1.
Naamloze vennootschap
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Naamloze vennootschap is a legal structure of a company conformable law in in the Netherlands, Belgium, Indonesia, and Suriname. The company is owned by shareholders, and the shares are not registered to certain owners. The phrase literally means nameless partnership or anonymous venture and comes from the fact that the partners are not directly known and this is in contrast to the term for a private limited company, which is called besloten vennootschap. SE – additional legal structure of a company available in the European Union S. p. A Types of companies
2.
Ticker symbol
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A ticker symbol or stock symbol is an abbreviation used to uniquely identify publicly traded shares of a particular stock on a particular stock market. A stock symbol may consist of letters, numbers or a combination of both, ticker symbol refers to the symbols that were printed on the ticker tape of a ticker tape machine. Stock symbols are unique identifiers assigned to each security traded on a particular market, for example, AAPL is for Apple Inc. OODH is for Orion DHC, Inc. and HD is for Home Depot, a stock symbol can consist of letters, numbers, or a combination of both, and is a way to uniquely identify that stock. The symbols were kept as short as possible to reduce the number of characters that had to be printed on the ticker tape, the allocation of symbols and formatting convention is specific to each stock exchange. In the US, for example, stock tickers are typically between 1 and 4 letters and represent the name where possible. In Europe, most exchanges use three-letter codes, for example Dutch consumer goods company Unilever traded on the Amsterdam Euronext exchange has the symbol UNA, while in Asia, numbers are often used as stock tickers to avoid issues for international investors when using non-Latin scripts. For example, the bank HSBCs stock traded on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange has the ticker symbol 0005, symbols sometimes change to reflect mergers. Prior to the 1999 merger with Mobil Oil, Exxon used a spelling of the company XON as its ticker symbol. The symbol of the firm after the merger was XOM, symbols are sometimes reused, in the US the single-letter symbols are particularly sought after as vanity symbols. For example, since Mar 2008 Visa Inc. has used the symbol V that had previously used by Vivendi which had delisted. To fully qualify a stock, both the ticker and the exchange or country of listing needs to be known, on many systems both must be specified to uniquely identify the security. This is often done by appending the location or exchange code to the ticker, although stock tickers identify a security, they are exchange dependent, generally limited to stocks and can change. These limitations have led to the development of other codes in financial markets to identify securities for settlement purposes, the most prevalent of these is the International Securities Identifying Number. An ISIN uniquely identifies a security and its structure is defined in ISO6166, Securities for which ISINs are issued include bonds, commercial paper, stocks, and warrants. The ISIN identifies the security, not the exchange on which it trades, for instance, Daimler AG stock trades on twenty-two different stock exchanges worldwide, and is priced in five different currencies, it has the same ISIN on each, though not the same ticker symbol. ISIN cannot specify a particular trade in this case, and another identifier, following the introduction of the Sequence trading platform in 1996, EPICs were renamed Tradable Instrument Display Mnemonics, but they are still widely referred to as EPICs. Stocks can also be identified using their SEDOL number or their ISIN, in the United States, modern letter-only ticker symbols were developed by Standard & Poors to bring a national standard to investing
3.
Borsa Italiana
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Borsa Italiana S. p. A. based in Milan, is Italys stock exchange. It manages and organises domestic market, regulating procedures for admission and listing of companies and intermediaries, following exchange privatisation in 1997, the Company was established and became effective since January 2,1998. It is now a subsidiary of the London Stock Exchange Group plc since June 23,2007, in 2015, overall capitalisation for listed company on Borsa Italiana was worth €465Bln, representing % of Italian GDP. Borsa Italiana is also known as Piazza Affari, after the city square of Milan where its headquarters is located. Borsa Italiana is chaired by Andrea Sironi while Raffaele Jerusalmi serves as CEO, the two, moreover, are also both members of the Board of Directors of London Stock Exchange Group. The Borsa di commercio di Milano was established by Eugène de Beauharnais, viceroy of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, in March 2016, the London Stock Exchange Group announced it had agree to merge in an all-stock deal with Deutsche Borse. Borsa Italiana acts as a management firm operating with autonomy. It organises and manages the domestic market along with Italian. Among its leading tasks, Borsa Italiana supervises listed companies, defining rules for admission and listings, major trading markets for Borsa Italiana are, MTA, the leading equity market, which is devoted to mid and large-size companies
4.
Euronext
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Euronext NV is a European stock exchange seated in Amsterdam, Brussels, London, Lisbon and Paris. In addition to cash and derivatives markets, the Euronext group provides listing market data, market solutions, custody and its total product offering includes equities, exchange-traded funds, warrants and certificates, bonds, derivatives, commodities and indices. As of 2017, Euronext was the largest in continental Europe with 1,300 issuers representing a €3 trillion market capitalization, Euronext merged with NYSE Group, Inc. on April 4,2007 to form NYSE Euronext. On November 13,2013 Intercontinental Exchange, completed acquisition of NYSE Euronext, in June 2014 Euronext completed an initial public offering making it a standalone company again. In December 2001, Euronext acquired the shares of the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange, in 2002 the group merged with the Portuguese stock exchange Bolsa de Valores de Lisboa e Porto, renamed Euronext Lisbon. In 2001, Euronext became a company itself after completing its Initial Public Offering. Despite this, NYSE Group and Euronext penned an agreement, subject to shareholder vote. The initial regulatory response by SEC chief Christopher Cox was positive, the new firm, tentatively dubbed NYSE Euronext, would be headquartered in New York City, with European operations and its trading platform run out of Paris. In addition, the two hoped to add Borsa Italiana into the grouping. Deutsche Börse dropped out of the bidding for Euronext on 15 November 2006, a run-up of NYSE Groups stock price in late 2006 made the offering far more attractive to Euronexts shareholders. On 19 December 2006, Euronext shareholders approved the transaction with 98. 2% of the vote, only 1. 8% voted in favour of the Deutsche Börse offer. Jean-François Théodore, the Chief Executive Officer of Euronext, stated that expected the transaction to close within three or four months. Some of the agencies with jurisdiction over the merger had already given approval. NYSE Group shareholders gave their approval on 20 December 2006, the merger was completed on 4 April 2007, forming NYSE Euronext. In 2008 and 2009 Deutsche Börse made two attempts to merge with NYSE Euronext. Both attempts did not enter into advanced steps of merger, in 2011, Deutsche Börse and NYSE Euronext confirmed that they were in advanced merger talks. Such a merger would create the largest exchange in history, the deal was approved by shareholders of NYSE Euronext on July 7,2011, and Deutsche Börse on July 15,2011 and won the antitrust approved by the US regulators on December 22,2011. Deutsche Börse unsuccessfully appealed this decision, in 2012, Euronext announced the creation of Euronext London to offer listing facilities in the UK
5.
New York Stock Exchange
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The New York Stock Exchange, is an American stock exchange located at 11 Wall Street, Lower Manhattan, New York City, New York. It is by far the worlds largest stock exchange by market capitalization of its companies at US$19.3 trillion as of June 2016. The average daily trading value was approximately US$169 billion in 2013, the NYSE trading floor is located at 11 Wall Street and is composed of 21 rooms used for the facilitation of trading. A fifth trading room, located at 30 Broad Street, was closed in February 2007, the main building and the 11 Wall Street building were designated National Historic Landmarks in 1978. The NYSE is owned by Intercontinental Exchange, an American holding company that it also lists, previously, it was part of NYSE Euronext, which was formed by the NYSEs 2007 merger with Euronext. NYSE and Euronext now operate as divisions of Intercontinental Exchange, the NYSE has been the subject of several lawsuits regarding fraud or breach of duty and in 2004 was sued by its former CEO for breach of contract and defamation. The earliest recorded organization of securities trading in New York among brokers directly dealing with each other can be traced to the Buttonwood Agreement, previously securities exchange had been intermediated by the auctioneers who also conducted more mundane auctions of commodities such as wheat and tobacco. In 1817 the stockbrokers of New York operating under the Buttonwood Agreement instituted new reforms, after sending a delegation to Philadelphia to observe the organization of their board of brokers, restrictions on manipulative trading were adopted as well as formal organs of governance. Several locations were used between 1817 and 1865, when the present location was adopted, the invention of the electrical telegraph consolidated markets, and New Yorks market rose to dominance over Philadelphia after weathering some market panics better than other alternatives. The Civil War greatly stimulated speculative securities trading in New York, by 1869 membership had to be capped, and has been sporadically increased since. The latter half of the century saw rapid growth in securities trading. Securities trade in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was prone to panics. The Stock Exchange Luncheon Club was situated on the floor from 1898 until its closure in 2006. The main building, located at 18 Broad Street, between the corners of Wall Street and Exchange Place, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1978, as was the 11 Wall Street building. The NYSE announced its plans to merge with Archipelago on April 21,2005, NYSEs governing board voted to merge with rival Archipelago on December 6,2005, and became a for-profit, public company. It began trading under the name NYSE Group on March 8,2006, Wall Street is the leading US money center for international financial activities and the foremost US location for the conduct of wholesale financial services. It comprises a matrix of wholesale financial sectors, financial markets, financial institutions, the principal sectors are securities industry, commercial banking, asset management, and insurance. Prior to the acquisition of NYSE Euronext by the ICE in 2013, Marsh Carter was the Chairman of the NYSE, presently, the chairman is Jeffrey Sprecher
6.
CAC 40
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The CAC40 is a benchmark French stock market index. The index represents a measure of the 40 most significant values among the 100 highest market caps on the Euronext Paris. It is one of the national indices of the pan-European stock exchange group Euronext alongside Brussels BEL20, Lisbons PSI-20. The CAC40 takes its name from the Paris Bourses early automation system Cotation Assistée en Continu and its base value of 1,000 was set on 31 December 1987, equivalent to a market capitalisation of 370,437,433,957.70 French francs. In common with many major world markets, its all-time high to date was reached at the peak of the dot-com bubble in September 2000. On 1 December 2003, the weighting system switched from being dependent on total market capitalisation to free float market cap only. The CAC40 index composition is reviewed quarterly by an independent Index Steering Committee, if any changes are made, they are effected a minimum of two weeks after the review meeting. At each review date, the companies listed on Euronext Paris are ranked according to free float market capitalisation, if a company has more than one class of shares traded on the exchange, only the most actively traded of these will be accepted into the index. The CAC40 is a capitalization-weighted index, the number of shares issued of a company is reviewed quarterly, on the third Friday of March, June, September and December. Since December 2003, the weightings of companies in the index have been capped at 15% at each quarterly index review. A capping factor is used to limit the weights to 15%, although the CAC40 is almost exclusively composed of French-domiciled companies, about 45% of its listed shares are owned by foreign investors, more than any other main European index. German, Japanese, American and British investors are amongst the most significant holders of CAC40 shares and this large percentage is due to the fact that CAC40 companies are more international, or multinational, than any other European market. CAC40 companies conduct over two-thirds of their business and employ over two-thirds of their workforce outside France, the index consists of the following companies as of the quarterly update effective 1st December 2016. The most recent composition can be found on euronext website, category, CAC40 CAC Next 20 List of French companies Official Euronext page for CAC40 Index FCHI, Summary for CAC40 INDEX - Yahoo. Finance Thomson Reuters page for. FCHI Bloomberg page for CAC, IND CAC40 on Investing. com Contains real time overview, components, historical data, live charts, technichal analysis and related news
7.
Semiconductor
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Semiconductors are crystalline or amorphous solids with distinct electrical characteristics. They are of high electrical resistance — higher than typical resistance materials and their resistance decreases as their temperature increases, which is behavior opposite to that of a metal. The behavior of charge carriers which include electrons, ions and electron holes at these junctions is the basis of diodes, transistors and all modern electronics. Semiconductor devices can display a range of properties such as passing current more easily in one direction than the other, showing variable resistance. The modern understanding of the properties of a semiconductor relies on quantum physics to explain the movement of carriers in a crystal lattice. Doping greatly increases the number of carriers within the crystal. When a doped semiconductor contains mostly free holes it is called p-type, the semiconductor materials used in electronic devices are doped under precise conditions to control the concentration and regions of p- and n-type dopants. A single semiconductor crystal can have many p- and n-type regions, although some pure elements and many compounds display semiconductor properties, silicon, germanium, and compounds of gallium are the most widely used in electronic devices. Elements near the so-called metalloid staircase, where the metalloids are located on the table, are usually used as semiconductors. Some of the properties of materials were observed throughout the mid 19th. The first practical application of semiconductors in electronics was the 1904 development of the Cats-whisker detector, developments in quantum physics in turn allowed the development of the transistor in 1947 and the integrated circuit in 1958. There are several developed techniques that allow semiconducting materials to behave like conducting materials and these modifications have two outcomes, n-type and p-type. These refer to the excess or shortage of electrons, respectively, an unbalanced number of electrons would cause a current to flow through the material. Heterojunctions Heterojunctions occur when two differently doped semiconducting materials are joined together, for example, a configuration could consist of p-doped and n-doped germanium. This results in an exchange of electrons and holes between the differently doped semiconducting materials, the n-doped germanium would have an excess of electrons, and the p-doped germanium would have an excess of holes. The transfer occurs until equilibrium is reached by a process called recombination, a product of this process is charged ions, which result in an electric field. Excited Electrons A difference in electric potential on a material would cause it to leave thermal equilibrium. This introduces electrons and holes to the system, which interact via a process called ambipolar diffusion, whenever thermal equilibrium is disturbed in a semiconducting material, the amount of holes and electrons changes
8.
Geneva
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Geneva is the second most populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandy, the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Situated where the Rhône exits Lake Geneva, it is the capital of the Republic, the municipality has a population of 198,072, and the canton has 484,736 residents. In 2014, the compact agglomération du Grand Genève had 946,000 inhabitants in 212 communities in both Switzerland and France, within Swiss territory, the commuter area named Métropole lémanique contains a population of 1.25 million. This area is essentially spread east from Geneva towards the Riviera area and north-east towards Yverdon-les-Bains, Geneva is the city that hosts the highest number of international organizations in the world. It is also the place where the Geneva Conventions were signed, Geneva was ranked as the worlds ninth most important financial centre for competitiveness by the Global Financial Centres Index, ahead of Frankfurt, and third in Europe behind London and Zürich. A2009 survey by Mercer found that Geneva has the third-highest quality of life of any city in the world, the city has been referred to as the worlds most compact metropolis and the Peace Capital. In 2009 and 2011, Geneva was ranked as, respectively, the city was mentioned in Latin texts, by Caesar, with the spelling Genava, probably from a Celtic toponym *genawa- from the stem *genu-, in the sense of a bending river or estuary. The medieval county of Geneva in Middle Latin was known as pagus major Genevensis or Comitatus Genevensis, the name takes various forms in modern languages, Geneva /dʒᵻˈniːvə/ in English, French, Genève, German, Genf, Italian, Ginevra, and Romansh, Genevra. The city in origin shares its name, *genawa estuary, with the Italian port city of Genoa, Geneva was an Allobrogian border town, fortified against the Helvetii tribe, when the Romans took it in 121 BC. It became Christian under the Late Roman Empire, and acquired its first bishop in the 5th century, having been connected to the bishopric of Vienne in the 4th. In the Middle Ages, Geneva was ruled by a count under the Holy Roman Empire until the late 14th century, around this time the House of Savoy came to dominate the city. In the 15th century, a republican government emerged with the creation of the Grand Council. In 1541, with Protestantism in the ascendancy, John Calvin, by the 18th century, however, Geneva had come under the influence of Catholic France, which cultivated the city as its own. France also tended to be at odds with the ordinary townsfolk, in 1798, revolutionary France under the Directory annexed Geneva. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, on 1 June 1814, in 1907, the separation of Church and State was adopted. Geneva flourished in the 19th and 20th centuries, becoming the seat of international organizations. Geneva is located at 46°12 North, 6°09 East, at the end of Lake Geneva. It is surrounded by two chains, the Alps and the Jura
9.
Didier Lombard
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Didier Lombard is a French businessman. Between February 2005 and March 2010 he was Chairman and CEO of France Télécom, in 2010 he resigned as CEO, retaining the chairmanship. He is a graduate of the École Polytechnique and the Télécom Paris, didier Lombard, Google, Apple et Nokia nous prennent au sérieux
10.
Chair (official)
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The chairman is the highest officer of an organized group such as a board, a committee, or a deliberative assembly. The person holding the office is elected or appointed by the members of the group. The chair presides over meetings of the group and conducts its business in an orderly fashion. When the group is not in session, the officers duties include acting as its head, its representative to the outside world. In some organizations, this position is called president, in others, where a board appoints a president. Other terms sometimes used for the office and its holder include chair, chairperson, chairwoman, presiding officer, president, moderator, facilitator, the chairman of a parliamentary chamber is often called the speaker. The term chair is used in lieu of chairman, in response to criticisms that using chairman is sexist. In his 1992 State of the Union address, then-U. S, president George H. W. Bush used chairman for men and chair for women. A1994 Canadian study found the Toronto Star newspaper referring to most presiding men as chairman, the Chronicle of Higher Education uses chairman for men and chairperson for women. An analysis of the British National Corpus found chairman used 1,142 times, chairperson 130 times, the National Association of Parliamentarians does not approve using chairperson. In World Schools Style debating, male chairs are called Mr. Chairman, the FranklinCovey Style Guide for Business and Technical Communication, as well as the American Psychological Association style guide, advocate using chair or chairperson, rather than chairman. The Oxford Dictionary of American Usage and Style suggests that the forms are gaining ground. It advocates using chair to refer both to men and to women, the word chair can refer to the place from which the holder of the office presides, whether on a chair, at a lectern, or elsewhere. During meetings, the person presiding is said to be in the chair and is referred to as the chair. Major dictionaries state that the word derives from chair and man, some authorities, however, including Riddicks Rules of Procedure, suggest that the second part of chairman derives from the Latin manus, and thus claim gender-neutrality for the word. Vladimir Lenin, for example, officially functioned as the head of Soviet Russia not as tsar or as president, note in particular the popular standard method for referring to Mao Zedong, Chairman Mao. In the absence of the chairman and vice chairman, groups sometimes elect a chairman pro tempore to fill the role for a single meeting. In some organizations that have titles, deputy chairman ranks higher than vice chairman, as there are often multiple vice chairs
11.
Supervisory board
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Corporate governance varies between countries, especially regarding the board system. There are countries that have a one-tier board system and there are others that have a two-tier board system like Germany, in a one-tier board, all the directors form one board, called the board of directors. In a two-tier board there is a board and a separate supervisory board. German corporation law, the Aktiengesetz, requires all companies to have two boards, a management board called a Vorstand and a supervisory board called an Aufsichtsrat. In Germany the supervisory board of corporations is composed of 20 members,10 of whom are elected by the shareholders. The supervisory board oversees and appoints the members of the management board, when a German company has between 500-2,000 employees, the minimum of members a board can consist of is three, and the maximum is 21. The number of members has to be divisible by three, as stated in the law, in such companies, the workers select one-third of the supervisory board. When it comes to internal elections the chairman of supervisory board, the supervisory board, in theory, is intended to provide a monitoring role. However, the appointment of board members has not been a transparent process and has therefore led to inefficient monitoring. The discussion about whether a one-tier or a two-tier board system leads to better corporate governance is ongoing in Germany and many other countries, improvements in corporate governance are often the result of shareholders holding boards of companies in which they invest to account. A limited liability company, which has relatively less shareholders or is relatively small in scale, may have 1 or 2 supervisors, the board of supervisors shall have one chairman, who shall be elected by half or more of all the supervisors. The chairman of the board of supervisors shall convene and preside over the meetings of the board of supervisors, no director or senior manager may concurrently work as a supervisor. Every term of office of the supervisors shall be 3 years, the supervisors may, after the expiry of their term of office, hold a consecutive term upon re-election. The supervisors may attend the meetings of the board of directors as non-voting delegates, if the board of supervisors or supervisor of the company with no board of directors finds that the company is running abnormally, it may make investigations. Where necessary, it may hire a firm to help it. The board of supervisors shall hold meetings at least once a year, the supervisors may propose to hold temporary meetings of the board of supervisors. The discussion methods and voting procedures of the board of supervisors shall be prescribed in the articles of association, the resolution of the board of supervisors shall be adopted by half or more of the supervisors. The board of supervisors shall make records for the resolutions on the matter it discusses, the expenses necessary for the board of supervisors or the supervisor of a company with no board of supervisors to perform its duties shall be borne by the company
12.
Integrated circuit
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An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece of semiconductor material, normally silicon. The ICs mass production capability, reliability and building-block approach to circuit design ensured the rapid adoption of standardized ICs in place of using discrete transistors. ICs are now used in all electronic equipment and have revolutionized the world of electronics. Computers, mobile phones, and other home appliances are now inextricable parts of the structure of modern societies, made possible by the small size. These advances, roughly following Moores law, allow a computer chip of 2016 to have millions of times the capacity, ICs have two main advantages over discrete circuits, cost and performance. Cost is low because the chips, with all their components, are printed as a unit by photolithography rather than being constructed one transistor at a time, furthermore, packaged ICs use much less material than discrete circuits. Performance is high because the ICs components switch quickly and consume little power because of their small size, the main disadvantage of ICs is the high cost to design them and fabricate the required photomasks. This high initial cost means ICs are only practical when high production volumes are anticipated, Circuits meeting this definition can be constructed using many different technologies, including thin-film transistor, thick film technology, or hybrid integrated circuit. However, in general usage integrated circuit has come to refer to the single-piece circuit construction originally known as a integrated circuit. Jacobi disclosed small and cheap hearing aids as typical industrial applications of his patent, an immediate commercial use of his patent has not been reported. The idea of the circuit was conceived by Geoffrey Dummer. Dummer presented the idea to the public at the Symposium on Progress in Quality Electronic Components in Washington and he gave many symposia publicly to propagate his ideas, and unsuccessfully attempted to build such a circuit in 1956. A precursor idea to the IC was to create small ceramic squares, Components could then be integrated and wired into a bidimensional or tridimensional compact grid. This idea, which seemed very promising in 1957, was proposed to the US Army by Jack Kilby, however, as the project was gaining momentum, Kilby came up with a new, revolutionary design, the IC. In his patent application of 6 February 1959, Kilby described his new device as a body of semiconductor material … wherein all the components of the circuit are completely integrated. The first customer for the new invention was the US Air Force, Kilby won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit. His work was named an IEEE Milestone in 2009, half a year after Kilby, Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor developed his own idea of an integrated circuit that solved many practical problems Kilbys had not. Noyces design was made of silicon, whereas Kilbys chip was made of germanium, Noyce credited Kurt Lehovec of Sprague Electric for the principle of p–n junction isolation, a key concept behind the IC
13.
Computer memory
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In computing, memory refers to the computer hardware devices involved to store information for immediate use in a computer, it is synonymous with the term primary storage. Computer memory operates at a speed, for example random-access memory, as a distinction from storage that provides slow-to-access program and data storage. If needed, contents of the memory can be transferred to secondary storage. An archaic synonym for memory is store, there are two main kinds of semiconductor memory, volatile and non-volatile. Examples of non-volatile memory are flash memory and ROM, PROM, EPROM and EEPROM memory, most semiconductor memory is organized into memory cells or bistable flip-flops, each storing one bit. Flash memory organization includes both one bit per cell and multiple bits per cell. The memory cells are grouped into words of fixed word length, each word can be accessed by a binary address of N bit, making it possible to store 2 raised by N words in the memory. This implies that processor registers normally are not considered as memory, since they only store one word, typical secondary storage devices are hard disk drives and solid-state drives. In the early 1940s, memory technology oftenly permit a capacity of a few bytes, the next significant advance in computer memory came with acoustic delay line memory, developed by J. Presper Eckert in the early 1940s. Delay line memory would be limited to a capacity of up to a few hundred thousand bits to remain efficient, two alternatives to the delay line, the Williams tube and Selectron tube, originated in 1946, both using electron beams in glass tubes as means of storage. Using cathode ray tubes, Fred Williams would invent the Williams tube, the Williams tube would prove more capacious than the Selectron tube and less expensive. The Williams tube would prove to be frustratingly sensitive to environmental disturbances. Efforts began in the late 1940s to find non-volatile memory, jay Forrester, Jan A. Rajchman and An Wang developed magnetic core memory, which allowed for recall of memory after power loss. Magnetic core memory would become the dominant form of memory until the development of transistor-based memory in the late 1960s, developments in technology and economies of scale have made possible so-called Very Large Memory computers. The term memory when used with reference to computers generally refers to Random Access Memory or RAM, volatile memory is computer memory that requires power to maintain the stored information. Most modern semiconductor volatile memory is either static RAM or dynamic RAM, SRAM retains its contents as long as the power is connected and is easy for interfacing, but uses six transistors per bit. SRAM is not worthwhile for desktop system memory, where DRAM dominates, SRAM is commonplace in small embedded systems, which might only need tens of kilobytes or less. Forthcoming volatile memory technologies that aim at replacing or competing with SRAM and DRAM include Z-RAM and A-RAM, non-volatile memory is computer memory that can retain the stored information even when not powered
14.
EEPROM
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EEPROMs are organized as arrays of floating-gate transistors. EEPROMs can be programmed and erased in-circuit, by applying special programming signals, originally, EEPROMs were limited to single byte operations which made them slower, but modern EEPROMs allow multi-byte page operations. It also has a life for erasing and reprogramming, now reaching a million operations in modern EEPROMs. In an EEPROM that is frequently reprogrammed while the computer is in use, unlike most other kinds of non-volatile memory, an EEPROM typically allows bytes to be read, erased, and re-written individually. Eli Harari at Hughes Aircraft invented the EEPROM in 1977 utilising Fowler-Nordheim tunneling through a floating gate. Hughes went on to produce the first EEPROM devices, in 1978, George Perlegos at Intel developed the Intel 2816, which was built on earlier EPROM technology, but used a thin gate oxide layer enabling the chip to erase its own bits without a UV source. Perlegos and others later left Intel to form Seeq Technology, which used on-device charge pumps to supply the high voltages necessary for programming EEPROMs, EEPROM devices use a serial or parallel interface for data input/output. The common serial interfaces are SPI, I²C, Microwire, UNI/O and these use from 1 to 4 device pins and allow devices to use packages with 8-pins or less. A typical EEPROM serial protocol consists of three phases, OP-Code Phase, Address Phase and Data Phase. The OP-Code is usually the first 8-bits input to the input pin of the EEPROM device, followed by 8 to 24 bits of addressing depending on the depth of the device. Each EEPROM device typically has its own set of OP-Code instructions mapped to different functions, most devices have chip select and write protect pins. Some microcontrollers also have integrated parallel EEPROM, EEPROM memory is used to enable features in other types of products that are not strictly memory products. It was also used on game cartridges to save game progress and configurations. There are two limitations of stored information, endurance, and data retention, during rewrites, the gate oxide in the floating-gate transistors gradually accumulates trapped electrons. The electric field of the trapped electrons adds to the electrons in the floating gate, after sufficient number of rewrite cycles, the difference becomes too small to be recognizable, the cell is stuck in programmed state, and endurance failure occurs. The manufacturers usually specify the number of rewrites being 1 million or more. During storage, the electrons injected into the gate may drift through the insulator, especially at increased temperature. The manufacturers usually guarantee data retention of 10 years or more, flash memory is a later form of EEPROM
15.
Microcontroller
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A microcontroller is a small computer on a single integrated circuit. In modern terminology, it is a system on a chip or SoC, a microcontroller contains one or more CPUs along with memory and programmable input/output peripherals. Program memory in the form of Ferroelectric RAM, NOR flash or OTP ROM is also included on chip. Microcontrollers are designed for embedded applications, in contrast to the used in personal computers or other general purpose applications consisting of various discrete chips. Mixed signal microcontrollers are common, integrating analog components needed to control non-digital electronic systems, some microcontrollers may use four-bit words and operate at frequencies as low as 4 kHz, for low power consumption. Other microcontrollers may serve performance-critical roles, where they may need to act more like a signal processor, with higher clock speeds. The first microprocessor was the 4-bit Intel 4004 released in 1971, with the Intel 8008, however, both processors required external chips to implement a working system, raising total system cost, and making it impossible to economically computerize appliances. One book credits TI engineers Gary Boone and Michael Cochran with the creation of the first microcontroller in 1971. The result of their work was the TMS1000, which became available in 1974. It combined read-only memory, read/write memory, processor and clock on one chip and was targeted at embedded systems and it combined RAM and ROM on the same chip. This chip would find its way into one billion PC keyboards. At that time Intels President, Luke J. Valenter, stated that the microcontroller was one of the most successful in the companys history, most microcontrollers at this time had concurrent variants. One had an erasable EPROM program memory, with a transparent quartz window in the lid of the package to allow it to be erased by exposure to ultraviolet light, often used for prototyping. The PROM was of type of memory as the EPROM. The erasable versions required ceramic packages with quartz windows, making them more expensive than the OTP versions. The same year, Atmel introduced the first microcontroller using Flash memory, other companies rapidly followed suit, with both memory types. Cost has plummeted over time, with the cheapest 8-bit microcontrollers being available for under 0.25 USD in quantity in 2009, nowadays microcontrollers are cheap and readily available for hobbyists, with large online communities around certain processors. In the future, MRAM could potentially be used in microcontrollers as it has infinite endurance, in 2002, about 55% of all CPUs sold in the world were 8-bit microcontrollers and microprocessors
16.
Transistor
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A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify or switch electronic signals and electrical power. It is composed of semiconductor material usually with at least three terminals for connection to an external circuit, a voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistors terminals controls the current through another pair of terminals. Because the controlled power can be higher than the controlling power, today, some transistors are packaged individually, but many more are found embedded in integrated circuits. The transistor is the building block of modern electronic devices. Julius Edgar Lilienfeld patented a field-effect transistor in 1926 but it was not possible to construct a working device at that time. The first practically implemented device was a point-contact transistor invented in 1947 by American physicists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, the transistor revolutionized the field of electronics, and paved the way for smaller and cheaper radios, calculators, and computers, among other things. The transistor is on the list of IEEE milestones in electronics, and Bardeen, Brattain, the thermionic triode, a vacuum tube invented in 1907, enabled amplified radio technology and long-distance telephony. The triode, however, was a device that consumed a substantial amount of power. Physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld filed a patent for a transistor in Canada in 1925. Lilienfeld also filed patents in the United States in 1926 and 1928. However, Lilienfeld did not publish any research articles about his devices nor did his patents cite any examples of a working prototype. In 1934, German inventor Oskar Heil patented a device in Europe. Solid State Physics Group leader William Shockley saw the potential in this, the term transistor was coined by John R. Pierce as a contraction of the term transresistance. Instead, what Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley invented in 1947 was the first point-contact transistor, Mataré had previous experience in developing crystal rectifiers from silicon and germanium in the German radar effort during World War II. Using this knowledge, he began researching the phenomenon of interference in 1947, realizing that Bell Labs scientists had already invented the transistor before them, the company rushed to get its transistron into production for amplified use in Frances telephone network. The first bipolar junction transistors were invented by Bell labs William Shockley, on April 12,1950, Bell Labs chemists Gordon Teal and Morgan Sparks had successfully produced a working bipolar NPN junction amplifying germanium transistor. Bell Labs had made this new sandwich transistor discovery announcement, in a release on July 4,1951. The first high-frequency transistor was the surface-barrier germanium transistor developed by Philco in 1953 and these were made by etching depressions into an N-type germanium base from both sides with jets of Indium sulfate until it was a few ten-thousandths of an inch thick
17.
Smartcard
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A smart card, chip card, or integrated circuit card is any pocket-sized card that has embedded integrated circuits. Smart cards are made of plastic, generally polyvinyl chloride, but sometimes polyethylene terephthalate based polyesters, since April 2009, a Japanese company has manufactured reusable financial smart cards made from paper. Smart cards can be either contact or contactless smart card, Smart cards can provide personal identification, authentication, data storage, and application processing. Smart cards may provide strong security authentication for single sign-on within large organizations, in 1968 and 1969 Helmut Gröttrup and Jürgen Dethloff jointly filed patents for the automated chip card. Roland Moreno patented the memory card concept in 1974, an important patent for smart cards with a microprocessor and memory as used today was filed by Jürgen Dethloff in 1976 and granted as USP4105156 in 1978. Three years later, Motorola used this patent in its CP8, at that time, Bull had 1,200 patents related to smart cards. In 2001, Bull sold its CP8 division together with its patents to Schlumberger, in 2006, Axalto and Gemplus, at the time the worlds top two smart card manufacturers, merged and became Gemalto. The first mass use of the cards was as a card for payment in French pay phones. After the Télécarte, microchips were integrated into all French Carte Bleue debit cards in 1992, customers inserted the card into the merchants point of sale terminal, then typed the personal identification number, before the transaction was accepted. Only very limited transactions are processed without a PIN, smart-card-based electronic purse systems store funds on the card so that readers do not need network connectivity. They entered European service in the mid-1990s and they have been common in Germany, Austria, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, UK, Denmark and Portugal. Since the 1990s, smart-cards have been the Subscriber Identity Modules used in European GSM mobile phone equipment, Mobile phones are widely used in Europe, so smart cards have become very common. Europay MasterCard Visa -compliant cards and equipment are widespread, the United States started using the EMV technology in 2014. Historically, in 1993 several international payment companies agreed to develop specifications for debit and credit cards. The original brands were MasterCard, Visa, and Europay, the first version of the EMV system was released in 1994. In 1998 the specifications became stable, eMVcos purpose is to assure the various financial institutions and retailers that the specifications retain backward compatibility with the 1998 version. EMVco upgraded the specifications in 2000 and 2004, EMV compliant cards were first accepted into Malaysia in 2005 and later into United States in 2014. MasterCard was the first company that was allowed to use the technology in the United States, the United States has felt pushed to use the technology because of the increase in identity theft
18.
United States dollar
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The United States dollar is the official currency of the United States and its insular territories per the United States Constitution. It is divided into 100 smaller cent units, the circulating paper money consists of Federal Reserve Notes that are denominated in United States dollars. The U. S. dollar was originally commodity money of silver as enacted by the Coinage Act of 1792 which determined the dollar to be 371 4/16 grain pure or 416 grain standard silver, the currency most used in international transactions, it is the worlds primary reserve currency. Several countries use it as their currency, and in many others it is the de facto currency. Besides the United States, it is used as the sole currency in two British Overseas Territories in the Caribbean, the British Virgin Islands and Turks and Caicos Islands. A few countries use the Federal Reserve Notes for paper money, while the country mints its own coins, or also accepts U. S. coins that can be used as payment in U. S. dollars. After Nixon shock of 1971, USD became fiat currency, Article I, Section 8 of the U. S. Constitution provides that the Congress has the power To coin money, laws implementing this power are currently codified at 31 U. S. C. Section 5112 prescribes the forms in which the United States dollars should be issued and these coins are both designated in Section 5112 as legal tender in payment of debts. The Sacagawea dollar is one example of the copper alloy dollar, the pure silver dollar is known as the American Silver Eagle. Section 5112 also provides for the minting and issuance of other coins and these other coins are more fully described in Coins of the United States dollar. The Constitution provides that a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and that provision of the Constitution is made specific by Section 331 of Title 31 of the United States Code. The sums of money reported in the Statements are currently being expressed in U. S. dollars, the U. S. dollar may therefore be described as the unit of account of the United States. The word dollar is one of the words in the first paragraph of Section 9 of Article I of the Constitution, there, dollars is a reference to the Spanish milled dollar, a coin that had a monetary value of 8 Spanish units of currency, or reales. In 1792 the U. S. Congress passed a Coinage Act, Section 20 of the act provided, That the money of account of the United States shall be expressed in dollars, or units. And that all accounts in the offices and all proceedings in the courts of the United States shall be kept and had in conformity to this regulation. In other words, this act designated the United States dollar as the unit of currency of the United States, unlike the Spanish milled dollar the U. S. dollar is based upon a decimal system of values. Both one-dollar coins and notes are produced today, although the form is significantly more common
19.
Earnings before interest and taxes
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In accounting and finance, earnings before interest and taxes, is a measure of a firms profit that includes all expenses except interest and income tax expenses. It is the difference between operating revenues and operating expenses, when a firm does not have non-operating income, then operating income is sometimes used as a synonym for EBIT and operating profit. To calculate EBIT, expenses are subtracted from revenues, net income is later obtained by subtracting interest and taxes from the result
20.
Net income
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In business, net income is an entitys income minus cost of goods sold, expenses and taxes for an accounting period. In the context of the presentation of financial statements, the IFRS Foundation defines net income as synonymous with profit, net income is a distinct accounting concept from profit but the same as net profit. Net income can also be calculated by adding a companys operating income to non-operating income, net income can be distributed among holders of common stock as a dividend or held by the firm as an addition to retained earnings. As profit and earnings are used synonymously for income, net earnings, often, the term income is substituted for net income, yet this is not preferred due to the possible ambiguity. Net income is called the bottom line because it is typically found on the last line of a companys income statement. The items deducted will typically include tax expense, financing expense, likewise, preferred stock dividends will be subtracted too, though they are not an expense. For a merchandising company, subtracted costs may be the cost of goods sold, sales discounts, for a product company advertising, manufacturing, and design and development costs are included
21.
Asset
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In financial accounting, an asset is an economic resource. Anything tangible or intangible that can be owned or controlled to produce value, simply stated, assets represent value of ownership that can be converted into cash. The balance sheet of a firm records the value of the assets owned by that firm. It covers money and other valuables belonging to an individual or to a business, one can classify assets into two major asset classes, tangible assets and intangible assets. Tangible assets contain various subclasses, including current assets and fixed assets, current assets include inventory, while fixed assets include such items as buildings and equipment. Intangible assets are resources and rights that have a value to the firm because they give the firm some kind of advantage in the marketplace. Examples of intangible assets include goodwill, copyrights, trademarks, patents and computer programs, an asset is a resource controlled by the entity as a result of past events and from which future economic benefits are expected to flow to the entity. One of the most widely accepted accounting definitions of asset is the one used by the International Accounting Standards Board, employees are not considered assets like machinery is, even though they can generate future economic benefits. This is because an entity does not have sufficient control over its employees to satisfy the Frameworks definition of an asset, similarly, in economics an asset is any form in which wealth can be held. The accounting equation is the structure of the balance sheet. It relates assets, liabilities, and owners equity, Assets = Liabilities + Capital Liabilities = Assets − Capital Equity = Assets − Liabilities Assets are listed on the balance sheet. On a companys balance sheet certain divisions are required by generally accepted accounting principles, Assets can be divided into e. g. current assets and fixed assets, often with further subdivisions such as cash, receivables and inventory. Assets are formally controlled and managed within larger organizations via the use of asset tracking tools and these monitor the purchasing, upgrading, servicing, licensing, disposal etc. of both physical and non-physical assets. Current assets are cash and other assets expected to be converted to cash or consumed either in a year or in the operating cycle and these assets are continually turned over in the course of a business during normal business activity. There are 5 major items included into current assets, Cash and cash equivalents – it is the most liquid asset, which includes currency, deposit accounts, short-term investments – include securities bought and held for sale in the near future to generate income on short-term price differences. Receivables – usually reported as net of allowance for non-collectable accounts, inventory – trading these assets is a normal business of a company. The inventory value reported on the sheet is usually the historical cost or fair market value. This is known as the lower of cost or market rule, prepaid expenses – these are expenses paid in cash and recorded as assets before they are used or consumed
22.
Equity (finance)
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In accounting, equity is the difference between the value of the assets and the value of the liabilities of something owed. Equity can be negative if liabilities exceeds assets, shareholders equity represents the equity of a company as divided among shareholders of common or preferred stock. Negative shareholders equity is often referred to as a shareholders deficit, alternatively, equity can also refer to the capital stock of a corporation. The value of the stock depends on the future economic prospects. For a company in liquidation proceedings, the equity is that which remains after all liabilities have been paid, when starting a business, the owners fund the business to finance various operations. Throughout the businesss existence, the equity of the business will be the difference between its assets and debt liabilities, this is the accounting equation, when a business liquidates during bankruptcy, the proceeds from the assets are used to reimburse creditors. The creditors are ranked by priority, with secured creditors being paid first, other creditors being paid next, owners equity is this remaining or residual claim against assets, which is paid only after all other creditors are paid. In such cases where even creditors could not get money to pay their bills. In financial accounting, owners equity consists of the net assets of an entity, net assets is the difference between the total assets and total liabilities. Equity appears on the sheet, one of the four primary financial statements. The assets of an entity can be tangible and intangible items. Intangible assets include such as brand names, copyrights or goodwill. Tangible assets include land, equipment, and cash, issue of new equity in which the firm obtains new capital increases the total shareholders equity. Share repurchases, in which a firm returns money to investors, reducing on the side its financial assets. For practical purposes, share repurchasing is similar to a dividend payment, rather than giving money to all shareholders immediately in the form of a dividend payment, a share repurchase reduces the number of shares outstanding. Dividends paid out to preferred stock owners are considered an expense to be subtracted from net income, sometimes assets bought and held in other countries get translated back into the reporting currency at different exchange rates, resulting in a changed value. When the owners are shareholders, the interest can be called shareholders equity, the remains the same. If all shareholders are in one and the class, they share equally in ownership equity from all perspectives
23.
ST Ericsson
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ST-Ericsson was a multinational manufacturer of wireless products and semiconductors, supplying to mobile device manufacturers. ST-Ericsson was a 50/50 joint venture of Ericsson and STMicroelectronics established on 3 February 2009, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, it was a fabless company, outsourcing semiconductor manufacturing to foundry companies. ST-Ericsson was formed on 3 February 2009 when STMicroelectronics and Ericsson completed the merger of Ericsson Mobile Platforms, on 20 August 2008, STMicroelectronics and Ericsson announced their interest to merge their wireless semiconductor businesses. ST contributed its multimedia and connectivity products as well as their 2G/EDGE platform, Ericsson contributed its 3G and 3GPP Long Term Evolution platform technology. The merger followed an existing strategic co-operation between Ericsson Mobile Platforms and ST-NXP Wireless, Ericsson also had a venture with Sony called Sony Ericsson during 2001–2012. Since ST-Ericsson came into being in 2009, STMicroelectronics has slipped from 5 to 7 in global semiconductor firms rakings. On 18 March 2013, the parent companies announced that the joint venture was to be closed down, with the parent companies taking over parts, but not all, of its operation and products. On 28 May 2013, ST-Ericsson announced that they would sell the assets, on 5 August 2013 Ericsson and STMicroelectronics announced the closing of the transaction for the split up of ST-Ericsson. This follows the announcement the companies made on 18 March 2013 on the strategic option for the future of the joint venture. Effective 2 August 2013 Ericsson has taken on the design, development and sales of the LTE multimode thin modem solutions, including 2G, 3G, ST-NXP Wireless, a joint venture made up of the wireless operations of STMicroelectronics and NXP Semiconductors, began operations on 2 August 2008. NXP and STMicroelectronics announced on 10 April 2008 that they would combine their wireless operations in 2G,2. 5G, 3G, multimedia, connectivity, the combined venture was created from businesses that together owned significant portfolios of communication and multimedia patents. Formerly a division of the semiconductor firm Royal Philips Electronics, NXP was established as an independent company in 2006, STMicroelectronics was formed in June 1987 by the merger of semiconductor companies SGS Microelettronica of Italy and Thomson Semiconductors, the semiconductor arm of Frances Thomson. Ericsson Mobile Platforms had been formed in 2001 from Ericsson Mobile Communications during the European telecom crisis around the year 2000 and it was a pure platform company after the transfer of all handset products to SonyEricsson, later Sony Mobile. At the forming of ST-Ericsson, Ericsson Mobile Platforms had roughly 3100 employees, some of EMPs customers were Flextronics, HTC, LG, NEC, Sagem, Sharp and of course Sony Ericsson. The main focus in the company was for the eight years it existed and their main development centers were situated in Lund, Sweden and with other three developments centers in Basingstoke and Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and Nuremberg. In addition, it had R&D, sales and customer teams in Tokyo, Shanghai, Taipei, Seoul, Grimstad. It provided mobile terminal technology to customers who wanted to develop and produce mobile phones for the GPRS, EDGE, EMP and, Ericsson as a whole, donated resources to standardization bodies such as 3GPP, OMA, JCP and OMTP. Likewise, the NXP part of the company had worked on a product named Nexperia, the Nomadik platform was chosen as a starting point for development of new application processors within the company
24.
Italy
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Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a unitary parliamentary republic in Europe. Located in the heart of the Mediterranean Sea, Italy shares open land borders with France, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, San Marino, Italy covers an area of 301,338 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal and Mediterranean climate. Due to its shape, it is referred to in Italy as lo Stivale. With 61 million inhabitants, it is the fourth most populous EU member state, the Italic tribe known as the Latins formed the Roman Kingdom, which eventually became a republic that conquered and assimilated other nearby civilisations. The legacy of the Roman Empire is widespread and can be observed in the distribution of civilian law, republican governments, Christianity. The Renaissance began in Italy and spread to the rest of Europe, bringing a renewed interest in humanism, science, exploration, Italian culture flourished at this time, producing famous scholars, artists and polymaths such as Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Michelangelo and Machiavelli. The weakened sovereigns soon fell victim to conquest by European powers such as France, Spain and Austria. Despite being one of the victors in World War I, Italy entered a period of economic crisis and social turmoil. The subsequent participation in World War II on the Axis side ended in defeat, economic destruction. Today, Italy has the third largest economy in the Eurozone and it has a very high level of human development and is ranked sixth in the world for life expectancy. The country plays a prominent role in regional and global economic, military, cultural and diplomatic affairs, as a reflection of its cultural wealth, Italy is home to 51 World Heritage Sites, the most in the world, and is the fifth most visited country. The assumptions on the etymology of the name Italia are very numerous, according to one of the more common explanations, the term Italia, from Latin, Italia, was borrowed through Greek from the Oscan Víteliú, meaning land of young cattle. The bull was a symbol of the southern Italic tribes and was often depicted goring the Roman wolf as a defiant symbol of free Italy during the Social War. Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus states this account together with the legend that Italy was named after Italus, mentioned also by Aristotle and Thucydides. The name Italia originally applied only to a part of what is now Southern Italy – according to Antiochus of Syracuse, but by his time Oenotria and Italy had become synonymous, and the name also applied to most of Lucania as well. The Greeks gradually came to apply the name Italia to a larger region, excavations throughout Italy revealed a Neanderthal presence dating back to the Palaeolithic period, some 200,000 years ago, modern Humans arrived about 40,000 years ago. Other ancient Italian peoples of undetermined language families but of possible origins include the Rhaetian people and Cammuni. Also the Phoenicians established colonies on the coasts of Sardinia and Sicily, the Roman legacy has deeply influenced the Western civilisation, shaping most of the modern world
25.
Electronics
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Electronics is the science of controlling electrical energy electrically, in which the electrons have a fundamental role. Commonly, electronic devices contain circuitry consisting primarily or exclusively of active semiconductors supplemented with passive elements, the science of electronics is also considered to be a branch of physics and electrical engineering. The ability of electronic devices to act as switches makes digital information processing possible, until 1950 this field was called radio technology because its principal application was the design and theory of radio transmitters, receivers, and vacuum tubes. Today, most electronic devices use semiconductor components to perform electron control and this article focuses on engineering aspects of electronics. Components are generally intended to be connected together, usually by being soldered to a circuit board. Components may be packaged singly, or in more complex groups as integrated circuits, some common electronic components are capacitors, inductors, resistors, diodes, transistors, etc. Components are often categorized as active or passive, vacuum tubes were among the earliest electronic components. They were almost solely responsible for the revolution of the first half of the Twentieth Century. They took electronics from parlor tricks and gave us radio, television, phonographs, radar, long distance telephony and they played a leading role in the field of microwave and high power transmission as well as television receivers until the middle of the 1980s. Since that time, solid state devices have all but completely taken over, vacuum tubes are still used in some specialist applications such as high power RF amplifiers, cathode ray tubes, specialist audio equipment, guitar amplifiers and some microwave devices. The 608 contained more than 3,000 germanium transistors, thomas J. Watson Jr. ordered all future IBM products to use transistors in their design. From that time on transistors were almost exclusively used for computer logic, circuits and components can be divided into two groups, analog and digital. A particular device may consist of circuitry that has one or the other or a mix of the two types, most analog electronic appliances, such as radio receivers, are constructed from combinations of a few types of basic circuits. Analog circuits use a range of voltage or current as opposed to discrete levels as in digital circuits. The number of different analog circuits so far devised is huge, especially because a circuit can be defined as anything from a single component, analog circuits are sometimes called linear circuits although many non-linear effects are used in analog circuits such as mixers, modulators, etc. Good examples of analog circuits include vacuum tube and transistor amplifiers, one rarely finds modern circuits that are entirely analog. These days analog circuitry may use digital or even microprocessor techniques to improve performance and this type of circuit is usually called mixed signal rather than analog or digital. Sometimes it may be difficult to differentiate between analog and digital circuits as they have elements of both linear and non-linear operation, an example is the comparator which takes in a continuous range of voltage but only outputs one of two levels as in a digital circuit
26.
Europe, the Middle East and Africa
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EMEA is a shorthand designation meaning Europe, the Middle East and Africa. It is used by institutions and governments, as well as in marketing and it is particularly common among North American companies. The region is accepted to include all European nations, all African nations. Typically this does not include independent overseas territories of countries in the region. Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa, some companies separate their Eastern European business from the rest of Europe, and refer to the EEMEA region separately from the Western/Central European region. Southern Europe, Middle East and Africa, south-Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa Central and Eastern Europe. Central Europe, Middle East and Africa, Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa. Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Commonwealth of Independent States, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Caribbean. The Commonwealth of Independent States, around the Black Sea and Caspian Sea, North Atlantic and Central Europe Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa Americas Asia-Pacific List of business region acronyms
27.
Amsterdam
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Amsterdam is the capital and most populous municipality of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Its status as the capital is mandated by the Constitution of the Netherlands, although it is not the seat of the government, which is The Hague. Amsterdam has a population of 851,373 within the city proper,1,351,587 in the urban area, the city is located in the province of North Holland in the west of the country. The metropolitan area comprises much of the part of the Randstad, one of the larger conurbations in Europe. Amsterdams name derives from Amstelredamme, indicative of the citys origin around a dam in the river Amstel, during that time, the city was the leading centre for finance and diamonds. In the 19th and 20th centuries the city expanded, and many new neighborhoods and suburbs were planned, the 17th-century canals of Amsterdam and the 19–20th century Defence Line of Amsterdam are on the UNESCO World Heritage List. As the commercial capital of the Netherlands and one of the top financial centres in Europe, Amsterdam is considered a world city by the Globalization. The city is also the capital of the Netherlands. Many large Dutch institutions have their headquarters there, and seven of the worlds 500 largest companies, including Philips and ING, are based in the city. In 2012, Amsterdam was ranked the second best city to live in by the Economist Intelligence Unit and 12th globally on quality of living for environment, the city was ranked 3rd in innovation by Australian innovation agency 2thinknow in their Innovation Cities Index 2009. The Amsterdam seaport to this day remains the second in the country, famous Amsterdam residents include the diarist Anne Frank, artists Rembrandt van Rijn and Vincent van Gogh, and philosopher Baruch Spinoza. The Amsterdam Stock Exchange, the oldest stock exchange in the world, is located in the city center. After the floods of 1170 and 1173, locals near the river Amstel built a bridge over the river, the earliest recorded use of that name is in a document dated October 27,1275, which exempted inhabitants of the village from paying bridge tolls to Count Floris V. This allowed the inhabitants of the village of Aemstelredamme to travel freely through the County of Holland, paying no tolls at bridges, locks, the certificate describes the inhabitants as homines manentes apud Amestelledamme. By 1327, the name had developed into Aemsterdam, Amsterdam is much younger than Dutch cities such as Nijmegen, Rotterdam, and Utrecht. In October 2008, historical geographer Chris de Bont suggested that the land around Amsterdam was being reclaimed as early as the late 10th century. This does not necessarily mean there was already a settlement then, since reclamation of land may not have been for farming—it may have been for peat. Amsterdam was granted city rights in either 1300 or 1306, from the 14th century on, Amsterdam flourished, largely from trade with the Hanseatic League
28.
Coppell, Texas
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Coppell is a city in the northwest corner of Dallas County in the U. S. state of Texas. It is a suburb of Dallas and a community in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. The population was 38,659 at the 2010 census, a small area in the far northern portion of the city extends into neighboring Denton County. The Coppell area was settled by German and French immigrants in the 1840s, members of the Peters Colony also settled here in the 1840s. Popular belief is that he was an engineer, however, there is little or no evidence to support that claim. In 1955, the community was incorporated through a measure that passed by a vote of 41 to 1. By 2000, almost all of the residentially zoned land in the city was developed, and the population grew to over 35,000. In addition to homes, the city has a growing commercial base of warehouses and transportation centers on the south and west sides of the city. Coppell is located at 32°58′2″N 96°59′12″W, according to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 14.7 square miles, of which 14.4 square miles is land and 0.31 square miles, or 2. 00%, is water. Coppell occupies the northwest corner of Dallas County and lies in proximity to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, a portion of the airport property is within the city limits of Coppell. It is bordered on the west by Grapevine, on the north by Lewisville, on the east by Carrollton, as of the census of 2000, there were 35,958 people,12,211 households, and 9,781 families residing in the city. The population density was 2,418.5 people per square mile, there were 12,587 housing units at an average density of 846.6 per square mile. The racial makeup of the city was 83. 23% White,3. 26% African American,0. 34% Native American,9. 30% Asian,0. 02% Pacific Islander,1. 88% from other races, and 1. 97% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 6. 92% of the population,16. 1% of all households were made up of individuals and 1. 5% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.94 and the family size was 3.34. In the city, the population was out with 34. 7% under the age of 18,4. 5% from 18 to 24,39. 0% from 25 to 44,19. 3% from 45 to 64. The median age was 34 years, for every 100 females there were 97.3 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 93.2 males, according to a 2007 estimate, the median income for a household in the city was $106,783, and the median income for a family was $119,229
29.
Singapore
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Singapore, officially the Republic of Singapore, sometimes referred to as the Lion City or the Little Red Dot, is a sovereign city-state in Southeast Asia. It lies one degree north of the equator, at the tip of peninsular Malaysia. Singapores territory consists of one island along with 62 other islets. Since independence, extensive land reclamation has increased its size by 23%. During the Second World War, Singapore was occupied by Japan, after early years of turbulence, and despite lacking natural resources and a hinterland, the nation developed rapidly as an Asian Tiger economy, based on external trade and its workforce. Singapore is a global commerce, finance and transport hub, the country has also been identified as a tax haven. Singapore ranks 5th internationally and first in Asia on the UN Human Development Index and it is ranked highly in education, healthcare, life expectancy, quality of life, personal safety, and housing, but does not fare well on the Democracy index. Although income inequality is high, 90% of homes are owner-occupied, 38% of Singapores 5.6 million residents are permanent residents and other foreign nationals. There are four languages on the island, Malay, Mandarin, Tamil. English is its language, most Singaporeans are bilingual. Singapore is a multiparty parliamentary republic, with a Westminster system of unicameral parliamentary government. The Peoples Action Party has won every election since self-government in 1959, however, it is unlikely that lions ever lived on the island, Sang Nila Utama, the Srivijayan prince said to have founded and named the island Singapura, perhaps saw a Malayan tiger. There are however other suggestions for the origin of the name, the central island has also been called Pulau Ujong as far back as the third century CE, literally island at the end in Malay. In 1299, according to the Malay Annals, the Kingdom of Singapura was founded on the island by Sang Nila Utama and these Indianized Kingdoms, a term coined by George Cœdès were characterized by surprising resilience, political integrity and administrative stability. In 1613, Portuguese raiders burned down the settlement, which by then was part of the Johor Sultanate. The wider maritime region and much trade was under Dutch control for the following period, in 1824 the entire island, as well as the Temenggong, became a British possession after a further treaty with the Sultan. In 1826, Singapore became part of the Straits Settlements, under the jurisdiction of British India, prior to Raffles arrival, there were only about a thousand people living on the island, mostly indigenous Malays along with a handful of Chinese. By 1860 the population had swelled to over 80,000, many of these early immigrants came to work on the pepper and gambier plantations
30.
Tokyo
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Tokyo, officially Tokyo Metropolis, is the capital of Japan and one of its 47 prefectures. The Greater Tokyo Area is the most populous area in the world. It is the seat of the Emperor of Japan and the Japanese government, Tokyo is in the Kantō region on the southeastern side of the main island Honshu and includes the Izu Islands and Ogasawara Islands. Formerly known as Edo, it has been the de facto seat of government since 1603 when Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu made the city his headquarters. It officially became the capital after Emperor Meiji moved his seat to the city from the old capital of Kyoto in 1868, Tokyo Metropolis was formed in 1943 from the merger of the former Tokyo Prefecture and the city of Tokyo. The Tokyo metropolitan government administers the 23 Special Wards of Tokyo, the metropolitan government also administers 39 municipalities in the western part of the prefecture and the two outlying island chains. The population of the wards is over 9 million people. The prefecture is part of the worlds most populous metropolitan area with upwards of 37.8 million people, the city hosts 51 of the Fortune Global 500 companies, the highest number of any city in the world. Tokyo ranked third in the International Financial Centres Development IndexEdit, the city is also home to various television networks such as Fuji TV, Tokyo MX, TV Tokyo, TV Asahi, Nippon Television, NHK and the Tokyo Broadcasting System. Tokyo ranked first in the Global Economic Power Index and fourth in the Global Cities Index. The city is considered a world city – as listed by the GaWCs 2008 inventory – and in 2014. In 2015, Tokyo was named the Most Liveable City in the world by the magazine Monocle, the Michelin Guide has awarded Tokyo by far the most Michelin stars of any city in the world. Tokyo ranked first in the world in the Safe Cities Index, the 2016 edition of QS Best Student Cities ranked Tokyo as the 3rd-best city in the world to be a university student. Tokyo hosted the 1964 Summer Olympics, the 1979 G-7 summit, the 1986 G-7 summit, and the 1993 G-7 summit, and will host the 2020 Summer Olympics, Tokyo was originally known as Edo, which means estuary. During the early Meiji period, the city was also called Tōkei, some surviving official English documents use the spelling Tokei. However, this pronunciation is now obsolete, the name Tokyo was first suggested in 1813 in the book Kondō Hisaku, written by Satō Nobuhiro. When Ōkubo Toshimichi proposed the renaming to the government during the Meiji Restoration, according to Oda Kanshi, Tokyo was originally a small fishing village named Edo, in what was formerly part of the old Musashi Province. Edo was first fortified by the Edo clan, in the twelfth century
31.
Greater China
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Greater China or the Greater China Region is a term used to refer to Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. As a phrase of the moment, the meaning is not entirely clear. The term is used with reference to business/economic development, such as Focus Taiwan reporting on economic integration in the Greater China region. Usage of the term may vary as to the geographic regions it is meant to imply. The term Greater China is generally used for referring to the cultural, but to avoid any political connotation, the term Chinese-speaking world or Sinophone world is often used instead of Greater China. The term was used at least as far back as the 1930s by George Cressey to refer to the entire Chinese Empire, the English term subsequently re-emerged in the 1980s to refer to the growing economic ties between the regions as well as the possibility of political unification. It is not an entity such as the EU or ASEAN. The concept is a generalization to group several markets seen to be closely linked economically, in the financial context, a number of Greater China stocks and funds exist. For example, the ING Greater China Fund invests 80% of its assets in the Greater China region, as does the JF Greater China Fund, and the HSBC Greater China Fund prior to February 2009. The term is used to avoid invoking sensitivities over the political status of Taiwan. For some Asians, the term is a reminder of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a euphemism for the region controlled by the Japanese Empire during the Second World War
32.
Shanghai
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Shanghai is the most populous city proper in the world, with a population of more than 24 million as of 2014. As one of the four direct-controlled municipalities of the Peoples Republic of China, it is a financial centre and transport hub. Located in the Yangtze River Delta in East China, Shanghai sits on the edge of the mouth of the Yangtze in the middle portion of the eastern Chinese coast. The municipality borders the provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang to the north, south and west, as a major administrative, shipping and trading city, Shanghai grew in importance in the 19th century due to trade and recognition of its favourable port location and economic potential. The city was one of five treaty ports forced open to foreign trade following the British victory over China in the First Opium War, the subsequent 1842 Treaty of Nanking and 1844 Treaty of Whampoa allowed the establishment of the Shanghai International Settlement and the French Concession. The city then flourished as a center of commerce between China and other parts of the world, and became the financial hub of the Asia-Pacific region in the 1930s. However, with the Communist Party takeover of the mainland in 1949, trade was limited to other socialist countries, and the citys global influence declined. In the 1990s, the reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping resulted in an intense re-development of the city, aiding the return of finance. The two Chinese characters in the name are 上 and 海, together meaning Upon-the-Sea. The earliest occurrence of this dates from the 11th-century Song Dynasty, at which time there was already a river confluence. There are disputes as to exactly how the name should be understood, Shanghai is officially abbreviated 沪 in Chinese, a contraction of 沪渎, a 4th- or 5th-century Jin name for the mouth of Suzhou Creek when it was the main conduit into the ocean. This character appears on all motor vehicle license plates issued in the municipality today, another alternative name for Shanghai is Shēn or Shēnchéng, from Lord Chunshen, a third-century BC nobleman and prime minister of the state of Chu, whose fief included modern Shanghai. Sports teams and newspapers in Shanghai often use Shen in their names, such as Shanghai Shenhua F. C. Huating was another early name for Shanghai. In AD751, during the dynasty, Huating County was established at modern-day Songjiang. Today, Huating appears as the name of a hotel in the city. The city also has various nicknames in English, including Pearl of the Orient, during the Spring and Autumn period, the Shanghai area belonged to the Kingdom of Wu, which was conquered by the Kingdom of Yue, which in turn was conquered by the Kingdom of Chu. During the Warring States period, Shanghai was part of the fief of Lord Chunshen of Chu and he ordered the excavation of the Huangpu River. Its former or poetic name, the Chunshen River, gave Shanghai its nickname of Shen, two important events helped promote Shanghais development in the Ming dynasty
33.
Thomson SA
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Technicolor SA, formerly Thomson SARL and Thomson Multimedia, is a French multinational corporation that provides services and products for the communication, media and entertainment industries. Technicolors headquarters are located in Issy-les-Moulineaux – France, other main office locations include Rennes, Los Angeles, Edegem, London, Bangalore, Chennai, and Indianapolis. On January 27,2010, the changed its name to Technicolor SA. Thomsons US subsidiary became Technicolor USA, Inc, Technicolor began as Thomson, named after the electrical engineer Elihu Thomson, who was born in Manchester, England, on March 26,1853. Thomson moved to Philadelphia, USA, at the age of 5, Thomson formed the Thomson-Houston Electric Company in 1879 with Edwin Houston. The company merged with the Edison General Electric Company to become the General Electric Company in 1892, in 1893, the Compagnie Française Thomson-Houston was formed in Paris, a sister company to GE in the United States. It was from this company, that the modern Thomson Group would evolve, in 1966, CFTH merged with Hotchkiss-Brandt to form Thomson-Houston-Hotchkiss-Brandt. In 1968 the electronics business of Thomson-Brandt merged with Compagnie Générale de Télégraphie Sans Fil to form Thomson-CSF, Thomson Brandt maintained a significant shareholding in this company. In 1982, both Thomson-Brandt and Thomson-CSF saw nationalization due to the efforts of François Mitterrand, Thomson-Brandt was subsequently renamed Thomson SA, and soon thereafter merged with Thomson-CSF. In 1988, Thomson Consumer Electronics was formed, and then renamed Thomson SA, in 1995, the French government split the consumer electronics from the defense businesses of Thomson Multimedia and Thomson-CSF prior to privatization in 1999. The company then went through a series of transactions, including with Marconi plc, in 2005, Thomson bought Cirpack and Inventel. In 2004, Thomson set up a joint venture with Chinas TCL, giving to TCL all manufacturing of RCA and Thomson television and DVD products, at the time, TCL was hailed as the first Chinese company to compete on the international stage with large international corporations. Thomson initially retained all marketing of TTEs products, but transferred that to TTE in 2005, in June 2005, the Videocon Group of India announced, that it would acquire the color picture tube manufacturing business from Thomson SA for €240 million. In early 2010, Thomson sold TV brand RCA to ON corporation, in December 2007, Thomson SA agreed to sell off its Audio/Video and Accessories businesses to Audiovox. On October 2007, Thomson SA agreed to sell its consumer electronics audio video business outside Europe including the rights to the RCA brand. Thomson then purchased the Moving Picture Company from ITV and the internet startup Singingfish, in 2004, Thomson increased its stake in the Bangalore, India based company Celstream Technologies, which specializes in product engineering. Cirpack, a manufacturer, was incorporated and acquired in April 2005. In July 2005, Thomson agreed to purchase PRN Corporation for $285 million, in December 2005, Thomson re-purchased the Broadcast & Multimedia part of Thales Group
34.
Abruzzo
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Abruzzo is a region of Italy in Southern Italy, with an area of 10,763 square km and a population of 1.3 million. Its western border lies 80 km east of Rome, the region is divided into the four provinces of LAquila, Teramo, Pescara, and Chieti. Abruzzo borders the region of Marche to the north, Lazio to the west and south-west, Molise to the south-east, and the Adriatic Sea to the east. Geographically, Abruzzo is divided into an area to the west, which includes the Gran Sasso Ditalia. Abruzzo is considered culturally, linguistically, and historically a region of Southern Italy, the Italian Statistical Authority deems it to be part of Southern Italy, partially because of Abruzzos historic association with the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. These ensure the survival of 75% of Europes living species including species, such as the small wading dotterel, golden eagle, the Abruzzo chamois, Apennine wolf. Abruzzo is also home to Calderone, Europes southernmost glacier, visiting nineteenth-century Italian diplomat and journalist Primo Levi said that forte e gentile best describes the beauty of the region and the character of its people. Forte e gentile has since become the motto of the region, Abruzzo is divided into four administrative provinces, Humans have inhabited Abruzzo since Neolithic times. A skeleton from Lama dei Peligni in the province of Chieti has been dated to 6,540 bp. The name Abruzzo appears to derive from the Latin Aprutium, although in Roman times the region was known at times as Picenum, Sabina et Samnium, Flaminia et Picenum. Until 1963 it was part of the Abruzzi region with Molise, Abruzzo Citeriore is present day Chieti province. Abruzzo Ulteriore I comprised the Teramo and Pescara provinces, Abruzzo Ulteriore II is now the Province of LAquila, in this province is found the city of Corfinio, the chief city of the Paeligni,7 m. N. of Sulmona in the valley of the Aternus. The site of the town is occupied by the village of Pentima. It appears also as a fortress of importance in the Civil War and these people were honored by Caesar as citizens of Rome. It is said that the name Italia came from this region because of ancient coins that have found here that date from about the 1st century BC. These coins have the name Italia on them and are proof of this fact. This theory of the origin of the name Italia is debated by scholars, archaeologists and it is also said by the Italian Government that Calabria was once called Italia by the ancient Greeks in honour of its inhabitants who were known as the Itali. This occurred hundreds of years before the coins of Corfinio were apparently minted, the late archaeologist Massimo Pallottino also claimed that the name was derived from the Italic tribes that settled in modern Calabria
35.
L'Aquila
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LAquila is a city and comune in Southern Italy, both the capital city of the Abruzzo region and of the Province of LAquila. As of 2013, it has a population of 70,967 inhabitants, laid out within medieval walls on a hill in the wide valley of the Aterno river, it is surrounded by the Apennine Mountains, with the Gran Sasso dItalia to the north-east. LAquila sits upon a hillside in the middle of a narrow valley, a maze of narrow streets, lined with Baroque and Renaissance buildings and churches, open onto elegant piazzas. There are several ski resorts in the surrounding province, close to the highest of the Apennine summits, LAquila is positioned at an elevation of 721 metres in the Valley of the Aterno-Pescara, situated between four mountain peaks above 2,000 metres. The mountains block the city off from warm air currents from the Mediterranean, and give rise to a climate that is cool in comparison to most of central Italy. It has been said that the city each year 11 cold months. LAquila is approximately 100 kilometres east-northeast of Rome, with which it is connected by an autostrada through the mountains. The citys construction was begun by Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily, out of already existing villages. The name of Aquila means Eagle in Italian, construction was completed in 1254 under Fredericks son, Conrad IV of Germany. The name was switched to Aquila degli Abruzzi in 1861, after the death of Conrad, the city was destroyed by his brother Manfred in 1259, but soon rebuilt by Charles I of Anjou, its successor as king of Sicily. The walls were completed in 1316 and it quickly became the second city of the Kingdom of Naples. It was a city, ruled by a diarchy composed of the City Council. It fell initially under the lordship of Niccolò dellIsola, appointed by the people as the Peoples Knight, later, it fell under Pietro Lalle Camponeschi, Count of Montorio, who became the third side of a new triarchy, with the Council and the Kings Captain. Camponeschi, who was also Great Chancellor of the kingdom of Naples, became too powerful and his descendants fought with the Pretatti family for power for several generations, but never again attained the power of their ancestor. In the end, however, the Aquilans had him deposed and imprisoned by the king of Naples, the Fountain of the 99 Spouts, was given its name to celebrate the ancient origin of the town. The City Council was originally composed of the Mayors of the villages, later, the Camerlengo also took political power, as President of the City Council. Negotiations for the succession of Edmund, son of Henry III of England, the pontificate of Celestine V gave a new impulse to building development, as can be seen from the city statutes. In 1311, moreover, King Robert of Anjou granted privileges which had a influence on the development of trade
36.
Catania
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Catania is an Italian city on the east coast of Sicily facing the Ionian Sea. It is the capital of the Metropolitan City of Catania, one of the ten biggest cities in Italy, the population of the city proper is 315,601 while the population of the conurbation is estimated to be 767,003. The metropolitan city has 1,115,310 inhabitants, Catania has had a long and eventful history, having been founded in the 8th century BC. In 1434, the first university in Sicily was founded in the city, in the 14th century and into the Renaissance period, Catania was one of Italys most important cultural, artistic and political centres. The city has a culture and history, hosting many museums, restaurants, churches, parks. Catania is well known for its street food, Catania is located on the east coast of the island of Sicily, at the foot of Mount Etna. As observed by Strabo, the location of Catania at the foot of Mount Etna has been both a curse and a blessing, two subterranean rivers run under the city, the Amenano, which surfaces at one single point south of Piazza Duomo, and the Longane. The ancient indigenous population of the Sicels named their villages after geographical attributes of their location, the Sicilian word, katane, means grater, flaying knife, skinning place or a crude tool apt to pare. Other translations of the name are harsh lands, uneven ground, sharp stones, the latter etymologies are easily justifiable since, for many centuries following an eruption, the city has always been rebuilt within its black-lava landscape. Around 729 BC, the ancient village of Katane became the Chalcidian colony of Katánē where the population was rapidly Hellenized. The Naxian founders, coming from the adjacent coast, later used the name for their new settlement along the River Amenano, around 263 BC, the city was variously known as Catĭna and Catăna. The former has been used for its supposed assonance with catina. Catinus has two meanings, a gulf, a basin or a bay and a bowl, a vessel or a trough, around 900, when Catania was part of the emirate of Sicily, it was known in Arabic as Balad al-fīl and Madinat al-fīl. The former means The Village of the Elephant, while the latter means The City of the Elephant, the Elephant is the lava sculpture over the fountain in Piazza Duomo. Another Arab toponym was Qaṭāniyyah, allegedly from the Arabic word for the leguminous plants, pulses like lentils, beans, peas, broad beans, and lupins were chiefly cultivated in the plains around the city well before the arrival of Aghlabids. Afterwards, many Arabic agronomists developed these crops and the orchards in the area around the city. The toponym Wadi Musa, or Valley of Moses, was rarely used, Catania was founded as a Greek colony named Κατάνη, of Chalcidic origin, under the guidance of a leader named Euarchos. The exact date of its foundation is not recorded, but it appears from Thucydides that it came into existence slightly later than Leontini, the only event of its early history that is known about is the legislation of Charondas, The exact date of which is uncertain
37.
Adriano Olivetti
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Adriano Olivetti was an Italian engineer, politician and industrialist whose entrepreneurial activity thrived on the idea that profit should be reinvested for the benefits of the whole society. He was son of the founder of Olivetti, Camillo Olivetti, and Luisa Revel, Adriano Olivetti was known worldwide during his lifetime as the Italian manufacturer of Olivetti typewriters, calculators, and computers. Olivetti was an entrepreneur and innovator who transformed shop-like operations into a modern factory, in and out of the factory, he both practiced and preached the utopian system of the community movement, but he was not an astute enough politician to have a mass following. The Olivetti empire had been begun by his father Camillo, initially, the factory concentrated on electric measurement devices. By 1908,25 years after Remington in the United States, Adrianos father Camillo, who was Jewish, believed that his children could get a better education at home. Adrianos formative years were spent under the tutelage of his mother, daughter of the local Waldensian pastor, also, as a socialist, Camillo emphasized the non-differentiation between manual and intellectual work. His children, during their time away from study, worked with, nevertheless, after graduation in chemical engineering at the Polytechnic University of Turin in 1924 he joined the company for a short while. When he became undesirable to Mussolinis Fascist regime, his father sent him to the United States to learn the roots of American industrial power, for the same reasons he later went to England. Upon his return he married Paola Levi, a daughter of Giuseppe Levi and a sister of his good friend Natalia Ginzburg and his visit to various plants in the United States, and especially Remington, convinced Adriano that productivity is a function of the organizational system. With the approval of father Camillo, he organized the system at Olivetti on a quasi-Taylorian model and transformed the shop into a factory with departments. Possibly as a result of reorganization, output per man-hour doubled within five years. Olivetti for the first time sold half of the used in Italy in 1933. Adriano Olivetti shared with his workers the productivity gains by increasing salaries, fringe benefits, in 1931 he visited the USSR and created an Advertising Department at Olivetti which worked with artists and designers. The creation of an Organization Office followed one year later, when he became manager. His success in business did not diminish his idealism, in the 1930s he developed an interest in architecture, as well as urban and community planning. He supervised a housing plan for the workers at Ivrea and a proposal for the adjacent Aosta Valley. Under Fascism, patronizing workers at work and at home was in line with the design of the regime. While Adriano showed distaste for the regime, he joined the Fascist Party, yet during World War II he participated in the underground antifascist movement, was jailed, and at the end sought refuge in Switzerland
38.
Mostek
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Mostek was an integrated circuit manufacturer, founded in 1969 by L. J. Sevin, Louay E. Sharif, Richard L. Petritz and other ex-employees of Texas Instruments. Initially their products were manufactured in Worcester, Massachusetts, however by 1974 most of its manufacturing was done in the Carrollton, in 1979, soon after its market peak, Mostek was purchased by United Technologies Corporation for $345M. In 1985, after years of red ink and declining market share, UTC sold Mostek for $71M to the French electronics firm Thomson SA. Mosteks first contract was from Burroughs, a contract for circuit design. The first design to be produced in their newly set-up MOS fab in Worcester, was the MK1001 and this was followed by a 1k PMOS aluminum-gate DRAM, the MK4006 that was manufactured in their Carrollton facility. Mostek had been working with Sprague Electric to develop the ion implantation process which provided a tremendous gain in the control of doping profiles, using ion implantation, Mostek became an early leader in MOS manufacturing technology, while their competition was still mostly using the older bipolar technology. The resulting increased speed and lower cost of the MK4006 memory chip made it the favorite to IBM and other mainframe. In 1970 Busicom, a Japanese adding machine manufacturer, approached Intel, Intel responded first, providing them with the Intel 4004, which they used in a line of desktop calculators. Mosteks device took longer to develop but was a single chip calculator solution, Busicom used the Mostek design in a new handheld line, the Busicom LE-120A, which went on the market in 1971 and was the smallest calculator available for some time. Hewlett-Packard also contracted with Mostek for mask development and production of chips for their HP-35, Mostek co-founder Robert Proebsting invented DRAM address multiplexing with the MK40964096 X1 bit DRAM introduced in 1973. Per pin costs are a major cost driver in integrated circuits, plus the multiplexed approach used less silicon area, in 1976 Mostek introduced the silicon-gate MK4027, and the new MK4116 16kb double-poly silicon-gate DRAM. They were designed by Paul Schroeder, who later left Mostek to co-found Inmos, from this point until the late 1970s Mostek was a continual leader in the DRAM field, holding as much as 85% of the world market for DRAM. The MK4027 and MK4116 were reverse-engineered by Mosaid and successfully cloned by many companies, the 64K generation of DRAMs required a transition from 12 volt to 5 volt-only operation, in order to free the +12 and –5 volt pins for use as addresses. Mosteks 256K DRAM was further delayed by a two layer metallization design. When the price for 64K DRAMs collapsed in 1985, Mosteks 256K device was not ready for production. Mosteks DRAM legacy is exemplified in the MK4116, MK4164 and MK41256, each of which were successfully cloned by competitors, Mostek enjoyed many years of mastery of the international market for telecommunications products. Their product line included telephone tone and pulse dialers, touchtone decoders, counters, top-octave generators, CODECs, watch circuits, during the fab shutdown production of the PMOS products was shifted to several external fabs. Several employees played a key role in the Telecommunications and Industrial Products Department, Robert Paluck headed the department, assisted by Michael Callahan, Charles Johnson, William H. Bradley, Robert C
39.
Texas Instruments
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Texas Instruments Inc. is an American technology company that designs and manufactures semiconductors, which it sells to electronics designers and manufacturers globally. Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, United States, TI is one of the top ten semiconductor companies worldwide, Texas Instrumentss focus is on developing analog chips and embedded processors, which accounts for more than 85% of their revenue. TI also produces TI digital light processing technology and education technology products including calculators, microcontrollers, to date, TI has more than 43,000 patents worldwide. TI produced the worlds first commercial silicon transistor in 1950, Jack Kilby invented the integrated circuit in 1958 while working at TIs Central Research Labs. TI also invented the hand-held calculator in 1967, and introduced the first single-chip microcontroller in 1970, in 1987, TI invented the digital light processing device, which serves as the foundation for the companys award-winning DLP technology and DLP Cinema. In 1990, TI came out with the popular TI-81 calculator which made them a leader in the calculator industry. In 1997, its business was sold to Raytheon, which allowed TI to strengthen its focus on digital solutions. Texas Instruments was founded by Cecil H. Green, J. Erik Jonsson, Eugene McDermott, McDermott was one of the original founders of Geophysical Service Inc. in 1930. McDermott, Green, and Jonsson were GSI employees who purchased the company in 1941, in November,1945, Patrick Haggerty was hired as general manager of the Laboratory and Manufacturing division, which focused on electronic equipment. By 1951, the L&M division, with its contracts, was growing faster than GSIs Geophysical division. The company was reorganized and initially renamed General Instruments Inc, because there already existed a firm named General Instrument, the company was renamed Texas Instruments that same year. From 1956 to 1961, Fred Agnich of Dallas, later a Republican member of the Texas House of Representatives, was the Texas Instruments president, Geophysical Service, Inc. became a subsidiary of Texas Instruments. Early in 1988 most of GSI was sold to the Halliburton Company, in 1930, J. Clarence Karcher and Eugene McDermott founded Geophysical Service, an early provider of seismic exploration services to the petroleum industry. In 1939, the company reorganized as Coronado Corp. an oil company with Geophysical Service Inc, on December 6,1941, McDermott along with three other GSI employees, J. Erik Jonsson, Cecil H. Green, and H. B. During World War II, GSI expanded their services to include electronics for the U. S. Army, Signal Corps, in 1951, the company changed its name to Texas Instruments, GSI becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of the new company. Texas Instruments also continued to manufacture equipment for use in the seismic industry, after selling GSI, TI finally sold the company to Halliburton in 1988, at which point GSI ceased to exist as a separate entity. Texas Instruments entered the electronics market in 1942 with submarine detection equipment. During the early 1980s, Texas Instruments instituted a quality program which included Juran training, as well as promoting statistical process control, Taguchi methods and Design for Six Sigma
40.
Saint-Gobain
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Saint-Gobain S. A. is a French multinational corporation, founded in 1665 in Paris and headquartered on the outskirts of Paris, at La Défense and in Courbevoie. Originally a mirror manufacturer, it now produces a variety of construction. The company is a component of the Euro Stoxx 50 stock market index, since the middle of the 17th century, luxury products such as silk textiles, lace and mirrors were in high demand. French minister of finance Jean-Baptiste Colbert wanted France to become completely self-sufficient in meeting domestic demand for luxury products, Colbert established by letters patent the public enterprise Manufacture royale de glaces de miroirs in October 1665. The company was created for a period of twenty years and would be financed in part by the State. The beneficiary and first director was the French financier Nicolas du Noyer, receiver of taxes of Orléans, the company had the informal name Compagnie du Noyer. To compete with the Italian mirror industry, Colbert commissioned several Venetian glassworkers he had enticed to Paris to work for the company, the first unblemished mirrors were produced in 1666. Soon the mirrors created in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, under the French company, the French company was capable of producing mirrors that were 40 to 45 inches long, which at the time was considered impressive. Competition between France and the Venetians became so fierce that Venice considered it a crime for any glass artisan to leave and practice their trade elsewhere, especially in foreign territory. Nicolas du Noyer complained in writing that the jealous Venetians were unwilling to impart the secrets of glassmaking to the French workers, the distractions of Paris proved distracting to the workers, and supplies of firewood to stoke the furnaces were dearer in the capital than elsewhere. In 1678, the company produced the glass for the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, in 1683 the companys financial arrangement with the State was renewed for another two decades. However, in 1688 the rival Compagnie Thévart was created, also financed in part by the state, the two companies were in competition for seven years, until 1695, when the economy slowed down and their technical and commercial rivalry became counterproductive. Under an order from the French government, the two companies were forced to merge, creating the Compagnie Plastier, in 1702 Compagnie Plastier declared bankruptcy. A group of Franco-Swiss Protestant bankers rescued the company, changing the name to Compagnie Dagincourt. In 1789, as a consequence of the French Revolution, the state financial, the company now had to depend on the participation and capital of private investors, although it continued to remain partly under the control of the French state. In the 1820s, Saint-Gobain continued to function as it had under the Ancien Régime, manufacturing high-quality mirrors, however, in 1824, a new glass manufacturer was established in Commentry, France, and in 1837 several Belgian glass manufacturers were also founded. While Saint-Gobain continued to dominate the luxury high-quality mirror and glass markets, its newly created competitors focused their attention on making medium, the manufacture of products of such quality made mirrors and glass affordable for the masses. In response, the extended its product line to include lower-quality glass
41.
National Semiconductor
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National Semiconductor was an American semiconductor manufacturer which specialized in analog devices and subsystems, formerly with headquarters in Santa Clara, California, United States. The company produced power management integrated circuits, display drivers, audio and operational amplifiers, communication interface products, Nationals key markets included wireless handsets, displays and a variety of broad electronics markets, including medical, automotive, industrial and test and measurement applications. On September 23,2011, the company became part of Texas Instruments as the Silicon Valley division. The founding of the new company was followed by Sperry Rand filing a lawsuit against National Semiconductor for patent infringement, by 1965, as it was reaching the courts, the preliminaries of the lawsuit had caused the stock value of National to be depressed. The depressed stock values allowed Peter J Sprague to invest heavily in the company with Spragues family funds, Sprague also relied on further financial backing from a pair of west coast investment firms and a New York underwriter to take control as the Chairman of National Semiconductor. At that time Sprague was 27 years old, young characterised the era as the beginning of venture capitalism. That same year National Semiconductor acquired Molectro, Molectro was founded in 1962, in Santa Clara, California by J. Nall and D. Spittlehouse, who were formerly employed at Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation. The acquisition also brought to National Semiconductor two experts in linear semiconductor technologies, Robert Widlar and Dave Talbert, who were formerly employed at Fairchild. The acquisition of Molectro provided National with the technology to itself in the fabrication. In 1967, Sprague hired five top executives away from Fairchild, among whom were Charles E. Sporck, at the time of Sporcks hiring, Robert Noyce was de facto head of semiconductor operations at Fairchild and Sporck was his operations manager. Sporck was appointed President and CEO of National, to make the deal better for Sporcks hiring and appointment for half his former salary at Fairchild, Sporck was allotted a substantial share of Nationals stock. In essence, Sporck took four of his personnel from Fairchild with him as well as three others from TI, Perkin-Elmer and Hewlett Packard to form a new eight man team at National Semiconductor. Incidentally, Sporck had been Widlars superior at Fairchild before Widlar left Fairchild to join Molectro due to a dispute with Sporck. In 1968, National shifted its headquarters from Danbury, Connecticut to Santa Clara, however, like many companies, National retained its registration as a Delaware corporation, for legal and financial expediency. Over the years National Semiconductor acquired several companies like Fairchild Semiconductor, however, over time National Semiconductor spun off these acquisitions. Fairchild Semiconductor became a company again in 1997 and the Cyrix microprocessors division was sold to VIA Technologies of Taiwan in 1999. Based largely on the success of the WebPad National formed the Information Appliance division in 1998, the Information Appliance Division was sold to AMD in 2003. Immediately after becoming CEO, Sporck started a price war among semiconductor companies
42.
Inmos
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Inmos Limited’s head office and design office were at Aztec West business park in Bristol, England. Inmos first products were static RAM devices, followed by dynamic RAMs and EEPROMs, despite early production difficulties, Inmos eventually captured around 60% of the world SRAM market. However, Barrons long-term aim was to produce an innovative microprocessor architecture intended for parallel processing, david May and Robert Milne were recruited to design this processor, which went into production in 1985 in the form of the T212 and T414 chips. The transputer achieved some success as the basis for several parallel supercomputers from companies such as Meiko, Floating Point Systems, Parsytec, being a relatively self-contained design, it was also used in some embedded systems. However, the nature of the transputer and its native occam programming language limited its appeal. During the late 1980s, the transputer also struggled to keep up with the performance of its competitors. The company was founded by Iann Barron, a British computer consultant, Richard Petritz and Paul Schroeder, initial funding of £50M was provided by the UK government via the National Enterprise Board. A US subsidiary, Inmos Corporation, was established in Colorado. Semiconductor fabrication facilities were built in the US at Colorado Springs, Colorado and in the UK at Newport, under the privatization policy of Margaret Thatcher the National Enterprise Board was merged into the British Technology Group and had to sell its shares in Inmos. Offers for Inmos from AT&T and a Dutch consortium had been turned down, in 1982, construction of the microprocessor factory in Newport, South Wales was completed. By July 1984 Thorn EMI had made a £124. 1M bid for the states 76% interest in the company, later it was raised to £192 million, approved August 1984 and finalized in September. In total, Inmos had received £211 million from the government, in April 1989, Inmos was sold to SGS-Thomson. Around the same time, work was started on an enhanced transputer and this encountered various technical problems and delays, and was eventually abandoned, signalling the end of the development of the transputer as a parallel processing platform. However, transputer derivatives such as the ST20 were later incorporated into chipsets for embedded applications such as set-top boxes, in December 1994, Inmos was fully assimilated into STMicroelectronics, and the usage of the Inmos brand name was discontinued. Past, Present, Parallel, A Survey of Available Parallel Computing Systems, ISBN 0-387-19664-1 Mick McClean and Tom Rowland. Parsys SN9500 based on 32 x T9000 running at 20 MHz
43.
Transputer
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The transputer was a series of pioneering microprocessors of the 1980s, featuring integrated memory and serial communication links, intended for parallel computing. It was designed and produced by Inmos, a company based in Bristol. For some time in the late 1980s, many considered the transputer to be the great design for the future of computing. In the early 1980s, conventional CPUs appeared to reach a performance limit, up to that time, manufacturing difficulties limited the amount of circuitry designers could place on a chip. Continued improvements in the process, however, removed this restriction. Soon the problem became that the chips could hold more circuitry than the designers knew how to use, traditional CISC designs were reaching a performance plateau, and it wasnt clear it could be overcome. It seemed that the way forward was to increase the use of parallelism. This depended on the machines in question being able to run several tasks at once and this had generally been too difficult for previous CPU designs to handle, but more recent designs were able to accomplish it effectively. It was clear that in the future this would be a feature of all operating systems, a side effect of most multitasking design is that it often also allows the processes to be run on physically different CPUs, in which case it is known as multiprocessing. A low-cost CPU built with multiprocessing in mind could allow the speed of a machine to be increased by adding more CPUs, the first transputer designs were due to David May and Robert Milne. Tony Fuge, an engineer at Inmos at the time, was awarded the Prince Philip Designers Prize in 1987 for his work on the T414 transputer. The transputer was the first general purpose microprocessor designed specifically to be used in computing systems. The goal was to produce a family of chips ranging in power, the name was selected to indicate the role the individual transputers would play, numbers of them would be used as basic building blocks, just as transistors had earlier. Originally the plan was to make the transputer cost only a few dollars per unit, Inmos saw them being used for practically everything, from operating as the main CPU for a computer to acting as a channel controller for disk drives in the same machine. Spare cycles on any of these transputers could be used for other tasks, even a single transputer would have all the circuitry needed to work by itself, a feature more commonly associated with microcontrollers. The intention was to allow transputers to be connected together as easily as possible, power and a simple clock signal had to be supplied, but little else, RAM, a RAM controller, bus support and even an RTOS were all built in. The original transputer used a simple and rather unusual architecture to achieve a high performance in a small area. It used microcode as the method of controlling the data path but unlike other designs of the time
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Microprocessor
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A microprocessor is a computer processor which incorporates the functions of a computers central processing unit on a single integrated circuit, or at most a few integrated circuits. Microprocessors contain both combinational logic and sequential digital logic, Microprocessors operate on numbers and symbols represented in the binary numeral system. The integration of a whole CPU onto a chip or on a few chips greatly reduced the cost of processing power. Integrated circuit processors are produced in numbers by highly automated processes resulting in a low per unit cost. Single-chip processors increase reliability as there are many electrical connections to fail. As microprocessor designs get better, the cost of manufacturing a chip generally stays the same, before microprocessors, small computers had been built using racks of circuit boards with many medium- and small-scale integrated circuits. Microprocessors combined this into one or a few large-scale ICs, the internal arrangement of a microprocessor varies depending on the age of the design and the intended purposes of the microprocessor. Advancing technology makes more complex and powerful chips feasible to manufacture, a minimal hypothetical microprocessor might only include an arithmetic logic unit and a control logic section. The ALU performs operations such as addition, subtraction, and operations such as AND or OR, each operation of the ALU sets one or more flags in a status register, which indicate the results of the last operation. The control logic retrieves instruction codes from memory and initiates the sequence of operations required for the ALU to carry out the instruction, a single operation code might affect many individual data paths, registers, and other elements of the processor. As integrated circuit technology advanced, it was feasible to manufacture more and more complex processors on a single chip, the size of data objects became larger, allowing more transistors on a chip allowed word sizes to increase from 4- and 8-bit words up to todays 64-bit words. Additional features were added to the architecture, more on-chip registers sped up programs. Floating-point arithmetic, for example, was not available on 8-bit microprocessors. Integration of the point unit first as a separate integrated circuit and then as part of the same microprocessor chip. Occasionally, physical limitations of integrated circuits made such practices as a bit slice approach necessary, instead of processing all of a long word on one integrated circuit, multiple circuits in parallel processed subsets of each data word. With the ability to put large numbers of transistors on one chip and this CPU cache has the advantage of faster access than off-chip memory, and increases the processing speed of the system for many applications. Processor clock frequency has increased more rapidly than external memory speed, except in the recent past, a microprocessor is a general purpose system. Several specialized processing devices have followed from the technology, A digital signal processor is specialized for signal processing, graphics processing units are processors designed primarily for realtime rendering of 3D images
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Thorn EMI
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Thorn EMI was a major British company involved in consumer electronics, music, defence and retail. Created in October 1979 when Thorn Electrical Industries merged with EMI, it was listed on the London Stock Exchange and was once a constituent of the FTSE100 Index, the Company was formed in October 1979 when Thorn Electrical Industries merged with EMI. In May 1984 the Company attempted to merge with British Aerospace and in July 1984 it bought the micro-chip manufacturer, Thorn EMI acquired the Mullard Equipment Limited division of Philips in 1990. On 16 August 1996, Thorn EMI shareholders voted in favour of demerging Thorn from EMI again, the Company became EMI Group plc, Thorn EMIs wide range of business covered five principal areas of activity, television broadcasting, retail/rentals, defence, music and consumer electronics. Thorn EMI was, until a share flotation in 1984, the majority shareholder in the London-based ITV broadcaster Thames Television and this shareholding was inherited from the 1967 purchase of the Associated British Picture Corporation by EMI. The deal included their interests in the ITV company ABC Weekend Television, through an enforced merger with Rediffusion London, this became Thames Television. In 1985 the company attempted to sell their stake to Carlton Communications but this was blocked by the body of ITV. Radio Rentals, DER and Rumbelows Rent-A-Center, big Brown Box was launched in Australia in 2008 by Thorn and was later sold to Appliances Online, subsidiary of Winning Appliances in 2011. The site was a retailer of AV equipment, consumer electronics. From its formation until the mid-1990s Thorn EMI was one of the United Kingdoms largest defence companies, the MEL Division, acquired from Philips, was involved in radar, electronic warfare and communications. The MEL communications business was sold to Thomson-CSF, now Thales, in 1989 Thorn EMI bought a 50% interest in Chrysalis Records, buying the outstanding 50% in 1991. In one of its highest-profile and most expensive acquisitions, Thorn EMI took over Richard Bransons Virgin Records in 1992, in the early to mid-1980s, Thorn EMI Video Programmes released a number of games for several home computer formats, initially under their own name. They received a reception with no major hits. These included Computer War, Tank Commander, Snooker and Billiards, 8-Ball and Tournament Pool, Darts, Cribbage and Dominoes Gold Rush, Mutant Herd, Road Racer and Volcanic Planet, the label was later renamed Creative Sparks. The staff and management paid £82 million for the £117 million turnover division, in 1996, IBM acquired Data Sciences plc for £95 million. From 1981 until about 1983, Thorn EMI Video Programmes was based in the Thorn EMI head office near Seven Dials in central London and they moved from there to an office in Soho and the name changed to just Thorn EMI Video. Thorn Security installed and serviced all types of security systems from their bases around the UK. However, the products are still present in many premises
US$ 8.082 billion (2013)[1]
US$ 9.173 billion (2013)
