1.
Geographic coordinate system
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A geographic coordinate system is a coordinate system used in geography that enables every location on Earth to be specified by a set of numbers, letters or symbols. The coordinates are chosen such that one of the numbers represents a vertical position. A common choice of coordinates is latitude, longitude and elevation, to specify a location on a two-dimensional map requires a map projection. The invention of a coordinate system is generally credited to Eratosthenes of Cyrene. Ptolemy credited him with the adoption of longitude and latitude. Ptolemys 2nd-century Geography used the prime meridian but measured latitude from the equator instead. Mathematical cartography resumed in Europe following Maximus Planudes recovery of Ptolemys text a little before 1300, in 1884, the United States hosted the International Meridian Conference, attended by representatives from twenty-five nations. Twenty-two of them agreed to adopt the longitude of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, the Dominican Republic voted against the motion, while France and Brazil abstained. France adopted Greenwich Mean Time in place of local determinations by the Paris Observatory in 1911, the latitude of a point on Earths surface is the angle between the equatorial plane and the straight line that passes through that point and through the center of the Earth. Lines joining points of the same latitude trace circles on the surface of Earth called parallels, as they are parallel to the equator, the north pole is 90° N, the south pole is 90° S. The 0° parallel of latitude is designated the equator, the plane of all geographic coordinate systems. The equator divides the globe into Northern and Southern Hemispheres, the longitude of a point on Earths surface is the angle east or west of a reference meridian to another meridian that passes through that point. All meridians are halves of great ellipses, which converge at the north and south poles, the prime meridian determines the proper Eastern and Western Hemispheres, although maps often divide these hemispheres further west in order to keep the Old World on a single side. The antipodal meridian of Greenwich is both 180°W and 180°E, the combination of these two components specifies the position of any location on the surface of Earth, without consideration of altitude or depth. The grid formed by lines of latitude and longitude is known as a graticule, the origin/zero point of this system is located in the Gulf of Guinea about 625 km south of Tema, Ghana. To completely specify a location of a feature on, in, or above Earth. Earth is not a sphere, but a shape approximating a biaxial ellipsoid. It is nearly spherical, but has an equatorial bulge making the radius at the equator about 0. 3% larger than the radius measured through the poles, the shorter axis approximately coincides with the axis of rotation
2.
Lausanne Metro
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Around a quarter of the system has been used for urban rail transport since 1877, when the route between the city centre and Ouchy opened as Switzerlands first public funicular railway. The network is owned by two companies and operated by a third. Of the two operating lines, the first is a limited-capacity light rail route, while the second is an automated metro which opened on 27 October 2008. When this opened, Lausanne replaced Rennes as the smallest city in the world to have a metro system. A third line is now planned, based on the same rubber-tyred metro technology, the Lausanne-Ouchy railway, the precursor to the M2 line of the Lausanne Metro, was inaugurated in 1877 as a funicular. In 1959 the first overhaul took place by transforming the funicular into a railway under the name métro. At that time, Flon and Gare CFF stations were demolished and replaced by concrete underground equivalents, the line was however always nicknamed La Ficelle by its users due to its funicular past and circulation above ground in the greenery for more than half of its run. The line was closed to all traffic on 21 January 2006. A bus service was put into operation to replace the then-closed La Ficelle until the opening of the new metro M2 line and this service was called Métrobus, the south loop linked Ouchy to the CFF station and the north loop linked the station to Montbenon. Lausanne originally had a system that opened in 1896. But the original Lausanne tram network closed entirely in 1964, a modern tramline, which ultimately became Lausanne Métro Line M1, opened on 24 May 1991, and began revenue service on 2 June 1991. In 2001, for marketing and public communication reasons, this line was renamed the M1 line by its operator TSOL, the M1 is a light rail line with a total of 15 stations, a dozen of which are at-grade and three of which are underground. The line is owned by a company named TSOL and this acronym is used by the commuters who use the line. Trains on the line are operated by the Transports publics de la région lausannoise, the M1 is a light rail line with a dozen surface stations and three underground. The line, which is 7. 8-kilometre long, links the centre of Lausanne, the line is generally single track. At most stations a passing loop is provided to allow trains to pass, exceptions to this are Bassenges, UNIL-Sorge and Provence stations, where the line is still single track serving one bidirectional platform. Unlike the later line 2, an automated or remotely controlled train was not planned when the line opened in 1991. There are a total of 18 of these original LRVs on the line, but after 20 years in service they were showing their age, and 2 were regularly out of use
3.
Lausanne
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Lausanne is a city in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and the capital and biggest city of the canton of Vaud. The city is situated on the shores of Lake Geneva and it faces the French town of Évian-les-Bains, with the Jura Mountains to its north-west. Lausanne is located 62 kilometres northeast of Geneva, Lausanne has a population of 146,372, making it the fourth largest city in Switzerland, with the entire agglomeration area having 420,000 inhabitants. The metropolitan area of Lausanne-Geneva was over 1.2 million inhabitants in 2000, Lausanne is a focus of international sport, hosting the International Olympic Committee, the Court of Arbitration for Sport and some 55 international sport associations. It lies in a noted wine-growing region, the city has a 28-station metro system, making it the smallest city in the world to have a rapid transit system. Lausanne will host the 2020 Winter Youth Olympics, by the 2nd century AD it was known as vikanor Lousonnensium and in 280 as lacu Lausonio. By 400 it was civitas Lausanna and in 990 it was mentioned as Losanna, after the fall of the Roman Empire, insecurity forced the transfer of Lausanne to its current centre, a hilly site that is easier to defend. The city which emerged from the camp was ruled by the Dukes of Savoy, then it came under Bern from 1536 to 1798 and a number of its cultural treasures, including the hanging tapestries in the Cathedral, were permanently removed. Lausanne has made a number of requests to recover them, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, Lausanne became a place of refuge for French Huguenots. In 1729 a seminary was opened by Antoine Court and Benjamin Duplan, by 1750 ninety pastors had been sent back to France to work clandestinely, this number would rise to four hundred. Official persecution ended in 1787, a faculty of Protestant theology was established at Montauban in 1808, during the Napoleonic Wars, the citys status changed. In 1803, it became the capital of a newly formed Swiss canton, in 1964 the city hosted the Swiss National Exhibition, displaying its newly found confidence to host major international events. From the 1950s to 1970s a large number of Italians, Spaniards and Portuguese immigrated, settling mostly in the district of Renens. The city has served as a refuge for European artists, while under the care of a psychiatrist at Lausanne, T. S. Eliot composed most of his 1922 poem The Wasteland. Hemingway also visited from Paris with his wife during the 1920s, in fact, many creative people - such as Edward Gibbon, an historian, and Romantic era poets Shelley and Byron - have sojourned, lived, and worked in Lausanne or nearby. The city has been quiet, but in the late 1960s. Later demonstrations took place to protest against the high cinema prices, the most important geographical feature of the area surrounding Lausanne is Lake Geneva. Lausanne boasts a dramatic panorama over the lake and the Alps, in addition to its generally southward-sloping layout, the centre of the city is the site of an ancient river, the Flon, which has been covered since the 19th century
4.
Romandy
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Romandy is the French-speaking part of western Switzerland. In 2010 about 1.9 million people, or 24. 4% of the Swiss population, the bulk of romand population lives in the Arc Lémanique region along Lake Geneva, connecting Geneva, Vaud and the Lower Valais. The adjective romand is a dialectal variant of roman, in Old French used as a term for the Gallo-Romance vernaculars. Suisse romande is used in contrast to Suisse alémanique, Alemannic Switzerland, formed by analogy is Suisse italienne, which is composed of Ticino and of a part of Graubünden. Simple Westschweiz western Switzerland may also be used as a loose synonym, in four Swiss cantons, French is the sole official language, Geneva, Vaud, Neuchâtel, and Jura. There are three cantons where French and German have co-official status, Bern, Fribourg and Valais, the linguistic boundary between French and German is known as Röstigraben. The term is humorous in origin and refers both to the division and to perceived cultural differences between the Romandy and the German-speaking Swiss majority. The term can be traced to the WWI period, but it entered mainstream usage in the 1970s in the context of the Jurassic separatism virulent at the time. It then follows the border between Neuchâtel and Bern and turns south towards Morat, again traversing an areal of traditional bilinguism including the communities of Morat and Fribourg. Cutting across the High Alps at Les Diablerets, the boundary separates the French-speaking Lower Valais from the Alemannic-speaking Upper Valais. It then cuts southwards into the High Alps again, separating the Val dAnniviers from the Mattertal, traditionally speaking the Franco-Provençal or Patois dialects of Upper Burgundy, the romand population now speak a variety of Standard French. Today, the differences between Swiss French and Parisian French are minor and mostly lexical, although in rural speakers, in particular, some parts of the Swiss Jura participate in the Frainc-Comtou dialect spoken in the Franche-Comté region of France. Since the 1970s, there has been an amount of linguistic revivalism. In this context, the Franco-Provençal dialects are called Arpitan and their historical area Arpitania, the cultural identity of Romandy is supported by Télévision Suisse Romande, Radio Suisse Romande and the universities of Geneva, Fribourg, Lausanne and Neuchâtel. Historically, most of Romandy has been strongly Protestant, especially Calvinist, however, Roman Catholicism continued to predominate in Jura, Valais, and Fribourg. In recent decades, due to significant immigration from France and Southern European countries, languages of Switzerland Swiss French Röstigraben Jurassic separatism Bernese Jura Lake Geneva region Rhodanic Republic Arpitania Organisation internationale de la Francophonie
5.
Switzerland
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Switzerland, officially the Swiss Confederation, is a federal republic in Europe. It consists of 26 cantons, and the city of Bern is the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in western-Central Europe, and is bordered by Italy to the south, France to the west, Germany to the north, and Austria and Liechtenstein to the east. Switzerland is a country geographically divided between the Alps, the Swiss Plateau and the Jura, spanning an area of 41,285 km2. The establishment of the Old Swiss Confederacy dates to the medieval period, resulting from a series of military successes against Austria. Swiss independence from the Holy Roman Empire was formally recognized in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The country has a history of armed neutrality going back to the Reformation, it has not been in a state of war internationally since 1815, nevertheless, it pursues an active foreign policy and is frequently involved in peace-building processes around the world. In addition to being the birthplace of the Red Cross, Switzerland is home to international organisations. On the European level, it is a member of the European Free Trade Association. However, it participates in the Schengen Area and the European Single Market through bilateral treaties, spanning the intersection of Germanic and Romance Europe, Switzerland comprises four main linguistic and cultural regions, German, French, Italian and Romansh. Due to its diversity, Switzerland is known by a variety of native names, Schweiz, Suisse, Svizzera. On coins and stamps, Latin is used instead of the four living languages, Switzerland is one of the most developed countries in the world, with the highest nominal wealth per adult and the eighth-highest per capita gross domestic product according to the IMF. Zürich and Geneva have each been ranked among the top cities in the world in terms of quality of life, with the former ranked second globally, according to Mercer. The English name Switzerland is a compound containing Switzer, a term for the Swiss. The English adjective Swiss is a loan from French Suisse, also in use since the 16th century. The name Switzer is from the Alemannic Schwiizer, in origin an inhabitant of Schwyz and its associated territory, the Swiss began to adopt the name for themselves after the Swabian War of 1499, used alongside the term for Confederates, Eidgenossen, used since the 14th century. The data code for Switzerland, CH, is derived from Latin Confoederatio Helvetica. The toponym Schwyz itself was first attested in 972, as Old High German Suittes, ultimately related to swedan ‘to burn’
6.
Microcomputer
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A microcomputer is a small, relatively inexpensive computer with a microprocessor as its central processing unit. It includes a microprocessor, memory, and minimal input/output circuitry mounted on a printed circuit board. Microcomputers became popular in the 1970s and 1980s with the advent of increasingly powerful microprocessors, the predecessors to these computers, mainframes and minicomputers, were comparatively much larger and more expensive. Many microcomputers are also personal computers, the abbreviation micro was common during the 1970s and 1980s, but has now fallen out of common usage. The term microcomputer came into use after the introduction of the minicomputer. Most notably, the replaced the many separate components that made up the minicomputers CPU with one integrated microprocessor chip. The first microcomputer was the Japanese Sord Computer Corporations SMP80/08, which was followed by the SMP80/x, the French developers of the Micral N filed their patents with the term Micro-ordinateur, a literal equivalent of Microcomputer, to designate a solid state machine designed with a microprocessor. Use of audio cassettes for data storage replaced manual re-entry of a program every time the device was powered on. Large cheap arrays of silicon logic gates in the form of memory and EPROMs allowed utility programs. This replaced the slow, complex, and expensive teletypewriter that was common as an interface to minicomputers. All these improvements in cost and usability resulted in an explosion in their popularity during the late 1970s, a large number of computer makers packaged microcomputers for use in small business applications. This allowed businesses unable to afford leasing of a minicomputer or time-sharing service the opportunity to automate business functions, without hiring a full-time staff to operate the computers. A representative system of this era would have used an S100 bus, an 8-bit processor such as an Intel 8080 or Zilog Z80, the increasing availability and power of desktop computers for personal use attracted the attention of more software developers. In time, and as the industry matured, the market for personal computers standardized around IBM PC compatibles running DOS, everyday use of the expression microcomputer has declined significantly from the mid-1980s and has declined in commonplace usage since 2000. The term is most commonly associated with the first wave of all-in-one 8-bit home computers, although, or perhaps because, an increasingly diverse range of modern microprocessor-based devices fit the definition of microcomputer, they are no longer referred to as such in everyday speech. IBM first promoted the personal computer to differentiate themselves from other microcomputers, often called home computers. However, following its release, the IBM PC itself was widely imitated, the component parts were commonly available to producers and the BIOS was reverse engineered through cleanroom design techniques. IBM PC compatible clones became commonplace, and the personal computer
7.
Video game console
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A video game console is an electronic, digital or computer device that outputs a video signal or visual image to display a video game that one or more people can play. The term video game console is used to distinguish a console machine primarily designed for consumers to use for playing video games. An arcade machine consists of a video game computer, display, game controller, a home computer is a personal computer designed for home use for a variety of purposes, such as bookkeeping, accessing the Internet and playing video games. There are various types of game consoles, including home video game consoles, handheld game consoles, microconsoles. Although Ralph Baer had built working game consoles by 1966, it was nearly a decade before the Pong game made them commonplace in regular peoples living rooms. Through evolution over the 1990s and 2000s, game consoles have expanded to additional functions such as CD players, DVD players, Blu-ray disc players, web browsers, set-top boxes. The first video appeared in the 1960s. They were played on massive computers connected to vector displays, not analog televisions, Ralph H. Baer conceived the idea of a home video game in 1951. In the late 1960s, while working for Sanders Associates, Baer created a series of game console designs. In 1972, Magnavox released the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home game console which could be connected to a TV set. Magnavox replaced the switch design with separate cartridges for each game, by autumn 1975, Magnavox, bowing to the popularity of Pong, cancelled the Odyssey and released a scaled-down version that played only Pong and hockey, the Odyssey 100. A second, higher end console, the Odyssey 200, was released with the 100 and added on-screen scoring, up to four players, almost simultaneously released with Ataris own home Pong console through Sears, these consoles jump-started the consumer market. All three of the new consoles used simpler designs than the original Odyssey did with no board game pieces or extra cartridges, in the years that followed, the market saw many companies rushing similar consoles to market. Most of the consoles from this era were dedicated consoles playing only the games came with the console. These video game consoles were often just called video games, because there was reason to distinguish the two yet. While a few companies like Atari, Magnavox, and newcomer Coleco pushed the envelope, Fairchild released the Fairchild Video Entertainment System in 1976. The VES, however, contained a programmable microprocessor so its cartridges only needed a single ROM chip to store microprocessor instructions, RCA and Atari soon released their own cartridge-based consoles, the RCA Studio II and the Atari 2600, respectively. The first handheld console with interchangeable cartridges was the Microvision designed by Smith Engineering
8.
Cloud computing
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Cloud computing is a type of Internet-based computing that provides shared computer processing resources and data to computers and other devices on demand. It is a model for enabling ubiquitous, on-demand access to a pool of configurable computing resources. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and economy of scale, advocates claim that cloud computing allows companies to avoid up-front infrastructure costs. As well, it enables organizations to focus on their core businesses instead of spending time, Cloud providers typically use a pay as you go model. This will lead to unexpectedly high charges if administrators do not adapt to the pricing model. Companies can scale up as computing needs increase and then scale down again as demands decrease, the origin of the term cloud computing is unclear. In analogy to the usage, the word cloud was used as a metaphor for the Internet. Later it was used to depict the Internet in computer network diagrams, with this simplification, the implication is that the specifics of how the end points of a network are connected are not relevant for the purposes of understanding the diagram. The cloud symbol was used to represent networks of computing equipment in the original ARPANET by as early as 1977, the term cloud has been used to refer to platforms for distributed computing. No one had conceived that before, references to cloud computing in its modern sense appeared as early as 1996, with the earliest known mention in a Compaq internal document. The popularization of the term can be traced to 2006 when Amazon. com introduced its Elastic Compute Cloud, during the 1960s, the initial concepts of time-sharing became popularized via RJE, this terminology was mostly associated with large vendors such as IBM and DEC. Full time-sharing solutions were available by the early 1970s on such platforms as Multics, Cambridge CTSS, yet, the data center model where users submitted jobs to operators to run on IBM mainframes was overwhelmingly predominant. By switching traffic as they saw fit to balance server use and they began to use the cloud symbol to denote the demarcation point between what the provider was responsible for and what users were responsible for. Cloud computing extended this boundary to all servers as well as the network infrastructure. As computers became more diffused, scientists and technologists explored ways to make large-scale computing power available to users through time-sharing. They experimented with algorithms to optimize the infrastructure, platform, and applications to prioritize CPUs, since 2000, cloud computing has come into existence. Will result in growth in IT products in some areas. In August 2006 Amazon introduced its Elastic Compute Cloud, Microsoft Azure was announced as Azure in October 2008 and was released on 1 February 2010 as Windows Azure, before being renamed to Microsoft Azure on 25 March 2014
