the thermonuclear missiles above Magrathea "I can't do this without my third arm") hostage to ensure his help.
While the Jatravartids were mentioned in the books, the character of Humma Kavula was created by Adams for . Quoting Robbie Stamp: "All the substantive new ideas in the movie, Humma, the Point of View Gun and the "paddle slapping sequence" on Vogsphere are brand new Douglas ideas written especially for the movie by him."
Appears in:
the 2005 film The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, played by John Malkovich.
Hurling Frootmig
Hurling Frootmig is said to be the founding editor of the Hitchhiker's Guide, who "established its fundamental principles of honesty and idealism, and went bust." Later, after much soul-searching, he re-established the Guide with its "principles of honesty and idealism and where you could stuff them both, and went on to lead the Guide to its first major commercial success."
He is mentioned in . He did not make , but was mentioned in .
Judiciary Pag
His High Judgmental Supremacy, Judiciary Pag, L.I.V.R. (the Learned, Impartial, and Very Relaxed) was the chairman of the board of Judges at the Krikkit War Crimes Trial. He privately called himself Zipo Bibrok 5 × 108 (which is five hundred million or half a billion in short-scale terminology).
It was Judiciary Pag's idea that the people of Krikkit be permanently sealed in a Slo-Time envelope, and the seal could only be broken by bringing a special Key to the Lock. When the rest of the universe had ended, the seal would be broken and Krikkit could continue a solitary existence in the universe. This judgement seemed to please everybody except the people of Krikkit themselves, but the only alternative was to face annihilation.
Pag appears to be related to Zaphod Beeblebrox; they share the same carefree and charming attitude, and Pag's real name (Zipo Bibrok 5 × 108) appears to be a mutation of Zaphod's name. (They also share the initials Z.B.) Since the Beeblebrox family lives backwards in time, Pag (despite living in the distant past) is therefore one of Zaphod's descendants.
Appears in:
He is played on radio by Rupert Degas, and appears in .
Karl Mueller
Karl Mueller operates a nightclub, Club Alpha, in New York City. He is German with a Greek mother, and was handed the running of the club by his brother Stavro Mueller, who renamed Club Alpha with his own name. He appears in , in the storyline regarding the final death of Agrajag.
Know-Nothing Bozo the Non-Wonder Dog
A dog belonging to advertiser Will Smithers which was so stupid that it was incapable of eating the right dog food on camera, even when engine oil was poured on the wrong food. It was so named because its hair stuck upright on its head in a way that resembled Ronald Reagan. It also had an adverse reaction whenever someone said the word "commies". Bozo barked at Arthur when he considered entering the Horse and Groom pub on his return to Earth in So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
Krikkiters
Ford, Arthur, Trillian and Slartibartfast meet a group of murderous Krikkiters on the surface of their planet. Away from the influence of Hactar, they are troubled by their Elders wanting to destroy the Universe as they are keen to have sporting links with the rest of the Galaxy. They appear in and the Tertiary Phase of the radio series. They're described as being white, but that's nearly all the indication of their appearance in the book series, but the cover of the CD version of the Tertiary Phase features a drawing of the robots, one of them batting a Cricket ball. On the image, they look rather like Marvin from the 2005 movie, only with longer legs, and smaller heads, including sunglasses-like eyes and antennae, like a play on their name.
Kwaltz
Kwaltz is one of the Vogons on Vogsphere, directing Jeltz's Vogon Constructor Fleet during the demolition of Earth and enforcing the galaxy's bureaucracy. He is the partner and advisor of vice-president Questular Rontok, who seems to care more about winning Zaphod's affections than retrieving the Heart of Gold. Kwaltz also leads a team of a few hundred Vogons to capture the president's kidnapper in the penultimate scene of the movie, a chase which takes them to Magrathea, where they discover and capture Marvin the Paranoid Android (not shown), then to Earth Mark II, where they shoot up Arthur Dent's house, and are finally defeated by Marvin who gives them all a lethargic and depressed nature, at least for the moment, by use of the Point-of-view gun which, oddly enough, works on non-organic life forms.
Appears in:
, voiced by Ian McNeice.
Lady Cynthia Fitzmelton
Lady Cynthia Fitzmelton is described in the original radio script as "a sort of Margaret Thatcher, Penelope Keith character." She is responsible for christening the "very splendid and worthwhile yellow bulldozer" which knocks down Arthur Dent's house in "cruddy Cottington", and it gives her "great pleasure" to make a "very splendid and worthwhile" speech immediately beforehand.
She only appears in , where she was voiced by Jo Kendall. Her "very splendid and worthwhile" lines were entirely dropped from later versions.
The Lajestic Vantrashell of Lob
The Lajestic Vantrashell of Lob is a small man with a strange hat who guards God's Final Message to His Creation, and who sells Arthur and Fenchurch a ticket to it before passing them on a scooter and imploring them to "keep to the left". Introduced by Prak in the epilogue to , he finally appears towards the end of when we also realize that he has been a regular visitor to Wonko The Sane, who describes angels with golden beards and green wings, Dr Scholl sandals, who eat nachos and do a lot of coke. He says that he runs a concession stand by the message and when Wonko says "I don't know what that means" he says "no, you don't".
Lallafa
Lallafa was an ancient poet who lived in the forests of the Long Lands of Effa. His home inspired him to write a poetic opus known as The Songs of the Long Land on pages made of dried habra leaves. His poems were discovered years after Lallafa's death, and news of them quickly spread. For centuries, the poems gave inspiration and illumination to many who would otherwise be much more unhappy, and for this they are usually considered around the Galaxy to be the greatest poetic works in existence. This is remarkable because Lallafa wrote his poems without the aid of education or correction fluid.
The latter fact attracted the attention of some correction fluid manufacturers from the Mancunian nebula. The manufacturers worked out that if they could get Lallafa to use their fluids in a variety of leafy colours in the course of his work, their companies would be as successful as the poems themselves. They therefore traveled back in time and persuaded him—in the book, by explaining the situation, with difficulty; in the radio adaptation, by beating him—to go along with their plan. The plan succeeded and Lallafa became extremely rich, but spent so much time on chat shows that he never got around to actually writing The Songs. This was solved by each week, in the past, giving Lallafa a copy of his poems, from the present, and having him write his poems again for the first time, but on the condition that he make the odd mistake and use the correction fluid.
Some argued the poems were now worthless, and set out to stop this sort of thing with the Campaign for Real Time (a play on Campaign for Real Ale), or CamTim, to keep the flow of history untampered by time travel. Slartibartfast is a member of CamTim. (The necessity for this campaign is contradicted by other events in the novels. For example, when Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect landed on primitive Earth, they decided that nothing they could do would change history. And when Agrajag diverted him to a Cathedral of Doom to try to kill him, Arthur Dent's perpetual victim said that he'd try to kill Dent even if it were a logical impossibility, Dent not having ducked a bullet yet.)
Lallafa appears in and .
Lazlar Lyricon
A customizer of starships to the rich and famous time travellers, who first appeared in , and later in and . Ford Prefect apparently believes that "the man has no shame." His trademark is an infra-pink lizard emblem.
Lig Lury, Jr
The fourth editor of the Guide, who never actually resigned from his job. He simply left one morning for lunch and never returned to his office, making all later holders of the position "Acting Editors." His old office is still preserved by the Guide employees in the hope that he will return. His desk sports a sign that reads "Missing, presumed fed."
Lintilla
Lintilla is a rather unfortunate woman who has (as of ) been cloned 578,000,000,000 times due to an accident at a Brantisvogan escort agency. While creating six clones of a wonderfully talented and attractive woman named Lintilla (at the same time another machine was creating five hundred lonely business executives, in order to keep the laws of supply and demand operating profitably), the machine got stuck in a loop and malfunctioned in such a way that it got halfway through completing each new Lintilla before it had finished the previous one. This meant that it was for a very long while impossible to turn the machine off without committing murder, despite lawyers' best efforts to argue about what murder actually was, including trying to redefine it, repronounce it, and respell it in the hope that no one would notice.
Arthur Dent encounters three of her on the planet of Brontitall, and takes a liking to (at least) one of them. He kills one of three male anti-clones, all called Allitnil (Lintilla backwards), sent by the cloning company to get her to "agree to cease to be" (although the other two of her "consummate" this legal agreement with their respective anti-clones). When Arthur leaves Zaphod, Ford, and Zarniwoop stranded with the Ruler of the Universe and his cat (at the conclusion of ), he takes one of the Lintillas with him aboard the Heart of Gold.
All Lintillas were played by the same actress: Rula Lenska. Lintilla (and her clones) appeared only in the final three episodes of the second radio series. Rula Lenska did return to the fourth and fifth radio series – she was first an uncredited "Update Voice" for the Hitchhiker's Guide itself and then played the Voice of the Bird (the new version of the Guide introduced in ). Zaphod noted in the new series that the new Guide has the same voice as "those Lintilla chicks." The footnotes of the published scripts make the connection, confirming that the bird is actually an amalgam of the Lintilla clones, the solution alluded to in the second series. Lintilla and her clones (of which at the end there are now more than 800,000,000,000 – "800 thousand million") do make a re-appearance of sorts on the Heart of Gold in an alternate ending to (which can only be heard on CD).
The Lintillas do not appear in the novels nor in the BBC television series.
The name Lintilla was reused for an adult-oriented multiple worlds talker that opened in 1994.
The scripts for the radio series make it clear that The Three Lintillas are "NOT an Italian High Wire Act, though I'm sure we don't actually need to mention this fact, only perhaps, well I don't know put it in anyway" (script for ).
Loonquawl and Phouchg
See Phouchg and Loonquawl
The Lord
The Lord is a cat, owned by The Ruler of the Universe. He might like fish and might like people singing songs to him, as the Ruler of the Universe isn't certain if people come to talk to him, or sing songs to his cat or even if the cat exists at all.
Appears in:
Lord High Sanvalvwag of Hollop
A man who never married. Had he done so, and forgotten his wife's birthday for the second year, he would have globbered. This definition of globber casts doubt on the usefulness of Ultra-Complete Maximegalon Dictionary of Every Language Ever. (Life, the Universe and Everything)
Lunkwill and Fook
Lunkwill and Fook are the two programmers chosen to receive Deep Thought's answer to the great question of Life, The Universe, and Everything! 7-1/2 million years after the day of the Great On-Turning.
Appear in:
On TV, Antony Carrick plays Lunkwill and Timothy Davies plays Fook, and they appear in .
On radio, the characters are just called First computer programmer and Second computer programmer, and appear in , and are played by Ray Hassett and Jeremy Browne respectively.
In they are merged with the characters of Frankie and Benjy Mouse. Jack Stanley plays Lunkwill and Dominique Jackson plays Fook.
Magician
Appears wandering along a beach in , but no one needs him.
Majikthise and Vroomfondel
Majikthise and Vroomfondel may (or may not) be philosophers. They quite definitely appear as representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and other Professional Thinking Persons. When the supercomputer Deep Thought is being programmed to determine the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, they declare a demarcation dispute since the search for ultimate truth is the "inalienable prerogative of your professional working thinkers". They insist on rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty, and demand Deep Thought be switched off immediately. They are disarmed when Deep Thought, already committed to its seven and a half million years' calculation, suggests that a great deal of money can be made by philosophers willing to exploit the expected media interest. It is later apparent that their distant descendants revere them as "the greatest and most truly interesting pundits the universe has ever known."
Appear in:
On radio, Majikthise was played by Jonathan Adams, and Vroomfondel was played by Jim Broadbent. In the television series (but not on The Big Read), David Leland played Majikthise and Charles McKeown played Vroomfondel.
The characters were omitted from .
The frog Litoria majikthise was named after the character Majikthise to reference this species' "vividly coloured thighs and groin."
Max Quordlepleen
Max Quordlepleen is an entertainer who hosts at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe and the Big Bang Burger Bar (or "Big Bang Burger Chef" in the original radio version). His feelings about the Universe outside of his onstage persona are unclear, but he has witnessed its end over five hundred times.
His name is derived from a phenomenon during a rocket's ascent.
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On radio, Roy Hudd played him. On television, it was Colin Jeavons.
He re-appears in the final episode of , played by Roy Hudd again.
Mo Minetti
In , it is Mo Minetti who had left, due to pregnancy, being the anchor the USAM TV breakfast show which Tricia McMillan is in New York to try out for. Apparently, she declined, surprisingly for reasons of taste, to deliver her child on the air.
Murray Bost Henson
Murray Bost Henson is "a journalist from one of those papers with small pages and big print" as Arthur Dent puts it. He is a friend of Arthur's whom Arthur phones one day to find out how he can get in touch with Wonko the Sane, and uses incredibly odd idioms in conversation, including such phrases as "my old silver tureen", "my old elephant tusk" and "my old prosthetic limb" (as terms of endearment) and "the Great Golden Spike in the sky" (referring to the death-place of old newspaper stories).
He is played in by Stephen Fry.
Old Man on the Poles
Played by Saeed Jaffrey in the old man on the poles on Hawalius, tells Arthur some old information wrapped up as news, and that everyone should have a beach house. The character appears in .
Old Thrashbarg
Old Thrashbarg first appears in , as a sort of priest on Lamuella, the planet on which Arthur becomes the Sandwich-Maker. He worships "Bob" and is often ignored by his villagers. Whenever he is questioned about Almighty Bob he merely describes him as "ineffable." No one on Lamuella knows what this means, because Thrashbarg owns the only dictionary, and it is "the ineffable will of Almighty Bob" that he keeps it to himself. Someone who sneaked into his house while he was out having a swim found that "ineffable" was defined in the dictionary as "unknowable, indescribable, unutterable, not to be known or spoken about".
In Fit the Twenty-Fifth and Fit the Twenty-Sixth of the radio series
Old Thrashbarg is voiced by Griff Rhys Jones.
Old Woman in the Cave
Played by Miriam Margolyes in , the smelly Old Woman in the Cave in the village of oracles on Hawalius provides Arthur Dent with bad olfactory stimulation and a photocopied story of her life, suggesting he live his life the opposite way so he won't end up living in a rancid cave. This occurs in .
The original, real "smelly goat" event happened during the Last Chance to See radio series, found on the Douglas Adams at the BBC CD as a "Pick of the Week".
Oolon Colluphid
Oolon Colluphid is the author of several books on religious and other philosophical topics. Colluphid's works include:Where God Went WrongSome More of God's Greatest MistakesWho Is This God Person Anyway?Well That About Wraps It Up for GodEverything You Ever Wanted To Know About Guilt But Were Too Ashamed To Ask (A play on the title of a sex manual written by Dr. David Reuben which inspired a Woody Allen film)Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Sex But Have Been Forced To Find Out (Another play on that same title)
Colluphid is also shown as the author of the book The Origins of the Universe in the first part of the Destiny of the Daleks serial of Doctor Who. The Doctor scoffs that he "got it wrong on the first line". The reference was inserted by Douglas Adams, who was at the time working as the show's script editor.
An early version of Colluphid was the character Professor Eric Von Contrick appearing in a December 1979 episode of the BBC radio series The Burkiss Way, which was based on author Erich von Däniken. "Spaceships of the Gods", "Some more of the Spaceships of the Gods", "It Shouldn't Happen to Spaceships of the Gods", were books by the fictional author who had a Gag Halfrunt-style accent and who is visited in the Adams-written sketch by the aliens to demand a cut of Von Contrick's profits.
Paul Neil Milne Johnstone
Paul Neil Milne Johnstone of Redbridge, Essex, was the writer, according to Adams, of the worst poetry in the universe. He appeared under that name in the original radio series and the first printings of the 1979 novelization (Pan Books, paperback, page 53).
The real Paul Neil Milne Johnstone (1952–2004) attended Brentwood School with Adams, and they jointly received a prize for English. At the school, Johnstone edited Broadsheet, "the Artsphere Magazine" that included mock reviews by Adams as well as Johnstone's own poetry. Johnstone won an exhibition to study at Emmanuel College, Cambridge while Adams won an exhibition to St John's College.
Johnstone achieved moderate prominence in the poetry world as an editor and festival organiser, including the 1977 Cambridge Poetry Festival. He died a few years after Adams of pancreatic failure.
After he requested the removal of his name and address, Johnstone was replaced with "Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex" (a garbled form of his name). On the 1979 ORA042 vinyl record release, his name has been made indecipherable by cutting up that part of the mastertape and reassembling it in the wrong order.
In the film version Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings has moved from Essex to Sussex. In the TV adaptation of the series, a portrait of Jennings was Adams with pigtails.
A sample of Jennings's poetry, taken from the animated readout in the TV series, is:The dead swans lay in the stagnant pool.They lay. They rotted. They turnedAround occasionally.Bits of flesh dropped off them fromTime to time.And sank into the pool's mire.They also smelt a great deal. In the TV series, Jennings is reported as living at 37 Wasp Villas, Greenbridge, Essex, GB10 1LL which is neither an actual town nor a valid postcode. The real Johnstone lived at Beehive Court in Redbridge.
Phouchg and Loonquawl
In the first novel, Phouchg and Loonquawl received Deep Thought's answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything on the day of the answer, seven and a half million years (75,000 generations) after Deep Thought had been asked the question. They were chosen at birth for this task. The name "Phouchg" may be a bastardization of the word Fuck, as his predecessor's name is Fook.
Poodoo
Poodoo is a representative of the cloning company responsible for all the Lintilla clones. He arrives on Brontitall with Varntvar The Priest on a mission to 'revoke' the three Lintillas there by marrying them to their anti-clones, each of which is named Allitnil. The marriage certificates are actually legally binding forms that make the signers agree to terminate their existence, and the unctuous Poodoo may therefore be a lawyer of some sort.
After two of the newly married couples disappear in unsmoke, Arthur shoots the third Allitnil dead and, after tying up Poodoo and Varntvar, forces them to listen to a recording of Marvin's autobiography, so as he says, "It's all over for them."
Poodoo only appears in , in which he is played by Ken Campbell.
Prak
In the epilogue of , a journalist with the Sidereal Daily Mentioner tells of Prak and then collapses into a coma.
Prak was a witness in a trial on Argabuthon where the Dwellers in the Forest were suing the Princes of the Plains and the Tribesmen of the Cold Hillsides. Prak was a messenger for Dwellers in the Forest sent to the other two parties to ask "the reason for this intolerable behaviour." He would always walk away thinking about how well-thought out the reason was, but he would always forget what it was by the time he got back. The white robots of Krikkit broke into the court room to steal the Argabuthon Sceptre of Justice, as it was part of the Wikkit Gate Key. In so doing they may have jogged a surgeon's arm, while the surgeon was injecting Prak with truth serum, resulting in too high a dose.
When the trial resumed, Prak was instructed to tell "the Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth," which he did, in its entirety. People at the scene had to flee or risk insanity as Prak told every single bit of the entire truth of the entire universe and all of its history, much of which they found ghastly. Prak recalled that many of the weird bits involved frogs or Arthur Dent.
As a result, when Arthur Dent came to visit him in search of the truth, he nearly died laughing. He never did write down anything he discovered while telling the truth, first because he could not find a pencil and then because he could not be bothered. He has therefore forgotten almost all of it, but did recall the address of God's Last Message to His Creation, which he gave to Arthur when the laughter subsided. He died afterwards, not having recovered from his laughing fit.
On radio he appears in and is voiced by Chris Langham, who had played Arthur Dent in the very first stage adaptation of the scripts of the first radio series, in 1979.
Pralite monks
Pralite monks are an order that undergo extreme mental training before taking their final vows to be locked in small metal boxes for the rest of their lives; consequently, the galaxy is full of ex-Pralite monks who leave the order just before taking their final vows. Ford visited the ex-Pralite monks to Mind Surf and learned the techniques he used to charm animals on prehistoric Earth long enough for him to kill them for food and clothing.
President Hudson
Fictional former president of the US who was publicly known to have had an affair with astrologer Gail Andrews in . One of his presidential orders was the bombing of Damascus or "Damascectomy" (the taking out of Damascus), an issue Andrews denied that she counselled him on. At the time of , Hudson had died for unknown reasons.
Princess Hooli
On the tri-d TV, Trillian Astra reports on the future wedding of Princess Hooli of Raui Alpha to Prince Gid of the Soofling Dynasty whilst Arthur is visiting Hawalius in . The seer who is showing Arthur the future news in order to demonstrate the sudden lack of need for future tellings quickly changes the channel. Arthur says that he knows her (referring to Trillian) and tells the seer to turn the channel back. The seer, thinking that Arthur was referring to the princess, replies "Look mate, if I had to stand here saying hello to everyone who came by who knew Princess Hooli, I'd need a new set of lungs!"
Mr Prosser
Mr L. Prosser is a nervous fat and shabby married 40-year-old road builder who would like to build a bypass right through Arthur Dent's house. He is unaware that he is a direct but very distant descendant of Genghis Khan which causes him to have occasional visions of Mongol hordes and a preference for fur hats and axes above the door. He unfailingly addresses Arthur as "Mr Dent."
After some negotiation with Ford Prefect (or with Arthur Dent in the radio series), he is temporarily persuaded to halt the demolition. This respite does not last because the Vogon demolish Earth.
Prosser holds the distinction of having the very first line of dialogue ever in the Hitchhiker's Guide canon, as he is the first character (not counting The Guide itself) to speak in .
Appears in:
On radio, he was played by Bill Wallis and appears in . On television, he appears in , played by Joe Melia. He is played by Steve Pemberton in the movie version. He appears in , despite not appearing in , voiced by Bruce Hyman; this Prosser exists on a parallel Earth where the cottage he wishes to demolish is the home of both Arthur Dent and Fenchurch.
Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz
The Vogon Captain in charge of overseeing the destruction of the Earth, Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz is sadistic, even by Vogon standards. When not shouting at or executing members of his own crew for insubordination, Jeltz enjoys torturing hitchhikers on board his ship by reading his poetry at them, then having them thrown out of an airlock into open space.
Physically, Jeltz is described as being unpleasant to look at, even for other Vogons. Given that Ford Prefect describes Vogons as having "as much sex appeal as a road accident", one can only imagine how much worse Jeltz must appear. This may explain his disposition.
It is revealed in that Jeltz had been hired by Gag Halfrunt to destroy the Earth. Halfrunt had been acting on behalf of a consortium of psychiatrists and the Imperial Galactic Government in order to prevent the discovery of the Ultimate Question. When Halfrunt learns that Arthur Dent escaped the planet's destruction, Jeltz is dispatched to track him down and destroy him. Jeltz is unable to complete this task, due to the intervention of Zaphod Beeblebrox the Fourth, Zaphod's great-grandfather.
In , Jeltz is once again responsible for the destruction of the Earth, this time presumably killing Arthur, Ford, Trillian, and Arthur's daughter, Random.
In , it is revealed that Jeltz did not kill Arthur, Ford, Trillian and Random. It is also revealed that he has a son called Constant Mown and that his space ship is called the Business End.
"Prostetnic Vogon" may be a title, rather than part of his name, during (), two other Prostetnic Vogons are heard from. Also, in , Gag Halfrunt refers to Jeltz as "Captain of Vogons Prostetnic" (although this may have been a play on Halfrunt's accent).
Appears in:
In the first radio series, he was played by Bill Wallis. On television, it was Martin Benson. In the third, fourth and fifth radio series, he was played by Toby Longworth, although Longworth did not receive a credit for the role during the third series. In the film, he is voiced by Richard Griffiths.
Prostetnic is a play on the word prosthetic in regard to special effects make-up. Adams was known to have a very low opinion of monsters (describing them as "cod" meaning fake looking) during his tenure as a Dr Who writer.
Questular Rontok
Questular Rontok is the Vice President of the Galaxy. This character did not appear in the radio or television series or any of the novels, being introduced in the 2005 film.
Rontok is desperately in love with Zaphod Beeblebrox, the fugitive President of the Galaxy, and he knows it, as she unsuccessfully tries to hide it. Throughout , Questular alternately tries to arrest Zaphod for stealing the Heart of Gold (even enlisting the help of the Vogons), protects his life (when endangered by Vogon blaster fire), and at one point beseeches him to just give the stolen spaceship up. Questular appears to be the "doer", performing all the real functions of the Presidency, whilst Zaphod enjoys his status as the figurehead President. After Trillian interrogates Zaphod by repeatedly zapping him with the Point-of-view gun and he learns that she is truly in love with Arthur Dent and not him, he and Questular end up together at the end of the film, Zaphod telling her "Let's trip the light fantastic, babe." Questular is also severely jealous of Trillian for obvious reasons ("She's lying. She's skinny, and she's pretty, and she's lying!"), until Trillian and Zaphod part as lovers. In the early drafts of the film the character was male, and therefore somewhat different. In a deleted scene on the DVD, Questular expresses her love for Zaphod shortly after all the Vogons become depressed.
In the 2005 movie, she is played by Anna Chancellor.
Raffle ticket woman
In , Arthur Dent and Fenchurch attempt to get to know each other in an especially grim public house near Taunton railway station, their conversation is somewhat thwarted by a woman selling raffle tickets "for Anjie who's retiring". The numbers on both the front and back of the cloakroom ticket prove highly relevant to the protagonist. She is played in the Fit the Twentieth episode of the radio series by British comedy stalwart June Whitfield.
Random Dent
Originally prophesied by her father, Arthur Dent, after he hears a Vogon for the first time ("I wish I had a daughter so I could forbid her to marry one."), a disillusioned, teenaged Random Frequent Flyer Dent (the in-vitro progeny with Trillian Astra) is found in . The line is followed up in and , the 2005 radio series adaptation of this book. The new Poe-reminiscent black bird version of the Guide manipulates her (as it has the Grebulons and Ford Prefect), so she is indirectly responsible for the destruction of all possible Earths.
Early in , Arthur travels from planet to planet by donating to "DNA banks", finding that when he makes these deposits, he can travel first class. Trillian, wishing to have a child, finds some of his sperm in a DNA bank (which was very easy, since he was the only donor of the same species) and uses it to conceive Random.
Shortly before the events of , Random is kept in a dream sequence and frozen along with all the other main characters thanks to her telling the Guide Mark II to safeguard their lives. In her dream she is Galactic President and highly successful (having been rescued from Earth by a suspiciously girlish troop of unicorns) and marries a flaybooz (a large, guinea-pig-like creature named Fertle) to annoy her mother. When the Guides batteries run out, she is released from her dream with all the other main characters. The events of the book then occur. Strangely, she seems affected by her dream sequence and often laments the loss of her position and her 'husband'. By the end of the book, Arthur proposes to go with her to find a good university for her to attend.
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Quintessential Phase
In , adapted from , she is played by Samantha Béart.
Receptionists
New York Hotel receptionist
In Tricia gets garbled messages via the receptionist from Gail Andrews. Tricia interprets the message "Not happy," as meaning Gail Andrews wasn't happy with their interview.
Megadodo receptionist
Appearing in and the large, pink-winged, insectoid receptionist in the Megadodo offices points Zaphod using a petulant tentacle towards Zarniwoop's office, the one with a whole electronic universe in it, and is also bugged by Marvin who just wants someone to talk to. In , he directs Zaphod towards Zarniwoop's new office, having put on the old hippy act.
Reg Nullify Reg Nullify leads the "Cataclysmic Combo" band at Milliways. His band—from —performed on the LP album/cassette re-recording of and , released as The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The role was played by Graham de Wilde. In 1980 the song was also released as a track on an EP (Original Records ABO 5).
Rob McKenna
Described by the scientific community in as a "Quasi Supernormal Incremental Precipitation Inducer," Rob McKenna is an ordinary lorry driver who can never get away from rain and he has a log-book showing that it has rained on him every day, anywhere that he has ever been, to prove it. Arthur suggests that he could show the diary to someone, which Rob does, making the media deem him a 'Rain God' (something which he actually is) for the clouds want "to be near him, to love him, to cherish him and to water him". This windfall gives him a lucrative career, taking money from resorts and similar places in exchange for not going there. Rob McKenna is, in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, a "miserable bastard and he knew it because he'd had a lot of people point it out to him...he disliked...everyone." In the book, he is shown only twice, first when he splashes Arthur Dent, who is hitchhiking in a normal environment, on the side of a desolate road in England, for the first time on record. Second when Arthur meets him in a café, in "Thundercloud Corner," Rob McKenna's personal spot, which most people wouldn't venture near. But McKenna is mentioned throughout the book, especially when he is hailed by the media as a "Rain God," though not in those terms. In the radio show, however, he picks Arthur up instead of ignoring him, and meets him again later, after he acquired his fame. He then has a much more positive attitude towards Life, the Universe, and Everything, and is thrilled to meet Arthur again. He explains, as the narrator does in the book, that "Quasi Supernormal Incremental Precipitation Inducer" means, in layman's terms, a Rain God, but the media couldn't call him simply that, because it would suggest that the ordinary people knew something they didn't.
He appears in , and and is played by Bill Paterson, who also played one of the Arcturan Megafreighter crew in .
Rob McKenna is assumed to be English because that is where he is always driving round, trying to escape the elements, and where, thanks to the summer resorts who've heard of him, he will be confined until his death in the Quintissential Phase; but in the Quandary Phase, he has a Scottish-sounding voice.
Roosta Roosta is a hitchhiker and researcher for the Guide, whom Ford Prefect knows at least in passing and holds in some regard (Ford describes him as "a frood who really knows where his towel is"). He carries a special towel infused with nutrients, wheat germ, barbecue sauce, and antidepressants, which can be obtained by sucking on different areas. The last two of these, he explains, are for use when the taste of the first two sickens or depresses him. He saves Zaphod Beeblebrox from a horrible death in the offices of the Guide (by taking him into the artificial universe in Zarniwoop's office), and is then kidnapped along with Zaphod and the left-hand tower of the Guide building by a squadron of Frogstar Fighters. In the radio series, he serves no other purpose than to provide conversation (and deliver the line "here Zaphod, suck this!") while the pair are travelling to the Frogstar. However, in the books, he instructs Zaphod to leave the office through the window instead of the door after the building lands. This allows Zaphod to remain in Zarniwoop's universe and survive the Total Perspective Vortex.
In , Roosta is a much more officious, standoffish and antagonistic character than he appears in the radio series.
Appears in:
and .
On radio, he was voiced by Alan Ford.
The Ruler of the Universe The Ruler of the Universe is a man living in a small shack on a world that can only be reached with a key to an improbability field or use of an Infinite Improbability Drive. He does not want to rule the universe and tries not to whenever possible, and therefore is the ideal candidate for the job. He has an odd, solipsistic view of reality: he lives alone with his cat, which he has named 'The Lord' even though he is not certain of its existence. He has a very dim view of the past, and he only believes in what he senses with his eyes and ears (and doesn't seem too certain of that, either): anything else is hearsay, so when executive-types visit to ask him what he thinks about certain matters, such as wars and the like, he tells them how he feels without considering consequences. As part of his refusal to accept that anything is true, or simply as another oddity, "He talked to his table for a week to see how it would react." He does sometimes admit that some things may be more likely than others – e.g., that he might like a glass of whisky, which the visitors leave for him.
In the radio adaptation of , Ford also meets Zaphod in the accounting department of the new Guide offices. Zaphod describes being bored by a man in a shack and his cat for over a year.
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Referenced in:
He was voiced on radio by Stephen Moore (in the original Radio Times listing he was announced as being played by Ron Hate – an anagram of "A.N. Other" or possibly "No Earth" – because the show was so far behind schedule that the role had not been cast when the magazine went to print).
Russell Russell is Fenchurch's burly, blonde-moustached, blow-dried brother. He picks up Arthur Dent in his car after Arthur arrives on Earth at the beginning of . Arthur and Russell take an instant dislike to each other. This is also the first time Arthur meets Fenchurch, his lover and co-flyer to be – albeit she is asleep or in a comatose/fugue state and only utters one word – "This" – then lapses back into wherever she is. Fenchurch also doesn't like Russell – he calls her "Fenny" which she dislikes intensely. He also tries to simplify her problems so he can explain and understand them better (for example, he tells Arthur that Fenchurch believes herself to be a hedgehog).
He first appeared in , and when this was adapted to radio appears in , where he is played by Rupert Degas.
Safety and Civil Reassurance Administration Officials
In the story "Young Zaphod Plays it Safe", a young Zaphod visits the wreck of the Starship Billion Year Bunker that has crashed on the planet with the best lobsters in the Western Galaxy. He is accompanied by two Officials from the Safety and Civil Reassurance Administration and an empty spacesuit, as they search for aorist rods and a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Designer Person (babbling gently about a shining city on a hill) who it turns out has escaped to Earth. The Officials declare the planet ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha (Earth) must be made "perfectly safe".
Sheila Steafel
Whilst asleep in a cave on prehistoric Earth, Arthur Dent dreams of visiting comedian Sheila Steafel on the radio show Steafel Plus on 4 August 1982. Arthur, in his dressing gown, talks of missing Mars Bars, various types of tea, Radio 4's News Quiz, chat shows, The Archers and Just a Minute. "There is nothing quite like Kenneth Williams in the entire galaxy, I've looked!" Space, he says, is "staggering, bewilderingly dull": there is so much of it and so little in it, "it sometimes reminds me of The Observer".
Adams wrote this segment specifically for Steafel's show, and Simon Jones appeared in character as Arthur Dent. Steafel can be regarded as a canonical Hitchhiker's character.
Shooty and Bang Bang Shooty and Bang Bang are Blagulon galactic policemen. They pursue Zaphod Beeblebrox to the planet of Magrathea, whereupon they proceed to shoot at him. In the radio and television series this results in a hyperspatial field generator exploding and throwing Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect and Zaphod forwards in time to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. In the books, Arthur, Ford and Zaphod are saved from certain death when Marvin talks to the cops' spaceship, which subsequently becomes so depressed it commits suicide, disabling the cops' life support units and rendering them unable to breathe as they were described as being "methane breathers." They claim to be well balanced and caring, while gratuitously shooting everything in sight. Shooty writes novels (in crayon), and Bang Bang agonizes for hours to his girlfriend about gratuitously shooting everything in sight.
Bang Bang was played on radio by Ray Hassett and on television by Marc Smith. Shooty was played on radio by Jim Broadbent and on television by Matt Zimmerman.
In the Illustrated Guide to the Galaxy, the pair are played by Douglas Adams and Ed Victor (his literary agent).
The characters are never named in dialogue or in the novels, but are named in the original radio series scripts. The script notes describe how the pair were written as a parody of American cop show characters, particularly Starsky and Hutch.
Six Men
In their six starships, the Six Men are the only people who have, as far as anyone is aware, the key to the improbability field that locks away The Ruler of the Universe. This occurs in and .
Slartibartfast
Slartibartfast is a Magrathean, and a designer of planets. By the third novel, he has joined the Campaign for Real Time and convinces the main characters to join him to attempting to save the Galaxy from murderous robots.
Sperm Whale
A sperm whale called suddenly and instantly into existence by the Heart of Golds improbability drive, above the planet Magrathea alongside Agrajag (as a bowl of petunias), in place of two thermonuclear missiles that were targeting the ship prior. The whale has an existential life of discovery which lasts a minute before it hits the ground, leaving a large crater and whale remains. It appears in , , the movie, and . Voiced by Stephen Moore in the radio and TV series, and by Bill Bailey in the feature film.
Stavro Mueller
Ran Club Alpha in New York, visited by Tricia McMillan in . Stavro opens a second club in called Club Beta, which is where Arthur Dent narrowly escapes death from a blaster shot by his daughter Random Dent and the shot hits Agrajag who proclaims that Arthur keeps killing him in Life, the Universe and Everything. We are told that he was a Greek with a German father and has handed Club Alpha over to his brother Karl Mueller so Stavro can open a new club in London. In Stavro is an only child.
Strinder the Tool Maker
As Arthur is regarded as The Sandwichmaker from Bob on the remote iron-age planet of Lamuella, Strinder makes knives to cut the Perfectly Normal Beast for his sarnies. From and .
Sulijoo
Another friend of Disaster Area's Hotblack Desiato, who Ford says agreed with him that Disaster Area was going to make Hotblack a star. Appears in .
Thor
Thor, a figure from Norse mythology, appears at Milliways, and is mentioned in , , and .
He next appears in , at a party, where he is chatting up Trillian. Arthur tricks him into stepping out of the (flying) building by challenging him to a fight. In the radio adaptation of this he appears in , where he is played by Dominic Hawksley. Hawksley reprises the role in the radio adaptation of , , despite not appearing in that book. Two other characters from the Restaurant – Max Quordlepleen and Zarquon – also appear.
Thor is a major character in , where he fights Wowbagger and protects the humans from Zaphod's dodgy weapons.
Thor also appears in the Dirk Gently novel and radio series The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.
Tribesmen of the Cold Hillsides
These tribesmen fought with (in the epilogue of ) the Princes of the Plains in the land of the Dwellers in the Forest, to the detriment of the latter, for a really good reason, but Prak cannot remember why.
Trin Tragula Trin Tragula was a speculative philosopher who invented the Total Perspective Vortex basically in order to annoy his wife. His wife thought he was an idiot who needed to "have some sense of proportion", exhorting her view frequently. When he attached his wife to the Total Perspective Vortex, the shock of seeing herself in relation to the rest of the universe instantly annihilated her brain. Although he was horrified by this, Trin Tragula found some satisfaction in discovering that the one thing that a person cannot afford to have in a universe this size is a sense of proportion.
Varntvar The Priest
He has only four lines in the programme, accompanying Poodoo and the Allitnils in the conspiracy to destroy Lintilla's clones. Varntvar is eventually forced to listen to a tape of Marvin's autobiography.
He appears only in , in which he is played by Geoffrey McGivern.
Veet Voojagig Veet Voojagig' is described as "a quiet, young student at the University of Maximegalon", who initially studied ancient philology, transformational ethics and the Wave Harmonic Theory of Historical Perception. Then, after drinking some Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters with Zaphod Beeblebrox, he became obsessed with the problem of what happens to all the biros he'd bought over the years which had somehow disappeared. Voojagig claimed to have discovered the solution that they disappear to a world of their own, and claimed further to have worked on that world, working for a family of cheap green retractables. The character was described as ending up in "tax exile" – and may have had a hand in "Zaphod Beeblebrox's highly profitable second-hand [pen] business." Also of note that when others visited the planet where Veet Voojagig claimed to have lived, all they found was a small asteroid inhabited by "a strange old man who repeatedly claimed that nothing was true, though he was later found to be lying."
Veet Voojagig appears in and is mentioned in .
Vroomfondel and Majikthise See Majikthise and Vroomfondel
War Command Krikkiters
Zaphod overheard the two War Command Krikkiters in the Robot War Zones, discussing the lassitude of the Krikkit War Robots, saying The war, sir, it seems to be getting them down. They just seem to get a little tired and a little grim ... and then they sulk. In ().
Will Smithers
Owner of a grey Porsche 928S (which Rob McKenna has been blocking for 20 miles) with a sticker that reads "My other car is also a Porsche", Will soaks Arthur Dent (and fails to give him a lift) when he is hitchhiking back on Earth at the beginning of . Will works in advertising and drinks in Arthur's local pub, the Horse and Groom and is owner of Know-Nothing Bozo the Non-Wonder Dog.
The Wise Old Bird
The Wise Old Bird is the leader of the Bird People of Brontitall. He does not like saying the word "shoe", as he and the bird people consider it unspeakable. The Bird People live in the right ear of a fifteen-mile-high statue of Arthur Dent, constructed by their ancestors.
The "wise old bird" is a phrase which features in the nursery rhyme A Wise Old Owl
A wise old owl lived in an oak;
The more he saw the less he spoke;
The less he spoke the more he heard.
Why can't we all be like that wise old bird?
The Wise Old Bird appeared in . He was voiced by John Le Mesurier who was originally intended to play the character of Slartibartfast.
Werdle Sneng
Werdle Sneng, in , has a book out, Bath Sheets in Space which is found adorning contemporary hot beverage tables, as it is far too large for anyone's pocket, fashionable or otherwise.
Wonko the Sane
John Watson aka Wonko the Sane lives in coastal California with his wife, Arcane Jill Watson, in a house called The Outside of the Asylum (which features interior features on its outside and exterior on its inside). When Wonko saw instructions on how to use a toothpick on a packet of toothpicks, he became convinced that the world had gone crazy and so built the house as an asylum for it, hence the reversal of the interior and exterior. Arthur and Fenchurch pay Wonko a visit and learn that like both of them, he had also received a fishbowl from the dolphins (having been a marine biologist and close to them). He also claims to have seen angels with golden beards, green wings and Dr Scholl sandals, who drive little scooters, do a lot of coke and are very wonderful about a whole range of things. Arthur and Fenchurch discover the truth behind this after they have seen God's Last Message to His Creation.
John Watson appears in . In the radio series, he is played by Christian Slater.
Wowbagger, the Infinitely Prolonged
In contrast to most other immortals, Bowerick Wowbagger was not born one, but became immortal due to an accident with "an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch, and a pair of rubber bands", an event which no-one has been able to replicate without ending up looking rather silly or dead (or both). Unlike other immortals, whom he calls "a load of serene bastards", he doesn't cope very well with his infinite life, having not been born into it and thus lacking the innate ability to handle it. Finding something to do on Sunday afternoons causes him particular difficulties. Eventually he comes up with a plan to keep himself busy: he will insult every single living being in the universe – in alphabetical order. He appears in , while insulting Arthur Dent with the phrase, "You're a jerk, a complete arsehole" (in the US changed to "...complete kneebiter"). Later, after Arthur escapes prehistoric Earth, Wowbagger shows up again in the present, but when he sees Arthur he says, "I've done you before, haven't I?" After Arthur, his next planned victim is A-Rth-Urp-Hil-Ipdenu, a slug he intends to call "a brainless prat." In , one Arthur Philip Deodat is also a victim of Wowbagger, during the Krikkit Robot attack on Lord's Cricket Ground.
Wowbagger makes a return in in his ship, the Tanngrisnir where he falls in love with Trillian, fights with Thor (during which he loses his immortality, but survives) and calls Zaphod "a fat arse".
Wowbagger is also present in "The Private Life of Genghis Khan", where he insults Genghis Khan, so that he "stormed into Europe in such a rage that he almost forgot to burn down Asia before he left."
In the new radio series, he is voiced by Toby Longworth. In , he finally reaches the end of his quest by insulting the Great Prophet Zarquon, who revokes Wowbagger's immortality.
Appears in:
the short story "The Private Life of Genghis Khan", published in The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book
Cultural reference:
Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged was the inspiration for an insult generation program of the same name, originally available on Atari ST computers and later rewritten for Windows-based systems. Since early 2013 its support site has also incorporated the insult functionality, at which moment the software got a "no longer supported" status.
Yooden Vranx
Yooden Vranx is the late former President of the Galaxy, the direct predecessor to Zaphod Beeblebrox. Just before his death, Yooden came to see Zaphod and presented his idea to steal the Heart of Gold. Following Yooden's suggestion, Zaphod locked out a section in each of his own brains so that no one could figure out why he ran for the presidency.
Zaphod and Ford Prefect's first encounter with Yooden occurred when they were children on Betelgeuse and Yooden was a ship's captain. Zaphod had bet Ford that he could raid a heavily fortified Arcturan megafreighter and took Ford along for the attempt, using a souped-up trijet scooter. They successfully boarded the ship (captained by Yooden), stormed the bridge with toy pistols, and demanded conkers. Yooden gave them conkers, food, booze, and various other items before teleporting them to the maximum-security wing of the Betelgeuse state prison.
Zaphod Beeblebrox the Fourth
Zaphod Beeblebrox's father's name was Zaphod Beeblebrox the Second, and Zaphod's grandfather was called Zaphod Beeblebrox the Third. This was due to an "accident with a contraceptive and a time machine".
The great-grandfather of Zaphod Beeblebrox, Zaphod Beeblebrox the Fourth is one of two active characters in books who are dead (see also: Hotblack Desiato). When Arthur Dent inadvertently freezes the systems on board Heart of Gold at the same moment Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz attacks, the younger Zaphod holds a séance to contact Zaphod the Fourth.
Zaphod the Fourth berates his great-grandchild for being generally self-absorbed and learns of the ship's imminent destruction. He stops time so he can continue deriding Zaphod, who tries (rather weakly) to defend his life. Zaphod the Fourth saves the ship and crew to keep his great-grandchild and his "modern friends" from joining him in the afterlife and thereby ruining the experience.
When he learns that the ship had seized up to solve the dilemma of either making tea (in ) or figuring out why Arthur would want dried leaves in water (), he solves these problems before leaving by either leaving a pot of tea in the Nutri-Matic Drink Synthesizer or by explaining to Eddie that "he's an ignorant monkey who doesn't know better", respectively. In the book Z.B. the Fourth approves of the tying up of all computer resources to make tea – unlike everyone else present on the Heart of Gold at the time, including Arthur who originally made the request of Eddie.
As a final note, Zaphod explains that his great-grandfather is "the Fourth" due to an accident with a contraceptive and a time machine. Zaphod the Fourth, therefore, bitterly refers to his great-grandson as "Zaphod Beeblebrox the Nothingth" (Zaphod tries to counter this by referring to himself as "the First").
Appears in:
He was voiced on radio by Richard Goolden.
Zarniwoop (Vann Harl)
Zarniwoop Vann Harl works in the offices of the Guide, on Ursa Minor Beta.
He appears in , , , and .
When Zaphod travels to Ursa Minor Beta to meet him, he is informed that Zarniwoop is unavailable, and too cool, to see him right now. He is in his office, but he's on an intergalactic cruise.
Zaphod subsequently discovers that Zarniwoop's intergalactic cruise ship has spent 900 years on Brontitall (in ), or Frogstar B (in ), waiting for delivery of a complement of small lemon-soaked paper napkins, and every single passenger has aged considerably despite enforced hibernation. Only one person has not aged: Zarniwoop, who was not a passenger, but who hid himself on the spaceship. Zaphod subsequently learns that before he sealed part of his own brain, he was collaborating with Zarniwoop to find out who rules the universe – this being Zarniwoop's obsession. In the books, Zarniwoop is marooned on The Ruler of the Universe's planet by Zaphod et al. and is stuck outside the only shelter for weeks in driving rain, because The Ruler is unsure as to whether Zarniwoop's desperate thumping on the door is real or not. At the end of the second radio series, he is similarly marooned, but this time by Arthur, with Ford Prefect and Zaphod Beeblebrox for company.
In the Quintessential Phase radio series, Zarniwoop is revealed to be the same person as character Vann Harl (Zarniwoop is his first name), and a Vogon in disguise. He has escaped being left on the desolate planet and is masterminding the Guide's new all-powerful format.
On the radio, Zarniwoop Vann Harl is voiced by Jonathan Pryce. His casting was accidental – he had been hired to play a different role (The Ruler of the Universe) whose lines had apparently not been written in time. However, he was happy to return for the final series, at which point a lot more was revealed about his character – much of it appropriately sinister, since Pryce had then become well known for playing villains.
Zarquon
Zarquon is a legendary prophet. He is worshipped by a small group visiting The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and is old, bearded, robed, wreathed in light, has starry eyes and a crown of gold. His name is frequently invoked as a curse, specifically a substitute for "God" or "fuck", such as "Holy Zarquon's singing fish" and "for Zark's sake" in the first meaning, and "you zarking frood" and "zarking fardwarks" (meaning "fucking hell") in the second meaning.
It is only on the visit to Milliways that Zarquon does indeed appear – his overdue second coming – moments before the Universe ends (His last words are "How are we doing for time?"). The host Max claims that he had done the show "over five hundred times" and "nothing like this had ever happened before".
He appears in , voiced by Anthony Sharp, in the book and in is played by Colin Bennett.
He has a final brief cameo in played by William Franklyn.
Zem
Zem is an affable, yet quite staggeringly stupid, swamp dwelling mattress. The pocket-sprung lifeform flollops, willomies and glurries around Sqornshellous Zeta and tries his best to cheer up Marvin the Paranoid Android, who became stranded on the planet after having one arm welded to his side and one leg replaced by a steel pillar. Because of his limited intellect he has the same conversation with Marvin every day until the android leaves. After attempting to make conversation about the weather (Marvin: "The dew has fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning... if I had teeth I would grit them at this point"), Marvin's life story, and the (formerly thriving) economy of Sqornshellous itself, Zem offers that Marvin should be more mattresslike in his outlook. Zem is the sole witness to Marvin's abduction by the Krikkit war robots.
Note: "Zem" is the name of all Sqornshellous Zeta mattresses; as Zem himself puts it, "Some of us are killed, [i.e. taken away to be dried and slept on] but all of us are called Zem, so we never know which and globbering is thus kept to a minimum." He appears in
On radio, he is voiced by Andy Taylor.
See also
Phrases from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy cast lists
References
Bibliography
External links
Wowbagger.com – a tribute page to Douglas Adams and his character that includes a random insult generator applet and software.
Lists of literary characters
Lists of minor fictional characters
Character
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy characters
sv:Liftarens guide till galaxen#Karaktärer |
10910742 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark%20Napier%20%28artist%29 | Mark Napier (artist) | Mark Napier is an early adopter of the web and a pioneer of digital and Internet art (net.art) in the United States, known for creating interactive online artwork that challenges traditional definitions of art. He uses code as an expressive form, and the Internet as his exhibition space and laboratory.
Napier developed his first web-based applications for financial data in 1996. He is the author of his own website,potatoland.org, his online studio where many of his net artworks can be found, such as Shredder 1.0, net.flag, Riot, etc.
Personal life
Mark Napier was born in 1961 in Springfield, New Jersey. Napier lives and works in New York city. Currently, he is a consultant for a new personal finance company.
Education
Mark Napier graduated in 1984 with a bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from Syracuse University.
Life and work
Trained as a painter, Napier worked as a self-taught programmer in New York's financial markets until 1995, when a friend introduced him to the web. With Levi Asher, Napier collaborated on his first website ("Chicken Wire Mother") and began several experiments with hypertext in which he explored juxtaposing meanings and pop culture symbols. In The Distorted Barbie site, Napier created a family of Photoshopped Barbie also-rans that riffed on the "sacred cash-cow" status of the capitalist icon. Mattel was not amused and threatened Napier with a cease-and-desist letter, which prompted a wholesale copying of the site by enraged fans.
In 1997, shortly after the Distorted Barbie episode, Napier opened potatoland.org, an online studio for interactive work where he explored software as an art medium with such pieces as Digital Landfill and Internet shredder 1.0 (1998). Both pieces were included in the seminal "net_condition" show at ZKM in Karlsruhe and attracted critical attention: Shredder was shown at Ars Electronica and Digital Landfill was written up in the Village Voice. Over the next five years Napier explored the networked software environment, creating work that challenged the definition of the art object. The salient features of these pieces: 1) The artwork can be altered by the viewer/visitor, 2) it responds to actions from the viewer/visitor and 3) typically relies on viewer/visitor actions to enact the work. The work can change, possibly unpredictably, over time, and often appropriates other network property to use as raw material, e.g., websites, flags, images. The art is "massively public": it is accessible to and can be altered by anybody with access to the network.
These pieces exist in part as performances, in part as places that a viewer visits, in part as compositions, like music, that unfold differently when played under different circumstances. The overriding experience is that the art object is disembodied, existing in many places at once, with many authors contributing to the piece, with many appearances, over time, with no clear end point. The artwork is in the algorithm, the process, which manifests itself in an unending series of appearances on the screen.
During this time Napier produced Riot, an alternative browser shown in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, Feed, commissioned by SFMOMA and shown in the "010101" show at SFMOMA (2001), and net.flag, commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum. In 2002 net.flag and John Simon's Unfolding Object became the first network-based artworks to be acquired by a major museum.
These pieces turn the structure of the software/network environment inside out, hacking the inner workings of virtual space, and often collide physical metaphors with the insolidity of the net environment, i.e. shredding (Shredder), decaying (Digital Landfill), breaking down neighborhoods (Riot), creating a flag (net.flag). By hacking the http protocol he turns the web into an abstract expressionist painting or a meditative color field. Matt Mirapaul writing in the New York Times described Feed as "a digital action painting, albeit with actual action." Napier has said, he is influenced by Jackson Pollock, he admires how he used the material, the way "he explored paint in its most raw form, without disguising it." In Shredder he wanted to use the web as raw material, so the code, HTML, text, images, and colors, would become a visual aesthetic in their own right. Cy Twombly has also influenced him as well, for the "chaotic, accidental, seemingly unplanned quality of his work."
This repurposing of the matter of the web continues in Black and White (2003), a transitional piece in which Napier reads the text of the Old Testament, New Testament and Koran, as a stream of zeroes and ones, then treats the stream of binary data as two forces that drive a black and white line on the screen. The lines are propelled by the 0 and 1 values from the data, and are mutually attracted to one another, creating a swirling, orbiting dance as the black and white points seek equilibrium. The Black and White algorithm translates writing from a form that is meaningful to human beings into a form that is equally precise, but that can only be understood as a gestalt: a moment of insight that points to experiences that cannot be transcribed into text.
In the period following 2003, Napier explored a more private side of software, making meditative pieces and drawing on the history of painting for inspiration. In three solo shows at bitforms gallery in Manhattan, Napier leaves the browser and moves towards a more tactile interactivity, showing work that is graphically rich and minimally interactive. Still addressing the expression of power in the global network, Napier turns to the Empire State Building as a symbol of nationalism, military and economic might. By transliterating the monument into software, Napier creates a contradiction: a soft, malleable, bouncing skyscraper. Flexible where the original is rigid, small where the original is huge, at once delicate and unbreakable, Napier's skyscraper collides the worlds of steel with the world of software, and reveals the anxiety of transitional time.
These pieces, with names like KingKong, Cyclops Birth and Smoke, deal with the expression of power in the age of information. The seeming permanence of steel, the formative material of the Industrial Revolution, appears almost quaint as we navigate an environment that is increasingly made of electricity, magnetism and light.
As they comment on the condition of human media in transition, these pieces also upset the conventions of visual art, long dominated by permanent unique objects. By creating virtual "objects" Napier's work exists in a space that is visible, yet forever just out of reach. These objects teeter on the edge of solidity and tempt the viewer to freeze them, hold them, to return them to the familiar and comfortably solid world.
In 2013 Napier created an android app(Kaarme Scholarship Search) that allowed individuals to search for both college and scholarships. This app gives high-school students a LinkedIn like site where they can network with colleges, counselors and find the resources they need to get into college. This project was the company's first step into mobile apps, a critical technology for the high-school demographic.
A recipient of grants from Creative Capital, NYFA, and the Greenwall Foundation, Napier has also been commissioned to create artwork for SFMOMA, the Whitney Museum, and the Guggenheim. Napier.s work has also been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou, PS1, the Walker Arts Center, Ars Electronica, The Kitchen, Kunstlerhaus Vienna, Transmediale, Bard College, the Princeton Art Museum, ASCII Digital Festival, bitforms gallery in Seoul, and la Villette in Paris among many others.
Notable projects
The Distorted Barbie (1996)
Digital Landfill (1998)
Shredder 1.0 (1998)
Riot (1999)
©Bots (2000)
net.flag (2002)
Black and White (2003)
Kaarme Scholarship Search (2013)
Awards and honors
2007 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Computer Arts
2002 Creative Capital grant
2001 Nominated for a Webby Award in the Arts category
2001 New York Foundation for the Arts, fellowship in Computer Arts
2001 Greenwall Foundation grant for “Point-to-Point”
2000 Fraunhofer Society prize for “Point-to-Point”
1999 The Shredder awarded honorable mention by Ars Electronica 99.
1998 Digital Landfill receives first prize in ASCII Digital 99 festival
References
Mark Napier's official website
Interview with Mark Napier by Tilman Baumgaertel
Interview with Mark Napier by Jon Ippolito, January 2002
Interview with Mark Napier by Andreas Broegger
010101: Art in Technological Times (catalog), pp. 112–113
Tilman Baumgartel, net.art 2.0, Kunst Nurnberg, pp. 182–191
Christiane Paul, Digital Art, Thames & Hudson Ltd
Ebon Fisher, Wigglism Leonardo Journal 40, No. I, p. 40
New Media Art by Mark Tribe and Reena Jana, Taschen p. 70
From Steel to Software by Lauren Cornell,
Lieser, Wolf. Digital Art''. Langenscheidt: h.f. ullmann. 2009 pp. 46–49
Interview of Mark Napier by Kristine Feeks,Spring 2001
Mark Napier's official website biography
External links
Napier's website, featuring some of his artwork
Napier's earlier website, featuring his controversial Barbie pieces
A Harvard page discussing the legal standpoints of the Barbie controversy
Thomas Dreher: Tomatoland (Napier) (in German)
Thomas Dreher: History of Computer Art, chap. VI.3.3 Browser Art with a wider explanation of Mark Napier´s "The Shredder" (1998).
American digital artists
1961 births
Living people
Artists from Newark, New Jersey
Artists from New York (state)
Net.artists
Syracuse University alumni |
1966364 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperCalc | SuperCalc | SuperCalc is a CP/M-80 spreadsheet application published by Sorcim in 1980.
History
VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet program but its release for the CP/M operating system ran only on the HP-125, Sharp MZ80, and the Sony SMC-70. SuperCalc was created to fill that void and market opportunity. Alongside WordStar, it was one of the CP/M applications bundled with the Osborne 1 portable computer. It quickly became popular and was ported to MS-DOS in 1982.
An improvement over VisiCalc (though using much the same command structure using the slash key), SuperCalc was one of the first spreadsheet programs capable of iteratively solving circular references (cells that depend on each other's results). It would be over 10 years after the introduction of SuperCalc before this feature was implemented in Microsoft Excel, although in Lotus 1-2-3, manual programming of iterative logic could also be used to solve this issue. According to the SuperCalc product manager, iterative calculations were added when Sorcim changed from binary-coded decimal to binary math. Since the precision of the two math packages was different, some IF statements resolved differently, and iterative calculations helped solve this problem.
Versions of SuperCalc were later released for the Apple II, for PCs running MS-DOS, and, after Sorcim was bought by CA Technologies (CA) in 1985, for Microsoft Windows (under the name CA-SuperCalc). SuperCalc was CA Technologies' first personal computer product. The MS-DOS versions were more popular with many users than the market-leading Lotus 1-2-3, because it was distributed without copy protection, as well as being priced lower.
By the release of version 3 in March 1987, a million users were claimed. New versions were published into the early 1990s, after which Microsoft Excel dominated the spreadsheet market.
In 1993, the Ministry of Railway of Russia signed an agreement with CA Technologies after a Russian employee illegally used SuperCalc for government purposes.
Versions
1980: SuperCalc
SuperCalc 2, which featured a novelty: Split screen with formulas on one side, and graphs on the other
1986: SuperCalc 4, evaluated #2 on the spreadsheets market after Excel, with introduction of automatic construction of macros
1989: SuperCalc 5
References
External links
SuperCalc 1.00 running on an IBM PC Model 5150 at the System Source Computer Museum.
Spreadsheet software
Microcomputer software
CP/M software
DOS software
Presentation software for Windows
1980 software |
5368718 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc%20Maiffret | Marc Maiffret | Marc Maiffret is the Chief Technology Officer at BeyondTrust, a security and compliance management company. Maiffret joined BeyondTrust by way of their acquisition of eEye Digital Security, which he co-founded in 1998 along with Firas Bushnaq. Maiffret created one of the first Vulnerability Management and Web Application Firewall products, which to date, have been deployed worldwide and won numerous product awards. Maiffret is credited with discovering some of the first major vulnerability discoveries in Microsoft software and leads BeyondTrust's Advanced Research Labs, responsible for identifying new trends in enterprise security for the benefit of the BeyondTrust product roadmap. Maiffret left eEye for a three-year period, during which he served as Chief Security Architect at FireEye. He returned to eEye in July 2010.
During his brief time away from eEye, Maiffret also founded Invenio Security, which he eventually merged with veteran consulting firm The DigiTrust Group. At DigiTrust, Maiffret managed the company's Professional Services division, including network security consulting and managed security services. Maiffret is also responsible for helping expand the firm's internal research and development efforts.
Maiffret is known for running eEye's top security research team for nearly 10 years and at present, as well as discovering some critical Microsoft security vulnerabilities, such as Code Red.
Maiffret has accepted three invitations to testify before the United States Congress on matters of national cybersecurity and critical security threats posed to both public and private infrastructures. He was named one of People (magazine) Magazine's 30 People Under 30 and has been featured for cover stories in Details, the Los Angeles Times, Entrepreneur magazine, and USA Today in addition to numerous television appearances. Maiffret was featured in MTV's True Life: I'm a Hacker (October 1999). Marc was a guest speaker on episode 91 of Security Now, with Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson. Influential in his industry, Marc has spoken at a variety of conferences (including ISSA Los Angeles and InfoSec 2011) and has been featured in several publications including CNN, Fox News, Security Week, SC Magazine, PC World, and Computer World.
Marc was 'Chameleon' in the hacking group 'Rhino9'.
Marc was also known as 'sn1per' in the hacking group No|d.
On August 22, 2013, Yahoo News reported that Maiffret was prompting hackers to support in raising a $10,000 reward for Khalil Shreateh. On August 20, Maiffret stated that he had already raised $9,000 in his efforts, including the $2,000 he himself contributed. He and other hackers alike denounced Facebook for its actions. Maiffret said: "He is sitting there in Palestine doing this research on a five-year-old laptop that looks like it is half broken. It's something that might help him out in a big way."
References
1980 births
Chief technology officers of computer security companies
People from Aliso Viejo, California
Living people
American chief technology officers |
52212355 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TK-80 | TK-80 | The TK-80 (μCOM Training Kit TK-80) was an 8080-based single-board computer kit developed by Nippon Electric Company (NEC) in 1976. It was originally developed for engineers who considered using the μCOM-80 family in their product. It was successful among hobbyists in late 1970s in Japan, due to its reasonable price and an expensive computer terminal not being required.
History
NEC started as a telecommunications equipment vendor, and their business was heavily dependent on Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation (NTT). To increase private demand and exports, NEC began developing new industries such as computers and semiconductors in the 1950s. Although those businesses were not profitable enough, NEC continued investing profits from successful telecommunication business.
In the 1970s, the Semiconductor Division developed several microprocessors including Intel compatible processors, and in 1976 got a second-source agreement with Intel to produce the 8080 microprocessor legally. However, the division had trouble marketing them. In Japan, few engineers were interested in microprocessors, and NEC salesmen couldn't find what kind of demand would make much profit.
In February 1976, the Semiconductor and Integrated Circuit Sales Division formed the Microcomputer Sales Section, and began to provide development environments for their microprocessors. , who was formerly manager of the Automation Promotion Section, became its section manager. However, they visited customers and explained, but it was difficult for them to understand how to use a microprocessor. At the same time, NEC received an order from a laboratory in the Yokosuka Communication Institute of NTT that they wanted an educational microcomputer product for their new employees. , a member of the section, proposed to Watanabe developing an educational kit. Based on this kit, the TK-80 was developed for general engineers and aimed to create a demand for microprocessors outside the industrial field.
Goto mainly designed the TK-80, and did the detailed design work. Goto got an idea from a photo of the KIM-1. The KIM-1 can monitor and show the current address by the software, but the display disappears when the CPU is hanging. The TK-80 has the Dynamic Display using the 555 timer IC and interrupt the CPU, it can always show the current address. In addition, the TK-80 has a CMOS battery. He decided to document its manual with a circuit diagram and assembly code of the debug monitor, influenced by the PDP-8 which was an open architecture and was used as an IC tester at NEC.
The TK-80 came out on August 3, 1976. It was priced at 88,500 yen, an engineer's section manager could approve at that time. NEC had opened a support center (Bit-INN) at the Akihabara Radio Kaikan on September 13, 1976. They found many machines were sold to not only electrical engineers but also businessmen, hobbyists and students. The TK-80 was sold more than 2,000 units per month, despite 200 units expected.
Soon after its success, other Japanese microprocessor manufacturers developed an evaluation kit for their microprocessor. Power supplies and other peripherals came out from third parties. Watanabe and his members wrote an introductory book in July 1977, it became very popular and sold more than 200,000 copies. Also, some computer magazines were founded, the ASCII, the I/O, the and the RAM.
When Kato worked for the help desk at Bit-INN, a doctor asked him how to use the TK-80 for calculating medical costs on the point system, and a store manager asked him whether it could process sales information. He noticed users were trying to use the TK-80 as a computer rather than a training kit. However, the TK-80 lacked memory and expandability to use for practical purposes. Around the same time, a third party manufacturer suggested an expansion board to provide TV output and a BASIC interpreter. The TK-80BS was built upon that board, and was released in the end of 1977. Its BASIC was designed to fit in 4 KB of ROM, had the same as Li-Chen Wang's Tiny BASIC except some differences in functions and statements. Its functions and speed didn't satisfy users. This led to the development of a new machine which became the PC-8001.
In Japan, the Altair 8800 was sold in 1975, but not successful due to its high brokerage fee. Neither was the Apple II nor the Commodore PET. Single-board computers had been popular until the successor PC-8001 came out in 1979.
Variants
The TK-80E was a cost-reduced version priced at 67,000 yen, introduced in 1977. It contained the NEC μPD8080AF (2 MHz), fully compatible with the Intel 8080A. (The original μPD8080A has an incompatibility in the BCD adjustment, the μPD8080AF does not.). Other specifications included 768 B (Max. Up to 1 KB expandable) of ROM, and 512 B (Max. Up to 1 KB expandable) of RAM.
The TK-80BS was an expansion kit introduced in 1977. It included a keyboard, a backplane and an expansion board for the TK-80 with 5 KB of RAM and 12 KB of ROM. It supported 8K BASIC.
The COMPO BS/80 was a fully assembled unit of the TK-80BS, introduced in 1978. It was not a success because of its poor built-in BASIC and slow clock speed.
The TK-85 was introduced in May 1980 and was the successor to the TK-80E. It contained the μPD8085AC processor (2.4576 MHz) and has a system configuration that is considered to some extent for compatibility with the TK-80. Other specifications included 2 KB (Max. Up to 8 KB expandable) of ROM, 1 KB of RAM, while the board size was 310 × 220 mm. It supported BASIC.
The PDA-80 was a development platform for NEC's microprocessors. It had the μPD8080A processor, 8 KB of RAM, a teleprinter interface and a self assembler for its processor.
Literature
References
External links
(Japanese language)
(Japanese language. Photos & overview plus pages for TK-80BS & COMPO BS/80.)
(Japanese language. Photos for TK-80 & detailed overview for TK-80 models.)
(Japanese language. Photos & overview for TK-80BS (BASIC STATION).)
(Japanese language. Photos & overview for TK-85, and specifications comparison chart with TK-80.)
(Japanese language. Photos & overview for TK-85.)
NEC personal computers
Computer-related introductions in 1976
Early microcomputers |
602428 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto%20AG | Crypto AG | Crypto AG was a Swiss company specialising in communications and information security founded by Boris Hagelin in 1952. The company was secretly purchased for US $5.75 million and jointly owned by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and West German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) from 1970 until about 1993, with the CIA continuing as sole owner until about 2018. The mission of breaking encrypted communication using a secretly owned company was known as "Operation Rubikon". With headquarters in Steinhausen, the company was a long-established manufacturer of encryption machines and a wide variety of cipher devices.
The company had about 230 employees, had offices in Abidjan, Abu Dhabi, Buenos Aires, Kuala Lumpur, Muscat, Selsdon and Steinhausen, and did business throughout the world. The owners of Crypto AG were unknown, supposedly even to the managers of the firm, and they held their ownership through bearer shares.
The company has been criticised for selling backdoored products to benefit the American, British and German national signals intelligence agencies, the National Security Agency (NSA), the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), and the BND, respectively. On 11 February 2020, The Washington Post, ZDF and SRF revealed that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence, and the spy agencies could easily break the codes used to send encrypted messages. The operation was known first by the code name "Thesaurus" and later "Rubicon". According to a Swiss parliamentary investigation, "Swiss intelligence service were aware of and benefited from the Zug-based firm Crypto AG’s involvement in the US-led spying".
History
Crypto AG was established in Switzerland by the Russian-born Swede, Boris Hagelin. Originally called AB Cryptoteknik and founded by Arvid Gerhard Damm in Stockholm in 1920, the firm manufactured the C-36 mechanical cryptograph machine that Damm had patented. After Damm's death, and just before the Second World War, Cryptoteknik came under the control of Hagelin, an early investor.
Hagelin's hope was to sell the device to the United States Army. When Germany invaded Norway in 1940, he moved from Sweden to the US and presented the device to the military, which in turn brought the device to the Signal Intelligence Service, and the code-breakers in Arlington Hall. In the end he was awarded a licensing agreement. 140,000 units were made during the war for American troops.
During his time in United States, Hagelin became close friends with William F. Friedman, who in 1952 became chief cryptologist for the National Security Agency (NSA) and whom Hagelin had known since the 1930s. The same year, Hagelin's lawyer, Stuart Hedden, became deputy commander in CIA, Inspector General.
In 1948 Hagelin moved to Steinhausen in Switzerland to avoid taxes. In 1952 the company, which until then had been incorporated in Stockholm, also moved to Switzerland. The official reason was that it was transferred as a result of a planned Swedish government nationalization of militarily important technology contractors. A holding company was set up in Liechtenstein.
During the 1950s, Hagelin and Friedman had frequent mail correspondence, both personal and business alike. Crypto AG sent over new machines to the NSA and they had an ongoing discussion concerning which countries they would or would not sell the encryption systems to, and which countries to sell older, weaker systems. In 1958 when Friedman retired, Howard C. Barlow, a high-ranking NSA employee, and Lawrence E. Shinn, NSA's signal intelligence directory in Asia, took over the correspondence.
In June 1970, the company was bought in secret by the CIA and the West-German intelligence service, BND, for $5.75 million. This was effectively the start of Operation Rubikon. Hagelin had first been approached to sell to a partnership between the French and West-German intelligence services in 1967, but Hagelin contacted CIA and the Americans did not cooperate with the French. At this point, the company had 400 employees and the revenue increased from 100,000 Swiss franc in the 1950s to 14 million Swiss franc in the 1970s.
In 1994, Crypto AG bought InfoGuard AG a company providing encryption solutions to banks.
In 2010, Crypto AG sold G.V. LLC, a Wyoming company providing encryption and interception solutions for communications.
In 2018, Crypto AG was liquidated, and its assets and intellectual property sold to two new companies. CyOne was created for Swiss domestic sales, while Crypto International AG was founded in 2018 by Swedish entrepreneur Andreas Linde, who acquired the brand name, international distribution network, and product rights from the original Crypto AG.
in 2020, it was established following a parliamentary investigation that the Swiss government and its intelligence services were aware of the spying activities of Swiss-based Crypto for many years and had "benefited from the US-led spying".
The company and its history were the subject of BBC Radio 4's Archive on 4 programme in May 2021.
Products
The company had radio, Ethernet, STM, GSM, phone and fax encryption systems in its portfolio.
Machines:
C-52
CX-52
CD-57
HX-63
Compromised machines
According to declassified (but partly redacted) US government documents released in 2015, in 1955 (just after encryption was added to the US Munitions List on November 17, 1954) Crypto AG's founder Boris Hagelin and William Friedman entered into an unwritten agreement concerning the C-52 encryption machines that compromised the security of some of the purchasers. Friedman was a notable US government cryptographer who was then working for the National Security Agency (NSA), the main United States signals intelligence agency. Hagelin kept both NSA and its United Kingdom counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), informed about the technical specifications of different machines and which countries were buying which machines. Providing such information would have allowed the intelligence agencies to reduce the time needed to crack the encryption of messages produced by such machines from impossibly long to a feasible length. The secret relationship initiated by the agreement also involved Crypto AG not selling machines such as the CX-52, a more advanced version of the C-52, to certain countries; and the NSA writing the operations manuals for some of the CX-52 machines on behalf of the company, to ensure the full strength of the machines would not be used, thus again reducing the necessary cracking effort.
Crypto AG had already earlier been accused of rigging its machines in collusion with intelligence agencies such as NSA, GCHQ, and the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND), enabling the agencies to read the encrypted traffic produced by the machines. Suspicions of this collusion were aroused in 1986 following US president Ronald Reagan's announcement on national television that, through interception of diplomatic communications between Tripoli and the Libyan embassy in East Berlin, he had irrefutable evidence that Muammar Gaddafi of Libya was behind the West Berlin discotheque bombing in 1986. President Reagan then ordered the bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi in retaliation. There is no conclusive evidence that there was an intercepted Libyan message.
Further evidence suggesting that the Crypto AG machines were compromised was revealed after the assassination of former Iranian Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar in 1991. On 7 August 1991, one day before Bakhtiar's body was discovered, the Iranian Intelligence Service transmitted a coded message to Iranian embassies, inquiring "Is Bakhtiar dead?" Western governments deciphered this transmission, causing the Iranians to suspect their Crypto AG equipment.
The Iranian government then arrested Crypto AG's top salesman, Hans Buehler, in March 1992 in Tehran. It accused Buehler of leaking their encryption codes to Western intelligence. Buehler was interrogated for nine months but, being completely unaware of any flaw in the machines, was released in January 1993 after Crypto AG posted bail of $1m to Iran. Soon after Buehler's release Crypto AG dismissed him and sought to recover the $1m bail money from him personally. Swiss media and the German magazine Der Spiegel took up his case in 1994, interviewing former employees and concluding that Crypto's machines had in fact repeatedly been rigged.
Crypto AG rejected these accusations as "pure invention", asserting in a press release that "in March 1994, the Swiss Federal Prosecutor's Office initiated a wide-ranging preliminary investigation against Crypto AG, which was completed in 1997. The accusations regarding influence by third parties or manipulations, which had been repeatedly raised in the media, proved to be without foundation." Subsequent commentators were unmoved by this denial, stating that it was likely that Crypto AG products were indeed rigged. Le Temps has argued that Crypto AG had been actively working with the British, US and West German secret services since 1956, going as far as to rig instruction manuals for the machines on the orders of the NSA. These claims were vindicated by US government documents declassified in 2015.
In 2020, an investigation carried out by The Washington Post, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), and Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen (SRF) revealed that Crypto AG was, in fact, entirely controlled by the CIA and the BND. The project, initially known by codename "Thesaurus" and later as "Rubicon" operated from the end of the Second World War until 2018.
The Swiss government's decision to impose export controls on Crypto International AG in the wake of the Crypto AG disclosures caused diplomatic tensions with Sweden, reportedly leading to the latter cancelling plans to celebrate 100 years of diplomatic relations with Switzerland. The export controls preventing Swedish authorities from obtaining equipment from Crypto International was reportedly a reason behind Sweden's decision.
See also
Katharine Gun
Operation Rubicon (Crypto AG)
Spying on United Nations leaders by United States diplomats
References
External links
Website of the new Crypto International AG located in the same location as the old company in Steinhausen/Zug (since 2018)
Crypto AG and Operation Rubicon at the Cryptomuseum
The intelligence coup of the century by Greg Miller at the Washington Post offering details on CIA's involvement with Crypto AG
La Suisse sous couverture, Episode 1 , Agents infiltrés, Radio Télévision Suisse , November 2019 (link to Youtube with subtitles in English)
Cryptography companies
Defence companies of Switzerland
Defunct companies of Switzerland
Technology companies established in 1952
Technology companies disestablished in 2018
Central Intelligence Agency front organizations
Swiss companies established in 1952
Swiss companies disestablished in 2018 |
44474 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn | Saturn | Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second-largest in the Solar System, after Jupiter. It is a gas giant with an average radius of about nine and a half times that of Earth. It only has one-eighth the average density of Earth; however, with its larger volume, Saturn is over 95 times more massive.
Saturn's interior is most likely composed of a core of iron–nickel and rock (silicon and oxygen compounds). Its core is surrounded by a deep layer of metallic hydrogen, an intermediate layer of liquid hydrogen and liquid helium, and finally, a gaseous outer layer. Saturn has a pale yellow hue due to ammonia crystals in its upper atmosphere. An electrical current within the metallic hydrogen layer is thought to give rise to Saturn's planetary magnetic field, which is weaker than Earth's, but which has a magnetic moment 580 times that of Earth due to Saturn's larger size. Saturn's magnetic field strength is around one-twentieth of Jupiter's. The outer atmosphere is generally bland and lacking in contrast, although long-lived features can appear. Wind speeds on Saturn can reach , higher than on Jupiter but not as high as on Neptune.
The planet's most notable feature is its prominent ring system, which is composed mainly of ice particles, with a smaller amount of rocky debris and dust. At least 83 moons are known to orbit Saturn, of which 53 are officially named; this does not include the hundreds of moonlets in its rings. Titan, Saturn's largest moon and the second largest in the Solar System, is larger than the planet Mercury, although less massive, and is the only moon in the Solar System to have a substantial atmosphere.
Name and symbol
Saturn is named after the Roman god of wealth and agriculture and father of Jupiter. Its astronomical symbol () has been traced back to the Greek Oxyrhynchus Papyri, where it can be seen to be a Greek kappa-rho with a horizontal stroke, as an abbreviation for Κρονος (Cronus), the Greek name for the planet.
It later came to look like a lower-case Greek eta, with the cross added at the top in the 16th century to Christianize this pagan symbol.
The Romans named the seventh day of the week Saturday, Sāturni diēs ("Saturn's Day"), for the planet Saturn.
Physical characteristics
Saturn is a gas giant composed predominantly of hydrogen and helium. It lacks a definite surface, though it may have a solid core. Saturn's rotation causes it to have the shape of an oblate spheroid; that is, it is flattened at the poles and bulges at its equator. Its equatorial and polar radii differ by almost 10%: 60,268 km versus 54,364 km. Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune, the other giant planets in the Solar System, are also oblate but to a lesser extent. The combination of the bulge and rotation rate means that the effective surface gravity along the equator, , is 74% of what it is at the poles and is lower than the surface gravity of Earth. However, the equatorial escape velocity of nearly is much higher than that of Earth.
Saturn is the only planet of the Solar System that is less dense than water—about 30% less. Although Saturn's core is considerably denser than water, the average specific density of the planet is due to the atmosphere. Jupiter has 318 times Earth's mass, and Saturn is 95 times Earth's mass. Together, Jupiter and Saturn hold 92% of the total planetary mass in the Solar System.
Internal structure
Despite consisting mostly of hydrogen and helium, most of Saturn's mass is not in the gas phase, because hydrogen becomes a non-ideal liquid when the density is above , which is reached at a radius containing 99.9% of Saturn's mass. The temperature, pressure, and density inside Saturn all rise steadily toward the core, which causes hydrogen to be a metal in the deeper layers.
Standard planetary models suggest that the interior of Saturn is similar to that of Jupiter, having a small rocky core surrounded by hydrogen and helium, with trace amounts of various volatiles. This core is similar in composition to Earth, but is more dense. The examination of Saturn's gravitational moment, in combination with physical models of the interior, has allowed constraints to be placed on the mass of Saturn's core. In 2004, scientists estimated that the core must be 9–22 times the mass of Earth, which corresponds to a diameter of about 25,000 km. However, measurements of Saturn's rings suggest a much more diffuse core with a mass equal to about 17 Earths and a radius equal to around 60% of Saturn's entire radius. This is surrounded by a thicker liquid metallic hydrogen layer, followed by a liquid layer of helium-saturated molecular hydrogen that gradually transitions to a gas with increasing altitude. The outermost layer spans 1,000 km and consists of gas.
Saturn has a hot interior, reaching 11,700 °C at its core, and radiates 2.5 times more energy into space than it receives from the Sun. Jupiter's thermal energy is generated by the Kelvin–Helmholtz mechanism of slow gravitational compression, but such a process alone may not be sufficient to explain heat production for Saturn, because it is less massive. An alternative or additional mechanism may be generation of heat through the "raining out" of droplets of helium deep in Saturn's interior. As the droplets descend through the lower-density hydrogen, the process releases heat by friction and leaves Saturn's outer layers depleted of helium. These descending droplets may have accumulated into a helium shell surrounding the core. Rainfalls of diamonds have been suggested to occur within Saturn, as well as in Jupiter and ice giants Uranus and Neptune.
Atmosphere
The outer atmosphere of Saturn contains 96.3% molecular hydrogen and 3.25% helium by volume. The proportion of helium is significantly deficient compared to the abundance of this element in the Sun. The quantity of elements heavier than helium (metallicity) is not known precisely, but the proportions are assumed to match the primordial abundances from the formation of the Solar System. The total mass of these heavier elements is estimated to be 19–31 times the mass of the Earth, with a significant fraction located in Saturn's core region.
Trace amounts of ammonia, acetylene, ethane, propane, phosphine, and methane have been detected in Saturn's atmosphere. The upper clouds are composed of ammonia crystals, while the lower level clouds appear to consist of either ammonium hydrosulfide () or water. Ultraviolet radiation from the Sun causes methane photolysis in the upper atmosphere, leading to a series of hydrocarbon chemical reactions with the resulting products being carried downward by eddies and diffusion. This photochemical cycle is modulated by Saturn's annual seasonal cycle.
Cloud layers
Saturn's atmosphere exhibits a banded pattern similar to Jupiter's, but Saturn's bands are much fainter and are much wider near the equator. The nomenclature used to describe these bands is the same as on Jupiter. Saturn's finer cloud patterns were not observed until the flybys of the Voyager spacecraft during the 1980s. Since then, Earth-based telescopy has improved to the point where regular observations can be made.
The composition of the clouds varies with depth and increasing pressure. In the upper cloud layers, with the temperature in the range 100–160 K and pressures extending between 0.5–2 bar, the clouds consist of ammonia ice. Water ice clouds begin at a level where the pressure is about 2.5 bar and extend down to 9.5 bar, where temperatures range from 185 to 270 K. Intermixed in this layer is a band of ammonium hydrosulfide ice, lying in the pressure range 3–6 bar with temperatures of 190–235 K. Finally, the lower layers, where pressures are between 10 and 20 bar and temperatures are 270–330 K, contains a region of water droplets with ammonia in aqueous solution.
Saturn's usually bland atmosphere occasionally exhibits long-lived ovals and other features common on Jupiter. In 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope imaged an enormous white cloud near Saturn's equator that was not present during the Voyager encounters, and in 1994 another smaller storm was observed. The 1990 storm was an example of a Great White Spot, a unique but short-lived phenomenon that occurs once every Saturnian year, roughly every 30 Earth years, around the time of the northern hemisphere's summer solstice. Previous Great White Spots were observed in 1876, 1903, 1933 and 1960, with the 1933 storm being the most famous. If the periodicity is maintained, another storm will occur in about 2020.
The winds on Saturn are the second fastest among the Solar System's planets, after Neptune's. Voyager data indicate peak easterly winds of . In images from the Cassini spacecraft during 2007, Saturn's northern hemisphere displayed a bright blue hue, similar to Uranus. The color was most likely caused by Rayleigh scattering. Thermography has shown that Saturn's south pole has a warm polar vortex, the only known example of such a phenomenon in the Solar System. Whereas temperatures on Saturn are normally −185 °C, temperatures on the vortex often reach as high as −122 °C, suspected to be the warmest spot on Saturn.
North pole hexagonal cloud pattern
A persisting hexagonal wave pattern around the north polar vortex in the atmosphere at about 78°N was first noted in the Voyager images. The sides of the hexagon are each about long, which is longer than the diameter of the Earth. The entire structure rotates with a period of (the same period as that of the planet's radio emissions) which is assumed to be equal to the period of rotation of Saturn's interior. The hexagonal feature does not shift in longitude like the other clouds in the visible atmosphere. The pattern's origin is a matter of much speculation. Most scientists think it is a standing wave pattern in the atmosphere. Polygonal shapes have been replicated in the laboratory through differential rotation of fluids.
South pole vortex
HST imaging of the south polar region indicates the presence of a jet stream, but no strong polar vortex nor any hexagonal standing wave. NASA reported in November 2006 that Cassini had observed a "hurricane-like" storm locked to the south pole that had a clearly defined eyewall. Eyewall clouds had not previously been seen on any planet other than Earth. For example, images from the Galileo spacecraft did not show an eyewall in the Great Red Spot of Jupiter.
The south pole storm may have been present for billions of years. This vortex is comparable to the size of Earth, and it has winds of 550 km/h.
Other features
Cassini observed a series of cloud features found in northern latitudes, nicknamed the "String of Pearls". These features are cloud clearings that reside in deeper cloud layers.
Magnetosphere
Saturn has an intrinsic magnetic field that has a simple, symmetric shape – a magnetic dipole. Its strength at the equator – 0.2 gauss (20 µT) – is approximately one twentieth of that of the field around Jupiter and slightly weaker than Earth's magnetic field. As a result, Saturn's magnetosphere is much smaller than Jupiter's. When Voyager 2 entered the magnetosphere, the solar wind pressure was high and the magnetosphere extended only 19 Saturn radii, or 1.1 million km (712,000 mi), although it enlarged within several hours, and remained so for about three days. Most probably, the magnetic field is generated similarly to that of Jupiter – by currents in the liquid metallic-hydrogen layer called a metallic-hydrogen dynamo. This magnetosphere is efficient at deflecting the solar wind particles from the Sun. The moon Titan orbits within the outer part of Saturn's magnetosphere and contributes plasma from the ionized particles in Titan's outer atmosphere. Saturn's magnetosphere, like Earth's, produces aurorae.
Orbit and rotation
The average distance between Saturn and the Sun is over 1.4 billion kilometers (9 AU). With an average orbital speed of 9.68 km/s, it takes Saturn 10,759 Earth days (or about years) to finish one revolution around the Sun. As a consequence, it forms a near 5:2 mean-motion resonance with Jupiter. The elliptical orbit of Saturn is inclined 2.48° relative to the orbital plane of the Earth. The perihelion and aphelion distances are, respectively, 9.195 and 9.957 AU, on average. The visible features on Saturn rotate at different rates depending on latitude, and multiple rotation periods have been assigned to various regions (as in Jupiter's case).
Astronomers use three different systems for specifying the rotation rate of Saturn. System I has a period of (844.3°/d) and encompasses the Equatorial Zone, the South Equatorial Belt, and the North Equatorial Belt. The polar regions are considered to have rotation rates similar to System I. All other Saturnian latitudes, excluding the north and south polar regions, are indicated as System II and have been assigned a rotation period of (810.76°/d). System III refers to Saturn's internal rotation rate. Based on radio emissions from the planet detected by Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, System III has a rotation period of (810.8°/d). System III has largely superseded System II.
A precise value for the rotation period of the interior remains elusive. While approaching Saturn in 2004, Cassini found that the radio rotation period of Saturn had increased appreciably, to approximately . An estimate of Saturn's rotation (as an indicated rotation rate for Saturn as a whole) based on a compilation of various measurements from the Cassini, Voyager and Pioneer probes is . Studies of the planet's C Ring yield a rotation period of .
In March 2007, it was found that the variation of radio emissions from the planet did not match Saturn's rotation rate. This variance may be caused by geyser activity on Saturn's moon Enceladus. The water vapor emitted into Saturn's orbit by this activity becomes charged and creates a drag upon Saturn's magnetic field, slowing its rotation slightly relative to the rotation of the planet.
An apparent oddity for Saturn is that it does not have any known trojan asteroids. These are minor planets that orbit the Sun at the stable Lagrangian points, designated L4 and L5, located at 60° angles to the planet along its orbit. Trojan asteroids have been discovered for Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune. Orbital resonance mechanisms, including secular resonance, are believed to be the cause of the missing Saturnian trojans.
Natural satellites
Saturn has 83 known moons, 53 of which have formal names. In addition, there is evidence of dozens to hundreds of moonlets with diameters of 40–500 meters in Saturn's rings, which are not considered to be true moons. Titan, the largest moon, comprises more than 90% of the mass in orbit around Saturn, including the rings. Saturn's second-largest moon, Rhea, may have a tenuous ring system of its own, along with a tenuous atmosphere.
Many of the other moons are small: 34 are less than 10 km in diameter and another 14 between 10 and 50 km in diameter. Traditionally, most of Saturn's moons have been named after Titans of Greek mythology. Titan is the only satellite in the Solar System with a major atmosphere, in which a complex organic chemistry occurs. It is the only satellite with hydrocarbon lakes.
On 6 June 2013, scientists at the IAA-CSIC reported the detection of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in the upper atmosphere of Titan, a possible precursor for life. On 23 June 2014, NASA claimed to have strong evidence that nitrogen in the atmosphere of Titan came from materials in the Oort cloud, associated with comets, and not from the materials that formed Saturn in earlier times.
Saturn's moon Enceladus, which seems similar in chemical makeup to comets, has often been regarded as a potential habitat for microbial life. Evidence of this possibility includes the satellite's salt-rich particles having an "ocean-like" composition that indicates most of Enceladus's expelled ice comes from the evaporation of liquid salt water. A 2015 flyby by Cassini through a plume on Enceladus found most of the ingredients to sustain life forms that live by methanogenesis.
In April 2014, NASA scientists reported the possible beginning of a new moon within the A Ring, which was imaged by Cassini on 15 April 2013.
Planetary rings
Saturn is probably best known for the system of planetary rings that makes it visually unique. The rings extend from outward from Saturn's equator and average approximately in thickness. They are composed predominantly of water ice, with trace amounts of tholin impurities and a peppered coating of approximately 7% amorphous carbon. The particles that make up the rings range in size from specks of dust up to 10 m. While the other gas giants also have ring systems, Saturn's is the largest and most visible.
There are two main hypotheses regarding the origin of the rings. One hypothesis is that the rings are remnants of a destroyed moon of Saturn. The second hypothesis is that the rings are left over from the original nebular material from which Saturn was formed. Some ice in the E ring comes from the moon Enceladus's geysers. The water abundance of the rings varies radially, with the outermost ring A being the most pure in ice water. This abundance variance may be explained by meteor bombardment.
Beyond the main rings, at a distance of 12 million km from the planet is the sparse Phoebe ring. It is tilted at an angle of 27° to the other rings and, like Phoebe, orbits in retrograde fashion.
Some of the moons of Saturn, including Pandora and Prometheus, act as shepherd moons to confine the rings and prevent them from spreading out. Pan and Atlas cause weak, linear density waves in Saturn's rings that have yielded more reliable calculations of their masses.
History of observation and exploration
The observation and exploration of Saturn can be divided into three phases. The first phase is ancient observations (such as with the naked eye), before the invention of modern telescopes. The second phase began in the 17th century, with telescopic observations from Earth, which improved over time. The third phase is visitation by space probes, in orbit or on flyby. In the 21st century, telescopic observations continue from Earth (including Earth-orbiting observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope) and, until its 2017 retirement, from the Cassini orbiter around Saturn.
Ancient observations
Saturn has been known since prehistoric times, and in early recorded history it was a major character in various mythologies. Babylonian astronomers systematically observed and recorded the movements of Saturn. In ancient Greek, the planet was known as Phainon, and in Roman times it was known as the "star of Saturn". In ancient Roman mythology, the planet Phainon was sacred to this agricultural god, from which the planet takes its modern name. The Romans considered the god Saturnus the equivalent of the Greek god Cronus; in modern Greek, the planet retains the name Cronus—: Kronos.
The Greek scientist Ptolemy based his calculations of Saturn's orbit on observations he made while it was in opposition. In Hindu astrology, there are nine astrological objects, known as Navagrahas. Saturn is known as "Shani" and judges everyone based on the good and bad deeds performed in life. Ancient Chinese and Japanese culture designated the planet Saturn as the "earth star" (). This was based on Five Elements which were traditionally used to classify natural elements.
In ancient Hebrew, Saturn is called 'Shabbathai'. Its angel is Cassiel. Its intelligence or beneficial spirit is 'Agȋȇl (), and its darker spirit (demon) is Zȃzȇl (). Zazel has been described as a great angel, invoked in Solomonic magic, who is "effective in love conjurations". In Ottoman Turkish, Urdu and Malay, the name of Zazel is 'Zuhal', derived from the Arabic language ().
European observations (17th–19th centuries)
Saturn's rings require at least a 15-mm-diameter telescope to resolve and thus were not known to exist until Christiaan Huygens saw them in 1655 and published about this in 1659. Galileo, with his primitive telescope in 1610, incorrectly thought of Saturn's appearing not quite round as two moons on Saturn's sides. It was not until Huygens used greater telescopic magnification that this notion was refuted, and the rings were truly seen for the first time. Huygens also discovered Saturn's moon Titan; Giovanni Domenico Cassini later discovered four other moons: Iapetus, Rhea, Tethys and Dione. In 1675, Cassini discovered the gap now known as the Cassini Division.
No further discoveries of significance were made until 1789 when William Herschel discovered two further moons, Mimas and Enceladus. The irregularly shaped satellite Hyperion, which has a resonance with Titan, was discovered in 1848 by a British team.
In 1899 William Henry Pickering discovered Phoebe, a highly irregular satellite that does not rotate synchronously with Saturn as the larger moons do. Phoebe was the first such satellite found and it takes more than a year to orbit Saturn in a retrograde orbit. During the early 20th century, research on Titan led to the confirmation in 1944 that it had a thick atmosphere – a feature unique among the Solar System's moons.
Modern NASA and ESA probes
Pioneer 11 flyby
Pioneer 11 made the first flyby of Saturn in September 1979, when it passed within 20,000 km of the planet's cloud tops. Images were taken of the planet and a few of its moons, although their resolution was too low to discern surface detail. The spacecraft also studied Saturn's rings, revealing the thin F-ring and the fact that dark gaps in the rings are bright when viewed at high phase angle (towards the Sun), meaning that they contain fine light-scattering material. In addition, Pioneer 11 measured the temperature of Titan.
Voyager flybys
In November 1980, the Voyager 1 probe visited the Saturn system. It sent back the first high-resolution images of the planet, its rings and satellites. Surface features of various moons were seen for the first time. Voyager 1 performed a close flyby of Titan, increasing knowledge of the atmosphere of the moon. It proved that Titan's atmosphere is impenetrable in visible wavelengths; therefore no surface details were seen. The flyby changed the spacecraft's trajectory out from the plane of the Solar System.
Almost a year later, in August 1981, Voyager 2 continued the study of the Saturn system. More close-up images of Saturn's moons were acquired, as well as evidence of changes in the atmosphere and the rings. Unfortunately, during the flyby, the probe's turnable camera platform stuck for a couple of days and some planned imaging was lost. Saturn's gravity was used to direct the spacecraft's trajectory towards Uranus.
The probes discovered and confirmed several new satellites orbiting near or within the planet's rings, as well as the small Maxwell Gap (a gap within the C Ring) and Keeler gap (a 42 km-wide gap in the A Ring).
Cassini–Huygens spacecraft
The Cassini–Huygens space probe entered orbit around Saturn on 1 July 2004. In June 2004, it conducted a close flyby of Phoebe, sending back high-resolution images and data. Cassini flyby of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, captured radar images of large lakes and their coastlines with numerous islands and mountains. The orbiter completed two Titan flybys before releasing the Huygens probe on 25 December 2004. Huygens descended onto the surface of Titan on 14 January 2005.
Starting in early 2005, scientists used Cassini to track lightning on Saturn. The power of the lightning is approximately 1,000 times that of lightning on Earth.
In 2006, NASA reported that Cassini had found evidence of liquid water reservoirs no more than tens of meters below the surface that erupt in geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus. These jets of icy particles are emitted into orbit around Saturn from vents in the moon's south polar region. Over 100 geysers have been identified on Enceladus. In May 2011, NASA scientists reported that Enceladus "is emerging as the most habitable spot beyond Earth in the Solar System for life as we know it".
Cassini photographs have revealed a previously undiscovered planetary ring, outside the brighter main rings of Saturn and inside the G and E rings. The source of this ring is hypothesized to be the crashing of a meteoroid off Janus and Epimetheus. In July 2006, images were returned of hydrocarbon lakes near Titan's north pole, the presence of which were confirmed in January 2007. In March 2007, hydrocarbon seas were found near the North pole, the largest of which is almost the size of the Caspian Sea. In October 2006, the probe detected an 8,000 km diameter cyclone-like storm with an eyewall at Saturn's south pole.
From 2004 to 2 November 2009, the probe discovered and confirmed eight new satellites. In April 2013 Cassini sent back images of a hurricane at the planet's north pole 20 times larger than those found on Earth, with winds faster than . On 15 September 2017, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft performed the "Grand Finale" of its mission: a number of passes through gaps between Saturn and Saturn's inner rings. The atmospheric entry of Cassini ended the mission.
Possible future missions
The continued exploration of Saturn is still considered to be a viable option for NASA as part of their ongoing New Frontiers program of missions. NASA previously requested for plans to be put forward for a mission to Saturn that included the Saturn Atmospheric Entry Probe, and possible investigations into the habitability and possible discovery of life on Saturn's moons Titan and Enceladus by Dragonfly.
Observation
Saturn is the most distant of the five planets easily visible to the naked eye from Earth, the other four being Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter. (Uranus, and occasionally 4 Vesta, are visible to the naked eye in dark skies.) Saturn appears to the naked eye in the night sky as a bright, yellowish point of light. The mean apparent magnitude of Saturn is 0.46 with a standard deviation of 0.34. Most of the magnitude variation is due to the inclination of the ring system relative to the Sun and Earth. The brightest magnitude, −0.55, occurs near in time to when the plane of the rings is inclined most highly, and the faintest magnitude, 1.17, occurs around the time when they are least inclined. It takes approximately 29.5 years for the planet to complete an entire circuit of the ecliptic against the background constellations of the zodiac. Most people will require an optical aid (very large binoculars or a small telescope) that magnifies at least 30 times to achieve an image of Saturn's rings in which clear resolution is present. When Earth passes through the ring plane, which occurs twice every Saturnian year (roughly every 15 Earth years), the rings briefly disappear from view because they are so thin. Such a "disappearance" will next occur in 2025, but Saturn will be too close to the Sun for observations.
Saturn and its rings are best seen when the planet is at, or near, opposition, the configuration of a planet when it is at an elongation of 180°, and thus appears opposite the Sun in the sky. A Saturnian opposition occurs every year—approximately every 378 days—and results in the planet appearing at its brightest. Both the Earth and Saturn orbit the Sun on eccentric orbits, which means their distances from the Sun vary over time, and therefore so do their distances from each other, hence varying the brightness of Saturn from one opposition to the next. Saturn also appears brighter when the rings are angled such that they are more visible. For example, during the opposition of 17 December 2002, Saturn appeared at its brightest due to a favorable orientation of its rings relative to the Earth, even though Saturn was closer to the Earth and Sun in late 2003.
From time to time, Saturn is occulted by the Moon (that is, the Moon covers up Saturn in the sky). As with all the planets in the Solar System, occultations of Saturn occur in "seasons". Saturnian occultations will take place monthly for about a 12-month period, followed by about a five-year period in which no such activity is registered. The Moon's orbit is inclined by several degrees relative to Saturn's, so occultations will only occur when Saturn is near one of the points in the sky where the two planes intersect (both the length of Saturn's year and the 18.6-Earth year nodal precession period of the Moon's orbit influence the periodicity).
Notes
References
Further reading
See also
Stats of planets in the Solar System
External links
Saturn overview by NASA's Science Mission Directorate
Saturn fact sheet at the NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive
Saturnian System terminology by the IAU Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature
Cassini-Huygens legacy website by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Saturn at SolarViews.com
Interactive 3D gravity simulation of the Cronian system
Astronomical objects known since antiquity
Gas giants
Outer planets |
3041667 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open%20Cascade%20Technology | Open Cascade Technology | Open Cascade Technology (OCCT), formerly called CAS.CADE, is an open-source software development platform for 3D CAD, CAM, CAE, etc. that is developed and supported by Open Cascade SAS.
OCCT is a full-scale B-Rep (Boundary representation) modeling toolkit. OCCT is available under the LGPL-2.1-only license permitting its usage in open source and proprietary applications.
History
CAS.CADE (abbreviated from Computer Aided Software for Computer Aided Design and Engineering) was originally developed in the early 1990s by Matra Datavision, developer of Euclid CAD software as the underlying infrastructure for its future version Euclid Quantum. In 1998 the company abandoned software development to concentrate on services, and most of the software development facilities were sold to Dassault Systèmes, developer of competing CATIA.
Open sourcing
In 1999 Matra Datavision decided to publish its CAS.CADE infrastructure under an open-source model under the Open CASCADE Technology Public License and renamed it Open Cascade.
In 2000, a separate company, Open Cascade SAS, was created to make business around Open Cascade. Open Cascade SAS was sold in 2003 to Principia, a French service provider corporation, and then in 2006 it was acquired by Euriware Group, a subsidiary of Areva.
In 2004, software was renamed to Open Cascade Technology in order to distinguish it from the name of the company itself.
Open Cascade S.A.S. provides a certified version of the library, which is released sporadically, usually 1–2 releases per year. Until version 6.5.0 (2011), only minor and major versions were publicly available, while intermediate (maintenance) releases were accessible only to customers of Open Cascade S.A.S. For example, version 6.3.0 was publicly released in 2008, and the next public version 6.5.0 was released in early 2011. All recent releases starting from version 6.5.0 are public.
Community fork
In March 2011, Thomas Paviot initiated a fork of the then most recent publicly available version 6.5.0 of Open Cascade library. The initiative is called Open Cascade Community Edition. The project aims to establish a separate community-based release and bug-report process for the library.
Collaborative development portal
In December 2011, Open Cascade installed a web portal for external contributors and made its Mantis Bug Tracker and further Git repository publicly available (read-only GitHub mirror has been established in '2020). According to the statements on the new website, external contributors from the Open Source Community are encouraged to participate in the development of Open Cascade Technology, i.e. register bugs directly in the bugtracker, make contributions to the code after signing a Contributor License Agreement, etc.
License change
Since 18 December 2013 with version 6.7.0 Open Cascade Technology is available under the LGPL-2.1-only with additional exception. Versions before that were licensed under the "Open Cascade Technology Public License" which was not compatible with the GPL and was considered non-free by the Fedora project.
Functionality
Object libraries
OCCT's functionality is split into several large modules. Each module defines a list of toolkits (libraries). Key Modules:
Foundation Classes: defines basic classes, memory allocators, OS abstraction layer, collections (data maps, arrays, etc.), acceleration data structures (BVH Trees) and vector/matrix math used by other Modules.
Modeling Data: supplies data structures to represent 2D and 3D geometric primitives (analytical curves: Line, Circle, Ellipse, Hyperbola, Parabola, Bézier, B-spline, Offset; analytical surfaces: Plane, Cylinder, Cone, Sphere, Torus, Bézier, B-spline, Revolution, Extrusion, Offset) and their compositions into B-Rep models.
Modeling Algorithms: contains a vast range of geometrical and topological algorithms (intersection, Boolean operations, surface meshing, fillets, shape healing).
Visualization: provides interactive services for displaying geometry in 3D Viewer; implements a compact OpenGL / OpenGL ES renderer, supporting conventional Phong, real-time PBR metal-roughness shading models as well as interactive Ray-Tracing/Path-Tracing engine.
Data Exchange: provides possibility to import/export various CAD formats. STEP, IGES, glTF, OBJ, STL and VRML are supported natively. Other formats can be imported by using plug-ins. Extended Data Exchange (XDE) components rely on a unified XCAF document definition, which includes an assembly structure of CAD shapes, color/name/material/metadata/layer attributes as well as other supplementary information like PMI.
Application Framework: offers solutions for handling application-specific data.
DRAW Test Harness: implements a scripting interface to OCCT algorithms based on Tcl-interpreter for interactive usage, automating processes, prototyping applications and testing purposes.
Workshop Organization Kit
Workshop Organization Kit (WOK) is Open Cascade development environment, which has been designed to allow a large number of developers to work on a product getting advantage of common reference version shared over the local network.
Until OCCT 7.0.0 release, substantial modifications in the source code were not possible without using WOK, since it is the only tool that provides support for CDL (CAS.CADE definition language), used for declaration of most of OCCT classes and also serving to define logical structure of OCCT libraries. WOK has been included in previous OCCT distributions; since OCCT version 6.4 it is made an independent tool.
Within 7.0.0 release, all CDL files have been dropped from OCCT source code making WOK no longer necessary for OCCT development.
CAD Programs based on Open Cascade Technology
Several CAD programs relies on Open CASCADE Technology including:
FreeCAD an open source, 3D parametric modeler, with support for building information modeling, finite-element-method (FEM), and Python scripting.
SALOME an open source platform for pre- and post-processing for numerical simulation.
KiCad an open source suite for electronic design automation (EDA).
Gmsh an open source finite-element mesh (FEM) generator. Since version 3.0, Gmsh supports full constructive solid geometry features, based on OCCT.
FORAN an integrated CAD/CAM/CAE system developed by SENER for the design and production of practically any naval ship and offshore unit. FORAN uses OCCT since V80R2.0 release for working with analytical surfaces.
See also
Free hardware
List of CAx companies
Computer-aided design
References
Free computer-aided design software
Free software programmed in C++
Computer-aided design software for Linux
Computer-aided manufacturing software for Linux
Computer-aided engineering software for Linux
3D graphics software |
2234 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari | Atari | Atari () is a brand name that has been owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. It is currently owned by French publisher Atari SA (formerly Infogrames Entertainment SA) through a subsidiary named Atari Interactive. The original Atari, Inc., founded in Sunnyvale, California, in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, was a pioneer in arcade games, home video game consoles and home computers. The company's products, such as Pong and the Atari 2600, helped define the electronic entertainment industry from the 1970s to the mid-1980s.
In 1984, as a result of the video game crash of 1983, the home console and computer divisions of the original Atari Inc. were sold off, and the company was renamed Atari Games Inc. Atari Games received the rights to use the logo and brand name with appended text "Games" on arcade games, as well as rights to the original 1972–1984 arcade hardware properties. The Atari Consumer Electronics Division properties were in turn sold to Jack Tramiel's Tramel Technology Ltd., which then renamed itself to Atari Corporation. In 1996, Atari Corporation reverse-merged with disk-drive manufacturer JT Storage (JTS), becoming a division within the company. In 1998, Hasbro Interactive acquired all Atari Corporation related properties from JTS, creating a new subsidiary, Atari Interactive.
Infogrames Entertainment (IESA) bought Hasbro Interactive in 2001 and renamed it Infogrames Interactive, which intermittently published Atari-branded titles. In 2003, it renamed the division Atari Interactive. Another IESA division, Infogrames Inc. (formerly GT Interactive), changed its name to Atari Inc. the same year, licensing the Atari name and logo from its fellow subsidiary.
In 2008, IESA completed its acquisition of Atari, Inc.'s outstanding stock, making it a wholly owned subsidiary. IESA renamed itself Atari SA in 2009. It sought bankruptcy protection under French law in January 2013. In 2020 Atari launched the Atari Token in partnership with the ICICB Group, where ICICB Group is 50% owner of the company, Atari Chain LTD, registered in Gibraltar. Also Atari issued an exclusive license to the ICICB Group to launch a gaming platform using crypto-currencies. The ICICB Group is a holding company with multiply license in FinTech, Blockchain, Crypto Exchanges, financial houses and hedge funds.
History
Logotype
The name comes from the Japanese term atari, used while playing the ancient board game Go. The word ataru means “to hit a target” in Japanese and is associated with good fortune; in Go, it indicates a situation where a player will be able capture one or more stones of the opponent in the next move.
The Atari logo was designed by George Opperman, who was Atari's first in-house graphic designer and drawn by Evelyn Seto. The design is known as "Fuji" for its resemblance to the Japanese mountain, although the logo's origins are unrelated to it. Opperman designed the logo intending for the silhouette to look like the letter A as in Atari and for its three "prongs" to resemble players and the midline of the "court" in the company's first hit game, Pong.
Atari Inc. (1972–1984)
In 1971, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded a small engineering company, Syzygy Engineering, that designed Computer Space, the world's first commercially available arcade video game, for Nutting Associates. On June 27, 1972, the two incorporated Atari, Inc. and soon hired Al Alcorn as their first design engineer. Bushnell asked Alcorn to produce an arcade version of the Magnavox Odyssey's Tennis game, which would be named Pong. While Bushnell incorporated Atari in June 1972, Syzygy Company was never formally incorporated. Before Atari's incorporation, Bushnell considered various terms from the game Go, eventually choosing atari, referencing a position in the game when a group of stones is imminently in danger of being taken by one's opponent. Atari was incorporated in the state of California on June 27, 1972.
In 1973, Atari secretly spawned a competitor called Kee Games, headed by Nolan's next-door neighbor Joe Keenan, to circumvent pinball distributors' insistence on exclusive distribution deals; both Atari and Kee could market nearly the same game to different distributors, each getting an "exclusive" deal. Joe Keenan's management of the subsidiary led to his promotion to president of Atari that same year.
In 1975, Atari's Grass Valley, California subsidiary Cyan Engineering started the development of a flexible console that was capable of playing the four existing Atari games. The result was the Atari Video Computer System, or VCS (later renamed 2600 when the 5200 was released). The introductory price of $199 () included a console, two joysticks, a pair of paddles, and the Combat game cartridge. Bushnell knew he had another potential hit on his hands but bringing the machine to market would be extremely expensive. Looking for outside investors, Bushnell sold Atari to Warner Communications in 1976 for an estimated $28–32 million, using part of the money to buy the Folgers Mansion. Nolan continued to have disagreements with Warner Management over the direction of the company, the discontinuation of the pinball division, and most importantly, the notion of discontinuing the 2600. In 1978, Kee Games was disbanded. In December of that year, Bushnell was fired following an argument with Manny Gerard. "[W]e started fighting like cats and dogs. And then the wheels came off that fall. Warner claimed they fired me", recalled Bushnell. "I say I quit. It was a mutual separation."
The development of a successor to the 2600 started as soon as it shipped. The original team estimated the 2600 had a lifespan of about three years; it then set forth to build the most powerful machine possible within that time frame. Mid-way into their effort the home computer revolution took off, leading to the addition of a keyboard and features to produce the Atari 800 and its smaller sibling, the 400. The new machines had some success when they finally became available in quantity in 1980. From this platform Atari released their next-generation game console in 1982, the Atari 5200. It was unsuccessful due to incompatibility with the 2600 game library, a small quantity of dedicated games, and notoriously unreliable controllers. Porting arcade games to home systems with inferior hardware was difficult. The ported version of Pac-Man for Atari 2600 omitted many of the visual features of the original to compensate for the lack of ROM space and the hardware struggled when multiple ghosts appeared on the screen creating a flickering effect.
Under Warner and Atari's chairman and CEO, Raymond Kassar, the company achieved its greatest success, selling millions of 2600s and computers. At its peak, Atari accounted for a third of Warner's annual income and was the fastest-growing company in US history at the time. It ran into problems in the early 1980s, however, as interference from the New York-based Warner management increasingly affected daily operations. Its home computer, video game console, and arcade divisions operated independently and rarely cooperated. Faced with fierce competition and price wars in the game console and home computer markets, Atari was never able to duplicate the success of the 2600.
These problems were followed by the video game crash of 1983, with losses that totaled more than $500 million. Warner's stock price slid from $60 to $20, and the company began searching for a buyer for its troubled division. In 1983, Ray Kassar had resigned and executives involved in the Famicom merger lost track of negotiations, eventually killing the deal. With Atari's financial problems and the Famicom's runaway success in Japan after its July 16, 1983, release, Nintendo decided to remain independent.
Financial problems continued to mount and Kassar's successor, James J. Morgan, had less than a year in which to tackle the company's problems. He began a massive restructuring of the company and worked with Warner Communications in May 1984 to create "NATCO" (an acronym for New Atari Company). NATCO further streamlined the company's facilities, personnel, and spending. Unknown to James Morgan and the senior management of Atari, Warner had been in talks with Tramel Technology to buy Atari's consumer electronics and home computer divisions. Negotiating until close to midnight on July 1, 1984, Jack Tramiel purchased the home computing and game console divisions of Atari for $50 cash and $240 million in promissory notes and stocks, giving Warner a 20% stake in Atari Corporation who then used it to create a new company under the name Atari Corporation. Warner retained the arcade division, continuing it under the name Atari Games, but sold it to Namco in 1985. Warner also sold the Ataritel division to Mitsubishi.
Atari Corporation (1984–1996)
Under Tramiel's ownership, Atari Corp. used the remaining stock of game console inventory to keep the company afloat while they finished development on a 16/32-bit computer system, the Atari ST. ("ST" stands for "sixteen/thirty-two", referring to the machines' 16-bit bus and 32-bit processor core.) In April 1985, they released the first update to the 8-bit computer line — the Atari 65XE, the Atari XE series. June 1985 saw the release of the Atari 130XE; Atari User Groups received early sneak-preview samples of the new Atari 520ST's, and major retailer shipments hit store shelves in September 1985 of Atari's new 32-bit Atari ST computers. In 1986, Atari launched two consoles designed under Warner — the Atari 2600jr and the Atari 7800 console (which saw limited release in 1984). Atari rebounded, earning a $25 million profit that year.
In 1987, Atari acquired the Federated Group for $67.3 million, securing shelf space in over 60 stores in California, Arizona, Texas and Kansas at a time when major American electronics outlets were reluctant to carry Atari-branded computers, and two-thirds of Atari's PC production was sold in Europe. The Federated Group (not related to Federated Department Stores) was sold to Silo in 1989.
In 1989, Atari released the Atari Lynx, a handheld console with color graphics, to much fanfare. A shortage of parts kept the system from being released nationwide for the 1989 Christmas season, and the Lynx lost market share to Nintendo's Game Boy, which, despite only having a black and white display, was cheaper, had better battery life and had much higher availability. Tramiel emphasized computers over game consoles but Atari's proprietary computer architecture and operating system fell victim to the success of the Wintel platform while the game market revived. In 1989, Atari Corp. sued Nintendo for $250 million, alleging it had an illegal monopoly. Atari eventually lost the case when it was rejected by a US district court in 1992.
In 1993, Atari positioned its Jaguar as the only 64-bit interactive media entertainment system available, but it sold poorly. It would be the last home console to be produced by Atari and the last to be produced by an American manufacturer until Microsoft's introduction of the Xbox in 2001.
By 1996, a series of successful lawsuits had left Atari with millions of dollars in the bank, but the failure of the Lynx and Jaguar left Atari without a product to sell. Tramiel and his family also wanted out of the business. The result was a rapid succession of changes in ownership. In July 1996, Atari merged with JTS Inc., a short-lived maker of hard disk drives, to form JTS Corp. Atari's role in the new company largely became that of holder for the Atari properties and minor support, and consequently the name largely disappeared from the market.
Atari Games (1984–1999)
After the sale of the consumer electronics and computer divisions to Jack Tramiel, Atari was renamed Atari Games Corporation Atari Games retained most of the same employees and managers from the coin-operated games division and continued many of the divisions projects from before the transition. In 1985, a controlling interest in the coin-operated games division was sold to Namco, which also took the Atari Games name. Warner renamed Atari Games to Atari Holdings, which continued as a non-operating subsidiary until 1992. Meanwhile, Namco later lost interest in operating Atari Games. In 1987, Namco sold 33% of its shares to a group of employees led by then-president Hideyuki Nakajima. He had been the president of Atari Games since 1985. Atari Ireland was a subsidiary of Atari Games that manufactured their games for the European market; while under Namco, Atari Ireland also manufactured Sega's Hang-On (1985) for the European market.
Atari Games continued to manufacture arcade games and units, and starting in 1988, also sold cartridges for the Nintendo Entertainment System under the Tengen brand name, including a version of Tetris. The companies exchanged a number of lawsuits in the late 1980s related to disputes over the rights to Tetris and Tengen's circumvention of Nintendo's lockout chip, which prevented third parties from creating unauthorized games. The suit finally reached a settlement in 1994, with Atari Games paying Nintendo cash damages and use of several patent licenses.
In April 1996, after an unsuccessful bid by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, the company was sold to WMS Industries, owners of the Williams, Bally and Midway arcade brands, which restored the use of the Atari Games name. On November 19, 1999, Atari Games Corporation was renamed Midway Games West Inc., resulting in the Atari Games name no longer being used.
Hasbro Interactive (1998–2000)
On March 13, 1998, JTS sold the Atari name and assets to Hasbro Interactive for $5 million, less than a fifth of what Warner Communications had paid 22 years earlier. This transaction primarily involved the brand and intellectual property, which now fell under the Atari Interactive division of Hasbro Interactive. The brand name changed hands again in December 2000 when French software publisher Infogrames took over Hasbro Interactive.
Atari SA (2001–present)
In October 2001, Infogrames (now Atari SA) announced that it was "reinventing" the Atari brand with the launch of three new games featuring a prominent Atari branding on their boxarts: Splashdown, MX Rider and TransWorld Surf. Infogrames used Atari as a brand name for games aimed at 18–34 year olds. Other Infogrames games under the Atari name included V-Rally 3, Neverwinter Nights, Stuntman and Enter the Matrix.
On May 7, 2003, Infogrames had its majority-owned, but discrete US subsidiary Infogrames NA officially renamed Atari, Inc., renamed its European operations to Atari Europe but kept the original name of the main company Infogrames Entertainment. The original Atari holdings division purchased from Hasbro, Hasbro Interactive, was also made a separate corporate entity renamed as Atari Interactive.
Between 2004 and 2011, Atari produced and marketed Atari Flashback retro consoles, reminiscent of the Atari 2600 design. Since 2011, these consoles have been produced by AtGames under the license from Atari. Atari Flashback Portable is a handheld game console sold since 2016. In April 2011, Atari re-released their back catalogue of arcade and Atari 2600 games to be played on mobile devices.
On March 6, 2008, Infogrames made an offer to Atari Inc. to buy out all remaining public shares for a value of $1.68 per share, or $11 million total. The offer would make Infogrames sole owner of Atari Inc., thus making it a privately held company. On April 30, 2008, Atari Inc. announced its intentions to accept Infogrames' buyout offer and to merge with Infogrames. On October 8, 2008, Infogrames completed its acquisition of Atari Inc., making it a wholly owned subsidiary.
On December 9, 2008, Atari announced that it had acquired Cryptic Studios, a MMORPG developer.
Namco Bandai purchased a 34% stake in Atari Europe on May 14, 2009, paving the way for its acquisition from Infogrames. Atari had significant financial issues for several years prior, with losses in the tens of millions since 2005.
In May 2009, Infogrames Entertainment SA, the parent company of Atari, and Atari Interactive, announced it would change its name to Atari SA.
In April 2010, Atari SA board member and former CEO David Gardner resigned. Original Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell joined the board as a representative for Blubay holdings.
As of March 31, 2011, the board of directors consisted of Frank Dangeard, Jim Wilson, Tom Virden, Gene Davis and Alexandra Fichelson.
On January 21, 2013, the four related companies Atari, Atari Interactive, Humongous, and California US Holdings filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. All three Ataris emerged from bankruptcy one year later and the entering of the social casino gaming industry with Atari Casino. Frederic Chesnais, who now heads all three companies, stated that their entire operations consist of a staff of 10 people.
On June 22, 2014, Atari announced a new corporate strategy that would include a focus on "new audiences", specifically "LGBT, social casinos, real-money gambling, and YouTube".
On June 8, 2017, a short teaser video was released, promoting a new product; and the following week Chesnais confirmed the company was developing a new game console – the hardware was stated to be based on PC technology, and still under development. In mid July 2017 an Atari press release confirmed the existence of the aforementioned new hardware, referred to as the "Ataribox". The box design was derived from early Atari designs (e.g. 2600) with a ribbed top surface, and a rise at the back of the console; two versions were announced: one with a traditional wood veneer front, and the other with a glass front. Connectivity options were revealed, including HDMI, USB (x4), and SD card – the console was said to support both classic and current games. Also, according to an official company statement of June 22, 2017, the product was to be initially launched via a crowdfunding campaign in order to minimize any financial risk to the parent company.
On September 26, 2017, Atari sent out a press release about the new "Atari VCS", which confirmed more details about the console. It will run a Linux operating system, with full access to the underlying OS, but it will have a custom interface designed for the TV.
On January 27, 2020, Atari announced a deal with GSD Group to build Atari Hotels, with the first breaking ground in Phoenix in mid-2020. Additional hotels were also planned in Las Vegas, Denver, Chicago, Austin, Seattle, San Francisco, and San Jose. The company plans to make the hotel experience immersive and accessible to all ages. Hotels are planned to include virtual and augmented reality technologies.
On December 16, 2020, Atari shipped the first units of the Atari VCS exclusive to backers of the systems crowdfunding campaign. Atari urged the backers to give feedback on the system so that the company could make changes to improve the product on its official launch.
In 2020 Atari Token was launched by Atari in equal partnership with the ICICB Group. Atari Group announced in March 2020 that it granted ICICB a non-exclusive license to run a crypto currency online casino on Atari's website, based on the Atari Token.
The group partnering with Atari opened a new company in Gibraltar called Atari Chain LTD.
In March 2021, Atari extended its partnership with ICICB Group for the development of Atari branded hotels and the first hotels will be constructed at selected locations outside the United States, with Dubai, Gibraltar and Spain.
See also
Golden age of arcade video games
History of video games
References
External links
Atari official site
Former Atari brand's official global site
The Atari History Museum – Atari historical archive site
The biggest Atari Archive – Atari softwares archive site
Atari Times , supporting all Atari consoles
Atari On Film – List of Atari products in films
The Dot Eaters: classic video game history – Comprehensive history of videogames, extensive info on Atari offerings and history
Video game companies established in 1972
Home computer hardware companies
Video game companies of France
Video game companies of the United States
Video game development companies
Video game publishers |
28760 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity%20%281989%20video%20game%29 | SimCity (1989 video game) | SimCity, also known as Micropolis or SimCity Classic, is a city-building simulation video game developed by Will Wright and released for a number of platforms from 1989 to 1991. SimCity features two-dimensional graphics and an overhead perspective. The objective of the game is to create a city, develop residential and industrial areas, build infrastructure and collect taxes for further development of the city. Importance is put on increasing the standard of living of the population, maintaining a balance between the different sectors, and monitoring the region's environmental situation to prevent the settlement from declining and going bankrupt.
SimCity was independently developed by Will Wright beginning in 1985, and would not see its first release until 1989. Because the game lacked any of the arcade or action elements that dominated the video game market in the 1980s, video game publishers declined to release the title in fear of its commercial failure, until Broderbund eventually agreed to distribute it. Although the game initially sold poorly, positive feedback from the gaming press boosted its sales. After becoming a best-seller, SimCity was released on several other platforms, most notably on the Super NES in 1991, in which its gameplay was significantly improved with Nintendo's involvement.
SimCity was commercially successful, selling 300,000 units for personal computers and nearly 2 million units for the SNES. The game was recognized as a new phenomenon within the gaming industry, and it broke the widespread belief that computer games were primarily intended for children. SimCity was met with critical acclaim for its innovative and addictive gameplay in spite of the absence of action elements. Reviewers considered the game to be instructive and helpful toward the player's understanding of the basics of urban planning, politics and economics. SimCity received numerous awards from various news publishers and associations. The success of SimCity marked the beginning of the urban simulation genre of video games, as well as publisher Maxis's tradition of producing non-linear simulation games, one of which – The Sims – would surpass all its predecessors in popularity and become one of the best-selling franchises in the video game industry. It is considered one of the greatest video games ever made.
Gameplay
The objective of SimCity is to build and design a city, without specific goals to achieve. The player can mark land as being zoned as commercial, industrial, or residential, add buildings, change the tax rate, build a power grid, build transportation systems and take many other actions, to enhance the city. Once able to construct buildings in a particular area, the too-small-to-see residents, known as "Sims", may choose to construct and upgrade houses, apartment blocks, light or heavy industrial buildings, commercial buildings, hospitals, churches, and other structures. The Sims make these choices based on such factors as traffic levels, adequate electrical power, crime levels, and proximity to other types of buildings—for example, residential areas next to a power plant will seldom appreciate to the highest grade of housing. In the Super NES version and later, the player can also build rewards when they are given to them, such as a mayor's mansion or a casino.
The player may face disasters including flooding, tornadoes, fires (often from air disasters or shipwrecks), earthquakes and attacks by monsters. In addition, monsters and tornadoes can trigger train crashes by running into passing trains.
Scenarios
SimCity includes goal-centered, timed scenarios that could be won or lost depending on the performance of the player. The scenarios were an addition suggested by Brøderbund to make SimCity more like a game. The original cities were based on real world cities and attempted to re-create their general layout. While most scenarios either take place in a fictional timeline or have a city under siege by a fictional disaster, a handful of available scenarios are based on actual historical events.
Development
SimCity was developed by game designer Will Wright. While working on the game Raid on Bungeling Bay, in which the player flies a helicopter dropping bombs on islands, Wright found he enjoyed designing the islands in the level editor more than playing the actual game. This led him to develop increasingly sophisticated level editors. At the same time, Wright was cultivating a love of the intricacies and theories of urban planning and acknowledges the influence of System Dynamics which was developed by Jay Wright Forrester and whose book on the subject laid the foundations for what would become SimCity. In addition, Wright also was inspired by reading "The Seventh Sally", a short story from The Cyberiad by Stanisław Lem, in which an engineer encounters a deposed tyrant, and creates a miniature city with artificial citizens for the tyrant to oppress. The game reflected Wright's approval of mass transit and disapproval of nuclear power; Maxis president Jeff Braun stated "We're pushing political agendas".
The first version of the game was developed for the Commodore 64 in 1985; it was not published for another four years. The original working title of SimCity was Micropolis. The game was unusual in that it could neither be won nor lost; as a result, game publishers did not believe it was possible to market and sell such a game successfully. Brøderbund declined to publish the title when Wright proposed it, and he pitched it to a range of major game publishers without success. Finally, Braun, founder of the tiny software company Maxis, agreed to publish SimCity as one of two initial games for the company.
Wright and Braun returned to Brøderbund to formally clear the rights to the game in 1988, when SimCity was near completion. After Brøderbund executives Gary Carlston and Don Daglow saw SimCity, they signed Maxis to a distribution deal for both of its initial games. With that, four years after initial development, SimCity was released for the Amiga and Macintosh platforms, followed by the IBM PC and Commodore 64 later in 1989.
Ports and versions
After the original release on the Amiga and Macintosh, then the Commodore 64 and IBM PC, it was ported to several other computer platforms and video game consoles, specifically the Atari ST, Acorn Archimedes, Amstrad CPC, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, Acorn Electron, Super Nintendo Entertainment System (which was later released on Virtual Console), EPOC32, mobile phone, Internet, Windows, FM-Towns, OLPC XO-1 and NeWS HyperLook on Sun Unix. The game is available as a multiplayer version for X11 Tcl/Tk on various Unix, Linux, DESQview and OS/2 operating systems. Certain versions have been re-released with various add-ons, including extra scenarios. Two 'Graphics Sets' packs were released, 3 sets in each, which change the graphics and messages in the game, for both DOS and Windows versions. An additional extra add on, included with the Windows version of SimCity Classic was the Terrain Editor - a 'level editor', or city map creator. The Terrain Editor is a simple tool that allows the user to create maps with forest, land, and water portions. SimCity Classic was re-released in 1993 as part of the SimClassics Volume 1 compilation alongside SimAnt and SimLife for PC, Mac and Amiga.
A version was developed in 1991 for the Nintendo Entertainment System, but never released; a prototype version was found in 2017. On December 25, 2018, a ROM image of the unreleased NES version was released online by Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation.
The original DOS version of SimCity supports a variety of graphics modes. SimCity v1.00 runs in CGA monochrome 640x200, EGA color 320x200, Tandy 640x200 mode, Hercules 720x348 mono, and EGA 640x350 in color or mono. v1.07 added MCGA 640x480 mono. A later v2.00 DOS release (SimCity 'Classic''') dropped all of the old 200-line modes, added VGA 640x480 color, and a special VGA/MCGA 320x200 256-color mode.
A Windows 3.0/3.1 port of SimCity was released in 1992. It runs in the Windows GDI with new sounds and music, either PC-Speaker type or digital/MIDI type. The Windows PC-Speaker sound/music is quite innovative. Two later CD-ROM versions were released: One by Interplay in 1994 for DOS, with new 256 color graphics and event-triggered movies. The second is a Deluxe version by Maxis in 1995 with new 256-color graphics and sound, and also including all 6 graphics sets and a new Terrain Editor.
Super NESSimCity for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) features the same gameplay and scenario features; however, since it was developed and published by Nintendo, the company incorporated their own ideas. Instead of the Godzilla monster disaster, Bowser of the Super Mario series becomes the attacking monster, and once the city reaches a landmark 500,000 populace, the player receives a Mario statue that is placeable in the city. The Super NES port also features special buildings the player may receive as rewards, such as casinos, large parks, amusement parks, and expo centers; some of which would be incorporated into SimCity 2000. A bank can be built which will allow a loan of $10,000 to be taken, but it must be paid back before another loan can be taken out. The game includes schools and hospitals, though they cannot be placed by the player; instead, the game will sometimes turn an empty residential lot into one. There are city classifications, such as becoming a metropolis at 100,000 people. It has some of the same pre-set scenarios in the PC and Mac versions and two new ones. One is in Las Vegas under attack by aliens and another called Freeland. Freeland has no water and no rewards buildings are given. Also unique to the Super NES version is a character named "Dr. Wright" (whose physical appearance is based on Will Wright) who acts as an adviser to the player. The soundtrack was composed by Soyo Oka. The edition is featured as Nintendo's Player's Choice as a million seller.
In August 1996, a version of the game entitled BS Sim City Machizukuri Taikai was broadcast to Japanese players via the Super Famicom's Satellaview subsystem. Later, a sequel titled SimCity 64 was released for Nintendo 64DD, the Japan-only Nintendo 64 add-on.
Cancelled NES version
A version for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was announced alongside the SNES version, and had been showcased at the 1991 Consumer Electronics Show, but the NES version was never properly released. However, prototype cartridges for the NES version were discovered in 2017, and one copy was obtained by video game preservationist Frank Cifaldi, who extensively documented its features compared to the original personal computer game and the SNES version. It featured a completely different soundtrack (also composed by Oka) from that of the SNES version; besides Metropolis Theme, a composition that Oka herself considers one of her best works.
Micropolis
In January 2008, the SimCity source code was released as free software under the GPL-3.0-or-later license, renamed to Micropolis (the original working title) for trademark reasons, and developed by Don Hopkins. The release of the source code was motivated by the One Laptop Per Child program. The Micropolis source code has been translated to C++, integrated with Python and interfaced with both GTK+ and OpenLaszlo.
In 2008, Maxis established an online browser-based version of SimCity. A second browser-based version was later released under the name Micropolis. In 2013, a browser-based version was released, ported using JavaScript and HTML5, as micropolisJS.
Since Micropolis is licensed under the GPL-3.0-or-later, users can do anything they want with it that conforms with the GPL-3.0-or-laterthe only restriction is that they cannot call it "SimCity" (along with a few other limitations to protect EA's trademarks). This allows other, differently named projects to be forked from the Micropolis source code. Improvements to the open source code base that merit EA's approval may be incorporated into the official "OLPC SimCity" source code, to be distributed with the OLPC under the trademarked name OLPC SimCity, but only after it has been reviewed and approved by EA.
Comparison of different versions
SimCity Classic is available for Palm OS and on the SimCity.com website as Classic Live. It was also released by Atelier Software for the Psion 5 handheld computer, and mobile phones in 2006.
The July 2005 issue of Nintendo Power stated that a development cartridge of SimCity for the NES was found at Nintendo headquarters. Never released, it is reportedly the only one in existence.
Additionally a terrain editor and architecture disks were available with tileset graphics for settings of Ancient Asia, Medieval, Wild West, Future Europe, Future USA and a Moon Colony.
Versions of SimCity for the BBC Micro, Acorn Electron, and Acorn Archimedes computers were published by Superior Software/Acornsoft. Programmer Peter Scott had to squeeze the 512k Amiga version of the game into 20k to run on the ageing 32k BBC Micro and Acorn Electron. Despite this, it kept almost all of the functionality of the Amiga game and very similar graphics (although only using four colours).
DUX Software published a Unix version of SimCity for the NeWS window system using the HyperLook user interface environment, and a multi-player version of SimCity for the X11 window system using the Tcl/Tk user interface toolkit, both developed and ported to various platforms by Don Hopkins.
ReceptionSimCity was a financial success, selling one million copies by late 1992. In the United States, it was the ninth best-selling computer game from 1993 to 1999, with another 830,000 units sold. It was critically acclaimed and received significant recognition within a year after its initial release. As of December 1990, the game was reported to have won the following awards:
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:left;"
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Best Entertainment Program 1989.
Best Educational Program, 1989.
Best Simulation Program, 1989.
Critics' Choice: Best Consumer Program, 1989, Software Publisher's Association.
Most Innovative Publisher, 1989, Computer Game Developer's Conference.
Best PC Game, 1989.
Member of the 1989 Game Hall of Fame, Macworld.
Game of the Year, 1989., Computer Gaming World.
Second Best Simulation of all Time for C-64.
Fourth Best Simulation of All Time for Amiga, .info.
Editors' Choice Award: Best Simulation, 1989, Compute.
Editors' Choice Award: Best Recreation Program, 1989, MacUser.
| style="width:50%; vertical-align:top;"|
Best Computer Strategy Game, 1989, Video Games & Computer Entertainment.
Best Game Designer of the Year: Will Wright, for SimCity, 1989, Computer Entertainer.
Best 20th Century Computer Game, 1989, Charles S. Roberts Award.
Software Award of Excellence, 1990–1991, Technology and Learning.
Best Educational Program, 1990, European Computer Leisure Award.
Tilt D'Or (Golden Award): Most Original Game, 1989, Tilt (France).
Game of the Year, 1989, Amiga Annual (Australia).
World Class Award, 1990, Macworld (Australia).
4th best game of all time, Amiga Power.
Best Curricular Program, Codie award.
Best Consumer Program, Critic's Choice Award.
|}
In addition, SimCity won the Origins Award for "Best Military or Strategy Computer Game" of 1989 in 1990, was named to Computer Gaming Worlds Hall of Fame for games readers highly rated over time, and the multiplayer X11 version of the game was also nominated in 1992 as the Best Product of the Year in Unix World. Macworld named the Macintosh version of SimCity the Best Simulation Game of 1989, putting it into the Macintosh Game Hall of Fame. Macworld, in their review, praised its graphics as well as its strategic gameplay, calling it "A challenging, dynamic game, realistic and unpredictable", and notes how "as the population grows the city's needs change." SimCity was named No. 4 "Ten Greatest PC Game Ever" by PC World in 2009. It was named one of the sixteen most influential games in history at Telespiele, a German technology and games trade show, in 2007. Sid Meier in 2008 named SimCity as one of the three most important innovations in videogame history, as it led to other games that encouraged players to create, not destroy. It was named No. 11 on IGN's 2009 "Top 25 PC Games of All Time" list. In 1996, Computer Gaming World declared SimCity the 6th-best computer game ever released. In 2018, Complex rated SimCity 50th on it's "The Best Super Nintendo Games of All Time." In 1995, Total! listed SimCity 89th on their "Top 100 SNES Games."
Mike Siggins reviewed SimCity for Games International magazine, and gave it 5 stars out of 5, and stated that "Overall, Sim City must be ranked right up there in the all time Amiga classics. It is the first title that I have come across to turn a 'serious' theme into a passable simulation while also making for an excellent game."
Entertainment Weekly gave the game an B+.
Johnny L. Wilson reviewed the game for Computer Gaming World, and stated that "Dynamic is exactly the right word for this product. There is constant strategy involved in placement of zones, road building, political decision-making, and damage control."
In 1991, PC Format named SimCity one of the 50 best computer games ever. The editors called it "a town planner's dream".
The University of Southern California and University of Arizona used SimCity in urban planning and political science classes. Chuck Moss of The Detroit News found that Godzilla attacking the city in the 1972 Detroit scenario caused less destruction than the mayoralty of Coleman Young. In 1990 The Providence Journal invited five candidates for Mayor of Providence, Rhode Island to manage a SimCity town resembling the city. Victoria Lederberg blamed her close loss in the Democratic primary to the newspaper's description of her poor performance in the game; former mayor Buddy Cianci, the most successful player, won election that year.
The SimCity Terrain Editor was reviewed in 1989 in Dragon No. 147 by Hartley, Patricia, and Kirk Lesser in "The Role of Computers" column. The reviewers gave the expansion 4 out of 5 stars.
The ZX Spectrum version was voted number 4 in the Your Sinclair Readers' Top 100 Games of All Time.
In 2004, SimCity was inducted into GameSpot's list of the greatest games of all time.
On March 12, 2007, The New York Times reported that SimCity was named to a list of the ten most important video games of all time, the so-called game canon. The Library of Congress took up a video game preservation proposal and began with the games from this list, including SimCity.
Legacy
SimCity yielded several sequels. "Sim" games of many types were developedwith Will Wright and Maxis developing myriad titles including SimEarth, SimFarm, SimTown, Streets of SimCity, SimCopter, SimAnt, SimLife, SimIsle, SimTower, SimPark, SimSafari, and The Sims, which spawned its own series, as well as the unreleased SimsVille and SimMars. They also obtained licenses for some titles developed in Japan, such as SimTower and Let's Take The A-Train (released as A-Train outside Japan). Spore, released in 2008, was originally going to be titled "SimEverything"a name that Will Wright thought might accurately describe what he was trying to achieve.
SimCity inspired a new genre of video games. "Software toys" that were open-ended with no set objective were developed trying to duplicate SimCity's success. The most successful was most definitely Wright's own The Sims, which went on to be the best selling computer game of all time. The ideas pioneered in SimCity have been incorporated into real-world applications as well, as urban developers have recognized that the game's design was "gamification" of city planning by integrating numerous real-world systems for a city or region interacted to project growth or change. For example, VisitorVille simulates a city based on website statistics. Several real-world city improvement projects started with models inspired by SimCity prior to implementation, particularly with the onset of more-connected smart cities.
The series also spawned a SimCity collectible card game, produced by Mayfair Games. Rick Swan reviewed Sim City: The Card Game for Dragon magazine No. 221 (September 1995). Swan says that "While the card game doesn't scale the heights of the computer game, it comes close."
Dr. Wright from the Super NES version has made appearances in several video games. He is a non-player character in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, and an assist trophy in the Super Smash Bros. series.
See also
Government simulation
Municipal government, the basis for SimCity
Urban planning
Regional planning
List of open source games
References
External links
Official website for the Super Famicom version
1989 video games
Acorn Archimedes games
Amiga games
Amstrad CPC games
Android (operating system) games
Atari ST games
BBC Micro and Acorn Electron games
Browser games
Business simulation games
Cancelled Nintendo Entertainment System games
City-building games
Commercial video games with freely available source code
Commodore 64 games
Commodore CDTV games
DOS games
DOS games ported to Windows
FM Towns games
Freeware games
God games
IOS games
IRIX games
Java platform games
Linux games
Classic Mac OS games
Palm OS games
Mobile games
NEC PC-9801 games
Nintendo Entertainment Analysis and Development games
Origins Award winners
Sharp X68000 games
SimCity
Software that uses Tk (software)
Super Nintendo Entertainment System games
Superior Software games
Symbian games
Top-down video games
Video games developed in the United States
Video games scored by Soyo Oka
Video games with oblique graphics
Video games with tile-based graphics
Virtual Console games
Windows games
ZX Spectrum games
Video games set in Germany
Video games set in San Francisco
Video games set in Switzerland
Video games set in Detroit
Video games set in Tokyo
Video games set in Boston
Hamburg in fiction
Video games set in Brazil
Rio de Janeiro (city) in fiction
Video games scored by Russell Lieblich
Video games set in the 20th century
Video games set in the 21st century
Video games set in Nevada
Video games with alternative versions
Video games about Nazi Germany |
33974484 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIM-600 | TIM-600 | TIM-600 was an important PC computer system in the TIM series of microcomputers from Mihajlo Pupin Institute-Belgrade, developed from 1987 to 1988 (see ref.Lit. #1, #2 and #6). It was based on the Intel microprocessor types 80386 and 80387. It has word-length of 32 bits, basic cycle time of 20 MHz and operating system Unix V.3. The TIM-600 computer system was presented at the Munich International Computer Exhibition in September 1988.
System specifications
TIM-600 architecture was based on three system buses (32, 16 and 8 bits respectively). The CPU performs 5,000,000 simple operations per second. Primary memory RAM had a maximum capacity of 8 x 2 MB. There were a maximum of eight TIM terminals or other equipment units connected by RS-232C. Centronics types interface was used for the line printers. Also, there were possibilities for the connections of two hard disks as well as the magnetic cassettes and diskettes.
Software
The TIM-600 uses the programming languages C++, Fortran, Cobol, BASIC and Pascal. Database management was performed by Informix and Oracle software.
Applications
The TIM-600 computer system was used for business data processing in many offices in Serbia, for example in public, health, and scientific organizations; for process automation in industrial production; in road traffic control; in some banks; for military and government services, etc.
See also
Mihajlo Pupin Institute
Personal computer
References
Microcomputers
IBM PC compatibles
Mihajlo Pupin Institute |
3698317 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93Intel%20architecture | Apple–Intel architecture | The Apple–Intel architecture, or Mactel, is an unofficial name used for Apple Macintosh personal computers developed and manufactured by Apple Inc. that use Intel x86 processors, rather than the PowerPC and Motorola 68000 ("68k") series processors used in their predecessors or the ARM processors used in their successors. With the change in architecture, a change in firmware became necessary; Apple selected the Intel-designed Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) as its comparable component to the Open Firmware used on its PowerPC architectures, and as the firmware-based replacement for the PC BIOS from Intel. With the change in processor architecture to x86, Macs gained the ability to boot into x86-native operating systems (such as Microsoft Windows), while Intel VT-x brought near-native virtualization with Mac OS X as the host OS.
Technologies
Background
Apple uses a subset of the standard PC architecture, which provides support for Mac OS X and support for other operating systems. Hardware and firmware components that must be supported to run an operating system on Apple-Intel hardware include the Extensible Firmware Interface.
The EFI and GUID Partition Table
With the change in architecture, a change in firmware became necessary. Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is the firmware-based replacement for the PC BIOS from Intel. Designed by Intel, it was chosen by Apple to replace Open Firmware, used on PowerPC architectures. Since many operating systems, such as Windows XP and many versions of Windows Vista, are incompatible with EFI, Apple released a firmware upgrade with a Compatibility Support Module that provides a subset of traditional BIOS support with its Boot Camp product.
GUID Partition Table (GPT) is a standard for the layout of the partition table on a physical hard disk. It is a part of the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) standard proposed by Intel as a substitute for the earlier PC BIOS. The GPT replaces the Master Boot Record (MBR) used with BIOS.
Booting
To Mac operating systems
Intel Macs can boot in two ways: directly via EFI, or in a "legacy" BIOS compatibility mode. For multibooting, holding down "Option" gives a choice of bootable devices, while the rEFInd bootloader is commonly used for added configurability.
Legacy Live USBs cannot be used on Intel Macs; the EFI firmware can recognize and boot from USB drives, but it can only do this in EFI mode–when the firmware switches to BIOS mode, it no longer recognizes USB drives, due to lack of a BIOS-mode USB driver. Many operating systems, such as earlier versions of Windows and Linux, could only be booted in BIOS mode, or were more easily booted or perform better when booted in BIOS mode, and thus USB booting on Intel-based Macs was for a time largely limited to Mac OS X, which can easily be booted via EFI.
To non-Mac operating systems
On April 5, 2006, Apple made available for download a public beta version of Boot Camp, a collection of technologies that allows users of Intel-based Macs to boot Windows XP Service Pack 2. The first non-beta version of Boot Camp is included in Mac OS X v10.5, "Leopard." Before the introduction of Boot Camp, which provides most hardware drivers for Windows XP, drivers for XP were difficult to find.
Linux can also be booted with Boot Camp.
Differences from standard PCs
Intel-based Mac computers use very similar hardware to PCs from other manufacturers that ship with Microsoft Windows or Linux operating systems. In particular, CPUs, chipsets, and GPUs are entirely compatible. However, Apple computers also include some custom hardware and design choices not found in competing systems:
System Management Controller is a custom Apple chip that controls various functions of the computer related to power management, including handling the power button, management of battery and thermal sensors, among others. It also plays a part in the protection scheme deployed to restrict booting macOS to Apple hardware (see Digital Rights Management below). Intel-based Mac doesn't use standard TPM.
Laptop input devices. Early MacBook and MacBook Pro computers used an internal variant of USB as a keyboard and trackpad interconnect. Since the 2013 revision of MacBook Air, Apple started to use a custom Serial Peripheral Interface controller instead. The 2016 MacBook Pro additionally uses a custom internal USB device dubbed "iBridge" as an interface to the Touch Bar and Touch ID components, as well as the FaceTime Camera. PC laptops generally use internal variant of the legacy PS/2 keyboard interconnect. PS/2 also used to be the standard for PC laptop pointing devices, although a variety of other interfaces, including USB, SMBus, and I2C, may also be used.
Additional custom hardware may include a GMUX chip that controls GPU switching, non-compliant implementations of NVMe solid-state storage and non-standard configurations of HD Audio subsystem.
Keyboard layout has significant differences between Apple and IBM PC keyboards. While PC keyboards can be used in macOS, as well as Mac keyboards in Microsoft Windows, some functional differences occur. For example, the (PC) and (Mac) keys function equivalently; the same is true for (PC) and (Mac) – however, the physical location of those keys is reversed. There are also keys exclusive for each platform (e.g. ), some of which may require software remapping to achieve the desired function. Compact and laptop keyboards from Apple also lack some keys considered essential on PCs, such as the forward key, although some of them are accessible through the key.
Boot process. All Intel-based Macs have been using some version of EFI as the boot firmware. At the time the platform debuted in 2006, it was in a stark contrast to PCs, which almost universally employed legacy BIOS, and Apple's implementation of EFI did not initially implement the Compatibility Support Module that would allow booting contemporary standard PC operating systems. Apple updated the firmware with CSM support with the release of Boot Camp in April 2006, and since the release of Windows 8 in 2012, Microsoft has required its OEM partners to use UEFI boot process on PCs, which made the differences smaller. However, Apple's version of EFI also includes some custom extensions that are utilized during regular macOS boot process, which include the following:
A driver for the HFS Plus file system with support locating the bootloader based on the "blessed directory" and "blessed file" properties of HFS+ volumes. The EFI System Partition is thus not used or necessary for regular macOS boot process.
Rudimentary pre-boot GUI framework, including support for image drawing, mouse cursor and events. This is used by FileVault 2 to present the login screen before loading the operating system.
Other non-standard EFI services for managing various firmware features such as the computer's NVRAM and boot arguments.
Some of these differences can pose as obstacles both to running macOS on non-Apple hardware and booting alternative operating systems on Mac computers – Apple only provides drivers for its custom hardware for macOS and Microsoft Windows (as part of Boot Camp); drivers for other operating systems such as Linux need to be written by third parties, usually volunteer free software enthusiasts.
Digital Rights Management
Digital Rights Management in the Apple–Intel architecture is accomplished via the "Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext," sometimes referred to as DSMOS or DSMOSX, a file present in Intel-capable versions of the Mac OS X operating system. Its presence enforces a form of Digital Rights Management, preventing Mac OS X being installed on stock PCs. The name of the kext is a reference to the Mac OS X license conditions, which allow installation on Apple hardware only. According to Apple, anything else is stealing Mac OS X. The kext is located at /System/Library/Extensions on the volume containing the operating system. The extension contains a kernel function called that performs AES decryption of "apple-protected" programs. A system lacking a proper key will not be able to run the Apple-restricted binaries, which include , , , , , , , , , or .
After the initial announcement of first Intel-based Mac hardware configurations, reporting a Trusted Platform Module among system components, it was believed that the TPM is responsible for handling the DRM protection. It was later proven to not be the case. The keys are actually contained within the System Management Controller, a component exclusive to Apple computers, and can be easily retrieved from it. These two 32-byte keys form a human-readable ASCII string copyrighted by Apple, establishing another possible line of legal defence against prospective clone makers.
Virtualization
The Intel Core Duo (and later, including the current i5, i7, i9, and Xeon) processors found in Intel Macs support Intel VT-x, which allows for high performance (near-native) virtualization that gives the user the ability to run and switch between two or more operating systems simultaneously, rather than having to dual-boot and run only one operating system at a time.
The first software to take advantage of this technology was Parallels Desktop for Mac, released in June 2006. The Parallels virtualization products allow users to use installations of Windows XP and later in a virtualized mode while running OS X. VirtualBox is virtualization software from Oracle Corporation, which was released January 2007. Available for Mac OS X as well as other host operating systems, it supports Intel VT-x and can run multiple other guest operating systems, including Windows XP and later. It is available free of charge under either a proprietary license or the GPL free software license and is used by default when running Docker images of other operating systems
VMware offers a product similar to Parallels called Fusion, released August 2007. VMware's virtualization product also allows users to use installations of Windows XP and later under OS X.
Regardless of the product used, there are inherent limitations and performance penalties in using a virtualized guest OS versus the native macOS or booting an alternative OS solution offered via Boot Camp.
See also
Mac transition to Intel processors
References and notes
External links
Intel EFI open-source implementation, code-name 'Tiano'
Macintosh platform
IBM PC compatibles
32-bit computers
64-bit computers |
23956711 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return-oriented%20programming | Return-oriented programming | Return-oriented programming (ROP) is a computer security exploit technique that allows an attacker to execute code in the presence of security defenses such as executable space protection and code signing.
In this technique, an attacker gains control of the call stack to hijack program control flow and then executes carefully chosen machine instruction sequences that are already present in the machine's memory, called "gadgets". Each gadget typically ends in a return instruction and is located in a subroutine within the existing program and/or shared library code. Chained together, these gadgets allow an attacker to perform arbitrary operations on a machine employing defenses that thwart simpler attacks.
Background
Return-oriented programming is an advanced version of a stack smashing attack. Generally, these types of attacks arise when an adversary manipulates the call stack by taking advantage of a bug in the program, often a buffer overrun. In a buffer overrun, a function that does not perform proper bounds checking before storing user-provided data into memory will accept more input data than it can store properly. If the data is being written onto the stack, the excess data may overflow the space allocated to the function's variables (e.g., "locals" in the stack diagram to the right) and overwrite the return address. This address will later be used by the function to redirect control flow back to the caller. If it has been overwritten, control flow will be diverted to the location specified by the new return address.
In a standard buffer overrun attack, the attacker would simply write attack code (the "payload") onto the stack and then overwrite the return address with the location of these newly written instructions. Until the late 1990s, major operating systems did not offer any protection against these attacks; Microsoft Windows provided no buffer-overrun protections until 2004. Eventually, operating systems began to combat the exploitation of buffer overflow bugs by marking the memory where data is written as non-executable, a technique known as executable space protection. With this enabled, the machine would refuse to execute any code located in user-writable areas of memory, preventing the attacker from placing payload on the stack and jumping to it via a return address overwrite. Hardware support later became available to strengthen this protection.
With data execution prevention, an adversary cannot execute maliciously injected instructions because a typical buffer overflow overwrites contents in the data section of memory, which is marked as non-executable. To defeat this, a return-oriented programming attack does not inject malicious code, but rather uses unintended instructions that are already present, called "gadgets", by manipulating return addresses. A typical data execution prevention cannot defend against this attack because the adversary did not use malicious code but rather combined "good" instructions by changing return addresses; therefore the code used would not be marked non-executable.
Return-into-library technique
The widespread implementation of data execution prevention made traditional buffer overflow vulnerabilities difficult or impossible to exploit in the manner described above. Instead, an attacker was restricted to code already in memory marked executable, such as the program code itself and any linked shared libraries. Since shared libraries, such as libc, often contain subroutines for performing system calls and other functionality potentially useful to an attacker, they are the most likely candidates for finding code to assemble an attack.
In a return-into-library attack, an attacker hijacks program control flow by exploiting a buffer overrun vulnerability, exactly as discussed above. Instead of attempting to write an attack payload onto the stack, the attacker instead chooses an available library function and overwrites the return address with its entry location. Further stack locations are then overwritten, obeying applicable calling conventions, to carefully pass the proper parameters to the function so it performs functionality useful to the attacker. This technique was first presented by Solar Designer in 1997, and was later extended to unlimited chaining of function calls.
Borrowed code chunks
The rise of 64-bit x86 processors brought with it a change to the subroutine calling convention that required the first argument to a function to be passed in a register instead of on the stack. This meant that an attacker could no longer set up a library function call with desired arguments just by manipulating the call stack via a buffer overrun exploit. Shared library developers also began to remove or restrict library functions that performed actions particularly useful to an attacker, such as system call wrappers. As a result, return-into-library attacks became much more difficult to mount successfully.
The next evolution came in the form of an attack that used chunks of library functions, instead of entire functions themselves, to exploit buffer overrun vulnerabilities on machines with defenses against simpler attacks. This technique looks for functions that contain instruction sequences that pop values from the stack into registers. Careful selection of these code sequences allows an attacker to put suitable values into the proper registers to perform a function call under the new calling convention. The rest of the attack proceeds as a return-into-library attack.
Attacks
Return-oriented programming builds on the borrowed code chunks approach and extends it to provide Turing complete functionality to the attacker, including loops and conditional branches. Put another way, return-oriented programming provides a fully functional "language" that an attacker can use to make a compromised machine perform any operation desired. Hovav Shacham published the technique in 2007 and demonstrated how all the important programming constructs can be simulated using return-oriented programming against a target application linked with the C standard library and containing an exploitable buffer overrun vulnerability.
A return-oriented programming attack is superior to the other attack types discussed both in expressive power and in resistance to defensive measures. None of the counter-exploitation techniques mentioned above, including removing potentially dangerous functions from shared libraries altogether, are effective against a return-oriented programming attack.
On the x86-architecture
Although return-oriented programming attacks can be performed on a variety of architectures, Shacham's paper and the majority of follow-up work focus on the Intel x86 architecture. The x86 architecture is a variable-length CISC instruction set. Return-oriented programming on the x86 takes advantage of the fact that the instruction set is very "dense", that is, any random sequence of bytes is likely to be interpretable as some valid set of x86 instructions.
It is therefore possible to search for an opcode that alters control flow, most notably the return instruction (0xC3) and then look backwards in the binary for preceding bytes that form possibly useful instructions. These sets of instruction "gadgets" can then be chained by overwriting the return address, via a buffer overrun exploit, with the address of the first instruction of the first gadget. The first address of subsequent gadgets is then written successively onto the stack. At the conclusion of the first gadget, a return instruction will be executed, which will pop the address of the next gadget off the stack and jump to it. At the conclusion of that gadget, the chain continues with the third, and so on. By chaining the small instruction sequences, an attacker is able to produce arbitrary program behavior from pre-existing library code. Shacham asserts that given any sufficiently large quantity of code (including, but not limited to, the C standard library), sufficient gadgets will exist for Turing-complete functionality.
An automated tool has been developed to help automate the process of locating gadgets and constructing an attack against a binary. This tool, known as ROPgadget, searches through a binary looking for potentially useful gadgets, and attempts to assemble them into an attack payload that spawns a shell to accept arbitrary commands from the attacker.
On address space layout randomization
The address space layout randomization also has vulnerabilities. According to the paper of Shacham et al., the ASLR on 32-bit architectures is limited by the number of bits available for address randomization. Only 16 of the 32 address bits are available for randomization, and 16 bits of address randomization can be defeated by brute force attack in minutes. For 64-bit architectures, 40 bits of 64 are available for randomization. In 2016, brute force attack for 40-bit randomization is possible, but is unlikely to go unnoticed. Also, randomization can be defeated by de-randomization techniques.
Even with perfect randomization, if there is any information leakage of memory contents it would help to calculate the base address of for example a shared library at runtime.
Without use of the return instruction
According to the paper of Checkoway et al., it is possible to perform return-oriented-programming on x86 and ARM architectures without using a return instruction (0xC3 on x86). They instead used carefully crafted instruction sequences that already exist in the machine's memory to behave like a return instruction. A return instruction has two effects: firstly, it searches for the four-byte value at the top of the stack, and sets the instruction pointer to that value, and secondly, it increases the stack pointer value by four (equivalent to a pop operation). On the x86 architecture, sequences of jmp and pop instructions can act as a return instruction. On ARM, sequences of load and branch instructions can act as a return instruction.
Since this new approach does not use a return instruction, it has negative implications for defense. When a defense program checks not only for several returns but also for several jump instructions, this attack may be detected.
Defenses
G-Free
The G-Free technique was developed by Kaan Onarlioglu, Leyla Bilge, Andrea Lanzi, Davide Balzarotti, and Engin Kirda. It is a practical solution against any possible form of return-oriented programming. The solution eliminates all unaligned free-branch instructions (instructions like RET or CALL which attackers can use to change control flow) inside a binary executable, and protects the free-branch instructions from being used by an attacker. The way G-Free protects the return address is similar to the XOR canary implemented by StackGuard. Further, it checks the authenticity of function calls by appending a validation block. If the expected result is not found, G-Free causes the application to crash.
Address space layout randomization
A number of techniques have been proposed to subvert attacks based on return-oriented programming. Most rely on randomizing the location of program and library code, so that an attacker cannot accurately predict the location of instructions that might be useful in gadgets and therefore cannot mount a successful return-oriented programming attack chain. One fairly common implementation of this technique, address space layout randomization (ASLR), loads shared libraries into a different memory location at each program load. Although widely deployed by modern operating systems, ASLR is vulnerable to information leakage attacks and other approaches to determine the address of any known library function in memory. If an attacker can successfully determine the location of one known instruction, the position of all others can be inferred and a return-oriented programming attack can be constructed.
This randomization approach can be taken further by relocating all the instructions and/or other program state (registers and stack objects) of the program separately, instead of just library locations. This requires extensive runtime support, such as a software dynamic translator, to piece the randomized instructions back together at runtime. This technique is successful at making gadgets difficult to find and utilize, but comes with significant overhead.
Another approach, taken by kBouncer, modifies the operating system to verify that return instructions actually divert control flow back to a location immediately following a call instruction. This prevents gadget chaining, but carries a heavy performance penalty, and is not effective against jump-oriented programming attacks which alter jumps and other control-flow-modifying instructions instead of returns.
Binary code randomization
Some modern systems such as Cloud Lambda (FaaS) and IoT remote updates use Cloud infrastructure to perform on-the-fly compilation before software deployment. A technique that introduces variations to each instance of an executing software can dramatically increase software's immunity to ROP attacks. Brute forcing Cloud Lambda may result in attacking several instances of the randomized software which reduces the effectiveness of the attack. Asaf Shelly published the technique in 2017 and demonstrated the use of Binary Randomization in a software update system. For every updated device, the Cloud-based service introduced variations to code, performs online compilation, and dispatched the binary. This technique is very effective because ROP attacks rely on knowledge of the internal structure of the software. The drawback of the technique is that the software is never fully tested before it is deployed because it is not feasible to test all variations of the randomized software. This means that many Binary Randomization techniques are applicable for network interfaces and system programming and are less recommended for complex algorithms.
SEHOP
Structured Exception Handler Overwrite Protection is a feature of Windows which protects against the most common stack overflow attacks, especially against attacks on a structured exception handler.
Against control flow attacks
As small embedded systems are proliferating due to the expansion of the Internet Of Things, the need for protection of such embedded systems is also increasing. Using Instruction Based Memory Access Control (IB-MAC) implemented in hardware, it is possible to protect low-cost embedded systems against malicious control flow and stack overflow attacks. The protection can be provided by separating the data stack and the return stack. However, due to the lack of a memory management unit in some embedded systems, the hardware solution cannot be applied to all embedded systems.
Against return-oriented rootkits
In 2010, Jinku Li et al. proposed that a suitably modified compiler could completely eliminate return-oriented "gadgets" by replacing each with the instruction sequence ; and each with the instruction sequence ; , where represents an immutable tabulation of all "legitimate" return addresses in the program and represents a specific index into that table. This prevents the creation of a return-oriented gadget that returns straight from the end of a function to an arbitrary address in the middle of another function; instead, gadgets can return only to "legitimate" return addresses, which drastically increases the difficulty of creating useful gadgets. Li et al. claimed that "our return indirection technique essentially de-generalizes return-oriented programming back to the old style of return-into-libc." Their proof-of-concept compiler included a peephole optimization phase to deal with "certain machine instructions which happen to contain the return opcode in their opcodes or immediate operands," such as .
Pointer Authentication Codes (PAC)
The ARMv8.3-A architecture introduces a new feature at the hardware level that takes advantage of unused bits in the pointer address space to cryptographically sign pointer addresses using a specially-designed tweakable block cipher which signs the desired value (typically, a return address) combined with a "local context" value (e.g., the stack pointer).
Before performing a sensitive operation (i.e., returning to the saved pointer) the signature can be checked to detect tampering or usage in the incorrect context (e.g., leveraging a saved return address from an exploit trampoline context).
Notably the Apple A12 chips used in iPhones have upgraded to ARMv8.3 and use PACs. Linux gained support for pointer authentication within the kernel in version 5.7 released in 2020; support for userspace applications was added in 2018.
See also
Blind return oriented programming
Integer overflow
JIT spraying
Sigreturn-oriented programming (SROP)
Threaded code return-oriented programming is a rediscovery of threaded code
References
External links
AntiJOP: a program that removes JOP/ROP vulnerabilities from assembly language code
Computer security exploits |
26758899 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity%20provider | Identity provider | An identity provider (abbreviated IdP or IDP) is a system entity that creates, maintains, and manages identity information for principals and also provides authentication services to relying applications within a federation or distributed network.
Identity providers offer user authentication as a service. Relying party applications, such as web applications, outsource the user authentication step to a trusted identity provider. Such a relying party application is said to be federated, that is, it consumes federated identity.
An identity provider is “a trusted provider that lets you use single sign-on (SSO) to access other websites.” SSO enhances usability by reducing password fatigue. It also provides better security by decreasing the potential attack surface.
Identity providers can facilitate connections between cloud computing resources and users, thus decreasing the need for users to re-authenticate when using mobile and roaming applications.
Types of identity providers
IndieAuth identity provider
IndieAuth is an open standard decentralized authentication protocol that uses OAuth 2.0 and enables services to verify the identity of a user represented by a URL as well as to obtain an access token that can be used to access resources under the control of the user. In the IndieAuth model, a user’s identity links to their preferred identity provider, which can be their own site, or delegated to a third party authorization endpoint.
OpenID provider
OpenID Connect (OIDC) is an identity layer on top of OAuth. In the domain model associated with OIDC, an identity provider is a special type of OAuth 2.0 authorization server. Specifically, a system entity called an OpenID Provider issues JSON-formatted identity tokens to OIDC relying parties via a RESTful HTTP API.
SAML identity provider
The Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) is a set of profiles for exchanging authentication and authorization data across security domains. In the SAML domain model, an identity provider is a special type of authentication authority. Specifically, a SAML identity provider is a system entity that issues authentication assertions in conjunction with an SSO profile of SAML. A relying party that consumes these authentication assertions is called a SAML service provider.
See also
Federated identity
Identity management system
SAML identity provider
References
Computer access control
Federated identity
Identity management
Identity management systems |
23153554 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector%20Informatik | Vector Informatik | Vector Informatik develops software tools and components for networking of electronic systems based on the serial bus systems CAN, LIN, FlexRay, MOST, Ethernet, AFDX, ARINC 429, and SAE J1708 as well as on CAN-based protocols such as SAE J1939, SAE J1587, ISO 11783, NMEA 2000, ARINC 825, CANaerospace, CANopen and more. The headquarters of the company Vector Informatik GmbH is in Stuttgart, Germany. Subsidiaries include Braunschweig, Munich, Hamburg, Regensburg along with international subsidiaries in Brazil, China, France, Italy, England, India, Japan, South Korea, Austria, Sweden, and the United States. Vector Informatik also includes Vector Consulting Services GmbH, a consultation firm specializing in optimization of technical product development. Altogether, these companies are referred to as the Vector Group.
History
Vector Software GmbH was founded on April 1, 1988 by Eberhard Hinderer, Martin Litschel and Helmut Schelling. In the year 1992, the company changed its name to Vector Informatik GmbH. In the same year, the first CANalyzer license was sold and the company attained sales of one million Euros for the first time. In 1996, the first CANoe and CANape licenses were sold.
In 1998, Vector CANtech (United States) was founded, and in the following year Vector Japan. In 2001, the subsidiary Vector Consulting GmbH was founded, which offers consultation services for engineering development and its cost effectiveness. In 2006, Vector Informatik acquired "Division 4m Software" from Micron Electronic Devices AG. In the same year, sales of the Vector Group exceeded the 100 million Euro mark for the first time. In the following year, Vector Korea was founded, and in 2009 Vector Great Britain, Vector Informatik India and Vector China. 2011 the previous representation office in China was converted into a legally independent business. In August 2011 the four owners of Vector Informatik GmbH have transferred their business shares to a family foundation and a non-profit foundation. In 2013, a new subsidiary Vector Austria was established, followed 2014 by Vector Brasil and Vector Italy.
In February 2017, Vector Informatik has acquired 100% of the US company Vector Software, Inc., which develops an embedded software testing platform VectorCAST.
In June 2018, Vector Informatik has acquired 100% of the French company Squoring Technologies SAS, which develops the Squore software analytics platform.
Fields of activity
Vector handles networking of electronic systems based on the serial bus systems CAN, LIN, FlexRay and MOST as well as CAN-based protocols such as SAE J1939 and CANopen. Electronic control modules in vehicles are the company's focus. Experience gained in this area has also been applied to other areas such as avionics, heavy-duty vehicles, special machines, and embedded systems in general. A selection of articles and case studies provides additional background:
Automatic validation of diagnostic services with GM Europe
FlexRay tools support PDU based comms
Optimizing driver assistance systems at BMW
XCP-on-FlexRay at Audi
ODX process from the perspective of an automotive supplier (ZF)
Car2x/DSRC communication
Products
Some of the company's key products are:
The CANalyzer analysis tool for CAN, FlexRay, Ethernet, LIN and MOST as well as other CAN-based protocols.
The CANoe development tool with support for simulation, diagnostics and as a test tool for automotive ECUs. Used at most automotive and truck OEMs and suppliers.
CANape development software, widely used by OEMs and ECU suppliers of automotive industries to calibrate algorithms in ECUs at runtime.
Embedded software components for CAN, FlexRay, LIN, AUTOSAR and others. These components can be found on nearly all automobiles with networked electronics throughout the world.
References
Software companies of Germany
Electronics companies of Germany
Companies based in Stuttgart
Automotive companies of Germany |
235843 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netrunner | Netrunner | Netrunner is an out-of-print collectible card game (CCG) designed by Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic: The Gathering. It was published by Wizards of the Coast and introduced in April 1996. The game took place in the setting for the Cyberpunk 2020 role-playing game (RPG), but it also drew from the broader cyberpunk genre.
In 2012, Fantasy Flight Games released Android: Netrunner, a new card game based on Netrunner, under license from Wizards of the Coast. The new game uses Fantasy Flight Games' Living Card Game release format (as used in their Warhammer: Invasion, A Game of Thrones, Call of Cthulhu, and Lord of the Rings games), and shares the cyberpunk setting of their Android board game.
Gameplay
Netrunner depicts cyberspace combat between a global mega-corporation (the Corp) and a hacker (the Runner). The Corp aims to complete its secret agendas before the Runner can hack in and steal data. It isn't easy, though, as the Corp has strong defensive data forts protected by malevolent computer programs known as ICE (short for Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics). Runners must use special programs of their own, called icebreakers, to break through and steal the hidden plans. All this is paid for in the game by bits (representing currency), which are earned and spent during the course of play.
An interesting feature of Netrunner is its asymmetry: each side has different abilities and uses completely different cards distinguished by alternate card backs. This contrasts with most other CCGs, which usually depict a "battle between peers" where each opponent draws upon the same card pool. While a player does not have to play both sides except in tournament play, many players believe that a firm understanding of both leads to better overall player ability.
The Cyberpunk 2020 supplement Rache Bartmoss' Brainware Blowout featured rules on using Netrunner cards instead of the RPG's existing system to simulate netrunning during game sessions. It also gave conversions to the RPG of some of the cards in the base set (the rest having been mentioned in one book or another).
Expansion sets
Netrunner base set (aka Limited, v1.0) - 374 cards - Release Date: April 26, 1996
Proteus (v2.1) - 154 cards - Release Date: September 1996
Silent Impact - Never released, development halted by WotC. However, a series of six cards labelled 'v2.0' were issued as promotional cards for a planned, but never released, Netrunner 2.0 core set. Even though originally appearing in Netrunner 1.0, these six cards have been revised for 2.0 and feature new artwork as well as revised game text. The six cards in question are Forged Activation Orders, misc.for-sale, The Shell Traders, Pacifica Regional AI, Bizarre Encryption Scheme, and New Galveston City Grid. These cards are extremely rare.
Classic (v2.2) - 52 cards from the Silent Impact set. Release Date: November 1999
Several fan-made expansions have been created for Netrunner, and released online. Many of them have been sanctioned for tournament play.
Webrunner
Netrunner launched with a proto-alternate reality game called Webrunner: The Hidden Agenda, which cast players as hackers against the evil Futukora corporation. Players broke through seven puzzle-themed "gates" to get the secret data ("agenda"). The popular game was the first online game tied into a product release, making the front page of the New York Times technology section.
A sequel, Webrunner II: The Forbidden Code, followed on release of the Proteus expansion. In this, players were cast as security chiefs beset by hackers.
Online gameplay
The Android: Netrunner community plays on Jinteki.net, a free and open source web platform with rule implementation.
Netrunner was playable online through CCG Workshop in the past, but it was shut down by Wizards of the Coast. It is now possible to play Netrunner online using Magic Workstation on Runners' Net, a site which also holds IRC chats and forums to discuss the game. Players may also use other CCG engines such as LackeyCCG or Gccg, which allows players to build and share plugins for different card games and play the games online.
This game can now be played on the OCTGN online game system.
Product ownership
Zvi Mowshowitz, a well-known Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour player, attempted to purchase the license for Netrunner from Wizards of the Coast after the company stopped producing the game. Negotiations, however, fell apart without any revival of the game or transfer of ownership.
In 2012, Fantasy Flight Games announced that they were releasing a modified version of Netrunner, under license from Wizards of the Coast, called Android: Netrunner.
In 2018, Fantasy Flight Games announced that their partnership with Wizards of the Coast to license development of the game was concluding. Starting October 22, 2018, Fantasy Flight will no longer sell Netrunner products.
In August and September 2021, Wizards of the Coast renewed trademarks for both physical and digital Netrunner goods and content.
Reception
Andy Butcher reviewed Netrunner for Arcane magazine, rating it a 9 out of 10 overall. Butcher comments that "Netrunner is almost without fault. It's certainly the best new card game in the last year, and arguably the best since Magic started it all. Richard Garfield has done it again."
Netrunner was lauded by critics, such as InQuest magazine, for its balanced game play and impressive artwork. In 1999 Pyramid magazine named Netrunner as one of "The Millennium's Most Underrated Games". According to editor Scott Haring, "among the connoisseurs of the card game design art, Netrunner is considered to be one of the best-designed games ever."
References
External links
Top Runners' Conference - The Official Netrunner Player Organization
The Netrunner Weekly - Online magazine
The Short Circuit
Runners' Net - Play NetRunner online with MWS and discuss about the game.
Fantasy Flight Games (Android: Netrunner The Card Game) - Android: Netrunner Official Website
Further reading
Card games introduced in 1996
Collectible card games
Cyberpunk games
Virtual reality in fiction
Richard Garfield games
Wizards of the Coast games |
19268578 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining%20Innovation%20Rehabilitation%20and%20Applied%20Research%20Corporation | Mining Innovation Rehabilitation and Applied Research Corporation | Mining Innovation Rehabilitation and Applied Research Corporation, or MIRARCO, is the "largest not-for-profit applied research firm in North America."
MIRARCO is made up of three primary divisions:
CEM
GRC
EVO
CEM (Centre for Environmental Monitoring)
CEM develops "analytical systems and remote monitoring technologies" and provides "research and technical services" to support resource industries. CEM's primary concern is environmental sustainability.
CEM's expertise includes:
Environmental Systems Monitoring
Remediation of Mine Sites
Environmental Data Management and Interpretation
Ecotoxicological Research
Mine Operation Environmental Effects Monitoring
Analytical Method Development, and
Geological Monitoring
GRC (Geomechanics Research Centre)
GRC conducts "engineering and scientific research and development in the field of geotechnical engineering," applying its findings to "promote safer and more economical excavations at depth." GRC's primary concern is geological risk assessment and management.
GRC's expertise includes:
Static and Impact Testing of Support
Performance Assessments
Support in Burst-prone Ground
Drillability Assessment
The Potash Roof Inspection System (PRIS) and the CRack Identification System (CRIS) (both are types of Ground-Penetrating Radar systems).
Borehole Acoustic Televiewer
EVO (Enhanced Visualization and Optimization)
EVO was created in 2008 from the former CMT (Centre for Mining Technology) and VREX (Virtual Reality Exploration) groups. CMT focused on technology projects like Water-jet scaling and mine planning, while VREX focused on mine safety, and integration, interpretation, and visualization through its Virtual Reality Laboratory (owned by Laurentian University).
The combined group now focuses its efforts on creating and using software for the mining industry. Its first major software product was the Schedule Optimization Tool (SOT), which launched in June 2008. The SOT uses a Genetic Algorithm to produce optimal schedules for underground mining operations.
EVO also has ongoing projects in Virtual Reality Safety, Mine Ventilation, and Long-term mine planning. In addition, EVO is building an open-source data visualization and integration product called ParaViewGeo, a derivative of ParaView.
Open Source Software
MIRARCO is a supporter of open source software, and tries to promote use of open source software throughout the company. One of MIRARCO's projects, ParaViewGeo, is licensed under the BSD Licence. Many of the projects at MIRARCO are completed using open source programming languages, such as Python, Java, OpenGL, and Processing, and some of MIRARCO's lab computers feature the Fedora Linux Operating System instead of, or in addition to, Microsoft Windows.
Software Freedom Day
On September 20, 2008, MIRARCO participated in Software Freedom Day, an annual worldwide celebration of free/open-source software. Robert Maynard, lead programmer of ParaViewGeo presented the results of a four-month effort to rapidly teach a group of seven co-op students how to program Python and how to use ParaViewGeo.
Mining Research Cluster
MIRARCO shares a floor in the Willet Green Miller Centre with CEMI (Centre for Excellence in Mining Innovation). An open-house was held on August 22, 2008 to showcase the original four research organizations to the public.
The goal for the organizations sharing the same location is to increase communication between stakeholders in mining research. Former President and CEO of MIRARCO, and now Founding Director of CEMI, Dr. Peter Kaiser described the move as sounding "primitive, but it's sometimes amazing how big the gap is across a parking lot, between a building and another one," and that "[if] we have these things all separated, we cannot reap the benefits from the integrated approach."
References
Non-profit organizations based in Ontario
Organizations based in Greater Sudbury
Environmental organizations based in Canada
Mining and the environment |
711755 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA%201802 | RCA 1802 | The COSMAC is an 8-bit microprocessor family introduced by RCA. It is historically notable as the first CMOS microprocessor. The first production model was the two-chip CDP1801R and CDP1801U, which were later combined into the single-chip CDP1802. The 1802 represented the majority of COSMAC production, and today the entire line is known simply as the RCA 1802.
The processor design traces its history to an experimental home computer designed by Joseph Weisbecker in the early 1970s, built at his home using TTL components. RCA began development of the CMOS version of the processor design in 1973, sampling it in 1974 with plans to move to a single-chip implementation immediately. Jerry Herzog led the design of the single-chip version, which sampled in 1975 and entered production in 1976.
In contrast to most designs of the era, which were fabricated using the NMOS process, the COSMAC was implemented in CMOS form and used static logic. This allowed it to run at lower power settings and even be stopped completely. RCA referred to its CMOS process as "complementary silicon/metal-oxide semiconductor", giving rise to the acronym COS/MAC, which was then backronymed to "complementary-symmetry monolithic-array computer" when referring to the processor. RCA also produced radiation hardened versions using a silicon on sapphire process, which found use in the aerospace field. These remain in use to this day, and continue to be produced by Renesas (formerly Intersil).
Successors to the 1802 are the CDP1804, CDP1805, and CDP1806, which have an extended instruction set, other enhanced features (like on-chip RAM and ROM, and built-in timer), with some versions running at faster clock speeds, though not a significant speed difference. Some features are also lost, like the DMA auto-boot loader functionality. There are also some minor pin function changes, but the line continues to be produced in its original 40-pin dual in-line package (DIP) format.
History
FRED
Joseph Weisbecker had long been fascinated with the potential for computers in the home, having stated as early as 1955 that he expected they would one day be built into practically every device. The technology of the era made small embedded computers impossible, but the introduction of the integrated circuit (IC) in the 1960s changed things dramatically. In 1974 he described the possibilities in an IEEE Computer article:
Beginning in 1970, Weisbecker began the design of a small machine using RCA transistor-transistor logic (TTL) ICs to construct the processor. Other parts, switches and lamps and such, he had to buy from Radio Shack, deliberately spreading his purchases around four stores so no one would ask him why he was buying so many parts. The design was running in October 1971, containing 100 chips spread over multiple circuit boards.
The result, which he called FRED, ostensibly for Flexible Recreational Educational Device, was packaged into a box that was not unlike the Altair 8800 of a few years later, with toggle switches on the front panel for input, lamps for output, and later adding a hex pad keyboard. Weisbecker added new features continually and by 1972 it had gained a character generator and the ability to load and save programs on cassette tapes.
Weisbecker's daughter, Joyce Weisbecker, was immediately drawn to the system and began writing programs for it. This included several games, which were ported to later machines based on the COSMAC. When RCA entered the game console business in the later 1970s, these games were burned to ROM cartridge form, and Joyce became the first known woman commercial videogame developer.
Release
Weisbecker demonstrated the machine to RCA management throughout this period, but there was little interest at first. This was shortly after David Sarnoff had retired and handed the CEO role to his son, Robert Sarnoff. Robert was more interested in building the media side of the company while dating recording stars, ignoring RCA Laboratories in spite of a number of industry-leading developments taking place there. Some of the skepticism displayed by management may have had to do with the company's recent sale of their mainframe computer business to Sperry Rand with a huge writedown.
Eventually, the company became interested in the system and began adapting it to their newly introduced COS/MOS fabrication system. A 1973 lab report refers to a "prototype" being delivered in 1972, but this is likely referring to the original TTL implementation. It goes on to note that an effort to reduce the processor to a two-chip implementation with deliveries in COS/MOS in 1974. It is here that the processor is first referred to as COSMAC, for COmplementary-Symmetry-Monolithic-Array Computer. It goes on to state that another lab will be producing the system in an 8-chip silicon-on-sapphire format, although the date is simply "soon after" the CMOS versions, and that plans for a single-chip version were already being planned.
COSMAC devices
Although RCA began the development of the COSMAC in the early 1970s, it was some time before they introduced their own products based on it. In 1975, a prototype of an arcade game machine with swappable ROMs was experimented with for the coin-op business, but was ultimately abandoned.
Meanwhile, Weisbecker had adapted the original FRED, known within RCA as System 00 by this time, using the new chipset to produce a greatly simplified single-board system known as then COSMAC ELF. Building instructions were described in an article in Popular Electronics magazine in 1976, and an expanded version with various upgrades in a second article in 1977. A unique feature of the ELF is that it did not require any read only memory (ROM) for startup, instead, the processor's direct memory access (DMA) system was used to read front-panel switches directly into memory.
RCA debated whether to introduce pre-packaged versions of the ELF to the market. While they debated, further development led to a simplified machine combining the ELF with a new display driver chip, the CDP1861, to produce a game console. During this time, Joyce was hired by RCA to write several videogames for the platform, including a quiz-style educational product in partnership with Random House, one of the many companies that had been picked up by RCA's buying sprees.
After a year of discussion, the company eventually decided to release two products based on the platform, a kit computer known as the COSMAC VIP, and a game console known as the RCA Studio II. The machines had been available since 1975, but the Studio II was announced only in January 1977, a couple of months after the Fairchild Channel F became the first cartridge-based machine on the market. Both would soon be eclipsed and largely forgotten due to the release of the Atari 2600 later that year. RCA canceled the Studio II in February 1978.
Embedded use
The COSMAC was unique among early 8-bit processors in that it had been explicitly designed for microcomputer use; other designs of the era were invariably aimed at the embedded processor space, and those that had been designed for computer use were generally more complex systems, and often 16-bit. Although the COSMAC had been designed for computer use, RCA's slow market entry and undersupported attempts in this market ultimately failed and other processors like the MOS 6502 and Zilog Z80 would come to dominate this market. Ironically, COSMAC would ultimately find great success in the embedded market, because its CMOS design allowed it to work at lower power. By the late 1970s it was widely used in many industrial settings, and especially aerospace. The 1802 ran the Galileo probe to Jupiter in 1989, and it remains in use in similar roles to this day.
Applications
Microcomputer systems
A number of early microcomputers were based on the 1802, including the COSMAC ELF (1976), Netronics ELF II, Quest SuperELF, COSMAC VIP, Comx-35, Finnish Telmac 1800, Telmac TMC-600 and Oscom Nano, Yugoslav Pecom 32 and 64, and the Cybervision systems sold through Montgomery Ward in the late 1970s, as well as the RCA Studio II video game console (one of the first consoles to use bitmapped graphics). The Edukit single board computer trainer system, similar to an expanded COSMAC Elf, was offered by Modus Systems Ltd. in Britain in the early 1980s. Infinite Incorporated produced an 1802-based, S-100 bus expandable console computer trainer in the late 1970s called the UC1800, available assembled or in kit form.
As part of 1802 retrocomputing hobbyist work, other computers have been built more recently (post-2000), including the Membership Card microcomputer kit that fits in an Altoids tin and the Spare Time Gizmos Elf 2000 (Elf 2K), among others. See for other systems.
Product integration
The 1802 was also used in scientific instruments and commercial products.
Post-1980 Chrysler and associated model vehicles use the 1802 in their second-generation Electronic Lean-Burn System, with electronic spark control, one of the first on-board auto computer-based control systems.
The 1802 was used in the manufacture of many pinball machines and video arcade games in Spain.
Radiation hardening
In addition to "bulk silicon" C2L CMOS technology, the 1802 was also available fabricated in Silicon on Sapphire (SOS) semiconductor process technology, which gives it a degree of resistance to radiation and electrostatic discharge (ESD). Along with its extreme low-power abilities, this makes the chip well-suited in space and military applications (also, at the time the 1802 was introduced, very few, if any, other radiation-hardened microprocessors were available in the market). The radiation hardened 1802 version was manufactured at Sandia National Laboratories in agreement with RCA.
Space technology and science
The 1802 was used in many spacecraft and space science programs, experiments, projects and modules such as the Galileo spacecraft, Magellan, the Plasma Wave Analyzer instrument on ESA's Ulysses spacecraft, various Earth-orbiting satellites and satellites carrying amateur radio.
The 1802 has also been verified from NASA source documentation to have been used in the Hubble Space Telescope.
Programming languages
The first high-level language available for the 1802 was Forth, provided by Forth, Inc. and it was known as MicroFORTH, in 1976 (see Forth Inc's archive). Other available programming languages, both interpreters and compilers, are CHIP-8 (and variants), 8th (a version of Forth created by Lee Hart), Tom Pittman's Tiny BASIC, C, various Assemblers and cross-assemblers, and others. Other specialty languages were used by federal agencies such as NASA and its installations, including Johnson Space Center, AMES, Goddard, Langley, Marshall, and Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which included the HAL/S cross-compiler, STOIC, a Forth-like language, and others.
Interpreter for Process Structures (IPS), a programming language and development environment, was specifically written and used for real-time control of AMSAT satellites.
Emulators and simulators
The 1802 chip and computers using the microprocessor have been emulated and simulated in hardware and/or software by hobbyists. There are three designs in VHDL for an FPGA. A bus-accurate, full speed COSMAC Elf clone was created without a CDP1802 microprocessor chip or CDP1861 video chip using PIC microcontrollers. An online simulator of the COSMAC Elf (enhanced) written in JavaScript runs in the user's browser with no need to download.
Description
Introduction
The RCA 1802 has a static core CMOS design with no minimum clock frequency, so that it can be run at very low speeds and low power, including a clock frequency of zero to suspend the microprocessor without affecting its operation.
It has two separate 8-pin buses: an 8-bit bidirectional data bus and a time-multiplexed address bus, with the high-order and low-order 8-bits of the 16-bit address being accessed on alternate clock cycles. This contrasts with most designs of the era, like the MOS 6502 and Intel 8080, which used a 16-bit address bus.
The 1802 has a single bit, programmable and testable output port (Q), and four input pins that are directly tested by branch instructions (EF1-EF4). These pins allow simple input/output (I/O) tasks to be handled directly and easily programmed.
Because the instructions took between 8 and 16 clock cycles to complete, the 1802 was not particularly fast. For comparison, the 6502 completes most instruction in 2 to 4 clock cycles, with the longest taking 7 cycles.
Part number suffix designations
Various suffixes to the CDP1802 part number denote technical specifications, including (A, B, & C) operating speed (3.2 MHz to 6.4 MHz), temperature (-40 °C to +85 °C, -55 °C to +125 °C), and voltage ranges (4V to 10.5V), package type (D, E, Q), and burn-in (X). These were somewhat standardized between the various source suppliers, including RCA, Intersil, Harris, Hughes Aircraft, and Solid State Scientific (SSS). Hughes used the HCMP prefix, and SSS used the SCP (and possibly BCP) prefix, instead of CDP, and had additional suffixes that have not been documented as of yet. (examples: CDP1802A, CDP1802ACE, CDP1802BCD, HCMP1802AP, SCP1802D)
Registers and I/O
The 1802 is an 8-bit byte machine, with minimal support for 16-bit operations, except via 2-byte manipulation. The primary accumulator is the 8-bit 'D' register (Data register). The single bit carry flag is DF (Data Flag). Most operations use the D register, including arithmetic and logic functions, and memory referencing load and store instructions. Most 16-bit operations have to work on the lower byte and then the upper byte, via D, using the DF as carry and borrow as needed.
An important feature of the 1802 is a set of sixteen registers of 16 bits each, used primarily for addressing. Using the SEP instruction, you can select any of the 16 registers to be the program counter; using the SEX instruction, you can select any of the 16-bit registers to be the index register. Register R0 has the special use of holding the memory address for the built-in DMA controller. Register R1 has the special use of being the program counter for the interrupt handler.
There are instructions that allow the values in these registers to be set and read via D, separately working the upper and lower 8-bits at a time. There are also instructions to perform increment and decrement of the entire 16-bit value, and a few instructions perform automatic increment and decrement, like LDA (load advance) and STXD (store via X and decrement). 16-bit register and value comparisons would also need to use the D register as a go-between, using multiple instructions to perform the operations.
The processor has five special I/O lines. There is a single Q output that can be set with the SEQ instruction and reset with the REQ instruction. There are four external, single-bit flag inputs, EF1, EF2, EF3, and EF4, and there are eight dedicated branch instructions to conditionally branch based on the state of those input lines. There are seven Input and seven Output port instructions that utilize the RX register and D accumulator.
The EF and Q lines were typically used for multiple interfaces on 1802-based hobbyist computers because of the lines' favorable and easy handling. It was typical for the Q line to drive a status LED, a cassette interface, an RS-232 interface, and the speaker. This meant that the user could actually hear RS-232 and cassette data being transmitted (unless a volume control was implemented). Traditionally, the EF4 line is attached to the INPUT momentary pushbutton on the COSMAC Elf. Other systems might use one of the other lines.
There are some other special use registers and flags, some internal, and some usable programmatically: 4-bit N, P, X, and I; 8-bit T; and 1-bit IE.
Branching
There are three types of unconditional and conditional branching in the 1802, Short and Long, and Skips.
Short branches are 2-byte instructions, and use 256-byte range, single byte address, page absolute addressing in the range 0 to 255 (hex FF). There is no relative branching. The short branch always jumps within the page that contains the address byte.
Long branches use full 16-bit addressing to support the 64K memory address space, and are the only 3-byte instructions.
Skip instructions increment the PC by one for the unconditional Short Skip, or two for the Long Skips. Only the Long Skip has conditional branching.
Subroutine calls
The processor does not have standard subroutine CALL address and RET instructions, though they can be simulated. The 16-register design makes possible some interesting subroutine call and return mechanisms, though they are better suited to small programs than general purpose coding.
A few commonly used subroutines can be called quickly by keeping their address in one of the 16 registers; however, the called subroutine must know (hard coded) what the calling PC register is to perform the "return" instruction. The SEP instruction is used to call a subroutine pointed to by one of the 16-bit registers and another SEP to return to the caller (SEP stands for Set Program Counter, and selects which one of the 16 registers is to be used as the program counter from that point onward). Before a subroutine returns, it jumps to the location immediately preceding its entry point so that after the SEP "return" instruction returns control to the caller, the register will be pointing to the right value for next usage. (the processor always increments the PC after reference and usage (retrieving the next instruction to execute), so this technique works as noted)
An interesting variation of this scheme is to have two or more subroutines in a ring so that they are called in round robin order. On early hobbyist computers, tricks and techniques like this were commonly used in the horizontal refresh interrupt to reprogram the scan line address to repeat each scan line four times for the video controller.
One well-known and often-used routine is known as SCRT (Standard CALL and RETURN Technique), which allows general purpose subroutine Call and Return, including passing of parameters "in line", and nested subroutines using a stack. Although any of the available registers can be used for this technique, per programmer's preference, many use the routine supplied by RCA in the CDP1802 User Manual, where the suggested register usage is R2 = Stack Pointer, R3 = General Program Counter (PC), R4 = Call, R5 = Return, R6 = Passed Arguments Pointer (non-destructive). Even though these supportive routines are small, there is an execution speed overhead using them. (as opposed to what would be incurred if actual CALL and RET instructions were part of the microprocessor's design) This setup allows R0 to be used for DMA and R1 to be used for Interrupts, if desired, allowing R7 through RF (hex) for general program usage.
Addressing modes
Because of the 16-bit address bus, and the 8-bit data bus, the sixteen general purpose registers are 16 bits wide, but the accumulator D-register is only 8 bits wide. The accumulator, therefore, tends to be a bottleneck. Transferring the contents of one register to another involves four instructions (one Get and one Put on the HI byte of the register, and a similar pair for the LO byte: GHI R1; PHI R2; GLO R1; PLO R2). Similarly, loading a new constant into a register (such as a new address for a subroutine jump, or the address of a data variable) also involves four instructions (two load immediate, LDI, instructions, one for each half of the constant, each one followed by a Put instruction to the register, PHI and PLO).
The two addressing modes Indirect register, and Indirect register with auto-increment are then fairly efficient, to perform 8-bit operations on the data in the accumulator. There are no other addressing modes, though. Thus, the direct addressing mode needs to be emulated using the four instructions mentioned earlier to load the address into a spare register; followed by an instruction to select that register as the index register; followed, finally, by the intended operation on the data variable that is pointed to by that address.
DMA and load mode
The CDP1802 has a simple built-in DMA controller, having two DMA request lines for DMA input and output. The CPU only accesses memory during certain cycles of the multi-step machine cycle, which required between 8 and 16 clock cycles. External hardware could read or write data during these periods without interrupting the processor, a general concept known as cycle stealing.
R0 is used as the DMA address pointer. The starting address of the DMA data would be put in R0 and then pulling the appropriate read or write pin on the CPU low. The CPU responded to the DMA request by incrementing the value in R0, so that the next request automatically stored in the next location in memory. Thus by simply repeatedly triggering the DMA pins, the system would walk through the entire memory.
The DMA controller also provides a special "load mode", which allows loading of memory while the CLEAR and WAIT inputs of the processor are active. This allows a program to be loaded without the need for a ROM-based bootstrap loader. This was used by the COSMAC Elf microcomputer and its successors to load a program from toggle switches or a hexadecimal keypad with no required software and minimal hardware. The user could simply set the switches to the next value, toggle the read, and then move on. There was no need to change the addresses, that was done automatically by the DMA stepping.
Instruction timing
Clock cycle efficiency is poor in comparison to most 8-bit microprocessors. Eight clock cycles makes up one machine cycle. Most instructions take two machine cycles (16 clock cycles) to execute; the remaining instructions take three machine cycles (24 clock cycles). By comparison, the MOS Technology 6502 takes two to seven clock cycles to execute an instruction, and the Intel 8080 takes four to 18 clock cycles.
Support chips
Graphics
In early 1802-based microcomputers, the companion graphics Video Display Controller chip, RCA CDP1861 (for the NTSC video format, CDP1864 variant for PAL), used the built-in DMA controller to display black and white bitmapped graphics on standard TV screens. The 1861 was also known as the Pixie graphics system.
Although the faster versions of 1802 could operate at 4–5 MHz (at 5 V; it was faster (6.4 MHz) at 10 V), it was usually operated at 3.58 MHz, divided by 2 (1.79 MHz) to suit the requirements of the 1861 chip, which gave a speed of a little over 100,000 instructions per second, though some ran at other speeds such as the ~2.8 MHz of the Comx or 5 MHz of the Pecom. The COSMAC VIP, which integrated the video chip with the processor as a single purpose-built computer (rather than as an add-on to a hobbyist kit), notably ran the 1802 much slower, synchronising it exactly with the 1861 - at a non-standard 1.76064 MHz, as recommended in the Pixie's spec sheet reference design.
The CDP1862 Color Generator Circuit IC, an 1861 companion chip, could be used to generate color graphics. Some computer systems, like the Pecom 64, used the VIS (Video Interface System), consisting of the CDP1869 and CDP1870 companion ICs, for distinctly higher resolution color graphics, comparable to other 8-bit systems of the 1980s.
Code samples
This code snippet example is a diagnostic routine that tests ALU (Arithmetic and Logic Unit) Operations.
.. TEST ALU OPS
0000 90 GHI 0 .. SET UP R6
0001 B6 PHI 6
0002 F829 LDI DOIT .. FOR INPUT OF OPCODE
0004 A6 PLO 6
0005 E0 SEX 0 .. (X=0 ALREADY)
0006 6400 OUT 4,00 .. ANNOUNCE US READY
0008 E6 SEX 6 .. NOW X=6
0009 3F09 BN4 * .. WAIT FOR IT
000B 6C INP 4 .. OK, GET IT
000C 64 OUT 4 .. AND ECHO TO DISPLAY
000D 370D B4 * .. WAIT FOR RELEASE
000F F860 LDI #60 .. NOW GET READY FOR
0011 A6 PLO 6 .. FIRST OPERAND
0012 E0 SEX 0 .. SAY SO
0013 6401 OUT 4,01
0015 3F15 BN4 *
0017 E6 SEX 6 .. TAKE IT IN AND ECHO
0018 6C INP 4 .. (TO 0060)
0019 64 OUT 4 .. (ALSO INCREMENT R6)
001A 371A B4 *
001C E0 SEX 0 .. DITTO SECOND OPERAND
001D 6402 OUT 4,02
001F E6 SEX 6
0020 3F20 LOOP: BN4 * .. WAIT FOR IT
0022 6C INP 4 .. GET IT (NOTE: X=6)
0023 64 OUT 4 .. ECHO IT
0024 3724 B4 * .. WAIT FOR RELEASE
0026 26 DEC 6 .. BACK UP R6 TO 0060
0027 26 DEC 6
0028 46 LDA 6 .. GET 1ST OPERAND TO D
0029 C4 DOIT: NOP .. DO OPERATION
002A C4 NOP .. (SPARE)
002B 26 DEC 6 .. BACK TO 0060
002C 56 STR 6 .. OUTPUT RESULT
002D 64 OUT 4 .. (X=6 STILL)
002E 7A REQ .. TURN OFF Q
002F CA0020 LBNZ LOOP .. THEN IF ZERO,
0032 7B SEQ .. TURN IT ON AGAIN
0033 3020 BR LOOP .. REPEAT IN ANY CASE
Note: The above routine presumes that the CDP1802 microprocessor is in an initial reset state (or that it has been set as such prior to executing this code). Therefore, the program counter (PC) and the X indirect register 'pointer' are both set to 16-bit register R0. That is why you can output an immediate value, as in the example 'OUT 4,00', because PC and X are both pointing to R0. The PC is incremented after the opcode instruction byte is retrieved from memory, so it points to the next address when the OUT 4 is executed. Therefore, it outputs the value in memory pointed to by RX = R0, which is the next immediate byte. The OUT instruction also increments the X register, which is R0, which is also the PC, so it outputs the immediate value after the OUT and continues program execution at the next instruction address after the immediate value. This is why you see the routine set X (SEX) to register R6 and R0 as needed. Also note that, although the OUT opcode increments the RX register, to easily output a section of memory ('buffer'), INP does not. It stores the value at the address pointed to by RX and into the D 8-bit data byte accumulator, but RX is not modified.
The routine also presumes that OUT 4 will display the value in the CPU system's 8-bit LED or 2-digit hex display, and IN 4 gets the value from the eight toggle switches (or possibly the hex keypad). The BN4 opcode (loop; * = 'this address'), "branch if the single-bit input EF4 line is lo", is used to test if the momentary 'Input' pushbutton is pressed. The B4 opcode ('if hi') loop waits for the button to be released. SEQ and REQ turn the single Q line, which is usually attached to an LED, on and off.
The 1802 is a "byte machine", but has 16 16-bit registers, R0-RF (sometimes referred to as 0-F without the 'R' prefix). To deal with 16-bit register data, the programmer must Get and Put the Hi or Lo values of the registers using the D accumulator as the go-between. These high and low bytes of the registers are sometimes referred to as Rn.0 (lo) and Rn.1 (hi). Short Branches are 2-byte opcodes with page-absolute addressing, and a 256-byte address boundary. Long Branches are 3-byte opcodes with full 16-bit address branching.
This information should make the routine more understandable to any computer programmer who is knowledgeable enough to read "pseudo-code" and is minimally familiar with assembly and machine language programming.
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
External links
CDP1802A/AC/BC datasheet, 1997 (PDF)
CDP1802AC/3 datasheet, 2008 (PDF)
COSMAC ELF website
A Short Course in Programming (1980 text on RCA 1802 assembler)
High resolution die shot
Minor parts of this article were originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.
Radiation-hardened microprocessors
RCA brands
8-bit microprocessors |
55259769 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VnStat | VnStat | vnStat is a network utility for the Linux operating system. It uses a command line interface. vnStat command is a console-based network traffic monitor. It keeps a log of hourly, daily and monthly network traffic for the selected interface(s) but is not a packet sniffer. The traffic information is analyzed from the proc filesystem. That way vnStat can be used even without root permissions.
History
vnStat is a console-based network traffic monitor that uses the network interface statistics provided by the kernel as information source. This means that vnStat won't actually be sniffing any traffic and also ensures light use of system resources. vnStat had an Initial public release in 23-Sep-2002 (version 1.0) by Teemu Toivola.
On 8 March 2004 its webpage moved to https://humdi.net/vnstat/ and a man page was included.
On 4 November 2006 was included in Debian for Testing Watch and on 17 November 2006 was removed and next day was accepted 1.4-4 version. On 20 February 2010 was accepted 1.10-0.1 version in Debian. Nowadays Debian keeps a full history about vnstat by using a Rich Site Summary.
On 26 April 2012 was included in Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin
On 16 February 2017 a 1.17 version was released.
Control keys
vnStat is a command line program and uses sames control keys, for example, stops live monitoring.
See also
Free network management software
References
External links
Official repository: https://github.com/vergoh/vnstat
Linux network-related software
Free software programmed in C
Console applications |
7709743 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System%209 | System 9 | System 9 or System IX may refer to:
Computing
IBM System z9, the mainframe line
Plan 9 from Bell Labs, the operating system
Mac OS 9, latest release of Classic Mac OS operating system
OS-9, the Unix-like real time operating system
SYSTEM POWER 9, line of power supplies by be quiet!
Other
STS-9 (Space Transportation System-9), the Space Shuttle mission
See also
Series 9
OS9 (disambiguation) |
512045 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index%20of%20feminism%20articles | Index of feminism articles | This is an index of articles related to the issue of feminism, women's liberation, the women's movement, and women's rights.
A
Act, Pornography Victims Compensation
- Activists, women's rights, list of
- Advertising, sex in
- Aid societies, ladies' or soldiers'
- All-female band
- Amazon feminism
- Amendment, Equal Rights
- Anarcha-feminism
- Anthropology, feminist
- Antifeminism
- Anti-pornography feminism (compare Sex-positive feminism)
- Archaeology, feminist
- Archaeology, gender
- Architecture, modern, feminism and
- Art movement, feminist
- Atheist feminism
- Australia, women's suffrage in
- Authors, ecofeminist, list of
B
Bahrain, women's political rights in
- BDSM, feminist views on
- Bicycling and feminism
- Binary, gender
- Black feminism
- Bonding, female
- Bride burning
- Bride kidnapping
- Burning, bride
C
Canada, women's rights in
- Car, passenger, women-only
- Chauvinism, female (compare Male chauvinism)
- Chicana feminism
- Christmas Letter, Open
- Choice, pro-
- Christian feminism
- Cinema, women's
- Colonial, post-, feminism
- Comics, women in, portrayal of
- Compensation Act, Pornography Victims
- Composition studies, feminist theory in
- Computing, women in
- Consciousness raising
- Conservative feminisms, list of
- Constitution, United States, Nineteenth Amendment to the
- Countries, timeline of first women's suffrage in majority-Muslim
- Crime, gender and
- Criminology, school of, feminist
- Cult of Domesticity
- Culture, feminism in
- Cultural feminism
- Cyberfeminism
D
Day, International Women's
- Dekh Le
- Difference feminism
- Differences, gender
- Discrimination
- Distinction, sex and gender
- Domestic violence
- Domesticity, Cult of
E
Ecofeminism
- Ecofeminist authors, list of
- Economics, feminist
- Education, female
- Education, mixed-sex
- Effects on society, feminist
- Egalitarianism
- Egypt, feminism in
- Engineering, women in
- English, gender neutrality in
- English, women's writing in
- English custom, wife selling
- Equal pay for women
- Equal Rights Amendment
- ERA
- Equality, feminism and
- Equality feminism
- Equality, gender
- Equity feminism
- Erotophilia
- Erotophobia
- Existentialism, feminist
F
Family, matrifocal
- Female bonding (compare Male bonding)
- Female chauvinism (compare Male chauvinism)
- Female education
- Female privilege: see Male privilege)
- Female superiority
- Feminazi
- Feminine psychology (compare Masculine psychology)
- Femininity (compare Masculinity)
- Feminisation of the workplace
- Feminism (compare Masculism)
- Feminism and equality
- Feminism and modern architecture
- Feminism and the Oedipus complex
- Feminism in Australia
- Feminism in culture
- Feminism in Egypt
- Feminism in France
- Feminism in India
- Feminism in international relations
- Feminism in Japan
- Feminism in Nepal
- Feminism in Poland
- Feminist anthropology
- Feminist archaeology
- Feminist art movement
- Feminist art movement in the United States
- Feminist economics
- Feminist effects on society
- Feminist existentialism
- Feminist film theory
- Feminist geography
- Feminist history
- Feminist history in the United Kingdom
- Feminist history in the United States (see also Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution)
- Feminist legal theory
- Feminist literary criticism
- Feminist movement
- Feminist movement in the United States
- Feminist movements and ideologies
- Feminist philosophy
- Feminist political ecology
- Feminist revisionist mythology
- Feminist rhetoricians, list of
- Feminist school of criminology
- Feminist science fiction
- Feminist Sex Wars
- Feminist sexology
- Feminist sociology
- Feminist Studies
- Feminist theology
- Feminist theory
- Feminist theory in composition studies
- Feminist therapy
- Feminist views on BDSM
- Feminist views on pornography
- Feminist views on prostitution
- Feminist views on sexuality
- Feminist views on transgenderism and transsexualism
- Feminists, list of
- Feminists and the Spanish Civil War
- Feminization of poverty
- Fiction, women's
- Film theory, feminist
- Fiction, science, feminist
- Fiction, science, women in
- First-wave feminism
- First women's suffrage in majority-Muslim countries, timeline of
- Fourth-wave feminism in Spain
- First World War, women in the
- France, feminism in
- Francoist Spain and the democratic transition period, feminism in
- French structuralist feminism
G
Gender and crime
- Gender archaeology
- Gender binary
- Gender differences
- Gender equality
- Gender history
- Gender identity
- Gender inequality
- Gender mainstreaming
- Gender-neutral language
- Gender neutrality in English
- Gender performativity
- Gender role
- Gender roles in Islam
- Gender, sex and, distinction
- Gender, sociology of
- Gender-specific job title
- Gender studies
- Gendercide
- Gendered division of labour
- Geography, feminist
- Geology, women in
- Girl Power
- Girls, women, and information technology
- Girly girl
- Glass ceiling
- Global feminism
- Grrrl, riot
- Gynarchy
- Gynocentrism (compare Androcentrism)
- Gynocracy (compare Androcracy)
- Gynocriticism
- Gynophobia
H
Harassment, sexual
- Health, women's (compare Men's health)
- Herstory (compare History)
- Hikes, Suffrage
- History, feminist
- History, gender
- History in the United Kingdom, feminist
- History in the United States, feminist (see also Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution)
- History, in, legal rights of women
- History of feminism
- History of women in the military
- History of women in the United States
- History, women's
- History Month, Women's
- Husband-selling
I
Identity, gender
- Ideologies, feminist movements and
- Income disparity
- Income disparity in the United States, male-female
- Income inequality in the United States
- India, feminism in
- Individualist feminism (also Libertarian feminism)
- Inequality, gender
- Information technology, women, and girls
- International relations, feminism in
- International Women's Day
- International Women's Year
- Islam, gender roles in
- Islam, women and
- Islamic feminism
J
Japan, feminism in
- Japan, women's suffrage in
- Jewish feminism
- Job title, gender-specific
- Journalism and media professions, women in
K
Kidnapping, bride
- Kuwait, women's suffrage in
L
Labour, gendered division of
- Ladies' aid societies
- Language, gender-neutral
- Led, women-, uprisings
- Left, the, and feminism
- Legal rights of women in history
- Legal theory, feminist
- Lesbian
- Lesbian Sex Wars
- Letter, Open Christmas
- Liberal feminism
- Liberation, women's (compare Men's liberation)
- Life, pro-, feminism
- Lipstick feminism
- List of conservative feminisms
- List of ecofeminist authors
- List of feminist rhetoricians
- List of feminists
- List of suffragists and suffragettes
- List of women's rights activists
- List of women's studies journals
- Literary criticism, feminist
M
Mainstreaming, gender
- Majority-Muslim countries, timeline of first women's suffrage in
- Male-female income disparity in the United States
- Marianismo (compare Machismo)
- Marxist feminism
- Material feminism
- Maternalism (compare Paternalism)
- Matriarchy (compare Patriarchy)
- Matrifocal family
- Matrilineal succession (compare Patrilineal succession)
- Matrilineality (compare Patrilineality)
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- Media professions, journalism and, women in
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- Men and feminism
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- Millie Tant
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- Muliebrity (compare Virility)
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N
Nepal, feminism in
- New feminism (also Catholic feminism)
- New Woman
- New Zealand, timeline of feminist art in
- Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution)
O
Objectification
- Objectification, sexual
- Occupational sexism
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- Open Christmas Letter
P
Passenger car, women-only
- Patriarchy
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- Philosophy, women in
- Philandry (compare Philogyny, Misandry, Misogyny)
- Philogyny
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- Privilege: see Male privilege
- Pro-choice
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- Protective laws
- Protofeminism
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Q
Queer studies
- Queer theory
R
Radical feminism
- Red Tent Meetings
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- Rights in Canada, women's
- Riot grrrl
- Role, gender
- Roles in the World Wars, women's
S
Science fiction, feminist
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- Second-wave feminism
- Segregation, sex
- Selling, husband-
- Selling, wife
- Selling, wife, English custom
- Separatist feminism
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- Sex in advertising
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- Shelter, women's (compare Men's shelter)
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- Soldiers' aid societies
- Standpoint feminism
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- Succession, matrilineal (compare Patrilineal succession)
- Suffrage
- Suffrage, women's
- Suffrage Hikes
- Suffrage, women's, in Switzerland
- Suffrage, women's, timeline of
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- Suffrage in Australia, women's
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- Suffrage in Kuwait, women's
- Suffrage in Switzerland, women's
- Suffrage in the United Kingdom, women's
- Suffrage in the United States, women's
- Suffragette
- Suffragists and suffragettes, list of
T
Tant, Millie
- Thealogy
- Theology, feminist
- Theology, womanist
- Theory, feminist
- Therapy, feminist
- Third-wave feminism
- Timeline of first women's suffrage in majority-Muslim countries
- Timeline of women's suffrage
- Timeline of women's rights (other than voting)
- Tomboy
- Transfeminism
- Transgenderism and transsexualism, feminist views on
- Transnational feminism
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- Trophy wife
U
United Kingdom, women's suffrage in the
- United States Constitution, Nineteenth Amendment to the
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- Uprisings, women-led
V
V-Day
- Vésuviennes
- Victims Compensation Act, Pornography
- Victorian era, women in the
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- Violence against women
- Violence, domestic
W
Waves of feminism
- Wave, first-, feminism
- Wave, second-, feminism
- Wave, third-, feminism
- Wife selling
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- Wife, trophy
- Woman question, the
- Womanism
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- Women's suffrage
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- Writing in English, women's
- Women-led uprisings
Y
Year, International Women's
Feminism-related lists
Feminism topics |
14220429 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic%20%28computer%20science%29 | Heuristic (computer science) | In mathematical optimization and computer science, heuristic (from Greek εὑρίσκω "I find, discover") is a technique designed for solving a problem more quickly when classic methods are too slow or for finding an approximate solution when classic methods fail to find any exact solution. This is achieved by trading optimality, completeness, accuracy, or precision for speed. In a way, it can be considered a shortcut.
A heuristic function, also simply called a heuristic, is a function that ranks alternatives in search algorithms at each branching step based on available information to decide which branch to follow. For example, it may approximate the exact solution.
Definition and motivation
The objective of a heuristic is to produce a solution in a reasonable time frame that is good enough for solving the problem at hand. This solution may not be the best of all the solutions to this problem, or it may simply approximate the exact solution. But it is still valuable because finding it does not require a prohibitively long time.
Heuristics may produce results by themselves, or they may be used in conjunction with optimization algorithms to improve their efficiency (e.g., they may be used to generate good seed values).
Results about NP-hardness in theoretical computer science make heuristics the only viable option for a variety of complex optimization problems that need to be routinely solved in real-world applications.
Heuristics underlie the whole field of Artificial Intelligence and the computer simulation of thinking, as they may be used in situations where there are no known algorithms.
Trade-off
The trade-off criteria for deciding whether to use a heuristic for solving a given problem include the following:
Optimality: When several solutions exist for a given problem, does the heuristic guarantee that the best solution will be found? Is it actually necessary to find the best solution?
Completeness: When several solutions exist for a given problem, can the heuristic find them all? Do we actually need all solutions? Many heuristics are only meant to find one solution.
Accuracy and precision: Can the heuristic provide a confidence interval for the purported solution? Is the error bar on the solution unreasonably large?
Execution time: Is this the best known heuristic for solving this type of problem? Some heuristics converge faster than others. Some heuristics are only marginally quicker than classic methods, in which case the 'overhead' on calculating the heuristic might have negative impact.
In some cases, it may be difficult to decide whether the solution found by the heuristic is good enough, because the theory underlying heuristics is not very elaborate.
Examples
Simpler problem
One way of achieving the computational performance gain expected of a heuristic consists of solving a simpler problem whose solution is also a solution to the initial problem.
Travelling salesman problem
An example of approximation is described by Jon Bentley for solving the travelling salesman problem (TSP):
"Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the origin city?"
so as to select the order to draw using a pen plotter. TSP is known to be NP-Hard so an optimal solution for even a moderate size problem is difficult to solve. Instead, the greedy algorithm can be used to give a good but not optimal solution (it is an approximation to the optimal answer) in a reasonably short amount of time. The greedy algorithm heuristic says to pick whatever is currently the best next step regardless of whether that prevents (or even makes impossible) good steps later. It is a heuristic in that practice says it is a good enough solution, theory says there are better solutions (and even can tell how much better in some cases).
Search
Another example of heuristic making an algorithm faster occurs in certain search problems. Initially, the heuristic tries every possibility at each step, like the full-space search algorithm. But it can stop the search at any time if the current possibility is already worse than the best solution already found. In such search problems, a heuristic can be used to try good choices first so that bad paths can be eliminated early (see alpha-beta pruning). In the case of best-first search algorithms, such as A* search, the heuristic improves the algorithm's convergence while maintaining its correctness as long as the heuristic is admissible.
Newell and Simon: heuristic search hypothesis
In their Turing Award acceptance speech, Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon discuss the heuristic search hypothesis: a physical symbol system will repeatedly generate and modify known symbol structures until the created structure matches the solution structure. Each following step depends upon the step before it, thus the heuristic search learns what avenues to pursue and which ones to disregard by measuring how close the current step is to the solution. Therefore, some possibilities will never be generated as they are measured to be less likely to complete the solution.
A heuristic method can accomplish its task by using search trees. However, instead of generating all possible solution branches, a heuristic selects branches more likely to produce outcomes than other branches. It is selective at each decision point, picking branches that are more likely to produce solutions.
Antivirus software
Antivirus software often uses heuristic rules for detecting viruses and other forms of malware. Heuristic scanning looks for code and/or behavioral patterns common to a class or family of viruses, with different sets of rules for different viruses. If a file or executing process is found to contain matching code patterns and/or to be performing that set of activities, then the scanner infers that the file is infected. The most advanced part of behavior-based heuristic scanning is that it can work against highly randomized self-modifying/mutating (polymorphic) viruses that cannot be easily detected by simpler string scanning methods. Heuristic scanning has the potential to detect future viruses without requiring the virus to be first detected somewhere else, submitted to the virus scanner developer, analyzed, and a detection update for the scanner provided to the scanner's users.
Pitfalls
Some heuristics have a strong underlying theory; they are either derived in a top-down manner from the theory or are arrived at based on either experimental or real world data. Others are just rules of thumb based on real-world observation or experience without even a glimpse of theory. The latter are exposed to a larger number of pitfalls.
When a heuristic is reused in various contexts because it has been seen to "work" in one context, without having been mathematically proven to meet a given set of requirements, it is possible that the current data set does not necessarily represent future data sets (see: overfitting) and that purported "solutions" turn out to be akin to noise.
Statistical analysis can be conducted when employing heuristics to estimate the probability of incorrect outcomes. To use a heuristic for solving a search problem or a knapsack problem, it is necessary to check that the heuristic is admissible. Given a heuristic function meant to approximate the true optimal distance to the goal node in a directed graph containing total nodes or vertices labeled , "admissible" means roughly that the heuristic underestimates the cost to the goal or formally that for all where .
If a heuristic is not admissible, it may never find the goal, either by ending up in a dead end of graph or by skipping back and forth between two nodes and where .
Etymology
The word "heuristic" came into usage in the early 19th century. It is formed irregularly from the Greek word heuriskein, meaning "to find".
See also
Algorithm
Constructive heuristic
Genetic algorithm
Heuristic
Heuristic routing
Heuristic evaluation: Method for identifying usability problems in user interfaces.
Metaheuristic: Methods for controlling and tuning basic heuristic algorithms, usually with usage of memory and learning.
Matheuristics: Optimization algorithms made by the interoperation of metaheuristics and mathematical programming (MP) techniques.
Reactive search optimization: Methods using online machine learning principles for self-tuning of heuristics.
Recursion (computer science)
Macro (computer science)
References
de:Heuristik#Informatik |
454403 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep%20web | Deep web | The deep web, invisible web, or hidden web are parts of the World Wide Web whose contents are not indexed by standard web search-engines. This is in contrast to the "surface web", which is accessible to anyone using the Internet. Computer-scientist Michael K. Bergman is credited with coining the term in 2001 as a search-indexing term.
The content of the deep web is hidden behind login forms, and includes uses such as web mail, online banking, restricted access social-media pages and profiles, some web forums that require registration for viewing content, and paywalled services such as video on demand and some online magazines and newspapers.
The content of the deep web can be located and accessed by a direct URL or IP address, but may require a password or other security access to get past public pages.
Terminology
The first conflation of the terms "deep web" with "dark web" came about in 2009 when deep web search terminology was discussed together with illegal activities taking place on the Freenet and darknet. Those criminal activities include the commerce of personal passwords, false identity documents, drugs, firearms, and child pornography.
Since then, after their use in the media's reporting on the Silk Road, media outlets have taken to using 'deep web' synonymously with the dark web or darknet, a comparison some reject as inaccurate and consequently has become an ongoing source of confusion. Wired reporters Kim Zetter and Andy Greenberg recommend the terms be used in distinct fashions. While the deep web is a reference to any site that cannot be accessed through a traditional search engine, the dark web is a portion of the deep web that has been intentionally hidden and is inaccessible through standard browsers and methods.
Non-indexed content
Bergman, in a paper on the deep web published in The Journal of Electronic Publishing, mentioned that Jill Ellsworth used the term Invisible Web in 1994 to refer to websites that were not registered with any search engine. Bergman cited a January 1996 article by Frank Garcia:
It would be a site that's possibly reasonably designed, but they didn't bother to register it with any of the search engines. So, no one can find them! You're hidden. I call that the invisible Web.
Another early use of the term Invisible Web was by Bruce Mount and Matthew B. Koll of Personal Library Software, in a description of the #1 Deep Web tool found in a December 1996 press release.
The first use of the specific term deep web, now generally accepted, occurred in the aforementioned 2001 Bergman study.
Indexing methods
Methods that prevent web pages from being indexed by traditional search engines may be categorized as one or more of the following:
Contextual web: pages with content varying for different access contexts (e.g., ranges of client IP addresses or previous navigation sequence).
Dynamic content: dynamic pages, which are returned in response to a submitted query or accessed only through a form, especially if open-domain input elements (such as text fields) are used; such fields are hard to navigate without domain knowledge.
Limited access content: sites that limit access to their pages in a technical way (e.g., using the Robots Exclusion Standard or CAPTCHAs, or no-store directive, which prohibit search engines from browsing them and creating cached copies). Sites may feature an internal search engine for exploring such pages.
Non-HTML/text content: textual content encoded in multimedia (image or video) files or specific file formats not handled by search engines.
Private web: sites that require registration and login (password-protected resources).
Scripted content: pages that are only accessible through links produced by JavaScript as well as content dynamically downloaded from Web servers via Flash or Ajax solutions.
Software: certain content is intentionally hidden from the regular Internet, accessible only with special software, such as Tor, I2P, or other darknet software. For example, Tor allows users to access websites using the .onion server address anonymously, hiding their IP address.
Unlinked content: pages which are not linked to by other pages, which may prevent web crawling programs from accessing the content. This content is referred to as pages without backlinks (also known as inlinks). Also, search engines do not always detect all backlinks from searched web pages.
Web archives: Web archival services such as the Wayback Machine enable users to see archived versions of web pages across time, including websites that have become inaccessible and are not indexed by search engines such as Google. The Wayback Machine may be called a program for viewing the deep web, as web archives that are not from the present cannot be indexed, as past versions of websites are impossible to view through a search. All websites are updated at some point, which is why web archives are considered Deep Web content.
Content types
While it is not always possible to directly discover a specific web server's content so that it may be indexed, a site potentially can be accessed indirectly (due to computer vulnerabilities).
To discover content on the web, search engines use web crawlers that follow hyperlinks through known protocol virtual port numbers. This technique is ideal for discovering content on the surface web but is often ineffective at finding deep web content. For example, these crawlers do not attempt to find dynamic pages that are the result of database queries due to the indeterminate number of queries that are possible. It has been noted that this can be (partially) overcome by providing links to query results, but this could unintentionally inflate the popularity of a member of the deep web.
DeepPeep, Intute, Deep Web Technologies, Scirus, and Ahmia.fi are a few search engines that have accessed the deep web. Intute ran out of funding and is now a temporary static archive as of July 2011. Scirus retired near the end of January 2013.
Researchers have been exploring how the deep web can be crawled in an automatic fashion, including content that can be accessed only by special software such as Tor. In 2001, Sriram Raghavan and Hector Garcia-Molina (Stanford Computer Science Department, Stanford University) presented an architectural model for a hidden-Web crawler that used key terms provided by users or collected from the query interfaces to query a Web form and crawl the Deep Web content. Alexandros Ntoulas, Petros Zerfos, and Junghoo Cho of UCLA created a hidden-Web crawler that automatically generated meaningful queries to issue against search forms. Several form query languages (e.g., DEQUEL) have been proposed that, besides issuing a query, also allow extraction of structured data from result pages. Another effort is DeepPeep, a project of the University of Utah sponsored by the National Science Foundation, which gathered hidden-web sources (web forms) in different domains based on novel focused crawler techniques.
Commercial search engines have begun exploring alternative methods to crawl the deep web. The Sitemap Protocol (first developed, and introduced by Google in 2005) and OAI-PMH are mechanisms that allow search engines and other interested parties to discover deep web resources on particular web servers. Both mechanisms allow web servers to advertise the URLs that are accessible on them, thereby allowing automatic discovery of resources that are not directly linked to the surface web. Google's deep web surfacing system computes submissions for each HTML form and adds the resulting HTML pages into the Google search engine index. The surfaced results account for a thousand queries per second to deep web content. In this system, the pre-computation of submissions is done using three algorithms:
selecting input values for text search inputs that accept keywords,
identifying inputs that accept only values of a specific type (e.g., date) and
selecting a small number of input combinations that generate URLs suitable for inclusion into the Web search index.
In 2008, to facilitate users of Tor hidden services in their access and search of a hidden .onion suffix, Aaron Swartz designed Tor2web—a proxy application able to provide access by means of common web browsers. Using this application, deep web links appear as a random string of letters followed by the .onion top-level domain.
See also
DARPA's Memex program
Deep linking
Gopher (protocol)
References
Further reading
.
.
.
.
.
.
Shestakov, Denis (June 2008). Search Interfaces on the Web: Querying and Characterizing. TUCS Doctoral Dissertations 104, University of Turku
.
.
External links
Dark web
Internet search engines
Internet terminology
World Wide Web
2000s neologisms |
27115282 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubesat%20Space%20Protocol | Cubesat Space Protocol | CubeSat Space Protocol (CSP) is a small network-layer delivery protocol designed for CubeSats. The idea was developed by a group of students from Aalborg University in 2008, and further developed for the AAUSAT3 CubeSat mission that was launched in 2013. The protocol is based on a 32-bit header containing both network and transport layer information. Its implementation is designed for embedded systems such as the 8-bit AVR microprocessor and the 32-bit ARM and AVR from Atmel. The implementation is written in C and is ported to run on FreeRTOS and POSIX and pthreads-based operating systems such as Linux. The three-letter acronym CSP was adopted as an abbreviation for CAN Space Protocol because the first MAC-layer driver was written for CAN-bus. The physical layer has since been extended to include several other technologies, and the name was therefore extended to the more general CubeSat Space Protocol without changing the abbreviation.
The protocol and the implementation is still actively maintained by Johan de Claville Christiansen, Space Inventor and GomSpace. The source code is available under an LGPL license and hosted on GitHub.
Description
The CubeSat Space Protocol enables distributed embedded systems to deploy a service-oriented network topology. The layering of CSP corresponds to the same layers as the TCP/IP model. The implementation supports a connection oriented transport protocol (Layer 4), a router-core (Layer 3), and several network-interfaces (Layer 1–2). A service-oriented topology eases the design of satellite subsystems, since the communication bus itself is the interface to other subsystems. This means that each subsystem developer only needs to define a service-contract, and a set of port-numbers their system will be responding on. Furthermore, subsystem inter-dependencies are reduced, and redundancy is easily added by adding multiple similar nodes to the communication bus.
Key features include:
Simple API similar to Berkeley sockets.
Router core with static routes. Supports transparent forwarding of packets over e.g. spacelink.
Support for both connectionless operation (similar to UDP), and connection oriented operation (based on RUDP).
Service handler that implements ICMP-like requests such as ping and buffer status.
Support for loopback traffic. This can e.g. be used for Inter-process communication between subsystem tasks.
Optional support for broadcast traffic if supported by the physical interface.
Optional support for promiscuous mode if supported by the physical interface.
Optional support for encrypted packets with XTEA in CTR mode.
Optional support for HMAC authenticated packets with truncated SHA-1 HMAC.
Operating systems supported
CSP should compile on all platforms that have a recent version of the gcc compiler. CSP requires support for C99 features such as inline functions and designated initializers.
FreeRTOS – Tested on AVR8, AVR32 and ARM7.
Linux – Tested on x86, x86-64 and Blackfin.
Mac OS X
Microsoft Windows
Physical layer drivers
CSP supports several physical layer technologies. The LGPL licensed source code contains an implementation of a fragmenting CAN interface and drivers for SocketCAN and the Atmel AT90CAN128, AT91SAM7A1 and AT91SAM7A3 processors. From version 1.1 onwards, CSP also includes interfaces for I2C and RS-232. Interfaces need only to implement a function to transmit a packet, and insert received packets into the protocol stack with the csp_new_packet function. CSP has been successfully tested with the following physical layers.
CAN
I2C
RS-232 using the KISS protocol
CCSDS 131.0-B-1-S/131.0-B-2 space link protocol
TCP/IP
Protocol header
Version 1
The port range is divided into three adjustable segments. Ports 0 to 7 are used for general services such as ping and buffer status, and are implemented by the CSP service handler. The ports from 8 to 47 are used for subsystem specific services. All remaining ports, from 48 to 63, are ephemeral ports used for outgoing connections. The bits from 28 to 31 are used for marking packets with HMAC, XTEA encryption, RDP header and CRC32 checksum.
Version 2
References
External links
Project Website and source code hosting
Aalborg University, Student Satellite Activities
Aalborg University, AAUSAT3 – the first AAU cubesat to use CSP
GomSpace ApS
Transport layer protocols
CubeSats |
4487862 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National%20Institute%20of%20Business%20Management%20%28Sri%20Lanka%29 | National Institute of Business Management (Sri Lanka) | The National Institute of Business Management (Sinhala: ජාතික ව්යාපාර කළමනාකරණ ආයතනය, romanized: jātika vyāpāra kaḷamanākaraṇa āyatanaya) also known as NIBM, is a public business school based in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
The institute was established in 1968 and offers Graduate, Post Graduate, Executive Education, Diploma and Certificate programmes in the fields of Information Technology, Business Management, Languages, Engineering, and Design. The MBA programme is the flagship programme of the institute and is offered in two year full time. NIBM has collaborated with Coventry University, UK and Limkokwing University, Malaysia in offering degree programmes.
The main campus is located in Colombo 07 and the four regional campuses are located in Galle, Kandy, Kurunegala, and Matara. The National Innovation Centre (NIC) that houses programmes in Design, Humanities, and Data Sciences is located in Kirulapone, Colombo.
The National Institute of Business Management is headed by V. K. Choksy as Chairman and Dr. D. M. A. Kulasooriya as Director General.
History
The Management Development & Productivity Centre (MDPC) was established as a means of producing trained and skilled personnel particularly in the field of Management. Based on a proposal submitted to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) by the Ministry of Industries, which was overseeing a large number of statutory boards and public corporations, the Management Development & Productivity Centre (MDPC) was established on 16 August 1968, in collaboration with the UNDP and the International Labour Organisation (ILO), which acted as the executing agency of the MDPC. Thus, MDPC became the first ever management training institute of Sri Lanka.
In 1972, the center began to function under the name of National Institute of Management (NIM). NIM commenced its first Diploma programme in 1975 in Business Management and in the following year, the institute was incorporated as the National Institute of Business Management by an Act of Parliament (The National Institute of Business Management Law, No. 23 of 1976). The first Diploma in Computer System Design was inaugurated in the year of 1980.
In the year of 1996, BSc in Management Information Systems was commenced in collaboration with University College Dublin, Ireland. Subsequently, the first convocation ceremony of NIBM was held in the year of 1999.
In 2017, NIBM commenced four Undergraduate Degree programmes in collaboration with Coventry University, UK. In the same year, NIBM established the National Innovation Centre (NIC) in collaboration with Limkokwing University, Malaysia.
Academics
NIBM has degree granting, diplomas and certificate programmes in business, computing and engineering, design and languages.
School of Business
The School of Business is the flagship school of NIBM and functions as a continuation of The Management Development & Productivity Centre (MDPC). Currently it houses close to 5000 students. SOB offers a number of degrees, higher diploma and diploma courses, and Certificate programmes for General Management, Human Resource Management, Productivity and Quality Improvement, Marketing, Finance, Accounting, Project Management, and Logistics Management.
SOB also provides consultancy services, computer application programmes, and tailormade training programmes. Diploma in Business Management offered by SOB is the oldest program of NIBM and is now known as advanced diploma in Business Management (ADBM). The programmes are affiliated with international; universities and recognized from a number of professional bodies.
The School of Business is currently headed by Mr. Kolitha Ranawaka, Director of SOB.
Productivity & Quality Centre
The Productivity Division that was there from the inception of NIBM was re-introduced in 2018 with a new identity as Productivity & Quality Centre (PQC). The Career Guidance & Industrial Training Unit and the Personal Certification Unit function under PQC.
The Centre provides consultancy services to the industry to improve productivity and quality, facilitates NIBM students to gain internships, and provides personal certifications (ISO 17024:2012) to professionals. PQC maintains a very close relationship with the industry.
The Productivity & Quality Centre is currently headed by Ms. Pavithra Wickramasuriya, Head of PQC.
Business Consultancy Unit
The Business Consultancy Unit provides consultancy services to businesses. NIBM’s Business Consultancy Unit consists of a team of business consultants from different disciplines.
The Business Consultancy Unit is currently headed by Dr. Himendra Balalle.
School of Computing and Engineering (SOCE)
The origin of the Management Information Systems Division (MIS) can be traced back to the early 1980s. It was the first division to offer the Bachelor of Science Degree in Information Technology in collaboration with the University College Dublin in 1996. The division was rebranded as the School of Computing and Engineering in 2018 and currently it has over 6000 students. The School offers degree programmes, Higher National Diplomas, Diplomas, Advanced Certificate and Certificate level programmes in Computer Programming, Software Engineering, Web Development, Graphic Designing, Application Packages, Hardware, and Networking. These programmes are conducted for school leavers and IT professionals.
SOCE is a CISCO Networking Academy, a Microsoft Imagine Academy, and a Redhat Academy. In addition, NIBM is an accredited training provider for BCS Agile and Business Analysis Certifications in Sri Lanka. Since August 2018, NIBM is a Pearson VUE Authorized Test Centre.
The School of Computing and Engineering is currently headed by Ms. G. C. Wickramasinghe, Director of SOCE.
The School of Computing and Engineering currently consists of two units: Computer Science Unit and Mathematics and Engineering Unit.
Computer Science Unit
The Computer Science Unit offers programmes under four specialization areas: Software Engineering, Network Engineering, Management of Information Systems, and Multimedia. In addition to the academic programmes it offers, custom programmes and workshops are conducted for private and public sector organizations. The Computer Science Unit develops industry standard software through the Software Development Unit of NIBM.
Software Development Unit (SDU)
Software Development Unit, which comes under the Computer Science Unit, was first established in 1988 and the unit is engaged in developing industry standard software for public and private sector organizations. Support services for its clients are also provided by the unit. SDU also provides employment opportunities to students with the intention of giving industry exposure.
Mathematics and Engineering Unit
The Engineering division offers BSc (Hons.) in Quantity Surveying, Higher Diploma and Diploma in Quantity Surveying, and several other certificate programmes.
National Innovation Centre (NIC)
The National Innovation Centre (NIC) was created with a strategic partnership agreement with the Limkokwing University of Creative Technology in Malaysia in 2017. NIC is located in Kirulapone and is equipped with a language lab and a Data Analytics Centre.
The National Innovation Centre is currently headed by Mr. Samira Wijayasiri, Director of NIC and SOL.
NIC currently consists of three division: School of Humanities, School of Design, and Data Analytics Centre.
School of Humanities (SOH)
The School of Humanities offers Diploma programmes, Bachelor’s and Master’s degree programmes in Psychology. It also offers Bachelor’s degrees in Teaching English for Speakers of Other Languages (BA in TESOL) and English Studies (BA in English Studies). A number of certificate programmes in foreign languages (Japanese, French, German, and Chinese) are also offered by the School of Humanities.
School of Design (SOD)
School of Design at NIC offers degree programmes in disciplines including Fashion Design, Interior Architecture, Broadcasting & Journalism, and Mobile Computing, while Diploma and Certificate courses are offered in a variety of similar subjects including Fashion Design, Fashion Entrepreneurship, Pattern Making, Accessory Design, Fashion Marketing, and Fashion Industry.
Data Analytics Centre (DAC)
The Data Analytics Centre offers an undergraduate degree programme in Data Science alongside an Advanced Diploma in Data Science. The center is also intended to provide data analytics to industries in Sri Lanka.
School of Language (SOL)
To cater to the increasing demand for learning English, the English Language Unit was established in the year 2006.
The School of Language conducts Diploma, Certificate, and Professional Certificate programmes in English, German, French, and in other foreign languages designed to enable students to acquire a variety of skills including speaking, business writing, reading, and listening. SOL also conducts workshops, training consultancies, and tailormade training programmes upon requirement.
Regional Campuses
NIBM has four campuses around the island. There are situated in the cities of Kurunegala, Kandy, Galle, and Matara.
Kurunegala Regional Campus
The regional campus in Kurunegala was established in the year 1996 with the assistance of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation of Germany, the Research Institute for Management (RVB) of the Netherlands, and the Regional Industrial Development Project.
Kurunegala Regional Campus offers a variety of programmes in the fields of Management, IT, and Languages and currently houses close to 700 students. The regional campus in Kurunegala is the first branch of NIBM and is currently headed by Mr. K. P. C. Gunarathna.
Kandy Regional Campus
The second branch of NIBM was established in Kandy in the year of 1996 in order to cater to the growing demand for training in Management and IT.
Kandy Regional Campus offers programmes in Management, IT, and Languages along with training programmes and workshops. The Degree School of NIBM Kandy located at Getambe will be in operation from April 2021. The branch is currently headed by Mr. Ishan Wiratunga.
Southern Campus – Galle/Matara
In 2010, the third regional campus of NIBM was established in Galle to cater to the increased needs of Management and IT education in the Southern Province.
The campus offers an array of programmes in IT, Management, and Languages. Matara regional campus was established in 2014 and is managed under the supervision of the Galle Regional Campus. Mr. Thusitha Liyanagamage currently heads the Southern Campus in Galle and Matara.
NIBM Digital Campus (NDC)/ NIBM Virtual University
The NIBM Digital Campus is the newest addition to the NIBM family, and is the platform of online education at NIBM.
NDC was established in the year of 2019 under the guidance of Dr. D.M.A. Kulasooriya, Director General of NIBM and under the supervision of Dr. Himendra Balalle, Head of Business Consultancy Unit. NDC is equipped with a Learning Management System (LMS) that encourages students to engage in the learning process with a new experience.
At present, NDC offers a number of foundation and certificate programmes online in Python, Database Management System, Mobile Application Development (Android), TESOL, Business Management, and Business English.
The online platform also allows hybrid assessments exposing students at NIBM to a state-of-the-art learning system.
References
Business schools in Sri Lanka
Educational institutions established in 1968
Universities and colleges in Colombo District
Universities in Sri Lanka |
6119900 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux%20color%20management | Linux color management | Linux color management has the same goal as the color management systems (CMS) for other operating systems: to achieve the best possible color reproduction throughout an imaging workflow from its source (camera, video, scanner, etc.), through imaging software (Digikam, darktable, RawTherapee, GIMP, Krita, Scribus, etc.), and finally onto an output medium (monitor, video projector, printer, etc.). In particular, color management attempts to enable color consistency across media and throughout a color-managed workflow.
Linux color management relies on the use of accurate ICC (International Color Consortium) and DCP (DNG Color Profile) profiles describing the behavior of input and output devices, and color-managed applications that are aware of these profiles. These applications perform gamut conversions between device profiles and color spaces. Gamut conversions, based on accurate device profiles, are the essence of color management.
Historically, color management was not an initial design consideration of the X Window System on which much of Linux graphics support rests, and thus color-managed workflows have been somewhat more challenging to implement on Linux than on other OS's such as Microsoft Windows or macOS. This situation is now being progressively remedied, and color management under Linux, while functional, has not yet acquired mature status. Although it is now possible to obtain a consistent color-managed workflow under Linux, certain problems still remain:
The absence of a central user control panel for color settings.
Some hardware devices for color calibration lack Linux drivers, firmware or accessory data.
Since ICC color profiles are written to an open specification, they are compatible across operating systems. Hence, a profile produced on one OS should work on any other OS given the availability of the necessary software to read it and perform the gamut conversions. This can be used as a workaround for the lack of support for certain spectrophotometers or colorimeters under Linux: one can simply produce a profile on a different OS and then use it in a Linux workflow. Additionally, certain hardware, such as most printers and certain monitors, can be calibrated under another OS and then used in a fully color-managed workflow on Linux.
The popular Ubuntu Linux distribution added initial color management in the 11.10 release (the "Oneiric Ocelot" release).
Requirements for a color-managed workflow
Accurate device profiles obtained with source or output characterization software.
Correctly loaded video card LUTs (or monitor profiles that do not require LUT adjustments).
Color-managed applications that are configured to use a correct monitor profile and input/output profiles, with support for control over the rendering intent and black point compensation.
Calibration and profiling requires:
for input devices (scanner, camera, etc.) a color target which the profiling software will compare to the manufacturer-provided color values of the target.
or for output devices (monitor, printer, etc.) a reading with a specific device (spectrophotometer, colorimeter or spectrocolorimeter) of the color patch values and comparing the measured values against the values originally sent for output.
Monitor calibration and profiling
One of the critical elements in any color-managed workflow is the monitor, because, at one step or another, handling and making color adaptation through imaging software is required for most images, thus the ability of the monitor to present accurate colors is crucial.
Monitor color management consists of calibration and profiling.
The first step, calibration, is done by adjusting the monitor controls and the output of the graphics card (via calibration curves) to match user-definable characteristics, such as brightness, white point and gamma. The calibration settings are stored in a .cal file. The second step, profiling (characterization), involves measuring the calibrated display's response and recording it in a color profile. The profile is stored in an .icc file ("ICC file"). For convenience, the calibration settings are usually stored together with the profile in the ICC file.
Note that .icm files are identical to .icc files - the difference is only in the name.
Seeing correct colors requires using a monitor profile-aware application, together with the same calibration used when profiling the monitor. Calibration alone does not yield accurate colors. If a monitor was calibrated before it was profiled, the profile will only yield correct colors when used on the monitor with the same calibration (the same monitor control adjustments and the same calibration curves loaded into the video card's lookup table). macOS has built-in support for loading calibration curves and installing a system-wide color profile. Windows 7 onward allows loading calibration curves, though this functionality must be enabled manually. Linux and older versions of Windows require using a standalone LUT loader.
Device profiles
ICC profiles are cross-platform and can thus be created on other operating systems and used under Linux. Monitor profiles, however, require some additional attention. Since a monitor profile depends both on the monitor itself and on the video card, a monitor profile should only be used with the same monitor and video card with which it was created. The monitor settings should not be adjusted after creating the profile. In addition, since most calibration software use LUT adjustments during calibration, the corresponding LUTs must be loaded every time the display server (X11, Wayland) is started (e.g. with every graphical login).
In the unlikely case of a colorimeter being unsupported by Linux, a profile created under Windows or macOS can be used under Linux.
Display-channel lookup tables
There are two approaches to loading display channel LUTs:
Create a profile that does not modify video card LUTs and thus does not require LUTs be loaded later on. Ideally, this approach would rely on DDC-capable monitors—the internal monitor settings of which are set via calibration software. Unfortunately, monitors capable of making these adjustments through DDC are not common and are generally expensive. There is only one calibration software on Linux that can interact with a DDC monitor. For mainstream monitors, a couple of options exist:
BasICColor software, which works with most colorimeters on the market, allows one to adjust display output via the monitor interface, and then to choose a "Profile, do not calibrate" option. By doing this, one can create a profile that does not require video card LUT adjustments.
For EyeOne devices, EyeOne Match allows the user to calibrate to "Native" gamma and white point targets, which results in the LUT adjustment curves displayed after the calibration as a simple, linear 1:1 mapping (a straight line from corner to corner).
Both BasICColor and EyeOne Match do not presently run under Linux but they are capable of creating a profile that does not require LUT adjustments.
Use an LUT loader to actually load the LUT adjustments contained within the profile prepared during calibration. According to the documentation, these loaders do not modify the video card LUT by itself, but achieve the same type of adjustment by modifying the X server gamma ramp. Loaders are available for Linux distributions that use X.org or XFree86—the two most popular X servers on Linux. Other X servers are not guaranteed to work with the currently available loaders. There are two LUT loaders available for Linux:
Xcalib is one such loader, and although it is a command-line utility, it is quite easy to use.
dispwin is a part of Argyll CMS.
If, for any reason, the LUT cannot be loaded, it is still recommended to go through the initial stages of calibration where a user is asked by calibration software to make some manual adjustments to the monitor, as this will often improve display linearity and also provide information on its color temperature. This is especially recommended for CRT monitors.
Color-managed applications
In ICC-aware applications, it is important to make sure the correct profiles are assigned to devices, mainly to the monitor and the printer. Some Linux applications can auto-detect the monitor profile, while others requires that it is specified manually.
Although there is no designated place to store device profiles on Linux, /usr/share/color/icc/ has become the de facto standard.
Most applications running under WINE have not been fully tested for color accuracy. While 8-bpp programs can have some color resolution difficulties due to depth conversion errors, colors in higher-depth applications should be accurate, as long as those programs perform their gamut conversions based on the same monitor profile as that used for loading the LUT, granted that the corresponding LUT adjustments are loaded.
List of color-managed applications
darktable, a raw photo developer and GIMP plugin.
digiKam, an image organizer and tag editor.
Firefox, a web browser, color-managed since version 3, turned on by default since v3.5.
GIMP, a raster graphics editor.
Geeqie, an image viewer and image organizer.
Krita and Karbon, an image editor and vector graphics editor, respectively (parts of Calligra Suite, a graphic art and office suite).
LightZone, a raw photo developer.
Opera, a web browser.
RawTherapee, a raw photo developer and GIMP plugin.
Scribus, a desktop publishing (DTP) application.
Siril, an astronomical image processing program.
UFRaw, a raw photo developer and GIMP plugin.
Obsolete
CinePaint, an obsolete 16-bit-capable image editor.
F-Spot, an obsolete image organizer.
Bibble Pro, an obsolete raw digital imaging program. Sold to Corel, renamed to Aftershot Pro.
Phatch, an obsolete raster graphics editor used to batch-process images.
List of software for input and output profiling
Argyll Color Management System (Argyll CMS) is an open-source command line only collection of tools. Argyll CMS covers a wide range of needs from source or output characterization to monitor LUT loading and more. Argyll CMS is available as a package in Ubuntu, Debian, openSUSE (Build Service) and Fedora and as a generic x86 Linux binary installation from the web site, along with source code under the GPL.
DisplayCAL is an open-source display calibration and profiling solution with a GUI which uses ArgyllCMS at its core. It allows one to calibrate and characterize a display, generate ICC profiles with optional CIECAM02 gamut mappings and 3D LUTs, generate reports for ICC profiles, measure display device uniformity, create and edit test charts, and among other things even to create synthetic ICC profiles.
DCamProf is an open-source command-line tool for generating ICC and DCP (DNG Color Profile) camera profiles from test target measurements or camera spectral sensitivity functions. Features include giving the user control over the matrix and LUT optimizers to hand-tune the trade-off between accuracy and smoothness, profile matching, generating reports for plotting, simulating reflective spectra, analyzing camera color separation performance under different illuminants, and flat-field correction of test-chart photos.
Obsolete
LPROF (or LCMS Profiler) was a GUI tool for producing profiles for cameras, scanners and monitors. LPROF was originally designed to demonstrate LittleCMS (LCMS) capabilities. In 2005, LPROF development was resumed by a new team, which released the final version in 2006 when development was abandoned.
List of LUT loaders
A color profile file for a monitor will typically contain two parts:
The VCGT/LUT part, which does white point correction, and is applied to the screen as a whole.
The gamma+matrix part, which does gamma/hue/saturation correction, and has to be applied by individual color-managed applications.
In a color-managed setup, the VCGT/LUT part is typically loaded on login, while the filename of the color profile is stored in the _ICC_PROFILE X atom so that color managed programs can load that as a default profile for applying gamma+matrix corrections. Some programs also let you override what profile is used for gamma+matrix corrections.
dispwin, used to load both VCGT/LUT and _ICC_PROFILE atoms at once. Part of ArgyllCMS.
xcalib, a tiny monitor calibration loader for XFree86 (or X.Org) and MS-Windows, which sets the monitor VCGT/LUT part of the color profile
xiccd, a daemon that interacts with colord and sets the _ICC_PROFILE X atom to the path of your color profile, for program-specific gamma+matrix corrections. Note that GNOME and KDE already inform colord if you've set a profile in their settings, whereas XFCE has no built-in colord interaction.
List of color management systems
colord
colord is a system daemon that makes it easy to manage, install and generate color profiles to accurately color manage input and output devices.
colord provides a D-Bus API for system frameworks to query, offering the ability to, for example, get the profiles for a given device or create a device and assign to it a given profile.
colord provides a persistent database-backed store that is preserved across reboots, and it provides the session for a way to set system settings, for instance setting the display profile for all users and all sessions.
GNOME Color Manager and colord-kde are graphical tools for colord to be used in the GNOME and KDE desktop environments. Each acts as a client to colord.
colord supports the following subsystems:
XRandR (monitors)
SANE (scanners)
udev (cameras)
CUPS (printers)
See also
International Color Consortium
External links
Argyll developer's point of view on how to use their software. A bit too technical
Coordinated open source color management effort. Has a list of applications whose developers are taking part in the project
ICC Profiles In X Specification
An overview of using monitor- and printer profiles in Scribus
Home of ICC Examin and Oyranos. Also maintains a feed of latest news in Linux color management
The most comprehensive list of general color management links; "not related to Linux" implementation
Little CMS, a small-footprint, speed-optimized, free software color management engine
Color Management in Fedora
Color daemon
References
Computer graphics |
13612 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexen%3A%20Beyond%20Heretic | Hexen: Beyond Heretic | Hexen: Beyond Heretic is a fantasy first-person shooter video game developed by Raven Software and published by id Software through GT Interactive Software on October 30, 1995. It is the sequel to 1994's Heretic, and the second game in Raven Software's "Serpent Riders" trilogy, which culminated with Hexen II. The title comes from the German noun Hexen, which means "witches", and/or the verb hexen, which means "to cast a spell". Game producer John Romero stated that a third, unreleased game in this series was to be called Hecatomb.
Hexen: Beyond Heretic met with highly positive reviews upon release, though the various 1997 console ports were negatively received because of problems with frame rate and controls and the aging of the game itself. Critical plaudits for the game centered on the non-linear level design and the selection of three playable characters, each offering a distinct gameplay experience.
Plot
Following the tale of D'Sparil's defeat in Heretic, Hexen takes place in another realm, Cronos, which is besieged by the second of the three Serpent Riders, Korax. Three heroes set out to destroy Korax. The player assumes the role of one such hero. Throughout the course of his quest, he travels through elemental dungeons, a wilderness region, a mountainside seminary, a large castle, and finally a necropolis, before the final showdown with the Serpent Rider.
Gameplay
A new series feature introduced in Hexen is the choice of three character classes. Players may choose to play as a fighter (Baratus), a cleric (Parias), or a mage (Daedolon). Each character has unique weapons and physical characteristics, lending an additional degree of variety and replay value to the game. The Fighter relies mainly on close-quarters physical attacks with weapons both mundane and magical in nature, and is tougher and faster than the other characters. The Mage uses an assortment of long-range spells, whose reach is counterbalanced by the fact that he is the most fragile and slowest moving of the classes. The Cleric arms himself with a combination of both melee and ranged capabilities, being a middle ground of sorts between the other two classes. Additionally, certain items, such as the flechette (poison gas bomb), behave differently when collected and used by each of the classes, functioning in a manner better suiting their varying approach to combat.
Hexen introduces "hub" levels to the series, wherein the player can travel back and forth between central hub levels and connected side levels. This is done in order to solve larger-scale puzzles that require a series of items or switches to be used. The player must traverse through a hub in order to advance to the next hub.
The inventory system returns from Heretic with several new items, such as the "Disc of Repulsion", which pushes enemies away from the player, and the "Icon of the Defender", which provides invincibility to each class in a different manner.
Development
Like Heretic, Hexen was developed on NeXTSTEP. Hexen uses a modified version of the Doom engine, which allows looking up and down, network play with up to eight players, and the choice of three character classes. It also popularized the "hub system" of level progression in the genre of first-person shooter games. Unlike previous games, which had relied purely on General MIDI for music, Hexen is also able to play tracks from a CD. The game's own CD contained a soundtrack in an audio format that was exactly the same as the MIDI soundtrack, but played through a high-quality sound module. However, the most significant improvement was the addition of wall translation, rotation, and level scripting.
Engine modifications
"Polyobjects" are the walls that move within the game. Because the Doom engine uses the binary space partitioning system for rendering, it does not enable moving walls. Hexens moving walls are actually one-sided lines built somewhere else on the map and rendered at the desired start spot when the level is loaded. This enables a pseudo-moving wall, but does not allow moving sectors (such as seeing the tops of moving doors). This often creates problems in sectors containing more than one node, however, explaining the relatively limited use of polyobjects.
Whereas Doom, Doom II, and Heretic rely on lines within the maps to perform simple actions, Hexen also allows these actions to be activated by Action Code Script (ACS). These scripts use a syntactic variant of C, thus allowing special sequencing of game actions. Programming features such as randomization, variables, and intermap script activation enable smooth hub gameplay and are responsible for most of the special effects within the game: on-screen messages, random sound effects, monster spawning, sidedef texture changes, versatile control of polyobjects, level initialization for deathmatch, and even complex environment changes such as earthquakes manipulating floor textures and heights.
Source code
On January 11, 1999, the source code for Hexen was released by Raven Software under a license that granted rights to non-commercial use, and was re-released under the GNU GPL-2.0-only on September 4, 2008. This allowed the game to be ported to different platforms such as Linux, AmigaOS, and OS/2 (including eComStation and ArcaOS).
Hexen is compatible with many Doom source ports; Hexens features are also compatible with Doom WADs made for source ports regardless of what game they are being played on.
Music
The score was composed by Kevin Schilder. In contrast to Heretic, some songs in Hexen, in addition to MIDI versions, had higher-quality versions on CD. When playing in CD-audio mode, songs absent from CD would be replaced by some existing CD tracks.
Console versions
Hexen was released for the Sega Saturn, PlayStation, and Nintendo 64, all released by GT Interactive during the first half of 1997. While presenting several specific differences in their respective translations of the original PC game, all of them constitute essentially the same game with no major changes to level design, plot, or overall delivery.
The PlayStation version, developed by Probe Entertainment, has the FMV scenes and Redbook audio music from the PC CD-ROM version, but no multiplayer mode. The scripting and animation is slower, enemies have only their front sprites and lack gory deaths when attacked by strong hits or weapons, and the frame rate is slower. Although all levels are present in this version and feature their correct layouts, their architecture details are somewhat simplified and there is some loss in overall lighting quality. This port is based on a beta version of the original PC version of Hexen as many gameplay tweaks are shared, such as the simpler level design and the Fighter's weapons being weaker compared to other versions.
The Sega Saturn version, also developed by Probe, inherits most of the restrictions of the PlayStation version, such as the simplified scenery architecture and the downgraded lighting, although it does feature improvements in certain aspects. The scripting is faster, and the frame rate, while not fluid or consistent, is slightly better. The enemies still have all but their front sprites missing, but they retain their gory deaths when killed by a strong hit or weapon. This version also has hidden two-player link-up cooperative and deathmatch modes, accessible only through the unlockable cheat menu. While this port shares the FMV scenes and most of the Redbook audio music from the other CD-ROM versions, it also includes some new music tracks.
The Nintendo 64 version, developed by Software Creations, retains all of the graphical quality and scenery architecture, has a consistent frame rate, and includes high detail and smooth filtering. This version also has four-player split-screen cooperative and deathmatch modes, although they must be played in low detail mode. Due to cartridge storage limitations, the Nintendo 64 version is based on the original PC floppy version and lacks the FMV scenes and Redbook audio music introduced in the CD-ROM version, although it has new narrative introductions to the levels.
Deathkings of the Dark Citadel
Deathkings of the Dark Citadel is an official expansion pack that was released for Hexen on September 3, 1996. It features three more hubs with a total of 20 new single player levels and six new deathmatch levels. Unlike the Shadow of the Serpent Riders expansion pack for Heretic, it had to be purchased in retail stores or by mail order. This was unusual at the time, as most non-free expansion packs also included other new or revised gameplay elements. Deathkings of the Dark Citadel, unlike Shadow of the Serpent Riders, was not packaged with the original game, meaning that both had to be purchased separately, and the expansion would not work without already having Hexen. This expansion pack also did not initially include nor enable any music. Music could be fully enabled by applying a patch specially released to address this issue (usually found online under the name "dkpatch").
Each of the hubs (The Blight, The Constable's Gate, and The Nave) features one secret level, and new puzzles based on the quest items from the original game (no new quest artifacts were added). Any type of enemy may spawn on the map.
The final level of the expansion, the Dark Citadel itself, is an arena-like level, which features teleporting waves of monsters and three bosses (Fighter, Cleric, and Mage clones).
Reception
Heretic and Hexen shipped a combined total of roughly 1 million units to retailers by August 1997.
Reviewing the PC version, Maximum remarked that Hexen sets itself apart from other "3D slashers" with its selection of characters and novel approach to level design, which "leads to your character choosing their path rather than being guided around a rather linear series of rooms, proving that 3D games have matured". They also commented that the gameplay is consistently intense due to the difficulty of the enemies, the variety of weapons and power-ups, and the sheer size and breadth of the levels. They gave the game 5 out of 5 stars and their "Maximum Game of the Month" award. A reviewer for Next Generation opined that "Hexen takes everything that was good about Heretic, and makes it even better." He commented that the ability to choose between three different character classes gives the game replay value, something that had been missing from first-person shooters up until then, and though the graphics are blocky and pixelated, the "eerily lifelike" sound effects make up for it to a large extent. Like Maximum, he praised the non-linear level design and concluded the game to be a must-have for any first-person shooter fan. Chris Hudak, citing the differing abilities of the three playable characters, called Hexen "Slicker, smarter and more stylish than Doom---with all the killing and three times the replay value."
Computer Games Strategy Plus named Hexen the best "First-Person Action" title of 1995. It was also a runner-up for Computer Gaming Worlds 1995 "Action Game of the Year" award, which ultimately went to Crusader: No Remorse. The editors called it "another Doom bloodfest distinguished by its fantasy setting and the fact that it let you play as either a fighter, priest or mage, each with unique attributes and weapons".
The Saturn version was far less well-received. A review in Next Generation of the Saturn version reasoned that, "Like oil and water, Doom-style games and console conversions don't mix well. Unless the programmers are willing to rewrite the graphics engine from scratch, PC ports suffer from getting cramped into too little memory and neglecting the console's native 3D hardware." The reviewer recommended Saturn owners instead try PowerSlave or Ghen War, first-person shooters specifically designed for the console. Shawn Smith and Sushi-X of Electronic Gaming Monthly similarly said the game had not been converted well from PC. Others described the Saturn port as an exact conversion, and argued the problem was simply that Hexen was too old a game to be released for console in 1997 without any improvements. Though they disagreed on exact reasons, most critics agreed that the Saturn version suffers from pixelated graphics, dramatic drops in frame rate, and cumbersome controls. Scary Larry of GamePro gave it a mixed review, summarizing that "although it doesn't live up to PowerSlaves standards, it's still decent fun." John Broady of GameSpot gave a slightly more dismal assessment: "Despite these glaring deficiencies, Hexen nonetheless offers enough enhancements over the standard shooter to warrant a rental, especially for fans of role-playing games who thirst for real-time action. ... But for the rest, the Saturn version of Hexen is a classic game of too little and too late." Rich Leadbetter of Sega Saturn Magazine and James Price of Saturn Power defended the Saturn version, commenting that, although not outstanding, it is far superior to the Saturn version of Doom, which was released at roughly the same time. Price was particularly enthusiastic about the link cable-enabled multiplayer mode.
The Nintendo 64 version also left most critics unimpressed. The four-player mode was praised as an unprecedented feature in console first person shooters, but the graphics were considered unacceptably poor, particularly the frame rate and the usage of the Nintendo 64's mip-mapping and anti-aliasing in a way which actually worsened the visuals of the game. As with the Saturn version, some critics opined that Hexen was too dated by this time to be receiving a straightforward port. Joe Fielder of GameSpot additionally complained of a severe bug in the save feature. In a dissenting opinion, Scary Larry concluded that "Although not as polished as Turok or as fun and creepy as Doom 64, Hexen gives you three characters to choose from, and the action's addicting once you get into it." He gave it higher scores than the Saturn version in every category except sound. In contrast, Matt Casamassina of IGN called it "A shoddy port of a PC game that wasn't so great to begin with."
The PlayStation version was even more negatively received; critics universally panned the port for its poor frame rate, pixelated graphics, and sloppy platform-jumping controls.
Electronic Gaming Monthlys 1998 Video Game Buyer's Guide named Hexen the 1997 "Game that Should've Stayed on the PC", commenting that while the Nintendo 64 version was the best of the console ports, all three were poor conversions, and Hexen was too old by the time they were released.
References
External links
Official Hexen webpage at Raven Software
Mini-documentary and gameplay of Hexen
Hexen at MobyGames
Hexen I
Doom engine games
1995 video games
Fantasy video games
Raven Software games
Id Software games
DOS games ported to Windows
Adventure games
Acorn Archimedes games
Amiga games
AmigaOS 4 games
Classic Mac OS games
Sega Saturn games
PlayStation (console) games
Nintendo 64 games
Amiga 1200 games
GP2X games
First-person shooters
Cooperative video games
Split-screen multiplayer games
Commercial video games with freely available source code
Video games with digitized sprites
Video games with expansion packs
Multiplayer and single-player video games
GT Interactive Software games
Video games developed in the United States
DOS games
Windows games
Sprite-based first-person shooters
Works set in castles |
41672405 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueSpice%20MediaWiki | BlueSpice MediaWiki | BlueSpice MediaWiki (BlueSpice for short) is free wiki software based on the MediaWiki engine and licensed with the GNU General Public License. It is especially developed for businesses as an enterprise wiki distribution for MediaWiki and used in over 150 countries.
History
The German company Hallo Welt! has been developing the open source wiki software BlueSpice since 2007. The project was originally initiated as "bluepedia" by IBM, who wanted to deploy MediaWiki but were unable to live with its downsides.
In 2011, Hallo Welt! decided to publish their wiki as free and open-source software. The stable version of BlueSpice for MediaWiki was released July 4, 2011. From this point on, a free download has been available at SourceForge. The first release of BlueSpice was a couple of extensions and is today a complete stand-alone distribution, which has the latest MediaWiki as a core system but offers in the free version more than 50 distinct extensions and a completely different user interface. Following independent sources the BlueSpice free distribution is one of the most popular wiki software for knowledge management in organisations.
In Autumn 2013, Hallo Welt! released the completely reworked version BlueSpice 2. According to the BlueSpice developers this release aims for opening up BlueSpice for freelance developers in the global MediaWiki community and multiple language versions.
In 2014, BlueSpice for MediaWiki became a project of Translatewiki.net. In January 2015 the developers announced that they will change to a subscription model.
Functionality
Some central features of BlueSpice are:
Visual editing: allowing editing without any knowledge of wiki code (WYSIWYG).
Search and navigation: An extended search (Elasticsearch) offers improved search functionalities, like faceted search. The search results can further be sorted or filtered by category, namespace, author, semantic data, data type etc. Any files attached are also searched. It also provides common features like autocomplete and search as you type.
Quality assurance and review tools (workflow tool, reminder e.a.): Pages for instance can be assigned to a reviewer. This allows articles to be reviewed and approved.
Book function: Individual articles can be grouped into article collections to create manuals, documentations or instructions with chapter navigation. The books can be exported with it in different formats (PDF, DOCX) together with the respective file attachments.
Meta data and semantic: analyze and work with meta data.
Communication: Additional discussion and blog functionalities, a timeline and notification system support editorial processes.
Administration: Convenient management of users, namespaces, groups, rights and settings.
Technology
BlueSpice is written in the PHP programming language and uses MySQL, Apache/IIS, Tomcat (optional). The editions can be installed on top of an existing MediaWiki installation or as a standalone installation that includes MediaWiki.
The distribution is a collection of extensions, which can be extended with user-specific features or skins. While every single extension can be deactivated, BlueSpice editions integrate and standardize extensions to improve the user experience and maintenance.
Licensing
According to the MediaWiki standard all extensions are published under the GPLv3 license.
Versions
See also
MediaWiki
Comparison of wiki software
References
External links
Official website
Free wiki software
Wiki software
PHP software
Collaborative software
Business software |
63099563 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christofari | Christofari | Christofari — are Christofari (2019), Christofari Neo (2021) supercomputers of Sberbank based on Nvidia corporation hardware Sberbank of Russia and Nvidia. Their main purpose is neural network learning. They are also used for scientific research and commercial calculations.
The supercomputers are named after , the first customer of Sberbank, holder of the Bank's first savings account passbook. The supercomputers are listed in the Top 500 ranking of most powerful commercially available computer systems.
Development
Sberbank presented the supercomputers together with its subsidiary SberCloud. In December 2019, Sberbank and SberCloud commercially launched the Christofari supercomputer. Within a year, the power of Christofari became the foundation of a cloud based ML Space platform. It was configured to work with machine learning models. Sberbank and SberCloud announced this platform in December 2020.
The more powerful Christofari Neo supercomputer was presented at the AI Journey international conference in November 2021.
Usage
The supercomputers can be used by scientific, commercial and government organizations working in the various sectors of the economy. The machines were developed to work with artificial intelligence algorithms, neural network learning, and inference of various models.
Sber uses Christofari for internal tasks e.g. speech recognition and autoresponder voice generation in a call center (40% of customer inquiries are already answered automatically by bots). Also they use it for analysis of CT scan images of the lungs. The SberDevices and Sber AI teams were the first who received access to Christofari Neo. They developed the first service based on the DALL-E neural network that generates images from queries in Russian.
The power of supercomputers is also provided to other organizations when connecting the services of the cloud platform SberCloud ML Space.
Christofari
The first supercomputer was presented by Herman Gref, CEO of Sberbank, and David Rafalovsky, CTO of Sberbank Group, on 8 November 2019, at the AI Journey conference in Moscow.
As of March 2020, this is the only supercomputer in Russia designed specifically for working with artificial intelligence algorithms. It is capable of training software models based on complex neural networks in unprecedentedly short time, it's Russia's fastest supercomputer.
The Christofari machines are based on Nvidia DGX-2 nodes equipped with Tesla V100 graphics accelerators. The InfiniBand network based on Mellanox hardware is used for an interconnection. Effective performance is about 6.7 petaflops, which makes it the 40th most powerful system in the world (at the time of launch on 8 November 2019), the 7th in Europe, and the 1st in Russia (the results of the previous Russian leader — the Lomonosov-2 system — were exceeded by more than two times). This is the first supercomputer of a financial organization in the world available for third-party users. It is also the first supercomputer certified in Russia to work with personal data.
DGX-2 single node specifications
Maximum Power Usage — 10 kW
CPU — Dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8168, 2.7 GHz, 24-cores
GPUs — 16X NVIDIA Tesla V100
GPU Memory — 512GB total
NVIDIA CUDA Cores — 81920
NVIDIA Tensor cores — 10240
System Memory — 1.5TB
The DGX servers are connected via Mellanox switches with 36-ports, supporting up to four InfiniBand EDR connections at 100 Gb/s.
Almost the entire machine learning stack in use is oriented on the Ubuntu operating system as the base platform. The machines utilize a modified server version of an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS operating system. It is supported by Nvidia including graphics accelerators drivers, network software stack, and the necessary tools for maintenance and diagnostics. The package also includes proprietary software from Nvidia CUDA Toolkit, cuDNN, NCCL, and Docker Engine Utility for GPU Nvidia (the entire main machine learning stack runs in containers).
The supercomputer is located in the Sberbank data center (DC) in the Skolkovo Innovation Center in Moscow, Russia. It occupies one machine room and was built in less than a year.
Positions in rankings
September 2021 — 1st of the 50th most powerful computers in CIS;
November 2021 — 72nd among the 500th most powerful computers in the world (November 2020 — 40th).
Christofari Neo
The second supercomputer is also built on the basis of Nvidia technologies and is equipped with Nvidia A100 GPUs with 80 GB of memory. For an interconnection is used the high-speed switching InfiniBand network, which provides the speed of data exchange up to 1600 GB/s per each compute node and minimal latency. The actual performance is 11,95 petaflops.
DGX A100 single processor specifications
Maximum Power Consumption — 6,5 kW
CPU — Dual AMD Rome 7742, 128-cores, 2.25 GHz (base), 3.4 GHz (maximum)
GPUs — 8X Nvidia A100, 80 GB
GPU memory — 640 GB
System memory — 2 TB
Positions in rankings
November 2021 — 7th place in the HPL-AI rating of supercomputers and artificial intelligence;
November 2021 — 43rd place among the 500 most powerful computers in the world.
See also
References
Supercomputers |
160673 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BogoMips | BogoMips | BogoMips (from "bogus" and MIPS) is a crude measurement of CPU speed made by the Linux kernel when it boots to calibrate an internal busy-loop. An often-quoted definition of the term is "the number of million times per second a processor can do absolutely nothing".
BogoMips is a value that can be used to verify whether the processor in question is in the proper range of similar processors, i.e. BogoMips represents a processor's clock frequency as well as the potentially present CPU cache. It is not usable for performance comparisons among different CPUs.
History
In 1993, Lars Wirzenius posted a Usenet message explaining the reasons for its introduction in the Linux kernel on comp.os.linux:
[...]
MIPS is short for Millions of Instructions Per Second. It is a measure for the computation speed of a processor. Like most such measures, it is more often abused than used properly (it is very difficult to justly compare MIPS for different kinds of computers).
BogoMips are Linus's own invention. The linux kernel version 0.99.11 (dated 11 July 1993) needed a timing loop (the time is too short and/or needs to be too exact for a non-busy-loop method of waiting), which must be calibrated to the processor speed of the machine. Hence, the kernel measures at boot time how fast a certain kind of busy loop runs on a computer. "Bogo" comes from "bogus", i.e, something which is a fake. Hence, the BogoMips value gives some indication of the processor speed, but it is way too unscientific to be called anything but BogoMips.
The reasons (there are two) it is printed during boot-up is that a) it is slightly useful for debugging and for checking that the computer[’]s caches and turbo button work, and b) Linus loves to chuckle when he sees confused people on the news.
[...]
Proper BogoMips ratings
As a very approximate guide, the BogoMips can be pre-calculated by the following table. The given rating is typical for that CPU with the then current and applicable Linux version. The index is the ratio of "BogoMips per clock speed" for any CPU to the same for an Intel 386DX CPU, for comparison purposes.
With the 2.2.14 Linux kernel, a caching setting of the CPU state was moved from behind to before the BogoMips calculation. Although the BogoMips algorithm itself wasn't changed, from that kernel onward the BogoMips rating for then current Pentium CPUs was twice that of the rating before the change. The changed BogoMips outcome had no effect on real processor performance.
In Linux, BogoMips can be easily obtained by searching the cpuinfo file:
$ grep -i bogomips /proc/cpuinfo
Computation of BogoMIPS
With kernel 2.6.x, BogoMIPS are implemented in the /usr/src/linux/init/calibrate.c kernel source file. It computes the Linux kernel timing parameter loops_per_jiffy (see jiffy) value. The explanation from source code:
<nowiki>
/*
* A simple loop like
* while ( jiffies < start_jiffies+1)
* start = read_current_timer();
* will not do. As we don't really know whether jiffy switch
* happened first or timer_value was read first. And some asynchronous
* event can happen between these two events introducing errors in lpj.
*
* So, we do
* 1. pre_start <- When we are sure that jiffy switch hasn't happened
* 2. check jiffy switch
* 3. start <- timer value before or after jiffy switch
* 4. post_start <- When we are sure that jiffy switch has happened
*
* Note, we don't know anything about order of 2 and 3.
* Now, by looking at post_start and pre_start difference, we can
* check whether any asynchronous event happened or not
*/
</nowiki>
loops_per_jiffy is used to implement udelay (delay in microseconds) and ndelay (delay in nanoseconds) functions. These functions are needed by some drivers to wait for hardware. Note that a busy waiting technique is used, so the kernel is effectively blocked when executing ndelay/udelay functions. For i386 architecture delay_loop is implemented in /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/lib/delay.c as:
/* simple loop based delay: */
static void delay_loop(unsigned long loops)
{
int d0;
__asm__ __volatile__(
"\tjmp 1f\n"
".align 16\n"
"1:\tjmp 2f\n"
".align 16\n"
"2:\tdecl %0\n\tjns 2b"
:"=&a" (d0)
:"0" (loops));
}
equivalent to the following assembler code
; input: eax = d0
; output: eax = 0
jmp start
.align 16
start: jmp body
.align 16
body: decl eax
jns body
which can be rewritten to C-pseudocode
static void delay_loop(long loops)
{
long d0 = loops;
do {
--d0;
} while (d0 >= 0);
}
Full and complete information and details about BogoMips, and hundreds of reference entries can be found in the (outdated) BogoMips mini-Howto.
Timer-based delays
In 2012, ARM contributed a new udelay implementation allowing the system timer built into many ARMv7 CPUs to be used instead of a busy-wait loop. This implementation was released in Version 3.6 of the Linux kernel. Timer-based delays are more robust on systems that use frequency scaling to dynamically adjust the processor's speed at runtime, as loops_per_jiffies values may not necessarily scale linearly. Also, since the timer frequency is known in advance, no calibration is needed at boot time.
One side effect of this change is that the BogoMIPS value will reflect the timer frequency, not the CPU's core frequency. Typically the timer frequency is much lower than the processor's maximum frequency, and some users may be surprised to see an unusually low BogoMIPS value when comparing against systems that use traditional busy-wait loops.
See also
Turbo button
References
External links
BogoMips Mini-Howto, V38
Sources of classical standalone benchmark
Linux kernel
Benchmarks (computing) |
828436 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR%20code | QR code | A QR code (an initialism for quick response code) is a type of matrix barcode (or two-dimensional barcode) invented in 1994 by the Japanese automotive company Denso Wave. A barcode is a machine-readable optical label that can contain information about the item to which it is attached. In practice, QR codes often contain data for a locator, identifier, or tracker that points to a website or application. A QR code uses four standardized encoding modes (numeric, alphanumeric, byte/binary, and kanji) to store data efficiently; extensions may also be used.
The Quick Response system became popular outside the automotive industry due to its fast readability and greater storage capacity compared to standard UPC barcodes. Applications include product tracking, item identification, time tracking, document management, and general marketing.
A QR code consists of black squares arranged in a square grid on a white background, which can be read by an imaging device such as a camera, and processed using Reed–Solomon error correction until the image can be appropriately interpreted. The required data is then extracted from patterns that are present in both horizontal and vertical components of the image.
History
The QR code system was invented in 1994 by Masahiro Hara from the Japanese company Denso Wave. The initial design was influenced by the black and white pieces on a Go board. Its purpose was to track vehicles during manufacturing; it was designed to allow high-speed component scanning.
Adoption
QR codes are now used in a much broader context, including both commercial tracking applications and convenience-oriented applications aimed at mobile-phone users (termed mobile tagging). QR codes may be used to display text to the user, to open a webpage on the user's device, to add a vCard contact to the user's device, to open a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), to connect to a wireless network, or to compose an email or text message. There are a great many QR code generators available as software or as online tools that are either free, or require a paid subscription. The QR code has become one of the most-used types of two-dimensional code.
During the month of June 2011, 14 million American mobile users scanned a QR code or a barcode. Some 58% of those users scanned a QR or barcode from their homes, while 39% scanned from retail stores; 53% of the 14 million users were men between the ages of 18 and 34.
A September 2020 survey found that 18.8 percent of consumers in the United States and United Kingdom strongly agreed that they had noticed an increase of QR code use since the begin of COVID-19 related shelter-in-place orders in March 2020.
Standards
There are several standards that cover the encoding of data as QR codes:
October 1997AIM (Association for Automatic Identification and Mobility) International
January 1999JIS X 0510
June 2000ISO/IEC 18004:2000 Information technologyAutomatic identification and data capture techniquesBar code symbologyQR code (now withdrawn) Defines QR code models 1 and 2 symbols.
1 September 2006ISO/IEC 18004:2006 Information technologyAutomatic identification and data capture techniquesQR code 2005 bar code symbology specification (now withdrawn) Defines QR code 2005 symbols, an extension of QR code model 2. Does not specify how to read QR code model 1 symbols, or require this for compliance.
1 February 2015ISO/IEC 18004:2015 InformationAutomatic identification and data capture techniquesQR Code barcode symbology specification Renames the QR Code 2005 symbol to QR Code and adds clarification to some procedures and minor corrections.
At the application layer, there is some variation between most of the implementations. Japan's NTT DoCoMo has established de facto standards for the encoding of URLs, contact information, and several other data types. The open-source "ZXing" project maintains a list of QR code data types.
Uses
QR codes have become common in consumer advertising. Typically, a smartphone is used as a QR code scanner, displaying the code and converting it to some useful form (such as a standard URL for a website, thereby obviating the need for a user to type it into a web browser).
QR code has become a focus of advertising strategy, since it provides a way to access a brand's website more quickly than by manually entering a URL. Beyond mere convenience to the consumer, the importance of this capability is that it increases the conversion rate: the chance that contact with the advertisement will convert to a sale. It coaxes interested prospects further down the conversion funnel with little delay or effort, bringing the viewer to the advertiser's website immediately, whereas a longer and more targeted sales pitch may lose the viewer's interest.
Although initially used to track parts in vehicle manufacturing, QR codes are used over a much wider range of applications. These include commercial tracking, entertainment and transport ticketing, product and loyalty marketing and in-store product labeling. Examples of marketing include where a company's discounted and percent discount can be captured using a QR code decoder which is a mobile app, or storing a company's information such as address and related information alongside its alpha-numeric text data as can be seen in Yellow Pages directories.
They can also be used in storing personal information for use by organizations. An example of this is Philippines National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) where NBI clearances now come with a QR code. Many of these applications target mobile-phone users (via mobile tagging). Users may receive text, add a vCard contact to their device, open a URL, or compose an e-mail or text message after scanning QR codes. They can generate and print their own QR codes for others to scan and use by visiting one of several pay or free QR code-generating sites or apps. Google had an API, now deprecated, to generate QR codes, and apps for scanning QR codes can be found on nearly all smartphone devices.
QR codes storing addresses and URLs may appear in magazines, on signs, on buses, on business cards, or on almost any object about which users might want information. Users with a camera phone equipped with the correct reader application can scan the image of the QR code to display text, contact information, connect to a wireless network, or open a web page in the phone's browser. This act of linking from physical world objects is termed hardlinking or object hyperlinking. QR codes also may be linked to a location to track where a code has been scanned. Either the application that scans the QR code retrieves the geo information by using GPS and cell tower triangulation (aGPS) or the URL encoded in the QR code itself is associated with a location. In 2008, a Japanese stonemason announced plans to engrave QR codes on gravestones, allowing visitors to view information about the deceased, and family members to keep track of visits. Psychologist Richard Wiseman was one of the first authors to include QR codes in a book, in Paranormality: Why We See What Isn't There (2011).
QR codes have been incorporated into currency. In June 2011, The Royal Dutch Mint (Koninklijke Nederlandse Munt) issued the world's first official coin with a QR code to celebrate the centenary of its current building and premises. The coin can be scanned by a smartphone and originally linked to a special website with contents about the historical event and design of the coin. In 2014, the Central Bank of Nigeria issued a 100-naira banknote to commemorate its centennial, the first banknote to incorporate a QR code in its design. When scanned with an internet-enabled mobile device, the code goes to a website which tells the centenary story of Nigeria. In 2015, the Central Bank of the Russian Federation issued a 100-rubles note to commemorate the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation. It contains a QR code into its design, and when scanned with an internet-enabled mobile device, the code goes to a website that details the historical and technical background of the commemorative note. In 2017, the Bank of Ghana issued a 5-cedis banknote to commemorate 60 years of Central Banking in Ghana, and contains a QR code in its design, which when scanned with an internet-enabled mobile device, that code goes to the official Bank of Ghana website.
Credit card functionality is under development. In September 2016, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) launched the eponymously named Bharat QR, a common QR code jointly developed by all the four major card payment companies - National Payments Corporation of India that runs RuPay cards along with MasterCard, Visa and American Express. It will also have the capability of accepting payments on the unified payments interface (UPI) platform.
Augmented reality
QR codes are used in some augmented reality systems to determine the positions of objects in 3-dimensional space.
Displaying multimedia contents
Multimedia QR codes are also used to direct users to specific multimedia contents (such as video, audio, images, documents, etc.).
Mobile operating systems
QR codes can be used on various mobile device operating systems. iPhones running on iOS 11 and higher and some Android devices can natively scan QR codes without downloading an external app. The camera app is able to scan and display the kind of QR code (only on iPhone) along with the link (both on Android and iPhone). These devices support URL redirection, which allows QR codes to send metadata to existing applications on the device. Many paid or free apps are available with the ability to scan the codes and hard-link to an external URL.
Virtual stores
QR codes have been used to establish "virtual stores", where a gallery of product information and QR codes is presented to the customer, e.g. on a train station wall. The customers scan the QR codes, and the products are delivered to their homes. This use started in South Korea, and Argentina, but is currently expanding globally. Walmart, Procter & Gamble and Woolworths have already adopted the Virtual Store concept.
QR code payment
QR codes can be used to store bank account information or credit card information, or they can be specifically designed to work with particular payment provider applications. There are several trial applications of QR code payments across the world. In developing countries like China, India and Bangladesh QR code payment is a very popular and convenient method of making payments. Since Alipay designed a QR code payment method in 2011, mobile payment has been quickly adopted in China. As of 2018, around 83% of all payments were made via mobile payment.
In November 2012, QR code payments were deployed on a larger scale in the Czech Republic when an open format for payment information exchange — a Short Payment Descriptor — was introduced and endorsed by the Czech Banking Association as the official local solution for QR payments. In 2013, the European Payment Council provided guidelines for the EPC QR code enabling SCT initiation within the Eurozone.
Website login
QR codes can be used to log into websites: a QR code is shown on the login page on a computer screen, and when a registered user scans it with a verified smartphone, they will automatically be logged in. Authentication is performed by the smartphone which contacts the server. Google tested such a login method in January 2012.
Restaurant ordering
Fast serve restaurants can present a QR code near the front door allowing guests to view an online menu, or even redirect them to an online ordering website or app, allowing them to order or potentially pay for their meal without having to stand in line or use a cashier. QR codes can also link to daily or weekly specials that are not printed on the standardized menus. At table serve restaurants, QR codes enable guests to order their meals without a waiter involved—the QR code contains the table number so servers know where to bring the food. This application has grown especially since the need for social distancing during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic has prompted reduced contact between service staff and customers.
Joining a Wi‑Fi network
By specifying the SSID, encryption type, password/passphrase, and if the SSID is hidden or not, mobile device users can quickly scan and join networks without having to manually enter the data. A MECARD-like format is supported by Android and iOS 11+.
Common format: WIFI:S:<SSID>;T:<WEP|WPA|blank>;P:<PASSWORD>;H:<true|false|blank>;;
Sample: WIFI:S:MySSID;T:WPA;P:MyPassW0rd;;
Funerary use
A QR code can link to an obituary and can be placed on a headstone. In 2008, Ishinokoe in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan began to sell tombstones with QR codes produced by IT DeSign, where the code leads to a virtual grave site of the deceased. Other companies, such as Wisconsin-based Interactive Headstones, have also begun implementing QR codes into tombstones. In 2014, the Jewish Cemetery of La Paz in Uruguay began implementing QR codes for tombstones.
Electronic authentication
QR codes are also used to generate time-based one-time passwords (TOTP) for electronic authentication.
Video games
Popular video games, such as Fez, The Talos Principle, and Watch Dogs, have incorporated QR codes as story and gameplay elements. Among Us has a QR code easter egg in the "Scan boarding pass" task in the Mira HQ and Polus map. Mobile games such as Munzee use geolocation in combination with QR codes to create a game that is played in the real world by scanning QR stickers in physical locations.
Loyalty programs
QR codes have been used by various retail outlets that have loyalty programs. Sometimes these programs are accessed with an app that is loaded onto a phone and includes a process triggered by a QR code scan. The QR codes for loyalty programs tend to be found printed on the receipt for a purchase or on the products themselves. Users in these schemes collect award points by scanning a code.
Counterfeit detection
Serialised QR codes have been used by brands and governments to let consumers, retailers and distributors verify the authenticity of the products and help with detecting counterfeit products, as part of a brand protection program. However, the security level of a regular QR Code is limited since QR Codes printed on original products are easily reproduced on fake products, even though the analysis of data generated as a result of QR Code scanning can be used to detect counterfeiting and illicit activity. A higher security level can be attained by embedding a digital watermark or copy detection pattern into the image of the QR Code. This makes the QR Code more secure against counterfeiting attempts, and fake products which contain a counterfeit QR Code can be detected by scanning the secure QR Code with a specific app (even though the QR Code message itself is valid).
The treaty regulating apostilles (documents bearing a seal of authenticity), has been updated to allow for the issuance of digital apostilles by countries; a digital apostille is a PDF document with a cryptographic signature containing a QR code for a canonical URL of the original document, allowing users to verify the apostille from a printed version of the document.
Product tracing
Different studies have been made to assess the effectiveness of QR codes as a means of conveying labelling information and their use as part of a food traceability system. In, it was found that when provided free access to a smartphone with QR Code scanning app, 52.6% of participants would use it to access labelling information. A study made in South Korea showed that consumers appreciate QR code used in food traceability system, as they provide detailed information about food, as well as information that helps them in their purchasing decision. If QR Codes are serialised, consumers can access a web page showing the supply chain for each ingredient, as well as information specific to each related batch, including meat processors and manufacturers, which helps address the concerns they have about the origin of their food.
COVID-19 pandemic
After the COVID-19 pandemic began spreading, QR codes began to be used as a "touchless" system to display information, show menus, or provide updated consumer information, especially in the hospitality industry. Restaurants replaced paper or laminated plastic menus with QR code decals on the table, which opened an online version of the menu. This prevented the need to dispose of single-use paper menus, or institute cleaning and sanitizing procedures for permanent menus after each use. Local television stations have also begun to utilize codes on local newscasts to allow viewers quicker access to stories or information involving the pandemic, including testing and immunization scheduling websites, or for links within stories mentioned in the newscasts overall.
In several Australian states, patrons are required to scan QR codes at shops, clubs, supermarkets and other service and retail establishments on entry to assist contact tracing. Singapore, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and New Zealand use similar systems.
QR codes are also present on COVID-19 vaccination certificates in places such as Canada, and the EU (EU Digital COVID certificate) where they can be scanned to verify the information on the certificate.
Design
Unlike the older, one-dimensional barcodes that were designed to be mechanically scanned by a narrow beam of light, a QR code is detected by a 2-dimensional digital image sensor and then digitally analyzed by a programmed processor. The processor locates the three distinctive squares at the corners of the QR code image, using a smaller square (or multiple squares) near the fourth corner to normalize the image for size, orientation, and angle of viewing. The small dots throughout the QR code are then converted to binary numbers and validated with an error-correcting algorithm.
Storage
The amount of data that can be stored in the QR code symbol depends on the datatype (mode, or input character set), version (1, ..., 40, indicating the overall dimensions of the symbol, i.e. 4 × version number + 17 dots on each side), and error correction level. The maximum storage capacities occur for version 40 and error correction level L (low), denoted by 40-L:
Here are some sample QR code symbols:
Error correction
QR codes use Reed–Solomon error correction over the finite field , the elements of which are encoded as bytes of 8 bits; the byte with a standard numerical value encodes the field element where is taken to be a primitive element satisfying . The Reed–Solomon code uses one of 37 different polynomials over , with degrees ranging from 7 to 68, depending on how many error correction bytes the code adds. It is implied by the form of Reed–Solomon used (systematic BCH view) that these polynomials are all on the form , however the rules for selecting the degree are specific to the QR standard.
When discussing the Reed–Solomon code phase there is some risk for confusion, in that the QR ISO standard uses the term codeword for the elements of , which with respect to the Reed–Solomon code are symbols, whereas it uses the term block for what with respect to the Reed–Solomon code are the codewords. The number of data versus error correction bytes within each block depends on (i) the version (side length) of the QR symbol and (ii) the error correction level, of which there are four. The higher the error correction level, the less storage capacity. The following table lists the approximate error correction capability at each of the four levels:
In larger QR symbols, the message is broken up into several Reed–Solomon code blocks. The block size is chosen so that no attempt is made at correcting more than 15 errors per block; this limits the complexity of the decoding algorithm. The code blocks are then interleaved together, making it less likely that localized damage to a QR symbol will overwhelm the capacity of any single block.
Due to error correction, it is possible to create artistic QR codes that still scan correctly, but contain intentional errors to make them more readable or attractive to the human eye, as well as to incorporate colors, logos, and other features into the QR code block.
It is also possible to design artistic QR codes without reducing the error correction capacity by manipulating the underlying mathematical constructs. Image processing algorithms are also used to reduce errors in QR-code.
Encoding
The format information records two things: the error correction level and the mask pattern used for the symbol. Masking is used to break up patterns in the data area that might confuse a scanner, such as large blank areas or misleading features that look like the locator marks. The mask patterns are defined on a grid that is repeated as necessary to cover the whole symbol. Modules corresponding to the dark areas of the mask are inverted. The format information is protected from errors with a BCH code, and two complete copies are included in each QR symbol.
The message dataset is placed from right to left in a zigzag pattern, as shown below. In larger symbols, this is complicated by the presence of the alignment patterns and the use of multiple interleaved error-correction blocks.
The general structure of a QR encoding is as a sequence of 4 bit indicators with payload length dependent on the indicator mode (e.g. byte encoding payload length is dependent on the first byte).
Note:
Character Count Indicator depends on how many modules are in a QR code (Symbol Version).
ECI Assignment number Size:
8 × 1 bits if ECI Assignment Bitstream starts with '0'
8 × 2 bits if ECI Assignment Bitstream starts with '10'
8 × 3 bits if ECI Assignment Bitstream starts with '110'
Four-bit indicators are used to select the encoding mode and convey other information.
Encoding modes can be mixed as needed within a QR symbol. (e.g., a url with a long string of alphanumeric characters )
[ Mode Indicator][ Mode bitstream ] --> [ Mode Indicator][ Mode bitstream ] --> etc... --> [ 0000 End of message (Terminator) ]
After every indicator that selects an encoding mode is a length field that tells how many characters are encoded in that mode. The number of bits in the length field depends on the encoding and the symbol version.
Alphanumeric encoding mode stores a message more compactly than the byte mode can, but cannot store lower-case letters and has only a limited selection of punctuation marks, which are sufficient for rudimentary web addresses. Two characters are coded in an 11-bit value by this formula:
V = 45 × C1 + C2
This has the exception that the last character in an alphanumeric string with an odd length is read as a 6-bit value instead.
Decoding example
The following images offer more information about the QR code.
Variants
Model 1
Model 1 QR code is an older version of the specification. It is visually similar to the widely seen model 2 codes, but lacks alignment patterns. Differences are in the bottom right corner, and in the midsections of the bottom and right edges are additional functional regions.
Micro QR code
Micro QR code is a smaller version of the QR code standard for applications where symbol size is limited. There are four different versions (sizes) of Micro QR codes: the smallest is 11×11 modules; the largest can hold 35 numeric characters.
IQR code
IQR Code is an alternative to existing QR codes developed by Denso Wave. IQR codes can be created in square or rectangular formations; this is intended for situations where a rectangular barcode would otherwise be more appropriate, such as cylindrical objects. IQR codes can fit the same amount of information in 30% less space. There are 61 versions of square IQR codes, and 15 versions of rectangular codes. For squares, the minimum size is 9x9 modules; rectangles have a minimum of 19x5 modules. IQR codes add error correction level S, which allows for 50% error correction. IQR Codes have not yet been given an ISO specification, and only proprietary Denso Wave products can create or read IQR codes.
Secure QR code
Secure Quick Response (SQR) code is a QR code that contains a "private data" segment after the terminator instead of the specified filler bytes "ec 11". This private data segment must be deciphered with an encryption key. This can be used to store private information and to manage company's internal information.
SQR codes have been developed by the FORUS Foundation to enable secure transactions, and published under a Creative Commons Licence.
The SQR solution guarantees the integrity of the source data as well as the validity of the originating party.
The payment instruction string is made up of the electronic instruction data from the scanned QR code appended with a SHA-2 cryptographic hash.
The message digest can then be encrypted using the private key of the sender, which then creates a digital signature of the message.
This signature validates the integrity of the data and the trustworthiness of the sender. This provides non-repudiation, confirming the identity of the sender, and that it has not been tampered with during transmission.
By embedding the URL and all the variables required to perform shopping cart type e-commerce, bill payment and peer to peer payments, coupled with a digital certificate eliminates the possibility of spoofing, tampering, and man in the middle attacks.
Frame QR
Frame QR is a QR code with a "canvas area" that can be flexibly used. In the center of this code is the canvas area, where graphics, letters, and more can be flexibly arranged, making it possible to lay out the code without losing the design of illustrations, photos, etc.
HCC2D
Researchers have proposed a new High Capacity Colored 2-Dimensional (HCC2D) Code, which builds upon a QR code basis for preserving the QR robustness to distortions and uses colors for increasing data density (at this stage it is still in prototyping phase). The HCC2D code specification is described in details in Querini et al. (2014), while techniques for color classification of HCC2D code cells are described in detail in Querini and Italiano (2014), which is an extended version of Querini and Italiano (2013).
Introducing colors into QR codes requires addressing additional issues. In particular, during QR code reading only the brightness information is taken into account, while HCC2D codes have to cope with chromatic distortions during the decoding phase. In order to ensure adaptation to chromatic distortions which arise in each scanned code, HCC2D codes make use of an additional field: the Color Palette Pattern. This is because color cells of a Color Palette Pattern are supposed to be distorted in the same way as color cells of the Encoding Region. Replicated color palettes are used for training machine learning classifiers.
JAB code
JAB code (Just Another Barcode) is a color 2D matrix symbology made of color squares arranged in either square or rectangle grids. It was developed by Fraunhofer Institute SIT (Secure Information Technology).
The code contains one primary symbol and optionally multiple secondary symbols. The primary symbol contains four finder patterns located at the corners of the symbol.
The code uses either 4 or 8 colours. The 4 basic colours (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) are the 4 primary colours of the subtractive CMYK color model which is the most widely used system in industry for colour printing on a white base such as paper. The other 4 colours (blue, red, green, white) are secondary colours of the CMYK model and originate as an equal mixture of a pair of basic colours.
The barcode is not subject to licensing and was submitted to ISO standardization as ISO 23634 expected to be approved at the beginning of 2021 and finalized in 2022. The software is open-source and published under the LGPL v2.1 license. The specification is freely available.
Because the colour adds a third dimension to the two-dimensional matrix, a JAB code can contain more information in the same area compared to two-colour (black and white) codes – theoretically twice as much data for a 4 colour code and three times more for 8 colours assuming the same encoding algorithm. This can allow storage of an entire message in the barcode, rather than just storing partial data with a reference to a full message somewhere else (such as a link to a website), thus eliminating the need for additional always-available infrastructure beyond the printed barcode itself. It may be used to digitally sign encrypted digital version of printed legal documents, contracts and certificates (diplomas, training), medical prescriptions or provide product authenticity assurance to increase protection against counterfeits.
License
The use of QR code technology is freely licensed as long as users follow the standards for QR Code documented with JIS or ISO. Non-standardized codes may require special licensing.
Denso Wave owns a number of patents on QR code technology, but has chosen to exercise them in a limited fashion. In order to promote widespread usage of the technology Denso Wave chose to waive its rights to a key patent in its possession for standardized codes only. In the US, the granted QR code patent is , and in Japan , both of which have expired. The European Patent Office granted patent to Denso Wave, which was then validated into French, UK, and German patents, all of which expired in March 2015.
The text QR Code itself is a registered trademark and wordmark of Denso Wave Incorporated. In UK, the trademark is registered as E921775, the word "QR Code", with a filing date of 03/09/1998. The UK version of the trademark is based on the Kabushiki Kaisha Denso (DENSO CORPORATION) trademark, filed as Trademark 000921775, the word "QR Code", on 03/09/1998 and registered on 6/12/1999 with the European Union OHIM (Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market).
The U.S. Trademark for the word "QR Code" is Trademark 2435991 and was filed on 29 September 1998 with an amended registration date of 13 March 2001, assigned to Denso Corporation.
Risks
The only context in which common QR codes can carry executable data is the URL data type. These URLs may host JavaScript code, which can be used to exploit vulnerabilities in applications on the host system, such as the reader, the web browser or the image viewer, since a reader will typically send the data to the application associated with the data type used by the QR code.
In the case of no software exploits, malicious QR codes combined with a permissive reader can still put a computer's contents and user's privacy at risk. This practice is known as "attagging", a portmanteau of "attack tagging". They are easily created and can be affixed over legitimate QR codes. On a smartphone, the reader's permissions may allow use of the camera, full Internet access, read/write contact data, GPS, read browser history, read/write local storage, and global system changes.
Risks include linking to dangerous web sites with browser exploits, enabling the microphone/camera/GPS, and then streaming those feeds to a remote server, analysis of sensitive data (passwords, files, contacts, transactions), and sending email/SMS/IM messages or packets for DDoS as part of a botnet, corrupting privacy settings, stealing identity, and even containing malicious logic themselves such as JavaScript or a virus. These actions could occur in the background while the user is only seeing the reader opening a seemingly harmless web page. In Russia, a malicious QR code caused phones that scanned it to send premium texts at a fee of $6 each. QR codes have also been linked to scams in which stickers are placed on parking meters, posing as quick payment options, as seen in Austin, San Antonio and Boston, among other cities across the United States and Australia.
See also
Aztec Code
Data Matrix
PDF417
QRpedia
SnapTag
SPARQCode
Touchatag
References
Bibliography
External links
Reed Solomon Codes for Coders – an elaborate tutorial on Wikiversity, covering both QR code structure and the Reed Solomon codes used to encode the data.
1994 introductions
Automatic identification and data capture
Barcodes
Encodings
Hypermedia
Japanese inventions |
4460725 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration%20Assistant%20%28Apple%29 | Migration Assistant (Apple) | Migration Assistant is a utility by Apple Inc. that transfers data, user accounts, computer settings and apps from one Macintosh computer to another computer, or from a full drive backup. As of OS X Lion and later, it can also migrate contacts, calendars, and email accounts and other files from Microsoft Windows. Migration Assistant can be used during initial setup of a new computer or run manually on a system that has already been set up. It may be used multiple times to copy only applications, user account(s), or settings. Its primary purpose is to duplicate the contents and configuration of an existing computer user account(s) on a new one.
The Migration Assistant does not transfer the operating system of the old computer to the new one. Similarly, applications and utilities bundled by Apple with the operating system (e.g. Safari) are not transferred, based on the assumption that the newer machine has the same or newer version already installed. However, settings for these applications (e.g. bookmarks) are transferred.
References
External links
Apple Inc., "How to move your content to a new Mac"
Apple Inc., "Migration Assistant tips and tricks"
Apple Inc., "Mac OS X 10.3, 10.4: Transferring data with Setup Assistant / Migration Assistant FAQ"
MacOS |
66086 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS | DR-DOS | DR-DOS (written as DR DOS, without a hyphen, in versions up to and including 6.0) is a disk operating system for IBM PC compatibles. Upon its introduction in 1988, it was the first DOS attempting to be compatible with IBM PC DOS and MS-DOS (which were the same product sold under different names).
DR-DOS was developed by Gary A. Kildall's Digital Research and derived from Concurrent PC DOS 6.0, which was an advanced successor of CP/M-86. As ownership changed, various later versions were produced with names including Novell DOS and Caldera OpenDOS.
History
Origins in CP/M
Digital Research's original CP/M for the 8-bit Intel 8080- and Z-80-based systems spawned numerous spin-off versions, most notably CP/M-86 for the Intel 8086/8088 family of processors. Although CP/M had dominated the market since the mid-1970s, and was shipped with the vast majority of non-proprietary-architecture personal computers, the IBM PC in 1981 brought the beginning of what was eventually to be a massive change.
IBM originally approached Digital Research in 1980, seeking an x86 version of CP/M. However, there were disagreements over the contract, and IBM withdrew. Instead, a deal was struck with Microsoft, who purchased another operating system, 86-DOS, from Seattle Computer Products (SCP). This became Microsoft MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS. 86-DOS's command structure and application programming interface imitated that of CP/M 2.2 (with BDOS 2.2). Digital Research threatened legal action, claiming PC DOS/MS-DOS to be too similar to CP/M. In early 1982, IBM settled by agreeing to sell Digital Research's x86 version of CP/M, CP/M-86, alongside PC DOS. However, PC DOS sold for while CP/M-86 had a $240 price tag. The proportion of PC buyers prepared to spend six times as much to buy CP/M-86 was very small, and the availability of compatible application software, at first decisively in Digital Research's favor, was only temporary.
Digital Research fought a long losing battle to promote CP/M-86 and its multi-tasking multi-user successors MP/M-86 and Concurrent CP/M-86, and eventually decided that they could not beat the Microsoft-IBM lead in application software availability, so they modified Concurrent CP/M-86 to allow it to run the same applications as MS-DOS and PC DOS.
This was shown publicly in December 1983 and shipped in March 1984 as Concurrent DOS 3.1 (a.k.a. CDOS with BDOS 3.1) to hardware vendors. While Concurrent DOS continued to evolve in various flavours over the years to eventually become Multiuser DOS and REAL/32, it was not specifically tailored for the desktop market and too expensive for single-user applications. Therefore, over time two attempts were made to sideline the product:
In 1985, Digital Research developed DOS Plus 1.0 to 2.1, a stripped-down and modified single-user derivative of Concurrent DOS 4.1 and 5.0, which ran applications for both platforms, and allowed switching between several tasks as did the original CP/M-86. Its DOS compatibility was limited, and Digital Research made another attempt, this time a native DOS system. This new disk operating system was launched in 1988 as DR DOS.
Although DRI was based in Pacific Grove and later in Monterey, California, USA, the work on DOS Plus started in Newbury, Berkshire in the UK, where Digital Research Europe had its OEM Support Group located since 1983. Beginning in 1986, most of the operating system work on Concurrent DOS 386 and XM, Multiuser DOS, DR DOS and PalmDOS was done in Digital Research's European Development Centre (EDC) in Hungerford, Berkshire. Later on some work was also done by Digital Research GmbH in Munich, Germany.
First DR DOS version
As requested by several OEMs, Digital Research started a plan to develop a new DOS operating system addressing the shortcomings left by MS-DOS in 1987. Of particular importance was a million dollar deal with Kazuhiko "Kay" Nishi of ASCII Corporation, who had previously been instrumental in opening the Japanese OEM market for Microsoft. The first DR DOS version was released on 28 May 1988. Version numbers were chosen to reflect features relative to MS-DOS; the first version promoted to the public was DR DOS 3.31, which offered features comparable to Compaq MS-DOS 3.31 with large disk support (FAT16B a.k.a. "BIGDOS"). DR DOS 3.31 reported itself as "IBM PC DOS 3.31", while the internal BDOS (Basic Disk Operating System) kernel version was reported as 6.0, single-user nature, reflecting its origin as derivative of Concurrent DOS 6.0 with the multitasking and multiuser capabilities as well as CP/M API support stripped out and the XIOS replaced by an IBM-compatible DOS-BIOS. The system files were named DRBIOS.SYS (for the DOS-BIOS) and DRBDOS.SYS (for the BDOS kernel), the disk OEM label used was "DIGITAL␠".
DR DOS offered some extended command line tools with command line help, verbose error messages, sophisticated command line history and editing (HISTORY directive) as well as support for file and directory passwords built right into the kernel. It was also cheaper to license than MS-DOS, and was ROMable right from the start. The ROMed version of DR DOS was also named ROS (ROM Operating System). DRI was approached by a number of PC manufacturers who were interested in a third-party DOS, which prompted several updates to the system.
At this time, MS-DOS was only available to OEMs bundled with hardware. Consequently, DR DOS achieved some immediate success when it became possible for consumers to buy it through normal retail channels beginning with version 3.4x.
Known versions are DR DOS 3.31 (BDOS 6.0, June 1988, OEM only), 3.32 (BDOS 6.0, 17 August 1988, OEM only), 3.33 (BDOS 6.0, 1 September 1988, OEM only), 3.34 (BDOS 6.0, OEM only), 3.35 (BDOS 6.0, 21 October 1988, OEM only), 3.40 (BDOS 6.0, 25 January 1989), 3.41 (BDOS 6.3, June 1989, OEM and retail). Like MS-DOS, most of them were produced in several variants for different hardware. While most OEMs kept the DR DOS name designation, 2001 Sales, Inc. marketed it under the name EZ-DOS 3.41 (also known as EZ-DOS 4.1).
DR DOS 5.0
DR DOS version 5.0 (code-named "Leopard") was released in May 1990, still reporting itself as "PC DOS 3.31" for compatibility purposes, but internally indicating a single-user BDOS 6.4 kernel. (Version 4 was skipped to avoid being associated with the relatively unpopular MS-DOS 4.0.) This introduced ViewMAX, a GEM-based GUI file management shell. ViewMAX's startup screen would present the slogan "Digital Research - We make computers work". DR DOS 5.0 also introduced the patented BatteryMAX power management system, bundled disk-caching software (DRCACHE), a remote file transfer tool (FILELINK), a cursor shape configuration utility (CURSOR), and offered a vastly improved memory management system (MemoryMAX). For compatibility purposes, the DR DOS 5.0 system files were now named IBMBIO.COM (for the DOS-BIOS) and IBMDOS.COM (for the BDOS kernel) and due to the advanced loader in the boot sector could be physically stored anywhere on disk. The OEM label in the boot sectors was changed to "IBM␠␠3.3".
DR DOS 5.0 was the first DOS to include load-high capabilities. The kernel and data structures such as disk buffers could be relocated in the High Memory Area (HMA), the first 64 KB of extended memory which are accessible in real mode. This freed up the equivalent amount of critical "base" or conventional memory, the first 640 KB of the PC's RAM – the area in which all DOS applications run.
Additionally, on Intel 80386 machines, DR DOS's EMS memory manager allowed the operating system to load DOS device drivers into upper memory blocks, further freeing base memory.
DR DOS 5.0 was the first DOS to integrate such functionality into the base OS (loading device drivers into upper memory blocks was already possible using third-party software like QEMM). This allowed it, on 286 systems with supported chipsets and on 386 systems, to provide significantly more free conventional memory than any other DOS. Once drivers for a mouse, multimedia hardware and a network stack were loaded, an MS-DOS/PC DOS machine typically might only have had 300 to 400 KB of free conventional memory – too little to run much late-1980s software. In contrast to this, DR DOS 5.0, with a little manual tweaking, could load all this and still keep all of its conventional memory free – allowing for some necessary DOS data structures, as much as 620 KB out of the 640 KB. With MEMMAX +V, the conventional memory region could even be extended into unused portions of the graphics adapter card typically providing another 64 to 96 KB more free DOS memory.
Because DR DOS left so much conventional memory available, some old programs utilizing certain address wrapping techniques failed to run properly as they were now loaded unexpectedly (or, under MS-DOS, "impossibly") low in memory – inside the first 64 KB segment (known as "low memory"). Therefore, DR DOS 5.0's new MEMMAX -L command worked around this by pre-allocating a chunk of memory at the start of the memory map in order for programs to load above this barrier (but with less usable conventional memory then). By default, MEMMAX was configured for +L, so that applications could take advantage of the extra memory.
DR DOS 6.0 / Competition from Microsoft
Faced with substantial competition in the DOS arena, Microsoft responded with an announcement of a yet-to-be released MS-DOS 5.0 in May 1990. This would be released in June 1991 and include similar advanced features to those of DR DOS. It included matches of the DR's enhancements in memory management.
Almost immediately in September 1991, Digital Research responded with DR DOS 6.0, code-named "Buxton". DR DOS 6.0, while already at BDOS level 6.7 internally, would still report itself as "IBM PC DOS 3.31" to normal DOS applications for compatibility purposes.
This bundled in SuperStor on-the-fly disk compression, to maximize available hard disk space, and file deletion tracking and undelete functionality by Roger A. Gross.
DR DOS 6.0 also included a task-switcher named TASKMAX with support for the industry-standard task-switching API to run multiple applications at the same time. In contrast to Digital Research's Multiuser DOS (successor of Concurrent DOS in the multi-user products line), which would run DOS applications in pre-emptively multitasked virtual DOS machines, the DR DOS 6.0 task switcher would freeze background applications until brought back into the foreground. While it ran on x86-machines, it was able to swap to XMS memory on 286+ machines. TASKMAX did support some Copy & Paste facility between applications.
Via the task-switcher API, graphical user interfaces such as ViewMAX or PC/GEOS could register as the task manager menu and thereby replace the TASKMAX text mode menu, so that users could switch between tasks from within a GUI.
Microsoft responded with MS-DOS 6.0, which again matched some features of DR DOS 6.0.
In December 1991, a pre-release version of Windows 3.1 was found to return a non-fatal error message if it detected a non-Microsoft DOS. This check came to be known as the AARD code. It was a simple matter for Digital Research to patch DR DOS 6.0 to circumvent the AARD code 'authenticity check' in the Windows 3.1 beta by rearranging the order of two internal tables in memory (with no changes in functionality), and the patched version, named "business update", was on the streets within six weeks of the release of Windows 3.1. With the detection code disabled, Windows ran perfectly under DR DOS and its successor Novell DOS. The code was present but disabled in the released version of Windows 3.1.
In July 1992, Digital Research Japan released DR DOS 6.0/V, a Japanese DOS/V compatible version of DR DOS 6.0. A Korean version appears to have been available as well.
PalmDOS
In 1992 Digital Research, still under its old name but already bought by Novell in July 1991, also embarked on a spin-off product code-named "Merlin" and later released as NetWare PalmDOS 1, which, as its name implies, was a very resource-light DR DOS 6.0 derivative aimed at the emerging Palmtop/PDA market.
PalmDOS was the first operating system in the family to support the new BDOS 7.0 kernel with native DOS compatible internal data structures instead of emulations thereof. Replacing the DOS emulation on top of a CP/M kernel by a true DOS compatible kernel helped a lot in improving compatibility with some applications using some of DOS' internal data structures and also was the key in reducing the resident size of the kernel code even further—a particular requirement for the PDA market. On the other hand, introducing a genuine Current Directory Structure (CDS) imposed a limit on the depth of working directories down to 66 characters (as in MS-DOS/PC DOS), whereas previous issues of DR DOS had no such limitation due to their internal organization of directories as relative links to parent directories instead of as absolute paths. PalmDOS still reported itself as "PC DOS 3.31" to applications in order to keep the kernel small and not run into compatibility problems with Windows, which would expect the DOSMGR API to be implemented for any DOS version since 5.0.
As well as a ROM-executing kernel, PalmDOS had palmtop-type support for features such as PCMCIA PC Cards (with DPMS support), power management (BatteryMAX and the $IDLE$ device driver with its patented dynamic idle detection by Gross and John P. Constant), MINIMAX task switcher support for PIM (Personal Information Modules) applications stored and executed from ROM via XIP (Execute-In-Place), etc.
The PCMCIA stack for PalmDOS was partially written by Ian H. S. Cullimore.
Novell DOS 7 / Contribution by Novell
Novell DOS was Novell Corporation's name for DR DOS during the period when Novell sold DR DOS, after the acquisition of Digital Research in 1991. Regarding features and performance, it was typically at least one release ahead of MS-DOS. In 1993, PC DOS 6.1, MS-DOS 6.2 and PC DOS 6.3 were trumped by Novell's .
Novell CEO Robert J. Frankenberg's strategy included "major trimming", selling off products like transactional database Btrieve and killing others such as Novell DOS and WordPerfect's multimedia Main Street children's titles. Novell licensed technology from Stac Electronics for use in Novell DOS and its Network operating system, NetWare. Novell sold the product line off to Caldera on 23 July 1996, after it approached Novell looking for a DOS operating system to bundle with its OpenLinux distribution.
Marc Perkel claimed to have had inspired Novell in February 1991 to buy Digital Research and develop something he envisioned as "NovOS". Novell had actually bought Digital Research in July 1991 with a view to using DR's product line as a lever in their comprehensive strategy to break the Microsoft monopoly. (This was part of a massive and ultimately disastrous spending spree for Novell: they bought WordPerfect Corporation at about the same time, some of Borland's products, and invested heavily in Unix as well.) The planned "DR DOS 7.0", internally named "Panther", intended to trump Microsoft's troubled MS-DOS 6.0, was repeatedly delayed, while Novell was working on an optionally loadable Unix-like multi-user security extension (with, if loaded, file commands like BACKUP, DELPURGE, MOVE, TOUCH, TREE, UNDELETE, XATTRIB, XCOPY, XDEL and XDIR supporting an otherwise disabled /U:name command line option to select specific users or groups, compatible with Multiuser DOS) and two new graphical user interfaces (ViewMAX 3, a derivative of GEM, and "Star Trek", a true port of Apple's System 7.1 to run under the new DR DOS multitasker named "Vladivar").
When DR DOS eventually arrived in December 1993 (with localized versions released in March 1994), renamed Novell DOS 7 (a.k.a. "NWDOS"), and without these three components, it was a disappointment to some. It was larger and lacked some finishing touches, but was nevertheless seen as best DOS by many industry experts.
In Germany, Novell DOS 7 was aggressively marketed with the slogan "" (Don't trust any DOS below 7) in the press and with free demo floppies in computer magazines. The campaign aimed at 20% of the DOS market and resulted in about 1.5 million copies sold until February 1994 and more than 3000 dealers interested to carry the product. Novell DOS 7 was available through various OEMs, a dedicated mail order shop and authorized dealers.
A major functional addition was Novell's second attempt at a peer-to-peer networking system, Personal NetWare (PNW). This was better than its predecessor, NetWare Lite (NWL), but it was incompatible with Microsoft's networking system, now growing popular with support in Windows for Workgroups, OS/2, and Windows NT. A considerable amount of manual configuration was needed to get both to co-exist on the same PC, and Personal NetWare never achieved much success.
Since Novell DOS 7 implemented the DOSMGR API and internal data structures had been updated, its BDOS 7.2 kernel could report with a DOS version of 6.0 and OEM ID "IBM" without risking compatibility problems with Windows. Most tools would report this as "PC DOS 6.1", because IBM PC DOS 6.1 also reported as DOS 6.0 to applications.
Novell DOS 7 introduced much advanced memory management including new support for DPMI (DOS Protected Mode Interface) and DPMS (DOS Protected Mode Services) as well as more flexible loadhigh options. It also introduced support for "true" pre-emptive multitasking of multiple DOS applications in virtual DOS machines (VDM), a component originally named MultiMAX. This was similar to Multiuser DOS, but now on the basis of a natively DOS compatible environment, similar to Windows 386 Enhanced Mode, but without a GUI. By default, the bundled TASKMGR would behave similar to the former DR DOS 6.0 TASKMAX. However, if EMM386 was loaded with the option /MULTI, EMM386 would load a natively 32-bit 386 Protected Mode operating system core providing API support for pre-emptive multitasking, multi-threading, hardware virtualization and domain management of virtual DOS machines. This API could be used by DR DOS-aware applications. If TASKMGR was run later on, it would use this API to instance the current 16-bit DOS system environment, create virtual DOS machines and run applications in them instead of using its own Real Mode task-switcher support. The multitasker was compatible with Windows, so that tasks started before launching Windows could be seen as tasks under Windows as well.
Novell DOS 7 and Personal NetWare 1.0 also shipped with NetWars, a network-enabled 3D arcade game.
Novell DOS 7 and Personal NetWare required several bug-fix releases (D70xyy with x=language, yy=number) and were not completely stable when the next development occurred. With beta versions of Microsoft's "Chicago" (what would later become Windows 95) in sight, Novell wound down further development on Novell DOS 7 in September 1994 and stopped maintenance in January 1996 after more than 15 updates.
After Novell
When Caldera approached Novell looking for a DOS operating system to bundle with their OpenLinux distribution, Novell sold the product line off to Caldera on 23 July 1996, by which time it was of little commercial value to them.
Between the Caldera-owned DR-DOS and competition from IBM's PC DOS 6.3, Microsoft moved to make it impossible to use or buy the subsequent Windows version, Windows 95, with any DOS product other than their own. Claimed by them to be a purely technical change, this was later to be the subject of a major lawsuit brought in Salt Lake City by Caldera with the help of the Canopy Group. Microsoft lawyers tried repeatedly to have the case dismissed but without success. Immediately after the completion of the pre-trial deposition stage (where the parties list the evidence they intend to present), there was an out-of-court settlement on 7 January 2000 for an undisclosed sum. This was revealed in November 2009 to be $280 million.
In August 1996, the US-based Caldera, Inc. was approached by Roger A. Gross, one of the original DR-DOS engineers, with a proposal to restart DR-DOS development and to make Windows 95 run on DR-DOS which would help the court case. Following a meeting in September 1996 in Lindon, Utah, USA, between Gross, Ransom H. Love, Bryan Wayne Sparks and Raymond John Noorda, Gross was hired and tasked to set up a new subsidiary in the UK. On 10 September 1996, Caldera announced the coming release of OpenDOS (COD) and their intent to also release the source code to the system, and Caldera UK Ltd. was incorporated on 20 September 1996. Gross hired some of the original developers of the operating system from the Novell EDC as well as some new talents to continue work on the operating system in a converted barn at the periphery of Andover, Hampshire, UK, nearby the former Digital Research and Novell EDC. Besides other improvements and enhancements all over the system, a string of new key features were added subsequently over the course of the next two years, including a TCP/IP stack (derived from LAN WorkPlace for DOS / NetWare Mobile), a graphical 32-bit DOS Protected Mode HTML 3.2 web-browser DR-WebSpyder (originally based on source code from the Arachne web browser by Michal Polák) with LAN and modem dialup, a POSIX Pthreads extension to the multi-tasker by Andy T. Wightman, long filename (LONGNAME) support by Edward N. Hill, Jr., as well as LBA and FAT32 support (DRFAT32) by Matthias R. Paul. Gross also hired Andrew Schulman (who had been, with Geoff Chappell, instrumental in identifying the AARD code in 1992) to work as a consultant and, in Andover, assist Paul in his work on "WinGlue", a secret project to create a version of DR-DOS compatible with Windows 95, 98 and 98 SE and replace its MS-DOS 7.xx component. This was demonstrated at CeBIT in March 1998, and later, in a small team, developed into "WinBolt", both versions of DR-DOS, which remained unreleased , but played an important role in the court case.
Caldera UK officially released Caldera OpenDOS 7.01 on 3 February 1997, but this version was just Novell DOS 7 update 10 (as of December 1994) compiled only with the necessary adaptations to incorporate the new name in display messages as well as in environment variables and file names. It was missing a year's worth of patches which had been developed for the Novell DOS updates 11 (January 1995) to 15.2 (January 1996). This was due to parts of the Novell DOS sources having been lost at Novell meanwhile. Consequently, this version still reported an internal BDOS version of 7.2, identical to Novell DOS 7. The new suite also lacked the SETFIFO command, which had been added with one of the Novell DOS updates, as well as Fifth Generation's Search&Destroy virus scanner and FastBack Plus 2.0 utility, which previously came bundled with Novell DOS. Instead it came bundled with a newer version of PNUNPACK and brought a much advanced version of NetWars.
Parts of OpenDOS 7.01 were released as open source in form of the M.R.S. kit (for Machine Readable Sources) in May 1997, but with license terms mostly incompatible with existing open-source licenses. The source was then closed again as Gross felt this would undermine the commercial aspirations of the system.
After beta releases in September and November 1997, the next official release came in December 1997, with the name changed to Caldera DR-OpenDOS 7.02, soon followed by a further release in March 1998, when the DR-DOS name returned as Caldera DR-DOS 7.02, now for the first time written with a hyphen. Version 7.02 (now reporting itself as BDOS 7.3) incorporated improved BIOS and BDOS issues, developed by Paul, adding many new boot and configuration options, integrating many compatibility enhancements, bug-fixes and optimizations for size and speed, and re-implementing all fixes of the missing Novell DOS updates. The BIOS improved the coexistence of DR-DOS with Windows 9x and its support for third-party disk compression drivers such as Microsoft's DriveSpace. It introduced a diagnostics mode (activated by Scroll Lock), integrated debugger support (with DEBUG=ON and a debugger loaded before or from within CONFIG.SYS) and more flexible CONFIG.SYS tracing capabilities via the /// hotkeys and the TRACE and TIMEOUT commands, thereby also improving the integration of alternative command line shells such as 4DOS. Together with LOADER, SYS /DR:ext and the CHAIN directive, it brought enhanced multi-configuration support for DR/D/CONFIG.ext files and came with enhancements to the BASIC-like CONFIG.SYS language for more powerful boot menus, convenient user interaction and programmatical acting upon conditions (CPU386), return codes and error levels (ERROR, ONERROR). It also allowed to change the SCROLLOCK, CAPSLOCK, INSERT and VERIFY settings as well as the SWITCHAR, YESCHAR, NOCHAR and RESUMECHAR characters. Various behavioural details could be controlled with new parameters /Q (Quiet), /L (Lowercase), /Y (Yes) and /S (Switch) for SWITCHES. Further, it provided optional support for a LPT4: device and allowed to configure the built-in COMx: and LPTx: devices as well as to change the PRN: and AUX: defaults. The handling of environment variables in CONFIG.SYS was improved and new load-high facilities included such as the HIFILES/FILESHIGH and HIFCBS/FCBSHIGH options to relocate file handles and FCB structures into UMBs, which typically gave between 1 and 4 KB (and up to 15 KB) more free conventional memory compared to previous versions, or the HISHELL/SHELLHIGH SIZE directive to control the pre-allocation of HMA memory for COMMAND.COM, which helped to avoid memory fragmentation and thereby typically gave between 5 and 8 KB more continuous HMA memory for HMA-capable third-party drivers to work with in conjunction with third-party command line shells, which could not load into the HMA as COMMAND.COM with its /MH option. At a reduced memory footprint version 7.02 also brought an enhanced NLS 4.xx sub-system by Paul to allow multiple, distributed and possibly user-configured COUNTRY.SYS files to be used by the system at the same time in a hierarchical model. This also gave dynamic parser support for MS-DOS/PC DOS COUNTRY.SYS file formats in addition to DR-DOS' own COUNTRY.SYS formats, and it introduced support for the ISO 8601 international date format (including automatic detection) and the then-new Euro currency. Some DR-DOS files such as IBMBIO.COM, IBMDOS.COM and COUNTRY.SYS carried misleading file extensions for compatibility reasons; with DR-DOS 7.02 they were enhanced to incorporate a fat binary-style safety feature devised by Paul so that they would exit gracefully when called inappropriately. DR-DOS 7.02 was fully Year 2000 compliant and provided special support to work with buggy system BIOSes. It also came with an updated FDISK, which could partition and format FAT32 volumes (but not yet work with LBA). The sources of the Novell patches for the external tools and drivers had meanwhile been found in Germany and could thus be retro-fitted into the system as well, so that DR-DOS 7.02 finally not only caught up with Novell DOS 7, but was a true step forward. The release was followed by various updates in June, August and September 1998.
The updated internal BDOS version number introduced a new problem: some legacy third-party applications with special support for Novell DOS, which were no longer being updated, stopped working. SETVER already allowed Novell DOS to disguise itself as DOS versions by file name and globally and, specifying a magic sub-version of 255, it would even disable its own internal BDOS version check in order to cope with programs specifically probing for "DR-DOS". The modified kernel and SETVER driver by Paul would, in an hierarchical model, also support load paths in order to distinguish between multiple executables of the same file name, and it introduced an extended mode, in which SETVER could not only fake DOS versions, but also BDOS kernel versions. Sub-versions of 128 to 255 would be reported as DOS sub-versions 0 to 127 to applications, but with the BDOS version check disabled, while sub-versions 100 to 127 could be used to fake different BDOS versions, whereas the DOS revision number (typically set to 0 in a static, pre-boot patchable data structure) would be taken as the reported sub-version instead, so that SETVER /G /X 6.114 would allow versions of DR-DOS since 7.02 to still report themselves as a "DOS 6.0" and with a faked BDOS version 7.2 (114 decimal = 72 hexadecimal), thereby masquerading as Novell DOS 7 / OpenDOS 7.01.
While otherwise beneficial, the new HIFILES triggered a compatibility problem in the DOS-UP feature of the third-party memory manager QEMM 8, which was hard-wired to expect a chunk of five handle structures in conventional memory under DR-DOS (as with previous versions up to 7.01), whereas version 7.02 by design left eight handles in low memory when loading high files in order to maintain full compatibility with older versions of Windows 3.xx. Compatibility with Windows for Workgroups 3.11 had not been affected by this. A maintenance fix was devised to patch a single byte in IBMBIO.COM in order to switch the behaviour and optionally re-invoke the old chunking. This freed some 150 bytes of conventional memory and enabled full compatibility with DOS-UP, but at the same time broke compatibility with older versions of Windows 3.xx when using the HIFILES feature, and vice versa. The patch named IBMBIO85.SCR continued to work with newer versions of DR-DOS.
In August 1998 the US-based Caldera, Inc. created two new subsidiaries, Caldera Systems, Inc. for the Linux business, and Caldera Thin Clients, Inc. for the embedded and thin-client market.
Another version, DR-DOS 7.03 (still with BDOS 7.3 and reporting itself to applications as "PC DOS 6.0" for compatibility purposes), was pre-released at Christmas 1998 and then officially released on 6 January 1999 by Caldera UK. It came with significantly improved memory managers (in particular enhanced DPMI support in conjunction with the multitasker) and other enhancements, such as added DEVLOAD and DRMOUSE utilities, but a changed OEM label in the boot sector of volumes formatted under DR-DOS could also cause problems under other operating systems (which can be circumvented by NOVOLTRK). DR-DOS 7.03 would become the last version of DR-DOS also tailored for desktop use.
Caldera, Inc. wanted to relocate the DR-DOS business into the US and closed the highly successful UK operation in February 1999 after Gross resigned and set up iCentrix to develop the MarioNet split web browser. Development was then moved into the US (which never worked out due to a total lack of expertise in this field at Caldera US), and the DR-DOS line fell to its branch company, Caldera Thin Clients, which was renamed Lineo, Inc. on 20 July 1999. DR-WebSpyder was renamed Embrowser and was said to be ported to Linux. Lineo re-released DR-DOS 7.03 in June and September 1999, still branded as "Caldera DR-DOS" and without any changes, but otherwise focussed on Linux for embedded systems, based on a stripped-down version of OpenLinux named Embedix.
Among the latest and independently developed versions of DR-DOS were OEM DR-DOS 7.04 (as of 19 August 1999) and 7.05 (as of 30 November 1999), still branded as "Caldera DR-DOS". These were variants of the system consisting only of the kernel and command shell. With a specialized native implementation of FAT32 and large hard disk support they could be found bundled with Ontrack's Easy Recovery 5 in 2000, replacing the dynamically-loadable DRFAT32 redirector driver, which still came with Easy Recovery 4. They were also used for Seagate Technology's SeaTools and the CD imaging software Nero Burning ROM. While still reporting a BDOS 7.3 internally, these were the first versions to report themselves as "PC DOS 7.10" to applications in order to indicate integrated FAT32 support. Designed to be mostly backwards-compatible, the DR-DOS 7.04/7.05 IBMBIO.COM could be combined with the DR-DOS 7.03 IBMDOS.COM in order to give the desktop-approved DR-DOS 7.03 kernel LBA capabilities and work with drives larger than 8 GB. For specific OEM requirements, DR-DOS 7.06 (as of 14 December 1999) by Wightman combined the kernel files into a single binary executable, so that, similar to IO.SYS of Windows 98, it could be booted by MS-DOS 7.10 boot sectors (but no longer by DR-DOS boot sectors). DR-DOS 7.07 (with BDOS 7.4/7.7) by Paul introduced new bootstrap loaders and updated disk tools in order to combine support for CHS and LBA disk access, the FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32 file systems, and the differing bootstrapping conventions of DR-DOS, PC DOS, MS-DOS, Windows, REAL/32 and LOADER into a single NEWLDR MBR and boot sector, so that the code would continue to load any version of DR-DOS down to 3.31 (and since DR-DOS 7.04 also with FAT32 support), but could also be used to launch the PC DOS or MS-DOS system files, including those of Windows 9x and PC DOS 7.10. At the same time the kernel could not only be booted by the new sectors, but also by any previously DR-DOS formatted disks, as well as off disks with existing PC DOS or MS-DOS boot sectors and a variety of other boot-loaders, thereby easing the coexistence and setup of multi-boot scenarios in conjunction with other operating systems.
Later versions
In 2002, Lineo was bought out, and some of Lineo's former managers purchased the name and formed a new company, DRDOS, Inc. dba DeviceLogics L.L.C. They have continued to sell DR-DOS for use in embedded systems. DR-DOS 8.0 was released on 30 March 2004 featuring FAT32 and large disk support, the ability to boot from ROM or Flash, multitasking and a DPMI memory manager. This version was based on the kernel from version 7.03.
The company later released DR-DOS 8.1 (with better FAT32 support) in autumn 2005. This version was instead based on OpenDOS 7.01.xx. DR-DOS 8.1 was withdrawn for GPL violations (see Controversies).
Aside from selling copies of the operating system, the DRDOS, Inc. website lists a buyout option for DR-DOS; the asking price is
.
The OpenDOS 7.01 source code was a base for The DR-DOS/OpenDOS Enhancement Project, set up in July 2002 in an attempt to bring the functionality of DR-DOS up to parity with modern PC non-Windows operating systems. The project's added native support for large disks (LBA) and the FAT32 file system, and several other enhancements, including improved memory management and support for the new FAT32+ file system extension which allows files of up to 256 GB in size on normal FAT partitions. DR-DOS 7.01.08 was released on 21 July 2011.
Controversies
In October 2005, it was discovered that DR-DOS 8.1 included several utilities from FreeDOS as well as other sources, and that the kernel was an outdated version of the Enhanced DR-DOS kernel. DR DOS, Inc. failed to comply with the GNU General Public License (GPL) by not crediting the FreeDOS utilities to their authors and including the source code. After complaints from FreeDOS developers (including the suggestion to provide the source code, and hence comply with the GPL), DR DOS, Inc. instead withdrew version 8.1, and also the unaffected 8.0, from its website.
Commands
APPEND, ASSIGN, BATCH, DBG, DELQ, ERA, ERAQ, MORE and SUBST have been among the internal commands supported since DR DOS 3.31. DR DOS 5.0 removed BATCH and added HILOAD. GOSUB, IDLE, RETURN and SWITCH were added as internal commands with DR DOS 6.0. ASSIGN and SUBST were changed to become external commands with DR DOS 6.0. ECHOERR and PAUSEERR existed as internal commands in DR DOS 6.0 (and in Multiuser DOS), but were not normally enabled. MORE remained an internal command up to including PalmDOS, but was changed to an external command with Novell DOS 7. DBG was removed with Novell DOS 7, LOADHIGH, LH and TRUENAME were added as internal commands. APPEND was still an internal command in DR DOS 6.0, but was changed to an external command with Novell DOS 7.
Internal commands
The following list of internal commands is supported by DR DOS 6.0:
APPEND
BREAK
CD
CHCP
CHDIR
CLS
COPY
CTTY
DATE
DBG
DEL
DELQ
DIR
ERA
ERAQ
ERASE
EXIT
HILOAD
IDLE
MD
MKDIR
MORE
PATH
PROMPT
RD
REN
RENAME
RMDIR
SET
TIME
TYPE
VER
VERIFY
VOL
Batch processing subcommands
Batch processing subcommands of DR DOS 6.0 include:
?
CALL
ECHO
ECHOERR
FOR
GOSUB
GOTO
IF
OR
PAUSE
PAUSEERR
REM
RETURN
SHIFT
SWITCH
External commands
DR DOS 6.0 supports the following external commands:
ASSIGN
ATTRIB
BACKUP
CHKDSK
COMMAND
COMP
CURSOR
DELPURGE
DELWATCH
DISKCOMP
DISKCOPY
DISKMAP
DISKOPT
DOSBOOK
EDITOR
EXE2BIN
FASTOPEN
FC
FDISK
FILELINK
FIND
FORMAT
GRAFTABL
GRAPHICS
JOIN
KEYB
LABEL
LOCK
MEM
MEMMAX
MODE
MOVE
NLSFUNC
PASSWORD
PRINT
RECOVER
RENDIR
REPLACE
RESTORE
SCRIPT
SETUP
SHARE
SID
SORT
SSTOR
SUBST
SUPERPCK
SYS
TASKMAX
TOUCH
TREE
UNDELETE
UNFORMAT
UNINSTAL
XCOPY
XDEL
XDIR
See also
CP/M
MP/M
DOS Plus
Multiuser DOS
NetWare
MarioNet split web browser
Comparison of DOS operating systems
Timeline of DOS operating systems
AARD code
General Software Embedded BIOS
Notes
References
Further reading
(501 pages)
(88 pages)
(11 pages)
(A5 – 1 fold)
(698 pages)
(106 pages)
External links
Official website (archived snapshot as of 2018-07-05)
Enhanced DR-DOS/OpenDOS Project
DR-DOS 7 online manual
DR-DOS Wiki
Caldera (company) operating systems
Novell
Digital Research operating systems
1988 software
Disk operating systems
DOS variants
Embedded operating systems
Floppy disk-based operating systems
Microcomputer software
Microsoft criticisms and controversies
Operating system distributions bootable from read-only media
Proprietary operating systems
ROM-based operating systems
Assembly language software |
23721267 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanish%20%28computer%20science%29 | Vanish (computer science) | Vanish was a project to "give users control over the lifetime of personal data stored on the web." It was led by Roxana Geambasu at the University of Washington. The project proposed to allow a user to enter information to send across the internet, thereby relinquishing control of it. However, the user is able to include an "expiration date," after which the information is no longer usable by anyone who may have a copy of it, even the creator. The Vanish approach was found to be vulnerable to a Sybil attack, and thus insecure, by a team called Unvanish from the University of Texas, University of Michigan, and Princeton.
Theory
Vanish acts by automating the encryption of information entered by the user with an encryption key that is unknown to the user. Along with the information the user enters, the user also enters metadata concerning how long the information should remain available. The system then encrypts the information, but does not store either the encryption key or the original information. Instead, it breaks up the decryption key into smaller components that are disseminated across distributed hash tables, or DHTs via the Internet. The DHTs refresh information within their nodes on a set schedule unless configured to make the information persistent. The time delay entered by the user in the metadata controls how long the DHTs should allow the information to persist, but once that time period is over, the DHTs will reuse those nodes, making the information about the decryption stored irretrievable. As long as the decryption key may be reassembled from the DHTs, the information is retrievable. However, once the period entered by the user has lapsed, the information is no longer recoverable, as the user never possessed the decryption key.
Implementation
Vanish currently exists as a Firefox plug-in which allows a user to enter text into either a standard Gmail email or Facebook message, and choose to send the message via Vanish. The message is then encrypted and sent via the normal networking pathways through the cloud to the recipient. The recipient must have the same Firefox plug-in to decrypt the message. The plugin accesses BitTorrent DHTs, which have 8-hour lifespans. This means the user may select an expiration date for the message in increments of 8 hours. After the expiration of the user-defined time span, the information in the DHT is overwritten, thereby eliminating the key. While both the user and recipient may have copies of the original encrypted message, the key used to turn it back into plain text is now gone.
Although this particular instance of the data has become inaccessible, it's important to note that the information can always be saved by other means before expiration (copied, or even via screen shots) and published again.
See also
Cryptography
Internet privacy
Proactive Cyber Defence
References
Computer security
Secure communication
Crime prevention
University of Michigan |
1314942 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative%20distance | Administrative distance | Administrative distance (AD) or route preference is a number of arbitrary unit assigned to dynamic routes, static routes and directly-connected routes. The value is used in routers to rank routes from most preferred (low AD value) to least preferred (high AD value). When multiple paths to the same destination are available in its routing table, the router uses the route with the lowest administrative distance.
Router vendors typically design their routers to assign a default administrative distance to each kind of route. For example, Cisco routers, routes issued by OSPF have a lower default administrative distance than routes issued by the Routing Information Protocol. By default, OSPF has a default administrative distance of 110 and RIP has a default administrative distance of 120. Administrative distance values can, however, usually be adjusted manually by a network administrator.
Overview
The administrative distance (AD) value is assigned by the router on a per-protocol basis. Routers, by design, should not install multiple routes into the routing table as this has the potential to cause routing loops. While a router may run multiple routing protocols on the same device, it is necessary for the router to implement a process to ensure that multiple routes, pointing to the same destination do not simultaneously exist in the routing table. Each process running on a router advertises its administrative distance value to the local router. The router uses this value to determine which route should be used. Once a route has been selected, the routing information database is updated. If two routes have the same administrative distance, the router uses its vendor-specific algorithm to determine which route should be installed. Cisco routers simply ignore the values and fall back to the default values, which are never the same.
The router will usually compare administrative distances to determine which protocol has the lowest value. The router prefers protocols that have a lower assigned administrative distance. For example, OSPF has a default distance of 110, so it is preferred by the router process, over RIP, which has a default distance of 120. The administrator can arbitrarily reconfigure the administrative distances, which affects the ranking of the preferred routes by the routing process. On Cisco routers, static routes have an administrative distance of 1, making them preferred over routes issued by a dynamic routing protocol. The administrative distance is a value that is always only referenced by the local router itself. The administrative distance is not advertised on the network.
Default administrative distances
Cisco
The following table lists the default administrative distances for various routing protocols used on Cisco routers.
Juniper
The following table lists the default administrative distances for various routing protocols used on Juniper routers.
Configuration
Cisco IOS
The network administrator may modify the administrative distance to change the desired ranking of router protocols. This may be necessary in cases where routing redistribution has to be used, otherwise, routing loops could occur. The Cisco Internetwork Operating System enables network administrators to modify the distance by changing the distance value in sub-router configuration mode. In the example below, RIP's administrative distance is changed to 89 so that it used in preference to OSPF.
R1<nowiki>></nowiki> '''enable'''
R1# '''configure terminal'''
R1(config)# '''router rip'''
R1(config-router)# '''distance 89'''
Manually configuring the administrative distance is also required when configuring a floating static route. Floating static routes are used to provide an alternate path when a primary link fails. In order for static routes to be configured as a backup, the static route's administrative distance would need to be adjusted. Otherwise, it will take precedence over all routing protocols and routes issued from a routing protocol will not be inserted into the routing table. The example below shows how to configure the administrative distance to 254 to specify that it should only be used as a last resort.
R1(config)# ip route 10.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 backupLink 1 254
In the event that two routing protocols are configured with the same administrative distance, the Cisco router will ignore the configured values and instead use the default values.
Verifying the configuration of the administrative distance is done on Cisco equipment using the show ip route command in privileged exec mode on the console of the Cisco router. In the example shown below, the administrative distance is 1. The letter "S" indicates that the route is a static route that has, for all intents and purposes, been added manually to the router process by the administrator and installed into the routing table.
Router# '''enable'''
Router# '''configure terminal'''
Router(config)# '''ip route 1.1.1.0 255.255.255.0 fastEthernet 0/0'''
Router(config)# '''do show ip route'''
The do show ip route command will display the following, confirming that a static route has an administrative distance of 1.
S 1.1.1.0/0 [1/0] via 172.31.0.1
See also
Metrics (networking), used for choosing a route when administrative distance is the same
References
External links
Cisco - What is Administrative Distance? (Ref. Mr. Praveen Suvarna Mundkur)
Routing |
58382 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaST | YaST | YaST (Yet another Setup Tool) is a Linux operating system setup and configuration tool.
YaST is featured in the openSUSE Linux distribution, as well as in SUSE's derived commercial distributions. It is also part of the defunct United Linux.
YaST features tools that can configure many aspects of the system.
YaST was released first in April 1995. The first SuSE distribution that included YaST was released in May 1996. YaST was re-written in 1999 and included first in SuSE Linux 6.3 as only an installer. YaST2 was added to the desktop in SuSE Linux 6.4 and co-existed with YaST1 until YaST1's removal in SuSE Linux 8.0.
Details
YaST is free software that SUSE has made available under the GPL in 2004.
It is a tool for administering and maintaining a SUSE Linux installation. It allows administrators to install software, configure hardware, set up networks and servers, and more.
A feature of YaST is that it contains both Graphical user interface (GUI) and Text-based user interface (TUI) (with ncurses) front ends. This is especially useful for non-GUI installations such as servers, for system administration over slow Internet connections, and for when one is unable to boot into a graphical X server but still requires an advanced user interface to the package manager (for example, a novice user trying to downgrade an Xorg package to fix a graphical installation).
YaST offers package management functionality through the ZYpp project. The first ZYpp enabled package management YaST applications had performance problems and long start up times, but was improved in the 10.2 and 10.3 releases. Starting with openSUSE 11.0 alpha 3, ZYpp was integrated with the SAT solver project, making YaST and Zypper faster than other rpm based package managers.
YaST used to include SaX and SaX2, the Suse Advanced X configuration. SaX was re-written as SaX2 in SuSE Linux 6.4. SaX1 was removed in SuSE Linux 8.1 and SaX2 was removed from the YaST Control Center in openSUSE 11.2. SaX2 was removed completely in openSUSE 11.3. The GTK interface was removed in openSUSE Leap 42.1.
YaST often receives updates and improvements in Tumbleweed and between versions of Leap. openSUSE Leap 15.1, for example, saw improvements to the YaST interface for managing firewalls including the addition of an interface in the command line version of YaST. In this same release of openSUSE Leap, YaST now has an updated logo and improved partition management module.
YaST is implemented in the Ruby programming language.
AutoYaST
AutoYaST is a system for installing one or more openSUSE systems automatically without user intervention. AutoYaST installations are performed using a control file with installation and configuration data.
The profile of each current system is stored in /root/autoyast.xml.
WebYaST
WebYaST is a web interface for YaST that can be used to check the status of the current machine. It can check on the installation of packages, shutdown or reboot the system, change some system settings (such as the time), and change the status of system services or daemons.
YaST4Debian
The change of license of YaST from a previous rather restrictive license to the GPL in 2004 made it possible to port YaST to other Linux distributions.
As a consequence of this, the project YaST4Debian was launched, which worked on a port of YaST to Debian.
The project, which was in contact with the YaST team of Novell/SuSE, reached some important milestones, such as the port of the modules yast2-ncurses and yast2-qt. Currently, the project is dormant, searching for a new voluntary project maintainer.
See also
Webmin
GAdmintools
Calamares
APT (software)
RPM Package Manager
ZYpp
References
External links
YaST on GitHub
YaST at openSUSE
SUSE Linux Enterprise Administration Guide – contains many YaST usage examples
YaST, AutoYast and ZENworks Linux Management
YAST for Fedora?
Project: Yast - oss.oracle.com
YaST4Debian Project website
1996 software
Free package management systems
Free software programmed in Ruby
Linux package management-related software
Linux PMS graphical front-ends
Software that uses ncurses
SUSE Linux
Unix configuration utilities
fr:SUSE#Centre de contrôle YaST |
11127 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal%20Bureau%20of%20Investigation | Federal Bureau of Investigation | The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic intelligence and security service of the United States and its principal federal law enforcement agency. Operating under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Justice, the FBI is also a member of the U.S. Intelligence Community and reports to both the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence. A leading U.S. counter-terrorism, counterintelligence, and criminal investigative organization, the FBI has jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crimes.
Although many of the FBI's functions are unique, its activities in support of national security are comparable to those of the British MI5 and the Russian FSB. Unlike the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which has no law enforcement authority and is focused on intelligence collection abroad, the FBI is primarily a domestic agency, maintaining 56 field offices in major cities throughout the United States, and more than 400 resident agencies in smaller cities and areas across the nation. At an FBI field office, a senior-level FBI officer concurrently serves as the representative of the Director of National Intelligence.
Despite its domestic focus, the FBI also maintains a significant international footprint, operating 60 Legal Attache (LEGAT) offices and 15 sub-offices in U.S. embassies and consulates across the globe. These foreign offices exist primarily for the purpose of coordination with foreign security services and do not usually conduct unilateral operations in the host countries. The FBI can and does at times carry out secret activities overseas, just as the CIA has a limited domestic function; these activities generally require coordination across government agencies.
The FBI was established in 1908 as the Bureau of Investigation, the BOI or BI for short. Its name was changed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1935. The FBI headquarters is the J. Edgar Hoover Building, located in Washington, D.C.
Mission, priorities and budget
Mission
The mission of the FBI is:Protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States
Priorities
Currently, the FBI's top priorities are:
Protect the United States from terrorist attacks
Protect the United States against foreign intelligence operations, espionage, and cyber operations
Combat significant cyber criminal activity
Combat public corruption at all levels
Protect civil rights
Combat transnational criminal enterprises
Combat major white-collar crime
Combat significant violent crime
Budget
In the fiscal year 2019, the Bureau's total budget was approximately $9.6 billion.
In the Authorization and Budget Request to Congress for fiscal year 2021, the FBI asked for $9,800,724,000. Of that money, $9,748,829,000 would be used for Salaries and Expenses (S&E) and $51,895,000 for Construction. The S&E program saw an increase of $199,673,000.
History
Background
In 1896, the National Bureau of Criminal Identification was founded, which provided agencies across the country with information to identify known criminals. The 1901 assassination of President William McKinley created a perception that the United States was under threat from anarchists. The Departments of Justice and Labor had been keeping records on anarchists for years, but President Theodore Roosevelt wanted more power to monitor them.
The Justice Department had been tasked with the regulation of interstate commerce since 1887, though it lacked the staff to do so. It had made little effort to relieve its staff shortage until the Oregon land fraud scandal at the turn of the 20th century. President Roosevelt instructed Attorney General Charles Bonaparte to organize an autonomous investigative service that would report only to the Attorney General.
Bonaparte reached out to other agencies, including the U.S. Secret Service, for personnel, investigators in particular. On May 27, 1908, Congress forbade this use of Treasury employees by the Justice Department, citing fears that the new agency would serve as a secret police department. Again at Roosevelt's urging, Bonaparte moved to organize a formal Bureau of Investigation, which would then have its own staff of special agents.
Creation of BOI
The Bureau of Investigation (BOI) was created on July 26, 1908. Attorney General Bonaparte, using Department of Justice expense funds, hired thirty-four people, including some veterans of the Secret Service, to work for a new investigative agency. Its first "chief" (the title is now "director") was Stanley Finch. Bonaparte notified the Congress of these actions in December 1908.
The bureau's first official task was visiting and making surveys of the houses of prostitution in preparation for enforcing the "White Slave Traffic Act" or Mann Act, passed on June 25, 1910. In 1932, the bureau was renamed the United States Bureau of Investigation.
Creation of FBI
The following year, 1933, the BOI was linked to the Bureau of Prohibition and rechristened the Division of Investigation (DOI); it became an independent service within the Department of Justice in 1935. In the same year, its name was officially changed from the Division of Investigation to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
J. Edgar Hoover as FBI director
J. Edgar Hoover served as FBI director from 1924 to 1972, a combined 48 years with the BOI, DOI, and FBI. He was chiefly responsible for creating the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory, or the FBI Laboratory, which officially opened in 1932, as part of his work to professionalize investigations by the government. Hoover was substantially involved in most major cases and projects that the FBI handled during his tenure. But as detailed below, his proved to be a highly controversial tenure as Bureau director, especially in its later years. After Hoover's death, Congress passed legislation that limited the tenure of future FBI directors to ten years.
Early homicide investigations of the new agency included the Osage Indian murders. During the "War on Crime" of the 1930s, FBI agents apprehended or killed a number of notorious criminals who committed kidnappings, bank robberies, and murders throughout the nation, including John Dillinger, "Baby Face" Nelson, Kate "Ma" Barker, Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, and George "Machine Gun" Kelly.
Other activities of its early decades focused on the scope and influence of the white supremacist group Ku Klux Klan, a group with which the FBI was evidenced to be working in the Viola Liuzzo lynching case. Earlier, through the work of Edwin Atherton, the BOI claimed to have successfully apprehended an entire army of Mexican neo-revolutionaries under the leadership of General Enrique Estrada in the mid-1920s, east of San Diego, California.
Hoover began using wiretapping in the 1920s during Prohibition to arrest bootleggers. In the 1927 case Olmstead v. United States, in which a bootlegger was caught through telephone tapping, the United States Supreme Court ruled that FBI wiretaps did not violate the Fourth Amendment as unlawful search and seizure, as long as the FBI did not break into a person's home to complete the tapping. After Prohibition's repeal, Congress passed the Communications Act of 1934, which outlawed non-consensual phone tapping, but did allow bugging. In the 1939 case Nardone v. United States, the court ruled that due to the 1934 law, evidence the FBI obtained by phone tapping was inadmissible in court. After Katz v. United States (1967) overturned Olmstead, Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Control Act, allowing public authorities to tap telephones during investigations, as long as they obtained warrants beforehand.
National security
Beginning in the 1940s and continuing into the 1970s, the bureau investigated cases of espionage against the United States and its allies. Eight Nazi agents who had planned sabotage operations against American targets were arrested, and six were executed (Ex parte Quirin) under their sentences. Also during this time, a joint US/UK code-breaking effort called "The Venona Project"—with which the FBI was heavily involved—broke Soviet diplomatic and intelligence communications codes, allowing the US and British governments to read Soviet communications. This effort confirmed the existence of Americans working in the United States for Soviet intelligence. Hoover was administering this project, but he failed to notify the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of it until 1952. Another notable case was the arrest of Soviet spy Rudolf Abel in 1957. The discovery of Soviet spies operating in the US allowed Hoover to pursue his longstanding obsession with the threat he perceived from the American Left, ranging from Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) union organizers to American liberals.
Japanese American internment
In 1939, the Bureau began compiling a custodial detention list with the names of those who would be taken into custody in the event of war with Axis nations. The majority of the names on the list belonged to Issei community leaders, as the FBI investigation built on an existing Naval Intelligence index that had focused on Japanese Americans in Hawaii and the West Coast, but many German and Italian nationals also found their way onto the FBI Index list. Robert Shivers, head of the Honolulu office, obtained permission from Hoover to start detaining those on the list on December 7, 1941, while bombs were still falling over Pearl Harbor. Mass arrests and searches of homes (in most cases conducted without warrants) began a few hours after the attack, and over the next several weeks more than 5,500 Issei men were taken into FBI custody. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. FBI Director Hoover opposed the subsequent mass removal and confinement of Japanese Americans authorized under Executive Order 9066, but Roosevelt prevailed. The vast majority went along with the subsequent exclusion orders, but in a handful of cases where Japanese Americans refused to obey the new military regulations, FBI agents handled their arrests. The Bureau continued surveillance on Japanese Americans throughout the war, conducting background checks on applicants for resettlement outside camp, and entering the camps (usually without the permission of War Relocation Authority officials) and grooming informants to monitor dissidents and "troublemakers". After the war, the FBI was assigned to protect returning Japanese Americans from attacks by hostile white communities.
Sex deviates program
According to Douglas M. Charles, the FBI's "sex deviates" program began on April 10, 1950, when J. Edgar Hoover forwarded to the White House, to the U.S. Civil Service Commission, and to branches of the armed services a list of 393 alleged federal employees who had allegedly been arrested in Washington, D.C., since 1947, on charges of "sexual irregularities". On June 20, 1951, Hoover expanded the program by issuing a memo establishing a "uniform policy for the handling of the increasing number of reports and allegations concerning present and past employees of the United States Government who assertedly [sic] are sex deviates." The program was expanded to include non-government jobs. According to Athan Theoharis, "In 1951 he [Hoover] had unilaterally instituted a Sex Deviates program to purge alleged homosexuals from any position in the federal government, from the lowliest clerk to the more powerful position of White house aide." On May 27, 1953, Executive Order 10450 went into effect. The program was expanded further by this executive order by making all federal employment of homosexuals illegal. On July 8, 1953, the FBI forwarded to the U.S. Civil Service Commission information from the sex deviates program. In 1977–1978, 300,000 pages, collected between 1930 and the mid-1970s, in the sex deviates program were destroyed by FBI officials.
Civil rights movement
During the 1950s and 1960s, FBI officials became increasingly concerned about the influence of civil rights leaders, whom they believed either had communist ties or were unduly influenced by communists or "fellow travelers". In 1956, for example, Hoover sent an open letter denouncing Dr. T. R. M. Howard, a civil rights leader, surgeon, and wealthy entrepreneur in Mississippi who had criticized FBI inaction in solving recent murders of George W. Lee, Emmett Till, and other blacks in the South. The FBI carried out controversial domestic surveillance in an operation it called the COINTELPRO, from "COunter-INTELligence PROgram". It was to investigate and disrupt the activities of dissident political organizations within the United States, including both militant and non-violent organizations. Among its targets was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a leading civil rights organization whose clergy leadership included the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who is addressed in more detail below.
The FBI frequently investigated King. In the mid-1960s, King began to criticize the Bureau for giving insufficient attention to the use of terrorism by white supremacists. Hoover responded by publicly calling King the most "notorious liar" in the United States. In his 1991 memoir, Washington Post journalist Carl Rowan asserted that the FBI had sent at least one anonymous letter to King encouraging him to commit suicide. Historian Taylor Branch documents an anonymous November 1964 "suicide package" sent by the Bureau that combined a letter to the civil rights leader telling him "You are done. There is only one way out for you." with audio recordings of King's sexual indiscretions.
In March 1971, the residential office of an FBI agent in Media, Pennsylvania was burgled by a group calling itself the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI. Numerous files were taken and distributed to a range of newspapers, including The Harvard Crimson. The files detailed the FBI's extensive COINTELPRO program, which included investigations into lives of ordinary citizens—including a black student group at a Pennsylvania military college and the daughter of Congressman Henry S. Reuss of Wisconsin. The country was "jolted" by the revelations, which included assassinations of political activists, and the actions were denounced by members of the Congress, including House Majority Leader Hale Boggs. The phones of some members of the Congress, including Boggs, had allegedly been tapped.
Kennedy's assassination
When President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed, the jurisdiction fell to the local police departments until President Lyndon B. Johnson directed the FBI to take over the investigation. To ensure clarity about the responsibility for investigation of homicides of federal officials, the Congress passed a law that included investigations of such deaths of federal officials, especially by homicide, within FBI jurisdiction. This new law was passed in 1965.
Organized crime
In response to organized crime, on August 25, 1953, the FBI created the Top Hoodlum Program. The national office directed field offices to gather information on mobsters in their territories and to report it regularly to Washington for a centralized collection of intelligence on racketeers. After the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO Act, took effect, the FBI began investigating the former Prohibition-organized groups, which had become fronts for crime in major cities and small towns. All of the FBI work was done undercover and from within these organizations, using the provisions provided in the RICO Act. Gradually the agency dismantled many of the groups. Although Hoover initially denied the existence of a National Crime Syndicate in the United States, the Bureau later conducted operations against known organized crime syndicates and families, including those headed by Sam Giancana and John Gotti. The RICO Act is still used today for all organized crime and any individuals who may fall under the Act's provisions.
In 2003, a congressional committee called the FBI's organized crime informant program "one of the greatest failures in the history of federal law enforcement." The FBI allowed four innocent men to be convicted of the March 1965 gangland murder of Edward "Teddy" Deegan in order to protect Vincent Flemmi, an FBI informant. Three of the men were sentenced to death (which was later reduced to life in prison), and the fourth defendant was sentenced to life in prison. Two of the four men died in prison after serving almost 30 years, and two others were released after serving 32 and 36 years. In July 2007, U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner in Boston found that the Bureau had helped convict the four men using false witness accounts given by mobster Joseph Barboza. The U.S. Government was ordered to pay $100 million in damages to the four defendants.
Special FBI teams
In 1982, the FBI formed an elite unit to help with problems that might arise at the 1984 Summer Olympics to be held in Los Angeles, particularly terrorism and major-crime. This was a result of the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany, when terrorists murdered the Israeli athletes. Named the Hostage Rescue Team, or HRT, it acts as a dedicated FBI SWAT team dealing primarily with counter-terrorism scenarios. Unlike the special agents serving on local FBI SWAT teams, HRT does not conduct investigations. Instead, HRT focuses solely on additional tactical proficiency and capabilities. Also formed in 1984 was the Computer Analysis and Response Team, or CART.
From the end of the 1980s to the early 1990s, the FBI reassigned more than 300 agents from foreign counter-intelligence duties to violent crime, and made violent crime the sixth national priority. With cuts to other well-established departments, and because terrorism was no longer considered a threat after the end of the Cold War, the FBI assisted local and state police forces in tracking fugitives who had crossed state lines, which is a federal offense. The FBI Laboratory helped develop DNA testing, continuing its pioneering role in identification that began with its fingerprinting system in 1924.
Notable efforts in the 1990s
On May 1, 1992, FBI SWAT and HRT personnel in Los Angeles County, California aided local officials in securing peace within the area during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. HRT operators, for instance, spent 10 days conducting vehicle-mounted patrols throughout Los Angeles, before returning to Virginia.
Between 1993 and 1996, the FBI increased its counter-terrorism role following the first 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York City, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and the arrest of the Unabomber in 1996. Technological innovation and the skills of FBI Laboratory analysts helped ensure that the three cases were successfully prosecuted. However, Justice Department investigations into the FBI's roles in the Ruby Ridge and Waco incidents were found to have been obstructed by agents within the Bureau. During the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, the FBI was criticized for its investigation of the Centennial Olympic Park bombing. It has settled a dispute with Richard Jewell, who was a private security guard at the venue, along with some media organizations, in regard to the leaking of his name during the investigation; this had briefly led to his being wrongly suspected of the bombing.
After Congress passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA, 1994), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA, 1996), and the Economic Espionage Act (EEA, 1996), the FBI followed suit and underwent a technological upgrade in 1998, just as it did with its CART team in 1991. Computer Investigations and Infrastructure Threat Assessment Center (CITAC) and the National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) were created to deal with the increase in Internet-related problems, such as computer viruses, worms, and other malicious programs that threatened U.S. operations. With these developments, the FBI increased its electronic surveillance in public safety and national security investigations, adapting to the telecommunications advancements that changed the nature of such problems.
September 11 attacks
During the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center, FBI agent Leonard W. Hatton Jr. was killed during the rescue effort while helping the rescue personnel evacuate the occupants of the South Tower, and he stayed when it collapsed. Within months after the attacks, FBI Director Robert Mueller, who had been sworn in a week before the attacks, called for a re-engineering of FBI structure and operations. He made countering every federal crime a top priority, including the prevention of terrorism, countering foreign intelligence operations, addressing cybersecurity threats, other high-tech crimes, protecting civil rights, combating public corruption, organized crime, white-collar crime, and major acts of violent crime.
In February 2001, Robert Hanssen was caught selling information to the Russian government. It was later learned that Hanssen, who had reached a high position within the FBI, had been selling intelligence since as early as 1979. He pleaded guilty to espionage and received a life sentence in 2002, but the incident led many to question the security practices employed by the FBI. There was also a claim that Hanssen might have contributed information that led to the September 11, 2001, attacks.
The 9/11 Commission's final report on July 22, 2004, stated that the FBI and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were both partially to blame for not pursuing intelligence reports that could have prevented the September 11 attacks. In its most damning assessment, the report concluded that the country had "not been well served" by either agency and listed numerous recommendations for changes within the FBI. While the FBI did accede to most of the recommendations, including oversight by the new Director of National Intelligence, some former members of the 9/11 Commission publicly criticized the FBI in October 2005, claiming it was resisting any meaningful changes.
On July 8, 2007, The Washington Post published excerpts from UCLA Professor Amy Zegart's book Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11. The Post reported, from Zegart's book, that government documents showed that both the CIA and the FBI had missed 23 potential chances to disrupt the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The primary reasons for the failures included: agency cultures resistant to change and new ideas; inappropriate incentives for promotion; and a lack of cooperation between the FBI, CIA, and the rest of the United States Intelligence Community. The book blamed the FBI's decentralized structure, which prevented effective communication and cooperation among different FBI offices. The book suggested that the FBI had not evolved into an effective counter-terrorism or counter-intelligence agency, due in large part to deeply ingrained agency cultural resistance to change. For example, FBI personnel practices continued to treat all staff other than special agents as support staff, classifying intelligence analysts alongside the FBI's auto mechanics and janitors.
Faulty bullet analysis
For over 40 years, the FBI crime lab in Quantico had believed that lead alloys used in bullets had unique chemical signatures. It was analyzing the bullets with the goal of matching them chemically, not only to a single batch of ammunition coming out of a factory, but also to a single box of bullets. The National Academy of Sciences conducted an 18-month independent review of comparative bullet-lead analysis. In 2003, its National Research Council published a report whose conclusions called into question 30 years of FBI testimony. It found the analytic model used by the FBI for interpreting results was deeply flawed, and the conclusion, that bullet fragments could be matched to a box of ammunition, was so overstated that it was misleading under the rules of evidence. One year later, the FBI decided to stop conducting bullet lead analyses.
After a 60 Minutes/Washington Post investigation in November 2007, two years later, the Bureau agreed to identify, review, and release all pertinent cases, and notify prosecutors about cases in which faulty testimony was given.
Organization
Organizational structure
The FBI is organized into functional branches and the Office of the Director, which contains most administrative offices. An executive assistant director manages each branch. Each branch is then divided into offices and divisions, each headed by an assistant director. The various divisions are further divided into sub-branches, led by deputy assistant directors. Within these sub-branches, there are various sections headed by section chiefs. Section chiefs are ranked analogous to special agents in charge. Four of the branches report to the deputy director while two report to the associate director.
The main branches of the FBI are:
FBI Intelligence Branch
Executive Assistant Director: Stephen Laycock
FBI National Security Branch
Executive Assistant Director: John Brown
FBI Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch
Executive Assistant Director: Terry Wade
FBI Science and Technology Branch
Executive Assistant Director: Darrin E. Jones
FBI Information and Technology Branch
Executive Assistant Director: Michael Gavin (Acting)
FBI Human Resources Branch
Executive Assistant Director: Jeffrey S. Sallet
Each branch focuses on different tasks, and some focus on more than one. Here are some of the tasks that different branches are in charge of:
FBI Headquarters Washington D.C.
National Security Branch (NSB)
Counterintelligence Division (CD)
Counterterrorism Division (CTD)
Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate (WMDD)
High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group
Terrorist Screening Center
Intelligence Branch (IB)
Directorate of Intelligence (DI)
Office of Partner Engagement (OPE)
Office of Private Sector
FBI Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch (CCRSB)
Criminal Investigation Division (CID)
Cyber Division (CyD)
Critical Incident Response Group (CIRG)
International Operation Division (IOD)
Victim Services Division
Science and Technology Branch (CTB)
Operational Technology Division (OTD)
Laboratory Division (LD)
Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIA) Division
Other Headquarter Offices
Information and Technology Branch (ITB)
IT Enterprise Services Division (ITESD)
IT Applications and Data Division (ITADD)
IT Infrastructure Division (ITID)
IT Management Division
IT Engineering Division
IT Services Division
Human Resources Branch (HRB)
Training Division (TD)
Human Resources Division (HRD)
Security Division (SecD)
Administrative and financial management support
Facilities and Logistics Services Division (FLSD)
Finance Division (FD)
Records Management Division (RMD)
Resource Planning Office (RPO)
Inspection Division (InSD)
Specialized support
Office of Public Affairs (OPA)
Office of Congressional Affairs (OCA)
Office of the General Counsel (OGC)
Office of Equal Employment Opportunity Affairs (OEEOA)
Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR)
Office of the Ombudsman
Office of Integrity and Compliance (OIC)
Office of the Director
The Office of the Director serves as the central administrative organ of the FBI. The office provides staff support functions (such as finance and facilities management) to the five function branches and the various field divisions. The office is managed by the FBI associate director, who also oversees the operations of both the Information and Technology and Human Resources Branches.
Senior staff
Deputy director
Associate deputy director
Chief of staff
Office of the Director
Finance and Facilities Division
Information Management Division
Insider Threat Office
Inspection Division
Office of the Chief Information Officer
Office of Congressional Affairs
Office of Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Affairs
Office of the General Counsel
Office of Integrity and Compliance
Office of the Ombudsman
Office of Professional Responsibility
Office of Public Affairs
Resource Planning Office
Rank structure
The following is a listing of the rank structure found within the FBI (in ascending order):
Field agents
New agent trainee
Special agent
Senior special agent
Supervisory special agent
Assistant special agent-in-charge (ASAC)
Special agent-in-charge (SAC)
FBI management
Deputy assistant director
Assistant director
Associate executive assistant director
Executive assistant director
Associate deputy director
Deputy chief of staff
Chief of staff and special counsel to the director
Deputy director
Director
Legal authority
The FBI's mandate is established in Title 28 of the United States Code (U.S. Code), Section 533, which authorizes the Attorney General to "appoint officials to detect and prosecute crimes against the United States." Other federal statutes give the FBI the authority and responsibility to investigate specific crimes.
The FBI's chief tool against organized crime is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. The FBI is also charged with the responsibility of enforcing compliance of the United States Civil Rights Act of 1964 and investigating violations of the act in addition to prosecuting such violations with the United States Department of Justice (DOJ). The FBI also shares concurrent jurisdiction with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in the enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.
The USA PATRIOT Act increased the powers allotted to the FBI, especially in wiretapping and monitoring of Internet activity. One of the most controversial provisions of the act is the so-called sneak and peek provision, granting the FBI powers to search a house while the residents are away, and not requiring them to notify the residents for several weeks afterward. Under the PATRIOT Act's provisions, the FBI also resumed inquiring into the library records of those who are suspected of terrorism (something it had supposedly not done since the 1970s).
In the early 1980s, Senate hearings were held to examine FBI undercover operations in the wake of the Abscam controversy, which had allegations of entrapment of elected officials. As a result, in the following years a number of guidelines were issued to constrain FBI activities.
A March 2007 report by the inspector general of the Justice Department described the FBI's "widespread and serious misuse" of national security letters, a form of administrative subpoena used to demand records and data pertaining to individuals. The report said that between 2003 and 2005, the FBI had issued more than 140,000 national security letters, many involving people with no obvious connections to terrorism.
Information obtained through an FBI investigation is presented to the appropriate U.S. Attorney or Department of Justice official, who decides if prosecution or other action is warranted.
The FBI often works in conjunction with other federal agencies, including the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in seaport and airport security, and the National Transportation Safety Board in investigating airplane crashes and other critical incidents. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) has nearly the same amount of investigative manpower as the FBI and investigates the largest range of crimes. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, then-Attorney General Ashcroft assigned the FBI as the designated lead organization in terrorism investigations after the creation of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. HSI and the FBI are both integral members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Indian reservations
The federal government has the primary responsibility for investigating and prosecuting serious crime on Indian reservations.
The FBI does not specifically list crimes in Native American land as one of its priorities. Often serious crimes have been either poorly investigated or prosecution has been declined. Tribal courts can impose sentences of up to three years, under certain restrictions.
Infrastructure
The FBI is headquartered at the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., with 56 field offices in major cities across the United States. The FBI also maintains over 400 resident agencies across the United States, as well as over 50 legal attachés at United States embassies and consulates. Many specialized FBI functions are located at facilities in Quantico, Virginia, as well as a "data campus" in Clarksburg, West Virginia, where 96 million sets of fingerprints "from across the United States are stored, along with others collected by American authorities from prisoners in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan." The FBI is in process of moving its Records Management Division, which processes Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, to Winchester, Virginia.
According to The Washington Post, the FBI "is building a vast repository controlled by people who work in a top-secret vault on the fourth floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington. This one stores the profiles of tens of thousands of Americans and legal residents who are not accused of any crime. What they have done is appear to be acting suspiciously to a town sheriff, a traffic cop or even a neighbor."
The FBI Laboratory, established with the formation of the BOI, did not appear in the J. Edgar Hoover Building until its completion in 1974. The lab serves as the primary lab for most DNA, biological, and physical work. Public tours of FBI headquarters ran through the FBI laboratory workspace before the move to the J. Edgar Hoover Building. The services the lab conducts include Chemistry, Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), Computer Analysis and Response, DNA Analysis, Evidence Response, Explosives, Firearms and Tool marks, Forensic Audio, Forensic Video, Image Analysis, Forensic Science Research, Forensic Science Training, Hazardous Materials Response, Investigative and Prospective Graphics, Latent Prints, Materials Analysis, Questioned Documents, Racketeering Records, Special Photographic Analysis, Structural Design, and Trace Evidence. The services of the FBI Laboratory are used by many state, local, and international agencies free of charge. The lab also maintains a second lab at the FBI Academy.
The FBI Academy, located in Quantico, Virginia, is home to the communications and computer laboratory the FBI utilizes. It is also where new agents are sent for training to become FBI special agents. Going through the 21-week course is required for every special agent. First opened for use in 1972, the facility is located on of woodland. The Academy trains state and local law enforcement agencies, which are invited to the law enforcement training center. The FBI units that reside at Quantico are the Field and Police Training Unit, Firearms Training Unit, Forensic Science Research and Training Center, Technology Services Unit (TSU), Investigative Training Unit, Law Enforcement Communication Unit, Leadership and Management Science Units (LSMU), Physical Training Unit, New Agents' Training Unit (NATU), Practical Applications Unit (PAU), the Investigative Computer Training Unit and the "College of Analytical Studies".
In 2000, the FBI began the Trilogy project to upgrade its outdated information technology (IT) infrastructure. This project, originally scheduled to take three years and cost around $380 million, ended up over budget and behind schedule. Efforts to deploy modern computers and networking equipment were generally successful, but attempts to develop new investigation software, outsourced to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), were not. Virtual Case File, or VCF, as the software was known, was plagued by poorly defined goals, and repeated changes in management. In January 2005, more than two years after the software was originally planned for completion, the FBI officially abandoned the project. At least $100 million (and much more by some estimates) was spent on the project, which never became operational. The FBI has been forced to continue using its decade-old Automated Case Support system, which IT experts consider woefully inadequate. In March 2005, the FBI announced it was beginning a new, more ambitious software project, code-named Sentinel, which they expected to complete by 2009.
Carnivore was an electronic eavesdropping software system implemented by the FBI during the Clinton administration; it was designed to monitor email and electronic communications. After prolonged negative coverage in the press, the FBI changed the name of its system from "Carnivore" to "DCS1000". DCS is reported to stand for "Digital Collection System"; the system has the same functions as before. The Associated Press reported in mid-January 2005 that the FBI essentially abandoned the use of Carnivore in 2001, in favor of commercially available software, such as NarusInsight.
The Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Division is located in Clarksburg, West Virginia. Organized beginning in 1991, the office opened in 1995 as the youngest agency division. The complex is the length of three football fields. It provides a main repository for information in various data systems. Under the roof of the CJIS are the programs for the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR), Fingerprint Identification, Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), NCIC 2000, and the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). Many state and local agencies use these data systems as a source for their own investigations and contribute to the database using secure communications. FBI provides these tools of sophisticated identification and information services to local, state, federal, and international law enforcement agencies.
The FBI heads the National Virtual Translation Center, which provides "timely and accurate translations of foreign intelligence for all elements of the Intelligence Community."
In June 2021, the FBI held a groundbreaking for its planned FBI Innovation Center, set to be built in Huntsville, Alabama. The Innovation Center is to be part of a large, college-like campus costing a total of $1.3 billion in Redstone Arsenal and will act as a center for cyber threat intelligence, data analytics, and emerging threat training.
Personnel
, the FBI had a total of 33,852 employees. That includes 13,412 special agents and 20,420 support professionals, such as intelligence analysts, language specialists, scientists, information technology specialists, and other professionals.
The Officer Down Memorial Page provides the biographies of 69 FBI agents who have died in the line of duty from 1925 to July 2017.
Hiring process
To apply to become an FBI agent, one must be between the ages of 23 and 37, unless one is a preference-eligible veteran, in which case one may apply after age 37. The applicant must also hold U.S. citizenship, be of high moral character, have a clean record, and hold at least a four-year bachelor's degree. At least three years of professional work experience prior to application is also required. All FBI employees require a Top Secret (TS) security clearance, and in many instances, employees need a TS/SCI (Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information) clearance. To obtain a security clearance, all potential FBI personnel must pass a series of Single Scope Background Investigations (SSBI), which are conducted by the Office of Personnel Management. Special agent candidates also have to pass a Physical Fitness Test (PFT), which includes a 300-meter run, one-minute sit-ups, maximum push-ups, and a run. Personnel must pass a polygraph test with questions including possible drug use. Applicants who fail polygraphs may not gain employment with the FBI. Up until 1975, the FBI had a minimum height requirement of .
BOI and FBI directors
FBI directors are appointed (nominated) by the President of the United States and must be confirmed by the United States Senate to serve a term of office of ten years, subject to resignation or removal by the President at his/her discretion before their term ends. Additional terms are allowed following the same procedure
J. Edgar Hoover, appointed by President Calvin Coolidge in 1924, was by far the longest-serving director, serving until his death in 1972. In 1968, Congress passed legislation, as part of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, requiring Senate confirmation of appointments of future directors. As the incumbent, this legislation did not apply to Hoover. The last FBI director was Andrew McCabe. The current FBI director is Christopher A. Wray appointed by President Donald Trump.
The FBI director is responsible for the day-to-day operations at the FBI. Along with the deputy director, the director makes sure cases and operations are handled correctly. The director also is in charge of making sure the leadership in any one of the FBI field offices is staffed with qualified agents. Before the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act was passed in the wake of the September 11 attacks, the FBI director would directly brief the President of the United States on any issues that arise from within the FBI. Since then, the director now reports to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), who in turn reports to the President.
Firearms
Upon qualification, an FBI special agent is issued a full-size Glock 22 or compact Glock 23 semi-automatic pistol, both of which are chambered in the .40 S&W cartridge. In May 1997, the FBI officially adopted the Glock, in .40 S&W, for general agent use, and first issued it to New Agent Class 98-1 in October 1997. At present, the Glock 23 "FG&R" (finger groove and rail; either 3rd generation or "Gen4") is the issue sidearm. New agents are issued firearms, on which they must qualify, on successful completion of their training at the FBI Academy. The Glock 26 (subcompact 9mm Parabellum), Glock 23 and Glock 27 (.40 S&W compact and subcompact, respectively) are authorized as secondary weapons. Special agents are also authorized to purchase and qualify with the Glock 21 in .45 ACP.
Special agents of the FBI Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) and regional SWAT teams are issued the Springfield Armory Professional Model 1911 pistol in .45 ACP.
In June 2016, the FBI awarded Glock a contract for new handguns. Unlike the currently issued .40 S&W chambered Glock pistols, the new Glocks will be chambered for 9mm Parabellum. The contract is for the full-size Glock 17M and the compact Glock 19M. The "M" means the Glocks have been modified to meet government standards specified by a 2015 government request for proposal.
Publications
The FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin is published monthly by the FBI Law Enforcement Communication Unit, with articles of interest to state and local law enforcement personnel. First published in 1932 as Fugitives Wanted by Police, the FBI Law Bulletin covers topics including law enforcement technology and issues, such as crime mapping and use of force, as well as recent criminal justice research, and ViCAP alerts, on wanted suspects and key cases.
The FBI also publishes some reports for both law enforcement personnel as well as regular citizens covering topics including law enforcement, terrorism, cybercrime, white-collar crime, violent crime, and statistics. However, the vast majority of federal government publications covering these topics are published by the Office of Justice Programs agencies of the United States Department of Justice, and disseminated through the National Criminal Justice Reference Service.
Crime statistics
During the 1920s the FBI began issuing crime reports by gathering numbers from local police departments. Due to limitations of this system that were discovered during the 1960s and 1970s—victims often simply did not report crimes to the police in the first place—the Department of Justice developed an alternative method of tallying crime, the victimization survey.
Uniform Crime Reports
The Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) compile data from over 17,000 law enforcement agencies across the country. They provide detailed data regarding the volume of crimes to include arrest, clearance (or closing a case), and law enforcement officer information. The UCR focuses its data collection on violent crimes, hate crimes, and property crimes. Created in the 1920s, the UCR system has not proven to be as uniform as its name implies. The UCR data only reflect the most serious offense in the case of connected crimes and has a very restrictive definition of rape. Since about 93% of the data submitted to the FBI is in this format, the UCR stands out as the publication of choice as most states require law enforcement agencies to submit this data.
Preliminary Annual Uniform Crime Report for 2006 was released on June 4, 2006. The report shows violent crime offenses rose 1.3%, but the number of property crime offenses decreased 2.9% compared to 2005.
National Incident-Based Reporting System
The National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) crime statistics system aims to address limitations inherent in UCR data. The system is used by law enforcement agencies in the United States for collecting and reporting data on crimes. Local, state, and federal agencies generate NIBRS data from their records management systems. Data is collected on every incident and arrest in the Group A offense category. The Group A offenses are 46 specific crimes grouped in 22 offense categories. Specific facts about these offenses are gathered and reported in the NIBRS system. In addition to the Group A offenses, eleven Group B offenses are reported with only the arrest information. The NIBRS system is in greater detail than the summary-based UCR system. , 5,271 law enforcement agencies submitted NIBRS data. That amount represents 20% of the United States population and 16% of the crime statistics data collected by the FBI.
eGuardian
eGuardian is the name of an FBI system, launched in January 2009, to share tips about possible terror threats with local police agencies. The program aims to get law enforcement at all levels sharing data quickly about suspicious activity and people.
eGuardian enables near real-time sharing and tracking of terror information and suspicious activities with local, state, tribal, and federal agencies. The eGuardian system is a spin-off of a similar but classified tool called Guardian that has been used inside the FBI, and shared with vetted partners since 2005.
Controversies
Throughout its history, the FBI has been the subject of many controversies, both at home and abroad.
Latin America - For decades during the Cold War, the FBI placed agents to monitor the governments of Caribbean and Latin American nations.
Domestic surveillance - In 1985, it was found that the FBI had made use of surveillance devices on numerous American citizens between 1940 and 1960.
Files on Puerto Rican independence advocates - Congressman Luiz Gutierrez revealed that Pedro Albizu Campos and his Nationalist political party had been watched for a decade-long period in the 1930s.
Covert operations on political groups - Political groups deemed disruptive have been investigated and discredited by the FBI in the aim of "protecting national security, preventing violence, and maintaining the existing social and political order."
Files on U.S. citizens - The Bureau kept files on certain individuals for varying reasons and lengths of time, notably, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, John Denver.
Robert Hanssen - In what is described by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) as "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history". Hanssen managed to evade the FBI as he simultaneously sold thousands of classified American documents to Soviet intelligence operatives.
Stoneman Douglas High School shooting - A statement from the FBI confirmed that it had failed to act on a tip warning of the possibility of the shooting over a month prior to its occurrence, which may have prevented the tragedy outright.
Internal investigations of shootings - A professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska Omaha suggested that FBI internal reports found a questionably high number of weapon discharges by its agents to be justified.
The Whitey Bulger case - The FBI was, and continues to be, criticized for its handling of Boston criminal Whitey Bulger. As a result of Bulger acting as an informant, the agency turned a blind eye to his activities as an exchange.
Associated Press (AP) impersonation case - A Bureau agent, masquerading as an AP journalist, placed surveillance software in the personal computer of a minor. This resulted in a series of conflicts between the news agency and the FBI.
FBI surveillance since 2010 - In the years since 2010, it has been uncovered by various civil liberties groups (such as the American Civil Liberties Union [ACLU]) that the FBI earmarked disproportionate resources for the surveillance of left-leaning movements and political organizations. The FBI has also committed several breaches of the First Amendment in this time.
Viola Liuzzo - Gary Thomas Rowe, an FBI informant who at the time was also an active member of the Ku Klux Klan, assisted in the murder of Viola Liuzzo (a Caucasian civil rights activist) in 1965, and afterwards, defamatory rumours were spread by the Bureau about the victim.
Media portrayal
The FBI has been frequently depicted in popular media since the 1930s. The bureau has participated to varying degrees, which has ranged from direct involvement in the creative process of film or TV series development, to providing consultation on operations and closed cases. A few of the notable portrayals of the FBI on television are the series The X-Files, which started in 1993 and concluded its eleventh season in early 2018, and concerned investigations into paranormal phenomena by five fictional special agents, and the fictional Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) agency in the TV drama 24, which is patterned after the FBI Counterterrorism Division. The 1991 movie Point Break depicts an undercover FBI agent who infiltrated a gang of bank robbers. The 1997 movie Donnie Brasco is based on the true story of undercover FBI agent Joseph D. Pistone infiltrating the Mafia. The 2005-2020 television series Criminal Minds, that follows the team members of the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) in the pursuit of serial killers. The 2017 TV series Riverdale where one of the main characters is a FBI agent. The 2015 TV series Quantico, titled after the location of the Bureau's training facility, deals with probationary and special agents, not all of whom, within the show's format, may be fully reliable or even trustworthy. The 2018 series FBI, set in NYC that follows the personal and professional lives of the agents assigned to 26 Federal Plaza (NYC FBI field office). FBI first spin-off titled FBI: Most Wanted (2019), follows the FBI's Fugitive Task Force in chasing down the US's most wanted criminals, and the second spin-off, FBI: International (2021), follows the FBI's International Fly Team that goes where ever they're needed in the world to protect the US's interests.
Notable FBI personnel
Edwin Atherton
Ed Bethune
James Comey
Alaska P. Davidson
Sibel Edmonds
W. Mark Felt
James R. Fitzgerald
Robert Hanssen
J. Edgar Hoover
Lon Horiuchi
John McClurg
Richard Miller
Robert Mueller
Eric O'Neill
John P. O'Neill
Joseph D. Pistone
Melvin Purvis
Coleen Rowley
Ali Soufan
Sue Thomas
Clyde Tolson
Frederic Whitehurst
See also
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF)
Diplomatic Security Service (DSS)
Law enforcement in the United States
List of United States state and local law enforcement agencies
State bureau of investigation
United States Marshals Service (USMS)
Additional links
FBI Honorary Medals
FBI Victims Identification Project
History of espionage
Inspector
Society of Former Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
References
Further reading
Graves, Melissa. "FBI Historiography: From Leader to Organisation" in Christopher R. Moran, Christopher J. Murphy, eds. Intelligence Studies in Britain and the US: Historiography since 1945 (Edinburgh UP, 2013) pp. 129–145. online
Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri. The FBI: A History (Yale University Press, 2007).
Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri. "The Historiography of the FBI", in Loch Johnson, ed., A Handbook of Intelligence (Routledge, 2006). pp. 39–51.
Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri. "Forcing Out Unwanted FBI Directors: A Brief, Messy History", Vox, (May 23, 2017).
Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri. "A brief history of the FBI's meddling in US politics" Vox, (November 5, 2016).
Lindorff, Dave, "Brothers against the Bureau: Ted Hall, the Soviet Union's youngest atomic spy, his rocket scientist brother Ed, and the untold story of how J. Edgar Hoover's biggest Manhattan Project bust was shut down", The Nation, vol. 314, no. 1 (January 10–17, 2022), pp. 26–31.
FBI—The Year in Review, Part 1, Part 2 (2013)
Church Committee Report, Vol. 6, "Federal Bureau of Investigation". 1975 congressional inquiry into American intelligence operations.
External links
Federal Bureau of Investigation from the Federation of American Scientists
The Vault, FBI electronic reading room (launched April 2011)
FBI Collection at Internet Archive, files on over 1,100 subjects
William H. Thomas, Jr.: Bureau of Investigation, in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
FBI coverage at C-SPAN
Federal law enforcement agencies of the United States
Law enforcement in the United States
United States Department of Justice agencies
United States intelligence agencies
Government agencies established in 1908
1908 establishments in Washington, D.C.
1908 establishments in the United States
Anti-communist organizations in the United States |
22529162 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%28311999%29%202007%20NS2 | (311999) 2007 NS2 | is an asteroid and Mars trojan orbiting near the of Mars.
Discovery, orbit and physical properties
was discovered on 14 July 2007, by the Observatorio Astronómico de La Sagra.
Its orbit is characterized by low eccentricity (0.054), moderate inclination (18.6°) and a semi-major axis of 1.52 AU. Upon discovery, it was classified as Mars-crosser by the Minor Planet Center. Its orbit is well determined as it is currently (March 2013) based on 87 observations with a data-arc span of 4,800 days. has an absolute magnitude of 17.8, which gives a characteristic diameter of 870 m.
Mars trojan and orbital evolution
Jean Meeus suspected that was a Mars Trojan, and this was confirmed by Reiner Stoss's analysis of two sets of observations dating from 1998 on the MPC database. It was confirmed to be a Mars Trojan numerically in 2012. Recent calculations confirm that it is a stable Mars Trojan asteroid with a libration period of 1310 years and an amplitude of 14°. These values as well as its short-term orbital evolution are similar to those of 5261 Eureka. Out of all known Mars Trojans, it currently has the smallest relative (to Mars) semimajor axis, 0.000059 AU.
Origin
Long-term numerical integrations show that its orbit is very stable on Gyr time-scales (1 Gyr = 1 billion years). As in the case of Eureka, calculations in both directions of time (4.5 Gyr into the past and 4.5 Gyr into the future) indicate that may be a primordial object, perhaps a survivor of the planetesimal population that formed in the terrestrial planets region early in the history of the Solar System.
See also
5261 Eureka (1990 MB)
References
Further reading
External links
data at MPC.
311999
311999
311999
20070714 |
2230309 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List%20of%20computer%20algebra%20systems | List of computer algebra systems | The following tables provide a comparison of computer algebra systems (CAS). A CAS is a package comprising a set of algorithms for performing symbolic manipulations on algebraic objects, a language to implement them, and an environment in which to use the language. A CAS may include a user interface and graphics capability; and to be effective may require a large library of algorithms, efficient data structures and a fast kernel.
General
These computer algebra systems are sometimes combined with "front end" programs that provide a better user interface, such as the general-purpose GNU TeXmacs.
Functionality
Below is a summary of significantly developed symbolic functionality in each of the systems.
via SymPy
<li> via qepcad optional package
Those which do not "edit equations" may have a GUI, plotting, ASCII graphic formulae and math font printing. The ability to generate plaintext files is also a sought-after feature because it allows a work to be understood by people who do not have a computer algebra system installed.
Operating system support
The software can run under their respective operating systems natively without emulation. Some systems must be compiled first using an appropriate compiler for the source language and target platform. For some platforms, only older releases of the software may be available.
Graphing calculators
Some graphing calculators have CAS features.
See also
:Category:Computer algebra systems
Comparison of numerical-analysis software
Comparison of statistical packages
List of information graphics software
List of numerical-analysis software
List of numerical libraries
List of statistical packages
Mathematical software
Web-based simulation
References
External links
Computer algebra systems
Computer algebra systems |
531760 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University%20of%20Cambridge%20Computing%20Service | University of Cambridge Computing Service | The University of Cambridge Computing Service provided computing facilities across the University of Cambridge between 1970 and 2014. It was located primarily on the New Museums Site, Free School Lane, in the centre of Cambridge, England but, in September 2013 moved to the Roger Needham Building on the West Cambridge site.
The Computing Service shares a common ancestry with the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. Founded on 14 May 1937 to provide a computing service for general use, and to be a centre for the development of computational techniques in the University as the Mathematical Laboratory (under the leadership of John Lennard-Jones), it was not until 2001 that the provision of computing services across the University and Colleges was fully separated from computing research and teaching.
On 30 March 2014, the Computing Service merged with the Management Information Services Division (MISD) of the Unified Administrative Service (UAS) to create the University Information Services department.
Landmark projects and services
EDSAC computer, 1949 - a pioneering stored-program computer
EDSAC 2 computer, 1965 - first computer to have a microprogrammed CPU
Titan computer, 1966 - timeshared computer developed jointly with Ferranti subsequently marketed as the commercial Atlas 2
Phoenix computer, 1973 - an IBM 370/165 running an IBM OS modified for improved interactive timesharing
Exim mail transfer agent, 1995 - in continued open-source development and in very widespread use
Raven authentication service, 2004 - a web-based authentication framework particularly suited to the widespread adoption across many federated institutions as at Cambridge. Extended subsequently to integrate with inter-organisational Shibboleth authentication and provide lifetime credentials known as Raven-for-life.
Lapwing Federated Wireless platform, 2006 - provides local management via web console/APIs to 200 institutions while retaining a single network appearance with common authentication and reporting.
my.phone user/telephony federated administration system, 2010 - providing a usable federated administrative interface to the VoIP platform to 17,000 users and 200 institutions.
IBIS master reference data / identity management service, 2011 - provides a central common data repository with LDAP and Web service API's for 300,000 members of 250 institutions, with a sophisticated federated access control model.
Directors of the University of Cambridge Computing Service
Maurice Wilkes 1945–1980 (as head of the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory)
David Hartley 1970–1994 (first head of the dedicated University Computing Service)
Mike Sayers 1994–2004
Ian Lewis 2005–2014 (final Director before the merger with MISD to create the UIS)
See also
University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory
Oxford University Computing Services
External links
University of Cambridge Computing Service
University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory
Organizations established in 1937
Computing Service
Information technology organisations based in the United Kingdom |
1742452 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult%20of%20the%20Dead%20Cow | Cult of the Dead Cow | 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. The group maintains a weblog on its site, also titled "Cult of the Dead Cow". New media are released first through the blog, which also features thoughts and opinions of the group's members.
Timeline
The group was formed in June 1984 at the Farm Pac slaughterhouse by Grandmaster Ratte' (aka Swamp Ratte'), Franken Gibe, Sid Vicious, and three BBS SysOps.
In the 1980s the Cult of the Dead Cow organized and maintained a loose collective of affiliated BBSs across the US and Canada. It was during this time that the cDc is credited with coining the term "31337" as an alternative spelling of "Eleet" or "Elite", an expression denoting skill or greatness in a person, place, or thing.
In December 1990, cDc member Drunkfux – the pseudonym of Jesse Dryden, the son of Jefferson Airplane drummer Spencer Dryden and grand nephew of Charlie Chaplin – gave birth to the modern hacker con. HoHoCon, usually held in Houston, Texas, was the first hacker conference which invited the participation of both journalists and law enforcement. In all, dFx hosted five annual HoHoCons.
In 1991, cDc was named "Sassiest Underground Computer Group" by Sassy magazine. Also in 1991, the group began distributing music in the form of cassette tape albums sold through its post office box. Many of these albums are now available online in their entirety.
October 1994 saw the creation of the cDc's Usenet newsgroup, alt.fan.cult-dead-cow. It was thus the first hacking group to have its own Usenet newsgroup. In November of that year, the group claimed responsibility for giving Ronald Reagan Alzheimer's disease, claiming to have done so in 1986 with a blowgun.
The cDc declared war on the Church of Scientology in 1995 during the alt.religion.scientology controversy, stating
In 1997, the cDc began distributing original MP3-format music on its website.
In August 1998, they presented their popular Back Orifice tool at DEF CON 6.
In February 2000, the cDc was the subject of an 11-minute documentary short titled "Disinformation". Also in February 2000, cDc member Mudge briefed President Bill Clinton on Internet security.
cDc communications
cDc communications is the parent organisation of Cult of the Dead Cow, one of three groups that fall under cDc communications. The other two are the Ninja Strike Force and Hacktivismo.
Ninja Strike Force
In 1996, the cDc announced the birth of its Ninja Strike Force, a group of "ninja" dedicated to achieving the goals of the cDc, an intervention task force both online and offline. The cDc opened the NSF Dojo in 2004. An "NSF Dojo" Member also operates a streaming radio station, which features recordings of hacker con presentations and other educational programming in addition to a wide range of musical styles and artists.
Membership in the NSF is granted by the cDc to those individuals who stand out in their support of the cDc and its ideals. Members are recognized for their abilities, capabilities, and being the best of the best in their skills.
In 2006 the Ninja Strike Force launched its own microsite.
Hacktivismo
In late 1999, the cDc created Hacktivismo, an independent group under the cDc communications umbrella dedicated to the creation of anti-censorship technology in furtherance of human rights on the Internet. The group's beliefs are described fully in The Hacktivismo Declaration, which seeks to apply the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to the Internet. Among Hacktivismo's beliefs include access to information as a basic human right. The organization partially shares Critical Art Ensemble's (CAE) belief in the value of secrecy, but challenges both with CAE and many hacktivists on the subject of civil disobedience. The cDc model is, instead, one of disruptive compliance. Disruptive, in this case, refers to disruptive technology; compliance refers back to the Internet and its original intent of constructive free-flow and openness. Hacktivismo has also authored its own software license agreement, the Hacktivismo Enhanced-Source Software License Agreement, which is source available (but not open source). Their work focuses on the development of software that empowers conduct forbidden by repression, rather than enabling (private or public) attacks on repressors. In general cDc hopes that open code can become the lingua franca of a hacktivism that seeks to wage peace, not war. While the term isn't used, the software described in cDc's "Waging of Peace on the Internet" would create a set of connections between dissidents that sound in technoliberationist terms, rhizomatic.
Crossover associations with other groups
In addition to the obvious associations between Cult of the Dead Cow, Hacktivismo, and the Ninja Strike Force, the cDc also has crossover associations with several other organizations. These include the L0pht; founding members White Knight and Count Zero and final members Dildog and Mudge are all members of cDc. Additionally, The Nightstalker was a member of Youth International Party Line/Technology Assistance Program. Lord Digital, one of the founders of Mindvox, is a former member of LOD/H and a current member of the Sacrament of Transition. Red Knight was a member of the Masters of Deception. Also, RaD Man, a member of the Ninja Strike Force, is one of the founders of ACiD Productions. Another NSF member, Mark Hinge, is a founding member of the British hacker group The Syndicate Of London. Flack, another Ninja Strike Force member, was a co-founder of the horror "lit group" Soulz at Zero. Mudge later went on to program manage the CINDER program at DARPA, which aimed to detect 'insider threats' like the WikiLeaks sources.
Electronic publication
During the 1980s, the cDc was well known throughout the BBS scene for their underground ezine, also called Cult of the Dead Cow,. The group claims to have invented the ezine.
The Cult of the Dead Cow has been credited with coining the term "elite" as used in the hacker scene/computer underground in cDc textfiles of the 1980s.
The ezine has led to some criticism of the group over the years; in a 1994 episode of Geraldo entitled "Computer Vice," Geraldo Rivera referred to the group as "a bunch of sickos" for having published an article called "Sex with Satan," originally published in 1988.
Hacktivism
In 1996, cDc member Omega used the term "hacktivism" in an email to other group members. The group has been active in hacktivist causes since that time.
Hong Kong Blondes
In the late 1990s, the cDc claimed to have worked with a group of Chinese dissidents called "The Hong Kong Blondes." The group’s ostensible goal was to disrupt computer networks within the People's Republic of China in order to allow citizens to access censored content online. The Hong Kong Blondes were, ostensibly, one of the first hacktivist groups, though the group's existence and actions have proven to be an invented fiction. The cDc first spoke about the group publicly in a presentation at the 1997 Beyond HOPE Conference held at The Puck Building in New York City. Members claimed to have advised the group on strong encryption techniques. The cDc formally severed ties with the Hong Kong Blondes in December 1998. In 2015, former cDc member Oxblood Ruffin claimed without evidence that the hacking activities attributed to the Hong Kong Blondes were an invention intended to create a diversion and cover for the extraction of several Chinese pro-democracy activists. Asked about the group during a White House meeting in February 2000 organized by then National Security Advisor Richard A. Clarke with President Bill Clinton, Mudge admitted "We made them up."
Cyberwar
On January 7, 1999, the cDc joined with an international coalition of hackers to denounce a call to cyberwar against the governments of China and Iraq.
Milošević trial
When questioning Patrick Ball during his International War Crimes Tribunal in 2002, Slobodan Milošević asked Ball about his relationship with the cDc. Ball had given a talk and been a member of a cDc-sponsored panel on hacktivism at DEF CON 9 in 2001.
Goolag campaign
In early 2006, the cDc launched the "Goolag" (a play on gulag, Soviet forced labour camps) campaign in response to Google's decision to comply with China's Internet censorship policy and censor search results in the mainland-Chinese version of its search engine. The campaign consists primarily of the use of a parody of Google's logo which reads "Goolag: Exporting censorship, one search at a time." The group encouraged readers to make t-shirts and other merchandise and donate any proceeds from their sale to Human Rights in China.
Students for a Free Tibet held an anti-Google rally in Dharamsala, India on February 14, 2006, employing the logo in a variety of ways. The cDc then issued a press release about the campaign, wherein it described Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, and Cisco as the "Gang of Four" due to their respective policies of compliance with the Beijing government's Internet policies. The United States Congress was also called out on this issue in the release. This press release, originally entitled "Congress jerks off, gang of four reach for raincoats," was picked up by many news sources, as an abbreviated version of it was distributed by PR Web (with the altered title of "Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc) Launches Campaign Against Internet Censorship in China").
Tools
The cDc has released several tools, for both hackers/system administrators and for the general public. Many of these are related to computer security and are sometimes dubbed "hacker tools".
The Automated Prayer Project
The Automated Prayer Project, written by Javaman, is "a VT420 connected to a Sun Ultra5 via a serial cable which displays the output of a continuously running program. The signaling rate is limited to 9600 baud. The program itself cycles through the Rosary, displaying a new individual prayer once every thirty seconds. Each individual prayer is then sent out via UDP to a random machine on the Internet on a random port."
Back Orifice
Back Orifice (often shortened to BO) is a computer program designed for remote system administration. It enables a user to control a computer running Microsoft Windows operating system from a remote location. The name is a pun on Microsoft BackOffice Server software. The program debuted at DEF CON 6 on August 1, 1998. It was the brainchild of Sir Dystic. According to the group, its purpose was to demonstrate the lack of security in Microsoft's operating system Windows 98.
Back Orifice 2000
Back Orifice 2000 (often shortened to BO2k) is a computer program that is similar in function to Back Orifice. Back Orifice 2000 debuted on July 10, 1999 at DEF CON 7. The original code was written by Dildog. Whereas the original Back Orifice was limited to the Windows 95 and Windows 98 operating systems, BO2k also supports Windows NT, Windows XP and Windows 2000. Some BO2k client functionality has also been implemented for *nix-systems. In addition, BO2k was released under the GPL. As of 2012, BO2k is being actively developed.
Camera/Shy
Camera/Shy was the first Hacktivismo project released. It debuted in 2002 at the H.O.P.E. 2k2 convention in New York City. It is a steganographic tool that scans for and delivers decrypted content directly from the world wide web.
NBName
NBName is a computer program that can be used to carry out denial-of-service attacks that can disable NetBIOS services on Windows machines. It was written by Sir Dystic and released July 29, 2000 at the DEF CON 8 convention in Las Vegas.
ScatterChat
ScatterChat is an encrypted instant messaging client based on Gaim. It was written by J. Salvatore Testa II and released at the H.O.P.E. Number Six conference in New York City on July 22, 2006. It provides encryption as well as integrated onion routing with Tor, and secure file transfers. Various flaws in the software have been elaborated by researchers.
The Six/Four System
The Six/Four System is a censorship-resistant network proxy written by Mixter, a member of both cDc and Hacktivismo. It works by using "trusted peers" to relay network connections over SSL encrypted links. Hacktivismo and the cDc further gained notoriety in 2003 when the Six/Four System became the first product of a hacker group to receive approval from the United States Department of Commerce for export of strong encryption.
SMBRelay and SMBRelay2
SMBRelay and SMBRelay2 are computer programs that can be used to carry out SMB man-in-the-middle attacks on Windows machines. They were written by Sir Dystic and released March 21, 2001 at the @lantacon convention in Atlanta, Georgia.
Torpark
XeroBank Browser (formerly known as Torpark) is a variant of the Portable Firefox web browser with Tor built into it. Torpark is intended for use on portable media such as a USB flash drive but it can also be used on any hard disk drive. cDc/Hacktivismo co-released v.1.5.0.7 along with Steve Topletz on September 19, 2006.
Whisker
Whisker is a project authored by Rain Forest Puppy that is no longer in development. It checked for thousands of known security vulnerabilities in web servers. Whisker Version 1.4 was co-released by the cDc at DEF CON 8 in 2000.
See also
2600: The Hacker Quarterly
Chaos Computer Club
DEADBEEF
H.O.P.E.
Legion of Doom
Masters of Deception
Operation Cybersnare
Phrack
Notes
References
External links
Wikipedia articles with ASCII art
Organizations established in 1984
Hacker groups |
15337974 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John%20Sall | John Sall | John P. Sall (born 1948) is an American billionaire businessman and computer software developer, who co-founded SAS Institute and created the JMP statistical software.
Sall grew up in Rockford, Illinois and earned degrees in history, economics and statistics. In 1976 he joined others from North Carolina State University in co-founding SAS Institute, an analytics software company. In the 1980s, Sall and other developers created the JMP statistical software.
Early life
John Sall was born in Rockford, Illinois, in 1948. He received a bachelor's degree in history from Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin. Sall felt he graduated into a weak job market, so he went to graduate school at Northern Illinois University, where he earned a master's degree in economics. It was at graduate school that Sall became interested in statistics and computer science. He went on to study graduate–level statistics at North Carolina State University, where he received an honorary doctorate in 2003.
Career
James Goodnight was John Sall's mentor at North Carolina State University. In 1976, the two joined others from the University, Anthony James Barr and Jane Helwig, in founding SAS Institute, an analytics software company founded to analyze agricultural data. Sall designed, developed, and documented many of the earliest procedures of the SAS language.
Sall started developing JMP in the 1980s, when the graphical user interface was introduced on the Macintosh. Sall and a small team of developers spent a year and a half working on JMP before version one was released in October 1989. Sall continued to do coding and product development for JMP software for more than 20 years, supporting Windows 3.1, writing the product in different implementation languages, re-writing the product's "nervous system" and improving the JMP scripting language. Today Sall still acts as JMP's chief architect. He also co-authored the book JMP Start Statistics with Ann Lehman and Lee Creighton.
Personal
Sall lives in Cary, North Carolina. He is married and has four children. Sall and his wife are involved in conservation, international health and development, and environmental issues through the Sall Family Foundation. Sall was on the board of The Nature Conservancy from 2002 to 2011, and is a member of the board for the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Sall and his wife also work with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), CARE and other non-profits. They contributed to the founding of Cary Academy, an independent college preparatory school for students grades six through 12. Sall was elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1998 and is a member of the North Carolina State University board of trustees. In 1994, he served as chairman of the Interface Foundation of North America.
Sall owns about one-third of SAS Institute, while Goodnight owns the remainder. According to Forbes, Sall's net worth was approximately $4.2 billion as of 2016, making him the 392nd richest person in the United States at the time. As of 2009, most of Sall's net worth was illiquid, and based on the estimated worth of his partial ownership in SAS Institute. In 2018, Sall was still working, doing programming, and leading a team of developers.
References
Living people
1948 births
American billionaires
Beloit College alumni
Businesspeople in software
Businesspeople from North Carolina
Giving Pledgers
21st-century philanthropists
North Carolina State University alumni
Northern Illinois University alumni
People from Cary, North Carolina
People from Rockford, Illinois
Fellows of the American Statistical Association
Mathematicians from Illinois |
42766065 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote%20Graphics%20Software | Remote Graphics Software | HP ZCentral Remote Boost, formerly known as HP Remote Graphics Software or HP RGS is a client-server remote desktop software developed by HP Inc. and initially launched in 2003. HP RGS enables remote access to high-performance workstations (or virtual workstations) from many different devices including other Workstations, PCs, Windows tablets, MacBooks and thin-clients. The software is targeted at remote access to graphic intensive applications, Video editing and complex 3D models. Collaboration, or screen sharing, between multiple users, remote USB and sound, as well as Windows and Linux are also supported. HP markets RGS for "Real-Time Collaboration", "Workstation-Class Mobility" and "Remote Workers"
In 2020 HP updated and re-branded RGS as part of the HP ZCentral Solution. ZCentral Remote Boost was awarded an Engineering Emmy Award in 2020 for enabling TV productions around the world to make it to air despite teams being unable to access their usual studios.
With HP RGS all the processing, including hardware-accelerated graphics with the latest OpenGL or DirectX rendering, is done on the workstation and only compressed bitmap images (the screen) are sent to the client device. HP RGS is distinguished by its proprietary compression algorithms which allows for real-time transmission of complex 3D images and video, which traditional remote desktop protocols struggle with. This opens up the use of remote desktops and thin clients to graphics-intensive industries such as CAD, oil and gas exploration, animation, architecture engineering and construction which previously required local workstations.
Performance improvements in RGS 7.1 opened up even more demanding use cases including remoting 4K displays, delivering 60 frames per second, or remote desktop sessions of 3D CAD applications with peak bandwidth usage under 3 Mbit/s. In 2014 HP released RGS 7.0 which brought remote workstation use cases to tablet devices. The remote desktop tool has shown resilience against latency and packet loss when compared to Citrix HDX 3D or Teradici's PCoiP.
There are two components to the software, the sender (for the workstation or server) and the receiver (for the client device). The software supports OpenGL and Microsoft DirectX. The software is sold stand alone for servers, virtual machines and non HP Workstations. HP started including RGS with all of its desktop Z brand workstations starting with version 5.4.7 in 2011. RGS can be downloaded from HP and run on HP Z Workstations and ZBook mobile workstations for free. Other hardware requires a license for the HP RGS sender. The receiver is a free download for Windows, Linux and macOS clients.
An early version of the HP RGS video compression codec, is derived from a patented system developed by HP Labs and used in the NASA Mars Rover program.
Industry Use Cases
HP Remote Graphics software is used in many industries including:
Oil and Gas
HP RGS is used for its performance with high visual fidelity and support for Linux-based applications. The massive amounts of data going into the visualizations make a server/client model ideal.
Financial Traders
HP RGS stability and support for multiple high resolution displays and fast update rate have made it ideal for this market since the release of the HP Blade Workstation solution in 2006.
Animation, TV, Film and Special Effects
HP RGS support for remote video editing, Linux-based applications, real time collaboration and visual fidelity have made it ideal for TV, film and animation studios.
Architecture Engineering and Construction
HP RGS is used for collaboration to enable subject matter experts to work on various projects around the globe. Centralizing large data sets and remoting the pixels allows users to spend more time working and less time loading the project for the day.
Product Design
HP RGS is used to collaborate on design projects and enable remote workers.
Education
Engineering and Animation programs get the same benefits as their professional counterparts with the added benefit of allowing students to access the expensive applications from home 24/7.
Versions
The HP RGS release notes are posted at www.hp.com/go/rgs
See also
Comparison of remote desktop software
References
http://www.hp.com/go/rgs
http://www8.hp.com/au/en/hp-news/press-release.html?id=1606586#.U-kp0vldV8E
External links
Remote Graphics Software homepage
HP software
NASA spin-off technologies
Remote desktop protocols
Remote desktop
Thin clients
Virtualization software |
38299 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activision | Activision | Activision Publishing, Inc. is an American video game publisher based in Santa Monica, California. It serves as the publishing business for its parent company, Activision Blizzard, and consists of several subsidiary studios. Activision is one of the largest third-party video game publishers in the world and was the top United States publisher in 2016.
The company was founded as Activision, Inc. on October 1, 1979 in Sunnyvale, California, by former Atari game developers upset at their treatment by Atari in order to develop their own games for the popular Atari 2600 home video game console. Activision was the first independent, third-party, console video game developer. The 1983 video game crash, in part created by too many new companies trying to follow in Activision's footsteps without the expertise of Activision's founders, hurt Activision's position in console games and forced the company to diversify into games for home computers, including the acquisition of Infocom. After a management shift, with CEO Jim Levy replaced by Bruce Davis, the company renamed itself to Mediagenic and branched out into business software applications. Mediagenic quickly fell into debt, and the company was bought for around by Bobby Kotick and a small group of investors around 1991.
Kotick drastically revamped and restructured the company to get it out of debt: dismissing most of its staff, moving the company to Los Angeles, and reverting to the Activision name. Building on existing assets, the Kotick-led Activision pursued more publishing opportunities and, after recovering from its former financial troubles, started acquiring numerous studios and various types of intellectual property over the 1990s and 2000s, among these being the Call of Duty and Guitar Hero series. A holding company was formed as Activision's parent company to manage both its internal and acquired studios. In 2008, this holding company merged with Vivendi Games (the parent company of Blizzard Entertainment) and formed Activision Blizzard, with Kotick as its CEO. Within this structure, Activision manages numerous third-party studios and publishes all games besides those created by Blizzard.
History
Founding (1979)
In 1976, Warner Communications bought Atari, Inc. from Nolan Bushnell to help accelerate the Atari Video Computer System (Atari VCS or later the Atari 2600) to market by 1977. That same year, Atari began hiring programmers to create games for the system. Prior to Warner's acquisition, the company did not award bonus pay to programmers who worked on profitable games, nor credit the programmers publicly, to prevent them from being recruited by rival game companies. Warner Communication's management style was also different from Bushnell's. According to developer John Dunn, Warner management treated developers as engineers rather than creative staff, creating conflicts with staff. Atari's CEO Ray Kassar, named to that position following Warner's acquisition in 1978, was committed to keeping production costs minimal for Warner, according to David Crane, one of Atari's programmers.
In early 1979, Atari's marketing department circulated a memo listing the best-selling cartridges from the previous year to help guide game ideas. Crane noted that the games he was fully responsible for had brought in over for the company but he was still only receiving a salary. Out of a development staff of thirty-five, four programmers (Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead), had produced games that had accounted for 60% of Atari's sales.
Crane, Kaplan, Miller, and Whitehead became vocal about the lack of recognition within the company and became known as the "Gang of Four". The group met with Kassar in May 1979 to demand that the company treat developers as record labels treated musicians, with royalties and their names on game boxes. Kaplan, who called the others "the best designers for the [2600] in the world", recalled that Kassar called the four men "towel designers" and claimed that "anybody can do a cartridge".
The four made the decision to soon leave Atari and start their own business, but were not sure how to go about it. In 1979, the concept of third-party developers did not exist, as software for video game consoles were published exclusively by makers of the systems for which the games were designed; thus the common thinking was that to make console games, one needed to make a console first. The four decided to create their own independent game development company. They were directed by their attorney to Jim Levy, who was at the time raising venture capital to get into the software business for early home computers. Levy listened to their plans, agreed with its direction, and helped the four to secure about in capital from Sutter Hill Ventures. They also checked with legal counsel on their plans to develop games for the Atari VCS, and included litigation fees in their capital investment.
By August, Crane and Miller had left Atari, with Whitehead joining them shortly after. Kaplan had also quit Atari in August, but initially decided not to join as he did not like the starting business plan; he came back later to join Activision that December. Activision was formally founded on October 1, 1979, with Levy serving as CEO. The company was initially named "Computer Arts, Inc." while they considered a better title. The founders had thought of the name VSync, Inc., but feared that the public would not understand or know how to say it. Levy suggested combining "active" and "television" to come up with Activision.
Early years (1980–1982)
Activision began working out of Crane's garage in the latter half of 1979, each programmer developing their own game that was planned for release in mid-1980, Dragster, Fishing Derby, Checkers, and Boxing. The four's knowledge of the Atari 2600, as well as software tricks for the system, helped them make their own games visually distinct from Atari-produced games. To further distinguish themselves, Activision's boxes were brightly colored and featured an in-game screenshot on the back cover. Instruction manuals for games devoted at least one page to credit the developer. Additionally, for nearly all of Activision's games through 1983, the instruction manuals included instructions for sending the company a photograph of a player's high scores to receive an embroidered patch in return.
Ahead of the release of the first four games, Activision obtained space at the mid-year 1980 Consumer Electronics Show to showcase their titles, and quickly obtained favorable press. The attention afforded to Activision worried Atari, as the four's departure had already created a major dent in their development staff. Atari initially tried to tarnish Activision's reputation by using industry press at CES to label those that took trade secrets as "evil, terrible people", according to Crane, and then later threatened to refuse to sell Atari games to retailers that also carried these Activision titles. By the end of 1980, Atari filed a formal lawsuit against Activision to try to stop the company, claiming the four had stolen trade secrets and violated non-disclosure agreements. The lawsuit was settled by 1982, with Activision agreeing to pay royalties to Atari but otherwise legitimizing the third-party development model. In 2003, Activision's founders were given the Game Developers Choice "First Penguin" award, reflecting their being the first successful third-party developer in the video game industry.
Following the first round of releases, each of the founders developed their own titles, about once a year, over the first few years of the company. While their 1980 games were modest hits, one of the company's first successful games was Kaboom!, released in 1981, which was Activision's first game to sell over a million units. Activision's breakout title was 1982's Pitfall!, created by Crane. More than four million copies of the game were sold. Near the end of 1982, Kaplan left Activision to work on the development of the Amiga personal computer as he wanted to be more involved in hardware development.
Total sales for Activision were estimated at and revenues at ahead of its June 1983 initial public offering; at this point Activision had around 60 employees. Danny Goodman stated in Creative Computing Video & Arcade Games in 1983, "I doubt that there is an active [Atari 2600] owner who doesn't have at least one Activision cartridge in his library". The company completed its public offering in June 1983 on NASDAQ under the stock ticker AVSN.
The video game market crash (1983–1988)
The success of Activision, alongside the popularity of the Atari 2600, led to many more home consoles third-party developers as well as other home consoles. Activision produced some of its Atari games for the Intellivision and Colecovision consoles, among other platforms. However, several new third-party developers also arose, attempting to follow the approach Activision had used but without the experience they had; according to Crane, several of these companies were founded with venture capital and hired programmers with little game design experience off the street, mass-publishing whatever product the developers had made. This was a contributing factor to the video game crash of 1983.
For Activision, while they survived the crash, they felt its effects in the following years. These third-party developers folded, leaving warehouses full of unsold games, which savvy retailers purchased and sold at a mass discount ( compared to Activision's manufacturer's suggested retail price). While there was still a demand for Activision games, uneducated consumers were more drawn to the heavily discounted titles instead, reducing their income. Their quarterly revenue dropped from in mid-1983 to about by the end of 1984, according to Levy, and were forced to lay off staff, going from about 400 employees to 95 in that period. Because of this, Activision decided that they needed to diversify their games onto home computers such as the Commodore 64, Apple, and Atari 8-bit family to avoid completely going out of business like other third-party developers. There still was a drain of talent through 1985 from the crash. Miller and Whitehead left in 1984 due to the large devaluation of their stock and went to form Accolade.
With the video game crash making console game development a risky proposition, the company focused on developing for home computers with games like Little Computer People and Hacker, while Levy tried to keep expenditures in check as they recovered. Looking to expand further, Activision acquired, through a corporate merger, the struggling text adventure pioneer Infocom in June 1986. This acquisition was spearheaded by Levy, who was a big fan of Infocom's titles and felt the company was in a similar position as Activision. About six months after the "Infocom Wedding", Activision's board decided to replace Levy with Bruce Davis. Davis was against the purchase of Infocom from the start and was heavy-handed in its management, and even attempted to seek a lawsuit to recover their purchase from Infocom's shareholders. Crane also found Davis difficult to work with and was concerned with how Davis managed the closure of Imagic, one of the third-party development studios formed in Activision's success in 1981. Crane left Activision in 1986 and helped Gary Kitchen found Absolute Entertainment.
Mediagenic (1988–1992)
In 1988, Activision began involvement in software besides video games, such as business applications. As a result, Activision changed its corporate name to Mediagenic to better represent all of its activities.
Mediagenic consisted of four groups:
Activision: video game publisher for various platforms, notably the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Sega Master System, the Atari 7800, Atari ST, Commodore 64 and Amiga
Infocom: developer of interactive fiction games
Gamestar: initially an independent company but purchased by Activision in 1986. Specialized in sports video games
Ten Point O: business application software
In 1989, after several years of losses, Activision closed down the Infocom studios, extending to only 11 of the 26 employees an offer to relocate to Activision's Silicon Valley headquarters. Five of them accepted this offer.
Notably during this time, Mediagenic was known to have worked on the early version of a football game that would be the basis for Joe Montana Football. Sega of America's Michael Katz had been able to get Sega to pay Mediagenic around early 1990 to develop this into the branded version after securing the rights to Joe Montana's name, but was unaware of internal troubles that had been going on within the company, which had left the state of the game mostly unfinished. Katz and Sega were forced to take the incomplete game to Electronic Arts, which had been developing its own John Madden Football series for personal computers, to complete the game.
During this period Mediagenic, via Activision, secured the rights to distribute games from Cyan Worlds. The first game published by Activision from Cyan was The Manhole, on CD-ROM for personal computers, the first major game distributed in this format.
Purchase by Bobby Kotick (1990–1997)
Davis' management of Mediagenic failed to produce a profitable company; in 1991, Mediagenic reported a loss of on only of revenue and had over in debt. Cyan severed their contract with Activision, and turned to Broderbund for publishing, including what would become one of the most significant computer games of the 1990s, Myst.
Bobby Kotick had become interested in the value of the video game industry following the crash, and he and three other investors worked to buy Commodore International in an effort to gain access to the Commodore Amiga line of personal computers. After failing to complete purchase, the group bought a company that licensed Nintendo characters, and through Nintendo was directed to the failing Mediagenic. Kotick was drawn to buy out Mediagenic not for its current offerings but for the Activision name, given its past successes with Pitfall!, with hopes to restore Activision to its former glory. Crane said that Kotick has recognized the Activision brand name could be valued around and rather than start a new company and spend that amount to obtain the same reputation, he saw the opportunity to buy the failing Mediagenic at a bargain price and gain Activision's reputation with minimal cost. Kotick and additional investors bought Mediagenic for approximately in 1991. This group of investors included real estate businessman Steve Wynn and Philips Electronics.
Kotick became CEO of Mediagenic on its purchase and made several immediate changes: He let go of all but 8 of the companies' 150 employees, performed a full restructuring of the company, developed a bankruptcy restructuring plan, and reincorporated the company in Los Angeles, California. In the bankruptcy plan, Kotick recognized that Mediagenic still had valuable assets, which included the Infocom library as well as its authoring tools to make games, Activision's distribution network, and licenses to develop on Nintendo and Sega home consoles. Kotick offset some debt by giving stock in the company to its distributors as to keep them vested in the company's success. Kotick also had the company reissue several of its past console and Infocom titles as compilations for personal computers. Kotick had also recognized the value of the Zork property from Infocom, and had the company develop a sequel, Return to Zork. Combined, these steps allowed Mediagenic to fulfill on the bankruptcy plan, and by the end of 1992, Kotick renamed Mediagenic to the original Activision name. The new Activision went public in October 1993, raising about , and was listed on NASDAQ under its new ticker symbol ATVI.
By 1995, Kotick's approach had met one promise he made to investors: that he would give them four years of 50% growth in revenues while remaining break-even. Reaching this goal, Kotick then set Activision on his second promise to investors, to develop high-demand games and make the company profitable by 1997.
Activision published the first-person perspective MechWarrior in 1989, based on FASA's pen-and-paper game BattleTech. A sequel, MechWarrior 2, was released in 1995 after two years of delays and internal struggles, prompting FASA not to renew their licensing deal with Activision. To counter, Activision released several more games bearing the MechWarrior 2 name, which did not violate their licensing agreement. These included NetMech, MechWarrior 2: Ghost Bear's Legacy, and MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries. The entire MechWarrior 2 game series accounted for more than in sales.
Activision procured the license to another pen-and-paper-based war game, Heavy Gear, in 1997. The video game version was well received by critics, with an 81.46% average rating on GameRankings and being considered the best game of the genre at the time by GameSpot. The Mechwarrior 2 engine was also used in other Activision games, including 1997's Interstate '76 and 1998's Battlezone.
Growth and acquisitions (1997–2008)
With several of its own successfully developed games helping to turn a profit, Kotick led Activision to start seeking acquisitions of video game development studios, guided by market surveys to determine what areas of content to focus on. It is estimated that between 1997 and 2008, Activision made 25 acquisitions, several for undisclosed amounts. Several of these came prior to 2001, in the midst of the Dot-com bubble, enabling the company to acquire studios at a lower valuation. On June 16, 2000, Activision reorganized as a holding company, Activision Holdings, to manage Activision and its subsidiaries more effectively. Activision changed its corporate name from "Activision, Inc." to "Activision Publishing, Inc.", while Activision Holdings took Activision's former "Activision, Inc." name. Activision Publishing became a wholly owned subsidiary of Activision, which in turn became the publicly traded company, with all outstanding shares of capital stock converted.
Some of the key acquisitions and investments made by Activision in this period include:
Raven Software: Raven was founded in 1990; because of their close proximity, Raven frequently collaborated with id Software, and one of the studio's early successes was the Heretic series using id's Doom engine. Around 1997, Raven's founders Brian and Steve Raffel felt the need to seek a parent company. They arranged a publishing deal with Activision in 1997, which not only served to provide Raven additional financial support, but also gave Activision the opportunity to work closely with id Software and gain business relationships with them. By the end of 1997, Activision acquired Raven as one of its first subsidiaries under Kotick. The acquisition price was $12 million.
Neversoft: Prior to its acquisition in 2000, Activision had arranged a development deal with Neversoft to re-develop Apocalypse, a title that failed to be completed within Activision. Subsequently, Activision had Neversoft work on a prototype for a skateboarding game, which would end up becoming the first in the Tony Hawk's series of skateboarding video games. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater was a critical success, leading Activision to acquire Neversoft in April 2000. After eight games, the series has brought in .
Infinity Ward: After Electronic Arts released Medal of Honor: Allied Assault in 2002, several of the developers from 2015, Inc., disenchanted with their current contracts, left to form a new studio, Infinity Ward. Kotick himself provided the group with startup funding, as they were seeking to develop a similar title to Medal of Honor. Activision acquired the studio for in January 2003, and later publish their first title, Call of Duty, directly competing with Electronic Arts. The Call of Duty series has since seen nearly yearly releases and as of 2016 had sold more than 250 million units and brought in more than in revenue.
Treyarch: The Santa Monica, California studio was founded in 1996. With the success of the first Tony Hawk game from Neversoft, Activision used Treyarch to assist in further Tony Hawk games as well as to develop titles using Activision's license of Marvel's Spider-Man. Activision acquired the studio in 2001 for about . Following the success of Call of Duty from Infinity Ward, Activision moved Treyarch to assist in the series' development, trading off each year' major release between the two studios.
Gray Matter Interactive: While Gray Matter was originally founded in 1993 as Xatrix Entertainment, it was rebranded to Gray Matter in 1999 as they began work on Return to Castle Wolfenstein, in conjunction with Nerve Software and oversight by id Software who owned the Castle Wolfenstein IP. Activision, the game's publisher, acquired a portion of Gray Matter's stock during this time. Return to Castle Wolfenstein was a critical and financial success, and led Activision to acquire the remaining shares of Gray Matter in 2002 for about , with the intent to help Infinity Ward expand out the Call of Duty franchise. In 2005, Activision made the decision to merge the smaller Gray Matter into the larger Treyarch to put their combined talents towards Call of Duty 3.
RedOctane: Around 2005, Red Octane was co-developing Guitar Hero, a console game based on the arcade game GuitarFreaks, with Harmonix; Harmonix was developing the software while RedOctane developed the instrument controllers. Guitar Hero was a major success. Activision purchased RedOctane for nearly in June 2006. The series has since earned more than in revenues.
Toys for Bob: Toys for Bob was founded by Paul Reiche III, Fred Ford, and Terry Falls in 1989 and gained success in developing the first two Star Control games, and later made film-to-video game adaptions. Activision purchased the studio in 2005, and had given them work on some of the Tony Hawk's games as well as other licensed properties. Following Activision's merger with Vivendi, Activision gained the Spyro intellectual property and assigned Toys for Bob to develop the series in a new direction, leading to the toys-to-life Skylanders series.
Merger with Vivendi Games (2008)
While Activision was highly successful with its range of developers and successful series, Kotick was concerned that they did not have a title for the growing massively multiplayer online market, which presented the opportunity for continued revenues from subscription models and microtransactions instead of the revenue from a single sale. Around 2006, Kotick contacted Jean-Bernard Lévy, the new CEO of Vivendi, a French media conglomerate. Vivendi had a games division, Vivendi Games, that was struggling to be viable at the time, but its principal feature was that it owned Blizzard Entertainment and its highly successful World of Warcraft game, which was drawing in a year in subscription fees. Vivendi Games also owned Sierra Entertainment.
Lévy recognized Kotick wanted control of World of Warcraft, and offered to allow the companies to merge, but only if Lévy held the majority shares in the merged group, forcing Kotick to cede control. Kotick fretted about this decision for a while, according to friends and investors. During this time in 2006–2007, some of Activision's former successful properties began to wane, such as Tony Hawk's, so Activision bought RedOctane, the publisher of the Guitar Hero franchise. Kotick met with Blizzard's president Mike Morhaime, and learned that Blizzard also had a successful inroad into getting their games into China, a potentially lucrative market. Given this potential opportunity, Kotick agreed to the merger.
Activision's board signed on to the merger by December 2007. The merger was completed in July 2008. The new company was called Activision Blizzard and was headed by Kotick, while Vivendi maintained a 52% share in the company. The new company was estimated to be worth , ahead of Electronic Arts, which was valued at .
Post-merger developments (2009–present)
Activision Publishing remains a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard following the merger, and is responsible for developing, producing, and distributing games from its internal and subsidiary studios. Eric Hirshberg was announced as Activision Publishing's CEO in 2010.
Activision Publishing established Sledgehammer Games in November 2009. Formed earlier in 2009 by Glen Schofield and Michael Condrey, former Visceral Games leads that had worked on Dead Space, Sledgehammer intended to develop a Call of Duty spin-off title fashioned after the gameplay in Dead Space. However, in early 2010, legal issues between Infinity Ward and Activision Blizzard led to several members of Infinity Ward leaving, and Activision assigned Sledgehammer to assist Infinity Ward in the next major Call of Duty title, Modern Warfare 3. Since then, Sledgehammer, Infinity Ward, and Treyarch share development duties for the flagship series, with support from Raven and other studios as necessary.
In February 2010, Activision Blizzard reported significant losses in revenue stemming from a slow down in Guitar Hero sales and from its more casual games. Subsequently, Activision Publishing shuttered Red Octane, Luxoflux and Underground Development as well as laid off about 25% of the staff at Neversoft. Within the same year, Activision shuttered Budcat Creations in November 2010, and Bizarre Creations in February 2011.
Hirshberg left the CEO position in March 2018.
Into the 2020s, Activision put more focus on the Call of Duty franchise, including the release of the free-to-play Call of Duty: Warzone in 2020. By April 2021, the company had assigned all of its internal studios to work on some part of the Call of Duty franchise. This includes a new studio, Activision Mobile, devoted to the Call of Duty Mobile title as reported in August 2021.
Studios
Activision Shanghai in Shanghai, China, founded in 2009.
Beenox in Québec City, Québec, Canada, founded in May 2000, acquired on May 25, 2005.
Demonware in both Dublin, Republic of Ireland and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, founded in 2003, acquired in May 2007.
Digital Legends Entertainment in Barcelona, Spain, founded in May 2001, acquired on October 28, 2021.
High Moon Studios in Carlsbad, California, founded as Sammy Corporation in April 2001, acquired by Vivendi Games in January 2006.
Infinity Ward in Woodland Hills, California, founded in 2002, acquired in October 2003.
Radical Entertainment in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, founded in 1991, acquired by Vivendi Games in 2005, laid off most staff in 2012.
Raven Software in Madison, Wisconsin, founded in 1990, acquired in 1997.
Sledgehammer Games in Foster City, California, founded on July 21, 2009.
Solid State in Santa Monica, California, founded in 2021.
Toys for Bob in Novato, California, founded in 1989, acquired on May 3, 2005.
Treyarch in Santa Monica, California, founded in 1996, acquired in 2001.
Former studios
7 Studios in Los Angeles, California, founded in 1999, acquired on April 6, 2009, closed in February 2011.
Beachhead Studio in Santa Monica, California, founded in February 2011.
Bizarre Creations in Liverpool, England, founded as Raising Hell Productions in 1987 and changed name in 1994, acquired on September 26, 2007, closed on February 18, 2011.
Budcat Creations in Iowa City, Iowa, founded in September 2000, acquired on November 10, 2008, closed in November 2010.
Gray Matter Interactive in Los Angeles, California, founded in the 1990s as Xatrix Entertainment, acquired in January 2002, merged into Treyarch in 2005.
Infocom in Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded on June 22, 1979, acquired in 1986, closed in 1989.
Luxoflux in Santa Monica, California, founded in January 1997, acquired in October 2002, closed on February 11, 2010.
Massive Entertainment in Malmö, Sweden, founded in 1997, acquired by Vivendi Universal Games in 2002, sold to Ubisoft on November 10, 2008.
Neversoft in Los Angeles, California, founded in July 1994, acquired in October 1999, merged into Infinity Ward on May 3, 2014 and was officially made defunct on July 10, 2014.
RedOctane in Mountain View, California, founded in November 2005, acquired in 2006, closed on February 11, 2010.
Shaba Games in San Francisco, California, founded in September 1997, acquired in 2002, and closed on October 8, 2009.
Swordfish Studios in Birmingham, England, founded in September 2002, acquired by Vivendi Universal Games in June 2005, sold to Codemasters on November 14, 2008.
The Blast Furnace in Leeds, United Kingdom, founded in November 2011 as Activision Leeds, changed rename in August 2012, closed in March 2014.
FreeStyleGames in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, United Kingdom, founded in 2002, acquired on September 12, 2008, sold to Ubisoft on January 18, 2017, subsequently renamed Ubisoft Leamington.
Underground Development in Redwood Shores, California, founded as Z-Axis in 1994, acquired in May 2002, closed on February 11, 2010.
Vicarious Visions in Menands, New York, founded in 1990, acquired in January 2005, moved to Blizzard Entertainment in January 2021.
Wanako Games in Santiago, Chile, founded in 2005, acquired by Vivendi Games on February 20, 2007, sold to Artificial Mind and Movement on November 20, 2008.
Notable games published
1980s
Fishing Derby (1980)
Boxing (1980)
Skiing (1980)
Freeway (1981)
Ice Hockey (1981)
Kaboom! (1981)
Stampede (1981)
Laser Blast (1981)
Tennis (1981)
Megamania (1982)
Barnstorming (1982)
Enduro (1982)
Chopper Command (1982)
Starmaster (1982)
Pitfall! series (1982–2004)
River Raid series (1982–1988)
Oink! (1983)
Beamrider (1983)
H.E.R.O. (1984)
Little Computer People (1985)
Hacker series (1985–1986)
Shanghai series (1986–1990)
Transformers series (1986, 2007–2017)
The Last Ninja series (1987–1988)
Deathtrack (1989)
MechWarrior series (1989–1996)
1990s
Hunter (1991)
Zork series (1993–1997)
Dark Reign series (1997–2000)
Heavy Gear series (1997–1999)
Quake series (1997–2007)
Interstate series (1997–1999)
Battlezone series (1998–1999)
SiN (1998)
Heretic II (1998)
Vigilante 8 series (1998–2008)
Tenchu series (1998–2004)
Call to Power series (1999–2000)
Star Trek series (1999–2003)
Tony Hawk's series (1999–2015, 2020)
2000s
Soldier of Fortune series (2000–2007)
X-Men series (2000–2011)
Spider-Man series (2000–2014)
Lost Kingdoms series (2002–2003)
Total War series (2002–2004)
Call of Duty series (2003–present)
True Crime series (2003–2005)
Wolfenstein series (2003–2009)
Shrek series (2004-2011)
Doom 3 (2004)
Madagascar series (2005-2011)
The Movies (2005)
Gun (2005)
Guitar Hero series (2006–2015)
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance series (2006–2009)
James Bond series (2008–2012)
Crash Bandicoot series (2008–present)
Spyro the Dragon series (2008–present)
Prototype series (2009–2015)
2010s
Blur (2010)
Singularity (2010)
NASCAR The Game series (2011–2013)
Skylanders series (2011–2018)
SpongeBob SquarePants series (2013–2015)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series (2013–2016)
Destiny series (2014–2018)
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019)
See also
List of video game companies
References
External links
1979 establishments in California
American brands
American companies established in 1979
Companies based in Santa Monica, California
Former Vivendi subsidiaries
Video game companies based in California
Video game companies established in 1979
Video game companies of the United States
Video game development companies
Video game publishers |
1564406 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cramer%E2%80%93Shoup%20cryptosystem | Cramer–Shoup cryptosystem | The Cramer–Shoup system is an asymmetric key encryption algorithm, and was the first efficient scheme proven to be secure against adaptive chosen ciphertext attack using standard cryptographic assumptions. Its security is based on the computational intractability (widely assumed, but not proved) of the decisional Diffie–Hellman assumption. Developed by Ronald Cramer and Victor Shoup in 1998, it is an extension of the ElGamal cryptosystem. In contrast to ElGamal, which is extremely malleable, Cramer–Shoup adds other elements to ensure non-malleability even against a resourceful attacker. This non-malleability is achieved through the use of a universal one-way hash function and additional computations, resulting in a ciphertext which is twice as large as in ElGamal.
Adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks
The definition of security achieved by Cramer–Shoup is formally termed "indistinguishability under adaptive chosen ciphertext attack" (IND-CCA2). This security definition is currently the strongest definition known for a public key cryptosystem: it assumes that the attacker has access to a decryption oracle which will decrypt any ciphertext using the scheme's secret decryption key. The "adaptive" component of the security definition means that the attacker has access to this decryption oracle both before and after he observes a specific target ciphertext to attack (though he is prohibited from using the oracle to simply decrypt this target ciphertext). The weaker notion of security against non-adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks (IND-CCA1) only allows the attacker to access the decryption oracle before observing the target ciphertext.
Though it was well known that many widely used cryptosystems were insecure against such an attacker, for many years system designers considered the attack to be impractical and of largely theoretical interest. This began to change during the late 1990s, particularly when Daniel Bleichenbacher demonstrated a practical adaptive chosen ciphertext attack against SSL servers using a form of RSA encryption.
Cramer–Shoup was not the first encryption scheme to provide security against adaptive chosen ciphertext attack. Naor–Yung, Rackoff–Simon, and Dolev–Dwork–Naor proposed provably secure conversions from standard (IND-CPA) schemes into IND-CCA1 and IND-CCA2 schemes. These techniques are secure under a standard set of cryptographic assumptions (without random oracles), however they rely on complex zero-knowledge proof techniques, and are inefficient in terms of computational cost and ciphertext size. A variety of other approaches, including Bellare/Rogaway's OAEP and Fujisaki–Okamoto achieve efficient constructions using a mathematical abstraction known as a random oracle. Unfortunately, to implement these schemes in practice requires the substitution of some practical function (e.g., a cryptographic hash function) in place of the random oracle. A growing body of evidence suggests the insecurity of this approach, although no practical attacks have been demonstrated against deployed schemes.
The cryptosystem
Cramer–Shoup consists of three algorithms: the key generator, the encryption algorithm, and the decryption algorithm.
Key generation
Alice generates an efficient description of a cyclic group of order with two distinct, random generators .
Alice chooses five random values from .
Alice computes .
Alice publishes , along with the description of , as her public key. Alice retains as her secret key. The group can be shared between users of the system.
Encryption
To encrypt a message to Alice under her public key ,
Bob converts into an element of .
Bob chooses a random from , then calculates:
, where H() is a universal one-way hash function (or a collision-resistant cryptographic hash function, which is a stronger requirement).
Bob sends the ciphertext to Alice.
Decryption
To decrypt a ciphertext with Alice's secret key ,
Alice computes and verifies that . If this test fails, further decryption is aborted and the output is rejected.
Otherwise, Alice computes the plaintext as .
The decryption stage correctly decrypts any properly-formed ciphertext, since
, and
If the space of possible messages is larger than the size of , then Cramer–Shoup may be used in a hybrid cryptosystem to improve efficiency on long messages.
References
Ronald Cramer and Victor Shoup. "A practical public key cryptosystem provably secure against adaptive chosen ciphertext attack." in proceedings of Crypto 1998, LNCS 1462, p. 13ff (ps,pdf)
Toy implementations of Cramer–Shoup in Emacs Lisp and Java
1998 vintage news coverage of Cramer and Shoup's publication in Wired News and in Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram
Ronald Cramer and Victor Shoup: "Universal hash proofs and a paradigm for chosen ciphertext secure public key encryption." in proceedings of Eurocrypt 2002, LNCS 2332, pp. 45–64. Full Version (pdf)
Public-key encryption schemes |
21354774 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud%20%28operating%20system%29 | Cloud (operating system) | Cloud was a browser-based operating system created by Good OS LLC, a Los Angeles-based corporation. The company initially launched a Linux distribution called gOS which is heavily based on Ubuntu, now in its third incarnation.
Overview
The Cloud was a simplified operating system that ran just a web browser, providing access to a variety of web-based applications that allowed the user to perform many simple tasks without booting a full-scale operating system. Because of its simplicity, Cloud could boot in just a few seconds. The operating system is designed for Netbooks, Mobile Internet Devices, and PCs that are mainly used to browse the Internet. From Cloud the user can quickly boot into the main OS, because Cloud continues booting the main OS in the background.
Combining a browser with a basic operating system allows the use of cloud computing, in which applications and data "live and run" on the Internet instead of the hard drive.
Cloud can be installed and used together with other operating systems, or act as a standalone operating system. When used as a standalone operating system, hardware requirements are relatively low.
In 2009, Cloud was only officially available built into the GIGABYTE M912 Touch Screen Netbook.
Early reviews compared the operating system's user interface to OS X and noted the similarity of its browser to Google Chrome, although it is actually based on a modified Mozilla Firefox browser
See also
Chrome OS
EasyPeasy
Joli OS
EyeOS
OSW3
References
External links
Netbooks running new 'Cloud OS' rumored for CES
Good OS introduce quick boot Cloud OS for netbooks
Cloud applications
Distributed data storage |
16988945 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklist%20%28computing%29 | Blacklist (computing) | In computing, a blacklist, disallowlist, blocklist, or denylist is a basic access control mechanism that allows through all elements (email addresses, users, passwords, URLs, IP addresses, domain names, file hashes, etc.), except those explicitly mentioned. Those items on the list are denied access. The opposite is a whitelist, allowlist, or passlist, in which only items on the list are let through whatever gate is being used. A greylist contains items that are temporarily blocked (or temporarily allowed) until an additional step is performed.
Blacklists can be applied at various points in a security architecture, such as a host, web proxy, DNS servers, email server, firewall, directory servers or application authentication gateways. The type of element blocked is influenced by the access control location. DNS servers may be well-suited to block domain names, for example, but not URLs. A firewall is well-suited for blocking IP addresses, but less so for blocking malicious files or passwords.
Example uses include a company that might prevent a list of software from running on its network, a school that might prevent access to a list of websites from its computers, or a business that wants to ensure their computer users are not choosing easily guessed, poor passwords.
Examples of systems protected
Blacklists are used to protect a variety of systems in computing. The content of the blacklist is likely needs to be targeted to the type of system defended.
Information systems
An information system includes end-point hosts like user machines and servers. A blacklist in this location may include certain types of software that are not allowed to run in the company environment. For example, a company might blacklist peer to peer file sharing on its systems. In addition to software, people, devices and Web sites can also be blacklisted.
Email
Most email providers have an anti-spam feature that essentially blacklists certain email addresses if they are deemed unwanted. For example, a user who wearies of unstoppable emails from a particular address may blacklist that address, and the email client will automatically route all messages from that address to a junk-mail folder or delete them without notifying the user.
An e-mail spam filter may keep a blacklist of email addresses, any mail from which would be prevented from reaching its intended destination. It may also use sending domain names or sending IP addresses to implement a more general block.
In addition to private email blacklists, there are lists that are kept for public use, including:
China Anti-Spam Alliance
Fabel Spamsources
Spam and Open Relay Blocking System
The DrMX Project
Web browsing
The goal of a blacklist in a web browser is to prevent the user from visiting a malicious or deceitful web page via filtering locally. A common web browsing blacklist is Google's Safe Browsing, which is installed by default in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome.
Usernames and passwords
Blacklisting can also apply to user credentials. It is common for systems or websites to blacklist certain reserved usernames that are not allowed to be chosen by the system or website's user populations. These reserved usernames are commonly associated with built-in system administration functions. Also usually blocked by default are profane words and racial slurs.
Password blacklists are very similar to username blacklists but typically contain significantly more entries than username blacklists. Password blacklists are applied to prevent users from choosing passwords that are easily guessed or are well known and could lead to unauthorized access by malicious parties. Password blacklists are deployed as an additional layer of security, usually in addition to a password policy, which sets the requirements of the password length and/or character complexity. This is because there are a significant number of password combinations that fulfill many password policies but are still easily guessed (i.e., Password123, Qwerty123).
Distribution methods
Blacklists are distributed in a variety of ways. Some use simple mailing lists. A DNSBL is a common distribution method that leverages the DNS itself. Some lists make use of rsync for high-volume exchanges of data. Web-server functions may be used; either simple GET requests may be used or more complicated interfaces such as a RESTful API.
Examples
For a list of some DNS-based blacklists, see the Comparison of DNS blacklists.
Companies like Google, Symantec and Sucuri keep internal blacklists of sites known to have malware and they display a warning before allowing the user to click them.
Content-control software such as DansGuardian and SquidGuard may work with a blacklist in order to block URLs of sites deemed inappropriate for a work or educational environment. Such blacklists can be obtained free of charge or from commercial vendors such as Squidblacklist.org.
There are also free blacklists for Squid (software) proxy, such as Blackweb
A firewall or IDS may also use a blacklist to block known hostile IP addresses and/or networks. An example for such a list would be the OpenBL project.
Many copy protection schemes include software blacklisting.
The company Password RBL offers a password blacklist for Microsoft's Active Directory, web sites and apps, distributed via a RESTful API.
Members of online auction sites may add other members to a personal blacklist. This means that they cannot bid on or ask questions about your auctions, nor can they use a "buy it now" function on your items.
Yet another form of list is the yellow list which is a list of email server IP addresses that send mostly good email but do send some spam. Examples include Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail. A yellow listed server is a server that should never be accidentally blacklisted. The yellow list is checked first and if listed then blacklist tests are ignored.
In Linux modprobe, the blacklist modulename entry in a modprobe configuration file indicates that all of the particular module's internal aliases are to be ignored. There are cases where two or more modules both support the same devices, or a module invalidly claims to support a device.
Many web browsers have the ability to consult anti-phishing blacklists in order to warn users who unwittingly aim to visit a fraudulent website.
Many peer-to-peer file sharing programs support blacklists that block access from sites known to be owned by companies enforcing copyright. An example is the Bluetack blocklist set.
Usage considerations
As expressed in a recent conference paper focusing on blacklists of domain names and IP addresses used for Internet security, "these lists generally do not intersect. Therefore, it appears that these lists do not converge on one set of malicious indicators." This concern combined with an economic model means that, while blacklists are an essential part of network defense, they need to be used in concert with whitelists and greylists.
Controversy over use of the term
In 2018, a journal commentary on a report on predatory publishing was released making claims that "white" and "black" are racially-charged terms that need to be avoided in instances such as "whitelist" and "blacklist". The journal hit mainstream in Summer 2020 following the George Floyd protests in America wherein a black man was murdered by an officer, sparking protests on police brutality.
The premise of the journal is that "black" and "white" have negative and positive connotations respectively. It states that since blacklist's first recorded usage was during "the time of mass enslavement and forced deportation of Africans to work in European-held colonies in the Americas," the word is therefore related to race. There is no mention of "whitelist" and its origin or relation to race.
This issue is most widely disputed in computing industries where "whitelist" and "blacklist" are prevalent (e.g. IP whitelisting). Despite the commentary-nature of the journal, some companies and individuals in others have taken to replacing "whitelist" and "blacklist" with new alternatives such as "allow list" and "deny list".
Those that oppose these changes question its attribution to race, citing the same etymology quote that the 2018 journal uses. The quote suggests that the term "blacklist" arose from "black book" almost 100 years prior. "Black book" does not appear to have any etymology or sources that support ties to race, instead coming from the 1400s referring "to a list of people who had committed crimes or fallen out of favor with leaders" and popularized by King Henry VIII's literal usage of a book bound in black. Others also note the prevalence of positive and negative connotations to "white" and "black" in the bible, predating attributions to skin tone and slavery. It wasn't until the 1960s Black Power movement that "Black" became a widespread word to refer to one's race as a person of color in America (alternate to African-American) lending itself to the argument that the negative connotation behind "black" and "blacklist" both predate attribution to race.
See also similar concerns regarding the technology terms "Master" and "Slave".
In August 2018, Ruby on Rails changed all occurrences of blacklist and whitelist to restricted list and permitted list.
Several companies responded to this controversy in June and July 2020:
GitHub announced that it would replace many "terms that may be offensive to developers in the black community".
Apple Inc. announced at its developer conference that it would be adopting more inclusive technical language and replacing the term blacklist with deny list and the term whitelist with allow list.
Linux Foundation said it would use neutral language in kernel code and documentation in the future and avoid terms such as blacklist and slave going forward.
Twitter Engineering team stated its intention to move away from a number of terms, including "blacklist" and "whitelist".
Red Hat announced that it would make open source more inclusive and avoid these and other terms.
ZDNet reports that the list of technology companies making such decisions "includes Twitter, GitHub, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Ansible, Red Hat, Splunk, Android, Go, MySQL, PHPUnit, Curl, OpenZFS, Rust, JP Morgan, and others."
References
External links
Squidblacklist.org - Blacklists For Squid Proxy and Content Filtering Applications.
ipfilterX by Nexus23 Labs - Blocks P2P Crawlers, Malware C&C IPs, Institutions and many more.
OpenBL.org - abuse reporting and blacklisting
Computer jargon
Computing |
17210742 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University%20of%20the%20Immaculate%20Conception | University of the Immaculate Conception | The University of the Immaculate Conception (), also referred to by its acronym UIC; is a private Catholic basic and higher education institution administered by the Religious of the Virgin Mary in Davao City, Davao del Sur, Philippines. The university began in 1905 as Escuela Catolica de San Pedro.
History
Early years until World War II
The university began in 1905 as Escuela Catolica de San Pedro along Bonifacio Street in downtown Davao City with only primary and intermediate courses. Then in 1934, when the high school department opened, the school was renamed Immaculate Conception Academy. After four years, during its first commencement exercise, however, it was again renamed Immaculate Conception Institute. The school closed during World War II, from 1941 to 1946.
Post-war period
After the war, the school reopened in 1947 when it received government recognition as a high school. A year later, the school became Immaculate Conception College (ICC) as it started to offer college-level courses. The two initial courses were Collegiate Secretarial and Pharmacy.
Between 1951 and 1958, four Bachelor of Science degree were introduced, namely: Education, Home Economics, Music, and Elementary Education. In 1961, the Liberal Arts Program was added along with majors in commerce and medical technology.
In 1969, the Grade School and High School Departments were moved to ICC’s new site at Fr. Selga St., while the College Department followed in 1971. Three more undergraduate majors were then added: namely, chemistry, nutrition & dietetics and a course on pharmacy aiding.
From 1983 to 1986, master's degrees in theology and elementary education were introduced. The first engineering degree of the college, civil engineering, was also instituted during this time. A course on cafeteria management was also offered. In the 1990s, in response to the local needs in Davao, ICC added more engineering-focused majors in computer engineering, electronics engineering, and computer science.
The graduate school was chosen by Fund Assistance for Private Education (FAPE) to be a training center in chemistry, physics, and engineering. More master of Arts degree courses were added in educational management, values education, teaching college physics, teaching college chemistry, and engineering education.
On May 1, 1992, Department of Education Secretary Dr. Isidro Carino granted ICC university status, and it became “University of the Immaculate Conception”. The school was then 87 years old.
2000 onwards
Since 2000, additional graduate programs in pharmacy, information technology, and information management have been instituted. The University also opened new undergraduate degrees in information technology and information management. The university also launched an e-learning program – a web-based learning system serving all departments and sections of the university. Along with this, the Information Technology Research Zone (ITRZ), a computing facility, was built.
Campus
The UIC has three separate campuses: the Fr. Selga (Main) campus, Bonifacio (Annex) campus and Bajada (basic education) campus.
The Fr. Selga campus along Pichon Street houses the departments of information technology, nursing, medical technology, music, nutrition & dietetics, pharmacy, and the Graduate School. Called the Main campus, it was built in the 1960s to house the college's growing population.
The school's original location in downtown Davao along San Pedro Street is within the San Pedro Church compound. The Annex campus in Bonifacio Street houses the Business and Governance, Engineering, Education, and Liberal Arts colleges.
Lastly, the Bajada campus houses the grade school and high school facilities of the university.
A library can be found on the Fr. Selga campus. The said campus also includes housing and sports facilities.
Student life
There are under 10,000 students in the entire UIC. There exists a student government body called the University Student Government of UIC, which represents the student's interests to the school administration.
References
Educational institutions established in 1904
Universities and colleges in Davao City
Immaculate Conception, University of the
Catholic elementary schools in the Philippines
Catholic secondary schools in the Philippines
Religious of the Virgin Mary
1904 establishments in the Philippines |
41900032 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ApacheCon | ApacheCon | ApacheCon is the official open source software convention of the Apache Software Foundation, focused on the software projects hosted at the ASF, as well as on the development and governance philosophies of the ASF. In the early years the event was primarily about Apache HTTP Server, but as the Foundation grew, this expanded to encompass all Apache Software Foundation projects.
The event was first held in 1998, before the official founding of the Apache Software Foundation, in San Francisco, California.
Since then, the event has been held annually in North America, and almost as frequently in Europe. It has occasionally been held in Europe.
The 2020 event was held online, and had more than 5000 registrations, from all over the world.
It featured 25 tracks, hosted by the various software projects and communities within the Foundation. More typical in-person event attendance is in the 500-700 range.
Apachecon's goals are education about Apache's projects and processes, and building the communities around those projects. Tracks are hosted by the projects themselves, or groups of related projects. The event always features the "State of the Feather" annual report of the Foundation.
The Apache Software Foundation also hosts a number of smaller events, called Apache Roadshows which are typically more regional, one or two day events.
See also
List of free-software events
References
Apache Software Foundation
Free-software conferences |
4265878 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groff%20%28software%29 | Groff (software) | Groff ( ) (also called GNU troff) is a typesetting system that creates formatted output when given plain text mixed with formatting commands. It is the GNU replacement for the troff and nroff text formatters.
Groff contains a large number of helper programs, preprocessors, and postprocessors including eqn, tbl, pic and soelim. There are also several macro packages included that duplicate, expand on the capabilities of, or outright replace the standard troff macro packages.
Groff development of new features is active, and is an important part of free, open source, and UNIX derived operating systems such as Linux and BSD 4.4 derivatives — notably because troff macros are used to create man pages, the standard form of documentation on Unix and Unix-like systems.
OpenBSD has replaced groff with mandoc in the base install, since their 4.9 release.
History
groff is an original implementation written primarily in C++ by James Clark and is modeled after ditroff, including many extensions. The first version, 0.3.1, was released June 1990. The first stable version, 1.04, was announced in November 1991. groff was developed as free software to provide an easily obtained replacement for the standard AT&T troff/nroff package, which at the time was proprietary, and was not always available even on branded UNIX systems. In 1999, Werner Lemberg and Ted Harding took over maintenance of groff. The current version of groff is 1.22.4, released on .
See also
TeX
Desktop publishing
Notes
References
External links
groff mailing list archive (searchable)
Groff Forum, hosted by Nabble, archiving the groff mailing list into a searchable forum (sadly none of the emails are visible today).
gives background and examples of troff, including the GNU roff implementation.
Home page of mom macros
GNU Project software
groff
Free typesetting software |
9877441 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exec | Exec | Exec or EXEC may refer to:
Executive officer, a person responsible for running an organization
Executive producer, provides finance and guidance for the making of a commercial entertainment product
A family of kit helicopters produced by RotorWay International
Computing
exec (computing), an operating system function for running a program
eval, a programming language function for executing a statement or evaluating an expression, variously called exec or eval
Exec (Amiga), the OS kernel of Amiga computers
CMS EXEC, an interpreted command procedure control language for IBM's VM/CMS operating system
EXEC 2, an interpreted command procedure control language for IBM's VM/CMS operating system
UNIVAC EXEC I, the original operating system developed for the UNIVAC 1107
UNIVAC EXEC II, an operating system developed for the UNIVAC 1107 and ported to the UNIVAC 1108
UNIVAC EXEC 8, a.k.a. EXEC VIII, an operating system developed for the UNIVAC 1108
See also
Executable
Executive (disambiguation)
Non-executive director (also known as non-exec)
Exec Shield
Exec (errand service) |
275909 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-box%20testing | Black-box testing | Black-box testing is a method of software testing that examines the functionality of an application without peering into its internal structures or workings. This method of test can be applied virtually to every level of software testing: unit, integration, system and acceptance. It is sometimes referred to as specification-based testing.
Test procedures
Specific knowledge of the application's code, internal structure and programming knowledge in general is not required. The tester is aware of what the software is supposed to do but is not aware of how it does it. For instance, the tester is aware that a particular input returns a certain, invariable output but is not aware of how the software produces the output in the first place.
Test cases
Test cases are built around specifications and requirements, i.e., what the application is supposed to do. Test cases are generally derived from external descriptions of the software, including specifications, requirements and design parameters. Although the tests used are primarily functional in nature, non-functional tests may also be used. The test designer selects both valid and invalid inputs and determines the correct output, often with the help of a test oracle or a previous result that is known to be good, without any knowledge of the test object's internal structure.
Test design techniques
Typical black-box test design techniques include:
Decision table testing
All-pairs testing
Equivalence partitioning
Boundary value analysis
Cause–effect graph
Error guessing
State transition testing
Use case testing
User story testing
Domain analysis
Syntax testing
Combining technique
Hacking
In penetration testing, black-box testing refers to a method where an ethical hacker has no knowledge of the system being attacked. The goal of a black-box penetration test is to simulate an external hacking or cyber warfare attack.
See also
ABX test
Acceptance testing
Blind experiment
Boundary testing
Fuzz testing
Gray box testing
Metasploit Project
Sanity testing
Smoke testing
Software performance testing
Software testing
Stress testing
Test automation
Unit testing
Web application security scanner
White hat hacker
White-box testing
References
External links
BCS SIGIST (British Computer Society Specialist Interest Group in Software Testing): Standard for Software Component Testing, Working Draft 3.4, 27. April 2001.
Software testing
Hardware testing |
6061534 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common%20Open%20Software%20Environment | Common Open Software Environment | The Common Open Software Environment (COSE) was an initiative formed in March 1993 by the major Unix vendors of the time to create open, unified operating system (OS) standards.
Background
The COSE process was established during a time when the "Unix wars" had become an impediment to the growth of Unix. Microsoft, already dominant on the corporate desktop, was beginning to make a bid for two Unix strongholds: technical workstations and the enterprise data center. In addition, Novell was seeing its NetWare installed base steadily eroding in favor of Microsoft-based networks; as part of a multi-faceted approach to battling Microsoft, they had turned to Unix as a weapon, having recently formed a Unix-related partnership with AT&T known as Univel.
Unlike other Unix unification efforts that preceded it, COSE was notable in two ways: it was not formed in opposition to another set of Unix vendors, and it was more oriented toward making standards of existing technologies than creating new offerings from scratch.
The initial members, (known as "The Big Six" or "SUUSHI"), were:
The Santa Cruz Operation
Unix System Laboratories
Univel
Sun Microsystems
Hewlett-Packard
IBM
These represented the significant Unix system and OS vendors of the time, as well as the holders of the Unix brand and AT&T-derived source code. They also represented almost all the key players in the two major Unix factions of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the OSF and Unix International (UI). Notable in its absence was OSF co-founder Digital Equipment Corporation; Digital did finally announce its endorsement of the COSE process the following June.
COSE's announced areas of focus were: a common desktop environment; networking; graphics; multimedia; object-based technology; and, systems management. On September 1, 1993 it was also announced that the COSE vendors were developing a unified Unix specification with the support of over 75 companies.
Unix standardization
Unlike OSF or UI, the COSE initiative was not tasked to create or promote a single operating system. Their approach was to instead survey and document the OS interfaces already in use by Unix software vendors of the time. This resulting list, originally known as "Spec 1170", evolved to become what is now known as the Single Unix Specification.
Spec 1170 (no relation to the SPEC benchmarking organization) was named after the results of the first COSE effort to determine which Unix interfaces were actually in use; inspection of a large sample of current Unix applications uncovered 1,170 such system and library calls. As might be expected, the actual number of interfaces cataloged continued to grow over time.
Management of the specification was given to X/Open. In October 1993, it was announced that the UNIX trademark, which was at that time owned by Novell, would be transferred to X/Open. These developments meant that the UNIX brand was no longer tied to one source code implementation; any company could now create an OS version compliant with the UNIX specification, which would then be eligible for the UNIX brand.
Common Desktop Environment
Besides the opening and standardization of the UNIX brand, the most notable product of the COSE initiative was the Common Desktop Environment, or CDE. CDE was an X11-based user environment jointly developed by HP, IBM, and Sun, with an interface and productivity tools based on OSF's Motif graphical widget toolkit.
Other technology areas
Although in the areas of desktop and the OS itself the COSE process was one of unification, in other announced areas, it was decided to endorse existing technologies from both camps rather than pick one. For example, the announced direction for networking was for all participants to sell, deliver and support OSF's DCE, UI's ONC+, and a NetWare client.
Other areas were addressed in very broad terms. For object-based technology, CORBA was called out as the underlying technology, but method of implementation was left to the individual companies.
Legacy
In March 1994 UI and OSF announced their merger into a new organization, which retained the OSF name. The COSE initiative became the basis of the new OSF's "Pre-Structured Technology" (PST) process. These efforts in turn eventually became the responsibility of The Open Group, an entity formed by the merger of the new OSF and X/Open in 1996.
In the end, the most significant product of the COSE process was the creation of a universally-recognized single UNIX standard and an independent organization to administer it. It marked the end of Sun's OPEN LOOK graphical environment in favor of a Motif-based desktop, at the same time making the latter a standard rather than a proprietary toolkit. Although it had less impact on the other standardization areas it originally intended to address, it nonetheless had a major influence on the future of Unix extending far beyond the 12 months of its independent existence.
References
Standards organizations in the United States
X Window System
Open Group standards
Unix history |
1397936 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugin%20%28software%29 | Hugin (software) | Hugin () is a cross-platform open source panorama photo stitching and HDR merging program developed by Pablo d'Angelo and others. It is a GUI front-end for Helmut Dersch's Panorama Tools and Andrew Mihal's Enblend and Enfuse. Stitching is accomplished by using several overlapping photos taken from the same location, and using control points to align and transform the photos so that they can be blended together to form a larger image. Hugin allows for the easy (optionally automatic) creation of control points between two images, optimization of the image transforms along with a preview window so the user can see whether the panorama is acceptable. Once the preview is correct, the panorama can be fully stitched, transformed and saved in a standard image format.
Features
Hugin and the associated tools can be used to
combine overlapping images for panoramic photography
correct complete panorama images, e.g. those that are "wavy" due to a badly levelled panoramic camera
stitch large mosaics of images and photos, e.g. of long walls or large microscopy samples
find control points and optimize parameters with the help of software assistants/wizards
output several projection types, such as equirectangular (used by many full spherical viewers), mercator, cylindrical, stereographic, and sinusoidal
perform advanced photometric corrections and HDR stitching
With the release of 2010.4.0, which includes a built-in control point generator, the developers consider Hugin to be feature-complete.
Development
Infrastructure
The Hugin development is tracked on Launchpad and the code resides in a Mercurial repository.
Google Summer of Code
Five projects for the development of Hugin / panotools were accepted for the 2007 Google Summer of Code. Additionally a sixth, community sponsored project has been set up. The projects were:
Automatic feature detection by Pedro Alonso (Spain), mentored by Herbert Bay (Switzerland)
New modular GUI by Ippei Ukai (Japan), mentored by Yuval Levy (Canada), who is also the lead administrator on the Summer of Code effort
HDR de-ghosting by Jing Jin (USA), mentored by Pablo d'Angelo (Germany) who is also the lead developer on Hugin
Large image processing with VIPS by Mohammad Shahiduzzaman (Bangladesh), mentored by John Cupitt (United Kingdom)
Interactive Panorama Viewer by Leon Moctezuma (Mexico), mentored by Aldo Hoeben (The Netherlands)
Community project: PTbatcher by Zoran Mesec (Slovenija), mentored by Daniel M. German (Canada)
Hugin was also accepted to Summer of Code 2008. Projects were:
Fast, OpenGL accelerated preview by James Alastair Legg, mentored by Pablo d'Angelo
Automated feature matching by Onur Kucuktunc, mentored by Alexandre Jenny
User interface for masking of images by Fahim Mannan, mentored by Daniel M. German
Batch processing ability by Marko Kuder, mentored by Zoran Mesec
Automatic detection of non-static features in imagery (final application is called Celeste) by Timothy Nugent, mentored by Yuval Levy
In 2009 Google Summer of Code projects were as follows:
Ghost removal for Enfuse by Luka Jirkovsky, mentored by Andrew Mihal
Layout model by James Legg, mentored by Bruno Postle
Automatic lens calibration by detecting straight lines in pictures by Timothy Nugent, mentored by Tom Sharpless
and fourth project for porting LightTwist to Mac OS X by Yulia Kotseruba, mentored by Sébastien Roy.
In 2010 the Google Summer of Code projects were:
implementing a patent-free image feature detector and control point generator by Antoine Deleforge, mentored by Timothy Nugent.
creating a new interactive panorama overview, by Darko Makreshanski and mentored by James Legg
improving the make file libraries used in panorama stitching and
adding regression tests for libpano13
In 2011 the GSoC project was centered around Enblend's seam line optimization algorithm using graph-cut algorithm.
See also
Comparison of photo stitching applications
References
External links
Hugin mailing list for users and developers
OpenPhotoVR is a similar open-source software project
Panotools Next Generation wiki
Google Summer of Code project description
2003 software
BSD software
Free software
Free graphics software
Free panorama software
Free photo software
Free photo stitching software
Free software programmed in C++
Panorama software
Windows graphics-related software
MacOS graphics software
Photo software for Linux
Photo stitching software
Photo software
Software that uses wxWidgets
HDR tone mapping software |
11526231 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy%20Thackeray | Andy Thackeray | Andrew John Thackeray (born 13 February 1968 in Huddersfield) is an English former professional footballer who made more than 400 appearances in the Football League playing as a defender.
Thackeray was part of the Manchester City youth team which won the FA Youth Cup in 1986, but moved on to Huddersfield Town without appearing for City's first team. He played only twice for Huddersfield, then spent a season with Newport County, before making more than 150 league appearances for each of his next two employers, Wrexham and Rochdale. In the 1997–98 season he helped Halifax Town to promotion from the Conference and played one more season in the Football League. Thackeray then returned to the Conference, spending four seasons with Nuneaton Borough. In 2003, he joined Ashton United, where he scored 5 goals from 91 games in all competitions, and for a time acted as assistant manager. His final club before retirement was Mossley, where he scored 4 goals from 74 games, and won the Player of the Year award in helping them to the Northern Premier League Division One title in the 2005–06 season.
References
External links
1968 births
Living people
Footballers from Huddersfield
English footballers
English Football League players
Association football defenders
Manchester City F.C. players
Huddersfield Town A.F.C. players
Newport County A.F.C. players
Wrexham A.F.C. players
Rochdale A.F.C. players
Halifax Town A.F.C. players
Nuneaton Borough F.C. players
Ashton United F.C. players
Mossley A.F.C. players |
20493998 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United%20States%20v.%20Drew | United States v. Drew | United States v. Drew, 259 F.R.D. 449 (C.D. Cal. 2009), was an American federal criminal case in which the U.S. government charged Lori Drew with violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) over her alleged cyberbullying of her 13-year-old neighbor, Megan Meier, who had committed suicide. The jury deadlocked on a felony conspiracy count and acquitted Drew of three felony CFAA violations, but found her guilty of lesser included misdemeanor violations; the judge overturned these convictions in response to a subsequent motion for acquittal by Drew.
Allegations leading to indictment and trial
In 2006, Lori Drew (née Shreeves) lived in St. Charles County, Missouri, with her husband Curt and their teenaged daughter, Sarah. Megan Meier, who at one time had been friends with Sarah Drew, lived down the street from Drew.
During the summer of 2006, Drew reportedly became concerned that Meier was spreading false statements about her daughter. Lori Drew, Sarah Drew, and Drew's employee, Ashley Grills, allegedly decided to create a fake Myspace account of a 16-year-old boy under the alias "Josh Evans". They allegedly used that account to discover whether Meier was spreading false statements about Sarah Drew.
A Myspace account in the name of "Josh Evans" was created in September 2006. Drew allegedly used the Myspace account to contact Meier, who apparently believed that "Josh Evans" was a 16-year-old boy. "Josh Evans" communicated with Meier through October 16, 2006, via the Myspace account in a manner described by the prosecution as flirtatious.
On October 16, 2006, "Josh Evans" reportedly sent Meier a message to the effect that the world would be a better place without her. Additional Myspace members whose profiles reflected links with the "Josh Evans" profile also began to send Meier negative messages. Subsequently, Meier's mother discovered that her daughter had hanged herself in her bedroom closet.
After Meier's death, according to the indictment, Lori Drew removed the fake "Josh Evans" account and commanded a juvenile who knew about the fake account "keep her mouth shut".
Legal history
In early December 2007, Missouri prosecutors announced they would not file charges against Lori Drew in connection with Megan Meier's death. At a press conference, St. Charles County Prosecutor Jack Banas stated there was not enough evidence to bring the charges. As a result, the federal government decided to pursue the case in Los Angeles, where Myspace is based.
The Meiers did not file a civil lawsuit.
Indictment
Thomas O'Brien, U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, undertook prosecution of federal charges in connection with the case. On May 15, 2008, Drew was indicted by the Grand Jury of the United States District Court for the Central District of California on four counts. The first count alleged a conspiracy arising out of a charged violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371, namely that Drew and her co-conspirators agreed to violate the CFAA by intentionally accessing a computer used in interstate commerce "without authorization" and in "excess of authorized use", and by using interstate communication to obtain information from the computer in order to inflict emotional distress in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(2)(C). Counts Two through Four allege that Drew violated the CFAA by accessing MySpace servers to obtain information regarding Meier in breach of the Myspace Terms of Service, on September 20, 2006 and October 16, 2006.
Amicus brief in support of defendant
On September 4, 2008, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed an amicus brief in support of Drew's motion to dismiss the indictment. The brief argued that Drew's indictment was wrongful because Drew's alleged violation of the Myspace terms and conditions was not an "unauthorized access" or a use that "exceeds authorized access" under the CFAA statute; that applying the CFAA to Drew's conduct would constitute a serious encroachment of civil liberties; and that interpreting the CFAA to apply to a breach of a website's Terms of Service would violate the Due Process protections of the Constitution and thereby render the statute void on the grounds of vagueness and lack of fair notice.
Jury trial and split verdict
This jury announced on November 26, 2008 that it was deadlocked on Count One for Conspiracy. It unanimously found Drew not guilty of Counts Two through Four, but convicted her of lesser included misdemeanor offenses on those three counts.
Motion for acquittal granted
On November 23, 2008, Drew filed a motion for acquittal. On August 28, 2009, U.S. District Judge George H. Wu formally granted Drew's motion for acquittal, overturning the jury's guilty verdict on the three misdemeanor CFAA violations.
In his opinion, Wu examined each element of the misdemeanor offense, noting that a misdemeanor conviction under 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(2)(C) requires that:
The defendant intentionally have accessed a computer without authorization, or have exceeded authorized access of a computer
The access of the computer involved an interstate or foreign communication
By engaging in this conduct, the defendant obtained information from a computer used in interstate or foreign commerce or communication
Wu found that many courts have held that any computer that provides a web-based application accessible through the internet would satisfy the interstate communication requirement of the second element, and that the third element is met whenever a person using a computer contacts an internet website and reads any part of that website.
The only issue arose with respect to the first element, and the meaning of the undefined term "unauthorized access". Wu noted the government's concession that its only basis for claiming that Drew had intentionally accessed Myspace's computers without authorization was the creation of the false "Josh Evans" alias in violation of the MySpace Terms of Service. Wu reasoned that, if a conscious violation of the Terms of Service was not sufficient to satisfy the first element, Drew's motion for acquittal would have to be granted for that reason alone. Wu found that an intentional breach of the Myspace Terms of Service could possibly satisfy the definition of an unauthorized access or access exceeding authorization, but that rooting a CFAA misdemeanor violation in an individual's conscious violation of a website's Terms of Service would render the statute void for vagueness because there were insufficient guidelines to govern law enforcement as well as a lack of actual notice to the public.
Wu cited several reasons an individual would be lacking in actual notice:
The statute does not explicitly state that it is criminalizing breaches of contract, and most individuals are aware that a contract breach is not typically subject to criminal prosecution
If a website's Terms of Service control what is an "authorized" use or a use that "exceeds authorization", the statute would be unconstitutionally vague because it would be unclear whether any or all violations of the Terms of Service would constitute "unauthorized" access
Allowing a conscious violation of website's Terms of Service to be a misdemeanor violation of the CFAA would essentially give a website owner the power to define criminal conduct
Wu summed up his opinion by stating that allowing a violation of a website's Terms of Service to constitute an intentional access of a computer without authorization or exceeding authorization would "result in transforming section 1030(a)(2)(C) into an overwhelmingly overbroad enactment that would convert a multitude of otherwise innocent Internet users into misdemeanant criminals." For these reasons, Wu granted Drew's motion for acquittal. The Government did not appeal.
Legislative responses
Missouri legislators amended the state's harassment law to include penalties for bullying via computers, other electronic devices, or text messages. The bill was approved on May 16, 2008. More than twenty states have enacted legislation to address bullying that occurs through electronic media. These laws include statutes that mandate that school boards must adopt policies to address cyberbullying, statutes that criminalize harassing minors online, and statutes providing for cyberbullying education. California enacted Cal. Educ. Code §32261 that encourages schools and other agencies to develop strategies, programs and activities that will reduce bullying via electronic and other means.
A bill was introduced in Congress in 2009 () to set a federal standard definition for the term cyberbullying, but the proposal was criticized as overbroad and did not advance.
Reactions
Legal experts expressed concern that the prosecution sought effectively to criminalize any violation of web site terms of service. Andrew M. Grossman, senior legal analyst for the Heritage Foundation, said "If this verdict stands ... it means that every site on the Internet gets to define the criminal law. That's a radical change. What used to be small-stakes contracts become high-stakes criminal prohibitions."
Law Professor Orin Kerr, one of Drew's pro bono attorneys, commented that he was "very pleased" with the vacated guilty verdict as the case was "an extremely important test case for the scope of the computer crime statutes, with tremendously high stakes for the civil liberties of every Internet user".
See also
LVRC Holdings v. Brekka
United States v. Nosal
References
2009 in United States case law
Cyberbullying
United States District Court for the Central District of California cases
United States Internet case law
United States federal criminal case law |
1100760 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madster | Madster | Madster (initially called Aimster) appeared in Napster's wake in August 2000 and was intended to be a P2P file sharing service. It was shut down in December 2002 as a result of a lawsuit by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
Origin
According to John Deep, a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Madster software was originally inspired by his daughter's use of instant messaging software. His idea was to combine instant messaging with file sharing. John Deep's daughter Aimee had an interest in providing privacy to her online friends; instant messaging was lacking when it came to privacy protection.
Features
The Madster service was initially called Aimster, but it was later renamed to Madster due to concerns that the Aimster name infringed AOL's AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) trademark. The Madster software allowed users to share files via instant messaging services. In particular, users could share files specifically with users who were included on a "buddy list" with the advantage of privacy.
Around March 2001, support for encrypted network communications was included in a new release of the Madster software (at the time, the Aimster name was still in use.) Among other things, the Madster service hoped that the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act would have the effect of prohibiting others from monitoring the encrypted Madster network communications. In addition, the Madster operators argued that the encryption meant that they could not be aware of any copyright infringement that took place. Later on, around April-May 2001, a service was introduced wherein a network including tens of thousands of people could be searched for music and other content and new users would by default be added to this network although users could choose to instead restrict trading to buddy list members. At one point, the company announced a premium service that was available for US$4.95 per month.
PC Magazine gave Madster a 1 out of 5 rating of "Dismal," based on interface design, partner advertising, and content selection.
Recording industry collaboration
In 2000, for a short time, Capitol Records authorized Madster (which was called Aimster at the time) to provide some Radiohead video files on the service's Web site and to release a skin for the Madster software that had a Radiohead theme. This collaboration was done for the purpose of promoting a new Radiohead album.
Legal difficulties and shutdown
In December 2002, the company was ordered by a federal judge to disconnect its computer systems from the Internet. Earlier on in September, the court stated that Aimster had knowledge of copyright infringements, including a Web-based "Aimster Guardian" tutorial that showed copyrighted materials and the tracking of popular songs on the service via "Club Aimster"; the latter also indicated contribution to infringing activity and the monthly fees for the service indicated a financial interest for the Aimster operators in conjunction with infringing usage. The requirement for users to sign up and log in to use the service meant that Aimster was in a position to control the activities of its users. The injunction to disconnect was upheld in June 2003 by the decision in In re Aimster Copyright Litigation of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In particular, it was found that Madster's support of encrypted file sharing was "willful blindness" and was not a valid defense with regard to copyright infringement. At the same time, a company could avoid copyright liability if it was "highly burdensome" for the company to detect and prevent copyright infringement. In January 2004, the US Supreme Court refused without explanation to hear an appeal of the lower court's ruling.
Madster was represented in court by Boies, Schiller & Flexner, the same law firm which defended Napster. In 2005, Deep sued Boies for malpractice and misappropriation, but ultimately lost the case in 2008.
References
External links
A 'blog' ostensibly written by Madeline Deep
File sharing software
Windows file sharing software
Discontinued software
Internet services shut down by a legal challenge |
55533945 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woz%20U | Woz U | Woz U is a company founded by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak that focuses on technical education for independent students, and offers curriculum to universities and organizations to upskill their employees.
Background
WOZ U was founded in October 2017 by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Wozniak was inspired by his own experience of teaching 5th Grade students in California. Woz U received the school license from the Arizona state board. In the first year, the school had 350 students, as confirmed by the Arizona State Board for Private Post secondary Education.
In fall of 2018, a CBS News investigation of Woz U cast some doubts on the professionalism of the expensive curriculum. CBS interviewed two dozen current and former students and employees, who shared their dissatisfaction with the content quality, such as documentation typos leading to confusing program errors, while some promised live lectures were actually recorded and out-of-date. One student described the 33-week online program as "a $13,000 e-book". A former "enrollment counselor" described a high-pressure sales environment, which the company denied. In a prepared statement, Woz U president Chris Coleman admitted the documentation errors and said quality control efforts were being implemented, and said curriculum was reviewed by Wozniak. The founder declined interview requests, then dodged a reporter's unannounced appearance at a conference.
Product and services
Courses
Woz U offers courses in Software Development, Cyber Security and Data Science that lasts approximately 33 weeks, with one to two hours of lectures a week. These courses provide graded assignments, weekly exercises, and a final project. As of March 2019, Woz U offered three technology-focused educational models for Software Development, Cyber Security and Data Science.
Business model
Woz U works on the Education-as-a-Service (EaaS) model to students an alternative or supplement to the traditional four-year degree programs. The students take a micro course to learn software development, cyber security and data science. As of December 2018, Woz U had 350 registered students signed up for its programs. Woz U charges $13,200 to $13,800 as a fee from the students for the courses.
It also partners with businesses to offer a technical curriculum to employees in order to meet the upskill demand for the technology based workforce.
Partnerships
Woz U has launched career pathway programs via STEAM initiatives to school districts across the United States. It also works with colleges and universities across the United States. University partners include University of North Dakota, University of the Potomac, Belhaven University and New Jersey Institute of Technology. It enables University partners to incorporate the Woz U technical curriculum into traditional college and university coursework.
Woz U also works directly with businesses to upskill their employees in Software Development, Cyber Security and Data Science, to remain current with the technology developments.
References
External links
Technology education
Computer science education
Educational technology companies of the United States
American educational websites
Open educational resources |
9564198 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel%20McCormack | Joel McCormack | Joel McCormack is the designer of the NCR Corporation version of the p-code machine, which is a kind of stack machine popular in the 1970s as the preferred way to implement new computing architectures and languages such as Pascal and BCPL. The NCR design shares no common architecture with the Pascal MicroEngine designed by Western Digital but both were meant to execute the UCSD p-System.[1,2]
P-machine theory
Urs Ammann, a student of Niklaus Wirth, originally presented p-code in his PhD thesis (see Urs Ammann, On Code Generation in a Pascal Compiler, Software: Practice and Experience, Vol. 7, No. 3, 1977, pp. 391–423). The central idea is that a complex software system is coded for a non-existent, fictitious, minimal computer or virtual machine and that computer is realized on specific real hardware with an interpreting computer program that is typically small, simple, and quickly developed. The Pascal programming language had to be re-written for every new computer being acquired, so Ammann proposed writing the system one time to a virtual architecture. The successful academic implementation of Pascal was the UCSD p-System developed by Kenneth Bowles, a professor at UCSD, who began the project of developing a universal Pascal programming environment using the P-machine architecture for the multitude of different computing platforms in use at that time. McCormack was part of a team of undergraduates working on the project.[3] He took this familiarity and experience with him to NCR.
P-machine Design
In 1979 McCormack was employed by NCR right out of college, and they had developed a Bit slicing implementation of the p-code machine using the Am2900 chip set. This CPU had a myriad of timing and performance problems so
McCormack proposed a total redesign of the processor using a programmable logic device based Microsequencer. McCormack left NCR to start a company called Volition Systems but continued the work on the CPU as a contractor.
The new CPU used an 80-bit wide microword, so parallelism in the microcode was radically enhanced. There were several loops
in the microcode that were a single instruction long and many of the simpler p-code ops took 1 or 2 microcode instructions. With the wide microword and the way the busses were carefully arranged, as well as incrementing memory address registers, the cpu could execute operations inside the ALU while transferring a memory word directly to the onboard stack, or feed one source into the ALU while sending a previously computed register to the destination bus in a single microcycle.
The cpu ran at three different clock speeds (using delay lines for a selectable clock); two bits in the microword selected the cycle time for that instruction. The clocks around 130, 150, and 175 nanoseconds. Newer parts from AMD would have allowed
a faster 98 ns cycle for the fastest instructions, but they didn't come out with a correspondingly faster branch control unit.
There was a separate prefetch/instruction formatting unit (again, using stoppable delay line clocks for synchronization...asynchronous logic allows for skewed timings). It had a 32-bit buffer and could deliver up the next data as a signed byte, unsigned byte, 16-bit word, or "big" operand (the one-or-two byte format where 0..127 was encoded as one byte, and 128..32767 was encoded as two bytes).
There was an onboard stack of 1024 16-bit words, so that both scalars and sets could be operated on there. The top of
the stack was actually kept in one of the AMD 2901's registers, so that simple operations like integer addition took a single cycle.
before we stole the technique of keeping the top word of the stack in one of the AMD 2901 registers. These often resulted in one fewer microinstructions. (The stack doesn't quite operate this way...it decrements before data is written to it, and increments
after data is read.)
Since next-address control and next microcode location were in each wide microword, there was no penalty for any-order execution of
the microcode. Thus, we had a table of 256 labels, and the microcode compiler moved the first instruction at each of those labels to the first 256 locations of microcode memory. The only restriction this placed upon the microcode was that if the p-code required more than one microinstruction, then the first microinstruction couldn't have any flow control specified (as it would be filled in with a "goto <rest of microcode for p-code>).
P-machine architecture
The CPU used the technique of keeping the top word of the stack in one of the AMD 2901 registers. This often resulted in one fewer
microinstructions. For example, here are a few p-codes the way they ended up. tos is a register, and q is a register. "|" means parallel activities in a single cycle. (The stack doesn't quite operate this way...it decrements before data is written to it, and increments after data is read.)
Since next-address control and next microcode location were in each wide microword, there was no penalty for any-order execution of
the microcode. A table of 256 labels, and the microcode compiler moved the first instruction at each of those labels to the
first 256 locations of microcode memory. The only restriction this placed upon the microcode was that if the p-code required more than one microinstruction, then the first microinstruction couldn't have any flow control specified (as it would be filled in with a "goto <rest of microcode for p-code>).
fetch % Fetch and save in an AMD register the next byte opcode from
% the prefetch unit, and go to that location in the microcode.
q := ubyte | goto ubyte
SLDCI % Short load constant integer (push opcode byte)
% Push top-of-stack AMD register onto real stack, load
% the top-of-stack register with the fetched opcode that got us here
dec(sp) | stack := tos | tos := q | goto fetch
LDCI % Load constant integer (push opcode word)
% A lot like SLDCI, except fetch 2-byte word and "push" on stack
dec(sp) | stack := tos | tos := word | goto fetch
SLDL1 % Short load local variable at offset 1
% mpd0 is a pointer to local data at offset 0. Write appropriate
% data address into the byte-addressed memory-address-register
mar := mpd0+2
% Push tos, load new tos from memory
SLDX dec(sp) | stack := tos | tos := memword | goto fetch
LDL % Load local variable at offset specified by "big" operand
r0 := big
mar := mpd0 + r0 | goto sldx
INCR % Increment top-of-stack by big operand
tos := tos + big | goto fetch
ADI % Add two words on top of stack
tos := tos + stack | inc(sp) | goto fetch
EQUI % Top two words of stack equal?
test tos - stack | inc(sp)
tos := 0 | if ~zero goto fetch
tos := 1 | goto fetch
This architecture should be compared to the original P-code machine specification as proposed by Niklaus Wirth.
P-machine performance
The end result was a 9"x11" board for the CPU that ran UCSD p-System faster than anything else, by a wide margin. As much as 35-50 times faster than the LSI-11 interpreter, and 7-9 times faster than the Western Digital Pascal MicroEngine did by replacing the LSI-11 microcode with p-code microcode. It also ran faster than the Niklaus Wirth Lilith machine but lacked the bit-mapped graphics capabilities, and around the same speed as a VAX-11/750 running native code. (But the VAX was hampered by the poor code coming out of the Berkeley Pascal compiler, and was also a 32-bit machine.)
Education
University of California, San Diego: BA, 1978
University of California, San Diego: MS, 1979
Later employment
Digital Equipment Corporation
Compaq Computer Corporation
Hewlett-Packard
Nvidia
Publications
Joel McCormack, Robert McNamara. Efficient and Tiled Polygon Traversal Using Half-Plane Edge Functions, to appear as Research Report 2000/4, Compaq Western Research Laboratory, August 2000. [Superset of Workshop paper listed immediately below.]
Joel McCormack, Robert McNamara. Tiled Polygon Traversal Using Half-Plane Edge Functions, Proceedings of the 2000 EUROGRAPHICS/SIGGRAPH Workshop on Graphics Hardware, ACM Press, New York, August 2000, pp. 15–21.
Robert McNamara, Joel McCormack, Norman P. Jouppi. Prefiltered Antialiased Lines Using Half-Plane Distance Functions, Research Report 98/2, Compaq Western Research Laboratory, August 2000. [Superset of Workshop paper listed immediately below.]
Robert McNamara, Joel McCormack, Norman P. Jouppi. Prefiltered Antialiased Lines Using Half-Plane Distance Functions, Proceedings of the 2000 EUROGRAPHICS/SIGGRAPH Workshop on Graphics Hardware, ACM Press, New York, August 2000, pp. 77–85.
Joel McCormack, Keith I. Farkas, Ronald Perry, Norman P. Jouppi. Simple and Table Feline: Fast Elliptical Lines for Anisotropic Texture Mapping, Research Report 99/1, Compaq Western Research Laboratory, October 1999. [Superset of SIGGRAPH paper listed immediately below.]
Joel McCormack, Ronald Perry, Keith I. Farkas, Norman P. Jouppi. Feline: Fast Elliptical Lines for Anisotropic Texture Mapping, SIGGRAPH 99 Conference Proceedings, ACM Press, New York, August 1999, pp. 243–250.
Joel McCormack, Robert McNamara, Christopher Gianos, Larry Seiler, Norman P. Jouppi, Ken Correll, Todd Dutton, John Zurawski. Neon: A (Big) (Fast) Single-Chip 3D Workstation Graphics Accelerator, Research Report 98/1, Compaq Western Research Laboratory, Revised July 1999. [Superset of Workshop and IEEE Neon papers listed immediately below.]
Joel McCormack, Robert McNamara, Christopher Gianos, Larry Seiler, Norman P. Jouppi, Ken Correll, Todd Dutton, John Zurawski. Implementing Neon: A 256-bit Graphics Accelerator, IEEE Micro, Vol. 19, No. 2, March/April 1999, pp. 58–69.
Joel McCormack, Robert McNamara, Christopher Gianos, Larry Seiler, Norman P. Jouppi, Ken Correll. Neon: A Single-Chip 3D Workstation Graphics Accelerator, Proceedings of the 1998 EUROGRAPHICS/SIGGRAPH Workshop on Graphics Hardware, ACM Press, New York, August 1998, pp. 123–132. [Voted Best Paper/Presentation.]
Joel McCormack, Robert McNamara. A Smart Frame Buffer, Research Report 93/1, Digital Equipment Corporation, Western Research Laboratory, January 1993. [Superset of USENIX paper listed immediately below.]
Joel McCormack, Robert McNamara. A Sketch of the Smart Frame Buffer, Proceedings of the 1993 Winter USENIX Conference, USENIX Association, Berkeley, January 1993, pp. 169–179.
Joel McCormack. Writing Fast X Servers for Dumb Color Frame Buffers, Research Report 91/1, Digital Equipment Corporation, Western Research Laboratory, February 1991. [Superset of the Software: Practice and Experience paper listed immediately below.]
Joel McCormack. Writing Fast X Servers for Dumb Color Frame Buffers, Software: Practice and Experience, Vol 20(S2), John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., West Sussex, England, October 1990, pp. 83–108. [Translated and reprinted in the Japanese edition of UNIX Magazine, ASCII Corp., October 1991, pp. 76–96.]
Hania Gajewska, Mark S. Manasse, Joel McCormack. Why X is Not Our Ideal Window System, Software: Practice and Experience, Vol 20(S2), John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., West Sussex, England, October 1990, pp. 137–171.
Paul J. Asente and Ralph R. Swick, with Joel McCormack. X Window System Toolkit: The Complete Programmer's Guide and Specification, X Version 11, Release 4, Digital Press, Maynard, Massachusetts, 1990.
Joel McCormack, Paul Asente. An Overview of the X Toolkit, Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on User Interface Software, ACM Press, New York, October 1988, pp. 46–55.
Joel McCormack, Paul Asente. Using the X Toolkit, or, How to Write a Widget. Proceedings of the Summer 1988 USENIX Conference, USENIX Association, Berkeley, June 1988, pp. 1–14.
Joel McCormack. The Right Language for the Job. UNIX Review, REVIEW Publications Co., Renton, Washington, Vol. 3, No. 9, September 1985, pp. 22–32.
Joel McCormack, Richard Gleaves. Modula-2: A Worthy Successor to Pascal, BYTE, Byte Publications, Peterborough, New Hampshire, Vol. 8, No. 4, April 1983, pp. 385–395.
See also
UCSD p-System
p-code machine
Pascal MicroEngine
References
The Pascal Users' Group Newsletter Archive
The UCSD P-system Museum
The UCSD Pascal Reunion website
Living people
American computer programmers
American computer scientists
Pascal (programming language)
NCR Corporation people
Digital Equipment Corporation people
Year of birth missing (living people) |
12322262 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella%20%28software%29 | Cinderella (software) | Cinderella is a proprietary interactive geometry software, written in Java programming language.
History
Cinderella was initially developed by Jürgen Richter-Gebert and Henry Crapo and was used to input incidence theorems and conjectures for automatic theorem proving using the binomial proving method by Richter-Gebert. The initial software was created in Objective-C on the NeXT platform.
In 1996, the software was rewritten in Java from scratch by Jürgen Richter-Gebert and Ulrich Kortenkamp. It still included the binomial prover, but was not suitable for classroom teaching as it still was prototypical. This version won the Multimedia Innovation Award at Learntec '97 in Karlsruhe, Germany. Due to this attention the German educational software publisher Heureka-Klett and the scientific publisher Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, agreed to produce a commercial version of the software. The school version of Cinderella 1.0 was published in 1998, including about 150 examples, animations and exercises created with Cinderella, the university version was released in 1999.
In 2006, a new version of Cinderella, Cinderella.2, was published in an online-only version. The printed manual for the now current version 2.6 has been published by Springer-Verlag in 2012.
In 2013, the pro version of Cinderella has been made freely available.
Features
Interactive geometry and analysis takes place in the realm of euclidean geometry, spherical geometry or hyperbolic geometry. It includes a physics simulation engine (with real gravity on Apple computers) and a scripting language. An export to blog feature allows for a 1-click publication on the web of a figure. It is currently mainly used in universities in Germany but its ease of use makes it suitable for usage at primary and secondary level as well.
See also
JavaScript reimplementation: CindyJS.
External links
Cinderella official website
Public Beta version
Online Documentation
Interactive geometry software |
1646964 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure%20by%20design | Secure by design | Secure by design, in software engineering, means that software products and capabilities have been designed to be foundationally secure.
Alternate security strategies, tactics and patterns are considered at the beginning of a software design, and the best are selected and enforced by the architecture, and they are used as guiding principles for developers. It is also encouraged to use strategic design patterns that have beneficial effects on security, even though those design patterns were not originally devised with security in mind.
Secure by Design is increasingly becoming the mainstream development approach to ensure security and privacy of software systems. In this approach, security is considered and built into the system at every layer and starts with a robust architecture design. Security architectural design decisions are based on well-known security strategies, tactics, and patterns defined as reusable techniques for achieving specific quality concerns. Security tactics/patterns provide solutions for enforcing the necessary authentication, authorization, confidentiality, data integrity, privacy, accountability, availability, safety and non-repudiation requirements, even when the system is under attack.
In order to ensure the security of a software system, not only is it important to design a robust intended security architecture but it is also necessary to map updated security strategies, tactics and patterns to software development in order to maintain security persistence.
Expect attacks
Malicious attacks on software should be assumed to occur, and care is taken to minimize impact. Security vulnerabilities are anticipated, along with invalid user input. Closely related is the practice of using "good" software design, such as domain-driven design or cloud native, as a way to increase security by reducing risk of vulnerability-opening mistakes—even though the design principles used were not originally conceived for security purposes.
Avoid security through obscurity
Generally, designs that work well do not rely on being secret. Often, secrecy reduces the number of attackers by demotivating a subset of the threat population. The logic is that if there is an increase in complexity for the attacker, the increased attacker effort to compromise the target will discourage them. While this technique implies reduced inherent risks, a virtually infinite set of threat actors and techniques applied over time will cause most secrecy methods to fail. While not mandatory, proper security usually means that everyone is allowed to know and understand the design because it is secure. This has the advantage that many people are looking at the computer code, which improves the odds that any flaws will be found sooner (see Linus's law). The disadvantage is that attackers can also obtain the code, which makes it easier for them to find vulnerabilities to exploit. It is generally believed, though, that the advantage of the open computer code outweighs the disadvantage.
Fewest privileges
Also, it is important that everything works with the fewest privileges possible (see the principle of least privilege). For example, a web server that runs as the administrative user ("root" or "admin") can have the privilege to remove files and users. A flaw in such a program could therefore put the entire system at risk, whereas a web server that runs inside an isolated environment, and only has the privileges for required network and filesystem functions, cannot compromise the system it runs on unless the security around it in itself is also flawed.
Methodologies
Secure Design should be a consideration at all points in the development lifecycle (whichever development methodology is chosen).
Some pre-built Secure By Design development methodologies exist (e.g. Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle).
Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle
Microsoft issued methodology and guidance based on the classical spiral model.
Standards and Legislation
Standards and Legislation exist to aide secure design by controlling the definition of "Secure", and providing concrete steps to testing and integrating secure systems.
Some examples of standards which cover or touch on Secure By Design principles:
ETSI TS 103 645 which is included in part in the UK Government "Proposals for regulating consumer smart product cyber security"
ISO/IEC 27000-series covers many aspects of secure design.
Server/client architectures
In server/client architectures, the program at the other side may not be an authorised client and the client's server may not be an authorised server. Even when they are, a man-in-the-middle attack could compromise communications.
Often the easiest way to break the security of a client/server system is not to go head on to the security mechanisms, but instead to go around them. A man in the middle attack is a simple example of this, because you can use it to collect details to impersonate a user. Which is why it is important to consider encryption, hashing, and other security mechanisms in your design to ensure that information collected from a potential attacker won't allow access.
Another key feature to client-server security design is good coding practices. For example, following a known software design structure, such as client and broker, can help in designing a well-built structure with a solid foundation. Furthermore, if the software is to be modified in the future, it is even more important that it follows a logical foundation of separation between the client and server. This is because if a programmer comes in and cannot clearly understand the dynamics of the program, they may end up adding or changing something that can add a security flaw. Even with the best design, this is always a possibility, but the better the standardization of the design, the less chance there is of this occurring.
See also
Computer security
Cyber security standards
Hardening
Multiple Independent Levels of Security
Secure by default
Security through obscurity
Software Security Assurance
References
External links
Secure Programming for Linux and Unix HOWTO
Secure UNIX Programming FAQ
Top 10 Secure Coding Practices
Security by Design Principles
Software quality
Articles with example C code
Software development philosophies
Software development process
Computer security procedures |
423866 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%E2%80%93LaPadula%20model | Bell–LaPadula model | The Bell–LaPadula Model (BLP) is a state machine model used for enforcing access control in government and military applications. It was developed by David Elliott Bell and Leonard J. LaPadula, subsequent to strong guidance from Roger R. Schell, to formalize the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) multilevel security (MLS) policy. The model is a formal state transition model of computer security policy that describes a set of access control rules which use security labels on objects and clearances for subjects. Security labels range from the most sensitive (e.g., "Top Secret"), down to the least sensitive (e.g., "Unclassified" or "Public").
The Bell–LaPadula model is an example of a model where there is no clear distinction between protection and security.
Features
The Bell–LaPadula model focuses on data confidentiality and controlled access to classified information, in contrast to the Biba Integrity Model which describes rules for the protection of data integrity. In this formal model, the entities in an information system are divided into subjects and objects. The notion of a "secure state" is defined, and it is proven that each state transition preserves security by moving from secure state to secure state, thereby inductively proving that the system satisfies the security objectives of the model. The Bell–LaPadula model is built on the concept of a state machine with a set of allowable states in a computer system. The transition from one state to another state is defined by transition functions. A system state is defined to be "secure" if the only permitted access modes of subjects to objects are in accordance with a security policy. To determine whether a specific access mode is allowed, the clearance of a subject is compared to the classification of the object (more precisely, to the combination of classification and set of compartments, making up the security level) to determine if the subject is authorized for the specific access mode. The clearance/classification scheme is expressed in terms of a lattice. The model defines one discretionary access control (DAC) rule and two mandatory access control (MAC) rules with three security properties:
The Simple Security Property states that a subject at a given security level may not read an object at a higher security level.
The * (star)Security Property states that a subject at a given security level may not write to any object at a lower security level.
The Discretionary Security Property uses an access matrix to specify the discretionary access control.
The transfer of information from a high-sensitivity document to a lower-sensitivity document may happen in the Bell–LaPadula model via the concept of trusted subjects. Trusted Subjects are not restricted by the Star-property. Trusted Subjects must be shown to be trustworthy with regard to the security policy.
The Bell–LaPadula security model is directed toward access control and is characterized by the phrase "write up, read down" (WURD). Compare the Biba model, the Clark–Wilson model, and the Chinese Wall model.
With Bell–LaPadula, users can create content only at or above their own security level (i.e. secret researchers can create secret or top-secret files but may not create public files; no write-down). Conversely, users can view content only at or below their own security level (i.e. secret researchers can view public or secret files, but may not view top-secret files; no read-up).
The Bell–LaPadula model explicitly defined its scope. It did not treat the following extensively:
Covert channels. Passing information via pre-arranged actions was described briefly.
Networks of systems. Later modeling work did address this topic.
Policies outside multilevel security. Work in the early 1990s showed that MLS is one version of boolean policies, as are all other published policies.
Strong Star Property
The Strong Star Property is an alternative to the *-Property, in which subjects may write to objects with only a matching security level. Thus, the write-up operation permitted in the usual *-Property is not present, only a write-to-same operation. The Strong Star Property is usually discussed in the context of multilevel database management systems and is motivated by integrity concerns. This Strong Star Property was anticipated in the Biba model where it was shown that strong integrity in combination with the Bell–LaPadula model resulted in reading and writing at a single level.
Tranquility principle
The tranquility principle of the Bell–LaPadula model states that the classification of a subject or object does not change while it is being referenced. There are two forms to the tranquility principle: the "principle of strong tranquility" states that security levels do not change during the normal operation of the system. The "principle of weak tranquility" states that security levels may never change in such a way as to violate a defined security policy. Weak tranquility is desirable as it allows systems to observe the principle of least privilege. That is, processes start with a low clearance level regardless of their owners clearance, and progressively accumulate higher clearance levels as actions require it.
Limitations
Only addresses confidentiality, control of writing (one form of integrity), *-property and discretionary access control
Covert channels are mentioned but are not addressed comprehensively
The tranquility principle limits its applicability to systems where security levels do not change dynamically. It allows controlled copying from high to low via trusted subjects. [Ed. Not many systems using BLP include dynamic changes to object security levels.]
See also
Biba Integrity Model
The Clark-Wilson Integrity Model
Discretionary Access Control - DAC
Graham-Denning Model
Mandatory Access Control - MAC
Multilevel security - MLS
Security Modes of Operation
Take-grant protection model
Air gap (networking)
Notes
References
Computer security models
Computer access control |
11879976 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padre%20Conceicao%20College%20of%20Engineering | Padre Conceicao College of Engineering | {{Infobox university
|name = Padre Conceicao College of Engineering
|established = 1997
|city = Verna
|native_name = Padre Conceição (Portuguese), Padre Konseisanv (Konkani)
|image =Padre_Conceição_College_Of_Engineering.jpg
|image_size = 160px
|motto = Love your neighbour as yourself|director = Fr. Orlando Rodrigues
|principal = Mahesh B. Parappagoudar
|state = Goa
|country = India
|address = Agnel Technical Education Complex, Agnel ganv, Verna, Goa
|colours =
|athletics_affiliations =
|type = Private unaided engineering college
|website =
}}
Padre Conceição College of Engineering (PCCE) is a private engineering college in Verna, Goa, India, established in 1997. The college is affiliated to Goa University, Taleigao, Goa, and the programmes are approved by All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), New Delhi. The college is a part of Agnel Technical Education Complex, Verna, Goa and the college campus was designed by civil engineer Olavo Carvalho. PCCE was the first private engineering college in the state. The students of PCCE call themselves as Pacers''.
History
The college is named after Fr. Conceicao Rodrigues, a patriot and founder of Agnel Ashram, who died in 1984 after making a contribution in the field of technical education at national level. Rev. Fr. Conceicao Rodrigues was a visionary and freedom fighter. Under his inspiration, the Agnel Fathers (the trustees of the Society of St. Francis Xavier, Pilar) established technical education complexes around India. The then Director of Technical Education of the State of Maharashtra, Prof. G. Kadu in his oration at the funeral of Fr. Conceicao Rodrigues, called him a Saint of Technical Education.
Academics
The college conducts four-year degree programmes in the fields of computer engineering, electronics and telecommunication engineering, mechanical engineering and information technology.
The college is affiliated to Goa University, Taleigao Goa, and all the programmes are approved by All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), New Delhi.
Mechanical engineering
The degree programme in mechanical engineering has been in existence since the inception of the college in 1997. The course is approved by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). The course is of four years duration, each year consisting of two semesters. The students undertake a project during the final year. The course has a capacity of 75 students per year.
Electronics and telecommunication engineering
Labs
Communication Engineering Lab
The students carry out projects usually every semester in subjects such as signals and systems, communication engineering, digital signal processing and digital image processing. There are a number of digital signal processing kits with which the students can implement the projects. There are communication engineering trainer kits that helps the students to understand the concepts of networking. Each year the final year students carry out projects under the guidance of the faculty in this lab.
Advanced Microprocessor Lab
The lab provides the students with microprocessor eits and other electronic devices required to program and implement the circuits ranging from a simplest LED lighting system to advanced robotics projects. Projects carried out in the lab have won awards at National Level Technical Symposiums.
Digital Systems Lab
The lab introduces students to digital electronics and lays a foundation for advanced courses such as Microprocessors and Micro Controllers.
Basic Electrical Lab
The lab is a part of the introductory course for the freshers in order to learn electric circuits, LEDs, and other simple electronics and electrical components that act as a foundation for the courses that follow in the advanced semesters.
Computer engineering
The degree programme in computer engineering has been in existence since the inception of the college in 1997. The course is approved by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). The course is of 4 years duration, each year consisting of two semesters. The students undertake a project during the final year. The course has an intake of 60 students.
Information technology
The degree programme in information technology was started in 2000. The course is approved by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). The course is of four years duration, each year consisting of two semesters. The students undertake a project during the final year. The course has an intake of 60 students per year.
Postgraduate degree courses
M.E. Information Technology (Internet Technologies)
Student life
PCCE students play many sports such as badminton and football.
Campus
PCCE has the fourth largest campus among the engineering colleges in Goa, with a library that houses around 13,000 books.
Cultural and non-academic activities
Annual cultural fest: Mithya
Each year the student council organize the inter department cultural event, under the guidance of the faculty.
Annual technical fest: Techyon
Each year the students of the department organize a national level technical fest. The organizing committee is the student council. Under the guidance of the faculty, the society is responsible for organizing technical events and provides technical assistance to juniors.
Fest events
Hackathon is an inter collegiate competition where teams of 2 to 3 must build an application or a computer software. The application or the software is based on a theme which is given to the participants. A time limit of 2 days is given and the participants are allowed to work overnight and off campus.
RoboWars is an inter collegiate competition where teams of five must construct, deploy and operate a fighting robot in a gladiatorial arena. Rules follow the traditional "RoboWar" league guidelines with only one weight category (<25 kg). Viewed as more of an entertainment event than an educational one; the decision to include it was based on the enthusiasm of students; the mechanical engineering department in particular.
Hardwired is a circuit building competition, where the students construct a circuit of their choice. The winners are judged based on the usefulness, understanding and the efforts involved in building the circuit.
Speak out is a technical paper presentation competition, where the students present their own technical topic in front of faculty and guests from industry.
Quiz is an open quiz on the final day of the event. Students from colleges from the state and also from other states, participate in the event.
The fest has literary events and a photography competition.
Linkages
The college has associations and linkages with industry and other organisations, such as a Memorandum of Understanding with National Institute of Oceanography, EMC Corporation, and D-Link. Workshops, seminars, conferences and field visits are organised in coordination with industry.
Reputation and standards
Being affiliated with Goa University, a university with an accreditation from the NAAC, the students answer the same exams as the government-run Goa Engineering College.
Sister institutes
Fr. Conceicao Rodrigues College of Engineering, Bandra, Mumbai
Fr. Conceicao Rodrigues Institute of Technology, Vashi, Mumbai
Agnel Institute of Technology and Design, Assagao, Goa
Father Agnel Polytechnic, New Delhi
Location
By road: the college is on National Highway 17 at Verna between the Panaji and Margao cities. It is from the Margao Bus Station and from Panaji Bus Station. The college is close to the Electronic City at Verna.
By rail: the college is from Margao Railway station.
By air: the college is from Dabolim Airport at Vasco, Goa.
References
External links
Official website
Engineering colleges in Goa
Educational institutions established in 1997
Education in South Goa district
1997 establishments in Goa |
28805 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen%20Cole%20Kleene | Stephen Cole Kleene | Stephen Cole Kleene ( ; January 5, 1909 – January 25, 1994) was an American mathematician. One of the students of Alonzo Church, Kleene, along with Rózsa Péter, Alan Turing, Emil Post, and others, is best known as a founder of the branch of mathematical logic known as recursion theory, which subsequently helped to provide the foundations of theoretical computer science. Kleene's work grounds the study of computable functions. A number of mathematical concepts are named after him: Kleene hierarchy, Kleene algebra, the Kleene star (Kleene closure), Kleene's recursion theorem and the Kleene fixed-point theorem. He also invented regular expressions in 1951 to describe McCulloch-Pitts neural networks, and made significant contributions to the foundations of mathematical intuitionism.
Biography
Kleene was awarded a bachelor's degree from Amherst College in 1930. He was awarded a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1934, where his thesis, entitled A Theory of Positive Integers in Formal Logic, was supervised by Alonzo Church. In the 1930s, he did important work on Church's lambda calculus. In 1935, he joined the mathematics department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he spent nearly all of his career. After two years as an instructor, he was appointed assistant professor in 1937.
While a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, 1939–1940, he laid the foundation for recursion theory, an area that would be his lifelong research interest. In 1941, he returned to Amherst College, where he spent one year as an associate professor of mathematics.
During World War II, Kleene was a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy. He was an instructor of navigation at the U.S. Naval Reserve's Midshipmen's School in New York, and then a project director at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C.
In 1946, Kleene returned to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, becoming a full professor in 1948 and the Cyrus C. MacDuffee professor of mathematics in 1964. He served two terms as the Chair of the Department of Mathematics and one term as the Chair of the Department of Numerical Analysis (later renamed the Department of Computer Science). He also served as Dean of the College of Letters and Science in 1969–1974. During his years at the University of Wisconsin he was thesis advisor to 13 Ph.D. students. He retired from the University of Wisconsin in 1979. In 1999 the mathematics library at the University of Wisconsin was renamed in his honor.
Kleene's teaching at Wisconsin resulted in three texts in mathematical logic, Kleene (1952, 1967) and Kleene and Vesley (1965). The first two are often cited and still in print. Kleene (1952) wrote alternative proofs to the Gödel's incompleteness theorems that enhanced their canonical status and made them easier to teach and understand. Kleene and Vesley (1965) is the classic American introduction to intuitionistic logic and mathematical mathematics.
Kleene served as president of the Association for Symbolic Logic, 1956–1958, and of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science, 1961. The importance of Kleene's work led to Daniel Dennett coining the saying, published in 1978, that "Kleeneness is next to Gödelness." In 1990, he was awarded the National Medal of Science.
Kleene and his wife Nancy Elliott had four children. He had a lifelong devotion to the family farm in Maine. An avid mountain climber, he had a strong interest in nature and the environment, and was active in many conservation causes.
Legacy
At each conference of the Symposium on Logic in Computer Science the Kleene award, in honour of Stephen Cole Kleene, is given for the best student paper.
Selected publications
1935.
1935.
1935.
1936.
1936.
1938.
1943.
1951.
1952. Introduction to Metamathematics. New York: Van Nostrand. (Ishi Press: 2009 reprint).
1956.
1965 (with Richard Eugene Vesley). The Foundations of Intuitionistic Mathematics. North-Holland.
1967. Mathematical Logic. John Wiley & Sons. Dover reprint, 2002. .
1981. "Origins of Recursive Function Theory" in Annals of the History of Computing 3, No. 1.
1987.
See also
Kleene–Brouwer order
Kleene–Rosser paradox
Kleene's O
Kleene's T predicate
List of pioneers in computer science
Notes
References
External links
Biographical memoir – by Saunders Mac Lane
Kleene bibliography
– Interview with Kleene and John Barkley Rosser about their experiences at Princeton
American computer scientists
American logicians
Amherst College alumni
Computability theorists
Educators from Hartford, Connecticut
Institute for Advanced Study visiting scholars
Intuitionism
National Medal of Science laureates
Princeton University alumni
University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty
1909 births
1994 deaths
20th-century American mathematicians
Mathematicians from Connecticut |
41227816 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global%20surveillance | Global surveillance | Global mass surveillance can be defined as the mass surveillance of entire populations across national borders.
Its existence was not widely acknowledged by governments and the mainstream media until the global surveillance disclosures by Edward Snowden triggered a debate about the right to privacy in the Digital Age.
Its roots can be traced back to the middle of the 20th century when the UKUSA Agreement was jointly enacted by the United Kingdom and the United States, which later expanded to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to create the present Five Eyes alliance. The alliance developed cooperation arrangements with several "third-party" nations. Eventually, this resulted in the establishment of a global surveillance network, code-named "ECHELON" (1971).
Historical background
The origins of global surveillance can be traced back to the late 1940s after the UKUSA Agreement was collaboratively enacted by the United Kingdom and the United States, which eventually culminated in the creation of the global surveillance network code-named "ECHELON" in 1971.
In the aftermath of the 1970s Watergate affair and a subsequent congressional inquiry led by Sen. Frank Church, it was revealed that the NSA, in collaboration with Britain's GCHQ, had routinely intercepted the international communications of prominent anti-Vietnam War leaders such as Jane Fonda and Dr. Benjamin Spock. Decades later, a multi-year investigation by the European Parliament highlighted the NSA's role in economic espionage in a report entitled 'Development of Surveillance Technology and Risk of Abuse of Economic Information', in 1999.
However, for the general public, it was a series of detailed disclosures of internal NSA documents in June 2013 that first revealed the massive extent of the NSA's spying, both foreign and domestic. Most of these were leaked by an ex-contractor, Edward Snowden. Even so, a number of these older global surveillance programs such as PRISM, XKeyscore, and Tempora were referenced in the 2013 release of thousands of documents. Many countries around the world, including Western Allies and member states of NATO, have been targeted by the "Five Eyes" strategic alliance of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the United States—five English-speaking Western countries aiming to achieve Total Information Awareness by mastering the Internet with analytical tools such as the Boundless Informant. As confirmed by the NSA's director Keith B. Alexander on 26 September 2013, the NSA collects and stores all phone records of all American citizens. Much of the data is kept in large storage facilities such as the Utah Data Center, a US $1.5 billion megaproject referred to by The Wall Street Journal as a "symbol of the spy agency's surveillance prowess."
On 6 June 2013, Britain's The Guardian newspaper began publishing a series of revelations by an as yet unknown American whistleblower, revealed several days later to be ex-CIA and ex-NSA-contracted systems analyst Edward Snowden. Snowden gave a cache of documents to two journalists, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Greenwald later estimated that the cache contains 15,000–20,000 documents, some very large and detailed, and some very small. In over two subsequent months of publications, it became clear that the NSA had operated a complex web of spying programs that allowed it to intercept Internet and telephone conversations from over a billion users from dozens of countries around the world. Specific revelations were made about China, the European Union, Latin America, Iran and Pakistan, and Australia and New Zealand, however, the published documentation reveals that many of the programs indiscriminately collected bulk information directly from central servers and Internet backbones, which almost invariably carry and reroute information from distant countries.
Due to this central server and backbone monitoring, many of the programs overlapped and interrelated with one another. These programs were often carried out with the assistance of US entities such as the United States Department of Justice and the FBI, were sanctioned by US laws such as the FISA Amendments Act, and the necessary court orders for them were signed by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Some of the NSA's programs were directly aided by national and foreign intelligence agencies, Britain's GCHQ and Australia's ASD, as well as by large private telecommunications and Internet corporations, such as Verizon, Telstra, Google, and Facebook.
Snowden's disclosures of the NSA's surveillance activities are a continuation of news leaks which have been ongoing since the early 2000s. One year after the September 11, 2001, attacks, former U.S. intelligence official William Binney was publicly critical of the NSA for spying on U.S. citizens.
Further disclosures followed. On 16 December 2005, The New York Times published a report under the headline "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts." In 2006, further evidence of the NSA's domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens was provided by USA Today. The newspaper released a report on 11 May 2006, regarding the NSA's "massive database" of phone records collected from "tens of millions" of U.S. citizens. According to USA Today, these phone records were provided by several telecom companies such as AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth. In 2008, the security analyst Babak Pasdar revealed the existence of the so-called "Quantico circuit" that he and his team discovered in 2003 when brought on to update the carrier's security system. The circuit provided the U.S. federal government with a backdoor into the network of an unnamed wireless provider, which was later independently identified as Verizon.
Snowden's disclosures
Snowden made his first contact with journalist Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian in late 2012. The timeline of mass surveillance disclosures by Snowden continued throughout the entire year of 2013.
By category
Documents leaked by Snowden in 2013 include court orders, memos, and policy documents related to a wide range of surveillance activities.
Purposes
According to the April 2013 summary of documents leaked by Snowden, other than to combat terrorism, these surveillance programs were employed to assess the foreign policy and economic stability of other countries, and to gather "commercial secrets".
In a statement addressed to the National Congress of Brazil in early August 2013, journalist Glenn Greenwald maintained that the U.S. government had used counter-terrorism as a pretext for clandestine surveillance in order to compete with other countries in the "business, industrial and economic fields". In a December 2013 letter to the Brazilian government, Snowden wrote that "These programs were never about terrorism: they're about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power." According to White House panel member NSA didn't stop any terrorist attack. However NSA chief said, that surveillance programs stopped 54 terrorist plots.
In an interview with Der Spiegel published on 12 August 2013, former NSA Director Michael Hayden admitted that "We (the NSA) steal secrets. We're number one in it". Hayden also added: "We steal stuff to make you safe, not to make you rich".
According to documents seen by the news agency Reuters, these "secrets" were subsequently funneled to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. Federal agents are then instructed to "recreate" the investigative trail in order to "cover up" where the information originated.
According to the congressional testimony of Keith B. Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency, one of the purposes of its data collection is to store all the phone records inside a place that can be searched and assessed at all times. When asked by Senator Mark Udall if the goal of the NSA is to collect the phone records of all Americans, Alexander replied, "Yes, I believe it is in the nation's best interest to put all the phone records into a lockbox that we could search when the nation needs to do it."
Targets and methods
Collection of metadata and other content
In the United States, the NSA is collecting the phone records of more than 300 million Americans. The international surveillance tool XKeyscore allows government analysts to search through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals. Britain's global surveillance program Tempora intercepts the fibre-optic cables that form the backbone of the Internet. Under the NSA's PRISM surveillance program, data that has already reached its final destination would be directly harvested from the servers of the following U.S. service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple Inc.
Contact chaining
The NSA uses the analysis of phone call and e-mail logs of American citizens to create sophisticated graphs of their social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information.
According to top secret NSA documents leaked by Snowden, during a single day in 2012, the NSA collected e-mail address books from:
22,881 Gmail accounts
82,857 Facebook accounts
105,068 Hotmail accounts
444,743 Yahoo! accounts
Each day, the NSA collects contacts from an estimated 500,000 buddy lists on live-chat services as well as from the inbox displays of Web-based e-mail accounts. Taken together, the data enables the NSA to draw detailed maps of a person's life based on their personal, professional, religious and political connections.
Data transfer
Federal agencies in the United States: Data gathered by these surveillance programs is routinely shared with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In addition, the NSA supplies domestic intercepts to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and other law enforcement agencies.
Foreign countries: As a result of the NSA's secret treaties with foreign countries, data gathered by its surveillance programs are routinely shared with countries who are signatories to the UKUSA Agreement. These foreign countries also help to operate several NSA programs such as XKEYSCORE. (See International cooperation.)
Financial payments monitoring
A special branch of the NSA called "Follow the Money" (FTM) monitors international payments, banking and credit card transactions and later stores the collected data in the NSA's financial databank, "Tracfin".
Mobile phone location tracking
Mobile phone tracking refers to the act of attaining the position and coordinates of a mobile phone. According to The Washington Post, the NSA has been tracking the locations of mobile phones from all over the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones. In the process of doing so, the NSA collects more than 5 billion records of phone locations on a daily basis. This enables NSA analysts to map cellphone owners' relationships by correlating their patterns of movement over time with thousands or millions of other phone users who cross their paths.
In order to decode private conversations, the NSA has cracked the most commonly used cellphone encryption technology, A5/1. According to a classified document leaked by Snowden, the agency can "process encrypted A5/1" even when it has not acquired an encryption key. In addition, the NSA uses various types of cellphone infrastructure, such as the links between carrier networks, to determine the location of a cellphone user tracked by Visitor Location Registers.
Infiltration of smartphones
As worldwide sales of smartphones grew rapidly, the NSA decided to take advantage of the smartphone boom. This is particularly advantageous because the smartphone contains a variety of data sets that would interest an intelligence agency, such as social contacts, user behaviour, interests, location, photos and credit card numbers and passwords.
According to the documents leaked by Snowden, the NSA has set up task forces assigned to several smartphone manufacturers and operating systems, including Apple Inc.'s iPhone and iOS operating system, as well as Google's Android mobile operating system. Similarly, Britain's GCHQ assigned a team to study and crack the BlackBerry. In addition, there are smaller NSA programs, known as "scripts", that can perform surveillance on 38 different features of the iOS 3 and iOS 4 operating systems. These include the mapping feature, voicemail and photos, as well as Google Earth, Facebook and Yahoo! Messenger.
Infiltration of commercial data centers
In contrast to the PRISM surveillance program, which is a front-door method of access that is nominally approved by the FISA court, the MUSCULAR surveillance program is noted to be "unusually aggressive" in its usage of unorthodox hacking methods to infiltrate Yahoo! and Google data centres around the world. As the program is operated overseas (United Kingdom), the NSA presumes that anyone using a foreign data link is a foreigner, and is, therefore, able to collect content and metadata on a previously unknown scale from U.S. citizens and residents. According to the documents leaked by Snowden, the MUSCULAR surveillance program is jointly operated by the NSA and Britain's GCHQ agency. (See International cooperation.)
Infiltration of anonymous networks
The Five Eyes have made repeated attempts to spy on Internet users communicating in secret via the anonymity network Tor. Several of their clandestine operations involve the implantation of malicious code into the computers of anonymous Tor users who visit infected websites. In some cases, the NSA and GCHQ have succeeded in blocking access to the anonymous network, diverting Tor users to insecure channels. In other cases, the NSA and the GCHQ were able to uncover the identity of these anonymous users.
Monitoring of hotel reservation systems
Under the Royal Concierge surveillance program, Britain's GCHQ agency uses an automated monitoring system to infiltrate the reservation systems of at least 350 luxury hotels in many different parts of the world. Other related surveillance programs involve the wiretapping of room telephones and fax machines used in targeted hotels, as well as the monitoring of computers, hooked up to the hotel network.
Virtual reality surveillance
The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) have been conducting surveillance on the networks of many online games, including massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft, as well as virtual worlds such as Second Life, and the Xbox gaming console.
Political Espionage
According to the April 2013 summary of disclosures, the NSA defined its "intelligence priorities" on a scale of "1" (highest interest) to "5" (lowest interest). It classified about 30 countries as "3rd parties", with whom it cooperates but also spies on:
Main targets: China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan were ranked highly on the NSA's list of spying priorities, followed by France, Germany, Japan, and Brazil. The European Union's "international trade" and "economic stability" are also of interest. Other high priority targets include Cuba, Israel, and North Korea.
Irrelevant: From a US intelligence perspective, countries such as Cambodia, Laos and Nepal were largely irrelevant, as were governments of smaller European Union countries such as Finland, Denmark, Croatia and the Czech Republic.
Other prominent targets included members and adherents of the Internet group known as "Anonymous", as well as potential whistleblowers. According to Snowden, the NSA targeted reporters who wrote critically about the government after 9/11.
As part of a joint operation with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the NSA deployed secret eavesdropping posts in eighty U.S. embassies and consulates worldwide. The headquarters of NATO were also used by NSA experts to spy on the European Union.
In 2013, documents provided by Edward Snowden revealed that the following intergovernmental organizations, diplomatic missions, and government ministries have been subjected to surveillance by the "Five Eyes":
International Cooperation
During World War II, the BRUSA Agreement was signed by the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom for the purpose of intelligence sharing. This was later formalized in the UKUSA Agreement of 1946 as a secret treaty. The full text of the agreement was released to the public on 25 June 2010.
Although the treaty was later revised to include other countries such as Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Norway, Turkey, and the Philippines, most of the information sharing has been performed by the so-called "Five Eyes", a term referring to the following English-speaking western democracies and their respective intelligence agencies:
– The Defence Signals Directorate of Australia
– The Communications Security Establishment of Canada
– The Government Communications Security Bureau of New Zealand
– The Government Communications Headquarters of the United Kingdom, which is widely considered to be a leader in traditional spying due to its influence on countries that were once part of the British Empire.
– The National Security Agency of the United States, which has the biggest budget and the most advanced technical abilities among the "five eyes".
Left: SEA-ME-WE 3, which runs across the Afro-Eurasian supercontinent from Japan to Northern Germany, is one of the most important submarine cables accessed by the "Five Eyes". Singapore, a former British colony in the Asia-Pacific region (blue dot), plays a vital role in intercepting Internet and telecommunications traffic heading from Australia/Japan to Europe, and vice versa. An intelligence-sharing agreement between Singapore and Australia allows the rest of the "Five Eyes" to gain access to SEA-ME-WE 3.
Right: TAT-14, a telecommunications cable linking Europe with the United States, was identified as one of few assets of "Critical Infrastructure and Key Resources" of the US on foreign territory. In 2013, it was revealed that British officials "pressured a handful of telecommunications and Internet companies" to allow the British government to gain access to TAT-14.
According to the leaked documents, aside from the Five Eyes, most other Western countries have also participated in the NSA surveillance system and are sharing information with each other. In the documents the NSA lists "approved SIGINT partners" which are partner countries in addition to the Five Eyes. Glenn Greenwald said that the "NSA often maintains these partnerships by paying its partner to develop certain technologies and engage in surveillance, and can thus direct how the spying is carried out." These partner countries are divided into two groups, "Second Parties" and "Third Parties". The Second Parties are doing comprehensive cooperation with the NSA, and the Third Parties are doing focused cooperation. However, being a partner of the NSA does not automatically exempt a country from being targeted by the NSA itself. According to an internal NSA document leaked by Snowden, "We (the NSA) can, and often do, target the signals of most 3rd party foreign partners."
Australia
The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), formerly known as the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD), shares information on Australian citizens with the other members of the UKUSA Agreement. According to a 2008 Five Eyes document leaked by Snowden, data of Australian citizens shared with foreign countries include "bulk, unselected, unminimised metadata" as well as "medical, legal or religious information".
In close cooperation with other members of the Five Eyes community, the ASD runs secret surveillance facilities in many parts of Southeast Asia without the knowledge of Australian diplomats. In addition, the ASD cooperates with the Security and Intelligence Division (SID) of the Republic of Singapore in an international operation to intercept underwater telecommunications cables across the Eastern Hemisphere and the Pacific Ocean.
In March 2017 it was reported that, on advice from the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, more than 500 Iraqi and Syrian refugees, have been refused entry to Australia, in the last year.
Canada
The Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) offers the NSA resources for advanced collection, processing, and analysis. It has set up covert sites at the request of NSA. The US-Canada SIGNT relationship dates back to a secret alliance formed during World War II, and was formalized in 1949 under the CANUSA Agreement.
On behalf of the NSA, the CSEC opened secret surveillance facilities in 20 countries around the world.
As well, the Communications Security Establishment Canada has been revealed, following the global surveillance disclosures to be engaging in surveillance on Wifi Hotspots of major Canadian Airports, collecting meta-data to use for engaging in surveillance on travelers, even days after their departure from said airports.
Denmark
The Politiets Efterretningstjeneste (PET) of Denmark, a domestic intelligence agency, exchanges data with the NSA on a regular basis, as part of a secret agreement with the United States. Being one of the "9-Eyes" of the UKUSA Agreement, Denmark's relationship with the NSA is closer than the NSA's relationship with Germany, Sweden, Spain, Belgium or Italy.
France
The Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE) of France maintains a close relationship with both the NSA and the GCHQ after discussions for increased cooperation began in November 2006. By the early 2010s, the extent of cooperation in the joint interception of digital data by the DGSE and the NSA was noted to have increased dramatically.
In 2011, a formal memorandum for data exchange was signed by the DGSE and the NSA, which facilitated the transfer of millions of metadata records from the DGSE to the NSA. From December 2012 to 8 January 2013, over 70 million metadata records were handed over to the NSA by French intelligence agencies.
Germany
The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) of Germany systematically transfers metadata from German intelligence sources to the NSA. In December 2012 alone, the BND provided the NSA with 500 million metadata records. The NSA granted the Bundesnachrichtendienst access to X-Keyscore, in exchange for the German surveillance programs Mira4 and Veras.
In early 2013, Hans-Georg Maaßen, President of the German domestic security agency Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), made several visits to the headquarters of the NSA. According to classified documents of the German government, Maaßen agreed to transfer all data records of persons monitored in Germany by the BfV via XKeyscore to the NSA. In addition, the BfV works very closely with eight other U.S. government agencies, including the CIA. Under Project 6, which is jointly operated by the CIA, BfV, and BND, a massive database containing personal information such as photos, license plate numbers, Internet search histories and telephone metadata was developed to gain a better understanding of the social relationships of presumed jihadists.
In 2012, the BfV handed over 864 data sets of personal information to the CIA, NSA and seven other U.S. intelligence agencies. In exchange, the BND received data from U.S. intelligence agencies on 1,830 occasions. The newly acquired data was handed over to the BfV and stored in a domestically accessible system known as NADIS WN.
Israel
The Israeli SIGINT National Unit (ISNU) routinely receives raw, unfiltered data of U.S. citizens from the NSA. However, a secret NSA document leaked by Snowden revealed that U.S. government officials are explicitly exempted from such forms of data sharing with the ISNU. As stated in a memorandum detailing the rules of data sharing on U.S. citizens, the ISNU is obligated to:
According to the undated memorandum, the ground rules for intelligence sharing between the NSA and the ISNU were laid out in March 2009. Under the data sharing agreement, the ISNU is allowed to retain the identities of U.S. citizens (excluding U.S. government officials) for up to a year.
Japan
In 2011, the NSA asked the Japanese government to intercept underwater fibre-optic cables carrying phone and Internet data in the Asia-Pacific region. However, the Japanese government refused to comply.
Libya
Under the reign of Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan regime forged a partnership with Britain's secret service MI6 and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to obtain information about Libyan dissidents living in the United States and Canada. In exchange, Gaddafi allowed the Western democracies to use Libya as a base for extraordinary renditions.
Netherlands
The Algemene Inlichtingen en Veiligheidsdienst (AIVD) of the Netherlands has been receiving and storing data of Internet users gathered by U.S. intelligence sources such as the NSA's PRISM surveillance program. During a meeting in February 2013, the AIVD and the MIVD briefed the NSA on their attempts to hack Internet forums and to collect the data of all users using a technology known as Computer Network Exploitation (CNE).
Norway
The Norwegian Intelligence Service (NIS) has confirmed that data collected by the agency is "shared with the Americans". Kjell Grandhagen, head of Norwegian military intelligence told reporters at a news conference that "We share this information with partners, and partners share with us ... We are talking about huge amounts of traffic data".
In cooperation with the NSA, the NIS has gained access to Russian targets in the Kola Peninsula and other civilian targets. In general, the NIS provides information to the NSA about "Politicians", "Energy" and "Armament". A top secret memo of the NSA lists the following years as milestones of the Norway-United States of America SIGNT agreement, or NORUS Agreement:
1952 – Informal starting year of cooperation between the NIS and the NSA
1954 – Formalization of the NORUS Agreement
1963 – Extension of the agreement for coverage of foreign instrumentation signals intelligence (FISINT)
1970 – Extension of the agreement for coverage of electronic intelligence (ELINT)
1994 – Extension of the agreement for coverage of communications intelligence (COMINT)
The NSA perceives the NIS as one of its most reliable partners. Both agencies also cooperate to crack the encryption systems of mutual targets. According to the NSA, Norway has made no objections to its requests.
Singapore
The Defence Ministry of Singapore and its Security and Intelligence Division (SID) have been secretly intercepting much of the fibre optic cable traffic passing through the Asian continent. In close cooperation with the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD/DSD), Singapore's SID has been able to intercept SEA-ME-WE 3 (Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 3) as well as SEA-ME-WE 4 telecommunications cables. Access to these international telecommunications channels is facilitated by Singapore's government-owned operator, SingTel. Temasek Holdings, a multibillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund with a majority stake in SingTel, has maintained close relations with the country's intelligence agencies.
Information gathered by the Government of Singapore is transferred to the Government of Australia as part of an intelligence sharing agreement. This allows the "Five Eyes" to maintain a "stranglehold on communications across the Eastern Hemisphere".
Spain
In close cooperation with the Centro Nacional de Inteligencia (CNI), the NSA intercepted 60.5 million phone calls in Spain in a single month.
Sweden
The Försvarets radioanstalt (FRA) of Sweden (codenamed Sardines) has allowed the "Five Eyes" to access underwater cables in the Baltic Sea. On 5 December 2013, Sveriges Television (Swedish Television) revealed that the FRA has been conducting a clandestine surveillance operation targeting the internal politics of Russia. The operation was conducted on behalf of the NSA, which receives data handed over to it by the FRA.
According to documents leaked by Snowden, the FRA of Sweden has been granted access to the NSA's international surveillance program XKeyscore.
Switzerland
The Federal Intelligence Service (NDB) of Switzerland exchanges information with the NSA regularly, on the basis of a secret agreement to circumvent domestic surveillance restrictions. In addition, the NSA has been granted access to Swiss surveillance facilities in Leuk (canton of Valais) and Herrenschwanden (canton of Bern), which are part of the Swiss surveillance program Onyx.
According to the NDB, the agency maintains working relationships with about 100 international organizations. However, the NDB has denied any form of cooperation with the NSA. Although the NSA does not have direct access to Switzerland's Onyx surveillance program, the Director of the NDB acknowledged that it is possible for other U.S. intelligence agencies to gain access to Switzerland's surveillance system.
United Kingdom
The British government allowed the NSA to store personal data of British citizens.
Under Project MINARET, anti-Vietnam War dissidents in the United States were jointly targeted by the GCHQ and the NSA.
United States
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
The CIA pays AT&T more than US$10 million a year to gain access to international phone records, including those of U.S. citizens.
National Security Agency (NSA)
The NSA's Foreign Affairs Directorate interacts with foreign intelligence services and members of the Five Eyes to implement global surveillance.
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
The FBI acts as the liaison between U.S. intelligence agencies and Silicon Valley giants such as Microsoft.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
In the early 2010s, the DHS conducted a joint surveillance operation with the FBI to crack down on dissidents of the Occupy Wall Street protest movement.
Other law enforcement agencies
The NSA supplies domestic intercepts to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and other law enforcement agencies, who use intercepted data to initiate criminal investigations against US citizens. Federal agents are instructed to "recreate" the investigative trail in order to "cover up" where the information originated.
White House
Weeks after the September 11 attacks, U.S. President George W. Bush signed the Patriot Act to ensure no disruption in the government's ability to conduct global surveillance:
The Patriot Act was extended by U.S. President Barack Obama in May 2011 to further extend the federal government's legal authority to conduct additional forms of surveillance such as roving wiretaps.
Commercial cooperation
Over 70 percent of the United States Intelligence Community's budget is earmarked for payment to private firms. According to Forbes magazine, the defense technology company Lockheed Martin is currently the US's biggest defense contractor, and it is destined to be the NSA's most powerful commercial partner and biggest contractor in terms of dollar revenue.
AT&T
In a joint operation with the NSA, the American telecommunications corporation AT&T operates Room 641A in the SBC Communications building in San Francisco to spy on Internet traffic. The CIA pays AT&T more than US$10 million a year to gain access to international phone records, including those of U.S. citizens.
Booz Allen Hamilton
Projects developed by Booz Allen Hamilton include the Strategic Innovation Group to identify terrorists through social media, on behalf of government agencies. During the fiscal year of 2013, Booz Allen Hamilton derived 99% of its income from the government, with the largest portion of its revenue coming from the U.S. Army. In 2013, Booz Allen Hamilton was hailed by Bloomberg Businessweek as "the World's Most Profitable Spy Organization".
British Telecommunications
British Telecommunications (code-named Remedy), a major supplier of telecommunications, granted Britain's intelligence agency GCHQ "unlimited access" to its network of undersea cables, according to documents leaked by Snowden.
Microsoft
The American multinational corporation Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent software encryption safeguards. It also allowed the federal government to monitor web chats on the Outlook.com portal. In 2013, Microsoft worked with the FBI to allow the NSA to gain access to the company's cloud storage service SkyDrive.
Orange S.A.
The French telecommunications corporation Orange S.A. shares customer call data with the French intelligence agency DGSE, and the intercepted data is handed over to GCHQ.
RSA Security
RSA Security was paid US$10 million by the NSA to introduce a cryptographic backdoor in its encryption products.
Stratfor
Strategic Forecasting, Inc., more commonly known as Stratfor, is a global intelligence company offering information to governments and private clients including Dow Chemical Company, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, and the U.S. Marine Corps.
Vodafone
The British telecommunications company Vodafone (code-named Gerontic) granted Britain's intelligence agency GCHQ "unlimited access" to its network of undersea cables, according to documents leaked by Snowden.
In-Q-Tel
In-Q-Tel, which receives more than US$56 million a year in government support, is a venture capital firm that enables the CIA to invest in Silicon Valley.
Palantir Technologies
Palantir Technologies is a data mining corporation with close ties to the FBI, NSA and CIA.
Based in Palo Alto, California, the company developed a data collection and analytical program known as Prism.
In 2011, it was revealed that the company conducted surveillance on Glenn Greenwald.
Surveillance evasion
Several countries have evaded global surveillance by constructing secret bunker facilities deep below the Earth's surface.
North Korea
Despite North Korea being a priority target, the NSA's internal documents acknowledged that it did not know much about Kim Jong-un and his regime's intentions.
Iran
In October 2012, Iran's police chief Esmail Ahmadi Moghaddam alleged that Google is not a search engine but "a spying tool" for Western intelligence agencies. Six months later in April 2013, the country announced plans to introduce an "Islamic Google Earth" to evade global surveillance.
Libya
Libya evaded surveillance by building "hardened and buried" bunkers at least 40 feet below ground level.
Impact
The global surveillance disclosure has caused tension in the bilateral relations of the United States with several of its allies and economic partners as well as in its relationship with the European Union. On 12 August 2013, President Obama announced the creation of an "independent" panel of "outside experts" to review the NSA's surveillance programs. The panel is due to be established by the Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper, who will consult and provide assistance to them.
According to a survey undertaken by the human rights group PEN International, these disclosures have had a chilling effect on American writers. Fearing the risk of being targeted by government surveillance, 28% of PEN's American members have curbed their usage of social media, and 16% have self-censored themselves by avoiding controversial topics in their writings.
Gallery
See also
2013 Department of Justice investigations of reporters
Terrorist Finance Tracking Program
Top Secret America
References
Further reading
"Global Surveillance". An annotated and categorized "overview of the revelations following the leaks by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. There are also some links to comments and followups". By Oslo University Library.
Politico Staff. "NSA leaks cause flood of political problems." Politico. 13 June 2013.
NSA inspector general report on email and internet data collection under Stellar Wind as provided by The Guardian on 27 June 2013.
"Putin talks NSA, Syria, Iran, drones in exclusive RT interview (FULL VIDEO)." Russia Today. 12 June 2013.
Ackerman, Spencer. "NSA warned to rein in surveillance as agency reveals even greater scope." The Guardian. 17 July 2013.
Ackerman, Spencer. "Slew of court challenges threaten NSA's relationship with tech firms." The Guardian. Wednesday, 17 July 2013.
Ackerman, Spencer and Paul Lewis. "NSA amendment's narrow defeat spurs privacy advocates for surveillance fight." The Guardian. Thursday, 25 July 2013.
Ackerman, Spencer and Dan Roberts. "US embassy closures used to bolster the case for NSA surveillance programs." The Guardian. Monday 5 August 2013.
Two of the 'trips' (numbers 29 and 76) in the 2006 book, 'No Holiday', are investigating the NSA and its activities.
Greenwald, Glenn. "Members of Congress denied access to basic information about NSA." The Guardian. Sunday 4 August 2013.
Liu, Edward C. Surveillance of Foreigners Outside the United States Under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Congressional Research Service, 13 April 2016.
MacAskill, Ewen. "Justice Department fails in bid to delay landmark case on NSA collection." The Guardian. Thursday 25 July 2013.
Rushe, Dominic. "Microsoft pushes Eric Holder to lift block on public information sharing." The Guardian. Tuesday 16 July 2013.
Perez, Evan. "Documents shed light on U.S. surveillance programs." (Archive) CNN. 9 August 2013.
Gellman, Barton. "NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, audit finds." Washington Post. Thursday 15 August 2013.
Roberts, Dan and Robert Booth. "NSA defenders: embassy closures followed pre-9/11 levels of 'chatter'." The Guardian. Sunday 4 August 2013.
Greenwald, Glenn. "The crux of the NSA story in one phrase: 'collect it all'." The Guardian. Monday 15 July 2013.
Sanchez, Julian. "Five things Snowden leaks revealed about NSA’s original warrantless wiretaps." Ars Technica. 9 July 2013.
Forero, Juan. "Paper reveals NSA ops in Latin America." Washington Post. 9 July 2013.
Jabour, Bridie. "Telstra signed deal that would have allowed US spying." The Guardian. Friday 12 July 2013.
Ackerman, Spencer. "White House stays silent on renewal of NSA data collection order." The Guardian. Thursday 18 July 2013.
Naughton, John. "Edward Snowden's not the story. The fate of the internet is." The Guardian. 28 July 2013.
Adams, Becket. "MAD MAGAZINE USES ICONIC CHARACTERS TO HIT OBAMA OVER GOV’T SURVEILLANCE." The Blaze. 8 August 2013.
Howerton, Jason. "HERE IS THE PRO-NSA SURVEILLANCE ARGUMENT." The Blaze. 10 June 2013.
"Edward Snowden NSA files: secret surveillance and our revelations so far – Leaked National Security Agency documents have led to several hundred Guardian stories on electronic privacy and the state" by The Guardians James Ball on 21 August 2013
2013-07-29 Letter of FISA Court president Reggie B. Walton to the Chairman of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Patrick J. Leahy about certain operations of the FISA Court; among other things the process of accepting, modifying and/or rejecting surveillance measures proposed by the U.S. government, the interaction between the FISA Court and the U.S. government, the appearance of non-governmental parties before the court and the process used by the Court to consider and resolve any instances where the government entities notifies the court of compliance concerns with any of the FISA authorities.
A collection of documents relating to surveillance.
Part 2 of the above.
Part 3 of the above.
Documents relating to the surveillance against Dilma Rousseff and Enrique Peña Nieto
NSA surveillance: A guide to staying secure - The NSA has huge capabilities – and if it wants in to your computer, it's in. With that in mind, here are five ways to stay safe by The Guardians Bruce Schneier on 5 September 2013.
GCHQ
National Security Agency
Mass surveillance
Surveillance
Edward Snowden
Espionage
Intelligence operations
National security
Articles containing video clips |
2911436 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft%20Plus%21 | Microsoft Plus! | Microsoft Plus! is a discontinued commercial operating system enhancement product by Microsoft. The last edition is the Plus! SuperPack, which includes an assortment of screensavers, themes, and games, as well as multimedia applications. The Microsoft Plus! product was first announced on January 31, 1994 under the internal codename "Frosting". The first edition was
an enhancement for Windows 95, Windows 95 Plus!
The enhancements that make up Microsoft Plus! were generally developed by Microsoft itself. The Plus! packs also included games and content from third-party companies; for example, in Plus! for Windows XP, the HyperBowl game developed by Hyper Entertainment Inc. was included. Plus! features that enhance the base operating system or provide utility are generally included free of charge in the next release of Windows.
Microsoft Plus! was discontinued in favor of Windows Ultimate Extras in Windows Vista.
Versions
Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95
This was the first version of Plus! and had an initial cost of US$ 49.99. It included Space Cadet Pinball, the Internet Jumpstart Kit (which was the introduction of Internet Explorer 1.0), DriveSpace 3 and Compression Agent disk compression utilities, the initial release of theme support along with a set of 12 themes, dial-up networking server, dial-up scripting tool, and the graphical improvements such as anti-aliased screen fonts, full-window drag, the ability to stretch or shrink the wallpaper to fit the screen and highcolor icons.
Task Scheduler as it is present in later Windows versions was included as System Agent. A utility to notify the user of low disk space (DiskAlm.exe) also ran as part of System Agent. Plus! for Windows 95 was initially marketed for adding features for "high-performance computers", the minimum system requirements were an 80386 CPU with 8 megabytes of RAM. Later releases of Windows 95 (OSR2 and onwards) included DriveSpace 3 and Internet Explorer 3.0. Windows 98 included all of the enhancements included in Plus! for Windows 95. The Pinball game was not installed by default, but included on the Windows 98 CD. Although Windows NT 4.0 is not intended to support desktop themes, each desktop theme from this pack (except the More Windows theme and the Windows 95 256-color theme) along with the Space theme from the Microsoft Plus! for Kids pack (albeit with a different startup sound) and three additional exclusive desktop themes is installable on this operating system via the Windows NT 4.0 Resource Kit.
The screen-saver and wallpaper files include images from the Codex Leicester, which Microsoft co-founder, then CEO Bill Gates bought in 1994.
Microsoft Plus! for Kids
This version was released in 1997 and targeted towards aiming at children of ages 3 to 12. It includes three new applications: Talk It!, a text-to-speech program that says what users type using various voices; Play It!, an electronic keyboard with music and sound effects; and Paint It!, a version of Paint oriented for kids. It also contained a "picture picker" along with clipart, fonts, 10 new desktop themes, and Protect It!, parental controls for Internet Explorer. Plus! for Kids was the only Plus! release from the Microsoft Home and Entertainment division rather than the Windows Operating System development group. Four desktop themes from this collection - Baseball, Jungle, Space and Underwater – were included in Windows 98 and Windows Me; the Underwater theme, however, was modified to have its sounds play in different events.
There is also a demo version for Microsoft Plus! for Kids; however, it only contains the readme for the program and the Underwater theme. The pack can also be installed on Windows NT 4.0 if the user is granted administrative privileges, according to the Readme document included with the pack, although Protect It! and the desktop themes cannot be installed, mainly due to design differences between Windows 95 and NT 4.0.
Microsoft Plus! 98
As the sequel to the original suite of enhancements to Windows, Plus! 98 included eighteen new desktop themes (Some were based on popular comics such as FoxTrot and Garfield.), along with new programs and tools for Windows 98. An "organic art" 3D screensaver rendered unique infinite 3D visual shapes. A Start Menu cleanup utility was added to Windows 98's Maintenance Wizard. A Cybermedia Non-Critical File Cleaner utility was integrated into Disk Cleanup. ZIP file integration with Windows Explorer was first introduced with this version under the name of "compressed folders". New games, such as Microsoft Golf 1998 Lite, Lose Your Marbles and the now popular Spider Solitaire were also part of Plus! 98. A Deluxe CD Player with CDDB support and a basic "express" version of Picture It! were also included. Finally, Plus! 98 came with McAfee VirusScan 3.0, along with a six-month supply of free updates.
Some Plus! 98 features such as compressed folders (and some Disney games, such as 101 Dalmatians: Escape from DeVil Manor, Disney's Ready for Math with Pooh and Timon & Pumbaa's Jungle Games) and the Spider Solitaire game were included in Windows Me and later Windows versions. The Deluxe CD Player was included with Windows 2000. Although Windows Me does not include all of the Plus! 98 features and Plus! 98 Setup is blocked by Windows Me as incompatible, it can be installed on Windows Me by copying the setup files to the local hard disk and renaming Setup.exe before running it.
Microsoft Plus! Game Pack: Cards & Puzzles
This Plus! pack was released at the time of Windows Millennium Edition; however, it could also be installed on Windows 95-98 and 2000. It included the Microsoft Entertainment Pack: The Puzzle Collection - a collection of 10 arcade games and Microsoft Bicycle Card Collection, another set of 12 card games (Hearts, Spades, Cribbage, Pinochle, Crazy 8's, Oh Hell!, Go Fish, Old Maid, Euchre, Gin Rummy, Schafkopf and Skat). A trial version of Microsoft Pandora's Box was also included.
Microsoft Plus! for Windows XP
Marketed as "The Ultimate Companion for Windows XP", Microsoft Plus! for Windows XP was launched alongside the Windows XP operating system on October 25, 2001. This version of Plus! was created to show off the enhanced capabilities that Windows XP presented with its updated Windows Media Player and DirectX 3D core technologies. Continuing the feature categories of the previous Plus! products, the product features were desktop themes, screen savers, games, and utilities.
Plus! for Windows XP includes:
Plus! Themes (Aquarium, Nature, da Vinci and Space)
Plus! Screen Savers (Aquarium, Nature, da Vinci, Space, Robot Circus, Sand Pendulum, Mercury Pool and Plus! My Pictures Premium screensaver)
Plus! Voice Command for Windows Media Player
Plus! Personal DJ
Plus! MP3 Converter
Plus! CD Label Maker
Plus! Speaker Enhancement
Plus! 3D Visualizations for Windows Media Player (Oddworld: Munch's Odyssee, Maxx's Kingdom and Plus! Undersea Wonders)
Plus! Skins for Windows Media Player (Aquarium, Nature, da Vinci and Space)
Plus! Hyperbowl
Plus! Russian Square
Plus! Labyrinth
Microsoft Plus! Digital Media Edition
Marketed as "The Ultimate Photo, Music, and Movie Enhancement Pack for Windows XP", Microsoft launched Plus! Digital Media Edition along with Windows XP Media Center Edition. Plus! Digital Media Edition signified the first time Microsoft had released a second Plus! product based on the same base operating system. Microsoft Plus! Digital Media Edition was also the first Microsoft product to be made available for sale to consumers via e-commerce as full product download through online retailers.
Released on January 7, 2003, Plus! Digital Media Edition built upon two newly enhanced Windows XP core components: Windows Media Player and Windows Movie Maker 2. This product version focused more on utility features for photos, music and movies rather than including the more traditional Plus! features like themes, screen savers, and games.
Plus! Digital Media Edition includes:
Plus! Photo Story 2
Plus! Party Mode
Plus! Analog Recorder
Plus! CD Label Maker
Plus! Dancer
Plus! Audio Converter
Plus! Effects and Transitions for Windows Movie Maker 2
Plus! Alarm Clock
Plus! Sleep Timer
Plus! Skins for Windows Media Player 9 Series
Plus! Sync & Go for Pocket PC
Microsoft Plus! Digital Media Edition is the only version of Microsoft Plus! to require activation.
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 includes some of the themes and screensavers from Microsoft Plus! for Windows XP, as it retains the Aquarium, Da Vinci, Nature and Space themes. It also includes some applications from Microsoft Plus! Digital Media Edition, namely, Audio Converter, CD Label Maker, Dancer and Party Mode and the My Pictures Premium screensaver. A Windows Media Player skin called Darkling, developed by The Skins Factory is included, the skin is exclusive to Microsoft Plus! Digital Media Edition.
Microsoft Plus! SuperPack for Windows XP
On October 19, 2004, Microsoft replaced its two separate Plus! products for Windows XP with a single combined version called the Microsoft Plus! SuperPack for Windows XP. There were no new features or functionality added nor are the two separate products integrated. On Windows XP Media Center Edition the Pack was not needed as it had included the Plus Pack features. The Plus! series has been discontinued, as some of its features have been integrated into Windows Vista and later Windows versions.
See also
Windows Ultimate Extras
Microsoft Photo Story
Microsoft Picture It!
Microsoft Windows Media Player
Microsoft Windows Movie Maker
External links
Microsoft Plus! for Modern Windows (Windows 98+)
References
Plus!
Internet Explorer
1995 software
Discontinued Microsoft software |
3426234 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CISA | CISA | CISA or Cisa may refer to:
Computing and law
Certified Information Systems Auditor, a professional certification for information technology audit professionals sponsored by ISACA
Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, a US law which allows sharing of Internet traffic information between the government and companies
Organizations
China Iron and Steel Association, a national, non-profit organization founded in 1999 on the basis of China Metallurgical Enterprise Management Association
Costruzioni Italiane Serrature e Affini, an Italian manufacturer of locking and access control systems
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, U.S. federal cybersecurity agency, overseen by DHS; formed in November 2018
Education and research
Canadian Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, an academic institute based in Winnipeg and Toronto
Centre for Intelligent Systems and their Applications, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
Council of International Students Australia, peak representative body for international students studying in Australia
Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, in Geneva
Other uses
CISA-DT, a television station in Canada
Cisa (goddess), a goddess in Germanic paganism
See also
Kisa (disambiguation)
Sisa (disambiguation)
Zisa (disambiguation) |
19801719 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPods | AirPods | AirPods are wireless Bluetooth earbuds designed by Apple Inc. They were first announced on September 7, 2016 alongside the iPhone 7. Within two years, they became Apple's most popular accessory. They are Apple's entry-level wireless headphones, sold alongside the AirPods Pro and AirPods Max.
In addition to playing audio, the AirPods contain a microphone that filters out background noise as well as built-in accelerometers and optical sensors capable of detecting taps and pinches (e.g. double-tap or pinch to pause audio) and placement within the ear, which enables automatic pausing of audio when they are taken out.
On March 20, 2019, Apple released the second-generation AirPods, which feature the H1 chip, longer talk time, and hands-free "Hey Siri" support. An optional wireless charging case which costs extra was added in the offerings.
On October 26, 2021, Apple released the third-generation AirPods, which feature an external redesign with shorter stems similar to AirPods Pro, spatial audio, IPX4 water resistance, longer battery life, and MagSafe charging capability.
Models
1st generation
Apple announced the first generation AirPods on September 7, 2016 at an Apple Special Event alongside the iPhone 7 and Apple Watch Series 2. Apple originally planned to release the AirPods in late October, but delayed the release date. On December 13, 2016, Apple began taking online orders for AirPods. They were available at Apple Stores, Apple Authorized Resellers, and select carriers on December 20, 2016.
AirPods contain a proprietary Apple W1 SoC processor which helps optimize battery use as well as the Bluetooth 4.2 and audio connections. The advanced connectivity functions of the W1 requires devices running iOS 10, macOS Sierra, watchOS 3, or later. They can also function as standard Bluetooth headphones when connected to any device that supports Bluetooth 4.0 or higher, including Windows laptops and Android devices.
There are two microphones inside each AirPod, one facing outward at ear level and another at the bottom of the stem. Each AirPod weighs , and its charging case weighs . The AirPods are capable of holding a charge of around five hours. Charging them for fifteen minutes in the case gives three hours of listening time. The charging case provides 24 hours of total usage time. During a complete dismantling, each AirPod was found to contain a 93 milliwatt hour battery in its stem, while the charging case contains a 1.52 watt hour or 398 mAh at 3.81 V battery.
The model numbers for the first-generation AirPods are A1523 and A1722.
Production of the first-generation AirPods was discontinued on March 20, 2019, after the second generation was released.
2nd generation
Apple announced the second generation AirPods on March 20, 2019. They are the same design as the first generation, but have updated features. They include an H1 processor which supports hands-free "Hey Siri", Bluetooth 5 connectivity. Apple also claims 50% more talk time and faster device connection times. The "Announce Messages with Siri” feature was added in iOS 13.2, which allows the user to dictate text messages to Siri.
Second-generation AirPods can be purchased with the same charging case as the first generation, or for an additional price bundled with the Wireless Charging Case, which can be used with Qi chargers. The Wireless Charging Case can be purchased separately and is compatible with first-generation AirPods. It moves the charging indicator LED to the exterior of the case. The Wireless Charging Case was initially announced in September 2017 alongside the AirPower charging mat, but was delayed by AirPower's protracted development and eventual cancellation. The second generation AirPods remained on sale with a price cut following the release of the third generation in October 2021, but are now only available with the lightning charging case.
The model numbers for the second-generation AirPods are A2032 and A2031.
3rd generation
Apple announced the third generation AirPods on October 18, 2021. They feature an external redesign with shorter stems similar to AirPods Pro and use similar force touch controls. They include support for spatial audio and Dolby Atmos, IPX4 water resistance, skin detection and a case supporting MagSafe charging. Apple claims increased battery life, with AirPods lasting six hours and the charging case providing up to 30 hours. Preorders of the third generation AirPods began on October 18, 2021. The third generation AirPods were released on October 26, 2021, and are priced at $179.
Technical specifications
All of the electronics and circuitry responsible for the audio drivers and Bluetooth transmission are stored entirely within the head of the AirPod. The battery is stored in the stem. The battery and circuit boards are connected via flex/ribbon cable.
Compatibility
AirPods are compatible with any device that supports Bluetooth 4.0 or higher, including Android and Windows devices, although certain features such as automatic switching between devices are only available on Apple devices using iCloud.
The first-generation AirPods are fully compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch models with iOS 10 or later, Apple Watch models with watchOS 3 or later, and Mac models with macOS Sierra or later.
The second-generation AirPods are fully compatible with devices running iOS 12.2 or later, macOS Mojave 10.14.4 or later, and watchOS 5.2 or later.
Support
The lithium-ion batteries in AirPods can see significant degradation over time, with two-year-old sets lasting for less than half of the advertised five hours. Apple has a program to service batteries and purchase replacement individual AirPods and charging cases. The replacement of one or both AirPods or the charging case has a lower price with AppleCare+ than without. Apple offers battery servicing for free with AppleCare+ and for a fee without. However, this is just a replacement service, as AirPods batteries cannot be removed.
AirPods contain upgradeable firmware. Its original firmware was version 3.3.1. In February 2017, Apple released version 3.5.1, 3.7.2 in May 2017, and then 6.3.2 on March 26, 2019. In July 2019, version 6.7.8 was released and 6.8.8 followed in September 2019. In June 2020, firmware 2D15 was released (G2). In September 2020, firmware 3A283 (G2 and Pro) was released and in April 2021, firmware 3E751. AirPods automatically sync through Apple's iCloud service, allowing users to switch audio sources to other supported devices connected by the same Apple ID.
Sales
Analysts estimate Apple sold between 14 million and 16 million AirPods in 2017. In 2018, AirPods were Apple's most popular accessory product, with 35 million units sold. 60 million units were sold in 2019. Analysts estimate AirPods make up 60% of the global wireless headphone market and that Apple's entire Wearables products (Apple Watch, AirPods, and AirPods Pro) “is now bigger than 60% of the companies in the Fortune 500”. An estimated 5-7% of Apple's revenue from AirPods comes from replacement earbuds and cases.
Cultural impact
On announcement day, AirPods were compared to Apple's previously existing EarPods (2012–present), with The Verge noting "They look... just like the old EarPods, with the wires cut off." Initially mocked by many for their unfamiliar design (including CNN asking "Would people actually wear these?" in 2016), their popularity grew rapidly over the years and they were voted the most popular "hearable" brand of 2019.
At an Apple earnings call in 2019, CEO Tim Cook called AirPods “nothing less than a cultural phenomenon.” AirPods had become a viral sensation with memes circulating across the internet about its appearance and its relation to the removal of the headphone jack in iPhones. However, as time wore on, AirPods became known as a status symbol.
Criticism
One criticism of AirPods is their high price; however, at launch they were actually priced less than most "true wireless" earbuds on the market (e.g. the Samsung Gear IconX and Bragi Dash) and remain competitively priced with similar products from other major brands.
Another prominent criticism was a problem that caused the charging case battery to deplete at a rapid rate despite the AirPods not being used. Users were reporting upwards of 30% idle discharge per day. In response, Apple released a firmware update (version 3.5.1) for the AirPods, which addressed connectivity and battery drain problems.
According to the Financial Times, AirPods are difficult if not impossible to recycle, and not designed to be repairable.
Competition
Some consumers expressed the viewpoint that there were better options for wireless earphones based on quality and cost. One of Apple's biggest competitors is Samsung, which markets wireless earbuds that are very similar to AirPods. Another similar product line is from Apple's Beats Electronics, which sells products such as the Powerbeats Pro wireless earbuds.
There are many similar products to the AirPods, or more, wireless earbuds.
See also
Apple headphones
EarPods
AirPods Pro
AirPods Max
Google Pixel Buds
Hearables
Powerbeats Pro
References
External links
– official site
Apple Inc. peripherals
IPhone accessories
Headphones
Products introduced in 2016 |
32729150 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmot%20Corfield | Wilmot Corfield | William Wilmot Corfield (1859 - 27 October 1919) was a British philatelist who was an important figure in Anglo-Indian philately. By his own account, he was an auditor by profession.
Early life
Corfield was born in Birmingham in 1859 and educated at King Edward's School. His mother was Jemima Corfield (nee Randell) who died in 1862. Subsequently, he was the editor in that city of Ye Manual, Birmingham Town Crier and Birmingham Faces and Places and he was a friend of George Bernasconi.
Philately
Corfield started to collect stamps aged six and later acquired his brother, Winter's, collection after Winter died following an accident on a cricket pitch.
In 1886 and also in 1893, Corfield travelled to India where he subsequently became Editor of The Philatelic World (1894 to 1897) and the Philatelic Journal of India. At different times the Hon. Secretary, Treasurer and Vice-President of the Philatelic Society of India (1897-1909). He was also Curator of the Indian National Stamp Collection at Victoria Museum, Calcutta. While in India, Corfield wrote topical verses under the pen name Dâk dicta which appeared in the Indian press, Dak being the Hindi equivalent of "post office". He was active in the Calcutta Historical Society.
Corfield returned to Britain permanently in around 1910 or 1911. He was already a member of the Royal Philatelic Society London from 1899 and of The Fiscal Philatelic Society. He was also a member of the Hertfordshire society, The Junior Philatelic Society (now the National Philatelic Society and the International Philatelic Union. He became closely associated with the Philatelic Congress of Great Britain. He was for a short time Editor of The London Philatelist. He was active in the National Philatelic War Fund and was credited by The London Philatelist with suggesting the design of the souvenir sword of justice stamp produced for the fund. He wrote the obituary of noted Indian philatelic specialist Sir David Parkes Masson in The London Philatelist.
Corfield campaigned for the Tapling Collection to be brought up to date so as to become the British national stamp collection but this ultimately proved impossible due to the terms under which the Tapling Collection had been donated and the scarcity of some of the material missing from it.
Death
Corfield died on 27 October 1919 at Sydenham, South London. He was survived by his wife and daughter.
Selected publications
Ye manual of the proceedings of the Birmingham Young Men’s Christian Association Debating Society. Vol. 1. Oct. 1881 - April 1882. Birmingham, 1881-82. (Editor)
The adhesive fiscal and telegraph stamps of British India. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1905. (With C.S.F. Crofton)
Calcutta faces and places in pre-camera days. Calcutta: Calcutta Historical Society, 1910. Free download here.
Dâk dicta: a selection from verses written in Calcutta, 1907-1910. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1910. Free download here.
More dâk dicta. Verses written in Calcutta (1894-1910) and philatelic verses. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1911. Free download here.
See also
Universal Postal Union Collection
References
1859 births
1919 deaths
People from Birmingham, West Midlands
British philatelists
Philately of India |
8394939 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardent%20Inc. | Stardent Inc. | Stardent Computer, Inc. was a manufacturer of graphics supercomputer workstations in the late 1980s. The company was formed in 1989 when Ardent Computer Corporation (formerly Dana Computer, Inc.) and Stellar Computer Inc. merged.
History
Stellar Computer
Stellar Computer was founded in 1985 in Newton, Massachusetts, and headed by William Poduska, who had previously founded Prime Computer and Apollo Computer. This company aimed to produce a workstation system with enough performance to be a serious threat to the Titan, and at a lower price. Ardent responded by starting work on a new desktop system called Stiletto, which featured two MIPS R3000s (paired with two R3010 FPUs) and four i860s for graphics processing (the i860s replaced the vector units). Their first product was demonstrated in March 1988. An investment from Japanese company Mitsui and others was announced in June 1988, bringing the total capital raised to $48 million.
Ardent Computer Corporation
At almost the same time, in November 1985, Allen H. Michels and Matthew Sanders III co-founded Dana Computer, Inc. in Sunnyvale, California. The company sought to produce a desktop multiprocessing supercomputer dedicated to graphics that could support up to four processor units. Each processor unit consisted initially of a MIPS R2000 CPU, and later a R3000, connected to a custom vector processor. The vector unit held 8,192 64-bit registers that could be used in any way from 8,192 one-word to thirty-two 256-word registers. This compares to modern SIMD systems which allow for perhaps eight to sixteen 128-bit registers with a small variety of addressing schemes.
Their goal was to release their Titan supercomputer in July 1987 at a $50,000 price point. By late 1986, however, it became clear that this was unrealistic. A second round of funding came from Kubota Corporation, a Japanese heavy industries company, which had cash to spare and was looking for new opportunities. Kubota agreed not only to fund the completion of the Titan but also to provide production facilities in Japan. By the time it was finally ready for testing in February 1988, the performance leadership position of Titan had been eroded and the price had risen to $80,000. Ardent software ran on Unix System V Release 3 with proprietary support for the four-way SMP and the vector processor. The compiler was based on the Convex Fortran (and C) compiler. Their significant graphics system for visualization was DORE (Dynamic Object Rendering Environment).
In December 1987, Dana changed its name to Ardent Computer after learning about a local disk drive company called Dana Computer.
Gordon Bell, who had been architect of the VAX computer, was VP of Engineering and an early member of Ardent. Michels had considered working with Poduska, but founded Convergent Technologies instead, before Ardent. Japan-based Kubota Corporation became a major investor, owning up to 44% of Ardent. After some delay, a product was introduced in 1988.
Formation of Stardent
The merger of the two rivals was announced on August 30, 1989,
and completed in November 1989, with Poduska as chief executive. Bell served as chief scientist.
Although the Stardent products were known for their high performance, they also demanded high prices. A 1990 model was quoted at $123,400, for example, although this price was much less than that of the Cray Y-MP.
Kubota is alleged to have forced the merger; in an odd twist, the original Stellar group was left with most of the corporate power. A number of the Ardent employees were less than happy with this move, and quit to form other companies. Others attempted to get Kubota to spin off the original development group as a new company called Comet, but nothing came of this.
In early July 1990, the California portion of Stardent was transferred to the company headquarters in Massachusetts.
Co-chairmen Michels and Sanders brought suit against Kubota on July 13 for $25 million in damages, contending that Kubota used its financial leverage over Ardent to force it to merge and then transfer people and technology into a Kubota unit.
On July 24, 1990, Stardent fired co-chairmen Michels and Sanders, after offering a settlement to avoid publicity.
In August, the board of directors dismissed Michels and Sanders from the board, and agreed to sell more equity in the company to Kubota for an additional $60 million.
In August 1991, Stardent spun off its popular Application Visualization System (AVS) software into a separate company. In November of that same year, Stardent announced that it would cease to operate under the name Stardent Computer, sell off its Titan workstation operations to Kubota Pacific Computers, find a buyer for its Vistra workstations and create a new company called GS Computer Services to provide maintenance and support for its discontinued GS series workstations it inherited from Stellar.
Investors lost an estimated $200 million.
The remainder of the company would focus on the AVS software system and the existing shareholders of Stardent would become shareholders of the software firm. By the end of the year, the company had given up on finding a buyer, believed to be Oki Electric, for the Vistra line of workstations but still hoped to sell the underlying graphics technology based on the Intel i860.
Stardent decided to liquidate rather than pursuing new funding from Kubota Corporation. Its sales were estimated at only $40 million in 1990, which limited its ability to compete with other workstation manufacturers such as IBM, HP, and Silicon Graphics. Kubota Pacific cast about looking for direction, before finally settling on a desktop-sized 3D graphics accelerator for the Alpha-based DEC 3000 AXP workstations, called Denali. The company also bought DEC 3000 AXP workstations, packaged them with the Denali, and sold the integrated product as the Kenai workstation. The company changed its name again, becoming Kubota Graphics Company which closed down in 1994.
AccelGraphics
In 1994, Kubota Graphics was bought by AccelGraphics, the maker of AccelGraphics AG300 and AG500. AccelGraphics in turn was acquired by Evans & Sutherland in 1998.
Products
Titan workstation
Vistra workstation
Stellar Graphics Supercomputer
The Stellar line was called the graphics supercomputer (GS). It was considered an advanced design for the late 1980s.
The Stellar GS workstation family consisted of the GS1000 and GS2000 models. After Stellar merged with Ardent to form Stardent they were sold as the ST1000 and ST2000 models. The GS2000 CPU supported four threads or streams of execution for a total of 20 MIPS and had a vector coprocessor capable of 80 MFLOPS. 16 to 128MB of system memory was supported. 64MB of memory was typical. The four threads were implemented using a Barrel processor design similar to that used in the CDC 6000 series and the Denelcor HEP. The GS2000 graphics subsystem supported interactive 3D rendering at rates of up to 120,000 Gouraud-shaded triangles per second and 600,000 short vectors per second. Texture mapping and antialiasing with an accumulation buffer were also supported. The CPU and graphics system shared the system memory and vector coprocessor.
The GS workstations used the X window system and the 3D hardware was programmed through an X extension known as XFDI (X Floating-point Device Interface). There were bindings for C and Fortran. The display supported 1280 by 1024 resolution at 12 or 24 bits per pixel (in pseudo-color and true-color modes). 12 and 24-bit Z buffers were supported. The GS2000 cabinet was quite large: approximately 30 inches wide by 48 inches tall by 36 inches deep. There was a companion expansion chassis of about the same size which could contain a 9-track tape drive, for example.
See also
Ardent Window Manager
Steve Blank Ardent VP of Sales
References
External links
Ardent Titan C compiler auto-vectorization and assembly code sample
Pictures of and some info on Ardent Titan Graphics Supercomputer
Pictures of the Ardent Titan at the VAXbarn
Companies based in Silicon Valley
Computer workstations
Defunct companies based in California
Defunct computer companies based in Massachusetts
MIPS architecture
1985 establishments in Massachusetts
Companies established in 1985
Defunct computer hardware companies |
42744070 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPU%20virtualization | GPU virtualization | GPU virtualization refers to technologies that allow the use of a GPU to accelerate graphics or GPGPU applications running on a virtual machine. GPU virtualization is used in various applications such as desktop virtualization, cloud gaming and computational science (e.g. hydrodynamics simulations).
GPU virtualization implementations generally involve one or more of the following techniques: device emulation, API remoting, fixed pass-through and mediated pass-through. Each technique presents different trade-offs regarding virtual machine to GPU consolidation ratio, graphics acceleration, rendering fidelity and feature support, portability to different hardware, isolation between virtual machines, and support for suspending/resuming and live migration.
API remoting
In API remoting or API forwarding, calls to graphical APIs from guest applications are forwarded to the host by remote procedure call, and the host then executes graphical commands from multiple guests using the host's GPU as a single user. It may be considered a form of paravirtualization when combined with device emulation. This technique allows sharing GPU resources between multiple guests and the host when the GPU does not support hardware-assisted virtualization. It is conceptually simple to implement, but it has several disadvantages:
In pure API remoting, there is little isolation between virtual machines when accessing graphical APIs; isolation can be improved using paravirtualization
Performance ranges from 86% to as low as 12% of native performance in applications that issue a large number of drawing calls per frame
A large number of API entry points must be forwarded, and partial implementation of entry points may decrease fidelity
Applications on guest machines may be limited to few available APIs
Hypervisors usually use shared memory between guest and host to maximize performance and minimize latency. Using a network interface instead (a common approach in distributed rendering), third-party software can add support for specific APIs (e.g. rCUDA for CUDA) or add support for typical APIs (e.g. VMGL for OpenGL) when it is not supported by the hypervisor's software package, although network delay and serialization overhead may outweigh the benefits.
Fixed pass-through
In fixed pass-through or GPU pass-through (a special case of PCI pass-through), a GPU is accessed directly by a single virtual machine exclusively and permanently. This technique achieves 96100% of native performance and high fidelity, but the acceleration provided by the GPU cannot be shared between multiple virtual machines. As such, it has the lowest consolidation ratio and the highest cost, as each graphics-accelerated virtual machine requires an additional physical GPU.
The following software technologies implement fixed pass-through:
VMware Virtual Dedicated Graphics Acceleration (vDGA)
Parallels Workstation Extreme
Hyper-V Discrete Device Assignment (DDA)
Citrix XenServer GPU pass-through
Xen and QEMU/KVM with Intel GVT-d
VirtualBox removed support for PCI pass-through in version 6.1.0.
QEMU/KVM
For certain GPU models, Nvidia and AMD video card drivers attempt to detect the GPU is being accessed by a virtual machine and disable some or all GPU features. NVIDIA has recently changed virtualization rules for consumer GPUs by disabling the check in GeForce Game Ready driver 465.xx and later.
For NVIDIA, various architectures of desktop and laptop consumer GPUs can be passed through in various ways. For desktop graphics cards, passthrough can be done via the KVM using either the legacy or UEFI BIOS configuration via SeaBIOS and OVMF, respectively.
NVIDIA
Desktops
For desktops, most graphics cards can be passed through, although for graphics cards with the Pascal architecture or older, the VBIOS of the graphics card must be passed through in the virtual machine if the GPU is used to boot the host.
Laptops
For laptops, the NVIDIA driver checks for the presence of a battery via ACPI, and without a battery, an error will be returned. To avoid this, an acpitable created from text converted into Base64 is required to spoof a battery and bypass the check.
Pascal and earlier
For the laptop graphics cards that are Pascal and older, passthrough varies widely on the configuration of the graphics card. For laptops that do not have NVIDIA Optimus, such as the MXM variants, passthrough can be achieved through traditional methods. For laptops that have NVIDIA Optimus on as well as rendering through the CPU's integrated graphics framebuffer as opposed to its own, the passthrough is more complicated, requiring a remote rendering display or service, the use of Intel GVT-g, as well as integrating the VBIOS into the boot configuration due to the VBIOS being present in the laptop's system BIOS as opposed to the GPU itself. For laptops that have a GPU with NVIDIA Optimus and have a dedicated framebuffer, the configurations may vary. If NVIDIA Optimus can be switched off, then passthrough is possible through traditional means. However, if Optimus is the only configuration, then it is most likely that the VBIOS is present in the laptop's system BIOS, requiring the same steps as the laptop rendering only on the integrated graphics framebuffer, but an external monitor is also possible.
Mediated pass-through
In mediated device pass-through or full GPU virtualization, the GPU hardware provides contexts with virtual memory ranges for each guest through IOMMU and the hypervisor sends graphical commands from guests directly to the GPU. This technique is a form of hardware-assisted virtualization and achieves near-native performance and high fidelity. If the hardware exposes contexts as full logical devices, then guests can use any API. Otherwise, APIs and drivers must manage the additional complexity of GPU contexts. As a disadvantage, there may be little isolation between virtual machines when accessing GPU resources.
The following software and hardware technologies implement mediated pass-through:
VMware Virtual Shared Pass-Through Graphics Acceleration with Nvidia vGPU or AMD MxGPU
Citrix XenServer shared GPU with Nvidia vGPU, AMD MxGPU or Intel GVT-g
Xen and KVM with Intel GVT-g
Thincast Workstation - Virtual 3D feature (Direct X 12 & Vulkan 3D API)
While API remoting is generally available for current and older GPUs, mediated pass-through requires hardware support available only on specific devices.
Device emulation
GPU architectures are very complex and change quickly, and their internal details are often kept secret. It is generally not feasible to fully virtualize new generations of GPUs, only older and simpler generations. For example, PCem, a specialized emulator of the IBM PC architecture, can emulate a S3 ViRGE/DX graphics device, which supports Direct3D 3, and a 3dfx Voodoo2, which supports Glide, among others.
When using a VGA or an SVGA virtual display adapter, the guest may not have 3D graphics acceleration, providing only minimal functionality to allow access to the machine via a graphics terminal. The emulated device may expose only basic 2D graphics modes to guests. The virtual machine manager may also provide common API implementations using software rendering to enable 3D graphics applications on the guest, albeit at speeds that may be low as 3% of hardware-accelerated native performance. The following software technologies implement graphics APIs using software rendering:
VMware SVGA 3D software renderer
VirtualBox VMSVGA graphics controller
Citrix XenServer OpenGL Software Accelerator
Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform
Core OpenGL software renderer
Mesa software renderer
See also
Comparison of platform virtualization software
Notes
References
Hardware virtualization |
2174392 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volition%20%28company%29 | Volition (company) | Deep Silver Volition, LLC (formerly Parallax Software Corporation and Volition, Inc.) is an American video game developer based in Champaign, Illinois. The company was founded as Parallax Software in June 1993 by Mike Kulas and Matt Toschlog, and developed Descent and Descent II. The company split in two, wherein Toschlog founded Outrage Entertainment, while Kulas stayed with Parallax, which was renamed Volition in November 1996. Volition was acquired by THQ in August 2000, and when THQ filed for bankruptcy and had its assets sold off, Volition changed hands to Deep Silver in January 2013. Volition is best known for its Red Faction and Saints Row series of games.
History
Parallax Software and Descent (1993–1996)
Parallax Software was founded on June 14, 1993, by Mike Kulas and Matt Toschlog. The company was incorporated under the name Parallax Software Corporation. Both founders were programmers who had previously worked together on Car and Driver. This led them to consider launching their own game development company, knowing that, should they fail, they would have to return to working for other's companies. To reach a lower cost-of-living, Toschlog moved from Boston to Champaign, Illinois, where Kulas resided, and the two launched Parallax Software. Early on, they hired programmers John Slagel and Che-Yuan Wang, of which Wang also worked on level design. The team developed a rough concept for a game called Inferno, which they pitched to Apogee Software, the primary publisher of id Software. Apogee began funding the game's development, though the funds did not suffice for the company over time.
Because the team lacked an artist, Adam Pletcher was hired in January 1994. Shortly thereafter, Apogee dropped the project after it had been in development for seven months, though leaving Parallax with an already funded, functional prototype. Subsequently, while the studio was slowly running out of money, they produced a demo reel of the game and set it as a VHS tape to various publishers. Three companies—Accolade, Trimark Interactive and Interplay Productions (where it was championed by Rusty Buchert)—offered to publish the game, of which Parallax chose Interplay. Jasen Whiteside then became Parallax's eighth employee, working on level design while studying industrial design at school. With the studio lacking a quality assurance department, the game was tested by the entire team. As Interplay's funds had also dried up, Parallax refused to ask them for more, not wanting to show signs of weakness. Instead, Kulas and Toschlog invested their own money into the continued development. Funds provided by Apogee, Interplay and the two founders totaled to about . Inferno, now titled Descent, was released in March 1995 to widespread attention.
By the time Parallax began development on another Descent game, the team had grown to about 14 people. Interplay wished for the studio to develop a "CD-enhanced" version of the game, which would include high-resolution textures, cutscenes and Red Book-quality audio, as well as several new levels. Interplay marketed the game as a new game, Descent II, so they could make more profit than they would have from a simple derivate version of the same game, and could publish a new game under the same contract they had with Parallax. As a result, Parallax profited heavily from Descent II success.
Creation of Volition (1996–1997)
Although Toschlog had moved to Champaign from Boston, he did not want to stay in Champaign long-term. During the development of Descent II, he and three designers moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to open a second office for Parallax. At the new office, Toschlog also hired two further programmers. After Descent II had shipped, the team came to the conclusion that working on the same game out of two distant offices had adverse effects on the team, where Toschlog and Kulas agreed to move the company to one office. However, they could not decide on where they should move the company, so they instead opted to split the company in half, a move they were able to pursue due to Descent success. Thus, half of Parallax' employees followed Toschlog to Michigan, where Toschlog formed Outrage Entertainment, while Kulas stayed with the main Parallax office in Champaign.
As Kulas' company was to receive a new name, he asked the remaining team for ideas. When he found that he liked none of the proposals, he sat down in his living room, pulling books from a shelf and looking through dictionaries and reference books' glossaries for a possible name. In one such glossary, he found the word "", described as "an intense active will to accomplish something". As he drew a connection between this definition and the act of software development, he chose "Volition" to be the new company name. He pitched the name and its definition to the company's employees, asking them to create a suitable logo. Of the many entries submitted, the one that was chosen was designed by Whiteside and inspired by the logo of Wax Trax! Records, while Pletcher created a font to display the company name with. The logo has been in use since. Formally, Volition was founded in October 1996 with twelve members, and the split was announced on December 1, 1997, with both companies having been organized into new corporate entities (wherein Volition was Volition, Inc.) and wholly owned by their respective leads.
FreeSpace and Summoner, THQ acquisition (1997–2000)
Following the split, Volition and Outrage signed with Interplay for two further projects each. Their first project under the new name was Descent: FreeSpace – The Great War (or simply FreeSpace), a game that was set to improve on the concepts of games like Star Wars: X-Wing and Star Wars: TIE Fighter. During the development of FreeSpace, the Volition team doubled in size, adding about five or six people to the studio. During this time many team members were allocated to training the new employees. Meanwhile, Kulas, as the sole manager of the company, had to divide his time between programming and managing the business; consequently, should any business matter come up, his portion of the programming work stood still. FreeSpace was the last Volition game Kulas would significantly do programming work on. Following the release of FreeSpace, Volition began work on four projects—FreeSpace 2, Descent 4, Tube Racer and Summoner. The first, FreeSpace 2, was developed within a year. When the game's development had about three months to go, Interplay, who had recently become a public company, urged Volition to complete the game within a month. While the game was completed within the month, Interplay did not adjust their advertisement strategy. As a result, the game sold poorly and was only marginally profitable. Tube Racers was canceled about six to nine months in development.
Descent 4 was to be the fourth main entry in the Descent series (the third game, Descent 3, was in development simultaneously at Outrage). As the Descent 3 release date came closer, Interplay began having financial difficulties. When the game launched in June 1999, it also did not sell well. The two companies separated on Volition's suggestion. Interplay owned the publishing rights to the Descent franchise, and as a result Volition could not publish Descent 4 with a different publisher. Instead, they reused much of the code and tools they had created for the game and used it to create Red Faction.
Summoner, unlike other games by Parallax and Volition, was developed as a role-playing video game, a genre the development team had no experience with. The team were later provided with a development kit for the PlayStation 2, and were tasked with making Summoner a launch title for the console. Meanwhile, the four-game deal with Interplay was winding down, and Volition required a new publisher for Summoner. On August 31, 2000, they were acquired by THQ, who also overtook the game's publishing duties. In exchange for the ownership of Volition, Volition received one million shares of THQ's common stock and THQ assumed about in net liabilities for Volition's operations. THQ also acquired Outrage in April 2002, though closed that studio by 2004. Following a troubled development cycle, Summoner eventually hit the intended release date in October 2000, but shipped in a flawed state that resulted from the technical discrepancies between personal computers and PlayStation 2, between which the studio had to port the game.
Red Faction, Summoner II and The Punisher (2000–2005)
After Volition had started to develop Red Faction out of what had been Descent 4, many people on the team felt like the game was a "ground-pounder", a game they would work hard on just to get an unpleasant result. The game shifted from a space combat game to a first-person shooter with a heavy focus on environmental destruction. Much like Summoner, Red Faction was first developed for personal computers before moving to consoles. When Kulas attempted to write a part of the game's code, he found himself writing code for personal computers, having to rewrite everything should it work on consoles. The game was delayed for two months shortly before release to allow the team to polish the game before it shipped. The game went gold shortly thereafter, and received positive reviews, much to the surprise of the development team. Following Red Faction, Volition developed Summoner 2, aiming at fixing all flaws made in the first game. While it was received better than the first game, it also sold fewer copies. After that came Red Faction II, which was ultimately not reviewed as good as the first game, again to the team's surprise. Internally, Red Faction II was considered a failure, and the series was halted. Ports of the game, released in 2003, were developed by fellow THQ studios Outrage (Microsoft Windows, Xbox) and Cranky Pants Games (GameCube). A third Red Faction game was already in development, but was consequently canceled. A third Summoner game was also canceled. Following these cancellations, their teams started development on a heist-style game called Underground. The team worked on the game for about twelve months, but when Grand Theft Auto III was released, the marketing department at THQ pushed the expectations for the game so high that they could not be met, wherefore Underground, too, was canceled.
Following Underground cancellation, THQ approached Volition and asked them whether they were willing to create a licensed game. The publisher suggested that they would create a game around Marvel Comics character Punisher, who had a movie coming up, which the studio agreed to. The development team had excursed to Marvel's film studios and were on set, talking to stage designers and witnessing some of the scenes being shot. Meanwhile, in 2003, as the studio grew to 30–40 employees, Kulas hired Dan Cermak as vice-president for the company, who then implemented a new company structure to replace its previous flat hierarchy. As the game neared completion, it was submitted to the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), which, as the game re-enacted the Punisher's violent interrogation methods, deemed the game to be more of a torture simulator than a game. Some elements were adjusted so that the game could pass the ESRB with a "Mature" rating.
Saints Row (2006–2008)
At one point, Volition held a design exercise, inviting staff members to submit ideas for a new game. One such idea was a hybrid between a first-person shooter and a "gang simulator", a genre unexplored by most games at the time. A trailer was put together by taking snippets from various movies and games, underlaid with the song "Fuck tha Police", and after it was showcased in their board room, THQ's chief financial officer stepped forward, stating that this would be a game they were willing to develop. Volition imposed several rules on the game, such as the exclusion of children and the inability to kill the police, so to not generate too much controversy. The team shifted away from developing in wide arrays of genres, instead focusing the entire studio's talent on one design principle: open world. The game, initially known as Bling Bling, was disliked by many of Volition's employees who either did not want to be associated with a gang simulator or thought that their work on the game was not worthwhile. The studio faced further trouble as they switched from the PlayStation 2 to the Xbox 360, because the documentation provided with the Xbox 360 was incomplete, and the final hardware specifications for it unknown.
During the game's development, the studio overspent its budget of and brought up its headcount to over 100. After the game, now titled Saints Row, was finished, the team was asked to write postmortem documentations, which presented a lot of negative views on the game, as well as criticism with the management. When the game was released and sold well, it was decided that Volition would develop another such game, which would become Saints Row 2. Saints Row 2 differed from its predecessor in that it was more sandbox-oriented and more infused with humor, which the first game almost completely lacked.
Return to Red Faction, Saints Row: The Third and Insane (2009–2012)
Kulas had wished to return to developing a game centered around destruction, either through Red Faction or through a new intellectual property, now that console hardware had been advanced enough to handle such gameplay. Thus, the studio decided to develop a new Red Faction game, Red Faction: Guerrilla. From the poor reception of Red Faction II, the team had learned that destruction-based gameplay was not a good fit for a shooter set in narrow, enclosed corridors, wherefore the team opted for an open world instead. The game's development cycle lasted roughly five years. While Guerrilla was set on Mars, the next installment in the franchise, Red Faction: Armageddon, went in the other direction by being set inside a cave. A third game in the Saints Row franchise, Saints Row 3, was announced in February 2009. The game stripped away many features included in its predecessor to make for a more focused but overall still "over-the-top" experience. Under the name Saints Row: The Third, the game was released in November 2011.
In December 2010, at that year's Spike Video Game Awards, film director Guillermo del Toro took the stage to announce Insane, a horror game developed in partnership with Volition, projecting a 2013 release date. del Toro later revealed that Insane would become a trilogy, with total development time spanning one decade. However, in August 2012, THQ announced that Insane had been canceled.
In April 2011, it was announced that Kulas was retiring from the company, effective on May 2, with Cermak taking over his position as general manager. Following his retirement, he "goofed off" for about four years before he got back together with Toschlog, founding a new studio, Revival Productions, in 2014. The new company went to develop a spiritual successor to Descent named Overload, which was funded through a crowdfunding campaign held on Kickstarter and released in May 2018.
Acquisition by Deep Silver (2013)
In December 2012, THQ filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. As the publisher's assets were to be sold off, Koch Media offered a bid for Volition. While a total of six groups—Warner Bros., Electronic Arts, Take-Two Interactive, Ubisoft, Koch Media, and an unnamed group from Chicago—were interested in purchasing the studio, the only other bid submitted was Ubisoft's for . As the sale closed, Volition and the Saints Row IP were sold to Koch Media for a total of , and became part of its Deep Silver division. As a result, Volition's operations were transitioned into a new legal entity, named Deep Silver Volition, LLC. In April 2014, DS Volition sought "incentives" from Champaign to remodel. If it met the city's goals, it could have received up to $200,000.
Several IPs owned by THQ, including Volition's Summoner and Red Faction, were acquired by Nordic Games (later known as THQ Nordic) for in a second auction held in April. With the purchase of Koch Media by the parent company of Nordic Games (then renamed THQ Nordic) in February 2018, Volition and their IPs were reunited under one company.
Saints Row IV and Agents of Mayhem, layoffs (2013–present)
A fourth Saints Row game, Saints Row IV, was released in August 2013. In September 2014, creative director Steve Jaros left Volition to join Valve. An expansion to Saints Row IV, titled Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell and developed in partnership with High Voltage Software, was released in January 2015.
Following Saints Row IV, Volition developed Agents of Mayhem, a game set in the Saints Row universe, featuring similar gameplay mechanics while being unconnected to the main series. The game released in August 2017 to mixed reviews and poor sales. As a result, about 30 positions, including Cermak, were cut from the studio's previously 200-people-strong workforce. Jim Boone, who had been part of Parallax in 1994, succeeded Cermak as studio development director in October. On December 31, Volition's staff count was 148. In January 2019, Kulas announced his return to Volition as general manager. At the time, Revival Productions was winding down, and when Kulas wondered what to do next, fearing he would end up not doing anything for four years, he decided to re-join the studio after eight years. According to Kulas, his time as an indie developer at Revival helped him "come up to speed on all kinds of stuff".
By August 2019, Volition is "deep in development" on a new installment in the Saints Row franchise. At this time, it had 174 employees, and has close to 200 as of February 2020. In May 2020, Koch Media and THQ Nordic, by this time both part of Embracer Group, exchanged some intellectual property rights, including Red Faction, which was handed to Deep Silver. Volition had approximately 230 employees in March 2021.
Games developed
References
External links
1993 establishments in Illinois
2000 mergers and acquisitions
American companies established in 1993
American subsidiaries of foreign companies
Champaign, Illinois
Companies based in Champaign County, Illinois
Deep Silver
Video game companies established in 1993
Video game companies of the United States
Video game development companies |
920704 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBinary | MacBinary | MacBinary is a file format that combines the two forks of a classic Mac OS file into a single file, along with HFS's extended metadata. The resulting file is suitable for transmission over FTP, the World Wide Web, and electronic mail. The documents can also be stored on computers that run operating systems with no HFS support, such as Unix or Windows.
MacBinary was widely supported on the Macintosh and was built into most communications programs on that platform. Similar solutions were built into most data compression applications on the Mac, and although these did not require MacBinary to survive transmission across non-Mac systems, MacBinary was often added in these cases to preserve longer filenames and other features.
The dual-fork nature of the HFS system was not used on Mac OS X, and MacBinary has largely disappeared.
Description
In contrast to other computers of the era, Macintosh applications included both computer code as well as a large number of resources that were used by the operating system (OS) itself. These resources were also widely used in documents to store rich media like sounds and images. However, the resource system had the significant limitation that the maximum size of any single resource was only 32 kB, far too small for storing document data. To address this, Apple introduced the concept of forks, allowing any file in the filesystem to have both a resource fork and a data fork. Physically these were separate files, but the OS would ensure the two separate files were always treated as a single object, so dragging it to a floppy disk in the Finder would copy both forks.
This presented a serious problem when the file had to be stored on other computer systems. Those systems, unaware of the fork concept, would have to store the two forks as separate files. This presented the possibility that the two would be separated at some point, or not properly recombined when they were transmitted back to the Mac. This problem led to a number of solutions that combined the two forks together into a single file, and then automatically pulling them back apart when they reached another Mac. MacBinary was one of the most popular solutions, although BinHex was also used on UseNet, where data transfer was not 8-bit clean. Apple's own solutions, AppleSingle and AppleDouble, were never widely adopted in the user community.
Files encoded with MacBinary, regardless of the version, usually have a .bin or .macbin file extension appended to the ends of their filenames. E-mail programs such as Eudora can extract and decode MacBinary mail messages. Most dedicated FTP programs for the Mac, such as Fetch and Transmit, transparently decode MacBinary files they download.
MacBinary is similar to BinHex, but MacBinary produces binary files as opposed to ASCII text. Thus, MacBinary files are smaller than BinHex files, but older applications and servers are more likely to corrupt them.
History
The first incarnation of MacBinary was released in 1985. The standard was originally specified by Dennis Brothers (author of the terminal program MacTEP and later an Apple employee), BinHex author Yves Lempereur, PackIt author Harry Chesley, et al. then added support for MacBinary into BinHex 5.0, using MacBinary to combine the forks instead of his own methods. Most terminal programs and internet utilities added built-in MacBinary support during this period as well.
Two years later it was updated to MacBinary II, to accommodate changes in Mac OS. MacBinary II remained compatible with subsequent updates of the operating system for some time. This changed with the release of Mac OS 8, which necessitated the release of MacBinary III in 1996. In the meantime, Apple itself had released the AppleSingle and AppleDouble formats, which serve the same purpose as MacBinary, but correct some problems with it.
References
Dennis Brothers, "Macintosh Binary Transfer Format 'MacBinary' Standard (Proposal)", Micro-networked Apple User's Group (CompuServe), 1985
Adam Engst, "Macintosh Internet File Format Primer", TidBits, 31 August 1991
"comp.sys.mac.comm FAQ"
External links
Mac Binary Converter, an open source tool for converting between different Macintosh file encodings.
macutils, converts between different Macintosh file encodings
MacBinary II Spec
MacBinary II+ Spec, a proposed enhancement to MacBinary to incorporate a directory tree, never widely adopted.
Archive formats
Computer-related introductions in 1985 |
33236 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word%20processor%20%28electronic%20device%29 | Word processor (electronic device) | A word processor is an electronic device (later a computer software application) for text, composing, editing, formatting, and printing.
The word processor was a stand-alone office machine in the 1960s, combining the keyboard text-entry and printing functions of an electric typewriter with a recording unit, either tape or floppy disk (as used by the Wang machine) with a simple dedicated computer processor for the editing of text. Although features and designs varied among manufacturers and models, and new features were added as technology advanced, the first word processors typically featured a monochrome display and the ability to save documents on memory cards or diskettes. Later models introduced innovations such as spell-checking programs, and improved formatting options.
As the more versatile combination of personal computers and printers became commonplace, and computer software applications for word processing became popular, most business machine companies stopped manufacturing dedicated word processor machines. As of 2009 there were only two U.S. companies, Classic and AlphaSmart, which still made them. Many older machines, however, remain in use. Since 2009, Sentinel has offered a machine described as a "word processor", but it is more accurately a highly specialised microcomputer used for accounting and publishing.
Word processing was one of the earliest applications for the personal computer in office productivity, and was the most widely used application on personal computers until the World Wide Web rose to prominence in the mid-1990s.
Although the early word processors evolved to use tag-based markup for document formatting, most modern word processors take advantage of a graphical user interface providing some form of what-you-see-is-what-you-get ("WYSIWYG") editing. Most are powerful systems consisting of one or more programs that can produce a combination of images, graphics and text, the latter handled with type-setting capability. Typical features of a modern word processor include multiple font sets, spell checking, grammar checking, a built-in thesaurus, automatic text correction, web integration, HTML conversion, pre-formatted publication projects such as newsletters and to-do lists, and much more.
Microsoft Word is the most widely used word processing software according to a user tracking system built into the software. Microsoft estimates that roughly half a billion people use the Microsoft Office suite, which includes Word. Many other word processing applications exist, including WordPerfect (which dominated the market from the mid-1980s to early-1990s on computers running Microsoft's MS-DOS operating system, and still (2014) is favored for legal applications), Apple's Pages application, and open source applications such as OpenOffice.org Writer, LibreOffice Writer, AbiWord, KWord, and LyX. Web-based word processors such as Office Online or Google Docs are a relatively new category.
Characteristics
Word processors evolved dramatically once they became software programs rather than dedicated machines. They can usefully be distinguished from text editors, the category of software they evolved from.
A text editor is a program that is used for typing, copying, pasting, and printing text (a single character, or strings of characters). Text editors do not format lines or pages. (There are extensions of text editors which can perform formatting of lines and pages: batch document processing systems, starting with TJ-2 and RUNOFF and still available in such systems as LaTeX and Ghostscript, as well as programs that implement the paged-media extensions to HTML and CSS). Text editors are now used mainly by programmers, website designers, computer system administrators, and, in the case of LaTeX, by mathematicians and scientists (for complex formulas and for citations in rare languages). They are also useful when fast startup times, small file sizes, editing speed, and simplicity of operation are valued, and when formatting is unimportant. Due to their use in managing complex software projects, text editors can sometimes provide better facilities for managing large writing projects than a word processor.
Word processing added to the text editor the ability to control type style and size, to manage lines (word wrap), to format documents into pages, and to number pages. Functions now taken for granted were added incrementally, sometimes by purchase of independent providers of add-on programs. Spell checking, grammar checking and mail merge were some of the most popular add-ons for early word processors. Word processors are also capable of hyphenation, and the management and correct positioning of footnotes and endnotes.
More advanced features found in recent word processors include:
Collaborative editing, allowing multiple users to work on the same document.
Indexing assistance. (True indexing, as performed by a professional human indexer, is far beyond current technology, for the same reasons that fully automated, literary-quality machine translation is.)
Creation of tables of contents.
Management, editing, and positioning of visual material (illustrations, diagrams), and sometimes sound files.
Automatically managed (updated) cross-references to pages or notes.
Version control of a document, permitting reconstruction of its evolution.
Non-printing comments and annotations.
Generation of document statistics (characters, words, readability level, time spent editing by each user).
"Styles", which automate consistent formatting of text body, titles, subtitles, highlighted text, and so on.
Later desktop publishing programs were specifically designed with elaborate pre-formatted layouts for publication, offering only limited options for changing the layout, while allowing users to import text that was written using a text editor or word processor, or type the text in themselves.
Typical usage
Word processors have a variety of uses and applications within the business world, home, education, journalism, publishing, and the literary arts.
Use in business
Within the business world, word processors are extremely useful tools. Some typical uses include: creating legal documents, company reports, publications for clients, letters, and internal memos. Businesses tend to have their own format and style for any of these, and additions such as company letterhead. Thus, modern word processors with layout editing and similar capabilities find widespread use in most business.
Use in home
While many homes have a word processor on their computers, word processing in the home tends to be educational, planning or business related, dealing with school assignments or work being completed at home. Occasionally word processors are used for recreational purposes, e.g. writing short stories, poems or personal correspondence. Some use word processors to create résumés and greeting cards, but many of these home publishing processes have been taken over by web apps or desktop publishing programs specifically oriented toward home uses. The rise of email and social networks has also reduced the home role of the word processor as uses that formerly required printed output can now be done entirely online.
History
Word processors are descended from the Friden Flexowriter, which had two punched tape stations and permitted switching from one to the other (thus enabling what was called the "chain" or "form letter", one tape containing names and addresses, and the other the body of the letter to be sent). It did not wrap words, which was begun by IBM's Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter (later, Magnetic Card Selectric Typewriter).
IBM Selectric
Expensive Typewriter, written and improved between 1961 and 1962 by Steve Piner and L. Peter Deutsch, was a text editing program that ran on a DEC PDP-1 computer at MIT. Since it could drive an IBM Selectric typewriter (a letter-quality printer), it may be considered the first-word processing program, but the term word processing itself was only introduced, by IBM's Böblingen Laboratory in the late 1960s.
In 1969, two software based text editing products (Astrotype and Astrocomp) were developed and marketed by Information Control Systems (Ann Arbor Michigan). Both products used the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8 mini computer, DECtape (4” reel) randomly accessible tape drives, and a modified version of the IBM Selectric typewriter (the IBM 2741 Terminal). These 1969 products preceded CRT display-based word processors. Text editing was done using a line numbering system viewed on a paper copy inserted in the Selectric typewriter.
Evelyn Berezin invented a Selectric-based word processor in 1969, and founded the Redactron Corporation to market the $8,000 machine. Redactron was sold to Burroughs Corporation in 1976.
By 1971 word processing was recognized by the New York Times as a "buzz word". A 1974 Times article referred to "the brave new world of Word Processing or W/P. That's International Business Machines talk ... I.B.M. introduced W/P about five years ago for its Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter and other electronic razzle-dazzle."
IBM defined the term in a broad and vague way as "the combination of people, procedures, and equipment which transforms ideas into printed communications," and originally used it to include dictating machines and ordinary, manually operated Selectric typewriters. By the early seventies, however, the term was generally understood to mean semiautomated typewriters affording at least some form of editing and correction, and the ability to produce perfect "originals". Thus, the Times headlined a 1974 Xerox product as a "speedier electronic typewriter", but went on to describe the product, which had no screen, as "a word processor rather than strictly a typewriter, in that it stores copy on magnetic tape or magnetic cards for retyping, corrections, and subsequent printout".
Mainframe systems
In the late 1960s IBM provided a program called FORMAT for generating printed documents on any computer capable of running Fortran IV. Written by Gerald M. Berns, FORMAT was described in his paper "Description of FORMAT, a Text-Processing Program" (Communications of the ACM, Volume 12, Number 3, March, 1969) as "a production program which facilitates the editing and printing of 'finished' documents directly on the printer of a relatively small (64k) computer system. It features good performance, totally free-form input, very flexible formatting capabilities including up to eight columns per page, automatic capitalization, aids for index construction, and a minimum of nontext [control elements] items." Input was normally on punched cards or magnetic tape, with up to 80capital letters and non-alphabetic characters per card. The limited typographical controls available were implemented by control sequences; for example, letters were automatically converted to lower case unless they followed a full stop, that is, the "period" character. Output could be printed on a typical line printer in all-capitals — or in upper and lower case using a special ("TN") printer chain — or could be punched as a paper tape which could be printed, in better than line printer quality, on a Flexowriter. A workalike program with some improvements, DORMAT, was developed and used at University College London.
Electromechanical paper-tape-based equipment such as the Friden Flexowriter had long been available; the Flexowriter allowed for operations such as repetitive typing of form letters (with a pause for the operator to manually type in the variable information), and when equipped with an auxiliary reader, could perform an early version of "mail merge". Circa 1970 it began to be feasible to apply electronic computers to office automation tasks. IBM's Mag Tape Selectric Typewriter (MT/ST) and later Mag Card Selectric (MCST) were early devices of this kind, which allowed editing, simple revision, and repetitive typing, with a one-line display for editing single lines. The first novel to be written on a word processor, the IBM MT/ST, was Len Deighton's Bomber, published in 1970.
Effect on office administration
The New York Times, reporting on a 1971 business equipment trade show, said
The "buzz word" for this year's show was "word processing", or the use of electronic equipment, such as typewriters; procedures and trained personnel to maximize office efficiency. At the IBM exhibition a girl typed on an electronic typewriter. The copy was received on a magnetic tape cassette which accepted corrections, deletions, and additions and then produced a perfect letter for the boss's signature ...
In 1971, a third of all working women in the United States were secretaries, and they could see that word processing would affect their careers. Some manufacturers, according to a Times article, urged that "the concept of 'word processing' could be the answer to Women's Lib advocates' prayers. Word processing will replace the 'traditional' secretary and give women new administrative roles in business and industry."
The 1970s word processing concept did not refer merely to equipment, but, explicitly, to the use of equipment for "breaking down secretarial labor into distinct components, with some staff members handling typing exclusively while others supply administrative support. A typical operation would leave most executives without private secretaries. Instead one secretary would perform various administrative tasks for three or more secretaries." A 1971 article said that "Some [secretaries] see W/P as a career ladder into management; others see it as a dead-end into the automated ghetto; others predict it will lead straight to the picket line." The National Secretaries Association, which defined secretaries as people who "can assume responsibility without direct supervision", feared that W/P would transform secretaries into "space-age typing pools". The article considered only the organizational changes resulting from secretaries operating word processors rather than typewriters; the possibility that word processors might result in managers creating documents without the intervention of secretaries was not considered—not surprising in an era when few managers, but most secretaries, possessed keyboarding skills.
Dedicated models
In 1972, Stephen Bernard Dorsey, Founder and President of Canadian company Automatic Electronic Systems (AES), introduced the world's first programmable word processor with a video screen. The real breakthrough by Dorsey's AES team was that their machine stored the operator's texts on magnetic disks. Texts could be retrieved from the disks simply by entering their names at the keyboard. More importantly, a text could be edited, for instance a paragraph moved to a new place, or a spelling error corrected, and these changes were recorded on the magnetic disk.
The AES machine was actually a sophisticated computer that could be reprogrammed by changing the instructions contained within a few chips.
In 1975, Dorsey started Micom Data Systems and introduced the Micom 2000 word processor. The Micom 2000 improved on the AES design by using the Intel 8080 single-chip microprocessor, which made the word processor smaller, less costly to build and supported multiple languages.
Around this time, DeltaData and Wang word processors also appeared, again with a video screen and a magnetic storage disk.
The competitive edge for Dorsey's Micom 2000 was that, unlike many other machines, it was truly programmable. The Micom machine countered the problem of obsolescence by avoiding the limitations of a hard-wired system of program storage. The Micom 2000 utilized RAM, which was mass-produced and totally programmable. The Micom 2000 was said to be a year ahead of its time when it was introduced into a marketplace that represented some pretty serious competition such as IBM, Xerox and Wang Laboratories.
In 1978, Micom partnered with Dutch multinational Philips and Dorsey grew Micom's sales position to number three among major word processor manufacturers, behind only IBM and Wang.
Software models
In the early 1970s, computer scientist Harold Koplow was hired by Wang Laboratories to program calculators. One of his programs permitted a Wang calculator to interface with an IBM Selectric typewriter, which was at the time used to calculate and print the paperwork for auto sales.
In 1974, Koplow's interface program was developed into the Wang 1200 Word Processor, an IBM Selectric-based text-storage device. The operator of this machine typed text on a conventional IBM Selectric; when the Return key was pressed, the line of text was stored on a cassette tape. One cassette held roughly 20 pages of text, and could be "played back" (i.e., the text retrieved) by printing the contents on continuous-form paper in the 1200 typewriter's "print" mode. The stored text could also be edited, using keys on a simple, six-key array. Basic editing functions included Insert, Delete, Skip (character, line), and so on.
The labor and cost savings of this device were immediate, and remarkable: pages of text no longer had to be retyped to correct simple errors, and projects could be worked on, stored, and then retrieved for use later on. The rudimentary Wang 1200 machine was the precursor of the Wang Office Information System (OIS), introduced in 1976. It was a true office machine, affordable by organizations such as medium-sized law firms, and easily learned and operated by secretarial staff.
The Wang was not the first CRT-based machine nor were all of its innovations unique to Wang. In the early 1970s Linolex, Lexitron and Vydec introduced pioneering word-processing systems with CRT display editing. A Canadian electronics company, Automatic Electronic Systems, had introduced a product in 1972, but went into receivership a year later. In 1976, refinanced by the Canada Development Corporation, it returned to operation as AES Data, and went on to successfully market its brand of word processors worldwide until its demise in the mid-1980s. Its first office product, the AES-90, combined for the first time a CRT-screen, a floppy-disk and a microprocessor, that is, the very same winning combination that would be used by IBM for its PC seven years later. The AES-90 software was able to handle French and English typing from the start, displaying and printing the texts side-by-side, a Canadian government requirement. The first eight units were delivered to the office of the then Prime Minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, in February 1974.
Despite these predecessors, Wang's product was a standout, and by 1978 it had sold more of these systems than any other vendor.<ref>Schuyten, Peter J. (1978): "Wang Labs: Healthy Survivor" The New York Times December 6, 1978 p. D1: "[Market research analyst] Amy Wohl... said... 'Since then, the company has installed more of these systems than any other vendor in the business."</ref>
The phrase "word processor" rapidly came to refer to CRT-based machines similar to the AES 90. Numerous machines of this kind emerged, typically marketed by traditional office-equipment companies such as IBM, Lanier (marketing AES Data machines, re-badged), CPT, and NBI.
All were specialized, dedicated, proprietary systems, priced around $10,000. Cheap general-purpose computers were still for hobbyists.
Some of the earliest CRT-based machines used cassette tapes for removable-memory storage until floppy diskettes became available for this purpose - first the 8-inch floppy, then the 5¼-inch (drives by Shugart Associates and diskettes by Dysan).
Printing of documents was initially accomplished using IBM Selectric typewriters modified for ASCII-character input. These were later replaced by application-specific daisy wheel printers, first developed by Diablo, which became a Xerox company, and later by Qume. For quicker "draft" printing, dot-matrix line printers were optional alternatives with some word processors.
WYSIWYG models
Electric Pencil, released in December 1976, was the first word processor software for microcomputers. Software-based word processors running on general-purpose personal computers gradually displaced dedicated word processors, and the term came to refer to software rather than hardware. Some programs were modeled after particular dedicated WP hardware. MultiMate, for example, was written for an insurance company that had hundreds of typists using Wang systems, and spread from there to other Wang customers. To adapt to the smaller, more generic PC keyboard, MultiMate used stick-on labels and a large plastic clip-on template to remind users of its dozens of Wang-like functions, using the shift, alt and ctrl keys with the 10 IBM function keys and many of the alphabet keys.
Other early word-processing software required users to memorize semi-mnemonic key combinations rather than pressing keys labelled "copy" or "bold". (In fact, many early PCs lacked cursor keys; WordStar famously used the E-S-D-X-centered "diamond" for cursor navigation, and modern vi-like editors encourage use of hjkl for navigation.) However, the price differences between dedicated word processors and general-purpose PCs, and the value added to the latter by software such as VisiCalc, were so compelling that personal computers and word processing software soon became serious competition for the dedicated machines. Word processing became the most popular use for personal computers, and unlike the spreadsheet (dominated by Lotus 1-2-3) and database (dBase) markets, WordPerfect, XyWrite, Microsoft Word, pfs:Write, and dozens of other word processing software brands competed in the 1980s; PC Magazine reviewed 57 different programs in one January 1986 issue. Development of higher-resolution monitors allowed them to provide limited WYSIWYG—What You See Is What You Get, to the extent that typographical features like bold and italics, indentation, justification and margins were approximated on screen.
The mid-to-late 1980s saw the spread of laser printers, a "typographic" approach to word processing, and of true WYSIWYG bitmap displays with multiple fonts (pioneered by the Xerox Alto computer and Bravo word processing program), PostScript, and graphical user interfaces (another Xerox PARC innovation, with the Gypsy word processor which was commercialised in the Xerox Star product range). Standalone word processors adapted by getting smaller and replacing their CRTs with small character-oriented LCD displays. Some models also had computer-like features such as floppy disk drives and the ability to output to an external printer. They also got a name change, now being called "electronic typewriters" and typically occupying a lower end of the market, selling for under US$200.
During the late 1980s and into the 1990s the predominant word processing program was WordPerfect. It had more than 50% of the worldwide market as late as 1995, but by 2000 Microsoft Word had up to 95% market share.
MacWrite, Microsoft Word, and other word processing programs for the bit-mapped Apple Macintosh screen, introduced in 1984, were probably the first true WYSIWYG word processors to become known to many people until the introduction of Microsoft Windows. Dedicated word processors eventually became museum pieces.
See also
Amstrad PCW
Authoring systems
Canon Cat
Comparison of word processors
Content management system
CPT Word Processors
Document collaboration
List of word processors
IBM MT/ST
Microwriter
Office suite
TeX
Typography
Literature
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum Track Changes - A Literary History of Word Processing'' Harvard University Press 2016
References
External links
FOSS word processors compared: OOo Writer, AbiWord, and KWord by Bruce Byfield
History of Word Processing
"Remembering the Office of the Future: Word Processing and Office Automation before the Personal Computer" - A comprehensive history of early word processing concepts, hardware, software, and use. By Thomas Haigh, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 28:4 (October–December 2006):6-31.
"A Brief History of Word Processing (Through 1986)" by Brian Kunde (December, 1986)
"AES: A Canadian Cautionary Tale" by CBC Television (Broadcast date: February 4, 1985, link updated Nov. 2, 2012)
Computing terminology |
244603 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinlock | Spinlock | In software engineering, a spinlock is a lock that causes a thread trying to acquire it to simply wait in a loop ("spin") while repeatedly checking whether the lock is available. Since the thread remains active but is not performing a useful task, the use of such a lock is a kind of busy waiting. Once acquired, spinlocks will usually be held until they are explicitly released, although in some implementations they may be automatically released if the thread being waited on (the one that holds the lock) blocks or "goes to sleep".
Because they avoid overhead from operating system process rescheduling or context switching, spinlocks are efficient if threads are likely to be blocked for only short periods. For this reason, operating-system kernels often use spinlocks. However, spinlocks become wasteful if held for longer durations, as they may prevent other threads from running and require rescheduling. The longer a thread holds a lock, the greater the risk that the thread will be interrupted by the OS scheduler while holding the lock. If this happens, other threads will be left "spinning" (repeatedly trying to acquire the lock), while the thread holding the lock is not making progress towards releasing it. The result is an indefinite postponement until the thread holding the lock can finish and release it. This is especially true on a single-processor system, where each waiting thread of the same priority is likely to waste its quantum (allocated time where a thread can run) spinning until the thread that holds the lock is finally finished.
Implementing spinlocks correctly is challenging because programmers must take into account the possibility of simultaneous access to the lock, which could cause race conditions. Generally, such an implementation is possible only with special assembly-language instructions, such as atomic test-and-set operations and cannot be easily implemented in programming languages not supporting truly atomic operations. On architectures without such operations, or if high-level language implementation is required, a non-atomic locking algorithm may be used, e.g. Peterson's algorithm. However, such an implementation may require more memory than a spinlock, be slower to allow progress after unlocking, and may not be implementable in a high-level language if out-of-order execution is allowed.
Example implementation
The following example uses x86 assembly language to implement a spinlock. It will work on any Intel 80386 compatible processor.
; Intel syntax
locked: ; The lock variable. 1 = locked, 0 = unlocked.
dd 0
spin_lock:
mov eax, 1 ; Set the EAX register to 1.
xchg eax, [locked] ; Atomically swap the EAX register with
; the lock variable.
; This will always store 1 to the lock, leaving
; the previous value in the EAX register.
test eax, eax ; Test EAX with itself. Among other things, this will
; set the processor's Zero Flag if EAX is 0.
; If EAX is 0, then the lock was unlocked and
; we just locked it.
; Otherwise, EAX is 1 and we didn't acquire the lock.
jnz spin_lock ; Jump back to the MOV instruction if the Zero Flag is
; not set; the lock was previously locked, and so
; we need to spin until it becomes unlocked.
ret ; The lock has been acquired, return to the calling
; function.
spin_unlock:
xor eax, eax ; Set the EAX register to 0.
xchg eax, [locked] ; Atomically swap the EAX register with
; the lock variable.
ret ; The lock has been released.
Significant optimizations
The simple implementation above works on all CPUs using the x86 architecture. However, a number of performance optimizations are possible:
On later implementations of the x86 architecture, spin_unlock can safely use an unlocked MOV instead of the slower locked XCHG. This is due to subtle memory ordering rules which support this, even though MOV is not a full memory barrier. However, some processors (some Cyrix processors, some revisions of the Intel Pentium Pro (due to bugs), and earlier Pentium and i486 SMP systems) will do the wrong thing and data protected by the lock could be corrupted. On most non-x86 architectures, explicit memory barrier or atomic instructions (as in the example) must be used. On some systems, such as IA-64, there are special "unlock" instructions which provide the needed memory ordering.
To reduce inter-CPU bus traffic, code trying to acquire a lock should loop reading without trying to write anything until it reads a changed value. Because of MESI caching protocols, this causes the cache line for the lock to become "Shared"; then there is remarkably no bus traffic while a CPU waits for the lock. This optimization is effective on all CPU architectures that have a cache per CPU, because MESI is so widespread. On Hyper-Threading CPUs, pausing with rep nop gives additional performance by hinting the core that it can work on the other thread while the lock spins waiting.
Transactional Synchronization Extensions and other hardware transactional memory instruction sets serve to replace locks in most cases. Although locks are still required as a fallback, they have the potential to greatly improve performance by having the processor handle entire blocks of atomic operations. This feature is built into some mutex implementations, for example in glibc. The Hardware Lock Elision (HLE) in x86 is a weakened but backwards-compatible version of TSE, and we can use it here for locking without losing any compatibility. In this particular case, the processor can choose to not lock until two threads actually conflict with each other.
A simpler version of the test can use the cmpxchg instruction on x86, or the __sync_bool_compare_and_swap built into many Unix compilers.
With the optimizations applied, a sample would look like:
; In C: while(!__sync_bool_compare_and_swap(&locked, 0, 1)) while(locked) __builtin_ia32_pause();
spin_lock:
mov ecx, 1 ; Set the ECX register to 1.
retry:
xor eax, eax ; Zero out EAX, because cmpxchg compares against EAX.
XACQUIRE lock cmpxchg [locked], ecx
; atomically decide: if locked is zero, write ECX to it.
; XACQUIRE hints to the processor that we are acquiring a lock.
je out ; If we locked it (old value equal to EAX: 0), return.
pause:
mov eax, [locked] ; Read locked into EAX.
test eax, eax ; Perform the zero-test as before.
jz retry ; If it's zero, we can retry.
rep nop ; Tell the CPU that we are waiting in a spinloop, so it can
; work on the other thread now. Also written as the "pause".
jmp pause ; Keep check-pausing.
out:
ret ; All done.
spin_unlock:
XRELEASE mov [locked], 0 ; Assuming the memory ordering rules apply, release the
; lock variable with a "lock release" hint.
ret ; The lock has been released.
Alternatives
The primary disadvantage of a spinlock is that, while waiting to acquire a lock, it wastes time that might be productively spent elsewhere. There are two ways to avoid this:
Do not acquire the lock. In many situations it is possible to design data structures that do not require locking, e.g. by using per-thread or per-CPU data and disabling interrupts.
Switch to a different thread while waiting. This typically involves attaching the current thread to a queue of threads waiting for the lock, followed by switching to another thread that is ready to do some useful work. This scheme also has the advantage that it guarantees that resource starvation does not occur as long as all threads eventually relinquish locks they acquire and scheduling decisions can be made about which thread should progress first. Spinlocks that never entail switching, usable by real-time operating systems, are sometimes called raw spinlocks.
Most operating systems (including Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD) use a hybrid approach called "adaptive mutex". The idea is to use a spinlock when trying to access a resource locked by a currently-running thread, but to sleep if the thread is not currently running. (The latter is always the case on single-processor systems.)
OpenBSD attempted to replace spinlocks with ticket locks which enforced first-in-first-out behaviour, however this resulted in more CPU usage in the kernel and larger applications, such as Firefox, becoming much slower.
See also
Synchronization
Busy spin
Deadlock
Seqlock
Ticket lock
References
External links
pthread_spin_lock documentation from The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 6, IEEE Std 1003.1, 2004 Edition
Variety of spinlock Implementations from Concurrency Kit
Article "User-Level Spin Locks - Threads, Processes & IPC" by Gert Boddaert
Article Spin Lock Example in Java
Paper "The Performance of Spin Lock Alternatives for Shared-Memory Multiprocessors" by Thomas E. Anderson
Paper "Algorithms for Scalable Synchronization on Shared-Memory Multiprocessors" by John M. Mellor-Crummey and Michael L. Scott. This paper received the 2006 Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing.
Spin-Wait Lock by Jeffrey Richter
Austria C++ SpinLock Class Reference
Interlocked Variable Access(Windows)
Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces (Chapter: Locks)
Concurrency control algorithms
Programming constructs |
35952110 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynix%20%28software%29 | Dynix (software) | The Dynix Automated Library System was a popular integrated library system, with a heyday from the mid-1980s to the late-1990s. It was used by libraries to replace the paper-based card catalog, and track lending of materials from the library to patrons.
First developed in 1983, it eventually became the most popular library automation software ever released, and was once near-ubiquitous in libraries boasting an electronic card catalog, peaking at over 5,000 installations worldwide in the late 1990s, with a market share of nearly 80%, including the United States' Library of Congress.
Typical of 1980s software technology, Dynix had a character-based user interface, involving no graphics except ASCII art/ANSI art boxes.
History
The first installation, in 1983, was at a public library in Kershaw County, South Carolina. The library actually contracted for the system before the software was written. In the words of Paul Sybrowsky, founder of Dynix: "There was no software, no product. Undaunted, we pitched our plan to create an automated library system to a public library in South Carolina. We didn't have a product, but we said 'You need a system and we'd like to bid on it,' and showed them our business plan."
The original Dynix library system was based on software developed at CTI (Computer Translation Incorporated) which was a development project of Brigham Young University, and presided over by Gary Carlson. The initial search engine tools: FSELECT and FSORT were written for the PICK operating system under contract for CTI by Walter Nicholes as part of a bid for a research support systems for AT&T laboratories. Paul Sybrowsky was an employee of CTI. (As was Bruce Park, founder of ALII library systems, later GEAC Library Systems.) Both library systems (Dynix and ALII) were based on these PICK based search engine tools.
Dynix use grew quickly in the early-and-mid 1990s. In October 1989, Dynix had just 292 installations. Fifteen months later, in January 1991, it was up 71% to 500 installations. A year-and-a-half later, in June 1993, Dynix had doubled its installed base, signing its 1,000th contract. At its peak in the late 1990s, Dynix had over 5,000 libraries using its system, amounting to an 80% market share.
The customer base for Dynix did not begin decreasing until 2000, at which point it started being replaced by Internet-based interfaces (so-called "Web PACs"). In 2003, it was reported that Dynix was being phased out by its manufacturer, and approaching "end-of-life" status in terms of functionality and support. By 2004, its market share was down to 62%, still a comfortable majority. Phase-outs were constant in the late 2000s, and by the second decade of the 21st century, it was obsolete and remained in very few libraries. By mid-2013, only 88 libraries were on record as having Dynix installed. The majority of phase-outs took place between 2002 and 2007.
At one point, Dynix was benchmarked supporting 1,600 terminals on a single system. This stability would later come in handy; the largest installations ever were the King County Library System in the greater Seattle area, which was largest by collection size (tens of millions of cataloged items), and New York Public Library in New York City, which covered the largest geographical area with 87 branches (requiring dumb terminals numbering into the thousands).
Several specialized versions were released, all nearly identical to the mainstream version. For academic libraries, primarily K-12, there was Dynix Scholar (an Intel 80xxx-based microcomputer version of regular Dynix). For very small libraries, with perhaps only one or two terminals, there was Dynix Elite. The original Dynix system, as used in regular public libraries, was renamed Dynix Classic later in its lifespan to distinguish it from other Dynix products.
Technical details
Based around a relational database, Dynix was originally written in Pick/BASIC, and run on the PICK operating system. In 1990, it was ported to VMark's uniVerse BASIC programming language, and run on Unix-based servers, with uniVerse acting as a PICK emulation layer between the software and the operating system. In the late 1990s, Dynix was once again re-ported, this time for Windows NT-based servers; again, uniVerse acted as a Pick emulator between the software and the operating system.
Pick/BASIC and uniVerse BASIC are the same programming language, so porting Dynix did not require re-writing the source code. In the words of one Dynix developer, "[Dynix] was programmed in Pick/BASIC ... however, as it matured, it was written in uniVerse BASIC ... It was never re-written. That type of BASIC isn't easy to move to any other language. None other handles data as well. It's a very fast-compiled and -interpreted language, and frankly nothing matches it, then or now. It's too bad that it (uniVerse BASIC) was so good, because it didn't make the transition to object-oriented Web-based technology in time to stay afloat."
The software was originally written on computers made by The Ultimate Corp. of East Hanover, New Jersey, which ran Ultimate's proprietary implementation of the PICK operating system. Later, Dynix moved to IBM RISC/6000-based computers running AIX throughout the company, except in Training, which used SCO Unix. While most libraries purchased the same type of servers as Dynix was using, there were installations done on platforms such as DEC and MIPS, Sequent, Sequoia (which used a very expensive native PICK), HP's Unix servers, etc. The Dynix corp. could do software-only installs to any compliant Unix because of uniVerse's scalability and adaptability.
Dynix was originally developed around the ADDS Viewpoint A2 terminal's escape sequences, because ADDS terminals were the de facto standard on the PICK-based mainframes on which Dynix was created. Shortly after Dynix started being deployed to libraries around the country, requests started coming back that alternate terminals be provided for patron use; children would bang on the keyboards or throw books at the terminals, or use unauthorized key sequences to mess up the programming. In response, Dynix asked Wyse to develop such a terminal; Wyse created the WY-30, which was a stripped-down version of the best-selling terminal ever made, the WY-60. The swivel base was removed so that the terminal sat flat on whatever surface it was placed on; what the unit now lacked in viewing-angle adjustability, it made up for in physical stability (it could not be knocked over by the force of a child). A specially-designed keyboard reduced the number of keys from 101 to 83, mainly by removing all the function keys; this was designed to keep users out of the internal setup functions and other parts of the software they "weren't supposed to be going". To maintain compatibility with how Dynix was already written, the WY-30 supported the Adds Viewpoint A2 emulation, which was actually one of the only emulations on the terminal. They WY-30 had very few emulations compared to most Wyse products, and notably did not support VT100 or any other ANSI emulations. Years later, when the Dynix company was moving from Ultimate computers running Pick/OS to IBM computers running AIX and uniVerse, compatibility for VT100/102/340 terminals was added to the software; then, other models of Wyse terminal started coming into favor, such as the WY-60 and WY-150, which were easier on the eyes and hands than the WY-30 was.
The complete Dynix Classic approached 900,000 lines of source code, and compiled at around 120 MB. It was distributed via tape drive, first on 1/2" reel-to-reel tape, then later 1/4" cartridge tapes for Dynix Elite users, and 8mm cartridges for everyone else.
One reason for Dynix's success was that an entire library consortium could be run off of just one server, in one location, with one copy of the software. This meant that a library system with multiple branches—whether a large single-city system such as the one in New York City, or whether a consortium made of several small cities/towns banded together—could pool their funds and only have to purchase one server and one copy of the software. Each branch had their own Circulation module, but the actual catalog database was a single copy on one server in a central location. Each record had a line in it stating which actual branch the item belonged to, allowing users to request holds/transfers from another branch to their branch, as well as see whether it was checked in or out at its home branch. This saved a significant sum of money - millions of dollars, in the case of the largest installations - versus Dynix's competitors, who required a separate server and copy of the software in each library branch.
With the single copy of the Dynix software installed on a central server, both patrons and librarians could access it by using dumb terminals. The technology for linking the terminals to the server within each building, and linking the separate buildings (branches) together to the central server location, changed over time as technology progressed. The earliest method was to have the entire system connected via RS-232; there would be many muxes (statistical multiplexers) and many miles of serial lines. Muxes were the phone company's solution for connecting serial lines between branches. Later, dumb terminals were connected via RS-232 to a terminal server, which in turn connected via Ethernet to the branch's LAN. The separate branches would be connected to the central Dynix server via IP-based methods (the Internet). The latest installations used PC's running terminal emulation software, and connecting to the Dynix server via telnet over the Internet.
Dynix was made up of several different modules, each of which was purchased independently to create a scaled system based on the library's size and needs. A library could buy as few as two modules. The two basic modules were Cataloging ($15,000 + $1,500 annual maintenance), and Circulation ($12,000 + $1,200 annual maintenance). Some of the other modules included Kids' Catalog, Bookmobile, Homebound, Media Scheduling, Reserve Bookroom, TeleCirc, DebtCollect, Electronic Notification System, and Self Check-Out. A Dialcat/DialPac module was offered, allowing patrons with a modem and terminal emulation software to dial in from home and search the card catalog or renew books.
Programs with a text-based interface, such as Dynix, are described as being either "menu-driven" or "command-line-driven", referring to how users interact with the software. Dynix was actually a hybrid of both; the patrons used a menu-driven interface, where they would be given a numbered list of options, and simply have to key in the number of the option they wanted in order to navigate through the system. Unknown to the patrons, the librarians had the ability to manipulate the system in the command-line-driven way, by keying in special codes at the same prompts where patrons would key in menu item numbers. These codes, referred to a "dot commands" due to their structure of being a period followed by one or two letters (such as '.c' to switch between checkout and checkin screens in to the Circulation module), allowed librarians access to advanced/hidden features of the Dynix system, and - along with password-protection - prevented patrons from gaining unauthorized levels of access.
Company history
The company selling the Dynix software changed hands several times over the years: first it was called Dynix Systems, Inc. Then it was Ameritech Library Services, followed by epixtech, then simply Dynix, then Sirsi Corporation, and most recently SirsiDynix.
Gallery
See also
Dell Wyse
Monochrome monitor
NOTIS
OPAC
References
External links
SirsiDynix, the current successor of the company that created Dynix
Library automation
Library and information science software |
15500143 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tux%20Droid | Tux Droid | Tux Droid is a Linux wireless Tux mascot (210mm × 180mm × 140mm - with lowered wings) with a programmable interface, allowing it to announce events by its gestures and by ALSA driven sound. The events are detected by specific gadgets, which are handled by the Tux Gadget Manager. The Tux Droid supports Linux kernel 2.4 or later and needs an 800 MHz CPU and 128 MB RAM. Communication from Tux Droid to the computer is via signalling operating in the 802.11 WLAN band, but not compatible with Wi-Fi. The receiver resembles a plastic fish, and connects to the host computer's USB port. An infrared remote control is supplied; signals from this are received by Tux Droid and sent to the host software over the wireless link. For media detection it needs an internet connection. The mascot is driven by Atmel AVR RISC microcontrollers.
The new version supports also Windows-based PCs. The Tux Droid can be used with Windows XP and Windows Vista (both at 32 Bit).
Information
Kysoh society has filed for bankruptcy in August 2010.
Official sites are unavailable.
Two communities are available to get help and information on Tux Droid.
See also
Speech synthesis
Tux
References
External links
homepage of Tux Droid
Tuxdroid-community – Unofficial Community
joelmatteotti at github
Linux
Fictional penguins
Free software culture and documents
Virtual pets
Pets
Entertainment robots
Open-source robots |
10656247 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen%20Sandiego | Carmen Sandiego | Carmen Sandiego (sometimes referred to as Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?) is a media franchise based on a series of computer games created by the American software company Broderbund. While the original 1985 Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? video game was classified as a "mystery exploration" series by creators and the media, the series would later be deemed edutainment when the games became unexpectedly popular in classrooms. The franchise centers around the fictional thieving villain of the same name, who is the ringleader of the criminal organization, V.I.L.E.; the protagonists (most often including the in-game character controlled by the computer user) are agents of the ACME Detective Agency who try to thwart the crooks' plans to steal treasures from around the world, while the later ultimate goal is to capture Carmen Sandiego herself.
The franchise primarily focuses on teaching children geography, but has also branched out into history, mathematics, language arts, and other subjects. An attempt was made to create a series of state-specific games in the 1980s, but the only prototype to be completed was North Dakota. Beginning in 1988, Carmen Sandiego Days became popular across American public schools. In the 1990s, the franchise extended into three television shows, books and comics, board games, a concert series, two planetarium shows, and two music albums. By 1996, the Carmen Sandiego character and game concept had been licensed to over 20 companies including Harper Collins, University Games, Great American Puzzle Factory, DIC Entertainment, WGBH/WQED, Micro Games of America, Publications International and Troll Associates. Towards the turn of the 21st century, the Carmen Sandiego property passed through a series of five corporate hands: Broderbund (1985-1997), The Learning Company (1998), Mattel (1999), The Gores Group (2000), and Riverdeep (2001–present). Subsequent acquisitions and mergers of Riverdeep led to the franchise currently being in the possession of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. For the next 15 years, the series would become mostly dormant despite a few licensed games. In 2017, soon after Netflix commissioned an animated show based on the property, HMH hired Brandginuity to reboot Carmen Sandiego through a licensing program built around the show and the franchise as a whole including toys, games, and apparel. HMH Productions, established in 2018, is currently the content incubator, production company, and brand manager of Carmen Sandiego. HMH Productions co-produced the animated Netflix TV series Carmen Sandiego, which ran for four seasons from 2019 to 2021 (including a 2020 interactive special), and is set to produce a live-action film as well. As of May 10, 2021, the franchise is owned by HarperCollins, which acquired HMH's trade division.
The franchise has become known for its ability to surreptitiously teach facts, breed empathy for other cultures, and develop logic skills, all behind a mask of highly entertaining detective mystery experiences. One aspect of the series that has received consistent praise by critics is its diverse representation of strong, independent, and intelligent minority women. Carmen Sandiego herself is Latina, and it has never been implied that her ethnicity is correlated to her thievery.
Carmen Sandiego has maintained a considerable popularity and commercial success over its history. Carmen Sandiego is one of the top 30 longest-running video game series, having existed for just over 30 years with the release of Returns in 2015. By 1997, Carmen Sandiego games had been translated into three different languages, and over 5 million copies had been sold into schools and homes worldwide. The three 1990s-airing television shows have together been nominated for 45 Daytime Emmy Awards (winning 8), while World also won a Peabody Award. They had a combined viewing audience of over 10 million viewers each week.
History of franchise
Brøderbund era (1985–1998)
The original game idea started in 1983 from Broderbund programmer Dane Bigham, wanting to take the idea of text adventure games like Colossal Cave Adventure, but create a menu-driven interface to be played on the Apple II computer. Initial work was done with Broderbund's "Rubber Room" artists, Gene Portwood and Lauren Elliott, creating a game where the player would chase down various crooks. Broderbund co-founder Gary Carlston suggested changing the concept to be focused on geography, anticipating shipping copies of The World Almanac to let players research clues and find the right answers for geography questions.
As Bigham was not thrilled with this direction, he focused more on the interface, and Carlston hired David Siefkin to write the game's story. Siefkin came up with the idea of the player tracking down numerous criminals, and developed several criminal personas, including Carmen Sandiego. The other staff found this name mysterious and exotic, in addition to being a female character they could use to attract younger women to the game. From Siefkin's script, they expanded out the idea of the criminal organization V.I.L.E. - Villains’ International League of Evil – and the ACME Detective Agency – with ACME jokingly considered an initialism for "A Company that Makes Everything". The core gameplay was then established, having the player as an ACME recruit to chase down underlings within V.I.L.E., following geography-based clues to complete their search, and working up their ranks in ACME until they were tasked to go after Carmen herself. The game proved successful, unexpected from the educational market, as it became a staple in many classrooms.
Portwood and Ellliot produced storyboards and initial graphics, while staff completed the software. They used a "Carmen bible" to maintain quality and consistency. Each design team consisted of 8-10 people. If a game idea became dull within a week, it was discarded. Games were play-tested in schools prior to release in order to identify problems. Prior to Carmen Sandiego, Broderbund had been involved in distributing and marketing software; therefore careful consideration was put into how to market the franchise. Awareness was built through editorials in magazines, placement on retailer shelves, and promotions. The launch price of $38 was chosen to suit cost-constrained teachers. Playing an entertaining game at schools led to children beginning to request the game from their parents, leading to a "pull-through effect" in the distribution chain. Brøderbund emphasized that the games were fun and labelled them 'explorations' rather than highlighting the educational aspect. The game play succeeded in this by giving the player a sense of agency while travelling through an adventure and chasing the villain. Broderbund included response cards in their games to gather information, which once in a database could be used via direct mail to sell upgrades or future products. According to New Product Success Stories: Lessons from Leading Innovators, Broderbund had also built an "organisational capacity that supports creativity" and was customer focused on its game development.
From 1986 to 1998, Brøderbund followed the first Carmen Sandiego video game with U.S.A., Europe, Time, America's Past, Space, and Junior Detective, reboots of World, U.S.A., and Great Chase Through Time, and finally released Word Detective and Math Detective. The first seven games of the franchise were each awarded one or more SPA Excellence in Software Awards, particularly for their educational effort. In 1991, Brøderbund went public, trading on the NASDAQ stock exchange as BROD. At the time, the Carmen Sandiego games were Brøderbund's second-biggest revenue source, comprising 26% of total revenue; the biggest was The Print Shop, which brought in 33% of revenue. By 1997, Carmen Sandiego games had been translated into three different languages and over 5 million copies had been sold into schools and homes, worldwide.
Carmen Sandiego also appeared in three television shows during this era. The World game show was broadcast on PBS from 1991 to 1996 and won six Daytime Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award. World was followed by Time, which was cancelled in 1998 due to the geography-based premise having "run its entire course". It was acknowledged that history can be more subjective than geography, but the show hoped to tackle more challenging material like the infamous Japanese American internment camps during World War II in a straightforward and educational way. The Earth animated series was broadcast on FOX from 1994 to 1999. In 1996, President Bill Clinton stated: "When I met the co-leaders of San Marino at the Olympics, I knew where it was because of Carmen Sandiego".
The Learning Company era (1998-present)
After Brøderbund ceased to exist in 1998, The Learning Company apparently sought to redesign the series. The company determined that the brand was stagnating but thought it easier to revive an established brand than start a new one. Under The Learning Company, the series seems to take its premise more seriously and uses character-based humor. Since The Learning Company has only created two Carmen Sandiego games, one of which is no longer sold. This change is evident mainly through the marketing of select Brøderbund products.
The first title released by The Learning Company was ThinkQuick Challenge, a quiz game with a similar tonality to Word Detective and Math Detective, which included the reappearance of Chase Devineaux. The new structure of Time was apparently to The Learning Company's liking since their new version of World, titled Treasures of Knowledge, was similar. The Learning Company decided to return the series to its original focus on geography, discontinuing Word Detective, Math Detective, and ThinkQuick Challenge.
In 2004, Bam! Entertainment released The Secret of the Stolen Drums on the GameCube, Xbox, and PlayStation 2. It is so far the only game of the franchise to use real-time 3D computer graphics, although many previous games had used pre-rendered 3D graphics. It was also an action game and while geographical facts were included, learning them was not necessary to complete the game. Although The Learning Company evidently licensed the use of the series as well as some of their own characters from Treasures of Knowledge, this game is not distributed by or sold under The Learning Company name. An animated Netflix series, Carmen Sandiego, aired for four seasons from 2019 to 2021.
On March 29, 2021, The Wall Street Journal reported that HarperCollins, a division of American mass media and publishing company News Corp, had reached a deal to buy HMH Books & Media for US$349 million. The sale includes HMH's trade publishing division and computer game franchises such as Carmen Sandiego and The Oregon Trail.
Entries in the franchise
Video games
The Carmen Sandiego franchise began with the classic video game in 1985, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?. Each subsequent video game in the series has a particular theme and subject, where the player must use their knowledge to find Carmen Sandiego or any of her myriad henchmen. This series was originally owned and developed by Broderbund, but is now owned by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Television shows
World
This was the PBS game show designed for children ages 8–12. The World game show was staged in a slightly off-skew detective office, which was part of the ACME agency with Lynne Thigpen portraying "The Chief" and Greg Lee portraying himself as a special agent in charge of training new recruits. Greg was helped in this training by various live-action and animated characters. Among the show's most popular were the members of the a cappella house band and comedy troupe, Rockapella, who also sang the show's main theme song.
The game was played in three rounds: the first round was Q&A, where the two gumshoes with the highest scores proceeded to a second round. In the second round, the two remaining gumshoes had to find the loot, the warrant, and the cartoon crook in the correct order. The winning gumshoe captured the day's crook and later advanced to the third and final round to capture Carmen. As Greg shouted the names or places in a region of the world, the gumshoe had to place a marker on the corresponding place on a giant map of that area within a 45-second time limit. A successful gumshoe who placed all the correct locations and captured Carmen would win a trip to anywhere in the contiguous United States and later in North America.
Time
The Time game show refocused the show on history, but was otherwise similar to World with Thigpen reprising her role as "The Chief". Kevin Shinick portrayed himself as a Time Pilot Squadron Leader and Rockapella was replaced by a different dance group, The Engine Crew. Gameplay for the first two rounds were much the same as World; whereas the third and final round involved the pilot answering six various history-related questions to open time gates. If the pilot answered correctly, he/she passed through the gate. Otherwise, the pilot had to turn a crank, pull a lever, or do some other task within the 90-second time limit. A successful pilot who passed through all six gates and captured Carmen would win a personal computer.
Earth
The Earth animated series was a Saturday morning cartoon series produced by DIC Entertainment. The series features the adventures of Zack and Ivy, two teenage siblings who work as ACME agents in San Francisco and are aided by the Max Headroom-like Chief, who had to stop Carmen (voiced by Rita Moreno) and her henchmen from stealing artifacts from around the world. The series was the first Saturday-morning children's program ever to win the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Children's Animated Program, in 1996. Its episodes have subsequently been aired on the Fox Family Channel, the Pax network, Hub TV, and Univision. The first season was released on DVD by Shout! Factory in 2006 and the complete series was later released by Mill Creek Entertainment in 2012.
Netflix series
The second animated series, Carmen Sandiego, is co-produced by Netflix, where it aired for four seasons from 2019 to 2021. In this series, Carmen Sandiego is not a villain or antihero but the heroine, who is recruited to V.I.L.E. in infancy and trained as a master thief, only to turn against them and seek to undo their thievery.
Book series and comics
John Peel book series
In the early 1990s, in response to the successful Carmen Sandiego franchise, "editor Sharon Shavers was tasked with turning the games into a book series". She gave the responsibility to John Peel. His research consisted of playing all the games, and this was followed by "Sharon and [him] work[ing] out a format for the series" before he commenced writing. While in the past his natural tendency to add jokes to his work had been looked down upon, "Sharon [actually] asked [him] to put more in". The art was done by Allan Neuwirth. The premise of each choose-your-own-adventure book is that "you are the detective", and each title features "four exciting detective adventures inside!". The books are written in the second person and in present tense, and have removable inserts that provided clues and the identities of the villains. The books are published by the Canadian branch of Golden Books Publishing. Western Publishing was planning a September 1991 debut. Inspired by the video games, Peel wrote 16 new cases in the original four-book series. The books came with insert cards which became important in solving the cases.
Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego? (1991)
Where In The USA Is Carmen Sandiego? (1991)
Where In Europe Is Carmen Sandiego? (1991)
Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego? (1991)
Where In America's Past Is Carmen Sandiego? (1992)
Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego, Part II (1993)
Where In Space Is Carmen Sandiego? (1993)
Where In The USA Is Carmen Sandiego? Part II (1994)
Where In America Is Carmen Sandiego? (1992) – this title was, as opposed to the others, "a picture book like Where's Waldo?", and the only picture book Peel ever wrote.
Where Is Carmen Sandiego? Calendar (1993) – this title was written for Workman Publishing, and Peel considers it "the strangest – and most difficult – writing job [he] ever had"
Carmen Sandiego Mystery series
In 1997 a series of junior novels was written by various authors and illustrated by S. M. Taggart. Each book in the series was subtitled A Carmen Sandiego Mystery and featured child detectives Ben and Maya as the protagonists. Six books were released:
Color Me Criminal by Ellen Weiss and Mel Friedman
Hasta la Vista, Blarney by Melissa Peterson
One T. Rex Over Easy by Bonnie Bader and Tracey West
The Cocoa Commotion by Melissa Peterson
Take the Mummy and Run by Ellen Weiss and Mel Friedman
Highway Robbery by Bonnie Bader and Tracey West
Comic book series
From mid 1996 to early 1997, four Carmen Sandiego comic books were published by DC in a series entitled Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?. They involved the exploits of Evan Sawyer, "Acme Detective Agency's newest and youngest gumshoe".
Issue #1 (June 1996)
Issue #2 (September 1996)
Issue #3 (November 1996)
Issue #4 (January 1997)
Miscellaneous
The Official Carmen Sandiego Clue Books (Harper Trophy Publishers)
Carmen Sandiego Mystery Adventure Novels (Harper Trophy Publishers)
Carmen Sandiego Travel Activity Books (Troll Associates)
Bi-monthly Carmen Sandiego comic strip in National Geographic Society World Magazine
Board games
University Games published a number of board games, and at least one card game, based on Carmen Sandiego throughout the 1990s. To promote the first board game, Broderbund made a special offer around Christmas when any Carmen Sandiego video game was purchased in tandem.
Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? card game.
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? (1992)
The designer is A. Robert Moog
The number of players is 2 − 6
The suggested playing time is 60min
The suggested ages are 10 and up
The game has two parts. First, players collect clues to work out which of Carmen's henchmen stole the landmark. Afterwards, players race to see who can catch the crook first.
Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego? (1993)
The number of players is 2 − 6
The suggested playing time is 60min
The suggested ages are 8 and up
Where In The World is Carmen Sandiego? Card Game (1993)
The number of players is 2 − 10
The suggested playing time is 15min
The suggested ages are 10 and up
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Junior Detective Edition (1994)
The number of players is 2 − 4
The suggested playing time is 30min
The suggested ages are 4 and up
Where in Space is Carmen Sandiego (1995)
The number of players is 2 − 4
The suggested playing time is 60min
Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego (1996)
The number of players is 2 − 4
The suggested playing time is 60min
The suggested ages are 8 and up
Other media
Planetarium films
Where in the Universe Is Carmen Sandiego? is a movie that was made to be played in a planetarium. It is less like a traditional movie, and more like one of the Carmen Sandiego game shows featured on PBS with the live audience as the detectives. This film also featured Lynne Thigpen as "The Chief" and was based on Where in Space Is Carmen Sandiego?. This marked Thigpen's final appearance of the franchise before her death of a cerebral hemorrhage on March 12, 2003. A sequel was later created called Where in the Universe is Carmen Sandiego? - II.
Concerts
Where in the World of Music is Carmen Sandiego? is a concert series developed by Gary Sheldon. It consists of 3 concerts: The Case of the Missing Concert Hall, The Case of the Missing Bells, and The Case of the Missing Pyramids.
Films
By 1991, rumours were swirling about a movie adaptation of Carmen Sandiego. In 1998, Walt Disney Pictures extended a first-look deal with DIC Entertainment subsidiary DIC Films. One such planned film involved Sandra Bullock as the title character.
In 2011, Walden Media announced its own plans to make a live action film with Jennifer Lopez as both Carmen Sandiego and producer of the film with her production company Nuyorican Productions. Writer Darren Lemke was attached to write the screenplay in July 2012.
In 2018, while the Netflix animated series Carmen Sandiego was still in production, Netflix announced plans to produce a related live action film adaptation, to star Gina Rodriguez, who also voiced the title character in the series. Rodriguez is set to co-produce the film, alongside Kevin Misher and the series' executive producer, Caroline Fraser.
Carmen Sandiego Days
Other
In the late 1990s, the Metro Washington Park Zoo in Portland, Oregon, (now the Oregon Zoo), in conjunction with Brøderbund, ran a summer-long event titled "Where in the Zoo Is Carmen Sandiego?", which functioned as a full-immersion live-action Carmen game in which zoo patrons were the investigating detectives. Actors were hired to play Carmen's henchmen, who could be found around the zoo, and on occasions a costumed Carmen appeared as well, but never in a location where patrons could interact with her. Clues were given out at various stations by members of the ZooTeens volunteer group. Campers aim to solve the mysteries and return the park to normal.
In 2016, NPR held an homage to the WinWiCS gameshow entitled "Where in the Mall is Carmen Sandiego?", in which incoming theft reports from ACME CrimeNet are relayed to contestants who must then work out which store in the mall is being referred to. It was part of the podcast NPR Programs: Ask Me Another.
The Carmen Sandiego Licensing Program saw the Carmen Sandiego brand licensed to over 20 companies including Harper Collins, University Games, Great American Puzzle Factory, DIC Entertainment, WGBH/WQED, Micro Games of America, Publications International and Troll Associates.
The Carmen Sandiego Connection website allowed players and fans to discover more about the franchise.
Pacific Bell Carmen Sandiego Prepaid Phone Cards were made available.
"Where in the Valley is Carmen Sandiego?" was a scavenger hunt held in Yakima, Washington in 2017.
Awards
By 1997, the franchise had received over 60 awards, including 12 Software Publishers Association Excellence Awards for Best Education Programs and 7 Parents' Choice Awards. By 2000, the franchise had won over 90 awards. They include:
Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego? Version 3.0: World Class Award – Best CD-ROM for Children, PC World, July 1997
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Version 3.0: "Best Software of '97 – around the world for ages 9-12", Child Magazine, Dec/Jan 1997
Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego? Version 3.0: "Best Software of '97 – around the world for ages 9-12", Child Magazine, Dec/Jan 1997
Carmen Sandiego Series: Family PC – Top 50 Products, Family PC, July/August 1997
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Version 2.0, 1996 PC World Class Award, PC World, 1996
Carmen Sandiego Junior Detective Edition, Silver Apple Award, National Educational Media Network, May 1996
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Version 2.0, Codie Award – Best Secondary Education Program, Software Publishers Association, March 1995
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, Excellence in Software Awards – Best Early Education Program, Software Publishers Association, September 1995
Carmen Sandiego Junior Detective Edition, 1996 Newsweek Editors' Choice Award, Newsweek, August 1995
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, NAPPA Gold Winner for Children's Software, The 1995 National Parenting Publications Award, December 1995
Critical response and legacy
The series as a whole has been met with critical acclaim, although most of the games released after Broderbund was sold to The Learning Company have received mixed to negative reviews.
A review by Mr. Bill & Lela for Mr. Bill's Adventureland Review says of the 1996 game Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? "It teaches knowledge of world geography and cultures, electronic database research skills, map reading and deductive reasoning. This game became so popular that there is a whole series of them out now: Where in the USA, Where in Time, etc. It's a great game and one that is often used in schools today." The 1991 document Three Instructional Approaches to Carmen Sandiego Software Series outlined three ways in which the Carmen Sandiego series could be utilized in an educational context: turning teacher instruction into a gamified cooperative/competitive experience, linking the previously discrete academic topics, and not playing it in its entirety but isolating segments for lessons on particular items. The 1994 journal article "The impact of a computer-based adventure game on achievement and attitudes in geography" by J. H. Wiebe and N. J. Martin found that there were no "significant differences in recall of geography facts or attitudes between the teaching methods" of the computer game Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? and a "non-computer-based board-style geography game". Kotaku explains the duality of the franchise thus: "In concept, it [is] a light edutainment game. In practice, it [is] a gateway to the rest of the world."
The Educational Technology Handbook says that the series "engage[s] youth in tracking elusive villains across the earth". It suggest that the many games in the franchise "...hold your child's interest by putting them in touch with real-life places and events in a way no formal history or geography lesson can match". From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games suggests that software games like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? challenge ideas of gender stereotypes in regard to games, due to it "hav[ing] equal appeal for boys and girls". In 2001, the Los Angeles Times said "even the most sophisticated recent titles have a hard time competing with Carmen Sandiego, the grand dame of teaching kids where in the world they are". The Stanford paper "Why in the World is Carmen Sandiego a Success?" by Todd Brown explained the long-lasting appeal of the series: "Ultimately, the keyfactor of success for the Carmen series has been cultural. The designers were able to appeal to all children, boys and girls, by developing an experience with something for everyone. Goals, conversations, intrigue, suspense, learning geography... it’s all there. Furthermore, they did it without just shoving a geography lesson down kids’ throats and without talking down to them either". He quoted Elliott, who said "We don’t use small words. Kids are short but not stupid", and concluded "By treating children as the intelligent little people they are, the designers had no need to hide from them the fact that they were playing and learning at the same time. Kids knew. The beauty of Carmen Sandiego is that they kept playing anyway."
PC Games deemed it the first product to "defy characterisation", being a game to some and an education tool to others.
References
External links
Carmen Sandiego home page as of 1997 at the Internet Archive
Carmen Sandiego home page as of 1998 at the Internet Archive
Carmen Sandiego home page as of 2012
ACME Virtual Detective Agency site at the Internet Archive
TV-Series 1991–1996:
TV-Series 1994–1998:
Carmen Sandiego at Don Markstein's Toonopedia. Archived from the original on April 13, 2012.
Reviews
Other media
Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego®? Junior Edition
The Ultimate Unofficial Carmen Sandiego Companion
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? TM Instructions
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? TM Jr. Detective Edition Game Instructions
Carmen Sandiego as the subject of an xkcd comic
Carmen Sandiego easter egg in Wolfram Alpha
Journal article WHERE IS CARMEN SANDIEGO: LOOKING FOR NEW CHALLENGES IN HISTORY
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt franchises |
4460501 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple%20single-level | Multiple single-level | Multiple single-level or multi-security level (MSL) is a means to separate different levels of data by using separate computers or virtual machines for each level. It aims to give some of the benefits of multilevel security without needing special changes to the OS or applications, but at the cost of needing extra hardware.
The drive to develop MLS operating systems was severely hampered by the dramatic fall in data processing costs in the early 1990s. Before the advent of desktop computing, users with classified processing requirements had to either spend a lot of money for a dedicated computer or use one that hosted an MLS operating system. Throughout the 1990s, however, many offices in the defense and intelligence communities took advantage of falling computing costs to deploy desktop systems classified to operate only at the highest classification level used in their organization. These desktop computers operated in system high mode and were connected with LANs that carried traffic at the same level as the computers.
MSL implementations such as these neatly avoided the complexities of MLS but traded off technical simplicity for inefficient use of space. Because most users in classified environments also needed unclassified systems, users often had at least two computers and sometimes more (one for unclassified processing and one for each classification level processed). In addition, each computer was connected to its own LAN at the appropriate classification level, meaning that multiple dedicated cabling plants were incorporated (at considerable cost in terms of both installation and maintenance).
Limits of MSL versus MLS
The obvious shortcoming of MSL (as compared to MLS) is that it does not support immixture of various classification levels in any manner. For example, the notion of concatenating a SECRET data stream (taken from a SECRET file) with a TOP SECRET data stream (read from a TOP SECRET file) and directing the resultant TOP SECRET data stream into a TOP SECRET file is unsupported. In essence, an MSL system can be thought of as a set of parallel (and collocated) computer systems, each restricted to operation at one, and only one, security level. Indeed, the individual MSL operating systems may not even understand the concept of security levels, since they operate as single-level systems. For example, while one of a set of collocated MSL OS may be configured to affix the character string "SECRET" to all output, that OS has no understanding of how the data compares in sensitivity and criticality to the data processed by its peer OS that affixes the string "UNCLASSIFIED" to all of its output.
Operating across two or more security levels then, must use methods extraneous to the purview of the MSL "operating systems" per se, and needing human intervention, termed "manual review". For example, an independent monitor (not in Brinch Hansen's sense of the term) may be provided to support migration of data among multiple MSL peers (e.g., copying a data file from the UNCLASSIFIED peer to the SECRET peer). Although no strict requirements by way of federal legislation specifically address the concern, it would be appropriate for such a monitor to be quite small, purpose-built, and supportive of only a small number of very rigidly defined operations, such as importing and exporting files, configuring output labels, and other maintenance/administration tasks that require handling all the collocated MSL peers as a unit rather than as individual, single-level systems. It may also be appropriate to utilize a hypervisor software architecture, such as VMware, to provide a set of peer MSL "OS" in the form of distinct, virtualized environments supported by an underlying OS that is only accessible to administrators cleared for all of the data managed by any of the peers. From the users' perspectives, each peer would present a login or X display manager session logically indistinguishable from the underlying "maintenance OS" user environment.
Advances in MSL
The cost and complexity involved in maintaining distinct networks for each level of classification led the National Security Agency (NSA) to begin research into ways in which the MSL concept of dedicated system high systems could be preserved while reducing the physical investment demanded by multiple networks and computers. Periods processing was the first advance in this area, establishing protocols by which agencies could connect a computer to a network at one classification, process information, sanitize the system, and connect it to a different network with another classification. The periods processing model offered the promise of a single computer but did nothing to reduce multiple cabling plants and proved enormously inconvenient to users; accordingly, its adoption was limited.
In the 1990s, the rise of virtualization technology changed the playing field for MSL systems. Suddenly, it was possible to create virtual machines (VMs) that behaved as independent computers but ran on a common hardware platform. With virtualization, NSA saw a way to preserve periods processing on a virtual level, no longer needing the physical system to be sanitized by performing all processing within dedicated, system-high VMs. To make MSL work in a virtual environment, however, it was necessary to find a way to securely control the virtual session manager and ensure that no compromising activity directed at one VM could compromise another.
MSL solutions
NSA pursued multiple programs aimed at creating viable, secure MSL technologies leveraging virtualization. To date, three major solutions have materialized.
"Multiple Independent Levels of Security" or MILS, an architectural concept developed by Dr. John Rushby that combines high-assurance security separation with high-assurance safety separation. Subsequent refinement by NSA and Naval Postgraduate School in collaboration with Air Force Research Laboratory, Lockheed Martin, Rockwell Collins, Objective Interface Systems, University of Idaho, Boeing, Raytheon, and MITRE resulted in a Common Criteria EAL-6+ Protection Profile for a high-assurance separation kernel.
"NetTop", developed by NSA in partnership with VMWare, Inc., uses security-enhanced Linux (SELinux) as the base operating system for its technology. The SELinux OS securely holds the virtual session manager, which in turn creates virtual machines to perform processing and support functions.
The "Trusted Multi-Net", a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) system based on a thin client model, was developed jointly by an industry coalition including Microsoft Corporation, Citrix Systems, NYTOR Technologies, VMWare, Inc., and MITRE Corporation to offer users access to classified and unclassified networks. Its architecture eliminates the need for multiple cabling plants, leveraging encryption to transmit all traffic over a cable approved for the highest level accessed.
Both the NetTop and Trusted Multi-Net solutions have been approved for use. In addition, Trusted Computer Solutions has developed a thin-client product, originally based on the NetTop technology concepts through a licensing agreement with NSA. This product is called SecureOffice(r) Trusted Thin Client(tm), and runs on the LSPP configuration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 5 (RHEL5).
Three competing companies have implemented MILS separation kernels:
Green Hills Software
LynuxWorks
Wind River Systems
In addition, there have been advances in the development of non-virtualization MSL systems through the use of specialized hardware, resulting in at least one viable solution:
The Starlight Technology (now marketed as the Interactive Link System), developed by the Australian Defence Science Technology Organisation (DSTO) and Tenix Pty Ltd, uses specialized hardware to allow users to interact with a "Low" network from a "High" network session within a window, without any data flowing from the "High" to the "Low" network.
Philosophical aspects, ease of use, flexibility
It is interesting to consider the philosophical implications of the MSL "solution path." Rather than providing MLS abilities within a classical OS, the chosen direction is to build a set of "virtual OS" peers that can be managed, individually and as a collective, by an underlying real OS. If the underlying OS (let us introduce the term maintenance operating system, or MOS) is to have sufficient understanding of MLS semantics to prevent grievous errors, such as copying data from a TOP SECRET MSL peer to an UNCLASSIFIED MSL peer, then the MOS must have the ability to: represent labels; associate labels with entities (here we rigorously avoid the terms "subject" and "object"); compare labels (rigorously avoiding the term "reference monitor"); distinguish between those contexts where labels are meaningful and those where they are not (rigorously avoiding the term "trusted computing base" [TCB]); the list goes on. One readily perceives that the MLS architecture and design issues have not been eliminated, merely deferred to a separate stratum of software that invisibly manages mandatory access control concerns so that superjacent strata need not. This concept is none other than the geminal architectural concept (taken from the Anderson Report) underlying DoD-style trusted systems in the first place.
What has been positively achieved by the set-of-MSL-peers abstraction, albeit, is radical restriction of the scope of MAC-cognizant software mechanisms to the small, subjacent MOS. This has been accomplished, however, at the cost of eliminating any practical MLS abilities, even the most elementary ones, as when a SECRET-cleared user appends an UNCLASSIFIED paragraph, taken from an UNCLASSIFIED file, to his SECRET report. The MSL implementation would obviously require every "reusable" resource (in this example, the UNCLASSIFIED file) to be replicated across every MSL peer that might find it useful—meaning either much secondary storage needlessly expended or intolerable burden on the cleared administrator able to effect such replications in response to users' requests therefor. (Of course, since the SECRET user cannot "browse" the system's UNCLASSIFIED offerings other than by logging out and beginning an UNCLASSIFIED system afresh, one evidences yet another severe limitation on functionality and flexibility.) Alternatively, less sensitive file systems could be NFS-mounted read-only so that more trustworthy users could browse, but not modify, their content. Albeit, the MLS OS peer would have no actual means for distinguishing (via a directory listing command, e.g.) that the NFS-mounted resources are at a different level of sensitivity than the local resources, and no strict means for preventing illegal uphill flow of sensitive information other than the brute-force, all-or-nothing mechanism of read-only NFS mounting.
To demonstrate just what a handicap this drastic effectuation of "cross-level file sharing" actually is, consider the case of an MLS system that supports UNCLASSIFIED, SECRET, and TOP SECRET data, and a TOP SECRET cleared user who logs into the system at that level. MLS directory structures are built around the containment principle, which, loosely speaking, dictates that higher sensitivity levels reside deeper in the tree: commonly, the level of a directory must match or dominate that of its parent, while the level of a file (more specifically, of any link thereto) must match that of the directory that catalogs it. (This is strictly true of MLS UNIX: alternatives that support different conceptions of directories, directory entries, i-nodes, etc.—such as Multics, which adds the "branch" abstraction to its directory paradigm—tolerate a broader set of alternative implementations.) Orthogonal mechanisms are provided for publicly shared and spool directories, such as /tmp or C:\TEMP, which are automatically—and invisibly—partitioned by the OS, with users' file access requests automatically "deflected" to the appropriately labeled directory partition. The TOP SECRET user is free to browse the entire system, his only restriction being that—while logged in at that level—he is only allowed to create fresh TOP SECRET files within specific directories or their descendants. In the MSL alternative, where any browsable content must be specifically, laboriously replicated across all applicable levels by a fully cleared administrator—meaning, in this case, that all SECRET data must be replicated to the TOP SECRET MSL peer OS, while all UNCLASSIFIED data must be replicated to both the SECRET and TOP SECRET peers—one can readily perceive that, the more highly cleared the user, the more frustrating his timesharing computing experience will be.
In a classical trusted systems-theoretic sense—relying upon terminology and concepts taken from the Orange Book, the foundation of trusted computing—a system that supports MSL peers could not achieve a level of assurance beyond (B1). This is because the (B2) criteria require, among other things, both clear identification of a TCB perimeter and the existence of a single, identifiable entity that has the ability and authority to adjudicate access to all data represented throughout all accessible resources of the ADP system. In a very real sense, then, the application of the term "high assurance" as a descriptor of MSL implementations is nonsensical, since the term "high assurance" is properly limited to (B3) and (A1) systems—and, with some laxity albeit, to (B2) systems.
Cross-domain solutions
MSL systems, whether virtual or physical in nature, are designed to preserve isolation between different classification levels. Consequently, (unlike MLS systems), an MSL environment has no innate abilities to move data from one level to another.
To permit data sharing between computers working at different classification levels, such sites deploy cross-domain solutions (CDS), which are commonly referred to as gatekeepers or guards. Guards, which often leverage MLS technologies themselves, filter traffic flowing between networks; unlike a commercial Internet firewall, however, a guard is built to much more stringent assurance requirements and its filtering is carefully designed to try to prevent any improper leakage of classified information between LANs operating at different security levels.
Data diode technologies are used extensively where data flows are required to be restricted to one direction between levels, with a high level of assurance that data will not flow in the opposite direction. In general, these are subject to the same restrictions that have imposed challenges on other MLS solutions: strict security assessment and the need to provide an electronic equivalent of stated policy for moving information between classifications. (Moving information down in classification level is particularly challenging and typically requires approval from several different people.)
As of late 2005, numerous high-assurance platforms and guard applications have been approved for use in classified environments. N.b. that the term "high-assurance" as employed here is to be evaluated in the context of DCID 6/3 (read "dee skid six three"), a quasi-technical guide to the construction and deployment of various systems for processing classified information, lacking both the precise legal rigidity of the Orange Book criteria and the underlying mathematical rigor. (The Orange Book is motivated by, and derived from, a logical "chain of reasoning" constructed as follows: [a] a "secure" state is mathematically defined, and a mathematical model is constructed, the operations upon which preserve secure state so that any conceivable sequence of operations starting from a secure state yields a secure state; [b] a mapping of judiciously chosen primitives to sequences of operations upon the model; and [c] a "descriptive top-level specification" that maps actions that can be transacted at the user interface (such as system calls) into sequences of primitives; but stopping short of either [d] formally demonstrating that a live software implementation correctly implements said sequences of actions; or [e] formally arguing that the executable, now "trusted," system is generated by correct, reliable tools [e.g., compilers, librarians, linkers].)
Computer security models |
1408342 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American%20Computer%20%26%20Robotics%20Museum | American Computer & Robotics Museum | The American Computer & Robotics Museum, formerly known as the American Computer Museum, is a museum of the history of computing, communications, artificial intelligence and robotics that is located in Bozeman, Montana, United States.
The museum's mission is "... to explore the past and imagine the future of the Information Age through thought-provoking exhibits, innovative storytelling, and the bold exchange of ideas."
History of the museum
The American Computer & Robotics Museum was founded by George and Barbara Keremedjiev as a non-profit organization in May, 1990 in Bozeman, Montana. It is likely the oldest extant museum dedicated to the history of computers in the world. The museum's artifacts trace over 4,000 years of computing history and information technology. George Keremedjiev passed away in November 2018, but his wife Barbara, the Museum Board, and the museum's Executive Director continue working toward his goals to "collect, preserve, interpret, and display the artifacts and history of the information age."
Exhibits on display
The museum has several permanent exhibits on display. The Benchmarks of the Information Age provides an overview of information technology from roughly 1860 B.C.E. with the development of ancient writing systems up to 1976 C.E. with the Apple I personal computer. Another significant exhibit is the NASA Apollo program, including NASA artifacts on loan from the National Air and Space Museum, such as an Apollo Guidance Computer and Apollo 15 watch worn on the moon by Commander David Scott, as well as the last surviving mainframe from the Apollo 11 mission, a UNIVAC 418-II. Another exhibit includes a comprehensive collection of early personal computers like the Altair, IMSAI, Commodore PET, SOL, Apple II, III, Lisa, Mac, KIM, and SYM. The museum has several more exhibits detailing Enigma codebreaking during World War II, neural computing and artificial intelligence, office and communications technology, robotics and automation with Hollywood artifacts, video games, and the future of computing with an eye toward quantum computing. The museum's current special exhibit is the Vintage Mac Museum, a private collection recently donated to the ACRM by the family of collector Adam Rosen.
Awards
In 1994 the American Computer Museum won the Dibner Award for Excellence in Museum Exhibits from the Society for the History of Technology.
Beginning in 1997, The American Computer Museum has presented the Stibitz-Wilson awards with support from Montana State University. The George R. Stibitz Computer & Communications Innovator Award is named for Dr. George R. Stibitz, who first built the first binary adding unit in 1937. The Edward O. Wilson Biodiversity Technology Innovator Award is named for Harvard Emeritus Professor Dr. Edward O. Wilson. In 2011, the museum formalized a new category of award called Lifetime Achievement.
Stibitz Award winners
1997 – Arthur Burks, Chuan Chu, Jack Kilby, Jerry Merryman, James Van Tassel, Maury Irvine, Eldon Hall, Ted Hoff, Federico Faggin
1998 – Ed Roberts, Doug Engelbart
1999 – James Harris, Vinton G. Cerf, Robert E. Kahn
2000 – Steve Wozniak, Tim Berners-Lee, Ray Tomlinson
2001 – Ted Hoff, Federico Faggin and Stan Mazor (together)
2002 – Ralph Baer, Martin Cooper, Leroy Hood, Klein Gilhousen, James Russell, Jon Titus
2005 – Ross Perot, Paul Baran, John Blankenbaker
2006 – Edward O. Wilson
2010 – Barbara Liskov, Max Mathews, Steve Sasson
2012 – Robert Metcalfe, Vic Hayes
2013 – Walt Disney (posthumously awarded), Chuck Hull, John Henry Holland, Jean B. Sweeney
2014 – Eric Horvitz, Douglas Hofstadter, Hans Moravec, Edward Feigenbaum, David Andes, Cynthia Breazeal
2015 – David Ferrucci, Robert Gunderson
2016 – Alan Turing (posthumously awarded), Joseph Desch, Mary Shaw
2017 – Jennifer Doudna, Michelle Simmons, Mark Ritter, Rufus Cone, Jerry M. Chow, Jay Gambetta
2018 – Donna Dubinsky, Bonnie J. Dunbar
Wilson Award winners
2009 – Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe, Steve Running, Michael Soulé, David Ward
2010 – Sir Alec Jeffreys, Lynn Margulis, David Quammen
2011 – Jim Lotimer, John Kress, Peter Belhumeur, David Jacobs
2012 – Paul Anastas, May Berenbaum, Gary Strobel
2013 – Frans de Waal,
2014 – Rebecca D. Costa, Dorothy Hinshaw Patent, Cathy Whitlock, John Charles Priscu
2015 – Janine Benyus, Kjetil Våge, Laurie Marker
2016 – Dan Wenk
2017 – Jennifer Doudna, John Heminway
2018 – Diana Six, Andone C. Lavery, Bonnie J. Dunbar
Lifetime Achievement Award Winners
2011 – Federico Faggin
2017 – Jonathan Titus
Collection
The ACRM's collection contains a wide variety of objects that span over 4,000 years of information technology history, beginning with a Babylonian cuneiform tablet dated to between 1860 and 1837 B.C.E. and a replica of the Antikythera Mechanism, the earliest known geared mechanism, circa 80 B.C.E. The Antikythera Mechanism is an ancient Greek analog computer and orrery used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses for calendar and astrological purposes.
The ACRM has a large collection of historical books, documents, and artifacts related to the history of computing, communications, and knowledge dating back to 1605, including original manuscripts by Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes and original copies of Newton's Principia & Opticks and Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
The museum also has a vast collection of early office technologies including mechanical adding machines like the Arithmometer, electromechanical/electronic calculators (Friden, SCM, Monroe, Mathatron, Anita, Cal Tech (calculator), and Wang), telephones, telegraphs, typewriters, cash registers, and several telephone switchboards. It also holds an IBM 409 (relay based tabulator) and a IBM 604 (vacuum tube calculator), mechanical adding machines, and a variety of slide rules.
The museum also has military technology, including a Minuteman 1 Missile Guidance Computer and a Norden bombsight.
The museum's collection also includes mechanical, electrical, and electronic toys, an industrial robot, and early consumer robots like Hubot.
Additionally, the museum has a replica of the Model K, the first binary adder, built for the museum by its inventor, George R. Stibitz. Also, the ACRM holds many mainframe computers and associated hardware from the 1950s to 1990s including the IBM 1620 Model II, the IBM System/360 Model 20, the Burroughs 205, PDP-8, PDP-8/ and the Univac 1004.
Signed artifacts at the ACRM include an original Altair 8800 signed by Ed Roberts and an original Apple I signed and donated by Steve Wozniak. The museum also has an original January 1975 Popular Electronics Magazine announcing the Altair signed by Ed Roberts, Bill Gates, Paul Allen & Monte Davidoff
See also
Computer museum
References
External links
American Computer & Robotics Museum website
Museums established in 1990
Computer museums in the United States
History museums in Montana
Museums in Bozeman, Montana
1990 establishments in Montana
Science museums in Montana |
46619633 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DarkComet | DarkComet | DarkComet is a remote access trojan (RAT) developed by Jean-Pierre Lesueur (known as DarkCoderSc), an independent programmer and computer security coder from France. Although the RAT was developed back in 2008, it began to proliferate at the start of 2012. The program was discontinued, partially due to its use in the Syrian civil war to monitor activists but also due to its author's fear of being arrested for unnamed reasons. As of August 2018, the program's development "has ceased indefinitely", and downloads are no longer offered on its official website.
DarkComet allows a user to control the system with a graphical user interface. It has many features which allows a user to use it as administrative remote help tool; however, DarkComet has many features which can be used maliciously. DarkComet is commonly used to spy on the victims by taking screen captures, key-logging, or password stealing.
History of DarkComet
Syria
In 2014 DarkComet was linked to the Syrian conflict. People in Syria began using secure connections to bypass the government's censorship and the surveillance of the internet. This caused the Syrian Government to resort to using RATs to spy on its civilians. Many believe that this is what caused the arrests of many activists within Syria.
The RAT was distributed via a "booby-trapped Skype chat message" which consisted of a message with a Facebook icon which was actually an executable file that was designed to install DarkComet. Once infected, the victim's machine would try to send the message to other people with the same booby-trapped Skype chat message.
Once DarkComet was linked to the Syrian regime, Lesueur stopped developing the tool, stating, “I never imagined it would be used by a government for spying,” he said. “If I had known that, I would never have created such a tool.”
Target Gamers, Military and Governments
In 2012 Arbos Network company found evidence of DarkComet being used to target military and gamers by unknown hackers from Africa. At the time, they mainly targeted the United States.
Je Suis Charlie
In the wake of the January 7, 2015, attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris, hackers used the "#JeSuisCharlie" slogan to trick people into downloading DarkComet. DarkComet was disguised as a picture of a newborn baby whose wristband read "Je suis Charlie." Once the picture was downloaded, the users became compromised. Hackers took advantage of the disaster to compromise as many systems as possible. DarkComet was spotted within 24 hours of the attack.
Architecture and Features
Architecture
DarkComet, like many other RATs, uses a reverse-socket architecture. The uninfected computer with a GUI enabling control of infected ones is the client, while the infected systems (without a GUI) are servers.
When DarkComet executes, the server connects to the client and allows the client to control and monitor the server. At this point the client can use any of the features which the GUI contains. A socket is opened on the server and waits to receive packets from the controller, and executes the commands when received.
Features
The following list of features is not exhaustive but are the critical ones that make DarkComet a dangerous tool. Many of these features can be used to completely take over a system and allows the client full access when granted via UAC.
Spy Functions
Webcam Capture
Sound Capture
Remote Desktop
Keylogger
Network Functions
Active Ports
Network Shares
Server Socks5
LAN Computers
Net Gateway
IP Scanner
Url Download
Browse Page
Redirect IP/Port
WiFi Access Points
Computer Power
Poweroff
Shutdown
Restart
Logoff
Server Actions
Lock Computer
Restart Server
Close Server
Uninstall Server
Upload and Execute
Remote Edit Service
Update Server
From URL
From File
DarkComet also has some "Fun Features".
Fun Features
Fun Manager
Piano
Message Box
Microsoft Reader
Remote Chat
Detection
DarkComet is a widely known piece of malware. If a user installs an antivirus, or a darkcomet remover, they can un-infect their computer quickly. Its target machines are typically anything from Windows XP, all the way up to Windows 10.
Common anti-virus tags for a dark comet application are as follow:
Trojan[Backdoor]/Win32.DarkKomet.xyk
BDS/DarkKomet.GS
Backdoor.Win32.DarkKomet!O
RAT.DarkComet
When a computer is infected, it tries to create a connection via socket to the controllers computer. Once the connection has been established the infected computer listens for commands from the controller, if the controller sends out a command, the infected computer receives it, and executes whatever function is sent.
References
External links
(now defunct)
Windows remote administration software
Remote administration software
Trojan horses |
4342455 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tech%20Mahindra | Tech Mahindra | Tech Mahindra is an Indian multinational information technology services and consulting company. Part of the Mahindra Group, the company is headquartered in Pune and has it Tech Mahindra is a 5.2 billion company with 125,236 employees across 90 countries. The company ranked #5 in India's IT firms and overall #47 in Fortune India 500 list for 2019. On 25 June 2013, Tech Mahindra announced the completion of a merger with Mahindra Satyam. Tech Mahindra has 973 active clients as of April 2020.
History
Mahindra & Mahindra started a joint venture with British Telecom in 1986 as a technology outsourcing firm. British Telecom initially had around 30 percent stake in Tech Mahindra. In December 2010, British Telecom sold 5.5 per cent of its stake in Tech Mahindra to Mahindra & Mahindra for Rs 451 crore. In August 2012, British Telecom sold 14.1 per cent of its stake to institutional investors for about Rs 1,395 crore. In December 2012, British Telecom sold its remaining 9.1 per cent (11.6 million shares) shareholding to institutional investors for a total gross cash proceeds of Rs 1,011.4 crores. This sale marked the exit of British Telecom from Tech Mahindra.
Acquisition of Satyam Computer Services Ltd.
After the Satyam scandal of 2008-09 Tech Mahindra bid for Satyam Computer Services, and emerged as a top bidder with an offer of INR 58.90 a share for a 31 percent stake in the company, beating a strong rival Larsen & Toubro. After evaluating the bids, the government-appointed board of Satyam Computer announced on 13 April 2009: "its Board of Directors has selected Venturbay Consultants Private Limited, a subsidiary controlled by Tech Mahindra Limited as the highest bidder to acquire a controlling stake in the Company, subject to the approval of the Hon'ble Company Law Board."
Merger with Mahindra Satyam
Tech Mahindra announced its merger with Mahindra Satyam on March 21, 2012, after getting approval of the two company boards to create an IT company worth US$ 2.5 billion. The two firms had received the go-ahead for the merger from the Bombay Stock Exchange and the National Stock Exchange. On June 11, 2013, Andhra Pradesh High Court gave its approval for merging Mahindra Satyam with Tech Mahindra, after getting approval from the Bombay high court. Vineet Nayyar said that technical approvals from the Registrar of Companies in Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra are required which will be done in two to four weeks, and within eight weeks, the new merged entity would be in place. The new organization would be led by Anand Mahindra as Chairman, Vineet Nayyar as Vice Chairman, and C. P. Gurnani as the CEO and Managing Director. On June 25, 2013, Tech Mahindra announced the completion of its merger with Mahindra Satyam to create the nation's fifth largest software services company with a turnover of US$2.7 billion. Tech Mahindra got the approval from the registrar of companies for the merger at 11:45 pm on June 24, 2013. July 5, 2013 has been determined as record date on which the Satyam Computer Services ('Mahindra Satyam') shares will be swapped for Tech Mahindra shares under the approved scheme. Mahindra Satyam (Satyam Computer Services), was suspended from trading with effect from July 4, 2013, following the merger. Tech Mahindra completed share swap and allocated its shares to the shareholders of Satyam Computer Services on July 12, 2013. The stock exchanges have accorded their approval for trading the new shares with effect from July 12, 2013 onwards. Tech Mahindra posted net profit of INR 686 crore for the first quarter ended June 30, 2013, up 27% compared to the corresponding quarter the previous year.
Later years
In 2014, Tech Mahindra acquired Lightbridge Communications Corporation (LCC), one of the largest independent telecom services companies in the world with local presence in over 50 countries. In 2015, Tech Mahindra acquired SOFGEN Holdings, a 450-employee Swiss IT firm serving the financial services industry Tech Mahindra purchased a controlling stake in Pininfarina S.p.A., an Italian brand in automotive and industrial design Tech Mahindra announced the launch of its Automation Framework AQT (Automation, Quality, Time) By March 2016, Tech Mahindra's post-tax earnings had surged past that of M&M. Tech Mahindra said it would buy financial technology firm Target Group to boost its platform business process-as-a-service offering in the banking sector. In 2017, Tech Mahindra and Midad Holdings, a part of diversified business conglomerate Al Fozan Group announced the launch of a joint venture, Tech Mahindra Arabia Ltd. On the basis of a global partnership agreement signed, Tech Mahindra will market Huawei's enterprise products and services across 44 countries including India. Tech Mahindra announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire CJS Solutions Group LLC, a US-based healthcare Information Technology consulting company which does business as (DBA) “The HCI Group.” In 2019, Tech Mahindra acquired DynaCommerce BV. Tech Mahindra, during September 2019, has acquired BORN Group, a New York City based digital content and production agency, for $95 million in an all-cash deal.
In March 2021, Tech Mahindra partnered with US-based business intelligence analytics company ThoughtSpot. In April 2021, Tech Mahindra acquired US-based DigitalOnUs, a hybrid cloud and DevOps services provider for $120 million.
Tech Mahindra offices
Tech Mahindra has offices in more than 60 countries.
IndiaHyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, Mysore, Noida, Nagpur, Pune, Visakhapatnam, and Warangal
Asia Pacific: China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam
North America and South America: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, Peru, and the United States of America
Australia: Australia and New Zealand
Europe: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and United Kingdom
Africa: Chad, Republic of the Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Egypt , Uganda and Zambia
Middle East: Bahrain, Israel, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates
Awards
IDC Insights Award 2018
See also
List of IT consulting firms
List of Indian IT companies
Fortune India 500
Software industry in Telangana
References
External links
International information technology consulting firms
Information technology consulting firms of India
Software companies of India
Companies established in 1986
Financial services companies based in Pune
Outsourcing companies
Outsourcing in India
Mahindra Group
1986 establishments in Maharashtra
Information technology companies of Bhubaneswar
Information technology companies of India
NIFTY 50
BSE SENSEX |
963435 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swordfish%20%28film%29 | Swordfish (film) | Swordfish is a 2001 American action thriller film directed by Dominic Sena, written by Skip Woods, produced by Joel Silver, and starring John Travolta, Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Don Cheadle, Vinnie Jones and Sam Shepard. The film centers on Stanley Jobson, an ex-con and computer hacker who is targeted for recruitment into a bank robbery conspiracy because of his formidable hacking skills.
Plot
Stanley Jobson (Hugh Jackman) is a cyber-hacker who became notorious for infecting the FBI's Carnivore program with a computer virus. Stanley's parole forbids him from accessing the internet and computers while his ex-wife Melissa, an alcoholic and part-time porn star, has issued a restraining order against him. This also prevents him from seeing his only daughter Holly.
Ginger Knowles (Halle Berry) persuades Stanley to work for Gabriel Shear (John Travolta), who threatens him into cracking a secure Defense Department server. After the hack, Gabriel offers Stanley $10 million to program a multi-headed worm, a "hydra", to siphon $9.5 billion from government slush funds. Stanley begins work on the worm, learning that Gabriel leads Black Cell, a secret organization created by J. Edgar Hoover to launch retaliatory attacks against terrorists that threaten the United States. He also privately discovers Ginger is a DEA agent working undercover and is further surprised to discover a corpse that resembles Gabriel.
After he goes to see Holly home from school, Stanley discovers that he is being followed by FBI agent J.T. Roberts (Don Cheadle), who had previously arrested him. Roberts, though monitoring Stanley closely, is more interested in Gabriel as he does not appear on any government database, and after learning that another hacker, Axl Torvalds (Rudolf Martin), had been killed by Gabriel's men, warns Stanley to be cautious. Stanley opts to secretly code a backdoor in his hydra that reverses the money transfer after a short period. Meanwhile, U.S. Senator Jim Reisman (Sam Shepard), who oversees Black Cell, learns the FBI has started tracking Gabriel and orders him to stand down. Gabriel refuses and narrowly defeats a hit team dispatched against him by Reisman. In retaliation, Gabriel personally kills Reisman in revenge and continues his plan.
Stanley delivers the hydra to Gabriel and leaves to see Holly, only to find that Gabriel has kidnapped her and framed him for Melissa's murder alongside her husband and porn producer. Stanley has no choice but to participate in a bank heist to get Holly back. At the site of the heist, Gabriel and his men storm a branch and secure its employees and customers as hostages, fitting each of them with ball-bearing-based explosives similar to Claymore mines. When police and FBI surround the branch, Gabriel takes Stanley to a nearby coffee shop across the street to meet with Roberts, but Gabriel spends the time discussing the film Dog Day Afternoon and the nature of misdirection. Once back in the bank, Gabriel has one of his men escort a hostage to demonstrate the situation where a sharpshooter kills the man. As other agents pull the hostage away from the bank, the bomb detonates and devastates much of the street, a scene shown in medias res.
Gabriel instructs Stanley to launch the hydra and turns Holly over to him once completed. However, the back door triggers before they can leave the bank, leading to Stanley being recaptured while Holly is rescued. Gabriel threatens to kill Ginger, who he knows is a DEA agent, unless Stanley re-siphons the money back to a Monte Carlo bank. Although Stanley complies, Gabriel shoots Ginger. Gabriel and his men load the hostages onto a bus and demand a plane wait for them at the local airport, but while en route, the bus is lifted off by a S-64 Aircrane and deposited on the roof of a local skyscraper. Gabriel deactivates the bombs and departs with his surviving men on a waiting helicopter, which Stanley shoots down using a rocket-propelled grenade from the bus.
Roberts takes Stanley to verify a corpse they found, believing Gabriel was a Mossad agent. There is no record of a DEA agent named Ginger Knowles, and her body hasn't been found. Stanley recognizes the corpse as the one he discovered earlier and personally realizes that the whole scenario was a deception; Ginger was wearing a bulletproof vest and was working with Gabriel all along, who escaped via a different route. Despite Stanley not telling the police that Gabriel and Ginger are still alive, Roberts arranges for Stanley to have full custody of Holly, where they depart to places elsewhere. In Monte Carlo, Gabriel and Ginger withdraw the stolen money and later watch as a yacht at sea explodes. Over the film's credits, a news report reveals the destruction of the yacht, carrying a known terrorist, as the third such incident in as many weeks.
Cast
Reception
The film received a great deal of press initially because word leaked out early that Halle Berry was doing her very first topless scene. She was paid an extra $500,000 on top of her $2 million fee to appear topless in this film. Critics said the scene looked forced, thrown into the film just to garner press, "Halle Berry Nude" jumped to the top of search engine results. Berry said she did the topless scene, knowing it was gratuitous, to overcome the fear of appearing nude onscreen.
, 25% of the 138 reviews compiled on Rotten Tomatoes are positive, with an average rating of 4.35/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "Swordfish is big on explosions, but critics dislike how it skimps on plot and logic. Also, the sight of a person typing at a computer just isn't that interesting." In a review for The New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote:
According to Box Office Mojo, the film grossed over $147 million in worldwide box office receipts on a production budget of $102 million. John Travolta's performance in the film earned him a Razzie Award nomination for Worst Actor (also for Domestic Disturbance).
DVD alternative ending
The DVD version contains an alternative ending wherein Ginger is told in the bank that the account is already almost empty, alluding to the possibility that Stanley has played one final trick on them and taken the money himself. When Ginger tells Gabriel about this, he takes it in stride and asks her to join him on a trip to Istanbul. In a companion scene to the alternate ending, Stanley is shown on a trip with his daughter in a brand new RV. While eating at a diner, Stanley is shown transferring billions of dollars to various charities before continuing his trip.
Soundtrack
The soundtrack for Swordfish was produced by Paul Oakenfold, under Village Roadshow and Warner Bros. and distributed through London Sire Records, Inc. It contains 15 tracks. The film's orchestral score was written by Christopher Young with several electronic additions by Paul Oakenfold. Fragments from the score were added to the official soundtrack, but were remixed by Oakenfold. A more complete release was issued as an award promo, which is known for its rarity.
References
External links
2001 films
2001 crime thriller films
2000s heist films
2000s spy thriller films
American films
American crime thriller films
American heist films
American spy thriller films
English-language films
Films about computer hacking
Films directed by Dominic Sena
Films produced by Joel Silver
Films scored by Christopher Young
Films set in Los Angeles
Films shot in Los Angeles
Films shot in Monaco
Films shot in Oregon
Films with screenplays by Skip Woods
Malware in fiction
Silver Pictures films
Techno-thriller films
Village Roadshow Pictures films
Warner Bros. films |
44286188 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIAONiao%20Virtual%20Singer | NIAONiao Virtual Singer | NIAONiao Virtual Singer (), is a freeware vocal synthesizer application built for Chinese and is the first singing vocal synthesizer made in China.
Overview
The software works similar to the Vocaloid software by Yamaha and another free shareware software called UTAU.
The default voicebank is named Yu Niaoniao (余袅袅), however additional voicebanks can be made manually to produce new vocals and additional languages are possible. The website for the software offers several other vocals for download.
The main samples are packed in a single large file. NIAONiao can have final consonants in a voice, since it is built for the Chinese language. There is a panel at the bottom for controlling parameters, pitchbends, and vibrato.
NIAONiao can import MIDI files, VSQX files, and UST files, export tracks as the "Niao" file format (*.nn), and can render vocal tracks directly as WAV, MP3, or MIDI files.
References
External links
Speech synthesis software
Singing software synthesizers |
7521954 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-6000%20series | PC-6000 series | The NEC PC-6000 series is a series of 8-bit home computers introduced in November 1981 by NEC Home Electronics. There are several models in this series, such as the PC-6001, the PC-6001 MK2 and the PC-6001 MK2 SR. There is also an American version, called the NEC TREK, or NEC PC-6001A. It was followed by the PC-6600 series.
Several peripherals were available for the system in North America, including an expander with three cartridge jacks (some of the cartridge-based games used two cartridges), a cassette-tape recorder, a 5.25" floppy disk drive, a printer, and a touchpad.
Development
was a subsidiary of NEC and a manufacturer of consumer electronics. They started manufacturing the PC-8001 and its peripherals which were developed by the Electronic Devices Group of Nippon Electric. It was successful and grew the personal computer market in Japan. They started developing a low-cost home computer, and it became the PC-6001. At the same time, the Electronic Devices Group developed the PC-8801 for home and business, and the Information Processing Group developed the PC-9801 for business market. In 1983, New Nippon Electric changed its name to NEC Home Electronics. At that time, NEC group had four personal computer lines come out from different divisions. To avoid confliction, they decided to consolidate personal computer business into two divisions; NEC Home Electronics dealt with the 8-bit home computer line, and the Information Processing Group dealt with the 16-bit personal computer line. NEC Home Electronics discontinued development of the PC-6000 series, the PC-6600 series, and the PC-8000 series. These lines were merged to the PC-8800 series.
PC-6001
The PC-6001 has the µPD780 processor (NEC clone of Zilog Z80), 16 KB RAM (up to 32 KB), General Instrument AY-3-8910 3-voice sound generator, a ROM Cartridge connector, a cassette tape interface, 2 x joystick port, a parallel printer connector, an RF modulator output and a composite video output. It supports four screen modes; 32x16 characters with 4 colors, 64x48 pixel graphics with 9 colors, 128x192 graphics with 4 colors, and 256x192 graphics with white and green colors. The ROM cartridge allowed the user to easily use software such as video games. The Japanese version uses a chiclet keyboard while a North American version (PC-6001A) uses a typewriter keyboard.
PC-6001mkII
The PC-6001mkII has 64 KB memory, 16 KB video RAM, a 5¼-inch 2D floppy drive interface, Kanji character generator, RGB monitor out, speech synthesizer unit and a typewriter keyboard. It supports following screen modes; 40x20 characters, 80x80 pixel graphics with 15 colors, 160x200 graphics with 15 colors, and 320x200 graphics with 4 colors.
References
Notes
NEC PC 6001, OLD-COMPUTERS.COM: The Museum
NEC PC 6001 MK 2, OLD-COMPUTERS.COM: The Museum
NEC PC 6001 MK 2 SR, OLD-COMPUTERS.COM: The Museum
Pc-6001
Z80-based home computers |
3659883 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary%20Synchronous%20Communications | Binary Synchronous Communications | Binary Synchronous Communication (BSC or Bisync) is an IBM character-oriented, half-duplex link protocol, announced in 1967 after the introduction of System/360. It replaced the synchronous transmit-receive (STR) protocol used with second generation computers. The intent was that common link management rules could be used with three different character encodings for messages. Six-bit Transcode looked backwards to older systems; USASCII with 128 characters and EBCDIC with 256 characters looked forward. Transcode disappeared very quickly but the EBCDIC and USASCII dialects of Bisync continued in use.
At one time Bisync was the most widely used communications protocol and is still in limited use in 2013.
Framing
Bisync differs from protocols that succeeded it in the complexity of message framing. Later protocols use a single framing scheme for all messages sent by the protocol. HDLC, Digital Data Communications Message Protocol (DDCMP), Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP), etc. each have different framing schemes but only one frame format exists within a specific protocol. Bisync has five different framing formats.
ACK0 and ACK1 (even/odd affirmative acknowledgement) are encoded as two characters—DLE '70'x, and DLE / for EBCDIC, DLE 0 and DLE 1 for USASCII, DLE - and DLE T for Transcode. WABT (wait before transmit) was encoded as DLE ", DLE ?, or DLE W.
All frame formats begin with at least two SYN bytes. The binary form of the SYN byte has the property that no rotation of the byte is equal to the original.
This allows the receiver to find the beginning of a frame by searching the received bit stream for the SYN pattern. When this is found, tentative byte synchronization has been achieved. If the next character is also a SYN, character synchronization has been achieved. The receiver then searches for a character that can start a frame. Characters outside of this set are described as "leading graphics". They are sometimes used to identify the sender of a frame. Long messages have SYN bytes inserted approximately every second to maintain synchronization. These are ignored by the receiver.
A normal block ending character (ETB or ETX) is followed by a check sum (block check character or BCC). For USASCII, this is a one character longitudinal redundancy check (LRC); for Transcode and EBCDIC, the check sum is a two character cyclic redundancy check(CRC). A data frame may contain an intermediate check sum preceded by an ITB character. This ability to include intermediate check sums in a long data frame allows a considerable improvement of the error detection probability. USASCII characters are also transmitted using odd parity for additional checking.
Pad characters are required following a line turn-around—NAK, EOT, ENQ, ACK0, ACK1. If the transmission ends with EOT or ETX the pad follows the BCC. This pad is either all '1' bits or alternating '0' and '1' bits. The next transmission begins with a pad character which can be either of the above or a SYN.
An optional heading containing control information can precede data in a frame. The content of the heading is not defined by the protocol but is defined for each specific device. The heading, if present, is preceded by an SOH (start of heading) character and followed by an STX (start of text).
Text data normally follows the heading, begun by the STX, and terminated by ETX (end of text) or ETB (end transmission block).
Normal data frames do not allow certain characters to appear in the data. These are the block ending characters: ETB, ETX and ENQ and the ITB and SYN characters. The number of unique characters that can be transmitted is therefore limited to 59 for Transcode, 123 for USASCII, or 251 for EBCDIC.
Transparent data framing provides an unrestricted alphabet of 64, 128 or 256 characters.
In transparent mode block framing characters such as ETB, ETX, and SYN are preceded by a DLE character to indicate their control significance (The DLE character itself is represented by the sequence DLE DLE). This technique became known as character stuffing, by analogy with bit stuffing.
Link control
The link control protocol is similar to STR. The designers attempted to protect against simple transmission errors. The protocol requires that every message be acknowledged (ACK0/ACK1) or negatively acknowledged (NAK), so transmission of small packets has high transmission overhead. The protocol can recover from a corrupted data frame, a lost data frame, and a lost acknowledgment.
Error recovery is by retransmission of the corrupted frame. Since Bisync data packets are not serial-numbered, it's considered possible for a data frame to go missing without the receiver realizing it. Therefore, alternating ACK0s and ACK1s are deployed; if the transmitter receives the wrong ACK, it can assume a data packet (or an ACK) went missing. A potential flaw is that corruption of ACK0 into ACK1 could result in duplication of a data frame.
Error protection for ACK0 and ACK1 is weak. The Hamming distance between the two messages is only two bits.
The protocol is half-duplex (2-wire). In this environment, packets or frames of transmission are strictly unidirectional, necessitating 'turn-around' for even the simplest purposes, such as acknowledgments. Turn-around involves
the reversal of transmission direction,
quiescing of line echo,
resyncing.
In a 2-wire environment, this causes a noticeable round-trip delay and reduces performance.
Some datasets support full-duplex operation, and full-duplex (4-wire) can be used in many circumstances to improve performance by eliminating the turn-around time, at the added expense of 4-wire installation and support. In typical full-duplex, data packets are transmitted along one wire pair while the acknowledgements are returned along the other.
Topology
Much Bisync traffic is point-to-point. Point-to-point lines can optionally use contention to determine the master station. In this case one device can transmit ENQ to bid for control. The other device can reply ACK0 to accept the bid and prepare to receive, or NAK or WABT to refuse. In some cases connection of a terminal to multiple hosts is possible via the dial telephone network.
Multi-drop is part of the initial Bisync protocol. A master station, normally a computer, can sequentially poll terminals which are attached via analog bridges to the same communication line. This is accomplished by sending a message consisting only of an ENQ character addressed to each device in turn. The selected station then transmits a message to the master or reply with EOT to indicate that it has no data to transmit.
Bisync applications
The original purpose of Bisync was for batch communications between a System/360 mainframe and another mainframe or a Remote Job Entry (RJE) terminal such as the IBM 2780 or IBM 3780. The RJE terminals support a limited number of data formats: punched card images in and out and print line images to the terminal.
Some non-IBM hardware vendors such as Mohawk Data Sciences used Bisync for other purposes such as tape-to-tape transmission. A programmer can easily emulate an RJE terminal or other device.
IBM offered assembler language macros to provide programming support. During the System/360 era, these access methods were BTAM (Basic Telecommunications Access Method) and QTAM (Queued Telecommunications Access Method) – which was later replaced by Telecommunications Access Method (TCAM). IBM introduced VTAM (Virtual Telecommunications Access Method) with the System/370.
Teleprocessing monitors such as IBM's CICS and third-party software such as Remote DUCS (display unit control system) and Westi platforms used Bisync line control to communicate with remote devices.
The academic computing network Bitnet, together with connecting networks in other geographic areas, used Bisync to connect 3000 computer systems at its peak.
Financial network S.W.I.F.T. used BSC protocol for communication between Regional Center and Institution (bank) server over leased line. In a mid-1990 BSC was replaced to the X.25 infrastructure.
Pseudo-Bisync applications
Some important systems use Bisync data framing with a different link control protocol. Houston Automatic Spooling Priority (HASP) uses Bisync half-duplex hardware in conjunction with its own link control protocol to provide full-duplex multi-datastream communication between a small computer and a mainframe running HASP. In Bisync terms, this is conversational mode.
Some early X.25 networks tolerated a connection scheme where transparent Bisync data frames encapsulated HDLC LAPB data and control packets. , several vendors encapsulate Bisync transmissions within TCP/IP data streams.
Disposition
Bisync began to be displaced in the 1970s by Systems Network Architecture (SNA) which allows construction of a network with multiple hosts and multiple programs using telecommunications. X.25 and the Internet Protocol are later protocols which, like SNA, provide more than mere link control.
Bisync devices
A large number of devices use the Bisync protocol, some of these are:
IBM 3270 Display Terminal Subsystem control units.
IBM 2780 Data Transmission Terminal.
IBM 2703 Transmission Control.
IBM HASP workstations.
IBM 1130 Computing System.
IBM 2922 Programmable Terminal.
See also
Asynchronous communication
References
Further reading
Detailed discussion of Bisync link control by Charles A Wilde (new link)
A detailed description of the protocol.
Bisync & STR programming for IBM 1130
Link protocols
IBM computer hardware |
1118035 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic%20programming | Automatic programming | In computer science, the term automatic programming identifies a type of computer programming in which some mechanism generates a computer program to allow human programmers to write the code at a higher abstraction level.
There has been little agreement on the precise definition of automatic programming, mostly because its meaning has changed over time. David Parnas, tracing the history of "automatic programming" in published research, noted that in the 1940s it described automation of the manual process of punching paper tape. Later it referred to translation of high-level programming languages like Fortran and ALGOL. In fact, one of the earliest programs identifiable as a compiler was called Autocode. Parnas concluded that "automatic programming has always been a euphemism for programming in a higher-level language than was then available to the programmer."
Program synthesis is one type of automatic programming where a procedure is created from scratch, based on mathematical requirements.
Origin
Mildred Koss, an early UNIVAC programmer, explains: "Writing machine code involved several tedious steps—breaking down a process into discrete instructions, assigning specific memory locations to all the commands, and managing the I/O buffers. After following these steps to implement mathematical routines, a sub-routine library, and sorting programs, our task was to look at the larger programming process. We needed to understand how we might reuse tested code and have the machine help in programming. As we programmed, we examined the process and tried to think of ways to abstract these steps to incorporate them into higher-level language. This led to the development of interpreters, assemblers, compilers, and generators—programs designed to operate on or produce other programs, that is, automatic programming."
Generative programming
Generative programming and the related term meta-programming are concepts whereby programs can be written "to manufacture software components in an automated way" just as automation has improved "production of traditional commodities such as garments, automobiles, chemicals, and electronics."
The goal is to improve programmer productivity. It is often related to code-reuse topics such as component-based software engineering.
Source-code generation
Source-code generation is the process of generating source code based on a description of the problem or an ontological model such as a template and is accomplished with a programming tool such as a template processor or an integrated development environment (IDE). These tools allow the generation of source code through any of various means.
Modern programming languages are well supported by tools like Json4Swift (Swift) and Json2Kotlin (Kotlin).
Programs that could generate COBOL code include:
the DYL250/DYL260/DYL270/DYL280 series
Business Controls Corporation's SB-5
Peat Marwick Mitchell's PMM2170 application-program-generator package
These application generators supported COBOL inserts and overrides.
A macro processor, such as the C preprocessor, which replaces patterns in source code according to relatively simple rules, is a simple form of source-code generator. Source-to-source code generation tools also exist.
Low-code applications
A low-code development platform (LCDP) is software that provides an environment programmers use to create application software through graphical user interfaces and configuration instead of traditional computer programming.
See also
Automatic bug fixing
Automated machine learning
Comparison of code generation tools
Feature-oriented programming
Language-oriented programming
Modeling language
Program transformation
Semantic translation
Vocabulary-based transformation
Fourth-generation programming language
Low-code development platforms
Notes
References
Generative Programming: Methods, Tools, and Applications by Krzysztof Czarnecki and Ulrich W. Eisenecker, Addison Wesley, 2000.
External links
Code Generation for Dummies
Programming paradigms
Source code generation |
25276681 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew%20Colin | Andrew Colin | Andrew John Theodore Colin was a British university professor of computer science, born in 1936. He is a co-inventor of the widely used Binary Tree data structure. Professor Colin published 12 textbooks on various aspects of Computer Science, some of which have been translated into other languages.
Andrew Colin lectured at Birkbeck College, University of London from 1957 to 1960, moving in 1960 to the university's Institute of Computer Science. From 1965 to 1970 he was Director of the Computer Science Laboratory at Lancaster University. In 1970 he was appointed Professor in the newly created Department of Computer Science at the University of Strathclyde. He stepped down as head of department in 1983 and started a company working on developing commercial applications based on the Department's research, while continuing to teach. Subsequently, he lectured part-time at the Graduate School of Business. He also sang bass in the choir of St. Mary's Cathedral, Glasgow.
He died on 25 September 2018 at the age of 82.
References
1936 births
2018 deaths
British computer scientists
Academics of Birkbeck, University of London
Academics of Lancaster University
Academics of the University of Strathclyde |
15064911 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave%20Gelperin | Dave Gelperin | Dr. David Gelperin chaired the working groups developing the IEEE 829-1989 software testing documentation standard. With Jerry E. Durant he went on to develop the High Impact Inspection Technology that builds upon traditional inspections but utilizes a test driven additive.
Gelperin received his PhD in Computer Science from Ohio State University. Together with his partner William C. Hetzel, he co-founded the Software Quality Engineering consultancy firm (now known as TechWell Corporation) in 1986. The firm played a leading role in organizing the International Conference on Software Testing and the Software Testing Analysis & Review conference.
Gelperin and Hetzel had developed the STEP methodology for implementing the original IEEE-829 Standard for Test Documentation. Their firm was instrumental in gaining recognition for testing as a separate discipline within the software industry.
He is CTO & President of ClearSpecs Enterprises in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
References
Software testing people
Living people
Year of birth missing (living people) |
16500675 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1172%20%C3%84neas | 1172 Äneas | 1172 Äneas is a large Jupiter trojan from the Trojan camp, approximately in diameter. It was discovered on 17 October 1930, by astronomer Karl Reinmuth at the Heidelberg Observatory in southwest Germany. The dark D-type asteroid is one of the largest Jupiter trojans and has a rotation period of 8.7 hours. It is named after the Trojan prince Aeneas, from Greek mythology.
Orbit and classification
Äneas is located in the Lagrangian point, 60° behind Jupiter in the so-called Trojan camp, orbiting in a 1:1 resonance . It is also a non-family asteroid of the Jovian background population.
It orbits the Sun at a distance of 4.7–5.8 AU once every 11 years and 11 months (4,354 days; semi-major axis of 5.22 AU). Its orbit has an eccentricity of 0.10 and an inclination of 17° with respect to the ecliptic. The body's observation arc begins with its official discovery observation at Heidelberg in October 1930.
Naming
This minor planet was named after the Trojan hero Aeneas from Greek mythology. He is the son of goddess Aphrodite and Anchises of after whom 1173 Anchises was named. The was mentioned in The Names of the Minor Planets by Paul Herget in 1955 ().
Physical characteristics
Rotation period
Several rotational lightcurves of Äneas have been obtained since the first photometric observations by William Hartmann in 1988, that gave a period of 8.33 hours, and by Stefano Mottola and Anders Erikson in 1993, using the ESO 1-metre telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile. Lightcurve analysis gave a rotation period of hours with a brightness variation of magnitude ().
In July and August 2008, Susan Lederer at CTIO in Chile, and Robert Stephens at the Goat Mountain Astronomical Research Station in California, determined a well-defined period of with an amplitude 0.20 magnitude (). Follow-up observations during 2015–2017 by Robert Stephens and Daniel Coley at the Center for Solar System Studies gave three concurring periods of 8.701, 8.681 and 8.7 hours with an amplitude of 0.62, 0.40 and 0.21 magnitude, respectively (), while in August 2011, Pierre Antonini reported a period of 11.8 hours based on a fragmentary lightcurve ().
Diameter and albedo
According to the surveys carried out by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite IRAS, the Japanese Akari satellite and the NEOWISE mission of NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, Äneas measures between 118.02 and 148.66 kilometers in diameter – making it anywhere from the 8th to 4th largest Jupiter trojan – determined from a common absolute magnitude of 8.33 and a surface albedo between 0.037 and 0.059. The Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link adopts the results obtained by IRAS, that is, an albedo of 0.0403 and a diameter of 142.82 kilometers based on an absolute magnitude of 8.33.
Spectral type
In the Tholen and Barucci classification, Äneas is a dark D-type asteroid, while in the Tedesco classification is as D/P-type asteroid. Its high V–I color index of 0.99 is typical for D-types.
Notes
References
External links
Largest Jupiter trojans SBDB, query
Asteroid Lightcurve Database (LCDB), query form (info )
Dictionary of Minor Planet Names, Google books
Asteroids and comets rotation curves, CdR – Observatoire de Genève, Raoul Behrend
Discovery Circumstances: Numbered Minor Planets (1)-(5000) – Minor Planet Center
001172
Discoveries by Karl Wilhelm Reinmuth
Minor planets named from Greek mythology
Named minor planets
001172
19301017 |
31461286 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1913%20New%20Zealand%20rugby%20league%20season | 1913 New Zealand rugby league season | The 1913 New Zealand rugby league season was the sixth season of rugby league that had been played in New Zealand.
International competitions
New Zealand toured Australia losing their first three matches to New South Wales before defeating them 17-11 in the final match. New Zealand then defeated Queensland 39-5, Ipswich 29-12 and Toowoomba 32-6. They also played matches against Northern NSW and Orange. Henry Thacker was the manager of the tour and Harold Hayward was the captain.
New Zealand then hosted a return tour by New South Wales. New South Wales won all eleven matches on tour, including over Canterbury, Auckland and Wellington. New South Wales defeated New Zealand 33-19 in Auckland and 58-19 in Wellington.
National competitions
Northern Union Cup
Auckland again held the Northern Union Cup at the end of the season. Auckland had defeated Canterbury 48-12 in front of 7,000 fans at Victoria Park in August.
Inter-district competition
Wellington defeated Auckland 33-18 on 27 September 1913. It was not until 1988 that they were again victorious over an Auckland side. The 1913 side was: A.Anderson, B.Whitley, W.Kelly, A.House (Petone), G.Bradley (Athletic), K.George (Newtown), J.Barber, J.Parker (Petone), J.Spencer, T.Turner, A.Bensmann, L.Campbell (Newtown), W.Wilson (Athletic). Bench: H.McGuire, B.Childs.
Canterbury conducted a northern tour; losing to Auckland 48-12 in a Northern Union Cup challenge, defeating Taranaki 10-9 and losing to Wellington 26-8. The match against Taranaki was Canterbury's first, and last for sixty years. Captain Charlie Pearce and Jim Auld were included in the Canterbury team on tour while Billy Mitchell joined them in the home match against New South Wales.
Club competitions
Auckland
North Shore won the Auckland Rugby League's competition.
Charles Savory was found guilty of kicking by the ARL judiciary and was suspended for life. Savory claimed it was a case of mistaken identity. This sparked a feud between the ARL and the New Zealand Rugby League as the NZRL heard the case and asked the ARL to reconsider, which they refused to do in June. The NZRL then quashed the conviction and Savory played for New Zealand while he was still suspended by the ARL. The NZRL then suspended the entire ARL board and on 15 January 1914 the NZRL approved an entirely "new" ARL board.
Wellington
Petone won the Wellington Rugby League's Appleton Shield.
Bill Kelly, Billy Wilson and George Bradley played for Athletic while James Barber, Jim Parker and Albert House played for Petone and John Spencer and Les Campbell played for Newtown.
Canterbury
Sydenham won the Canterbury Rugby League's inaugural competition over twelve rounds. Dr Henry Thacker donated the Thacker Shield during the season.
The Thacker Shield was first contested on 6 September. Sydenham successfully defended the shield against the North Shore, winning 13-8.
Addington was founded on 31 January 1913, Sydenham one week later on 7 February, Linwood on 12 March and on 14 March St. Albans was formed. Charlie Pearce played for Addington and served on their committee. Jim Auld, Bill King and David McPhail were involved with Sydenham while Abbie Shadbolt and Billy Mitchell played for St Albans and Joseph Lavery played for Linwood.
References
Rugby league season
New Zealand rugby league seasons |
38375190 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post%20open%20source | Post open source | Post open source, also called "post open-source software (POSS)", is a 2012/2013 noticed movement among software developers, in particular open-source software developers. The interpretation was that this was a reaction to the complex compliance requirements of the software license/permission culture, noticed by more code being posted into repositories without any license whatsoever, implying a disregard for the current license regimes, including copyleft as supporter of the current copyright system ("Copyright reform movement").
History
"POSS" was first used by James Governor, founder of analyst firm RedMonk, who said "younger devs today are about POSS – Post open-source software. fuck the license and governance, just commit to github." According to Luis Villa, when even "...the open license ecosystem assumes that sharing can't (or even shouldn't) happen without explicit permission in the form of licenses", developers vote their dissent through POSS.
Precursor
In 2004 Daniel J. Bernstein pushed a similar idea with his License-free software, where he neither placed his software (qmail, djbdns, daemontools, and ucspi-tcp) into public domain nor released it with a software license. But, with end of 2007 he dedicated his software in the public domain with an explicit waiver statement.
See also
License-free software
Anti-copyright notice
Copyright reform movement
References
Software distribution |
5609106 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payton%20Jordan | Payton Jordan | Payton Jordan (March 19, 1917 – February 5, 2009) was the head coach of the 1968 United States Olympic track and field team, one of the most powerful track teams ever assembled, which won a record twenty-four medals, including twelve golds. He was born in Whittier, California. Jordan was exceedingly successful as a collegiate track coach for a decade at Occidental College and for 23 years at Stanford University. A star three-sport athlete in his youth, Jordan more recently became one of the most dominant track athletes of all time, as a sprinter, in senior divisions (age 50 and over). Jordan died of cancer at his home in Laguna Hills, California on February 5, 2009.
Education and early athletics competition
Jordan excelled in track, rugby and football. Jordan was a star athlete at Pasadena High School in Pasadena, California, and graduated from the University of Southern California (USC), where he was captain of the Trojans' National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Championship track team in 1939. He helped the Trojans win two national collegiate team titles, in 1938 and 1939, and was a member of a world-record-setting 440-yard relay team, in a time of 40.5 seconds. Also in 1939, Jordan played on the Trojan football team that beat Duke University, 7-3, in the Rose Bowl. He won the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) 100 meters title in 1941.
Jordan missed his opportunity to compete in the Olympic Games as an athlete (both the 1940 and 1944 Games were canceled due to World War II), so he opted to join the United States Navy instead.
Jordan has cited three mentors as instrumental to shaping his career, philosophy, and coaching style: at Pasadena High, track coach Carl Metten, and at University of Southern California track coach Dean Cromwell and football coach Howard Jones.
Coaching career
At Occidental College, Jordan coached his team to two NAIA track and field championships and ten league titles. One of his athletes, Bob Gutowski, set a world record in the pole vault. During his 23 years as Stanford's track coach, between 1957 and 1979, Payton produced seven Olympians, six world record holders and six national champions. Jordan directed two of the greatest track meets ever held on American soil, the 1960 Olympic Trials and the 1962 USA-USSR dual meet, both at Stanford.
Jordan was the head coach of the 1968 US Olympic track team, and an assistant coach for the 1964 US Olympic track team. Billy Mills' upset victory in the 10,000 meters in 1964, the legendary leap of 29'2-1/2 by Bob Beamon in the long jump, the (third and) fourth gold medal in the discus by Al Oerter, the 100 meters sprint world record of 9.9 seconds by Jim Hines, Tommie Smith's gold medal win in the 200 meters in 19.8 seconds, and Lee Evans' world record (43.8 seconds) in the 400 meters were among the many Olympic highlights achieved when Jordan was coach.
Masters division American and world sprint records
Jordan began competing again at the Lake Tahoe Masters meet in 1972, after encouragement from friends.
World 100 m Masters records:
55+, 11.60 Progression
60+, 11.80 Progression
65+, 12.53 Progression
70+, 12.91 Progression
75+, 13.72 Progression
80+, 14.65 (1997, Modesto Relays, Modesto, California) Progression
World 200 m Masters records:
70+, 26.8
75+, 28.14
80+, 30.89 (1997, San Jose City College)
American 100 m Masters records:
60+, 11.8
65+, 12.6
70+, 12.91
75+, 13.72
80+, 14.65
American 200 m Masters records:
70+, 26.8
75+, 28.14
80+, 30.89
Payton Jordan U.S. Track & Field Open
Each May, the Payton Jordan US Track & Field Open is held at Stanford University's Cobb Track and Angell Field. After being renamed in Jordan's honor, the event was first held under the new title on Memorial Day, May 31, 2004. Since its inception in 2000, the USATF Golden Spike tour event has brought international track superstars to Stanford. The event has also established itself as a premier stop on the international IAAF Grand Prix tour. More than 75 Olympians from dozens of countries have competed at the event.
Documentary film role
Jordan appeared as himself in the 1999 documentary film Fists of Freedom: The Story of the '68 Summer Games, which chronicles the events before, during and after the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City and again in the 2008 documentary film "Salute" which was written, directed and produced by Matt Norman. This film chronicles the story of the white man in the black power protest photo of Tommie Smith, John Carlos and Peter Norman during the 1968 Mexico City Olympic 200m event. Payton appears as himself.
Recognition
In 1982 Jordan was inducted into the USA National Track and Field Hall of Fame, as well as separately in the 1996 inaugural class of the USATF Masters Hall of Fame Jordan is also a member of the U.S. Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association, USC, Occidental College, Stanford University, NAIA, Mt. SAC Relays and the National Senior Games Association Halls of Fame. In honor of his numerous outstanding achievements and contributions, in 2004 the US Open track meet at Stanford was renamed in his honor.
References
is the story of the life of Payton Jordan.
External links
GoStanford.cstv.com - 'Legendary Stanford Coach Payton Jordan Honored: US Open Track and Field meet to be renamed in Coach Jordan's honor' (March 31, 2004)
LATC.com - 'Payton Jordan enjoys life on the run', Pete Borello, Los Altos Town Crier (August 18, 1997)
MtSac.edu - 'Payton Jordan, Event: Coach, Inducted to Hall of Fame: 1983', Mt. San Antonio College
USOlympicTeam.com - 'A Living Legend—Payton Jordan: At 86 years of age, Payton Jordan is currently the oldest Olympic Coach. As an assistant coach of track and field in the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games and the head coach of the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games for track and field, Payton has been involved at the highest level of his sport.' Catherine Sellers, United States Olympic Committee Coaching Division
USTFOpen.org - 'US Open named in honor of legendary Stanford coach', Payton Jordan US Open Track & Field
StanfordAlumni.org - 'Listen to Payton Jordan: Jordan reflects on the U.S.-U.S.S.R. track meet' (requires Windows Media or QuickTime), Stanford Magazine (May/June 2005)
Litsky, Frank. "Payton Jordan, U.S. Track Team Coach, Is Dead at 91," The New York Times, Saturday, February 7, 2009.
Chapin, Dwight & FitzGerald, Tom. "Payton Jordan: 1917–2009; Coached Stanford and '68 Olympics," San Francisco Chronicle, Saturday, February 7, 2009.
1917 births
2009 deaths
American male sprinters
American track and field coaches
Deaths from cancer in California
Occidental Tigers track and field coaches
People from Laguna Hills, California
Stanford Cardinal track and field coaches
USC Trojans football players
USC Trojans men's track and field athletes
Sportspeople from Whittier, California
World record holders in masters athletics
American masters athletes
Track and field athletes from California
Pasadena High School (California) alumni
United States Navy personnel of World War II |
30605496 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929%20USC%20Trojans%20football%20team | 1929 USC Trojans football team | The 1929 USC Trojans football team represented the University of Southern California (USC) in the 1929 college football season. In their fifth year under head coach Howard Jones, the Trojans compiled a 10–2 record (6–1 against conference opponents), won the Pacific Coast Conference championship, and outscored their opponents by a combined total of 492 to 69. The team defeated Pittsburgh 47–14 in the 1930 Rose Bowl and was retroactively selected as the 1929 national champion under the Houlgate System and also retroactively selected as the national champion under the Berryman QPRS system and as a co-national champion by Jeff Sagarin.
Schedule
Season summary
UCLA
Russ Saunders 14 rushes, 234 yards
References
USC
USC Trojans football seasons
Pac-12 Conference football champion seasons
Rose Bowl champion seasons
College football national champions
USC Trojans football |
7172479 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBox2 | DBox2 | The DBox is a DVB satellite and cable digital television integrated receiver decoder (set-top box). They were distributed widely for use with Pay television channels.
It was commissioned by the Kirch group's DF1, an early German provider of digital television that later merged with Premiere. The hardware was developed and produced by Nokia though later also produced by Philips and Sagem under license.
The combination of third-party developers and network connectivity which facilitates card sharing, makes DBox2 (and the DBox2 based Dreambox) use particularly common among enthusiasts and those who intend to obtain services without payment. It also enables the receiver to store digital copies of DVB MPEG transport streams on networked filesystems or broadcast the streams as IPTV to VideoLAN and XBMC Media Center clients.
In 2001, following the bankruptcy of Kirch Media, production of the D-box ceased. However, many devices continue to be traded second-hand (often using online auction sites) and fairly high prices are paid because of the ability to gain services without payment. For this reason, there are also a significant number of, mostly German language, web sites and forums devoted to the devices.
Linux on the Dbox-2
Since 1997 an alternative operating system has been available for the predecessor of the Dbox2, the Dbox. This was DVB98 (later DVB2000), developed by a single programmer. Despite programming the hardware directly using machine code, DVB2000 is superior in many respects relative to the original software.
For the DBox2, an effort was created to port the Linux operating system. This is now the most popular choice. Installation involves first putting the box into its debug-mode, a mode intended for internal development. It is then possible to take a backup copy of the original operating system (including vital micro-code images for the MPEG decoder chipset) and flash an image based on Linux to the device.
In addition to the Linux kernel and drivers, a significant amount of code is needed to allow the DBox2 to function as a digital receiver. This code is all maintained under a single open-source project - TuxBox. There is, however, a choice of user-interfaces that can be used, the most popular being Neutrino and Enigma. Enigma is also used on the Dreambox.
Hardware upgrades
The DBox2 does not have a hard disk or other internal storage. Modules have however become available for attaching IDE hard drives and SATA hard drives and MMC and SD flash memory cards. Support for these is included in some software distributions.
See also
Dreambox
HDHomeRun
Monsoon HAVA
Slingbox
LocationFree Player
Unibox
Eurovox
References
External links
UK CVS development and support forum
GNU DBox2 Software Project ("Tuxbox")
Linux@Dbox2 HowTo
Tuxbox Sharing
Nokia d-box S/C support page
DBox Winserver (English)
Digital television
Linux-based devices |
330873 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star%20Wars%20Jedi%20Knight%3A%20Jedi%20Academy | Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy | Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy is a first- and third-person shooter video game, developed by Raven Software and published by LucasArts for the Microsoft Windows, OS X, and Xbox in 2003. Vicarious Visions was responsible for the development of the Xbox version. The game is a sequel to 2002's Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, and the fourth and final installment in the Star Wars: Jedi Knight series. The single-player story, set in the fictional Star Wars expanded universe two years after Jedi Outcast, follows Jaden Korr, a new student at Luke Skywalker's Jedi Academy under the tutelage of the previous games' protagonist, Kyle Katarn. As Jaden, players are tasked with investigating a Dark Jedi cult called the Disciples of Ragnos, while slowly learning the ways of the Force and committing themselves to either the light side or the dark side.
Jedi Academy uses the same game engine as Jedi Outcast, the id Tech 3, but features several technical improvements. Like Jedi Outcast, the game combines shooter elements with hack and slash combat, allowing players to wield blasters, lightsabers, and a variety of Force powers. The lightsaber combat has been slightly improved, and both the player and enemies can now wield standard, double-bladed or dual lightsabers. In addition to customizing their lightsaber and Force powers, players can also modify Jaden's appearance, choosing their species, gender, and clothing. Jedi Academy also features a multiplayer mode that allows players to compete in several different game modes online or over a local area network.
The game received largely positive reviews upon release. It was praised for the freedom it offered to players in terms of customization and gameplay, allowing them to wield a lightsaber from the very beginning and to select the order in which they wish to complete missions, unlike its predecessors. One of the most praised elements was the lightsaber combat, which is still regarded by many as the best in any Star Wars game to date. However, the story and some technical issues received criticism. In September 2009, Jedi Academy was re-released onto Steam and Direct2Drive alongside the rest of the Jedi Knight series. The Xbox version was made available on Xbox One via backward compatibility in April 2018. A Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 port was announced in September 2019 and published by Aspyr in March 2020.
Gameplay
As a first and third-person shooter set in the Star Wars expanded universe, Jedi Academy puts the player into combat wielding a variety of firearms from that universe, as well as lightsabers and Force powers. The player can choose perspective for every weapon except for the lightsaber, which must be wielded in a third person view. The shooter aspects of the game are standard, including a variety of projectile and energy weapons and explosives. Players have a health meter and a shield meter, which are replenished separately.
In both single-player and multiplayer, the player character is a Force-user, who has access to a variety of Force powers in addition to their lightsaber(s). Powers include Push, Pull, Jump, Heal, Lightning, and other abilities from the Star Wars universe. Force powers are categorized into core, Light Side, and Dark Side, and each Force power has three ranks, with the power increasing in effectiveness with each rank. In both single-player and multiplayer, players choose how to rank up their powers, adding a layer of customization. During gameplay, the player has a "Force meter" which is depleted when powers are used, and recharges when no powers are in use.
Jedi Academy places a heavy emphasis on lightsaber combat. The player can create a custom lightsaber by selecting a hilt and one of five blade colors. After the first few missions, the player is allowed to choose a new lightsaber fighting style ("fast" or "strong"), and can switch between that style and the original "medium" style at any time. Later in the game, the player can choose to learn the third fighting style, or wield one saber in each hand, or wield a "saber staff" similar to the double ended lightsaber Darth Maul used in The Phantom Menace which also adds a kicking ability unavailable with any other lightsaber. The different sabers and fighting styles each have unique strengths, weaknesses, and special moves. If using dual sabers, the player can switch off the second saber and use the "Fast"-style single-saber stance, or if using a saber staff, the player can switch one of the blades off and use it as a single-bladed saber in the "Medium"-style stance.
Single-player
The player initially chooses the character's species and gender, and begins the game with a single lightsaber. Most of the game is divided into three batches of five missions each. Out of each batch, the player may skip one mission and do the other four in any order, or may do all five in any order. These batches of missions are preceded by a mandatory training course and connected by mandatory missions: Acts 1 and 2 are connected by missions set on Hoth while Acts 2 and 3 are connected by missions set in Bast castle on the planet V'jun. At the end of the Hoth missions, the player may chose a new single-bladed lightsaber fighting style, and at the end of the V'jun/Bast missions, the player is allowed access to dual-wielding or to a saber staff. At the beginning of each optional mission, the player can choose one of their Force skills to upgrade. This will increase the impact of that Force power, thus making the character more powerful as the game progresses. This also encourages players to skip as few missions as possible. The game also introduces player-controllable vehicles and a single vehicle-based level. After the last batch of optional missions, there is a final string of missions which are mandatory, but which give the player a choice to turn to the Dark Side or not, and which feature important differences depending on which choice the player makes.
Multiplayer
In multiplayer mode, one can play online or via a local area network (LAN) with other players, as well as computer-controlled bots. The player can create their avatar using a series of options, similar to the character creation in single-player. Alternatively the player can choose to play as one of almost all of the characters from Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy. Before a match begins, the server specifies the Force ranking to be used; this controls how many points the players have to invest in different Force powers. Players can then customize their powers for the match. The server can also disable normal weapons to create a lightsaber-only game. There are different multiplayer modes such as "Capture the flag", "Power Duel" and "Siege". Depending on the mode, players can play on their own or as part of a team. In comparison with the single-player gameplay, multiplayer requires a high level of skill and can have a steep learning curve, as stated by many. There are six multiplayer modes in total, but the most popular and most willingly modified is the "Free For All".
Since 2011 the online community has started to slowly decline. As of May 2019, there were around 250 active players, with less than a third online at one time. A number of multiplayer modifications have been released, some of the most popular being Movie Battles II, JA+ and Lugormod.
Plot
Jedi Academy is set in 14 ABY, a decade after Return of the Jedi and two years after Jedi Outcast. Players take on the role of Jaden Korr (voiced by Philip Tanzini if male, and Jennifer Hale if female), a talented Jedi Padawan who, after building their own lightsaber, travels to the Jedi Academy on Yavin IV to learn the ways of the Force. En route to the Academy, Jaden befriends fellow student Rosh Penin (Jason Marsden), but the students' shuttle is suddenly shot down by an unknown enemy. Jaden and Rosh make their way to the Academy, where the former witnesses a woman using a staff to drain energy from the Temple; Jaden subsequently gets knocked out. Jaden is woken by Luke Skywalker (Bob Bergen) and Kyle Katarn (Jeff Bennett), who welcome them to the Academy. Jaden and Rosh are assigned to study under Kyle, but during their first training session, Rosh's over-competitiveness endangers Jaden. After the Jedi students complete their initial training, they are assigned various peace-keeping missions across the galaxy. During this time, Rosh becomes jealous of Jaden and begins to believe Kyle is trying to hold him back.
After several successful missions, Luke calls the students back to the Academy to tell them he has identified the Dark Jedi who attacked the Temple as members of a Sith cult called the Disciples of Ragnos. A member of the cult, the Twi'lek Alora (Grey DeLisle), infiltrated the Academy during the attack and stole Luke's journal, containing the locations of numerous places strong with the Force. Believing the cult is looking to drain their Force energy, Luke sends the students to investigate each location. Jaden travels to Hoth, where they find Imperial presence at the Rebel Alliance's abandoned Echo Base, and encounter Alora, who flees after a brief duel. Returning to the Academy, Jaden reports their findings, but is saddened to learn Rosh never returned from his mission to Byss.
After Jaden completes more missions and has several run-ins with the Disciples, they and Kyle travel to Darth Vader's abandoned fortress on Vjun—one of the few places strong with the Force supposedly unvisited by the Disciples—and find it crawling with stormtroopers and Dark Jedi. The pair fight them, but are eventually separated. Jaden encounters Rosh, who has fallen to the dark side and joined the Disciples to avoid being killed after they had captured him. Jaden defeats Rosh as Kyle arrives, but both are incapacitated by Tavion Axmis (Kath Soucie), the Disciples' leader and Rosh's new master. Tavion uses the Scepter of Ragnos, which can absorb and release Force energy, to trap Jaden and Kyle under debris, but the pair manage to escape, though the former's lightsaber is destroyed in the process. At the Academy, Jaden and Kyle inform Luke of their findings, and the former is honored for their actions by being promoted to the rank of Jedi Knight.
After building a new lightsaber, Jaden begins dismantling the Disciples' operations as they complete more missions, while Luke discovers that Tavion plans to use the stolen Force energy to resurrect the ancient Sith Lord Marka Ragnos (Peter Lurie), who is buried on Korriban. While the Jedi prepare to go there, Kyle convinces Jaden to accompany him to a mining facility on Taspir III, from where Rosh has sent a distress signal. The pair split up and Jaden eventually finds Rosh, who claims he wants to redeem himself, but Jaden's feelings of betrayal quickly manifest into anger. Alora tries to goad them into killing Rosh and joining the Disciples, while Kyle senses Jaden's anger and tries to telepathically dissuade them. If the player chooses the light side, Jaden forgives Rosh, but an enraged Alora attacks them and cuts off the latter's arm. If the player chooses the dark side, Jaden kills Rosh, but refuses to join the Disciples, instead seeking the Scepter's power for themselves. Either way, Jaden kills Alora and leaves for Korriban.
Jaden fights their way to Ragnos' tomb, where they confront Tavion and defeat her. If Jaden is light-sided, they spare Tavion, who completes the resurrection process, causing Ragnos' spirit to possess her. Jaden destroys the Scepter and defeats Ragnos, who leaves Tavion's lifeless body and returns to his tomb. At the Academy, Jaden reunites with Rosh, who has been outfitted with a prosthetic arm, and is honored by Luke, Kyle, and the other Jedi. If Jaden is dark-sided, they kill Tavion and claim the Scepter as Kyle arrives to confront them, but Jaden defeats him and buries him under debris. They later take command of Tavion's Star Destroyer, while Kyle is rescued by Luke and vows to hunt Jaden down, though Luke assures him that there is still good in them.
History
Development
After Jedi Outcast was completed, LucasArts immediately approached Raven Software to develop a sequel. Production began and Raven was given a one-year development cycle. Like Jedi Outcast, Jedi Academy uses a heavily modified Quake III: Team Arena game engine, and the development team was made up of people who worked on Jedi Outcast, as well as Star Trek: Voyager – Elite Force.
An early decision made during development was whether or not to have Kyle Katarn as the playable character. This was due to the character already being a powerful Jedi Knight, and, as such, starting off with the Force skills would affect the gameplay. To resolve this issue, Raven chose to make the playable character a student in the Jedi Academy. By using a completely new character, the developers were able to insert features that allowed the player to customize the character, including race and gender, as well as the lightsaber color, hilt, and type. The Kyle Katarn character was then made an instructor in the academy so as to remain integral to the plot, to ensure Jedi Academy built upon the existing Jedi Knight series storyline. Raven extended the customization further as the game progresses by allowing the player to choose specific Force powers to train upon completion of missions. This was done with the intention of giving freedom to choose the way and style the game is played.
Another decision made early on was to include locations and aspects from the Star Wars movies. The designers wanted to use locations such as Tatooine and Hoth, as well as the Rancor creature. To develop the map for Hoth, the designers obtained as much source material from The Empire Strikes Back as possible so to create an authentic reproduction. Level Designer Justin Negrete says that Hoth was one of the most challenging areas to design. The general level design process started by planning out the level on paper. These ideas were then "fleshed out" to get the size and flow of the level. Once this had been done, features of the Quake III engine were used to add more detail such as lighting effects. The final stage of level design was adding aspects that improved the gameplay and fun of the level.
The mission based format of Jedi Academy was used by Raven to reduce the linearity of the game, allowing the players to progress through levels mostly in the order they desire. The reduction in linearity was also achieved by requiring 80% of levels to be completed before the plot can move on. Raven provided modding tools with Jedi Academy, but the company specified that such tools are unsupported by customer support, so to avoid receiving calls on the subject. Brett Tosti, a producer for LucasArts, stated that the customization of the player that is provided by the game out of the box will mean that people are less likely to need to create their own "skins". Additional textures and skins nevertheless became popular leading Mike Gummelt, who designed the lightsaber combat system in Outcast and Academy, to declare "the community really owns the game now". The community's continued interest has led some more recent reviews to conclude that Jedi Academy has a lightsaber engine superior to those developed before or since.
Release
The game was published and distributed within North America by LucasArts. Activision took control of publishing and distributing the game in all other territories worldwide. The game was released for Microsoft Windows and OS X (published by Aspyr) on September 17, 2003, and for Xbox (developed by Vicarious Visions) in November 2003, and received positive reviews.
In September 2009, the game was re-released with the other Star Wars: Jedi Knight games (Star Wars: Dark Forces, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith and Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast) through the digital distributor Steam and Direct2Drive.
The original Xbox version of Jedi Academy was one of the six Star Wars titles made available on Xbox One via backward compatibility in April 2018. On January 29, 2019, Major Nelson announced that Jedi Academy will be available as part of Xbox's Games with Gold program from February 16 to February 28.
On September 19, 2019, it was announced that Jedi Academy would be rereleased on PlayStation 4 and the Nintendo Switch in "early" 2020, to follow the rerelease of Jedi Outcast for the same platforms in December 2019. On March 26, 2020, Jedi Academy was released on PlayStation 4 and the Nintendo Switch with updated controls for modern hardware, and a fully functional multiplayer component directly mirroring the original's.
Source-code release
Following Disney's decision to close LucasArts on April 3, 2013, the developers at Raven Software released the source code for the game on SourceForge under GNU GPL-2.0-only. A few days after release, the source code disappeared from SourceForge without explanation. SourceForge later explained to media outlet Kotaku that Raven Software had requested its removal. Kotaku speculated this was due to the presence of licensed code, such as for the Bink Video format from Rad Game Tools, that was not intended to be made public. Based on the source release from Raven, Jedi Academy is maintained by the JACoders group as OpenJK.
Critical reception
Both the PC and Xbox versions of the game were well received. The PC version holds an aggregate score of 81 out of 100 on Metacritic based on 34 reviews, and 80% on GameRankings based on 51 reviews. The Xbox version holds aggregate scores of 76 out of 100 on Metacritic based on 30 reviews, and 75% on GameRankings based on 45 reviews.
PC
Positive reviews praised the fact that, unlike in Dark Forces II and Jedi Outcast, players could use a lightsaber from the beginning. Game Over Online scored the game 92% and commented that "You start instantly with your lightsaber, rather than wading through six painfully bland FPS levels to get your lightsaber as you did in Jedi Outcast". Critics lauded the lightsaber interface and player customization options. Ernie Halal of Gaming Age gave the game an A-, writing, "You choose not only the gender and race of your character, but also which powers and fighting styles to develop [...] Third person adventure games rarely offer that much customization."
Critics noted that, despite its age, the Quake III engine was used well. PC Gamer UK, who scored the game 70 out of 100, wrote "the engine, which although hardly groundbreaking any more, perfectly evokes the glow of the lightsaber and the grimy, metallic backgrounds of the films." Some critics did, however, note that the engine was starting to look dated.
The multiplayer, in particular the objective-based Siege mode, was well received. The music, sound effects, and voice acting also received acclaim, although some critics found it odd that all aliens spoke English.
The story and level design received mixed reactions. Some critics commended the levels as varied (both in terms of length and content). GameZone scored the game 9 out of 10, writing "Some are a fast blast that can be beat in ten or so minutes. Others [...] can take as long as hours [...] The change of pace is very refreshing." The story was described as "great" by GameZone and as "strong" by Gaming Age. IGN's Steve Butts, however, disliked the plot, feeling that "Jedi Outcast was more satisfying in terms of involvement with the story. Jedi Academy dishes out more action sooner but fails to put it in as solid a context as the previous game."
Game Over Online was critical of the mission structure, writing "This kind of free-form mission assignment [...] only serves to weaken the plotline. It also leads to a disjointedness to the missions [...] it seems more like roaming than any actual story advancement." GameSpot's Craig Beers, however, praised the mission structure; "Jedi Academy does an excellent job of balancing its missions." IGN also defended the system; "It's nice that the game offers a series of fairly short, relatively unconnected missions at the start. It's a great way to get your feet wet and ease you in to the environments and the saber fighting before the challenge level ramps up."
The AI was criticized by PC Gamer UK as "laughable"; "Every encounter you have is filled with people too stupid to realise that running away or taking some sort of cover would be the best option. [Jedi Academy] requires little to no skill to play through." This opinion was echoed by GameSpot: "Stormtroopers usually just stand there shooting away at you [...] Dark Jedi rush at you, even after watching four of their brethren plummet to a horrible death. Occasionally, you'll see an enemy accidentally commit suicide by falling off a cliff or falling into lava, enemies will not even dive for cover or try and throw it back if you throw an uncooked thermal detonator at them."
Despite his criticism of the AI, GameSpot's Craig Beers scored the game 8.4 out of 10, writing "It manages to take all the fun parts from its predecessor and greatly expands them to create an engaging, new action game in its own right." IGN's Steve Butts scored the game 8.8 out of 10, giving it an "Editor's Choice Award" and writing "If you like Star Wars and think flipping around chopping up Stormtroopers and flinging Dark Jedi off of conveniently placed precipices is fun, then this game is definitely for you." Eurogamer's Kristan Reed was less impressed, scoring the game 7 out of 10, writing "The harsh reality is, for all the plentiful additions, there's much work to be done before LucasArts can boast it has created the ultimate Star Wars FPS. Sure, it's the best one yet, but with some often laughable AI and creaking tech underpinning it, the flaws are there for all to see."
Xbox
Kevin Gifford of 1UP.com scored the Xbox version a B-. He lauded the addition of Xbox Live support and the ability to use a lightsaber from the opening, two of biggest criticisms of Jedi Outcast. However, he called the graphics "worryingly out of date by current Xbox standards", saying that when playing in first-person mode "the game looks more like a two-year-old PC shooter than a modern Star Wars game." He concluded that "The Xbox Live games make Jedi Academy worth at least a rental to online players, but otherwise, this game's worth it to Star Wars fans only." Eurogamer's Kristan Reed was also somewhat unimpressed, scoring the game 6 out of 10 and criticizing the controls; "In common with the PC version, you still find yourself going into battle and fumbling furiously through cyclical menus while numerous baddies are busy blasting seven shades out of you." She was also critical of the AI and the graphics, concluding that "It's good to see Live make the package this time around, but we're disappointed that after all these years LucasArts is still scratching around abusing the Star Wars brand in this way. There are some good ideas here that haven't been realised, and we're once again left waiting for the definitive Star Wars FPS to appear."
IGN were more impressed, scoring the game 8 out of 10. Although they were critical of the graphics and frame rate, and found the game to be inferior to Jedi Outcast, reviewer Steve Butts concluded "For the 15 or so hours that it lasted, I enjoyed Jedi Academy." GameSpot's Craig Beers scored the game 8.1 out of 10. He praised the mapping of the PC version's controls to the Xbox Controller and the implementation of Xbox Live, but like IGN, he was critical of the frame rates. He concluded that "The game may not look great, but it translates well to the Xbox--for those who would prefer to play it on a console. It even caters to those who aren't familiar with the Star Wars universe and just want pure action. In general, Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy is highly recommendable." GameZone's Nick Valentino scored the game 8.2 out of 10 and was especially impressed with the use of Xbox live; "the biggest draw--and the one that has me playing this one very often--is the fact that the multiplayer modes can also be played online using the Xbox Live service. That's right, you read it correctly. You can duel against other Xbox gamers out there using any of the seven multiplayer modes and even talk trash using your Xbox Communicator. Here's your chance to see if you're truly good with the lightsaber."
See also
List of formerly proprietary software
List of open source games
Notes
References
External links
Official site via Internet Archive
Jedi Academy source code mirror at GitHub
Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy at MobyGames
2003 video games
Activision games
Aspyr games
Commercial video games with freely available source code
First-person shooters
Id Tech games
LucasArts games
Classic Mac OS games
MacOS games
Multiplayer and single-player video games
Multiplayer online games
Nintendo Switch games
PlayStation 4 games
Open-source video games
Raven Software games
Jedi Academy
Video games developed in the United States
Video games featuring protagonists of selectable gender
Video games with customizable avatars
Video game sequels
Video games with alternate endings
Windows games
Xbox games |
1570040 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next%20Step | Next Step | Next Step or Nextstep may refer to:
NeXTSTEP, a UNIX-based computer operating system developed by NeXT in the 1980s and 1990s
OpenStep, an open platform version of NeXTSTEP originated by Sun Microsystems and NeXT
Rhapsody (operating system), the Apple Macintosh NeXTSTEP/classic Mac OS hybrid predecessor to macOS
Darwin (operating system), the open source version of macOS
GNUstep, an open source version of NeXTSTEP originated by the GNU Organization
Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP), a NASA program
Next Step Tour, a 1999 tour by the British pop group Steps
Nextstep (magazine), an American magazine for high school students
Nextstep, the initial name of Sense of Purpose, a hardcore punk band from Melbourne
See also
The Next Step (disambiguation)
NeXstep, a brand of Coca-Cola Co.
NexStep, a polyurethane product from Interface, Inc.
Next (disambiguation)
Step (disambiguation) |
4661540 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%20Cluley | Graham Cluley | Graham Cluley (born 8 April 1969) is a British security blogger and the author of grahamcluley.com, a daily blog on the latest computer security news, opinion, and advice.
Cluley started his career in the computer security industry as a programmer at British anti-virus firm S&S International (later known as Dr Solomon's Software), where he wrote the first Windows version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit.
From 1999 to 2013, Cluley was a Senior Technology Consultant at Sophos and also acted as the Head of Corporate Communications, spokesperson and editor of Sophos's Naked Security site.
In 2009 and 2010, Computer Weekly named Cluley Twitter user of the year.
In April 2011, Cluley was inducted into the InfoSecurity Europe Hall of Fame.
Graham Cluley and Carole Theriault are the co-hosts of the weekly Smashing Security podcast.
His war of words with the virus-writer 'Gigabyte' - somewhat of a media sensation for being a teenage girl - generated a fair amount of media attention in its own right.
Public speaking
Cluley has given talks about computer security for some of the world's largest companies, worked with law enforcement agencies on investigations into hacking groups, and regularly appears on TV and radio explaining computer security threats.
Computer games
Before entering the computer security industry, Cluley achieved notoriety for two interactive fiction PC games: Jacaranda Jim (1987) and Humbug (1990). Both games were independently distributed as shareware, with Cluley advertising in computer magazines and sending them out on 5½- and 5¼-inch disks. As an incentive, tips and maps were sent out to players who had sent in their registration fees. Both were praised as "shareware masterpieces" in PC Review. Cluley later entered his games into the public domain, and they are now available for download or in-browser play from his website.
Jacaranda Jim
Cluley wrote Jacaranda Jim while studying computing at Guildford College of Technology. He began developing the game in 1987, borrowing liberally from an earlier unreleased game named Herbie. The game "took about 6 months to write, and was finished by April 1988". The game, which was written in Pascal, was then ported to the PC platform with the help of Alex Bull, another student at Guildford. The premise of the game, as presented in promotional materials, is:
Following an attack on his cargo-ship by a crack squad of homicidal beechwood armchairs, space cadet Jacaranda Jim is forced to crashland into the strange world of Ibberspleen IV. "Luckily", Jim is rescued from the burning wreckage by the mysteriously smug creature, Alan the Gribbley. Can you help Jim escape back to the safety of Earth?
In its original incarnation, the game was named Derek the Troll in honour of its central character, based upon one of Cluley's lecturers. When Cluley's maths lecturer questioned the lampooning of one her colleagues, the character was renamed "Alan the Gribbley" – inspired by one of Cluley's fellow students, "a failed accountant with vaguely homicidal tendencies" – and the game itself rechristened Jacaranda Jim.
Jacaranda Jim was well-reviewed, with Sue Medley writing in computer gaming magazine Zero that "Jacaranda Jim is well worth trying and will certainly give you some sleepless nights before you solve it!"
A sequel called The Case of Spindle's Crotchet was planned and partially completed, but never released. Some of the content from this game, including "a lot of ideas and jokes," were included in Cluley's next game, Humbug.
Humbug
Humbug is Cluley's second and final text adventure computer game, first distributed as shareware with the February 1991 issue of PC Plus. In a 1992 interview in SynTax magazine, Cluley estimated that the game "took about a year to write." The premise of this game, as presented in promotional materials, is:
You, Sidney Widdershins, are sent to your Grandad's for the Christmas holidays. Lurking in the shadows is Grandad's evil neighbour – Jasper Slake. Jasper, a particularly sadistic dentist, is after Grandad's crumbling manor.
While maintaining the playful tone of its predecessor, Humbug is considerably more difficult than Jacaranda Jim, with one contemporary reviewer noting that it "is not, perhaps, an adventure for novices". A quite extensive review of Humbug was written in 2018 by Joe Pranevich on The Adventure Gamer. Pranevich noted that the game has "more charm than it has any right to have," but that "it's also quite difficult".
Later games
Cluley went on to produce two graphical games: a Tetris clone called Blox (1990) and a Pacman-based game called Wibbling Wilf (1991). As of 2009, Blox was on display in the computer museum at Bletchley Park.
References
External links
Official website
Smashing Security website
Sophos NakedSecurity blog
Living people
Writers about computer security
Interactive fiction writers
British bloggers
British computer specialists
1969 births |
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