1.
Amazon (company)
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Amazon. com, also called Amazon, is an American electronic commerce and cloud computing company that was founded on July 5,1994, by Jeff Bezos and is based in Seattle, Washington. It is the largest Internet-based retailer in the world by total sales, the company also produces consumer electronics—notably, Kindle e-readers, Fire tablets, Fire TV, and Echo—and is the worlds largest provider of cloud infrastructure services. Amazon also sells certain low-end products like USB cables under its in-house brand AmazonBasics. Amazon has separate retail websites for the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Australia, Brazil, Japan, China, India, and Mexico. Amazon also offers international shipping to other countries for some of its products. In 2016, Dutch, Polish, and Turkish language versions of the German Amazon website were launched. In 2015, Amazon surpassed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the United States by market capitalization, in 1994, Bezos left his employment as vice-president of D. E. Shaw & Co. a Wall Street firm and moved to Seattle. He began to work on a plan for what would eventually become Amazon. com. Bezos incorporated the company as Cadabra on July 5,1994, Bezos changed the name to Amazon a year later after a lawyer misheard its original name as cadaver. In September 1994, Bezos purchased the URL Relentless. com and briefly considered naming his online store Relentless, the domain is still owned by Bezos and still redirects to the retailer. The company went online as Amazon. com in 1995, Bezos placed a premium on his head start in building a brand, telling a reporter, Theres nothing about our model that cant be copied over time. But you know, McDonalds got copied, and it still built a huge, multibillion-dollar company. A lot of it comes down to the brand name, brand names are more important online than they are in the physical world. Additionally, a beginning with A was preferential due to the probability it would occur at the top of any list that was alphabetized. Since June 19,2000, Amazons logotype has featured a curved arrow leading from A to Z, representing that the company carries every product from A to Z, with the arrow shaped like a smile. After reading a report about the future of the Internet that projected annual Web commerce growth at 2, 300% and he narrowed the list to what he felt were the five most promising products, which included, compact discs, computer hardware, computer software, videos and books. Amazon was founded in the garage of Bezos home in Bellevue, the company began as an online bookstore, an idea spurred off with discussion with John Ingram of Ingram Book, along with Keyur Patel who still holds a stake in Amazon. Amazon was able to access books at wholesale from Ingram, in the first two months of business, Amazon sold to all 50 states and over 45 countries
2.
Tablet computer
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Tablets often come equipped with sensors, including digital cameras, a microphone, and an accelerometer so images on screens are always displayed upright. The touchscreen display uses the recognition of finger or stylus gestures to replace the mouse, trackpad, tablets are typically larger than smartphones or personal digital assistants with screens 7 inches or larger, measured diagonally. However much of a tablets functionality resembles that of a modern smartphone, tablets can be classified according to the presence and physical appearance of keyboards. Slates and booklets do not have a keyboard, and usually accept text. Hybrids, convertibles, and 2-in-1s do have physical keyboards, yet they also make use of virtual keyboards. Some 2-in-1s have processors and operating systems like a full laptop, most tablets can use separate keyboards connected using Bluetooth. The format was conceptualized in the century and prototyped and developed in the last two decades of that century. In April 2010, Apple released the iPad, the first mass-market tablet to achieve widespread popularity, thereafter in the 2010s, tablets rapidly rose in ubiquity and became a large product category used for both personal and workplace applications. The tablet computer and its operating system began with the development of pen computing. Throughout the 20th century devices with these characteristics have been imagined and created whether as blueprints, prototypes, a device more powerful than todays tablets appeared briefly in Jerry Pournelle and Larry Nivens The Mote in Gods Eye. Adults could also use a Dynabook, but the audience was children. In 1992, Atari showed developers the Stylus, later renamed ST-Pad, the ST-Pad was based on the TOS/GEM Atari ST Platform and prototyped early handwriting recognition. Shiraz Shivjis company Momentus demonstrated in the time a failed x86 MS-DOS based Pen Computer with its own GUI. In 1994, the European Union initiated the NewsPad project, inspired by Clarke, Acorn Computers developed and delivered an ARM-based touch screen tablet computer for this program, branding it the NewsPad, the project ended in 1997. During the November 2000 COMDEX, Microsoft used the term Tablet PC to describe a prototype handheld device they were demonstrating, all three products were based on extended versions of the MS-DOS operating system. In 1992, IBM announced and shipped to developers the 2521 ThinkPad, also based on PenPoint was AT&Ts EO Personal Communicator from 1993, which ran on AT&Ts own hardware, including their own AT&T Hobbit CPU. Apple Computer launched the Apple Newton personal digital assistant in 1993 and it utilised Apples own new Newton OS, initially running on hardware manufactured by Motorola and incorporating an ARM CPU, that Apple had specifically co-developed with Acorn Computers. The operating system and platform design were later licensed to Sharp and Digital Ocean, in 1996, Palm, Inc. released the first of the Palm OS based PalmPilot touch and stylus based PDA, the touch based devices initially incorporating a Motorola Dragonball CPU
3.
Operating system
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An operating system is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources and provides common services for computer programs. All computer programs, excluding firmware, require a system to function. Operating systems are found on many devices that contain a computer – from cellular phones, the dominant desktop operating system is Microsoft Windows with a market share of around 83. 3%. MacOS by Apple Inc. is in place, and the varieties of Linux is in third position. Linux distributions are dominant in the server and supercomputing sectors, other specialized classes of operating systems, such as embedded and real-time systems, exist for many applications. A single-tasking system can run one program at a time. Multi-tasking may be characterized in preemptive and co-operative types, in preemptive multitasking, the operating system slices the CPU time and dedicates a slot to each of the programs. Unix-like operating systems, e. g. Solaris, Linux, cooperative multitasking is achieved by relying on each process to provide time to the other processes in a defined manner. 16-bit versions of Microsoft Windows used cooperative multi-tasking, 32-bit versions of both Windows NT and Win9x, used preemptive multi-tasking. Single-user operating systems have no facilities to distinguish users, but may allow multiple programs to run in tandem, a distributed operating system manages a group of distinct computers and makes them appear to be a single computer. The development of networked computers that could be linked and communicate with each other gave rise to distributed computing, distributed computations are carried out on more than one machine. When computers in a work in cooperation, they form a distributed system. The technique is used both in virtualization and cloud computing management, and 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 they are able to operate with a limited number of resources. They are very compact and extremely efficient by design, Windows CE and Minix 3 are some examples of embedded operating systems. A real-time operating system is a system that guarantees to process events or data by a specific moment in time. A real-time operating system may be single- or multi-tasking, but when multitasking, early computers were built to perform a series of single tasks, like a calculator. Basic operating system features were developed in the 1950s, such as resident monitor functions that could run different programs in succession to speed up processing
4.
Central processing unit
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The computer industry has used the term central processing unit at least since the early 1960s. The form, design and implementation of CPUs have changed over the course of their history, most modern CPUs are microprocessors, meaning they are contained on a single integrated circuit chip. An IC that contains a CPU may also contain memory, peripheral interfaces, some computers employ a multi-core processor, which is a single chip containing two or more CPUs called cores, in that context, one can speak of such single chips as sockets. Array processors or vector processors have multiple processors that operate in parallel, there also exists the concept of virtual CPUs which are an abstraction of dynamical aggregated computational resources. Early computers such as the ENIAC had to be rewired to perform different tasks. Since the term CPU is generally defined as a device for software execution, the idea of a stored-program computer was already present in the design of J. Presper Eckert and John William Mauchlys ENIAC, but was initially omitted so that it could be finished sooner. On June 30,1945, before ENIAC was made, mathematician John von Neumann distributed the paper entitled First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC and it was the outline of a stored-program computer that would eventually be completed in August 1949. EDVAC was designed to perform a number of instructions of various types. Significantly, the programs written for EDVAC were to be stored in high-speed computer memory rather than specified by the wiring of the computer. This overcame a severe limitation of ENIAC, which was the considerable time, with von Neumanns design, the program that EDVAC ran could be changed simply by changing the contents of the memory. Early CPUs were custom designs used as part of a larger, however, this method of designing custom CPUs for a particular application has largely given way to the development of multi-purpose processors produced in large quantities. This standardization began in the era of discrete transistor mainframes and minicomputers and has accelerated with the popularization of the integrated circuit. The IC has allowed increasingly complex CPUs to be designed and manufactured to tolerances on the order of nanometers, both the miniaturization and standardization of CPUs have increased the presence of digital devices in modern life far beyond the limited application of dedicated computing machines. Modern microprocessors appear in electronic devices ranging from automobiles to cellphones, the so-called Harvard architecture of the Harvard Mark I, which was completed before EDVAC, also utilized a stored-program design using punched paper tape rather than electronic memory. Relays and vacuum tubes were used as switching elements, a useful computer requires thousands or tens of thousands of switching devices. The overall speed of a system is dependent on the speed of the switches, tube computers like EDVAC tended to average eight hours between failures, whereas relay computers like the Harvard Mark I failed very rarely. In the end, tube-based CPUs became dominant because the significant speed advantages afforded generally outweighed the reliability problems, most of these early synchronous CPUs ran at low clock rates compared to modern microelectronic designs. Clock signal frequencies ranging from 100 kHz to 4 MHz were very common at this time, the design complexity of CPUs increased as various technologies facilitated building smaller and more reliable electronic devices
5.
ARM architecture
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ARM, originally Acorn RISC Machine, later Advanced RISC Machine, is a family of reduced instruction set computing architectures for computer processors, configured for various environments. It also designs cores that implement this instruction set and licenses these designs to a number of companies that incorporate those core designs into their own products, a RISC-based computer design approach means processors require fewer transistors than typical complex instruction set computing x86 processors in most personal computers. This approach reduces costs, heat and power use and these characteristics are desirable for light, portable, battery-powered devices—including smartphones, laptops and tablet computers, and other embedded systems. For supercomputers, which large amounts of electricity, ARM could also be a power-efficient solution. ARM Holdings periodically releases updates to architectures and core designs, some older cores can also provide hardware execution of Java bytecodes. The ARMv8-A architecture, announced in October 2011, adds support for a 64-bit address space, with over 100 billion ARM processors produced as of 2017, ARM is the most widely used instruction set architecture in terms of quantity produced. Currently, the widely used Cortex cores, older classic cores, the British computer manufacturer Acorn Computers first developed the Acorn RISC Machine architecture in the 1980s to use in its personal computers. Its first ARM-based products were coprocessor modules for the BBC Micro series of computers, according to Sophie Wilson, all the tested processors at that time performed about the same, with about a 4 Mbit/second bandwidth. After testing all available processors and finding them lacking, Acorn decided it needed a new architecture, inspired by white papers on the Berkeley RISC project, Acorn considered designing its own processor. Wilson developed the set, writing a simulation of the processor in BBC BASIC that ran on a BBC Micro with a 6502 second processor. This convinced Acorn engineers they were on the right track, Wilson approached Acorns CEO, Hermann Hauser, and requested more resources. Hauser gave his approval and assembled a team to implement Wilsons model in hardware. The official Acorn RISC Machine project started in October 1983 and they chose VLSI Technology as the silicon partner, as they were a source of ROMs and custom chips for Acorn. Wilson and Furber led the design and they implemented it with a similar efficiency ethos as the 6502. A key design goal was achieving low-latency input/output handling like the 6502, the 6502s memory access architecture had let developers produce fast machines without costly direct memory access hardware. The first samples of ARM silicon worked properly when first received and tested on 26 April 1985, Wilson subsequently rewrote BBC BASIC in ARM assembly language. The in-depth knowledge gained from designing the instruction set enabled the code to be very dense, the original aim of a principally ARM-based computer was achieved in 1987 with the release of the Acorn Archimedes. In 1992, Acorn once more won the Queens Award for Technology for the ARM, the ARM2 featured a 32-bit data bus, 26-bit address space and 27 32-bit registers
6.
Flash memory
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Flash memory is electronic non-volatile computer storage medium that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. Toshiba developed flash memory from EEPROM in the early 1980s and introduced it to the market in 1984, the two main types of flash memory are named after the NAND and NOR logic gates. The individual flash memory cells exhibit internal characteristics similar to those of the corresponding gates, where EPROMs had to be completely erased before being rewritten, NAND-type flash memory may be written and read in blocks which are generally much smaller than the entire device. NOR-type flash allows a machine word to be written—to an erased location—or read independently. The NAND type operates primarily in memory cards, USB flash drives, solid-state drives, NAND or NOR flash memory is also often used to store configuration data in numerous digital products, a task previously made possible by EEPROM or battery-powered static RAM. One key disadvantage of flash memory is that it can endure a relatively small number of write cycles in a specific block. In addition to being non-volatile, flash memory offers fast read access times, although flash memory is technically a type of EEPROM, the term EEPROM is generally used to refer specifically to non-flash EEPROM which is erasable in small blocks, typically bytes. Because erase cycles are slow, the block sizes used in flash memory erasing give it a significant speed advantage over non-flash EEPROM when writing large amounts of data. As of 2013, flash memory costs much less than byte-programmable EEPROM and had become the dominant memory type wherever a system required a significant amount of non-volatile solid-state storage, Flash memory was invented by Fujio Masuoka while working for Toshiba circa 1980. According to Toshiba, the flash was suggested by Masuokas colleague, Shōji Ariizumi. Masuoka and colleagues presented the invention at the IEEE1984 International Electron Devices Meeting held in San Francisco, Intel Corporation saw the massive potential of the invention and introduced the first commercial NOR type flash chip in 1988. NOR-based flash has long erase and write times, but provides full address and data buses, allowing random access to any memory location. This makes it a replacement for older read-only memory chips. Its endurance may be from as little as 100 erase cycles for a flash memory, to a more typical 10,000 or 100,000 erase cycles. NOR-based flash was the basis of early flash-based removable media, CompactFlash was originally based on it, however, the I/O interface of NAND flash does not provide a random-access external address bus. Rather, data must be read on a basis, with typical block sizes of hundreds to thousands of bits. This makes NAND flash unsuitable as a replacement for program ROM. In this regard, NAND flash is similar to other data storage devices, such as hard disks and optical media
7.
Secure Digital
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Secure Digital is a non-volatile memory card format developed by the SD Card Association for use in portable devices. The standard was introduced in August 1999 by joint efforts between SanDisk, Panasonic and Toshiba as an improvement over MultiMediaCards, and has become the industry standard. The three companies formed SD-3C, LLC, a company that licenses and enforces intellectual property rights associated with SD memory cards and SD host, the companies also formed the SD Association, a non-profit organization, in January 2000 to promote and create SD Card standards. SDA today has about 1,000 member companies, the SDA uses several trademarked logos owned and licensed by SD-3C to enforce compliance with its specifications and assure users of compatibility. There are many combinations of factors and device families, although as of 2016. Secure Digital includes four card families available in three different sizes, the four families are the original Standard-Capacity, the High-Capacity, the eXtended-Capacity, and the SDIO, which combines input/output functions with data storage. The three form factors are the size, the mini size, and the micro size. Electrically passive adapters allow a card to fit and function in a device built for a larger card. The SD cards small footprint is a storage medium for smaller, thinner. The second-generation Secure Digital card was developed to improve on the MultiMediaCard standard, which continued to evolve, Secure Digital changed the MMC design in several ways, Asymmetrical slots in the sides of the SD card prevent inserting it upside down. Most SD cards are 2.1 mm thick, compared to 1.4 mm for MMCs. The SD specification defines a card called Thin SD with a thickness of 1.4 mm, the cards electrical contacts are recessed beneath the surface of the card, protecting them from contact with a users fingers. The SD specification envisioned capacities and transfer rates exceeding those of MMC, for a comparison table, see below. While MMC uses a pin for data transfers, the SD card added a four-wire bus mode for higher data rates. The SD card added Content Protection for Recordable Media security circuitry for digital rights management content-protection, full-size SD cards do not fit into the slimmer MMC slots, and other issues also affect the ability to use one format in a host device designed for the other. The Secure Digital High Capacity format, announced in January 2006 and defined in version 2.0 of the SD specification, the SDHC trademark is licensed to ensure compatibility. SDHC cards are physically and electrically identical to standard-capacity SD cards, Version 2.0 also introduces a High-speed bus mode for both SDSC and SDHC cards, which doubles the original Standard Speed clock to produce 25 MB/s. SDHC host devices are required to accept older SD cards, however, older host devices do not recognize SDHC or SDXC memory cards, although some devices can do so through a firmware upgrade
8.
Liquid-crystal display
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A liquid-crystal display is a flat-panel display or other electronically modulated optical device that uses the light-modulating properties of liquid crystals. Liquid crystals do not emit light directly, instead using a backlight or reflector to produce images in color or monochrome and they use the same basic technology, except that arbitrary images are made up of a large number of small pixels, while other displays have larger elements. LCDs are used in a range of applications including computer monitors, televisions, instrument panels, aircraft cockpit displays. Small LCD screens are common in consumer devices such as digital cameras, watches, calculators. LCD screens are used on consumer electronics products such as DVD players, video game devices. LCD screens have replaced heavy, bulky cathode ray tube displays in all applications. LCD screens are available in a range of screen sizes than CRT and plasma displays, with LCD screens available in sizes ranging from tiny digital watches to huge. Since LCD screens do not use phosphors, they do not suffer image burn-in when an image is displayed on a screen for a long time. LCDs are, however, susceptible to image persistence, the LCD screen is more energy-efficient and can be disposed of more safely than a CRT can. Its low electrical power consumption enables it to be used in battery-powered electronic equipment more efficiently than CRTs can be, by 2008, annual sales of televisions with LCD screens exceeded sales of CRT units worldwide, and the CRT became obsolete for most purposes. Without the liquid crystal between the filters, light passing through the first filter would be blocked by the second polarizer. Before an electric field is applied, the orientation of the molecules is determined by the alignment at the surfaces of electrodes. In a twisted nematic device, the surface alignment directions at the two electrodes are perpendicular to other, and so the molecules arrange themselves in a helical structure. This induces the rotation of the polarization of the incident light, and this light will then be mainly polarized perpendicular to the second filter, and thus be blocked and the pixel will appear black. By controlling the voltage applied across the liquid crystal layer in each pixel, color LCD systems use the same technique, with color filters used to generate red, green, and blue pixels. The optical effect of a TN device in the state is far less dependent on variations in the device thickness than that in the voltage-off state. Because of this, TN displays with low content and no backlighting are usually operated between crossed polarizers such that they appear bright with no voltage. When no image is displayed, different arrangements are used, for this purpose, TN LCDs are operated between parallel polarizers, whereas IPS LCDs feature crossed polarizers
9.
USB
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It is currently developed by the USB Implementers Forum. USB was designed to standardize the connection of peripherals to personal computers. It has become commonplace on other devices, such as smartphones, PDAs, USB has effectively replaced a variety of earlier interfaces, such as serial ports and parallel ports, as well as separate power chargers for portable devices. Also, there are 5 modes of USB data transfer, in order of increasing bandwidth, Low Speed, Full Speed, High Speed, SuperSpeed, USB devices have some choice of implemented modes, and USB version is not a reliable statement of implemented modes. Modes are identified by their names and icons, and the specifications suggests that plugs, unlike other data buses, USB connections are directed, with both upstream and downstream ports emanating from a single host. This applies to power, with only downstream facing ports providing power. Thus, USB cables have different ends, A and B, therefore, in general, each different format requires four different connectors, a plug and receptacle for each of the A and B ends. USB cables have the plugs, and the corresponding receptacles are on the computers or electronic devices, in common practice, the A end is usually the standard format, and the B side varies over standard, mini, and micro. The mini and micro formats also provide for USB On-The-Go with a hermaphroditic AB receptacle, the micro format is the most durable from the point of view of designed insertion lifetime. The standard and mini connectors have a lifetime of 1,500 insertion-removal cycles. Likewise, the component of the retention mechanism, parts that provide required gripping force, were also moved into plugs on the cable side. A group of seven companies began the development of USB in 1994, Compaq, DEC, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC, a team including Ajay Bhatt worked on the standard at Intel, the first integrated circuits supporting USB were produced by Intel in 1995. The original USB1.0 specification, which was introduced in January 1996, Microsoft Windows 95, OSR2.1 provided OEM support for the devices. The first widely used version of USB was 1.1, the 12 Mbit/s data rate was intended for higher-speed devices such as disk drives, and the lower 1.5 Mbit/s rate for low data rate devices such as joysticks. Apple Inc. s iMac was the first mainstream product with USB, following Apples design decision to remove all legacy ports from the iMac, many PC manufacturers began building legacy-free PCs, which led to the broader PC market using USB as a standard. The USB2.0 specification was released in April 2000 and was ratified by the USB Implementers Forum at the end of 2001.1 specification, the USB3.0 specification was published on 12 November 2008. Its main goals were to increase the transfer rate, decrease power consumption, increase power output. USB3.0 includes a new, higher speed bus called SuperSpeed in parallel with the USB2.0 bus, for this reason, the new version is also called SuperSpeed
10.
HDMI
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HDMI is a digital replacement for analog video standards. HDMI implements the EIA/CEA-861 standards, which video formats and waveforms, transport of compressed, uncompressed, and LPCM audio, auxiliary data. CEA-861 signals carried by HDMI are electrically compatible with the CEA-861 signals used by the visual interface. No signal conversion is necessary, nor is there a loss of quality when a DVI-to-HDMI adapter is used. The CEC capability allows HDMI devices to each other when necessary. Several versions of HDMI have been developed and deployed since initial release of the technology but all use the same cable and connector. Other than improved audio and video capacity, performance, resolution and color spaces, newer versions have optional advanced features such as 3D, Ethernet data connection, production of consumer HDMI products started in late 2003. In Europe either DVI-HDCP or HDMI is included in the HD ready in-store labeling specification for TV sets for HDTV, HDMI began to appear on consumer HDTV camcorders and digital still cameras in 2006. As of January 6,2015, over 4 billion HDMI devices have been sold, the HDMI founders are Hitachi, Panasonic, Philips, Silicon Image, Sony, Thomson, RCA and Toshiba. Digital Content Protection, LLC provides HDCP for HDMI, HDMI has the support of motion picture producers Fox, Universal, Warner Bros. and Disney, along with system operators DirecTV, EchoStar and CableLabs. The HDMI founders began development on HDMI1.0 on April 16,2002, at the time, DVI-HDCP and DVI-HDTV were being used on HDTVs. HDMI1.0 was designed to improve on DVI-HDTV by using a connector and adding audio capability and enhanced YCbCr capability. The first Authorized Testing Center, which tests HDMI products, was opened by Silicon Image on June 23,2003, in California, the first ATC in Japan was opened by Panasonic on May 1,2004, in Osaka. The first ATC in Europe was opened by Philips on May 25,2005, in Caen, the first ATC in China was opened by Silicon Image on November 21,2005, in Shenzhen. The first ATC in India was opened by Philips on June 12,2008, the HDMI website contains a list of all the ATCs. According to In-Stat, the number of HDMI devices sold was 5 million in 2004,17.4 million in 2005,63 million in 2006, and 143 million in 2007. HDMI has become the de facto standard for HDTVs, and according to In-Stat, In-Stat has estimated that 229 million HDMI devices were sold in 2008. On April 8,2008 there were over 850 consumer electronics, on January 7,2009, HDMI Licensing, LLC announced that HDMI had reached an installed base of over 600 million HDMI devices
11.
Phone connector (audio)
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A phone connector, also known as phone jack, audio jack, headphone jack or jack plug, is a common family of electrical connector typically used for analog signals, primarily audio. It is cylindrical in shape, typically two, three, four and, recently, five contacts. Three-contact versions are known as TRS connectors, where T stands for tip, R stands for ring, similarly, two-, four- and five- contact versions are called TS, TRRS and TRRRS connectors respectively. The phone connector was invented for use in telephone switchboards in the 19th century and is widely used. In its original configuration, the diameter of the sleeve conductor is 1⁄4 inch. The mini connector has a diameter of 3.5 mm, specific models are termed stereo plug, mini-stereo, mini jack, headphone jack and microphone jack, or are referred to by size, i. e.3. 5mm or 6. 35mm. In the UK, the terms jack plug and jack socket are commonly used for the male and female phone connectors. In the US, an electrical connector is called a jack. Phone plugs and jacks are not to be confused with the similar terms phono plug and phono jack which refer to RCA connectors common in consumer hi-fi, the 3.5 mm connector is, however, sometimes—but counter to the connector manufacturers nomenclature—referred to as mini phono. Modern phone connectors are available in three standard sizes, the original 1⁄4 in version dates from 1878, when it was used for manual telephone exchanges, making it the oldest electrical connector standard still in use. The 3.5 mm or miniature and 2.5 mm or sub-miniature sizes were originally designed as two-conductor connectors for earpieces on transistor radios since the 1950s, the standard still used today. The 3.5 mm connector, which is the most commonly used in application today, was popularized by the Sony EFM-117J radio which was released in 1964. It became very popular with its application on the Walkman in 1979, the 3.5 mm and 2.5 mm sizes are sometimes referred to as 1⁄8 in and 3⁄32 in respectively in the United States, though those dimensions are only approximations. All three sizes are now available in two-conductor and three-conductor versions. Four- and five-conductor versions of the 3.5 mm plug are used for certain applications, a four-conductor version is often used in compact camcorders and portable media players, and sometimes also in laptop computers and smartphones, providing stereo sound plus a video signal. Proprietary interfaces using both four- and five-conductor versions exist, where the conductors are used to supply power for accessories. The four-conductor 3.5 mm plug is used as a connector on handheld amateur radio transceivers from Yaesu. It is also used in some amps like the LH Labs Geek Out V2+ for a balanced output, the most common arrangement remains to have the male plug on the cable and the female socket mounted in a piece of equipment, the original intention of the design
12.
Wi-Fi
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Wi-Fi or WiFi is a technology for wireless local area networking with devices based on the IEEE802.11 standards. Wi-Fi is a trademark of the Wi-Fi Alliance, which restricts the use of the term Wi-Fi Certified to products that successfully complete interoperability certification testing. Devices that can use Wi-Fi technology include personal computers, video-game consoles, smartphones, digital cameras, tablet computers, digital audio players, Wi-Fi compatible devices can connect to the Internet via a WLAN network and a wireless access point. Such an access point has a range of about 20 meters indoors, hotspot coverage can be as small as a single room with walls that block radio waves, or as large as many square kilometres achieved by using multiple overlapping access points. Wi-Fi most commonly uses the 2.4 gigahertz UHF and 5 gigahertz SHF ISM radio bands, having no physical connections, it is more vulnerable to attack than wired connections, such as Ethernet. In 1971, ALOHAnet connected the Hawaiian Islands with a UHF wireless packet network, ALOHAnet and the ALOHA protocol were early forerunners to Ethernet, and later the IEEE802.11 protocols, respectively. A1985 ruling by the U. S. Federal Communications Commission released the ISM band for unlicensed use and these frequency bands are the same ones used by equipment such as microwave ovens and are subject to interference. In 1991, NCR Corporation with AT&T Corporation invented the precursor to 802.11, the first wireless products were under the name WaveLAN. They are the credited with inventing Wi-Fi. In 1992 and 1996, CSIRO obtained patents for a method used in Wi-Fi to unsmear the signal. The first version of the 802.11 protocol was released in 1997 and this was updated in 1999 with 802. 11b to permit 11 Mbit/s link speeds, and this proved to be popular. In 1999, the Wi-Fi Alliance formed as an association to hold the Wi-Fi trademark under which most products are sold. Wi-Fi uses a number of patents held by many different organizations. In April 2009,14 technology companies agreed to pay CSIRO $1 billion for infringements on CSIRO patents and this led to Australia labeling Wi-Fi as an Australian invention, though this has been the subject of some controversy. In 2016, the local area network Test Bed was chosen as Australias contribution to the exhibition A History of the World in 100 Objects held in the National Museum of Australia. The name Wi-Fi, commercially used at least as early as August 1999, was coined by the brand-consulting firm Interbrand, the Wi-Fi Alliance had hired Interbrand to create a name that was a little catchier than IEEE802. 11b Direct Sequence. Phil Belanger, a member of the Wi-Fi Alliance who presided over the selection of the name Wi-Fi, has stated that Interbrand invented Wi-Fi as a pun upon the word hi-fi. Interbrand also created the Wi-Fi logo, the yin-yang Wi-Fi logo indicates the certification of a product for interoperability
13.
Bluetooth
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Bluetooth is a wireless technology standard for exchanging data over short distances from fixed and mobile devices, and building personal area networks. Invented by telecom vendor Ericsson in 1994, it was conceived as a wireless alternative to RS-232 data cables. It can connect up to seven devices, overcoming problems that older technologies had when attempting to connect to each other. Bluetooth is managed by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, which has more than 30,000 member companies in the areas of telecommunication, computing, networking, the IEEE standardized Bluetooth as IEEE802.15.1, but no longer maintains the standard. The Bluetooth SIG oversees development of the specification, manages the qualification program, a manufacturer must meet Bluetooth SIG standards to market it as a Bluetooth device. A network of patents apply to the technology, which are licensed to individual qualifying devices, the development of the short-link radio technology, later named Bluetooth, was initiated in 1989 by Nils Rydbeck, CTO at Ericsson Mobile in Lund, Sweden, and by Johan Ullman. The purpose was to develop wireless headsets, according to two inventions by Johan Ullman, SE 8902098-6, issued 1989-06-12 and SE9202239, issued 1992-07-24, Nils Rydbeck tasked Tord Wingren with specifying and Jaap Haartsen and Sven Mattisson with developing. Both were working for Ericsson in Lund, the specification is based on frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology. The idea of this name was proposed in 1997 by Jim Kardach who developed a system that would allow mobile phones to communicate with computers, at the time of this proposal he was reading Frans G. Bengtssons historical novel The Long Ships about Vikings and King Harald Bluetooth. The implication is that Bluetooth does the same with communications protocols, the Bluetooth logo is a bind rune merging the Younger Futhark runes and, Haralds initials. Bluetooth operates at frequencies between 2402 and 2480 MHz, or 2400 and 2483.5 MHz including guard bands 2 MHz wide at the end and 3.5 MHz wide at the top. This is in the globally unlicensed Industrial, Scientific and Medical 2.4 GHz short-range radio frequency band, Bluetooth uses a radio technology called frequency-hopping spread spectrum. Bluetooth divides transmitted data into packets, and transmits each packet on one of 79 designated Bluetooth channels, each channel has a bandwidth of 1 MHz. It usually performs 800 hops per second, with Adaptive Frequency-Hopping enabled, Bluetooth low energy uses 2 MHz spacing, which accommodates 40 channels. Originally, Gaussian frequency-shift keying modulation was the modulation scheme available. Since the introduction of Bluetooth 2. 0+EDR, π/4-DQPSK and 8DPSK modulation may also be used between compatible devices, devices functioning with GFSK are said to be operating in basic rate mode where an instantaneous data rate of 1 Mbit/s is possible. The term Enhanced Data Rate is used to describe π/4-DPSK and 8DPSK schemes, the combination of these modes in Bluetooth radio technology is classified as a BR/EDR radio. Bluetooth is a protocol with a master-slave structure
14.
Amazon Silk
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Amazon Silk is a web browser developed by Amazon for Kindle Fire and Fire Phone. It uses an architecture where some of the processing is performed on Amazons servers to improve webpage loading performance. It is based on the open source Chromium project that uses the Blink engine, for each webpage, Silk decides which browser subsystems to run locally on the device and which to run remotely on its own Amazon EC2 servers. Silk uses Googles SPDY protocol to speed up loading of web pages, Silk gives SPDY performance improvements for non-SPDY optimized websites if the pages are sent through Amazons servers. Some early reviewers found that cloud-based acceleration did not necessarily improve page loading speed, some privacy organizations raised concerns with how Amazon passes Silk traffic via its servers, effectively operating as an Internet service provider for those using the browser. The Silk browser includes the option to turn off Amazon server-side processing, on July 26,2016 it was reported that Silk prevents access to Google over HTTPS. History of web browsers List of web browsers Opera Mini Opera Turbo MarioNet split web browser
15.
Kindle Fire
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The Kindle Fire is a tablet computer developed by Amazon. com. The Kindle Fire HD followed in September 2012, and the Kindle Fire HDX in September 2013, in September 2014, when the fourth generation was introduced, the adjective Kindle was dropped. In September 2015, the fifth generation Fire 7 was released, followed by the sixth generation Fire HD8, on September 7,2012, upgrades to the device were announced with consumer availability to those European countries with a localized version of Amazons website. The original Kindle Fire retailed for US$199 in 2011, estimates of the devices initial bill of materials cost ranged from $150 to $202. Amazons business strategy was stated in 2011 as making money through sales of digital content on the Fire, rather than through sales of the device itself. On September 6,2012, the Kindle Fire was upgraded to the second generation, a more powerful and video-friendly version, the Kindle Fire HD was also made available, initially priced at $199 and $299. On September 25,2013, the Kindle Fire HD was upgraded as the third generation Fire, priced at US$139, the Kindle Fire HDX had an improved graphics engine, double the memory, and triple the processor speed of the previous model. The 7-inch and 8. 99-inch versions were introduced at US$229, in September 2014, the Fire HDX8.9 and the Fire HD were upgraded to the fourth generation of Fire tablets, removing the Kindle adjective in the naming scheme. There was also the Fire HD6 that has a screen with a quad-core processor priced at US$99. In September 2015, Amazon announced the release of the Fire 7, as of March 2016 it was the lowest-priced Amazon tablet. In June 2016, its price was dropped briefly to US$39.99 and this fifth generation tablet includes for the first time a micro SD card slot for extra storage. In September 2016, Amazon announced the release of the Fire HD8, as with most of Amazon’s devices, the aim isn’t to make money off of the hardware but instead to sell digital content such as books, movies, and TV shows to users reports Fortune. The Kindle Fire hardware was manufactured by Quanta Computer, which had also helped design the BlackBerry PlayBook. First-generation Kindle Fire devices employed a 1-GHz Texas Instruments OMAP4430 dual-core processor, the device has a 2-point multi-touch color LCD screen with a diagonal length of 7 inches and a 600×1024-pixel resolution. Connectivity is through 802. 11n Wi-Fi and USB2.0, the device includes 8 GB of internal storage—said to be enough for 80 applications, plus either 10 movies or 800 songs or 6,000 books. The first-generation Kindle Fire has a sensor on the upper corner of the screen. This was widely considered to be a sensor, disabled since an early software upgrade. The first generation of Kindle Fire devices run a customized Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread OS, the second-generation Kindle Fire HD runs a customized Android 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich OS
16.
Fire HDX
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The Fire HDX, formerly named Kindle Fire HDX, is the high-end model in Amazons Kindle Fire line of tablet computers. It was announced on September 25,2013 and is available in two models,7 inch and 8.9 inch. The 7 inch WiFi model was released on October 18,2013, in September 2014, Amazon released the second generation of the Fire HDX8.9 model that has a faster processor and a more powerful graphics processing unit. In addition, the name Kindle was removed from all of the Fire tablets names, both the 7 inch and 8.9 inch LCD models contain a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor that has an Adreno 330 GPU. The models also have a 1.2 megapixel front camera that shoots 720p HD video, the 8.9 inch model has an 8 megapixel rear camera that shoots HD 1080p video. The exterior surface has angular, raised plastic edges with the power, the Fire HDX features Dolby Digital Plus audio engine powering the two attached speakers. A normal user will get about 12 hours of life from a full charge. The Fire HDX8.9 refresh in 2014 uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 processor with an Adreno 420 GPU, the sound system features Dolby Atmos speaker technology and the Wi-Fi version weighs 13.2 ounces. Both models use Fire OS3 which is a fork of Android 4.2.2. It features Mayday, a button for free tech support available any time, Silk, a cloud-accelerated browser, the 2014 refresh uses Fire OS4 Sangria, which features profiles so each user on the tablet can have their own settings and apps. He or she will tell you what apps to download. Ive never seen anything else like it on a tablet, in his review of the Kindle Fire HDX7 he called the Mayday remote video support feature as revolutionary and Amazons most exciting feature. The Fire HDXs UI has a Carousel which contains the most recent apps used, the Carousel also holds documents, videos, music, and books. The Fire HDX also has a tab in which the user can access the users apps from any other application. Engadget gave the Fire HDX an 85 out of 100, saying that it may be the most compelling case for Amazons tablet ecosystem. While advanced users may be turned off by the app selection. PC Magazine gave the Amazon Kindle Fire HDX7 edition 4 out of 5 and rated Excellent while following pros were noted, Sharp screen. The Fire HDXs screen has high color accuracy and high density at 339 PPI
17.
Fork (software development)
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The term often implies not merely a development branch, but also a split in the developer community, a form of schism. Free and open-source software is that which, by definition, may be forked from the development team without prior permission without violating copyright law. However, licensed forks of proprietary software also happen, the word fork stems from the Latin word furca, meaning a fork or similarly shaped instrument. Fork in the meaning of to divide in branches, go separate ways has been used as early as the 14th century. In the software environment, the word evokes the fork system call, however, fork was in use in the present sense by 1995 to describe the XEmacs split, and was an understood usage in the GNU Project by 1996. Thus, there is a penalty associated with forking. The relationship between the different teams can be cordial or very bitter and he notes in the Jargon File, David A. Wheeler notes four possible outcomes of a fork, with examples, The death of the fork. This is by far the most common case and it is easy to declare a fork, but considerable effort to continue independent development and support. With a DVCS such as Mercurial or Git, the way to contribute to a project is to first branch the repository. Forks often restart version numbering from 0.1 or 1.0 even if the software was at version 3.0,4.0. An exception is when the software is designed to be a drop-in replacement for the original project. In proprietary software, the copyright is held by the employing entity. This is almost always an economic decision to generate a greater market share, a notable proprietary fork not of this kind is the many varieties of proprietary Unix—almost all derived from AT&T Unix under license and all called Unix, but increasingly mutually incompatible. The BSD licenses permit forks to become proprietary software, and some say that commercial incentives thus make proprietisation almost inevitable, examples include macOS, Cedega and CrossOver, EnterpriseDB, Supported PostgreSQL with their proprietary ESM storage system, and Netezzas proprietary highly scalable derivative of PostgreSQL. Some of these vendors contribute back changes to the community project, while some keep their changes as their own competitive advantages
18.
Touchscreen
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A touchscreen is a input and output device normally layered on the top of an electronic visual display of an information processing system. A user can give input or control the processing system through simple or multi-touch gestures by touching the screen with a special stylus and/or one or more fingers. Some touchscreens use ordinary or specially coated gloves to work while others may only work using a special stylus/pen, the user can use the touchscreen to react to what is displayed and to control how it is displayed, for example, zooming to increase the text size. The touchscreen enables the user to interact directly with what is displayed, rather using a mouse, touchpad. Touchscreens are common in such as game consoles, personal computers, tablet computers, electronic voting machines, point of sale systems. They can also be attached to computers or, as terminals and they also play a prominent role in the design of digital appliances such as personal digital assistants and some e-readers. The popularity of smartphones, tablets, and many types of appliances is driving the demand and acceptance of common touchscreens for portable. The application of technology for air traffic control was described in an article published in 1968. Frank Beck and Bent Stumpe, engineers from CERN, developed a transparent touchscreen in the early 1970s, then manufactured by CERN, it was put to use in 1973. A resistive touchscreen was developed by American inventor George Samuel Hurst, the first version was produced in 1982. This arrangement can sense any fingertip-sized opaque object in close proximity to the screen, a similar touchscreen was used on the HP-150 starting in 1983, this was one of the worlds earliest commercial touchscreen computers. HP mounted their infrared transmitters and receivers around the bezel of a 9 Sony Cathode Ray Tube, in 1984, Fujitsu released a touch pad for the Micro 16, to deal with the complexity of kanji characters, which were stored as tiled graphics. In 1985, Sega released the Terebi Oekaki, also known as the Sega Graphic Board, for the SG-1000 video game console and it consisted of a plastic pen and a plastic board with a transparent window where the pen presses are detected. It was used primarily for a software application. A graphic touch tablet was released for the Sega AI Computer in 1986, touch-sensitive Control-Display Units were evaluated for commercial aircraft flight decks in the early 1980s. In 1985, the University of Toronto group including Bill Buxton developed a tablet that used capacitance rather than bulky camera-based optical sensing systems. In 1986, the first graphical point of sale software was demonstrated on the 16-bit Atari 520ST color computer and it featured a color touchscreen widget-driven interface. In 1987, Casio launched the Casio PB-1000 pocket computer with a touchscreen consisting of a 4x4 matrix, until 1988 touchscreens had the bad reputation of being imprecise
19.
Texas Instruments
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Texas Instruments Inc. is an American technology company that designs and manufactures semiconductors, which it sells to electronics designers and manufacturers globally. Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, United States, TI is one of the top ten semiconductor companies worldwide, Texas Instrumentss focus is on developing analog chips and embedded processors, which accounts for more than 85% of their revenue. TI also produces TI digital light processing technology and education technology products including calculators, microcontrollers, to date, TI has more than 43,000 patents worldwide. TI produced the worlds first commercial silicon transistor in 1950, Jack Kilby invented the integrated circuit in 1958 while working at TIs Central Research Labs. TI also invented the hand-held calculator in 1967, and introduced the first single-chip microcontroller in 1970, in 1987, TI invented the digital light processing device, which serves as the foundation for the companys award-winning DLP technology and DLP Cinema. In 1990, TI came out with the popular TI-81 calculator which made them a leader in the calculator industry. In 1997, its business was sold to Raytheon, which allowed TI to strengthen its focus on digital solutions. Texas Instruments was founded by Cecil H. Green, J. Erik Jonsson, Eugene McDermott, McDermott was one of the original founders of Geophysical Service Inc. in 1930. McDermott, Green, and Jonsson were GSI employees who purchased the company in 1941, in November,1945, Patrick Haggerty was hired as general manager of the Laboratory and Manufacturing division, which focused on electronic equipment. By 1951, the L&M division, with its contracts, was growing faster than GSIs Geophysical division. The company was reorganized and initially renamed General Instruments Inc, because there already existed a firm named General Instrument, the company was renamed Texas Instruments that same year. From 1956 to 1961, Fred Agnich of Dallas, later a Republican member of the Texas House of Representatives, was the Texas Instruments president, Geophysical Service, Inc. became a subsidiary of Texas Instruments. Early in 1988 most of GSI was sold to the Halliburton Company, in 1930, J. Clarence Karcher and Eugene McDermott founded Geophysical Service, an early provider of seismic exploration services to the petroleum industry. In 1939, the company reorganized as Coronado Corp. an oil company with Geophysical Service Inc, on December 6,1941, McDermott along with three other GSI employees, J. Erik Jonsson, Cecil H. Green, and H. B. During World War II, GSI expanded their services to include electronics for the U. S. Army, Signal Corps, in 1951, the company changed its name to Texas Instruments, GSI becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of the new company. Texas Instruments also continued to manufacture equipment for use in the seismic industry, after selling GSI, TI finally sold the company to Halliburton in 1988, at which point GSI ceased to exist as a separate entity. Texas Instruments entered the electronics market in 1942 with submarine detection equipment. During the early 1980s, Texas Instruments instituted a quality program which included Juran training, as well as promoting statistical process control, Taguchi methods and Design for Six Sigma
20.
OMAP
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OMAP is a series of image/video processors developed by Texas Instruments. They are a category of system on chips for portable and mobile multimedia applications. OMAP devices generally include a general-purpose ARM architecture processor core plus one or more specialized co-processors, earlier OMAP variants commonly featured a variant of the Texas Instruments TMS320 series digital signal processor.5 and 3G mobile phones, that were going to be produced during 2003. The OMAP was Texas Instruments implementation of this standard, on September 26,2012, Texas Instruments announced that they would wind down their operations in smartphone and tablet oriented OMAP chips and instead focus on embedded platforms. The fate of OMAP therefore remains uncertain, on November 14,2012, Texas Instruments announced that they would cut 1,700 jobs due to its shift from mobile to embedded platforms. The genesis of the OMAP product line is from partnership with cell phone vendors, parts that are obsolete from the perspective of handset vendors may still be needed to support products developed using catalog parts and distributor-based inventory management. The OMAP1 family started with a TI-enhanced ARM core, and it included many variants, most easily distinguished according to manufacturing technology, CPU, peripheral set, and distribution channel. In March 2009, the OMAP1710 family chips are available to handset vendors. Products using OMAP1 processors include hundreds of phone models. OMAP34x and OMAP36x are distributed directly to large handset manufacturers, oMAP35x is a variant of OMAP34x intended for catalog distribution channels. The OMAP36x is a 45 nm version of the 65 nm OMAP34x with higher clock speed, not highlighted in the list below is that each OMAP3 SoC has an Image, Video, Audio accelerator. These units do not all have the same capabilities, most devices support 12 megapixel camera images, though some support 5 or 3 megapixels. The 4th generation OMAPs, OMAP4430,4460, and 4470 all use a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU, the 4430 and 4460 use a PowerVR SGX540 integrated 3D graphics accelerator, running at a clock frequency of 304 and 384 MHz respectively. 4470 has a PowerVR SGX544 GPU that supports DirectX9 which enables it for use in Windows 8 as well as a dedicated 2D graphics core for increased power efficiency up to 50-90%. All OMAP4 come with an IVA3 multimedia hardware accelerator with a programmable DSP that enables 1080p Full HD, OMAP4 uses ARM Cortex-A9s with ARMs SIMD engine which may have a significant performance advantage in some cases over Nvidia Tegra 2s ARM Cortex-A9s with non-vector floating point units. It also uses a dual-channel LPDDR2 memory controller compared to Nvidia Tegra 2s single-channel memory controller and they respectively support 24 and 20 megapixel cameras for front and rear 3D HD video recording. The chip also supports up to 8 GB of dual channel LPDDR2/DDR3 memory, output to four HD 3D displays, OMAP5 also includes three USB2.0 ports, one lowspeed USB3.0 OTG port and a SATA2.0 controller. These are marketed only to handset manufacturers and they are intended to be highly integrated, low cost chips for consumer products
21.
Dolby Digital Plus
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Dolby Digital Plus, also known as Enhanced AC-3 is a digital audio compression scheme developed by Dolby Labs for transport and storage of multi-channel digital audio. While Dolby Digital supports up to 5 full-bandwidth audio channels at a bitrate of 640kbit/s. A Dolby Digital Plus service consists of one or more substreams, there are three types of substreams, Independent substreams, which can contain a single 5.1 program. Up to eight independent substreams may be present in a Dolby Digital Plus stream. The channels present in an independent substream are the traditional 5.1 channels, Left, Right, Center, Left Surround, legacy substreams, which contain a single 5.1 program, and which correspond directly to Dolby Digital content. At most a single legacy substream may be present in a DD+ stream, dependent substreams, which contain additional channels beyond the traditional 5.1 channels. Metadata in the substream describes the purpose of each included channel, All DD+ streams must contain at least one independent substream or legacy substream, which contains the first 5.1 channels of the primary audio program. Additional independent substreams may be used for audio programs such as foreign language soundtracks, commentary. Dependent substreams may be provided for programs that have additional channels beyond 5.1. Within each substream, provision is made for encoding five full-bandwidth channels, one low-frequency channel, the coupling channels is used for medium-to-high-frequency information which is common to multiple full-bandwidth channels. Its context is mixed in with the channels in a fashion prescribed by the metadata. Dolby Digital Plus includes comprehensive bitstream metadata for decoder control over output loudness, downmixing, Dolby Digital Plus is nominally a 16-bit aligned protocol, though very few fields in the syntax respect any byte or word boundaries. A DD+ stream is a collection of fixed-length syncframe packets, each of which corresponds to either 256,512,768, each syncframe is independently decodable, and belongs to a specific substream within the service. A syncframe consists of the following elements, A 16-bit sync word. An Audio Frame section, which contains decoding information common to all audio blocks within the syncframe, including the information to determine how exponents. One, two, three, or six Audio Block sections and these sections contain additional decoding metadata, as well as the encoded and quantized frequency coefficients. Each Audio Block corresponds to 256 PCM samples in each channel, a final section containing user-defined auxiliary data, any necessary padding to produce uniform syncframe lengths, and a 16-bit cyclic redundancy check code for error detection. Coefficients are transmitted in a binary floating-point format, with exponents transmitted separately from mantissas and this allows for highly efficient coding
22.
MIMO
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In radio, multiple-input and multiple-output, or MIMO, is a method for multiplying the capacity of a radio link using multiple transmit and receive antennas to exploit multipath propagation. MIMO has become an element of wireless communication standards including IEEE802. 11n, IEEE802. 11ac, HSPA+, WiMAX. More recently, MIMO has been applied to communication for 3-wire installations as part of ITU G. hn standard. At one time, in wireless the term MIMO referred to the use of antennas at the transmitter. In modern usage, MIMO specifically refers to a technique for sending and receiving more than one data signal simultaneously over the same radio channel by exploiting multipath propagation. MIMO is fundamentally different from smart antenna techniques developed to enhance the performance of a data signal, such as beamforming. Methods were developed to improve the performance of radio networks. Space-division multiple access uses directional or smart antennas to communicate on the frequency with users in different locations within range of the same base station. An SDMA system was proposed by Richard Roy and Björn Ottersten, researchers at ArrayComm and their US patent describes a method for increasing capacity using an array of receiving antennas at the base station with a plurality of remote users. Arogyaswami Paulraj and Thomas Kailath proposed an SDMA-based inverse multiplexing technique in 1993, Paulraj was awarded the prestigious Marconi Prize in 2014 for his pioneering contributions to developing the theory and applications of MIMO antennas. The paper also identified practical solutions for modulation, coding, synchronization, later that year Gerard J. Foschini submitted a paper that also suggested it is possible to multiply the capacity of a wireless link using what the author described as layered space-time architecture. Greg Raleigh, V. K. Jones, and Michael Pollack founded Clarity Wireless in 1996, cisco Systems acquired Clarity Wireless in 1998. Bell Labs built a laboratory prototype demonstrating its V-BLAST technology in 1998, Arogyaswami Paulraj founded Iospan Wireless in late 1998 to develop MIMO-OFDM products. Iospan was acquired by Intel in 2003, V-BLAST was never commercialized, and neither Clarity Wireless nor Iospan Wireless shipped MIMO-OFDM products before being acquired. MIMO technology has been standardized for wireless LANs, 3G mobile phone networks, greg Raleigh and V. K. Jones founded Airgo Networks in 2001 to develop MIMO-OFDM chipsets for wireless LANs. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers created a group in late 2003 to develop a wireless LAN standard delivering at least 100 Mbit/s of user data throughput. There were two competing proposals, TGn Sync was backed by companies including Intel and Philips, and WWiSE was supported by companies including Airgo Networks, Broadcom. Both groups agreed that the 802. 11n standard would be based on MIMO-OFDM with 20 MHz and 40 MHz channel options, TGn Sync, WWiSE, and a third proposal were merged to create what was called the Joint Proposal
23.
Android (operating system)
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Android is a mobile operating system developed by Google, based on the Linux kernel and designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. In addition to devices, Google has further developed Android TV for televisions, Android Auto for cars. Variants of Android are also used on notebooks, game consoles, digital cameras, beginning with the first commercial Android device in September 2008, the operating system has gone through multiple major releases, with the current version being 7.0 Nougat, released in August 2016. Android applications can be downloaded from the Google Play store, which features over 2.7 million apps as of February 2017, Android has been the best-selling OS on tablets since 2013, and runs on the vast majority of smartphones. In September 2015, Android had 1.4 billion monthly active users, Android is popular with technology companies that require a ready-made, low-cost and customizable operating system for high-tech devices. The success of Android has made it a target for patent, Android Inc. was founded in Palo Alto, California in October 2003 by Andy Rubin, Rich Miner, Nick Sears, and Chris White. Rubin described the Android project as tremendous potential in developing smarter mobile devices that are aware of its owners location. The early intentions of the company were to develop an operating system for digital cameras. Despite the past accomplishments of the founders and early employees, Android Inc. operated secretly and that same year, Rubin ran out of money. Steve Perlman, a friend of Rubin, brought him $10,000 in cash in an envelope. In July 2005, Google acquired Android Inc. for at least $50 million and its key employees, including Rubin, Miner and White, joined Google as part of the acquisition. Not much was known about Android at the time, with Rubin having only stated that they were making software for mobile phones, at Google, the team led by Rubin developed a mobile device platform powered by the Linux kernel. Google marketed the platform to handset makers and carriers on the promise of providing a flexible, upgradeable system, Google had lined up a series of hardware components and software partners and signaled to carriers that it was open to various degrees of cooperation. Speculation about Googles intention to enter the communications market continued to build through December 2006. In September 2007, InformationWeek covered an Evalueserve study reporting that Google had filed several patent applications in the area of mobile telephony, the first commercially available smartphone running Android was the HTC Dream, also known as T-Mobile G1, announced on September 23,2008. Since 2008, Android has seen numerous updates which have improved the operating system, adding new features. Each major release is named in order after a dessert or sugary treat, with the first few Android versions being called Cupcake, Donut, Eclair. In 2010, Google launched its Nexus series of devices, a lineup in which Google partnered with different device manufacturers to produce new devices and introduce new Android versions
24.
Pixel density
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Horizontal and vertical density are usually the same, as most devices have square pixels, but differ on devices that have non-square pixels. PPI can also describe the resolution, in pixels, of an image file, the unit is not square centimeters—a 100×100 pixel image printed in a 1 cm square has a resolution of 100 pixels per centimeter. Used this way, the measurement is meaningful when printing an image and it has become commonplace to refer to PPI as DPI, even though PPI refers to input resolution. Industry standard, good quality photographs usually require 330 pixels per inch, at 100% size and this delivers a quality factor of 2, which is optimum. The lowest acceptable quality factor is considered 1.5, which equates to printing a 225 ppi image using a 150 lpi screen onto coated paper, screen frequency is determined by the type of paper the image is printed on. An absorbent paper surface, uncoated recycled paper for instance, lets ink droplets spread —so requires a more open printing screen, input resolution can therefore be reduced to minimize file size without loss in quality, as long as the quality factor of 2 is maintained. This is easily determined by doubling the line frequency, for example, printing on an uncoated paper stock often limits printing screen frequency to no more than 120 lpi, therefore, a quality factor of 2 is achieved with images of 240 ppi. The PPI of a display is related to the size of the display in inches. This measurement is referred to as dots per inch, though that measurement more accurately refers to the resolution of a computer printer. This figure is determined by dividing the width of the area in pixels by the width of the display area in inches. It is possible for a display to have different horizontal and vertical PPI measurements, the dot pitch of a computer display determines the absolute limit of possible pixel density. In January 2008, Kopin Corporation announced a 0.44 inch SVGA LCD with a density of 2272 PPI. In 2011 they followed this up with a 3760 DPI0. 21” diagonal VGA colour display, the manufacturer says they designed the LCD to be optically magnified, as in high-resolution eyewear devices. Holography applications demand even greater density, as higher pixel density produces a larger image size. Spatial light modulators can reduce pixel pitch to 2.5 μm, some observations indicate that the unaided human generally cant differentiate detail beyond 300 PPI. However, this figure depends both on the distance between viewer and image, and the visual acuity. The human eye also responds in a different way to a bright, high pixel density display technologies would make supersampled antialiasing obsolete, enable true WYSIWYG graphics and, potentially enable a practical “paperless office” era. For perspective, such a device at 15 inch screen size would have to more than four Full HD screens
25.
MediaTek
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MediaTek Inc. is a Taiwanese fabless semiconductor company that provides system-on-chip solutions for wireless communications, HDTV, DVD and Blu-ray. Headquartered in Hsinchu, Taiwan, the company has 25 offices worldwide and was the 3rd largest fabless IC designer worldwide in 2016, since its founding in 1997, MediaTek has been creating chipset solutions for the global market. MediaTek also provides its customers with reference designs, MediaTek was originally a unit of United Microelectronics Corporation tasked with designing chipsets for home entertainment products. On May 28,1997, the unit was spun off, MediaTek Inc. was listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange under the 2454 code on July 23,2001. The company started out designing chipsets for optical drives and subsequently expanded into chip solutions for DVD players, digital TVs, mobile phones, smartphones, in general MediaTek has had a strong record of gaining market share and displacing competitors after entering new markets. The company launched a division to design solutions for mobile devices in 2004, seven years later, it was taking orders for more than 500 million mobile system-on-chip units per annum, which included solutions for both feature phones and smart devices. The mobile chip market quickly became the main driver for the company. The revenue growth was partly due to revenue recognition from the acquisition of MStar which became effective at the beginning of 2014. In 2005, MediaTek acquired Inprocomm, a semiconductor design firm producing 802. 11a, b. In 2007, MediaTek acquired the cellular chip operations of Analog Devices for US$350 million, on April 11,2012, MediaTek acquired Coresonic, a global producer of digital signal processing solutions based in Linköping, Sweden. Coresonic is now a wholly owned subsidiary of MediaTek in Europe, on June 22,2012, MediaTek announced that it would acquire rival Taiwanese chipset designer MStar Semiconductor Inc. which held a strong market share position in digital television chips. The initial phase of the deal will see MediaTek taking a 48 percent stake, the merger between MediaTek and MStar was delayed by antitrust concerns of China and South Korea and finally finalized on February 1,2014. MediaTeks financial results have been subject to variation as the success of different product lines fluctuated. MediaTeks relatively strong sales in 2009/2010 was based on its market position for feature phone chipsets. MediaTeks stock has been trading on the Taiwan Stock Exchange under the symbol TWSE,2454, in its early days, the stock peaked at NT$783 in April 2002, and later saw a peak of NT$656 in March 2007. The lowest price in the starting from 2001 was reached in January 2005. In more recent times, the peaked at NT$590 in January 2010. The stock price saw its highest level since 2010 at NT$545 on July 3,2014, by concurrently allocating tasks to individual CPU cores, the MT8135 could in theory offer significant power saving advantages over competing mobile device solutions
26.
Multi-core processor
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A multi-core processor is a single computing component with two or more independent actual processing units, which are units that read and execute program instructions. The instructions are ordinary CPU instructions, but the multiple cores can run multiple instructions at the same time, manufacturers typically integrate the cores onto a single integrated circuit die, or onto multiple dies in a single chip package. A multi-core processor implements multiprocessing in a physical package. Designers may couple cores in a multi-core device tightly or loosely, for example, cores may or may not share caches, and they may implement message passing or shared-memory inter-core communication methods. Common network topologies to interconnect cores include bus, ring, two-dimensional mesh, homogeneous multi-core systems include only identical cores, heterogeneous multi-core systems have cores that are not identical. Just as with single-processor systems, cores in multi-core systems may implement architectures such as VLIW, superscalar, Multi-core processors are widely used across many application domains, including general-purpose, embedded, network, digital signal processing, and graphics. The improvement in performance gained by the use of a multi-core processor depends very much on the algorithms used. In particular, possible gains are limited by the fraction of the software that can run in parallel simultaneously on multiple cores, most applications, however, are not accelerated so much unless programmers invest a prohibitive amount of effort in re-factoring the whole problem. The parallelization of software is a significant ongoing topic of research, the terms multi-core and dual-core most commonly refer to some sort of central processing unit, but are sometimes also applied to digital signal processors and system on a chip. This article uses the terms multi-core and dual-core for CPUs manufactured on the integrated circuit. In contrast to systems, the term multi-CPU refers to multiple physically separate processing-units. The terms many-core and massively multi-core are sometimes used to describe multi-core architectures with a high number of cores. Some systems use many soft microprocessor cores placed on a single FPGA, each core can be considered a semiconductor intellectual property core as well as a CPU core. While manufacturing technology improves, reducing the size of individual gates and these physical limitations can cause significant heat dissipation and data synchronization problems. Various other methods are used to improve CPU performance, some instruction-level parallelism methods such as superscalar pipelining are suitable for many applications, but are inefficient for others that contain difficult-to-predict code. Many applications are better suited to thread-level parallelism methods, and multiple independent CPUs are commonly used to increase a systems overall TLP, a combination of increased available space and the demand for increased TLP led to the development of multi-core CPUs. Several business motives drive the development of multi-core architectures, for decades, it was possible to improve performance of a CPU by shrinking the area of the integrated circuit, which reduced the cost per device on the IC. Alternatively, for the circuit area, more transistors could be used in the design
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ARM big.LITTLE
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ARM big. LITTLE is a heterogeneous computing architecture developed by ARM Holdings, coupling relatively battery-saving and slower processor cores with relatively more powerful and power-hungry ones. Typically, only one side or the other will be active at once, the intention is to create a multi-core processor that can adjust better to dynamic computing needs and use less power than clock scaling alone. ARMs marketing material promises up to a 75% savings in power usage for some activities, in October 2011, Big. Little was announced along with the Cortex-A7, which was designed to be architecturally compatible with the Cortex-A15. In October 2012 ARM announced the Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A57 cores, which are compatible with each other to allow their use in a Big. Little chip. ARM later announced the Cortex-A12 at Computex 2013 followed by the Cortex-A17 in February 2014, there are three ways for the different processor cores to be arranged in a Big. Little design, depending on the scheduler implemented in the kernel. The clustered model approach is the first and simplest implementation, arranging the processor into identically-sized clusters of Big or Little cores. The operating system scheduler can only see one cluster at a time, all relevant data is then passed through the common L2 cache, the first core cluster is powered off and the other one is activated. A Cache Coherent Interconnect is used and this model has been implemented in the Samsung Exynos 5 Octa. CPU migration via the in-kernel switcher involves pairing up a Big core with a Little core, each pair operates as one virtual core, and only one real core is powered up and running at a time. The Big core is used when the demand is high and the Little core is employed when demand is low. When demand on the core changes, the incoming core is powered up, running state is transferred, the outgoing is shut down. Switching is done via the cpufreq framework, a complete Big. Little IKS implementation was added in Linux 3.11. Big. Little IKS is an improvement of Cluster Migration, the difference is that each pair is visible to the scheduler. The more complex arrangement involves a non-symmetric grouping of Big and Little cores, a single chip could have one or two Big cores and many more Little cores, or vice versa. Nvidia created something similar to this with the companion core in their Tegra 3 SoC. The most powerful use model of Big. Little architecture is heterogeneous multi-processing and this model has been implemented in the Samsung Exynos starting with the Exynos 5 Octa series. The paired arrangement allows for switching to be done transparently to the system using the existing dynamic voltage. The existing DVFS support in the kernel will simply see a list of frequencies/voltages, however, the low-end slots will activate the Little core and the high-end slots will activate the Big core
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ARM Cortex-A15
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The ARM Cortex-A15 MPCore is a 32-bit processor core licensed by ARM Holdings implementing the ARMv7-A architecture. It is a processor with out-of-order superscalar pipeline running at up to 2.5 GHz. ARM has claimed that the Cortex-A15 core is 40 percent more powerful than the Cortex-A9 core with the number of cores at the same speed. The first A15 designs came out in the autumn of 2011, key features of the Cortex-A15 core are, 40-bit Large Physical Address Extensions addressing up to 1 TB of RAM. As per the x86 Physical Address Extension, virtual address space remains 32 bit, ARM provides specifications but the licensees individually design ARM chips, and AMBA-4 scales beyond 2 clusters. The theoretical limit is 16 clusters,4 bits are used to code the CLUSTERID number in the CP15 register, press announcements of current implementations, Broadcom SoC HiSilicon K3V3 Nvidia Tegra 4 and Tegra K1. ARM architecture List of ARM cores List of applications of ARM cores Comparison of ARMv8-A cores JTAG Official website ARM Cortex-A15 Technical Reference Manuals
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Imagination Technologies
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Imagination Technologies Group plc is a British-based technology R&D company, focussing on semiconductor and related intellectual property licensing. It is most noted for its PowerVR mobile graphics processors, MIPS embedded microprocessors and it also supplies radio baseband processing, networking, DSP, video and audio hardware, VoIP software solutions, cloud hosting and silicon and system design services. The company is listed on the London Stock Exchange, the Company was founded in 1985 as VideoLogic and originally focused on graphics, sound acceleration, home audio systems, video-capture and video-conferencing systems. It was first listed on the London Stock Exchange in July 1994, on 2 December 1997, NEC subscribed 2.3 million new shares at a price of 56. 5p, taking its total stake to 3. 5%. In 1999, the Company refocused on intellectual property licensing generally, since the 1990s, VideoLogic has provided chips for digital television set-top boxes, and is a member of the Digital TV Group. During the late 1990s to 2000s, Sega utilized VideoLogic chips for the Dreamcast home video game console, Namco also utilized PowerVR chips for the Namco System 23 arcade system board in the late 1990s. On 23 March 2000, Imagination Technologies acquired Ensigma, a company specialising in Digital Signal Processing. In October 2006, Intel Corporation acquired a 2. 9% stake i. e.6 million shares in the Company for £5.28 million, in December 2008, Apple Inc purchased a 3. 6% stake in the company for £3.2 million. In June 2009, it was announced that Intels stake had increased to 14% after it had acquired 25m shares, one week later, Intel acquired another 5m shares from the Saad Group, and its shareholding rose to 16. 02%. On 14 December 2011, Imagination Technologies announced that it had signed a agreement with Qualcomm. The company signed an agreement for the display IP from its PowerVR portfolio, on 3 January 2012, Imagination Technologies announced that it will invest totalling £5 million, in Toumaz Microsystems, a wireless intercom spinout of Toumaz Ltd. and will own 25% of the business. In June 2012, Imagination Technologies acquired Nethra Imaging, a semiconductor and systems company focused on delivering video, as of November 2012, over 1 billion SOC units had shipped containing cores developed by Imagination Technologies. On 17 December 2012, Imagination Technologies beat Ceva Inc in the race to buy processor technology firm MIPS Technologies with an offer of $100 million. On 29 December 2012 its Chief Executive Officer, Hossein Yassaie, was awarded a knighthood in the 2013 New Year Honours, the award was given in recognition of his services to technology and innovation. On 8 February 2016, Imagination Technologies announced that Sir Hossein Yassaie had stepped down from the company after 18 years as CEO, andrew Heath was appointed as interim chief executive before taking the role on a permanent basis on 26 May 2016. Additionally, the announced its intention to sell its Pure digital radio division.11 Wi-Fi,802.15
30.
Arm Holdings
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ARM Holdings plc is a British multinational semiconductor and software design company, owned by SoftBank Group. It is considered to be dominant for processors in mobile phones. The company is one of the best-known Silicon Fen companies, processors based on designs licensed from ARM, or designed by licensees of one of the ARM instruction set architectures, are used in all classes of computing devices. ARMs Mali line of processing units are used in laptops, in over 50% of Android tablets by market share. It is the third most popular GPU in mobile devices, ARMs main CPU competitors in servers include Intel and AMD. In mobile applications, Intels x86 Atom is a competitor, AMD also sells ARM based chips as well as x86, Imagination Technologies offers another RISC design for embedded systems. ARMs main GPU competitors include mobile GPUs from Imagination Technologies, Qualcomm and increasingly Nvidia, despite competing within GPUs, Qualcomm and Nvidia have combined their GPUs with an ARM licensed CPU. ARM had a listing on the London Stock Exchange and was a constituent of the FTSE100 Index. It has a listing on NASDAQ. However Japanese telecommunications company SoftBank Group made an offer for ARM on 18 July 2016, subject to approval by ARMs shareholders. The transaction was completed on 5 September 2016, the acronym ARM was first used in 1983 and originally stood for Acorn RISC Machine. Acorn Computers first RISC processor was used in the original Acorn Archimedes and was one of the first RISC processors used in small computers. However, when the company was incorporated in 1990, the acronym was changed to Advanced RISC Machines, at the time of the IPO in 1998, the company name was changed to ARM Holdings, often just called ARM like the processors. The company was founded in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd, the new company intended to further the development of the Acorn RISC Machine processor, which was originally used in the Acorn Archimedes and had been selected by Apple for their Newton project. Its first profitable year was 1993, the companys Silicon Valley and Tokyo offices were opened in 1994. ARM invested in Palmchip Corporation in 1997 to provide system on chip platforms, in 1998 the Company changed its name from Advanced RISC Machines Ltd to ARM Ltd. The Company was first listed on the London Stock Exchange and NASDAQ in 1998 and by February 1999, in 2010, ARM joined with IBM, Texas Instruments, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Freescale Semiconductor in forming a non-profit open source engineering company, Linaro. ARM also acquired the team of PowerEscape
31.
PowerVR
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Rapid changes in that market, notably with the introduction of OpenGL and Direct3D, led to rapid consolidation. PowerVR introduced new versions with low-power electronics that were aimed at the computer market. Over time, this developed into a series of designs that could be incorporated into system-on-a-chip architectures suitable for handheld device use, as the polygon generating program feeds triangles to the PowerVR, it stores them in memory in a triangle strip or an indexed format. Unlike other architectures, polygon rendering is not performed until all polygon information has been collated for the current frame. Furthermore, the operations of texturing and shading of pixels is delayed, whenever possible. In order to render, the display is split into sections in a grid pattern. Each section is known as a tile, associated with each tile is a list of the triangles that visibly overlap that tile. Each tile is rendered in turn to produce the final image, tiles are rendered using a process similar to ray-casting. Rays are numerically simulated as if cast onto the triangles associated with the tile, the PowerVR hardware typically calculates the depths associated with each polygon for one tile row in 1 cycle. It also allows for correct rendering of partially transparent polygons, independent of the order in which they are processed by the polygon producing application. More importantly, as the rendering is limited to one tile at a time, the tile can be in fast on-chip memory. Under normal circumstances, each tile is visited just once per frame, PowerVR is a pioneer of tile based deferred rendering. Microsoft also conceptualised the idea with their abandoned Talisman project, gigapixel, a company that developed IP for tile-based deferred 3D graphics, was purchased by 3dfx, which in turn was subsequently purchased by Nvidia. Nvidia now uses a form of rendering in the Maxwell. ARM began developing another major tile based deferred rendering architecture known as Mali after their acquisition of Falanx, Intel uses a similar concept in their integrated graphics solutions. Today, the PowerVR software and hardware suite has ASICs for video encoding, decoding and it also has virtualisation, and DirectX, OpenGL ES, OpenVG, and OpenCL acceleration. Newest PowerVR Wizard GPUs have fixed-function Ray Tracing Unit hardware and support hybrid rendering, powerVRs initial products were available as the OEM graphics on some Compaq models, as an add-on card for other OEMs, the retail VideoLogic Apocalypse 3D card and the retail Matrox M3D card. As part of a competition at Sega to design the successor to the Saturn
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Random-access memory
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Random-access memory is a form of computer data storage which stores frequently used program instructions to increase the general speed of a system. A random-access memory device allows data items to be read or written in almost the same amount of time irrespective of the location of data inside the memory. RAM contains multiplexing and demultiplexing circuitry, to connect the lines to the addressed storage for reading or writing the entry. Usually more than one bit of storage is accessed by the same address, in todays technology, random-access memory takes the form of integrated circuits. RAM is normally associated with types of memory, where stored information is lost if power is removed. Other types of non-volatile memories exist that allow access for read operations. These include most types of ROM and a type of memory called NOR-Flash. Integrated-circuit RAM chips came into the market in the early 1970s, with the first commercially available DRAM chip, early computers used relays, mechanical counters or delay lines for main memory functions. Ultrasonic delay lines could only reproduce data in the order it was written, drum memory could be expanded at relatively low cost but efficient retrieval of memory items required knowledge of the physical layout of the drum to optimize speed. Latches built out of vacuum tube triodes, and later, out of transistors, were used for smaller and faster memories such as registers. Such registers were relatively large and too costly to use for large amounts of data, the first practical form of random-access memory was the Williams tube starting in 1947. It stored data as electrically charged spots on the face of a cathode ray tube, since the electron beam of the CRT could read and write the spots on the tube in any order, memory was random access. The capacity of the Williams tube was a few hundred to around a thousand bits, but it was smaller, faster. In fact, rather than the Williams tube memory being designed for the SSEM, magnetic-core memory was invented in 1947 and developed up until the mid-1970s. It became a form of random-access memory, relying on an array of magnetized rings. By changing the sense of each rings magnetization, data could be stored with one bit stored per ring, since every ring had a combination of address wires to select and read or write it, access to any memory location in any sequence was possible. Magnetic core memory was the form of memory system until displaced by solid-state memory in integrated circuits. Data was stored in the capacitance of each transistor, and had to be periodically refreshed every few milliseconds before the charge could leak away
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High-definition video
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High-definition video is video of higher resolution and quality than standard-definition. While there is no standardized meaning for high-definition, generally any video image with more than 480 horizontal lines or 576 horizontal lines is considered high-definition. 480 scan lines is generally the even though the majority of systems greatly exceed that. Images of standard resolution captured at rates faster than normal, by a camera may be considered high-definition in some contexts. Some television series shot on video are made to look as if they have been shot on film. The first electronic scanning format,405 lines, was the first high definition television system, from 1939, Europe and the US tried 605 and 441 lines until, in 1941, the FCC mandated 525 for the US. In wartime France, René Barthélemy tested higher resolutions, up to 1,042, in late 1949, official French transmissions finally began with 819. In 1984, however, this standard was abandoned for 625-line color on the TF1 network, modern HD specifications date to the early 1980s, when Japanese engineers developed the HighVision 1, 125-line interlaced TV standard that ran at 60 frames per second. The Sony HDVS system was presented at a meeting of television engineers in Algiers, April 1981. HighVision video is still usable for HDTV video interchange, but there is almost no modern equipment available to perform this function, attempts at implementing HighVision as a 6 MHz broadcast channel were mostly unsuccessful. All attempts at using this format for terrestrial TV transmission were abandoned by the mid-1990s, Europe developed HD-MAC, a member of the MAC family of hybrid analogue/digital video standards, however, it never took off as a terrestrial video transmission format. HD-MAC was never designated for video interchange except by the European Broadcasting Union, in essence, the end of the 1980s was a death knell for most analog high definition technologies that had developed up to that time. In the end, however, the DVB standard of resolutions, the FCC officially adopted the ATSC transmission standard in 1996, with the first broadcasts on October 28,1998. In the early 2000s, it looked as if DVB would be the video standard far into the future, high definition video is defined threefold, by, The number of lines in the vertical display resolution. High-definition television resolution is 1,080 or 720 lines, in contrast, regular digital television is 480 lines or 576 lines. However, since HD is broadcast digitally, its introduction sometimes coincides with the introduction of DTV, additionally, current DVD quality is not high-definition, although the high-definition disc systems Blu-ray Disc and the HD DVD are. The scanning system, progressive scanning or interlaced scanning, progressive scanning redraws an image frame when refreshing each image, for example 720p/1080p. Interlaced scanning yields greater image resolution if subject is not moving, the number of frames or fields per second
34.
Global Positioning System
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The Global Positioning System is a space-based radionavigation system owned by the United States government and operated by the United States Air Force. The GPS system operates independently of any telephonic or internet reception, the GPS system provides critical positioning capabilities to military, civil, and commercial users around the world. The United States government created the system, maintains it, however, the US government can selectively deny access to the system, as happened to the Indian military in 1999 during the Kargil War. The U. S. Department of Defense developed the system and it became fully operational in 1995. Roger L. Easton of the Naval Research Laboratory, Ivan A, getting of The Aerospace Corporation, and Bradford Parkinson of the Applied Physics Laboratory are credited with inventing it. Announcements from Vice President Al Gore and the White House in 1998 initiated these changes, in 2000, the U. S. Congress authorized the modernization effort, GPS III. In addition to GPS, other systems are in use or under development, mainly because of a denial of access. The Russian Global Navigation Satellite System was developed contemporaneously with GPS, GLONASS can be added to GPS devices, making more satellites available and enabling positions to be fixed more quickly and accurately, to within two meters. There are also the European Union Galileo positioning system and Chinas BeiDou Navigation Satellite System, special and general relativity predict that the clocks on the GPS satellites would be seen by the Earths observers to run 38 microseconds faster per day than the clocks on the Earth. The GPS calculated positions would quickly drift into error, accumulating to 10 kilometers per day, the relativistic time effect of the GPS clocks running faster than the clocks on earth was corrected for in the design of GPS. The Soviet Union launched the first man-made satellite, Sputnik 1, two American physicists, William Guier and George Weiffenbach, at Johns Hopkinss Applied Physics Laboratory, decided to monitor Sputniks radio transmissions. Within hours they realized that, because of the Doppler effect, the Director of the APL gave them access to their UNIVAC to do the heavy calculations required. The next spring, Frank McClure, the deputy director of the APL, asked Guier and Weiffenbach to investigate the inverse problem — pinpointing the users location and this led them and APL to develop the TRANSIT system. In 1959, ARPA also played a role in TRANSIT, the first satellite navigation system, TRANSIT, used by the United States Navy, was first successfully tested in 1960. It used a constellation of five satellites and could provide a navigational fix approximately once per hour, in 1967, the U. S. Navy developed the Timation satellite, which proved the feasibility of placing accurate clocks in space, a technology required by GPS. In the 1970s, the ground-based OMEGA navigation system, based on comparison of signal transmission from pairs of stations. Limitations of these systems drove the need for a more universal navigation solution with greater accuracy, during the Cold War arms race, the nuclear threat to the existence of the United States was the one need that did justify this cost in the view of the United States Congress. This deterrent effect is why GPS was funded and it is also the reason for the ultra secrecy at that time
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