1.
Wolverhampton
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Wolverhampton is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands, England. At the 2011 census, it had a population of 249,470, the demonym for people from the city is Wulfrunian. Historically part of Staffordshire, the city is named after Wulfrun, prior to the Norman Conquest, the areas name appears only as variants of Heantune or Hamtun, the prefix Wulfrun or similar appearing in 1070 and thereafter. Alternatively, the city may have earned its name from Wulfereēantūn after the Mercian King. The variation Wolveren Hampton is seen in records, e. g. in 1381. The city grew initially as a market town specialising in the woollen trade, in the Industrial Revolution, it became a major centre for coal mining, steel production, lock making and the manufacture of cars and motorcycles. The economy of the city is based on engineering, including a large aerospace industry. A local tradition states that King Wulfhere of Mercia founded an abbey of St Mary at Wolverhampton in 659, the Mercians and West Saxons claimed a decisive victory and the field of Woden is recognised by numerous place names in Wednesfield. In 985, King Ethelred the Unready granted lands at a place referred to as Heantun to Lady Wulfrun by royal charter and this became the site for the current St. Peters Church. A statue of Lady Wulfrun, sculpted by Sir Charles Wheeler, Wolverhampton is recorded in the Domesday Book in 1086 as being in the Hundred of Seisdon and the county of Staffordshire. The lords of the manor are listed as the canons of St Mary, with the tenant-in-chief being Samson, Wolverhampton at this date is a large settlement of fifty households. In 1179, there is mention of a market held in the town and this charter for a weekly market held on a Wednesday was eventually granted on 4 February 1258 by Henry III. From the 16th century onwards, Wolverhampton became home to a number of industries including lock and key making and iron. Wolverhampton suffered two Great Fires, the first in April 1590, and the second in September 1696, both fires started in todays Salop Street. The first fire lasted for five days and left nearly 700 people homeless and this second fire led to the purchase of the first fire engine within the city in September 1703. There is also evidence that Wolverhampton may have been the location of the first working Newcomen Steam Engine in 1712. In Victorian times, Wolverhampton grew to be a town mainly due to the huge amount of industry that occurred as a result of the abundance of coal. The remains of this wealth can be seen in houses such as Wightwick Manor and The Mount
2.
Linux
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Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open-source software development and distribution. The defining component of Linux is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17,1991 by Linus Torvalds, the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to describe the operating system, which has led to some controversy. Linux was originally developed for computers based on the Intel x86 architecture. Because of the dominance of Android on smartphones, Linux has the largest installed base of all operating systems. Linux is also the operating system on servers and other big iron systems such as mainframe computers. It is used by around 2. 3% of desktop computers, the Chromebook, which runs on Chrome OS, dominates the US K–12 education market and represents nearly 20% of the sub-$300 notebook sales in the US. Linux also runs on embedded systems – devices whose operating system is built into the firmware and is highly tailored to the system. This includes TiVo and similar DVR devices, network routers, facility automation controls, televisions, many smartphones and tablet computers run Android and other Linux derivatives. The development of Linux is one of the most prominent examples of free, the underlying source code may be used, modified and distributed—commercially or non-commercially—by anyone under the terms of its respective licenses, such as the GNU General Public License. Typically, Linux is packaged in a known as a Linux distribution for both desktop and server use. Distributions intended to run on servers may omit all graphical environments from the standard install, because Linux is freely redistributable, anyone may create a distribution for any intended use. The Unix operating system was conceived and implemented in 1969 at AT&Ts Bell Laboratories in the United States by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas McIlroy, first released in 1971, Unix was written entirely in assembly language, as was common practice at the time. Later, in a key pioneering approach in 1973, it was rewritten in the C programming language by Dennis Ritchie, the availability of a high-level language implementation of Unix made its porting to different computer platforms easier. Due to an earlier antitrust case forbidding it from entering the computer business, as a result, Unix grew quickly and became widely adopted by academic institutions and businesses. In 1984, AT&T divested itself of Bell Labs, freed of the legal obligation requiring free licensing, the GNU Project, started in 1983 by Richard Stallman, has the goal of creating a complete Unix-compatible software system composed entirely of free software. Later, in 1985, Stallman started the Free Software Foundation, by the early 1990s, many of the programs required in an operating system were completed, although low-level elements such as device drivers, daemons, and the kernel were stalled and incomplete. Linus Torvalds has stated that if the GNU kernel had been available at the time, although not released until 1992 due to legal complications, development of 386BSD, from which NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD descended, predated that of Linux. Torvalds has also stated that if 386BSD had been available at the time, although the complete source code of MINIX was freely available, the licensing terms prevented it from being free software until the licensing changed in April 2000
3.
KDE
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KDE is an international free software community that develops Free and Libre software. Well-known products include the Plasma Desktop, KDE Frameworks and a range of applications designed to run on modern Unix-like. It further provides tools and documentation for developers that enables them to write software and this supporting role makes KDE a central development hub and home for many popular applications and projects like Calligra Suite, Krita or digiKam. The Plasma Desktop, being one of the most recognized projects of KDE, is the desktop environment on many Linux distributions, such as openSUSE, Mageia, Chakra, Kubuntu. It was also the default desktop environment on PC-BSD, but was replaced with Lumina. The work of the KDE community can be measured in the following figures, more than 1800 contributors participate in developing KDE software. About 20 new developers contribute their first code each month, KDE Software consists of over 6 million lines of code. KDE Software is translated in over 108 languages, KDE Software is available on more than 114 official FTP mirrors in over 34 countries. A read-only mirror of all repositories can be found on Github, K Desktop Environment was founded in 1996 by Matthias Ettrich, who was then a student at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. At the time, he was troubled by certain aspects of the Unix desktop, among his concerns was that none of the applications looked, felt, or worked alike. He proposed the creation of not merely a set of applications but a desktop environment in which users could expect things to look, feel, and work consistently. He also wanted to make this easy to use, one of his complaints about desktop applications of the time was that it is too complicated for end user. His initial Usenet post spurred a lot of interest, and the KDE project was born, the name KDE was intended as a wordplay on the existing Common Desktop Environment, available for Unix systems. CDE is an X11-based user environment jointly developed by HP, IBM and it was supposed to be an intuitively easy-to-use desktop computer environment. The K was originally suggested to stand for Kool, but it was decided that the K should stand for nothing in particular. Therefore, the KDE initialism expanded to K Desktop Environment before it was dropped altogether in favor of KDE = Community due to the rebranding effort. The rebranding focused on de-emphasizing the desktop environment as just another product, what would have been previously known as KDE4 was split into three products, Plasma Workspaces, KDE Applications, and KDE Platform – bundled as KDE Software Compilation 4. As of today the name KDE no longer stands for K Desktop Environment, the financial and legal matters of KDE are handled by KDE e. V
4.
Ubuntu (operating system)
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Ubuntu is published by Canonical Ltd, who offer commercial support. It uses Unity as its user interface for the desktop. Ubuntu is the most popular operating system running in hosted environments, so–called clouds, development of Ubuntu is led by UK-based Canonical Ltd. a company of South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth. Canonical generates revenue through the sale of technical support and other related to Ubuntu. The Ubuntu project is committed to the principles of open-source software development, people are encouraged to use free software, study how it works, improve upon it. Ubuntu is built on Debians architecture and infrastructure, to provide Linux server, desktop, phone, tablet, the first release was in October 2004. Starting with Ubuntu 6.06, every release, one release every two years, receives long-term support. Long-term support includes updates for new hardware, security patches and updates to the Ubuntu stack. The first LTS releases were supported for three years on the desktop and five years on the server, since Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, LTS releases get regular point releases with support for new hardware and integration of all the updates published in that series to date. Ubuntu packages are based on packages from Debians unstable branch, both distributions use Debians deb package format and package management tools. Debian and Ubuntu packages are not necessarily compatible with each other, however. Many Ubuntu developers are also maintainers of key packages within Debian, Ubuntu cooperates with Debian by pushing changes back to Debian, although there has been criticism that this does not happen often enough. Ian Murdock, the founder of Debian, had expressed concern about Ubuntu packages potentially diverging too far from Debian to remain compatible, before release, packages are imported from Debian unstable continuously and merged with Ubuntu-specific modifications. One month before release, imports are frozen, and packagers then work to ensure that the frozen features interoperate well together, Ubuntu is currently funded by Canonical Ltd. On 8 July 2005, Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical announced the creation of the Ubuntu Foundation, the purpose of the foundation is to ensure the support and development for all future versions of Ubuntu. Mark Shuttleworth describes the goal as to ensure the continuity of the Ubuntu project. On 12 March 2009, Ubuntu announced developer support for 3rd-party cloud management platforms, Unity has become the default GUI for Ubuntu Desktop, although following the release of Ubuntu 17.10 it will move to the GNOME3 desktop instead as work on Unity ends. A default installation of Ubuntu contains a range of software that includes LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Transmission
5.
X Prize Foundation
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XPRIZE is a non-profit organization that designs and manages public competitions intended to encourage technological development that could benefit mankind. Their Board of Trustees include James Cameron, Larry Page, Arianna Huffington, the XPRIZE mission is to bring about “radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity” through incentivized competition. The most high-profile XPRIZE to date was the Ansari X Prize relating to spacecraft development awarded in 2004 and this prize was intended to inspire research and development into technology for space exploration. In 1927, underdog Charles Lindbergh won the prize in a modified single-engine Ryan aircraft called the Spirit of St. Louis, in total, nine teams spent $400,000 in pursuit of the Orteig Prize. The contest, later titled the Ansari XPRIZE for Suborbital Spaceflight, on October 4,2004, the Ansari XPRIZE was won by Mojave Aerospace Ventures, who successfully completed the contest in their spacecraft SpaceShipOne. The prize was awarded in a ceremony at the Saint Louis Science Center in St. Louis, as of 2011, the Science Center maintains numerous exhibits about the XPRIZE. The foundation has created the XPRIZE Cup rocket challenge competition. XPRIZES are monetary rewards to incentivize three primary goals, Attract investment from outside the sector that takes new approaches to difficult problems, create significant results that are real and meaningful. Competitions have measurable goals, and are created to promote adoption of the innovation, cross national and disciplinary boundaries to encourage teams around the world to invest the intellectual and financial capital required to solve difficult challenges. Other organizations such as the Nobel Prize committee award prizes and financial rewards to individuals or organizations that produce novel advances in science, medicine, the prize can increase attention to endeavors that otherwise might not receive much publicity. For example, attempts in the recent Lunar Lander competition have been publicized in the media. With the Ansari XPRIZE, XPRIZE established a model in which offering a prize for achieving a goal can stimulate entrepreneurial investment. Since then, new challenges have expanded into a range of other fields, XPRIZE is developing new prizes in Exploration, Life Sciences, Energy & Environment, Education and Global Development. Some hope the prizes will help improve lives, create equity of opportunity and stimulate new, as of June 2016, there are six completed contests, seven active contests and one contest that has been canceled. The Ansari XPRIZE for Suborbital Spaceflight was the first prize from the foundation and it successfully challenged teams to build private spaceships capable of carrying three people and fly two times within two weeks to open the space frontier. On that ship, Melvill broke the 100-kilometer mark, the recognized as the boundary of outer space. Brian Binnie completed the part of the requirements on October 4,2004. As a result, US$10 million was awarded to the winner, today, Sir Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and others are creating a personal spaceflight industry
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