1.
Software developer
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A software developer is a person concerned with facets of the software development process, including the research, design, programming, and testing of computer software. Other job titles which are used with similar meanings are programmer, software analyst. According to developer Eric Sink, the differences between system design, software development, and programming are more apparent, even more so that developers become systems architects, those who design the multi-leveled architecture or component interactions of a large software system. In a large company, there may be employees whose sole responsibility consists of one of the phases above. In smaller development environments, a few people or even an individual might handle the complete process. The word software was coined as a prank as early as 1953, before this time, computers were programmed either by customers, or the few commercial computer vendors of the time, such as UNIVAC and IBM. The first company founded to provide products and services was Computer Usage Company in 1955. The software industry expanded in the early 1960s, almost immediately after computers were first sold in mass-produced quantities, universities, government, and business customers created a demand for software. Many of these programs were written in-house by full-time staff programmers, some were distributed freely between users of a particular machine for no charge. Others were done on a basis, and other firms such as Computer Sciences Corporation started to grow. The computer/hardware makers started bundling operating systems, systems software and programming environments with their machines, new software was built for microcomputers, so other manufacturers including IBM, followed DECs example quickly, resulting in the IBM AS/400 amongst others. The industry expanded greatly with the rise of the computer in the mid-1970s. In the following years, it created a growing market for games, applications. DOS, Microsofts first operating system product, was the dominant operating system at the time, by 2014 the role of cloud developer had been defined, in this context, one definition of a developer in general was published, Developers make software for the world to use. The job of a developer is to crank out code -- fresh code for new products, code fixes for maintenance, code for business logic, bus factor Software Developer description from the US Department of Labor
2.
BlackBerry Limited
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QNX, a subsidiary of BlackBerry, produces automotive software. BlackBerrys software and hardware products are used worldwide by various agencies and by car makers. The company is headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada and it was founded by Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin in 1984. Fregin left the company in 2007, in 1992 Lazaridis hired Jim Balsillie, and Lazaridis and Balsillie served as co-CEOs until January 22,2012. In November 2013, John S. Chen took over as CEO and his strategy is to subcontract manufacturing to Foxconn, and to focus on software technology. Research In Motion Limited was founded in March 1984 by Mike Lazaridis, at the time, Lazaridis was an engineering student at the University of Waterloo while Fregin was an engineering student at the University of Windsor. In 1990, RIM introduced the DigiSync Film KeyKode Reader, in 1991, RIM introduced the first Mobitex protocol converter. In 1992, RIM introduced the first Mobitex point-of-sale solution, a converter box that interfaced with existing point-of-sale terminal equipment to enable wireless communication. In 1993, RIM introduced the RIMGate, the first general purpose Mobitex X.25 gateway, in the same year, RIM launched Ericsson Mobidem AT and Intel wireless modem containing RIM modem firmware. In 1994, RIM introduced the first Mobitex mobile point-of-sale terminal, in the same year, RIM received the Emmy Award for Technical Innovation and the KPMG High Technology Award. In 1995, RIM introduced Freedom, the first Type II PCMCIA radio modem for Mobitex, in 1995, RIM was financed by Canadian institutional and venture capital investors through a private placement in the privately held company. A total of C$30,000,000 in pre-IPO financing was raised by the prior to its initial public offering on the Toronto Stock Exchange in January 1998 under the symbol RIM. In 1996, RIM introduced the Inter@ctive Pager, the first two-way messaging pager, the company worked with RAM Mobile Data and Ericsson to turn the Ericsson-developed Mobitex wireless data network into a two-way paging and wireless e-mail network. Pivotal in this development was the release of the Inter@ctive Pager 950, about the size of a bar of soap, this device competed against the Skytel two-way paging network developed by Motorola. In 1999, RIM introduced the BlackBerry 850 pager, the introduction of the BlackBerry set the stage for future enterprise-oriented products from the company, such as the BlackBerry 957 in April 2000, the first BlackBerry smartphone. During fiscal 1999-2001, total assets declared in the RIMs balance sheet grew eight-fold due to massive capacity expansion, the introduction of the Pearl series was highly successful, as was the subsequent Curve 8300 series and Bold 9000. Extensive carrier partnerships fuelled the expansion of BlackBerry users globally in both enterprise and consumer markets. Despite the arrival of the first Apple iPhone in 2007, BlackBerry sustained unprecedented market share growth well into 2011, the Storm sold well but suffered from mixed to poor reviews and poor customer satisfaction
3.
Unix-like
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A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-like application is one that behaves like the corresponding Unix command or shell, there is no standard for defining the term, and some difference of opinion is possible as to the degree to which a given operating system or application is Unix-like. The Open Group owns the UNIX trademark and administers the Single UNIX Specification and they do not approve of the construction Unix-like, and consider it a misuse of their trademark. Other parties frequently treat Unix as a genericized trademark, in 2007, Wayne R. Gray sued to dispute the status of UNIX as a trademark, but lost his case, and lost again on appeal, with the court upholding the trademark and its ownership. Unix-like systems started to appear in the late 1970s and early 1980s, many proprietary versions, such as Idris, UNOS, Coherent, and UniFlex, aimed to provide businesses with the functionality available to academic users of UNIX. These largely displaced the proprietary clones, growing incompatibility among these systems led to the creation of interoperability standards, including POSIX and the Single UNIX Specification. Various free, low-cost, and unrestricted substitutes for UNIX emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, including 4. 4BSD, Linux, some of these have in turn been the basis for commercial Unix-like systems, such as BSD/OS and OS X. The various BSD variants are notable in that they are in fact descendants of UNIX, however, the BSD code base has evolved since then, replacing all of the AT&T code. Since the BSD variants are not certified as compliant with the Single UNIX Specification, dennis Ritchie, one of the original creators of Unix, expressed his opinion that Unix-like systems such as Linux are de facto Unix systems. Eric S. Raymond and Rob Landley have suggested there are three kinds of Unix-like systems, Genetic UNIX Those systems with a historical connection to the AT&T codebase. Most commercial UNIX systems fall into this category, so do the BSD systems, which are descendants of work done at the University of California, Berkeley in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Some of these systems have no original AT&T code but can trace their ancestry to AT&T designs. Trademark or branded UNIX These systems—largely commercial in nature—have been determined by the Open Group to meet the Single UNIX Specification and are allowed to carry the UNIX name, many ancient UNIX systems no longer meet this definition. Around 2001, Linux was given the opportunity to get a certification including free help from the POSIX chair Andrew Josey for the price of one dollar. Some non-Unix-like operating systems provide a Unix-like compatibility layer, with degrees of Unix-like functionality. IBM z/OSs UNIX System Services is sufficiently complete to be certified as trademark UNIX, cygwin and MSYS both provide a GNU environment on top of the Microsoft Windows user API, sufficient for most common open source software to be compiled and run. Subsystem for Unix-based Applications provides Unix-like functionality as a Windows NT subsystem, Windows Subsystem for Linux provides a Linux-compatible kernel interface developed by Microsoft and containing no Linux code, with Ubuntu user-mode binaries running on top of it
4.
Software release life cycle
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Usage of the alpha/beta test terminology originated at IBM. As long ago as the 1950s, IBM used similar terminology for their hardware development, a test was the verification of a new product before public announcement. B test was the verification before releasing the product to be manufactured, C test was the final test before general availability of the product. Martin Belsky, a manager on some of IBMs earlier software projects claimed to have invented the terminology, IBM dropped the alpha/beta terminology during the 1960s, but by then it had received fairly wide notice. The usage of beta test to refer to testing done by customers was not done in IBM, rather, IBM used the term field test. Pre-alpha refers to all activities performed during the project before formal testing. These activities can include requirements analysis, software design, software development, in typical open source development, there are several types of pre-alpha versions. Milestone versions include specific sets of functions and are released as soon as the functionality is complete, the alpha phase of the release life cycle is the first phase to begin software testing. In this phase, developers generally test the software using white-box techniques, additional validation is then performed using black-box or gray-box techniques, by another testing team. Moving to black-box testing inside the organization is known as alpha release, alpha software can be unstable and could cause crashes or data loss. Alpha software may not contain all of the features that are planned for the final version, in general, external availability of alpha software is uncommon in proprietary software, while open source software often has publicly available alpha versions. The alpha phase usually ends with a freeze, indicating that no more features will be added to the software. At this time, the software is said to be feature complete, Beta, named after the second letter of the Greek alphabet, is the software development phase following alpha. Software in the stage is also known as betaware. Beta phase generally begins when the software is complete but likely to contain a number of known or unknown bugs. Software in the phase will generally have many more bugs in it than completed software, as well as speed/performance issues. The focus of beta testing is reducing impacts to users, often incorporating usability testing, the process of delivering a beta version to the users is called beta release and this is typically the first time that the software is available outside of the organization that developed it. Beta version software is useful for demonstrations and previews within an organization
5.
Embedded system
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An embedded system is a computer system with a dedicated function within a larger mechanical or electrical system, often with real-time computing constraints. It is embedded as part of a device often including hardware. Embedded systems control many devices in use today. Ninety-eight percent of all microprocessors are manufactured as components of embedded systems, examples of properties of typically embedded computers when compared with general-purpose counterparts are low power consumption, small size, rugged operating ranges, and low per-unit cost. This comes at the price of limited processing resources, which make them more difficult to program. For example, intelligent techniques can be designed to power consumption of embedded systems. Modern embedded systems are based on microcontrollers, but ordinary microprocessors are also common. In either case, the processor used may be ranging from general purpose to those specialised in certain class of computations. A common standard class of dedicated processors is the signal processor. Since the embedded system is dedicated to tasks, design engineers can optimize it to reduce the size and cost of the product and increase the reliability. Some embedded systems are mass-produced, benefiting from economies of scale, complexity varies from low, with a single microcontroller chip, to very high with multiple units, peripherals and networks mounted inside a large chassis or enclosure. One of the very first recognizably modern embedded systems was the Apollo Guidance Computer, an early mass-produced embedded system was the Autonetics D-17 guidance computer for the Minuteman missile, released in 1961. When the Minuteman II went into production in 1966, the D-17 was replaced with a new computer that was the first high-volume use of integrated circuits. Since these early applications in the 1960s, embedded systems have come down in price and there has been a rise in processing power. An early microprocessor for example, the Intel 4004, was designed for calculators and other systems but still required external memory. By the early 1980s, memory, input and output system components had been integrated into the chip as the processor forming a microcontroller. Microcontrollers find applications where a computer would be too costly. A comparatively low-cost microcontroller may be programmed to fulfill the role as a large number of separate components
6.
Package manager
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A package manager deals with packages, distributions of software and data in archive files. Packages contain metadata, such as the name, description of its purpose, version number, vendor, checksum. Upon installation, metadata is stored in a package database. Package managers typically maintain a database of software dependencies and version information to prevent software mismatches and they work closely with software repositories, binary repository managers, and app stores. Package managers are designed to eliminate the need for manual installs, a software package is an archive file containing a computer program as well as necessary metadata for its deployment. The computer program can be in source code that has to be compiled, Package metadata include package description, package version, and dependencies. Package managers are charged with the task of finding, installing, maintaining or uninstalling software packages upon the users command, in these systems, complex relationships between different packages requiring different versions of libraries results in a challenge colloquially known as dependency hell. On Microsoft Windows systems, this is also called DLL hell when working with dynamically linked libraries, good package management is vital on these systems. System administrators may install and maintain software using other than package management software. For example, an administrator may download unpackaged source code, compile it. This may cause the state of the system to fall out of synchronization with the state of the package managers database. The local administrator will be required to take measures, such as manually managing some dependencies or integrating the changes into the package manager. There are tools available to ensure that locally compiled packages are integrated with the package management, particularly troublesome with software upgrades are upgrades of configuration files. There are exceptions to this that usually apply to kernel configuration, problems can be caused if the format of configuration files changes. For instance, if the old configuration file does not explicitly disable new options that should be disabled, some package managers, such as Debians dpkg, allow configuration during installation. In other situations, it is desirable to install packages with the configuration and then overwrite this configuration, for instance. This kind of pre-configured installation is also supported by dpkg, to give users more control over the kinds of software that they are allowing to be installed on their system, software is often downloaded from a number of software repositories. This process is called version pinning
7.
Intel 8088
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The Intel 8088 microprocessor is a variant of the Intel 8086. Introduced on July 1,1979, the 8088 had an 8-bit external data bus instead of the 16-bit bus of the 8086, the 16-bit registers and the one megabyte address range were unchanged, however. In fact, according to the Intel documentation, the 8086 and 8088 have the execution unit —only the bus interface unit is different. The original IBM PC was based on the 8088, the 8088 was designed in Israel, at Intels Haifa laboratory, as were a large number of Intels processors. The prefetch queue of the 8088 was shortened to four bytes, from the 8086s six bytes, and these modifications of the basic 8086 design were one of the first jobs assigned to Intels then new design office and laboratory in Haifa, Israel. Later followed the 80C88, a fully static CHMOS design, which could operate with clock speeds from 0 to 8 MHz, there were also several other, more or less similar, variants from other manufacturers. For instance, the NEC V20 was a pin compatible and slightly faster variant of the 8088, successive NEC8088 compatible processors would run at up to 16 MHz. In 1984, Commodore International signed a deal to manufacture the 8088 for use in a licensed Dynalogic Hyperion clone, when announced, the list price of the 8088 was US $124.80. The 8088 is architecturally similar to the 8086. The main difference is there are only 8 data lines instead of the 8086s 16 lines. All of the pins of the device perform the same function as they do with the 8086 with two exceptions. First, pin 34 is no longer BHE, instead it outputs a maximum mode status, SSO. Combined with the IO/M and DT/R signals, the bus cycles can be decoded, the second change is the pin that signals if a memory access or input/output access is being made has had it sense reversed. The pin on the 8088 is IO/M, on the 8086 part it is IO/M. The reason for the reversal is that it makes the 8088 compatible with the 8085. 33–1 million instructions per second. The speed of the unit and the bus of the 8086 CPU was well balanced, with a typical instruction mix. Cutting down the bus to 8 bits made it a bottleneck in the 8088. With the speed of instruction fetch reduced by 50% in the 8088 as compared to the 8086, when the queue is empty, instructions take as long to complete as they take to fetch
8.
X86
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X86 is a family of backward-compatible instruction set architectures based on the Intel 8086 CPU and its Intel 8088 variant. The term x86 came into being because the names of several successors to Intels 8086 processor end in 86, many additions and extensions have been added to the x86 instruction set over the years, almost consistently with full backward compatibility. The architecture has been implemented in processors from Intel, Cyrix, AMD, VIA and many companies, there are also open implementations. In the 1980s and early 1990s, when the 8088 and 80286 were still in common use, today, however, x86 usually implies a binary compatibility also with the 32-bit instruction set of the 80386. An 8086 system, including such as 8087 and 8089. There were also terms iRMX, iSBC, and iSBX – all together under the heading Microsystem 80, however, this naming scheme was quite temporary, lasting for a few years during the early 1980s. Today, x86 is ubiquitous in both stationary and portable computers, and is also used in midrange computers, workstations, servers. A large amount of software, including operating systems such as DOS, Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris and macOS, functions with x86-based hardware. There have been attempts, including by Intel itself, to end the market dominance of the inelegant x86 architecture designed directly from the first simple 8-bit microprocessors. Examples of this are the iAPX432, the Intel 960, Intel 860, however, the continuous refinement of x86 microarchitectures, circuitry and semiconductor manufacturing would make it hard to replace x86 in many segments. The table below lists processor models and model series implementing variations of the x86 instruction set, each line item is characterized by significantly improved or commercially successful processor microarchitecture designs. Such x86 implementations are seldom simple copies but often employ different internal microarchitectures as well as different solutions at the electronic, quite naturally, early compatible microprocessors were 16-bit, while 32-bit designs were developed much later. For the personal computer market, real quantities started to appear around 1990 with i386 and i486 compatible processors, other companies, which designed or manufactured x86 or x87 processors, include ITT Corporation, National Semiconductor, ULSI System Technology, and Weitek. Some early versions of these microprocessors had heat dissipation problems, AMD later managed to establish itself as a serious contender with the K6 set of processors, which gave way to the very successful Athlon and Opteron. There were also other contenders, such as Centaur Technology, Rise Technology, VIA Technologies energy efficient C3 and C7 processors, which were designed by the Centaur company, have been sold for many years. Centaurs newest design, the VIA Nano, is their first processor with superscalar and it was, perhaps interestingly, introduced at about the same time as Intels first in-order processor since the P5 Pentium, the Intel Atom. The instruction set architecture has twice been extended to a word size. In 1999-2003, AMD extended this 32-bit architecture to 64 bits and referred to it as x86-64 in early documents, Intel soon adopted AMDs architectural extensions under the name IA-32e, later using the name EM64T and finally using Intel 64
9.
MIPS architecture
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MIPS is a reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by MIPS Technologies. The early MIPS architectures were 32-bit, with 64-bit versions added later, multiple revisions of the MIPS instruction set exist, including MIPS I, MIPS II, MIPS III, MIPS IV, MIPS V, MIPS32, and MIPS64. The current revisions are MIPS32 and MIPS64, MIPS32 and MIPS64 define a control register set as well as the instruction set. Computer architecture courses in universities and technical schools often study the MIPS architecture, the architecture greatly influenced later RISC architectures such as Alpha. It used to be popular in supercomputers but all systems have dropped off the TOP500 list. Until late 2006, they were used in many of SGIs computer products. MIPS implementations were also used by Digital Equipment Corporation, NEC, Pyramid Technology, Siemens Nixdorf, in the mid to late 1990s, it was estimated that one in three RISC microprocessors produced was a MIPS implementation. Windows NT supported MIPS until the release of Windows NT4.0 SP3 in 1997, MIPS is a modular architecture supporting up to four coprocessors. In MIPS terminology, COP0 is the System Control Coprocessor, COP1 is an optional FPU, for example, in the original Playstation game console, COP0 is the System Control Coprocessor and COP2 is Geometry Transformation Engine. In the Playstation 2 game console, COP0 is a Toshiba R5900 chip, COP1 is a FPU, MIPS is a load-store architecture, meaning it only performs arithmetic and logic operations between CPU registers, requiring load/store instructions to access memory. Processors based upon the MIPS instruction set have been in production since 1988, over time several enhancements of the instruction set were made. The different revisions which have introduced are MIPS I, MIPS II, MIPS III, MIPS IV. Each revision is a superset of its predecessors, when MIPS Technologies was spun out of Silicon Graphics again in 1998, they refocused on the embedded market. At that time, this property was found to be a problem, and the architecture definition was changed to define a 32-bit MIPS32. Introduced in 1985 with the R2000, introduced in 1990 with the R6000. Introduced in 1992 in the R4000 and it adds 64-bit registers and integer instructions and a floating point square root instruction. MIPS IV is the version of the architecture. It is a superset of MIPS III and is compatible with all existing versions of MIPS, the first implementation of MIPS IV was the R8000, which was introduced in 1994
10.
PowerPC
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PowerPC is a RISC instruction set architecture created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM. PowerPC was the cornerstone of AIMs PReP and Common Hardware Reference Platform initiatives in the 1990s and it has since become niche in personal computers, but remain popular as embedded and high-performance processors. Its use in game consoles and embedded applications provided an array of uses. In addition, PowerPC CPUs are still used in AmigaOne and third party AmigaOS4 personal computers, the history of RISC began with IBMs 801 research project, on which John Cocke was the lead developer, where he developed the concepts of RISC in 1975–78. 801-based microprocessors were used in a number of IBM embedded products, the RT was a rapid design implementing the RISC architecture. The result was the POWER instruction set architecture, introduced with the RISC System/6000 in early 1990, the original POWER microprocessor, one of the first superscalar RISC implementations, was a high performance, multi-chip design. IBM soon realized that a microprocessor was needed in order to scale its RS/6000 line from lower-end to high-end machines. Work on a one-chip POWER microprocessor, designated the RSC began, in early 1991, IBM realized its design could potentially become a high-volume microprocessor used across the industry. IBM approached Apple with the goal of collaborating on the development of a family of single-chip microprocessors based on the POWER architecture and this three-way collaboration became known as AIM alliance, for Apple, IBM, Motorola. In 1991, the PowerPC was just one facet of an alliance among these three companies. The PowerPC chip was one of joint ventures involving the three, in their efforts to counter the growing Microsoft-Intel dominance of personal computing. For Motorola, POWER looked like an unbelievable deal and it allowed them to sell a widely tested and powerful RISC CPU for little design cash on their own part. It also maintained ties with an important customer, Apple, and seemed to offer the possibility of adding IBM too, at this point Motorola already had its own RISC design in the form of the 88000 which was doing poorly in the market. Motorola was doing well with their 68000 family and the majority of the funding was focused on this, the 88000 effort was somewhat starved for resources. However, the 88000 was already in production, Data General was shipping 88000 machines, the 88000 had also achieved a number of embedded design wins in telecom applications. The result of various requirements was the PowerPC specification. The differences between the earlier POWER instruction set and PowerPC is outlined in Appendix E of the manual for PowerPC ISA v.2.02, when the first PowerPC products reached the market, they were met with enthusiasm. In addition to Apple, both IBM and the Motorola Computer Group offered systems built around the processors, Microsoft released Windows NT3.51 for the architecture, which was used in Motorolas PowerPC servers, and Sun Microsystems offered a version of its Solaris OS
11.
SuperH
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SuperH is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computing instruction set architecture developed by Hitachi and currently produced by Renesas. It is implemented by microcontrollers and microprocessors for embedded systems, as of 2015, many of the original patents for the SuperH architecture are expiring and the SH2 CPU has been reimplemented as open source hardware under the name J2. The SuperH processor core family was first developed by Hitachi in the early 1990s, Hitachi has developed a complete group of upward compatible instruction set CPU cores. The SH-1 and the SH-2 were used in the Sega Saturn and these cores have 16-bit instructions for better code density than 32-bit instructions, which was a great benefit at the time, due to the high cost of main memory. A few years later the SH-3 core was added to the SH CPU family, new features included another interrupt concept, a management unit. The SH-3 core also got a DSP extension, then called SH-3-DSP, with extended data paths for efficient DSP processing, special accumulators and a dedicated MAC-type DSP engine, this core was unifying the DSP and the RISC processor world. A derivative was also used with the original SH-2 core, between 1994 and 1996,35.1 million SuperH devices were shipped worldwide. For the Dreamcast, Hitachi developed the SH-4 architecture, superscalar instruction execution and a vector floating point unit were the highlights of this architecture. SH-4 based standard chips were introduced around 1998, the SH-3 and SH-4 architectures support both big-endian and little-endian byte ordering. Hitachi and STMicroelectronics started collaborating as early as 1997 on the design of the SH-4, in 2003, Hitachi and Mitsubishi Electric formed a joint-venture called Renesas Technology, with Hitachi controlling 55% of it. In 2004, Renesas Technology bought STMicroelectronicss share of ownership in the SuperH Inc. Renesas Technology later became Renesas Electronics, following their merger with NEC Electronics. The SH-5 design supported two modes of operation, sHcompact mode is equivalent to the user-mode instructions of the SH-4 instruction set. SHmedia mode is different, using 32-bit instructions with sixty-four 64-bit integer registers. In SHmedia mode the destination of a branch is loaded into a branch register separately from the branch instruction. This allows the processor to prefetch instructions for a branch without having to snoop the instruction stream, however, SH-5 differs because its backward compatibility mode is the 16-bit encoding rather than the 32-bit encoding. The evolution of the SuperH architecture still continues, the last of the SH-2 patents expired in 2014. At LinuxCon Japan 2015, j-core developers presented a cleanroom reimplemention of the SH-2 ISA with extensions, subsequently, a design walkthrough was presented at ELC2016. The open source BSD licensed VHDL code for the J2 core has been proven on Xilinx FPGAs and on ASICs manufactured on TSMCs 180 nm process, additional instructions are easy to add
12.
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
13.
StrongARM
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The StrongARM is a family of computer microprocessors developed by Digital Equipment Corporation and manufactured in the late 1990s which implemented the ARM v4 instruction set architecture. It was later sold to Intel in 1997, who continued to manufacture it before replacing it with the XScale in the early 2000s, the StrongARM was a collaborative project between DEC and Advanced RISC Machines to create a faster ARM microprocessor. The StrongARM was designed to address the upper-end of the embedded market. Targets were devices such as personal digital assistants and set-top boxes. Traditionally, the division of DEC was located in Massachusetts. In order to access to the design talent in Silicon Valley, DEC opened a design center in Palo Alto. This design center was led by Dan Dobberpuhl and was the main site for the StrongARM project. Another design site which worked on the project was in Austin, Texas that was created by some ex-DEC designers returning from Apple Computer, the project was set up in 1995, and quickly delivered their first design, the SA-110. DEC agreed to sell StrongARM to Intel as part of a settlement in 1997. Intel used the StrongARM to replace their ailing line of RISC processors, the Austin design group spun off to become Alchemy Semiconductor, another start-up company designing MIPS SoCs for the hand-held market. A new StrongARM core was developed by Intel and introduced in 2000 as the XScale, the SA-110 was the first microprocessor in the StrongARM family. The first versions, operating at 100,160, and 200 MHz, were announced on 5 February 1996, when announced, samples of these versions were available, with volume production slated for mid-1996. Faster 166 and 233 MHz versions were announced on 12 September 1996, samples of these versions were available at announcement, with volume production slated for December 1996. Throughout 1996, the SA-110 was the highest performing microprocessor for portable devices, towards the end of 1996 it was a leading CPU for internet/intranet appliances and thin client systems. The SA-110s first design win was the Apple MessagePad 2000 and it was also used in a number of products including the Acorn Computers Risc PC and Eidos Optima video editing system. The SA-110s lead designers were Daniel W. Dobberpuhl, Gregory W. Hoeppner, Liam Madden, the SA-110 had a simple microarchitecture. It was a design that executed instructions in-order with a five-stage classic RISC pipeline. The microprocessor was partitioned into several blocks, the IBOX, EBOX, IMMU, DMMU, BIU, WB, the IBOX contained hardware that operated in the first two stages of the pipeline such as the program counter
14.
XScale
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XScale is a microarchitecture for central processing units initially designed by Intel implementing the ARM architecture instruction set. XScale comprises several distinct families, IXP, IXC, IOP, PXA and CE, Intel sold the PXA family to Marvell Technology Group in June 2006. Marvell then extended the brand to include processors with other microarchitectures, the XScale architecture is based on the ARMv5TE ISA without the floating point instructions. XScale uses an integer and an eight-stage memory super-pipelined microarchitecture. Intel used the StrongARM to replace its ailing line of outdated RISC processors, all the generations of XScale are 32-bit ARMv5TE processors manufactured with a 0.18 µm or 0.13 µm process and have a 32 KB data cache and a 32 KB instruction cache. First and second generation XScale multi-core processors also have a 2 KB mini data cache, products based on the 3rd generation XScale have up to 512 KB unified L2 cache. The XScale core is used in a number of microcontroller families manufactured by Intel and Marvell, there are four generations of XScale application processors, described below, PXA210/PXA25x, PXA26x, PXA27x, and PXA3xx. There are also standalone processors, the 80200 and 80219, the PXA210 was Intels entry-level XScale targeted at mobile phone applications. It was released with the PXA250 in February 2002 and comes clocked at 133 MHz and 200 MHz, the PXA25x family consists of the PXA250 and PXA255. The PXA250 was Intels first generation of XScale processors, there was a choice of three clock speeds,200 MHz,300 MHz and 400 MHz. It came out in February 2002, in March 2003, the revision C0 of the PXA250 was renamed to PXA255. The PXA26x family consists of the PXA260 and PXA261-PXA263, the PXA260 is a stand-alone processor clocked at the same frequency as the PXA25x, but features a TPBGA package which is about 53% smaller than the PXA25xs PBGA package. The PXA26x family was released in March 2003, the PXA27x family consists of the PXA270 and PXA271-PXA272 processors. This revision is an update to the XScale family of processors. The PXA270 is clocked in four different speeds,312 MHz,416 MHz,520 MHz and 624 MHz and is a processor with no packaged memory. The PXA271 can be clocked to 13,104,208 MHz or 416 MHz and has 32 MB of 16-bit stacked StrataFlash memory and 32 MB of 16-bit SDRAM in the same package. The PXA272 can be clocked to 312 MHz,416 MHz or 520 MHz and has 64 MB of 32-bit stacked StrataFlash memory. Intel also added new technologies to the PXA27x family such as, SpeedStep
15.
Kernel (operating system)
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The kernel is a computer program that is the core of a computers operating system, with complete control over everything in the system. It is the first program loaded on start-up and it handles the rest of start-up as well as input/output requests from software, translating them into data-processing instructions for the central processing unit. It handles memory and peripherals like keyboards, monitors, printers, the critical code of the kernel is usually loaded into a protected area of memory, which prevents it from being overwritten by applications or other, more minor parts of the operating system. The kernel performs its tasks, such as running processes and handling interrupts, in contrast, everything a user does is in user space, writing text in a text editor, running programs in a GUI, etc. This separation prevents user data and kernel data from interfering with other and causing instability. The kernels interface is an abstraction layer. When a process makes requests of the kernel, it is called a system call, Kernel designs differ in how they manage these system calls and resources. A monolithic kernel runs all the operating instructions in the same address space. A microkernel runs most processes in space, for modularity. The kernel takes responsibility for deciding at any time which of the running programs should be allocated to the processor or processors. Random-access memory Random-access memory is used to both program instructions and data. Typically, both need to be present in memory in order for a program to execute, often multiple programs will want access to memory, frequently demanding more memory than the computer has available. The kernel is responsible for deciding which memory each process can use, input/output devices I/O devices include such peripherals as keyboards, mice, disk drives, printers, network adapters, and display devices. The kernel allocates requests from applications to perform I/O to an appropriate device, key aspects necessary in resource management are the definition of an execution domain and the protection mechanism used to mediate the accesses to the resources within a domain. Kernels also usually provide methods for synchronization and communication between processes called inter-process communication, finally, a kernel must provide running programs with a method to make requests to access these facilities. The kernel has full access to the memory and must allow processes to safely access this memory as they require it. Often the first step in doing this is virtual addressing, usually achieved by paging and/or segmentation, virtual addressing allows the kernel to make a given physical address appear to be another address, the virtual address. This allows every program to behave as if it is the one running
16.
Microkernel
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In computer science, a microkernel is the near-minimum amount of software that can provide the mechanisms needed to implement an operating system. These mechanisms include low-level address space management, thread management, If the hardware provides multiple rings or CPU modes, the microkernel may be the only software executing at the most privileged level, which is generally referred to as supervisor or kernel mode. Traditional operating system functions, such as drivers, protocol stacks. In terms of the code size, as a general rule microkernels tend to be smaller than monolithic kernels. The MINIX3 microkernel, for example, has approximately 12,000 lines of code, in 1967, Regnecentralen was installing a RC4000 prototype in a Polish fertilizer plant in Puławy. The computer used a small operating system tailored for the needs of the plant. Brinch Hansen and his team became concerned with the lack of generality and reusability of the RC4000 system and they feared that each installation would require a different operating system so they started to investigate novel and more general ways of creating software for the RC4000. In 1969, their effort resulted in the completion of the RC4000 Multiprogramming System and its nucleus provided inter-process communication based on message-passing for up to 23 unprivileged processes, out of which 8 at a time were protected from one another. Besides these elementary mechanisms, it had no strategy for program execution. This strategy was to be implemented by a hierarchy of running programs in which parent processes had complete control over child processes, microkernels were first developed in the 1980s as a response to changes in the computer world, and to several challenges adapting existing mono-kernels to these new systems. New device drivers, protocol stacks, file systems and other systems were being developed all the time. This code was located in the monolithic kernel, and thus required considerable work. This would not only allow these services to be easily worked on. Moreover, it would allow entirely new operating systems to be built up on a common core, microkernels were a very hot topic in the 1980s when the first usable local area networks were being introduced. The same mechanisms that allowed the kernel to be distributed into user space also allowed the system to be distributed across network links. The first microkernels, notably Mach, proved to have disappointing performance, however, during this time the speed of computers grew greatly in relation to networking systems, and the disadvantages in performance came to overwhelm the advantages in development terms. As of 2012, the Mach-based GNU Hurd is also functional and included in testing versions of Arch Linux, although major work on microkernels had largely ended, experimenters continued development. Microkernels are closely related to exokernels, early operating system kernels were rather small, partly because computer memory was limited
17.
Software license
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A software license is a legal instrument governing the use or redistribution of software. Under United States copyright law all software is copyright protected, in code as also object code form. The only exception is software in the public domain, most distributed software can be categorized according to its license type. Two common categories for software under copyright law, and therefore with licenses which grant the licensee specific rights, are proprietary software and free, unlicensed software outside the copyright protection is either public domain software or software which is non-distributed, non-licensed and handled as internal business trade secret. Contrary to popular belief, distributed unlicensed software is copyright protected. Examples for this are unauthorized software leaks or software projects which are placed on public software repositories like GitHub without specified license. As voluntarily handing software into the domain is problematic in some international law domains, there are also licenses granting PD-like rights. Therefore, the owner of a copy of software is legally entitled to use that copy of software. Hence, if the end-user of software is the owner of the respective copy, as many proprietary licenses only enumerate the rights that the user already has under 17 U. S. C. §117, and yet proclaim to take away from the user. Proprietary software licenses often proclaim to give software publishers more control over the way their software is used by keeping ownership of each copy of software with the software publisher. The form of the relationship if it is a lease or a purchase, for example UMG v. Augusto or Vernor v. Autodesk. The ownership of goods, like software applications and video games, is challenged by licensed. The Swiss based company UsedSoft innovated the resale of business software and this feature of proprietary software licenses means that certain rights regarding the software are reserved by the software publisher. Therefore, it is typical of EULAs to include terms which define the uses of the software, the most significant effect of this form of licensing is that, if ownership of the software remains with the software publisher, then the end-user must accept the software license. In other words, without acceptance of the license, the end-user may not use the software at all, one example of such a proprietary software license is the license for Microsoft Windows. The most common licensing models are per single user or per user in the appropriate volume discount level, Licensing per concurrent/floating user also occurs, where all users in a network have access to the program, but only a specific number at the same time. Another license model is licensing per dongle which allows the owner of the dongle to use the program on any computer, Licensing per server, CPU or points, regardless the number of users, is common practice as well as site or company licenses
18.
Canada
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Canada is a country in the northern half of North America. Canadas border with the United States is the worlds longest binational land border, the majority of the country has a cold or severely cold winter climate, but southerly areas are warm in summer. Canada is sparsely populated, the majority of its territory being dominated by forest and tundra. It is highly urbanized with 82 per cent of the 35.15 million people concentrated in large and medium-sized cities, One third of the population lives in the three largest cities, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Its capital is Ottawa, and other urban areas include Calgary, Edmonton, Quebec City, Winnipeg. Various aboriginal peoples had inhabited what is now Canada for thousands of years prior to European colonization. Pursuant to the British North America Act, on July 1,1867, the colonies of Canada, New Brunswick and this began an accretion of provinces and territories to the mostly self-governing Dominion to the present ten provinces and three territories forming modern Canada. With the Constitution Act 1982, Canada took over authority, removing the last remaining ties of legal dependence on the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Canada is a parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy, with Queen Elizabeth II being the head of state. The country is officially bilingual at the federal level and it is one of the worlds most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many other countries. Its advanced economy is the eleventh largest in the world, relying chiefly upon its abundant natural resources, Canadas long and complex relationship with the United States has had a significant impact on its economy and culture. Canada is a country and has the tenth highest nominal per capita income globally as well as the ninth highest ranking in the Human Development Index. It ranks among the highest in international measurements of government transparency, civil liberties, quality of life, economic freedom, Canada is an influential nation in the world, primarily due to its inclusive values, years of prosperity and stability, stable economy, and efficient military. While a variety of theories have been postulated for the origins of Canada. In 1535, indigenous inhabitants of the present-day Quebec City region used the word to direct French explorer Jacques Cartier to the village of Stadacona, from the 16th to the early 18th century Canada referred to the part of New France that lay along the St. Lawrence River. In 1791, the area became two British colonies called Upper Canada and Lower Canada collectively named The Canadas, until their union as the British Province of Canada in 1841. Upon Confederation in 1867, Canada was adopted as the name for the new country at the London Conference. The transition away from the use of Dominion was formally reflected in 1982 with the passage of the Canada Act, later that year, the name of national holiday was changed from Dominion Day to Canada Day
19.
Mobile phone
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A mobile phone is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while the user is moving within a telephone service area. The radio frequency link establishes a connection to the systems of a mobile phone operator. Most modern mobile telephone services use a network architecture, and, therefore. Mobile phones which offer these and more general computing capabilities are referred to as smartphones, the first handheld mobile phone was demonstrated by John F. Mitchell and Martin Cooper of Motorola in 1973, using a handset weighing c.4.4 lbs. In 1983, the DynaTAC 8000x was the first commercially available mobile phone. From 1983 to 2014, worldwide mobile phone subscriptions grew to seven billion, penetrating 100% of the global population. In first quarter of 2016, the top smartphone manufacturers were Samsung, Apple, a handheld mobile radio telephone service was envisioned in the early stages of radio engineering. In 1917, Finnish inventor Eric Tigerstedt filed a patent for a pocket-size folding telephone with a thin carbon microphone. Early predecessors of cellular phones included analog radio communications from ships, the race to create truly portable telephone devices began after World War II, with developments taking place in many countries. These 0G systems were not cellular, supported few simultaneous calls, the first handheld mobile phone was demonstrated by John F. Mitchell and Martin Cooper of Motorola in 1973, using a handset weighing c.4.4 lbs. The first commercial automated cellular network was launched in Japan by Nippon Telegraph and this was followed in 1981 by the simultaneous launch of the Nordic Mobile Telephone system in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Several other countries followed in the early to mid-1980s. These first-generation systems could support far more simultaneous calls but still used analog cellular technology, in 1983, the DynaTAC 8000x was the first commercially available handheld mobile phone. In 1991, the digital cellular technology was launched in Finland by Radiolinja on the GSM standard. This sparked competition in the sector as the new operators challenged the incumbent 1G network operators, ten years later, in 2001, the third generation was launched in Japan by NTT DoCoMo on the WCDMA standard. This was followed by 3. 5G, 3G+ or turbo 3G enhancements based on the high-speed packet access family, allowing UMTS networks to have data transfer speeds. By 2009, it had become clear that, at point, 3G networks would be overwhelmed by the growth of bandwidth-intensive applications. Consequently, the industry began looking to data-optimized fourth-generation technologies, with the promise of speed improvements up to ten-fold over existing 3G technologies
20.
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
21.
Monolithic kernel
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A monolithic kernel is an operating system architecture where the entire operating system is working in kernel space and is alone in supervisor mode. The monolithic model differs from other operating system architectures in that it defines a high-level virtual interface over computer hardware. A set of primitives or system calls implement all operating system such as process management, concurrency. Device drivers can be added to the kernel as modules and this modularity of the operating system is at the binary level and not at the architecture level. Modular monolithic operating systems are not to be confused with the level of modularity inherent in Server-Client operating systems which use microkernels. Practically speaking, dynamically loading modules is simply a more flexible way of handling the operating system image at runtime — as opposed to rebooting with a different operating system image, the modules allow easy extension of the operating systems capabilities as required. Dynamically loadable modules incur a small overhead when compared to building the module into the system image. Namely, an unloaded module need not be stored in random access memory
22.
Floppy disk
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Floppy disks are read and written by a floppy disk drive. Floppy disks, initially as 8-inch media and later in 5¼-inch and 3½-inch sizes, were a form of data storage and exchange from the mid-1970s into the mid-2000s. These formats are usually handled by older equipment and these disks and associated drives were produced and improved upon by IBM and other companies such as Memorex, Shugart Associates, and Burroughs Corporation. The term floppy disk appeared in print as early as 1970, in 1976, Shugart Associates introduced the first 5¼-inch FDD. By 1978 there were more than 10 manufacturers producing such FDDs, there were competing floppy disk formats, with hard- and soft-sector versions and encoding schemes such as FM, MFM and GCR. The 5¼-inch format displaced the 8-inch one for most applications, the most common capacity of the 5¼-inch format in DOS-based PCs was 360 kB and in 1984 IBM introduced the 1.2 MB dual-sided floppy disk along with its PC-AT model. IBM started using the 720 kB double-density 3½-inch microfloppy disk on its Convertible laptop computer in 1986 and these disk drives could be added to older PC models. In 1988 IBM introduced a drive for 2.88 MB DSED diskettes in its top-of-the-line PS/2 models, throughout the early 1980s, limitations of the 5¼-inch format became clear. Originally designed to be practical than the 8-inch format, it was itself too large, as the quality of recording media grew. A number of solutions were developed, with drives at 2-, 2½-, 3-, 3½-, the large market share of the 5¼-inch format made it difficult for these new formats to gain significant market share. A variant on the Sony design, introduced in 1982 by a number of manufacturers, was then rapidly adopted. By the end of the 1980s, 5¼-inch disks had been superseded by 3½-inch disks, by the mid-1990s, 5¼-inch drives had virtually disappeared, as the 3½-inch disk became the predominant floppy disk. Floppy disks became ubiquitous during the 1980s and 1990s in their use with computers to distribute software, transfer data. Before hard disks became affordable to the population, floppy disks were often used to store a computers operating system. Most home computers from that period have a primary OS and BASIC stored as ROM, by the early 1990s, the increasing software size meant large packages like Windows or Adobe Photoshop required a dozen disks or more. In 1996, there were a five billion standard floppy disks in use. Then, distribution of packages was gradually replaced by CD-ROMs, DVDs. External USB-based floppy disk drives are available, many modern systems provide firmware support for booting from such drives
23.
BlackBerry PlayBook
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The PlayBook is the first device to run BlackBerry Tablet OS, based on QNX Neutrino, and runs apps developed using Adobe AIR. A second major revision to the BlackBerry PlayBook OS was released in February 2012, the PlayBook also supports Android OS applications, allowing them to be sold and installed through the BlackBerry App World store. Early reviews were mixed saying that although the hardware was good, shipments totaled approximately 500,000 units during the first quarter of sales and 200,000 in the following quarter. Many of the 700,000 units shipped to retailers allegedly remained on the shelves for months, sales rebounded following the price cuts, with BlackBerry shipping approximately 2.5 million BlackBerry PlayBooks by June 1,2013. Rumors about the computer, nicknamed the BlackPad in the press because of its expected similarity to Apples competing iPad, had circulated for several months before the announcement. Among the features demonstrated was its tight integration with and support for Adobe AIR applications, according to Lazaridis, Were not trying to dumb down the internet for a mobile device. What weve done is bring up mobile devices to the level of desktop computers, Lazaridis then announced at the end of his presentation that developers who get Adobe AIR applications approved on BlackBerry App World would be eligible for free BlackBerry PlayBook tablets. Since then, the free PlayBook offer has been extended to include WebWorks applications, the BlackBerry PlayBook supports up to 1080p video playback. PlayBook Features a 3 MP front-facing camera for video chatting over Wi-Fi, the PlayBook has a 1024×600 WSVGA with an aspect ratio of 16,9 making this device perfectly acceptable for viewing HD video content or other media, 7-inch display and 3D graphics acceleration. It features a variety of sensors, including an InvenSense 6-axis gyroscope, magnetometer, the PlayBook uses the dual-core Texas Instruments OMAP4430 processor. While the newer and faster PlayBook included the dual-core Texas Instruments OMAP4460 processor, the BlackBerry PlayBook supports high resolution video playback, and audio formats. It also has a port for HDMI video output. With its Adobe Flash Version 11.1.121.74 support, BlackBerry PlayBook was released in Canada and USA on April 19,2011, the UK and Netherlands on June 16,2011, and the United Arab Emirates on June 25,2011. PlayBook was criticized initially requiring a BlackBerry for its email and calendar applications, although third party email. The platform also has few native third party applications compared to other platforms. Following the mixed reviews, BlackBerrys Playbook began to gain traction and receive better reviews, walt Mossberg, columnist for The Wall Street Journal, wrote, I got the strong impression RIM is scrambling to get the product to market. RIMs then co-CEO Jim Balsillie countered critics by noting there were more than 60 million BlackBerry smartphones in use with the ability to pair with a PlayBook. At the time of launch, between 2,000 and 3,000 apps were available from the BlackBerry App World, as of May 1,2012, there are over 24,700 PlayBook applications available in BlackBerry App World
24.
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
25.
BlackBerry Tablet OS
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The BlackBerry Tablet OS is the first tablet running an operating system from QNX. BlackBerry Tablet OS supports standard BlackBerry Java applications, support for Android apps has also been announced, through sandbox app players which can be ported by developers or installed through sideloading by users. A BlackBerry Tablet OS Native Development Kit, to native applications with the GNU toolchain is currently in closed beta testing. The first device to run BlackBerry Tablet OS was the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet computer, a similar QNX-based operating system, known as BlackBerry 10, replaced the long-standing BlackBerry OS on handsets after version 7. BlackBerry OS BlackBerry 10 Meet the Power Behind the BlackBerry Tablet OS, official announcement, QNX website Blackberry Development Blackberry - Playbook Overview
26.
BlackBerry 10
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BlackBerry 10 is a proprietary mobile operating system for the BlackBerry line of smartphones, both developed by BlackBerry Limited. BlackBerry 10 is based on QNX, a Unix-like operating system that was developed by QNX Software Systems until the company was acquired by BlackBerry in April 2010. It supports the application framework Qt and features an Android runtime to run Android applications, prior to version 10.3.1, BlackBerry 10 also supported the Adobe AIR runtime. It also supports hardware keyboards, including ones which support touch input, on October 26,2015, BlackBerry announced that there are no plans to release new APIs and software development kits or adopt Qt version 5. Future updates, like versions 10.3.3 and 10.3.4, would focus on security, the company has not released a compatible device since the BlackBerry Leap smartphone, released in 2015. It has not ruled out any future devices, on November 12,2012, CEO Thorsten Heins announced a January 30,2013, launch of the BlackBerry 10 operating system version 10.0 and the first smartphones running it. The operating system, as well as two devices, the Z10, and the Q10, were announced simultaneously around the world on January 30,2013, the company also announced that the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet would receive an update to BlackBerry 10 later in 2013. BlackBerry has continued to support and develop the PlayBook with its separate Tablet OS, on 14 May 2013 BlackBerry OS10.1 was launched. This brought improvements to many features requested by users, on 13 September 2013, in Asia, BlackBerry announced the launch of BlackBerry OS10.2 and a new BlackBerry 10 device, the Z30, providing performance increases over the previous BlackBerry 10 devices. On June 18,2014, BlackBerry announced a relationship with Amazon. com. The touchscreen is the predominant input method of BlackBerry 10, in addition to hardware keyboard for devices that have one, users can use gestures and keyboard shortcuts to navigate around the system. For instance, a user can unlock the device or return to the screen by swiping from the bottom to the top. Some gestures offer additional modes of interaction when they are used differently, similarly, when the finger is moved from the bottom to the right in a curved motion, the user can enter BlackBerry Hub immediately. Devices with a keyboard can use keyboard shortcuts to reach applications or perform specific functions more quickly. When a user returns to the screen from within an application. An Active Frame is a window of the application which keeps running in the background. A user can return to such an application by tapping on the Active Frame or close it by tapping on the X icon, Active Frames can have widget-like functionality and show small bits of information, similar to widgets on Android. For instance, the application can show upcoming events and meetings
27.
University of Waterloo
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The University of Waterloo is a public research university with a main campus in Waterloo, Ontario. The main campus is on 404 hectares of land in Uptown Waterloo, the university offers academic programs administered by six faculties and ten faculty-based schools. The university also operates four campuses and four affiliated university colleges. Waterloo is a member of the U15, a group of universities in Canada. University of Waterloo is most famous for its education programs. University of Waterloo operates the largest post secondary program of its kind in the world. The institution was established on 1 July 1957 as the Waterloo College Associate Faculties and this entity formally separated from Waterloo College and was incorporated as a university with the passage of the University of Waterloo Act by the Legislative Assembly of Ontario in 1959. It was established to fill the need to train engineers and technicians for Canadas growing postwar economy and it grew substantially over the next decade, adding a faculty of arts in 1960, and the College of Optometry of Ontario which moved from Toronto in 1967. The university is co-educational, and as of 2016 has 30,600 undergraduate and 5,300 postgraduate students, Alumni and former students of the university can be found across Canada and in over 140 countries. Waterloos varsity teams, known as the Waterloo Warriors, compete in the Ontario University Athletics conference of the Canadian Interuniversity Sport. The University of Waterloo traces its origins to Waterloo College, the outgrowth of Waterloo Lutheran Seminary. When Gerald Hagey assumed the presidency of Waterloo College in 1953, following that method, Waterloo College established the Waterloo College Associate Faculties on 4 April 1956, as a non-denominational board affiliated with the college. The academic structure of the Associated Faculties was originally focused on education in the applied sciences – largely built around the proposals of Ira Needles. On 25 January 1958, the Associated Faculties announced the purchase of over 74 hectares of land west of Waterloo College, by the end of the same year, the Associated Faculties opened its first building on the site, the Chemical Engineering Building. In 1959, the Legislative Assembly of Ontario passed an act which split the Associated Faculties from Waterloo College. The president, appointed by the board, was to act as the chief executive officer. While the agreements sought to safeguard the existence of the two colleges, they also aimed at federating them with the newly established University of Waterloo. Due to disagreements with Waterloo College, the College was not formally federated with the new university and this was something that the Associated Faculties was not prepared to accept
28.
Kanata, Ontario
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Kanata is one of the largest suburbs of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Located about 22 km west-southwest of the downtown, Kanata had a population of 80,781 as of 2011 and is growing rapidly. Before it was amalgamated into Ottawa in 2001, it was one of the fastest growing cities in Canada, located just to the west of the National Capital Commission Greenbelt, it is one of the largest of several communities that surround central Ottawa. It is a community and an important hi-tech centre. The area that is today Kanata was originally part of the Township of March, one site dating from this era is Pinheys Point. It remained mainly agricultural until the 1960s when it became the site of heavy development, modern Kanata is largely the creation of Bill Teron, a developer and urban planner who purchased over 1,200 hectares of rural land and set about building a model community. Unlike other suburbs, Kanata was designed to have a mix of densities and it contained large amounts of open space, and was to be surrounded by a greenbelt. A reflection of the garden city movement, the area was divided into a series of communities, each of which was intended to have its own commercial centres and these include Beaverbrook, Glen Cairn, Bridlewood, Katimavik, Hazeldean, Morgans Grant, and Kanata Lakes. The first street to be built was Tiffany Crescent in 1964, the community grew rapidly due to the influx of hi-tech workers looking to capitalize on the new economical cityscape. The Province of Ontario incorporated Kanata as a city in 1978 out of the Township of March, and portions of the Township of Goulbourn and the Township of Nepean. On September 20,1998, the city of Kanata dedicated a cenotaph in Village Green Memorial Park dedicated to those who served their country in war and it remained a city until 2001, when the province created a new City of Ottawa that included the City of Kanata. As of the 2006 census, the population of Kanata had increased to 85,000, the city became an important hi-tech centre. DEC was one of the technology companies in Kanata. The DEC campus has been successively Digital, Compaq, and HP, nortel Networks and the former Bell-Northern Research had a major campus of buildings just outside the Kanata boundary to the east. The hi-tech industry is clustered along March Road, in the Kanata North Business Park and Kanata Research Park, and along Eagleson Road, in the Kanata South Business Park. Situated in the Ottawa Valley, Kanata is located about 22 km west-southwest of Downtown Ottawa along Highway 417 at a latitude of 45°18 North and its northern end is just to the west of the Ottawa River. To the east, Kanata is separated from the former City of Nepean by the National Capital Commissions Greenbelt, the community of Bells Corners borders the inner side of the Greenbelt. To the south of Kanata is Stittsville, Ontario, further to the south of Kanata is the former village of Richmond, Ontario, which pre-dated what is now the City of Ottawa
29.
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
30.
Ontario
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Ontario, one of the 13 provinces and territories of Canada, is located in east-central Canada. It is Canadas most populous province by a margin, accounting for nearly 40 percent of all Canadians. Ontario is fourth-largest in total area when the territories of the Northwest Territories and it is home to the nations capital city, Ottawa, and the nations most populous city, Toronto. There is only about 1 km of land made up of portages including Height of Land Portage on the Minnesota border. Ontario is sometimes divided into two regions, Northern Ontario and Southern Ontario. The great majority of Ontarios population and arable land is located in the south, in contrast, the larger, northern part of Ontario is sparsely populated with cold winters and is heavily forested. The province is named after Lake Ontario, a thought to be derived from Ontarí, io, a Huron word meaning great lake, or possibly skanadario. Ontario has about 250,000 freshwater lakes, the province consists of three main geographical regions, The thinly populated Canadian Shield in the northwestern and central portions, which comprises over half the land area of Ontario. Although this area mostly does not support agriculture, it is rich in minerals and in part covered by the Central and Midwestern Canadian Shield forests, studded with lakes, Northern Ontario is subdivided into two sub-regions, Northwestern Ontario and Northeastern Ontario. The virtually unpopulated Hudson Bay Lowlands in the north and northeast, mainly swampy. Southern Ontario which is further sub-divided into four regions, Central Ontario, Eastern Ontario, Golden Horseshoe, the highest point is Ishpatina Ridge at 693 metres above sea level located in Temagami, Northeastern Ontario. In the south, elevations of over 500 m are surpassed near Collingwood, above the Blue Mountains in the Dundalk Highlands, the Carolinian forest zone covers most of the southwestern region of the province. A well-known geographic feature is Niagara Falls, part of the Niagara Escarpment, the Saint Lawrence Seaway allows navigation to and from the Atlantic Ocean as far inland as Thunder Bay in Northwestern Ontario. Northern Ontario occupies roughly 87 percent of the area of the province. Point Pelee is a peninsula of Lake Erie in southwestern Ontario that is the southernmost extent of Canadas mainland, Pelee Island and Middle Island in Lake Erie extend slightly farther. All are south of 42°N – slightly farther south than the border of California. The climate of Ontario varies by season and location, the effects of these major air masses on temperature and precipitation depend mainly on latitude, proximity to major bodies of water and to a small extent, terrain relief. In general, most of Ontarios climate is classified as humid continental, Ontario has three main climatic regions
31.
Graphical user interface
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GUIs were introduced in reaction to the perceived steep learning curve of command-line interfaces, which require commands to be typed on a computer keyboard. The actions in a GUI are usually performed through direct manipulation of the graphical elements, beyond computers, GUIs are used in many handheld mobile devices such as MP3 players, portable media players, gaming devices, smartphones and smaller household, office and industrial controls. Designing the visual composition and temporal behavior of a GUI is an important part of application programming in the area of human–computer interaction. Its goal is to enhance the efficiency and ease of use for the logical design of a stored program. Methods of user-centered design are used to ensure that the language introduced in the design is well-tailored to the tasks. The visible graphical interface features of an application are sometimes referred to as chrome or GUI, typically, users interact with information by manipulating visual widgets that allow for interactions appropriate to the kind of data they hold. The widgets of an interface are selected to support the actions necessary to achieve the goals of users. A model–view–controller allows a structure in which the interface is independent from and indirectly linked to application functions. This allows users to select or design a different skin at will, good user interface design relates to users more, and to system architecture less. Large widgets, such as windows, usually provide a frame or container for the main presentation content such as a web page, smaller ones usually act as a user-input tool. A GUI may be designed for the requirements of a market as application-specific graphical user interfaces. By the 1990s, cell phones and handheld game systems also employed application specific touchscreen GUIs, newer automobiles use GUIs in their navigation systems and multimedia centers, or navigation multimedia center combinations. Sample graphical desktop environments A GUI uses a combination of technologies and devices to provide a platform that users can interact with, a series of elements conforming a visual language have evolved to represent information stored in computers. This makes it easier for people with few computer skills to work with, the most common combination of such elements in GUIs is the windows, icons, menus, pointer paradigm, especially in personal computers. The WIMP style of interaction uses a virtual device to represent the position of a pointing device, most often a mouse. Available commands are compiled together in menus, and actions are performed making gestures with the pointing device, a window manager facilitates the interactions between windows, applications, and the windowing system. The windowing system handles hardware devices such as pointing devices, graphics hardware, window managers and other software combine to simulate the desktop environment with varying degrees of realism. Smaller mobile devices such as personal assistants and smartphones typically use the WIMP elements with different unifying metaphors, due to constraints in space
32.
X Window System
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The X Window System is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on UNIX-like computer operating systems. X provides the framework for a GUI environment, drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting with a mouse. X does not mandate the user interface – this is handled by individual programs, as such, the visual styling of X-based environments varies greatly, different programs may present radically different interfaces. X originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984, the protocol has been version 11 since September 1987. The X. Org Foundation leads the X project, with the current reference implementation, X. Org Server, available as free and open source software under the MIT License, X is an architecture-independent system for remote graphical user interfaces and input device capabilities. Each person using a terminal has the ability to interact with the display with any type of user input device. X provides the framework, or primitives, for building such GUI environments, drawing and moving windows on the display and interacting with a mouse. X does not mandate the user interface, individual client programs handle this, programs may use Xs graphical abilities with no user interface. As such, the styling of X-based environments varies greatly. Unlike most earlier display protocols, X was specifically designed to be used over network connections rather than on an integral or attached display device. X features network transparency, which means an X program running on a computer somewhere on a network can display its user interface on an X server running on other computer on the network. The fact that the server is applied to the software in front of the user is often surprising to users accustomed to their programs being clients to services on remote computers. Xs network protocol is based on X command primitives and this approach allows both 2D and 3D operations by an X client application which might be running on a different computer to still be fully accelerated on the X servers display. X provides no support for audio, several projects exist to fill this niche. X uses a model, an X server communicates with various client programs. The server accepts requests for graphical output and sends back user input, a client and server can even communicate securely over the Internet by tunneling the connection over an encrypted network session. An X client itself may emulate an X server by providing services to other clients. This is known as X nesting, open-source clients such as Xnest and Xephyr support such X nesting
33.
Symmetric multiprocessing
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Most multiprocessor systems today use an SMP architecture. In the case of processors, the SMP architecture applies to the cores. SMP systems are tightly coupled multiprocessor systems with a pool of homogeneous processors running independently of each other, each processor, executing different programs and working on different sets of data, has the capability of sharing common resources that are connected using a system bus or a crossbar. SMP systems have centralized shared memory called main memory operating under an operating system with two or more homogeneous processors. Usually each processor has an associated private high-speed memory known as memory to speed up the main memory data access. Processors may be interconnected using buses, crossbar switches or on-chip mesh networks, the bottleneck in the scalability of SMP using buses or crossbar switches is the bandwidth and power consumption of the interconnect among the various processors, the memory, and the disk arrays. A single programming language would have to be able to not only partition the workload, but also comprehend the memory locality, with proper operating system support, SMP systems can easily move tasks between processors to balance the workload efficiently. The earliest production system with multiple identical processors was the Burroughs B5000, however at run-time this was asymmetric, with one processor restricted to application programs while the other processor mainly handled the operating system and hardware interrupts. IBM offered dual-processor computer systems based on its System/360 model 65, the operating systems that ran on these machines were OS/360 M65MP and TSS/360. Other software developed at universities, notably the Michigan Terminal System, both processors could access data channels and initiate I/O. In OS/360 M65MP, peripherals could generally be attached to either processor since the system kernel ran on both processors. The MTS supervisor has the ability to run on both CPUs of the IBM System/360 model 67-2, supervisor locks were small and used to protect individual common data structures that might be accessed simultaneously from either CPU. Starting with its version 7.0, Digital Equipment Corporations operating system TOPS-10 implemented the SMP feature, later KL10 system could aggregate up to 8 CPUs in a SMP manner. In contrast, DECs first multi-processor VAX system, the VAX-11/782, was asymmetric, the first commercial Unix SMP implementation was the NUMA based Honeywell Information Systems Italy XPS-100 designed by Dan Gielan of VAST Corporation in 1985. Its design supported up to 14 processors, but due to electrical limitations, the operating system was derived and ported by VAST Corporation from AT&T 3B20 Unix SysVr3 code used internally within AT&T. On personal computers, SMP is less useful for applications that have not been modified, if the system rarely runs more than one process at a time, SMP is useful only for applications that have been modified for multithreaded processing. Custom-programmed software can be written or modified to use multiple threads, multithreaded programs can also be used in time-sharing and server systems that support multithreading, allowing them to make more use of multiple processors. In SMP, all of the processors are tightly coupled inside the box with a bus or switch
34.
Eclipse (software)
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Eclipse is an integrated development environment used in computer programming, and is the most widely used Java IDE. It contains a base workspace and an extensible plug-in system for customizing the environment and it can also be used to develop documents with LaTeX and packages for the software Mathematica. Development environments include the Eclipse Java development tools for Java and Scala, Eclipse CDT for C/C++, the initial codebase originated from IBM VisualAge. The Eclipse software development kit, which includes the Java development tools, is meant for Java developers and it was one of the first IDEs to run under GNU Classpath and it runs without problems under IcedTea. Eclipse was inspired by the Smalltalk-based VisualAge family of integrated development environment products, although fairly successful, a major drawback of the VisualAge products was that developed code was not in a component-based software engineering model. Instead, all code for a project was held in a compressed lump, individual classes could not be easily accessed, certainly not outside the tool. A team primarily at the IBM Cary NC lab developed the new product as a Java-based replacement, in November 2001, a consortium was formed with a board of stewards to further the development of Eclipse as open-source software. It is estimated that IBM had already invested nearly $40 million by that time, the original members were Borland, IBM, Merant, QNX Software Systems, Rational Software, Red Hat, SuSE, TogetherSoft, and WebGain. The number of stewards increased to over 80 by the end of 2003, in January 2004, the Eclipse Foundation was created. Eclipse 3.0 selected the OSGi Service Platform specifications as the runtime architecture, the Association for Computing Machinery recognized Eclipse with the 2011 ACM Software Systems Award on 26 April 2012. The Eclipse Public License is the license under which Eclipse projects are released. Some projects require dual licensing, for which the Eclipse Distribution License is available, Eclipse was originally released under the Common Public License, but was later re-licensed under the Eclipse Public License. The Free Software Foundation has said that both licenses are free software licenses, but are incompatible with the GNU General Public License, different versions of Eclipse have been given different science-related names. The versions named after Callisto, Europa, and Ganymede, which are moons of Jupiter, were followed by a named after Galileo the discoverer of those moons. These were followed by two sun-themed names, Helios of Greek mythology, and Indigo, one of the seven colors of a rainbow, the version after that, Juno, has a triple meaning, a Roman mythological figure, an asteroid, and a spacecraft to Jupiter. Kepler, Luna, and Mars continued the theme, and then a new theme of chemical elements began with Neon. Since 2006 the Foundation has coordinated an annual Simultaneous Release, each release includes the Eclipse Platform and several other Eclipse projects. As of 2008, each Simultaneous Release has occurred on the 4th Wednesday of June, Eclipse uses plug-ins to provide all the functionality within and on top of the runtime system
35.
Harman International Industries
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On November 14,2016, Harman entered into an agreement to be acquired by South Korean company Samsung Electronics. The sale was completed on March 10,2017, Sidney Harman and Bernard Kardon founded the predecessor to Harman International, Harman Kardon, in 1953. Both Harman and Kardon were engineers by training and had worked at the Bogen Company and their collaboration helped to create a new industry, high-fidelity audio. Harman bought out his partner in 1956 and then expanded Harman Kardon into an audio powerhouse, in the 1970s, Harman accepted an appointment in the Carter administration as deputy secretary of the Department of Commerce. When Harman took office in 1976, he sold his company to conglomerate Beatrice Foods to avoid a conflict of interest, Beatrice promptly sold many portions of the company, including the original Harman Kardon division, and by 1980 only 60% of the original company remained. After he left government in 1978, he created Harman International Industries, Harman International went public in 1986 with a stock offering on the New York Stock Exchange. In July 2011, Harman acquired MWM Acoustics, a privately held company that specialized in speaker and microphone technology for consumer electronics, the combination of MWM Acoustics, Branded Audio, and AKG Automotive Microphones became the Embedded Audio Business Team. Harman expanded to include lighting in 2013 with the acquisition of Martin Professional, in March 2015, Harman acquired the automotive division of Bang & Olufsen for 145 million euros for the unit as well as technology license fees. The purchase didn’t include Bang & Olufsen’s consumer-electronics business, with these additions, Harman announced the formation of a fourth division, which they called Connected Services. In March 2016, Harman acquired the automotive cyber-security firm TowerSec and this acquisition increased Harmans competencies in the emerging automotive cyber-security field. This was evidenced by the subsequent launch of the companys 5+1 security framework incorporating TowerSecs ECU shield technology and this acquisition was notable for further demonstrating Harmans desire to expand beyond its traditional business areas of in-car audio and entertainment systems. In November 2016, Samsung decided to acquire the company for an $8 Billion all cash deal, in February 2017, Harman International shareholders have voted in favor of the acquisition by Samsung. On March 10,2017, the acquisition is complete, with Harman becoming a subsidiary of Samsung Electronics, Harman International Industries was to disappear from NYSE in Q3/2007 due to a buy-out by KKR and Goldman Sachs Capital Partners. However, as of mid September 2007, KKR announced they would back out of the deal, Harman shares plummeted by more than 24% that day, on the news. Coincident with the deal, Dinesh C. Paliwal was hired as company President and CEO in July 2007, Paliwal was a veteran of the corporate turn-around. During his tenure as president of U. S, on July 1,2008, Sidney Harman was succeeded by Dinesh Paliwal as Chairman of the Board. Soundcraft - mixing consoles Studer - mixing consoles Official website Harman Japan website Harman Korea website Harman Connected Services
36.
Telematics
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Telematics is an interdisciplinary field that encompasses telecommunications, vehicular technologies, road transportation, road safety, electrical engineering, and computer science. Though typically applied in the testing of flight objects, telemetry has multiple other uses, Telematics is a translation of the French word télématique which was first coined by Simon Nora and Alain Minc in a 1978 report to the French government on the computerization of society. It referred to the transfer of information over telecommunications and was a merging of the French words telecommunications, the original broad meaning of telematics continues to be used in academic fields but in commerce it now generally means vehicle telematics. GPS navigation, integrated hands-free cell phones, wireless safety communications, the science of telecommunications and informatics applied in wireless technologies and computational systems. Vehicle telematics can help improve the efficiency of an organization, practical applications include, Vehicle tracking is monitoring the location, movements, status and behaviour of a vehicle or fleet of vehicles. This is achieved through a combination of a GPS receiver and a device installed in each vehicle, communicating with the user. The data is turned into information by management reporting tools in conjunction with a display on computerised mapping software. Vehicle tracking systems may also use odometry or dead reckoning as an alternative or complementary means of navigation, GPS tracking is usually accurate to around 10–20 metres, but the European Space Agency has developed the EGNOS technology to provide accuracy to 1.5 metres. An increasingly sophisticated array of sensors, many incorporating RFID technology, is being used to ensure the cold chain, benefits of this approach include increased security and the possibility to reschedule the container transport movements based on accurate information about its location. According to Berg Insight the installed base of tracking units in the shipping container segment reached 190,000 at the end of 2013. Growing at an annual growth rate of 38.2 percent. Fleet management is the management of a companys fleet, Fleet management includes the management of ships and or motor vehicles such as cars, vans and trucks. These functions can either be dealt with by an in-house Fleet Management department or an outsourced Fleet Management provider, the Association of Equipment Management Professionals developed the industrys first telematics standard. This committee consisted of developers provided by the Caterpillar/Trimble joint venture known as Virtual Site Solutions, Volvo CE and this group worked from February 2009 through September 2010 to develop the industrys first standard for the delivery of telematics data. The result, the AEMP Telematics Data Standard V1.1 was released in 2010, komatsu, Topcon, and others are finishing beta testing and have indicated that they will be able to support customers before the end of 2010. The AEMPs telematics data standard was developed to allow end users to integrate key telematics data into their fleet management reporting systems. As such, the standard was intended to facilitate importation of these data elements into enterprise software systems such as those used by many medium to large construction contractors. This option was cumbersome and labor-intensive, a second option was for the end user to develop an API, or program, to integrate the data from each telematics provider into his or her database
37.
Car
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A car is a wheeled, self-powered motor vehicle used for transportation and a product of the automotive industry. The year 1886 is regarded as the year of the modern car. In that year, German inventor Karl Benz built the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, cars did not become widely available until the early 20th century. One of the first cars that was accessible to the masses was the 1908 Model T, an American car manufactured by the Ford Motor Company. Cars were rapidly adopted in the United States of America, where they replaced animal-drawn carriages and carts, cars are equipped with controls used for driving, parking, passenger comfort and safety, and controlling a variety of lights. Over the decades, additional features and controls have been added to vehicles, examples include rear reversing cameras, air conditioning, navigation systems, and in car entertainment. Most cars in use in the 2010s are propelled by a combustion engine. Both fuels cause air pollution and are blamed for contributing to climate change. Vehicles using alternative fuels such as ethanol flexible-fuel vehicles and natural gas vehicles are also gaining popularity in some countries, electric cars, which were invented early in the history of the car, began to become commercially available in 2008. There are costs and benefits to car use, the costs of car usage include the cost of, acquiring the vehicle, interest payments, repairs and auto maintenance, fuel, depreciation, driving time, parking fees, taxes, and insurance. The costs to society of car use include, maintaining roads, land use, road congestion, air pollution, public health, health care, road traffic accidents are the largest cause of injury-related deaths worldwide. The benefits may include transportation, mobility, independence. The ability for humans to move flexibly from place to place has far-reaching implications for the nature of societies and it was estimated in 2010 that the number of cars had risen to over 1 billion vehicles, up from the 500 million of 1986. The numbers are increasing rapidly, especially in China, India, the word car is believed to originate from the Latin word carrus or carrum, or the Middle English word carre. In turn, these originated from the Gaulish word karros, the Gaulish language was a branch of the Brythoic language which also used the word Karr, the Brythonig language evolved into Welsh where Car llusg and car rhyfel still survive. It originally referred to any wheeled vehicle, such as a cart, carriage. Motor car is attested from 1895, and is the formal name for cars in British English. Autocar is a variant that is attested from 1895
38.
Middleware
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Middleware is computer software that provides services to software applications beyond those available from the operating system. It can be described as software glue, middleware makes it easier for software developers to implement communication and input/output, so they can focus on the specific purpose of their application. The term is most commonly used for software that enables communication, an IETF workshop in 2000 defined middleware as those services found above the transport layer set of services but below the application environment. In this more specific sense middleware can be described as the dash in client-server, middleware includes web servers, application servers, content management systems, and similar tools that support application development and delivery. ObjectWeb defines middleware as, The software layer that lies between the system and applications on each side of a distributed computing system in a network. Services that can be regarded as middleware include enterprise application integration, data integration, message oriented middleware, object request brokers, database access services are often characterised as middleware. Some of them are language specific implementations and support heterogeneous features, examples of database-oriented middleware include ODBC, JDBC and transaction processing monitors. Distributed computing system middleware can loosely be divided into two categories—those that provide services and those that perform in machine-time. This latter middleware is somewhat standardized through the Service Availability Forum and is used in complex, embedded systems within telecom, defense. The term middleware is used in contexts as well. Middleware is sometimes used in a sense to a software driver. The mer software distribution is a middleware, it lacks the Linux kernel, mer is targeted at hardware vendors mobile-oriented operating systems. The Android operating system uses the Linux kernel at its core, in addition, Android provides a middleware layer including libraries that provide services such as data storage, screen display, multimedia, and web browsing. Because the middleware libraries are compiled to machine language, services execute quickly, middleware libraries also implement device-specific functions, so applications and the application framework need not concern themselves with variations between various Android devices. Androids middleware layer also contains the Dalvik virtual machine and its core Java application libraries, game engine software such as Gamebryo and Renderware are sometimes described as middleware, because they provide many services to simplify game development. In simulation technology, middleware is used in the context of the high level architecture that applies to many distributed simulations. It is a layer of software that lies between the code and the run-time infrastructure. Wireless networking developers can use middleware to meet the associated with a wireless sensor network
39.
Cisco Systems
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Through its numerous acquired subsidiaries, such as OpenDNS, WebEx, and Jasper, Cisco specializes into specific tech markets, such as Internet of Things, domain security, and energy management. Cisco is the largest networking company in the world, the stock was added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average on June 8,2009, and is also included in the S&P500 Index, the Russell 1000 Index, NASDAQ-100 Index and the Russell 1000 Growth Stock Index. By the time the company went public in 1990, when it was listed on the NASDAQ, Cisco was the most valuable company in the world by 2000, with a more than $500 billion market capitalization. Despite founding Cisco in 1984, Bosack, along with Kirk Lougheed, continued to work at Stanford on Ciscos first product and it consisted of exact replicas of Stanfords Blue Box router and a stolen copy of the Universitys multiple-protocol router software. The software was written some years earlier at Stanford medical school by research engineer William Yeager. Bosack and Lougheed adapted it into what became the foundation for Cisco IOS, in 1987, Stanford licensed the router software and two computer boards to Cisco. In addition to Bosack, Lerner and Lougheed, Greg Satz, a programmer, and Richard Troiano, the companys first CEO was Bill Graves, who held the position from 1987 to 1988. In 1988, John Morgridge was appointed CEO, the name Cisco was derived from the city name San Francisco, which is why the companys engineers insisted on using the lower case cisco in its early years. The logo is intended to depict the two towers of the Golden Gate Bridge, on February 16,1990, Cisco Systems went public and was listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange. On August 28,1990, Lerner was fired, upon hearing the news, her husband Bosack resigned in protest. The couple walked away from Cisco with $170 million, 70% of which was committed to their own charity, although Cisco was not the first company to develop and sell dedicated network nodes, it was one of the first to sell commercially successful routers supporting multiple network protocols. Classical, CPU-based architecture of early Cisco devices coupled with flexibility of operating system IOS allowed for keeping up with evolving technology needs by means of frequent software upgrades, some popular models of that time managed to stay in production for almost a decade virtually unchanged—a rarity in high-tech industry. This philosophy dominated the companys product lines throughout the 1990s, in 1995, John Morgridge was succeeded by John Chambers. The phenomenal growth of the Internet in mid-to-late 1990s quickly changed the telecom landspe, as the Internet Protocol became widely adopted, the importance of multi-protocol routing declined. In late March 2000, at the height of the bubble, Cisco became the most valuable company in the world. In July 2014, with a cap of about US$129 billion. One of them, Juniper Networks, shipped their first product in 1999, Cisco answered the challenge with homegrown ASICs and fast processing cards for GSR routers and Catalyst 6500 switches. In 2004, Cisco also started migration to new high-end hardware CRS-1, as part of a massive rebranding campaign in 2006, Cisco Systems adopted the shortened name Cisco and created The Human Network advertising campaign
