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Open Content is when someone creates something and lets others copy it or change it without having to ask for permission. Any media can be open content, from text and pictures to video and sound.
When someone creates something (like a picture or book), they can make that work "open". This means that other people are allowed to copy it and change it if they want. Something that is open content may be free of charge, but it does not have to be.
The Simple English Wikipedia is open content. So are other Wikipedias. If a person changes open content or makes new open content, everyone can give it to anyone else, or even sell it. It is never needed to ask permission to do this, because the people who wrote the text already gave their permission when they clicked the "save" button.
The rules that say how people can use, change and pass around open content are called a license. A license explains exactly what you are allowed to do with the content that falls under it. Licenses are often written in difficult lawyer language (legal jargon), but many licenses have summaries that are much easier to understand.
The makers of open content get to choose what license to use for their work, and everyone else has to follow it. Only the maker, who owns the copyright, can change it to another license. Most open content licenses say that when others change the work, they must also declare it to be open and under the same license. This is called "share-alike" and means that anything based on work will always be open content.
All the content in Wikipedia is open under the rules of the , a very well-known open content license. Another well-known open content license is the .
Orthography
Orthography is an official or correct way to write a particular language. It includes rules of spelling. Orthography may also include rules about punctuation, capitalization, and diacritics (e.g. accents). In English, spelling is a problem for all learners, and is the main issue in orthography.
Some languages have someone to decide the correct spelling, such as the Académie française. English does not. English orthography was the work of the early printers. They had to decide how particular words would be spelled in their books. Gradually the number of alternative spellings began to drop. The word which is "merry" today was spelled in about 30 ways in written sources from the 9th to the 16th century.
English orthography, or English spelling, is the way the 26 letters of the alphabet are used to write down the 36 (IPA) sounds of English. The first manuscripts in Old English were written using the Latin alphabet. It had 24 letters.
No alphabet fits its language exactly. One reason for this is that there are always more sounds than letters. In English there are far more vowel sounds than vowels. The ancient Greeks, who were the first to use letters for vowels, decided to use only a few letters for their vowel sounds. This choice influenced all later alphabets:
English would need about 20 vowels to represent the vowel phonemes (~sounds) in common use, and some languages do have more letters for vowels. The Georgian language has a total of 41 letters. A shorter alphabet works by using two or three letters for a single sound, or one letter for several sounds.
The English alphabet has only three consonants which have one sound, cannot be produced by other combinations and are never silent: n, r and v. The English language uses 22 to 26 consonant phonemes.
The other reason that alphabets never exactly fit languages is dialect. A spoken language varies from place to place and from time to time. This is very obvious with English, as the pronunciation is so different in different parts of the world. A written language will always be less flexible than its spoken parent. It has a different function, and is produced mechanically. It must serve everyone who speaks the language, and it does this by keeping the spelling similar from one time to another.
Therefore, all alphabets have sounds which are difficult to represent with the letters in use. And English also has other problems: sounds that can be written in different ways, and spelling which can be pronounced in different ways. This all gives rise to problems of spelling.
Differences between American English and British English spelling came about mainly as the result of one man. Noah Webster (1758–1843) wrote a "Grammar", a "Spelling" book, and finally an "American dictionary of the English language". In the course of this, he proposed a number of simplifications in spelling. In his dictionary, he chose "s" over "c" in words like "defense", he changed the "re" to "er" in words like "center", he dropped one of the Ls in "traveler". At first he kept the u in words like colour or favour but dropped it in later editions. He also changed "tongue" to "tung": that did not stick. His main reason was to help children learn to read and write. Webster's dictionary contained seventy thousand words, of which twelve thousand had never appeared in a published dictionary before.
Webster did create a slightly different identity for American English. But, because his efforts did not address some of the most glaring problems, his variations make little difference to the way the language is used. An example of the real problems in English orthography is the word ending "-ough", which is pronounced several different ways: tough, bough, cough... The root causes of spelling variation are historical. Loan words come with their own (foreign) spelling. Some French loan words are still spelled in the French way; others have been changed.
English spelling reform has been proposed by many people since Webster, such as George Bernard Shaw, who proposed a new phonetic alphabet for English. In some cases Webster's changes have been widely adopted in Britain: the spelling "programme" came from the French; US "program" is clearly simpler, and more consistent with word endings in English. In our modern world, English orthography is still a problem. In some countries (notably, France) a national committee can give advice and direction as to spelling. English has long escaped from national custody.
Modern British spelling and use was greatly influenced by the two great English dictionaries, Samuel Johnson's "A dictionary of the English language" (1755), and James Murray's "Oxford English Dictionary". Johnson's dictionary was hugely influential, abroad as well as at home. The dictionary was exported to America.
For American lexicographers, the dictionary was impossible to ignore:
Some people argue which language is the easiest to spell. People who learn a second language tend to think that their first (native) language is the easiest. However, for the learner, programmatic languages, with well-defined rules, are easier to start with than English. The spelling of the English language is by far the most irregular of all alphabetic spellings and thus the most difficult to learn. English is, in its origin, a Germanic language. From its early roots as Anglo-Saxon, it has borrowed words from many other languages: French (a Romance language) and Latin are the most frequent donors to English.
Languages that use phonetic spelling are easier to learn to spell than others. With phonetic spelling the words are spelled as they are pronounced. The Italian word "orologio" for instance is pronounced oh-ro-LO-jo ("gi" always making a "j" sound.) In English, one comes across the word "knife". In "knife", the "k" is not spoken, even though in English it's more common to pronounce "K"s when they are in words.
One of the problems we have is that similar sounding words may be spelt quite differently. Rough and ruff; meet and meat; great and grate. Words with complicated spelling may be pronounced simply: Leicester is pronounced 'Lester'. Even what rules we do have are frequently broken. ""i" before "e" except after "c"" has over 100 exceptions. Almost all these problems have come about for historical reasons. English has been changing for the last thousand years, and as the language changes, so parts of it get stuck with different spellings.
Here are some of the causes of English orthography:
English has a huge number of words, but its spelling comes from many different sources. "The large and varied lexicon of English has been bought at the expense of an increasingly deversified graphology".
Some languages have a high correspondence between phonemes and letters. That means they get close to one letter for each sound. If there was a perfect correspondence, that language would have "phonemic orthography". English is highly non-phonemic. It has almost every kind of deviation known:
This field of study is called "orthographic depth". The orthographic depth of an alphabetic script is the degree to which a written language deviates from simple one-to-one letter–phoneme correspondence. It shows how easy it is to predict the pronunciation of a word from its spelling. Shallow orthographies are easy to pronounce based on the written word, and deep orthographies are difficult to pronounce based on how they are written. In shallow orthographies, the spelling-sound correspondence is direct: given the rules of pronunciation, one is able to "say" the word correctly.
Most other international languages have similar problems: in French, Arabic or Hebrew, new readers have difficulty learning to decode words. As a result, children learn to read more slowly. In both Spanish and Italian there is a more direct connection between spelling and pronunciation. Those are languages with low orthographic depth.
Oil
The word oil is used for many different kinds of liquids. Oil usually does not mix with water.
Vegetable oils are made from plants. Many are used in foods and for cooking. Some kinds of plant oils that people use are palm oil, maize ("corn"), olive, peanut, soy, and sunflower.
Other kinds of oil are made from crude oil ("petroleum") which comes from under the ground. People use large oil wells to bring the oil up to the surface. The oil is sent in special ships called tankers or in pipelines to factories called refineries where it is distilled into LPG, gasoline ("petrol"), diesel fuel, and fuel oil. Plastics are among the Petrochemicals made from crude oil or natural gas. Oils from crude oil are also used as fuels for engines or as lubricants to make the parts of machines work together without sticking or stopping.
Different kinds of oils are also used for many other things, for example to make cosmetics, medicines, paints, and detergents, like washing up liquids. Soap(s) are similar to detergents, but they are generally made from animal fat(s) rather than oils.
Oil is also made for various purposes including synthetic fuel and lubricant.
OK
OK (okay) is a word in the English language. It is used to mean that something is good or correct.
It can often be used instead of the word Yes. It is not certain where the word "OK" originally comes from, but some experts say it came from a funny way of writing "Ol Korrect" (All correct).
It is also the two-letter abbreviation for the state of Oklahoma in the United States of America.
You also find the phrase "Ola kala" in Greek, which means something like "Everything fine".
The term appears to have achieved prominence in the United States in 1840, when supporters of the American Democratic political party claimed during the 1840 United States presidential election that it stood for "Old Kinderhook," a nickname for a Democratic presidential candidate, Martin Van Buren, a native of Kinderhook, New York. "'Vote for OK' was snappier than using his Dutch name." In response, Whig opponents attributed "OK", in the sense of "Oll Korrect," to Andrew Jackson's bad spelling. The country-wide publicity surrounding the election appears to have been a critical event in "okay"'s history, widely and suddenly popularizing it across the United States.
Oxymoron
An oxymoron is a term for a figure of speech. It is made up of two or more words that seem to be opposite to each other, or actually are opposite.
For example, the words "Wise fool", "Warm freezer", "Legal murder" all have two words. In each one, the one word looks like the opposite of the other word.
You can have words that look opposite, but are right. For example, a "warm freezer" could be right. A freezer could be warm if it was turned off or left open.
The word oxymoron is an oxymoron; 'oxy' comes from the Greek word that means 'sharp', while 'moron' comes from the Greek word that means 'dull'.
Words that really are opposite to each other, would be words that just cannot be put together. For example, a "round square" could not happen because squares are not round.
Oxymorons sometimes appear in jokes. Sometimes, the joke is just to say that a pair of words are an oxymoron. For example, a joke that says that "honest politician" is an oxymoron. This means that politicians are dishonest, if the word 'politician' is opposite to 'honest'.
Operating system
An operating system (or OS) is a group of computer programs, including device drivers, kernels, and other software that lets people interact with a computer. It manages computer hardware and software resources. It provides common services for computer programs. An OS can be small (like MenuetOS), or large (like Microsoft Windows). Different operating systems can be used for different purposes. Some are used for everyday things like on a personal computer. Others are mobile operating systems or are used for specialized work.
An operating system has many jobs. It makes sure that all the programs can use the CPU, system memory, displays, input devices, and other hardware. Some also give the user an interface to use a computer. An OS is also responsible for sending data to other computers or devices on a network.
Some examples of commonly used operating systems are macOS, Linux, and Microsoft Windows.
The first operating system was used with the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). It was very hard to make ENIAC do work. How the operating system worked was based on how the switches and cables were put together and depending on this factor punch cards would make a result. While this was an operating system of a kind, it is not what is thought of as one in modern times.
The first operating system that looked and felt like operating systems in the modern age was UNIX, made in 1969 by Bell Labs. It had a small kernel and many tiny programs that could be put together to work with user input and data. Many of its features were taken from Multics, an older operating system made in 1964.
A single-tasking system can only run one program at a time. A multitasking operating system can run more than one program at the same time. Multi-tasking is done by dividing processor time. The processor gives a little bit of its time to each program.
Single-user operating systems cannot distinguish between users, but may allow multiple programs to run simultaneously. A multi-user operating system permits multiple users to interact with the system at the same time.
A distributed operating system manages a group of distinct computers and makes them appear to be a single computer. Distributed computations are carried out on more than one machine.
In an OS, distributed and cloud computing context, templating refers to creating a single virtual machine as a guest operating system, then saving it as a tool for multiple running virtual machines. The technique is common in large server warehouses.
Embedded operating systems are designed to be used in embedded computer systems. They are designed to operate on small machines like PDAs with less autonomy and are able to operate with a limited number of resources. Windows CE and Minix 3 are some examples of embedded operating systems.
A real-time operating system guarantees processing of events or data by a specific moment in time. A real-time operating system may be single- or multi-tasking, but when multitasking, it uses specialized scheduling algorithms so that a deterministic nature of behavior is achieved. An event-driven system switches between tasks based on their priorities or external events while time-sharing operating systems switch tasks based on clock interrupts.
A library operating system is one in which the services that a typical operating system provides, such as networking, are provided in the form of libraries and composed with the application and configuration code to construct a unikernel: a specialized, single address space, machine image that can be deployed to cloud or embedded environments.
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of underlying things. This means philosophy tries to understand the reasons or basis for things. It also tries to understand how things should be. "" is the Ancient Greek word for the "love of wisdom". A person who does philosophy is called a philosopher. A philosopher is a kind of thinker or researcher. A "philosophy" can also mean a group of ideas by philosophers, or by a philosopher. Philosophy is a way of thinking about the world, the universe, and society. In the past, sciences were part of philosophy as well.
The ideas in philosophy are often general and "abstract". But this does not mean that philosophy is not about the real world. Ethics, for example, asks about how to be good in our day-to-day lives. Metaphysics asks about how the world works and what it is made of.
Sometimes people talk about how they have a ‘personal philosophy’, which means the way a person thinks about the world. This article is "not" about people's ’personal philosophies’. This article is about the ideas that have been discussed by philosophers (people who think and write about ways of thinking) for a long time.
One philosophical question is this: "Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?". Other questions asked by philosophers are these:
The etymological meaning of the word 'Philosophy' is 'love of wisdom'. It comes from the Greek word "'Philosophia'", with "'Philo'" meaning "'beloved'" and "'Sophia"' meaning "'wisdom"'.
There are different types of philosophy from different times and places. Some philosophers came from Ancient Greece, such as Plato and Aristotle. Others came from Asia, such as Confucius or Buddha and Laozi. Some philosophers are from the Middle Ages in Europe, such as William of Ockham or Saint Thomas Aquinas.
Philosophers from the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s included Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, John Locke, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. Philosophers from the 1900s included Søren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Philosophy is the study of humans and the world by thinking and asking questions. It is a science and an art. Philosophy tries to answer important questions by coming up with answers about real things and asking "why?"
Sometimes, philosophy tries to answer the same questions as religion and science. Philosophers do not all give the same answers to a question. Many types of philosophy criticize or even attack the beliefs of science and religion.
In his work "Critique of Pure Reason", Immanuel Kant asked the following questions:
The answers to these questions gives the different domains or categories of philosophy.
Philosophy can be divided into different groups, based on the types of questions that it asks. Below is a list of questions split into groups. One possible list of answers to these questions can be called a 'philosophy'. There are many different 'philosophies', because all of these questions have many different answers according to different people. Not all philosophies ask the same questions. These are the questions that are usually asked by philosophers from the Western world:
Metaphysics:
Metaphysics is sometimes split up into ontology (the philosophy of real life and living things), the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of religion; but these sub-branches are very close together.
"Ontology":
"The philosophy of mind":
"The philosophy of religion":
In epistemology:
In ethics:
In aesthetics:
In logic:
In :
Other divisions include eschatology, teleology and theology. In past centuries natural science was included in philosophy, and called "natural philosophy".
Does philosophy do any good? Very few people would dispute this. It is easy to argue that philosophy is a good thing, because it helps people to think more clearly. Philosophy helps people to understand the world and the way people act and think. Philosophers believe that asking philosophical questions is useful because it brings wisdom and helps people to learn about the world and each other. Some philosophers might even argue that the question "Is philosophy good or bad?" is a philosophical question itself.
However, some people think that philosophy is harmful, as philosophy encourages free-thinking and often questions the beliefs that others hold. For example, philosophies such as some existentialist views say that there is no meaning to life or human existence, except the meaning that we make up or invent. People from some religions do not agree with the beliefs of existentialism.
Every major science, including physics, biology, and chemistry, are disciplines that were once considered as philosophy. Medicine was always considered a practical art, however. As facts about nature became more understood, these subjects branched away. Psychology only split a century and a half ago. In our own time, subjects such as consciousness studies, decision theory, and applied ethics have increasingly found independence from philosophy as a whole. Because of this, philosophy seems useful because it spins off new kinds of science.
Philosophers ask questions about ideas (concepts). They try to find answers to those questions. Some thinkers find it very hard to find those words that best describe the ideas they have. When they find answers to some of these questions philosophers often have the same problem, that is how to best tell the answers they found to other people. Depending on the meaning of the words they use, the answers change.
Some philosophers are full-time thinkers (called academics), who work for universities or colleges. These philosophers write books and articles about philosophy and teach classes about philosophy to university or college students.
Other philosophers are just "hobby" thinkers who think about philosophy during their free time. A small number of hobby thinkers have thought so much about philosophy that they are able to write articles for philosophy magazines. Other people approach philosophy from another job. For example, monks, artists, and scientists may think about philosophical ideas and questions.
Most philosophers work by asking questions and looking for good definitions (meanings) of words to help them understand what a question means.
Some philosophers say the only thing needed to answer a question is to find out what it means. The only thing that makes philosophical questions (such as those above) difficult is that people do not really know what they mean. Ludwig Wittgenstein believed this.
Philosophers often use both real and imaginary examples to make a point. For example, they may write about a real or fictional person in order to show what they think a good person or a bad person is like.
Some philosophers look for the simplest way to answer a question and say that is probably the right answer. This is a process called Occam's razor. Others believe that complicated answers to questions can also be right. For an example of a philosophical problem, see the God paradox.
Philosophers use logic to solve problems and answer questions. Logical consistency is a cornerstone of any acceptable theory. Philosophers who disagree with a theory will often try to find a logical contradiction in a theory. If they find a contradiction, this gives them a reason to reject that theory. If they do not find an inconsistency, the philosopher might show that the theory leads to a conclusion which is either unacceptable or ridiculous. This second approach is usually called reductio ad absurdum.
People listed here should be genuine philosophers, rather than social or political campaigners. The lists are not meant to be complete.
Physics
Physics is a branch of science. It is one of the most fundamental scientific disciplines. The main goal of physics is to explain how things move in space and time and understand how the universe behaves. It studies matter, forces and their effects.
The word "physics" comes from the Greek word ἡ φύσις, meaning "nature". Physics can also be defined as "that department of knowledge which relates to the order of nature, or, in other words, to the regular succession of events".
Astronomy, a part of physics, is the oldest natural science. In the past it was a part of 'natural philosophy' with other fields of science, such as chemistry and biology. During the scientific revolution, these fields became separate, and physics became a distinct field of knowledge.