1.
Virtual reality
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VR also simulates a users physical presence in this environment. A person using virtual reality equipment is able to look around the world, and with high quality VR move about in it. Virtual reality is displayed with a virtual reality headset, VR headsets are head-mounted goggles with a screen in front of the eyes. Programs may include audio and sounds through speakers or headphones, advanced haptic systems may include tactile information, generally known as force feedback in medical, video gaming and military training applications. Some VR systems used in games can transmit vibrations and other sensations to the user through the game controller. Virtual reality also refers to remote communication environments which provide a presence of users with through telepresence and telexistence or the use of a virtual artifact. The immersive environment can be similar to the world in order to create a life-like experience grounded in reality or sci-fi. In 1938, Antonin Artaud described the nature of characters and objects in the theatre as la réalité virtuelle in a collection of essays. The English translation of book, published in 1958 as The Theater. The term artificial reality, coined by Myron Krueger, has been in use since the 1970s, the term virtual reality was used in The Judas Mandala, a 1982 science fiction novel by Damien Broderick. Virtual has had the meaning being something in essence or effect, the term virtual has been used in the computer sense of not physically existing but made to appear by software since 1959. A dictionary definition for cyberspace states that word is a synonym for virtual reality. Virtual reality shares some elements with augmented reality, AR is a type of virtual reality technology that blends what the user sees in their real surroundings with digital content generated by computer software. The additional software-generated images with the virtual scene typically enhance way the real look in some way. Some AR systems use a camera to capture the surroundings or some type of display screen which the user looks at. The Virtual Reality Modelling Language, first introduced in 1994, was intended for the development of worlds without dependency on headsets. The Web3D consortium was founded in 1997 for the development of industry standards for web-based 3D graphics. The consortium subsequently developed X3D from the VRML framework as an archival and these components led to relative affordability for independent VR developers, and lead to the 2012 Oculus Rift kickstarter offering the first independently developed VR headset
2.
Sun Microsystems
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Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. Sun was founded on February 24,1982, at its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California, on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center. On January 27,2010, Oracle Corporation acquired Sun by for US$7.4 billion, other technologies include the Java platform, MySQL, and NFS. Sun was a proponent of open systems in general and Unix in particular, the initial design for what became Suns first Unix workstation, the Sun-1, was conceived by Andy Bechtolsheim when he was a graduate student at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Bechtolsheim originally designed the SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation and it was designed around the Motorola 68000 processor with an advanced memory management unit to support the Unix operating system with virtual memory support. He built the first ones from spare parts obtained from Stanfords Department of Computer Science, on February 24,1982, Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Scott McNealy, all Stanford graduate students, founded Sun Microsystems. Bill Joy of Berkeley, a developer of the Berkeley Software Distribution. The Sun name is derived from the initials of the Stanford University Network, Sun was profitable from its first quarter in July 1982. By 1983 Sun was known for producing 68000-based systems with high-quality graphics that were the only computers other than DECs VAX to run 4. 2BSD and it licensed the computer design to other manufacturers, which typically used it to build Multibus-based systems running Unix from UniSoft. Suns initial public offering was in 1986 under the stock symbol SUNW, the symbol was changed in 2007 to JAVA, Sun stated that the brand awareness associated with its Java platform better represented the companys current strategy. Suns logo, which features four interleaved copies of the sun in the form of a rotationally symmetric ambigram, was designed by professor Vaughan Pratt. The initial version of the logo was orange and had the sides oriented horizontally and vertically, but it was rotated to stand on one corner and re-colored purple. In the dot-com bubble, Sun began making more money. It also began spending more, hiring workers and building itself out. Some of this was because of demand, but much was from web start-up companies anticipating business that would never happen. Sales in Suns important hardware division went into free-fall as customers closed shop, several quarters of steep losses led to executive departures, rounds of layoffs, and other cost cutting. In December 2001, the fell to the 1998, pre-bubble level of about $100. But it kept falling, faster than many other tech companies, a year later it had dipped below $10 but bounced back to $20
3.
Timothy Leary
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Timothy Francis Leary was an American psychologist and writer known for advocating the exploration of the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs under controlled conditions. Leary conducted experiments under the Harvard Psilocybin Project during American legality of LSD and psilocybin, resulting in the Concord Prison Experiment, Learys colleague, Richard Alpert, was fired from Harvard University on May 27,1963 for giving psilocybin to an undergraduate student. Leary was planning to leave Harvard when his contract expired in June. He was fired, for failure to keep classroom appointments, with his pay docked on April 30, Leary believed that LSD showed potential for therapeutic use in psychiatry. He used LSD himself and developed a philosophy of mind expansion and he popularized catchphrases that promoted his philosophy, such as turn on, tune in, drop out, set and setting, and think for yourself and question authority. He gave lectures, occasionally billing himself as a performing philosopher, during the 1960s and 1970s, he was arrested often enough to see the inside of 36 different prisons worldwide. President Richard Nixon once described Leary as the most dangerous man in America, Leary was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, the only child in an Irish Catholic household. His father, Timothy Tote Leary, was a dentist who left his wife Abigail Ferris when Leary was 14 and he graduated from Classical High School in the western Massachusetts city. He attended the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts from September 1938 to June 1940, under pressure from his father, he then accepted an appointment as a cadet in the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. In the first months as a plebe, he was given numerous demerits for rule infractions and he was alleged to have gone on a drinking binge and to have failed to come clean about it. He was asked by the Honor Committee to resign for violating the Academys honor code and he refused and was silenced—that is, shunned and ignored by his fellow cadets as a tactic to pressure him to resign. He was acquitted by a court-martial, but the silencing measures continued in full force, the treatment continued in his sophomore year, and his mother appealed to a family friend, United States Senator David I. Walsh, head of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, who conducted a personal investigation, behind the scenes, the Honor Committee revised its position and announced that it would abide by the court-martial verdict. Leary then resigned and was discharged by the Army. Almost 50 years later, he said that it was the fair trial Ive had in a court of law. To the chagrin of his family, Leary elected to transfer to the University of Alabama in late 1941 because of the institutions response to his application. Leary was drafted into the United States Army and reported for training at Fort Eustis in January 1943. After a fateful reunion with Ramsdell in Buffalo, New York, he was promoted to corporal
4.
Jaron Lanier
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Jaron Zepel Lanier is an American computer philosophy writer, computer scientist, visual artist, and composer of classical music. A pioneer in the field of reality, Lanier and Thomas G. Zimmerman left Atari in 1985 to found VPL Research. In the late 1990s, Lanier worked on applications for Internet2, from 2006 he began to work at Microsoft, and from 2009 forward he works at Microsoft Research as Interdisciplinary Scientist. Lanier was the director of a short film, Muzork. In 2010, Lanier was nominated in the TIME100 list of most influential people, born Jaron Zepel Lanier in New York City, Lanier was raised in Mesilla, New Mexico. Laniers mother and father were Jewish, his mother was a camp survivor from Vienna. When he was nine years old, his mother was killed in a car accident and he lived in tents for an extended period with his father before embarking on a seven-year project to build a geodesic dome home that he helped design. At the age of 13, Lanier convinced New Mexico State University to let him enroll, at NMSU, he took graduate-level courses, he received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study mathematical notation, which led him to learn computer programming. From 1979 to 1980, the NSF-funded project at NMSU focused on digital graphical simulations for learning, Lanier also attended art school in New York during this time, but returned to New Mexico and worked as a midwife. The father of a baby he helped deliver him a car as a gift. In California, Lanier worked for Atari, where he met Thomas Zimmerman, after Atari Inc. was split into two companies in 1984, Lanier became unemployed. The free time enabled him to concentrate on his own projects, including VPL, along with Zimmerman, Lanier founded VPL Research, focusing on commercializing virtual reality technologies, the company prospered for a while, but filed for bankruptcy in 1990. In 1999, Sun Microsystems bought VPLs virtual reality and graphics-related patents, the Initiative demonstrated the first prototypes of tele-immersion in 2000 after a three-year development period. From 2001 to 2004, he was Visiting Scientist at Silicon Graphics Inc. where he developed solutions to problems in telepresence. While transistor count increases according to Moores law, overall performance rises only very slowly, according to Lanier, this is because human productivity in developing software increases only slightly, and software becomes more bloated and remains as error-prone as it ever was. Simply put, software just wont allow it, code cant keep up with processing power now, and it never will. At the end he warns that the biggest problem of any theory is not that it is false, the impression of objective necessity paralyzes the ability of humans to walk out of or to fight the paradigm and causes the self-fulfilling destiny which spoils people. Some of Laniers speculation involves what he calls post-symbolic communication, Lanier sees this behavior, especially as exchanged between two octopodes, as a direct behavioral expression of thought
5.
Mitch Altman
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He is also Chief Scientist and CEO of Cornfield Electronics. Altman grew up in Rogers Park, Chicago, Illinois, after kindergarten his family moved to Highland Park, Illinois. Altman graduated from Deerfield High School in 1975, Altman is an alumnus of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he earned an undergraduate degree and a masters degree in electrical engineering. While at the University of Illinois, Altman co-organized the first Hash Wednesday in Champaign-Urbana in 1977, Altman moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1986 to work in Silicon Valley. Altman was a developer of Virtual Reality technologies, working at VPL Research with Jaron Lanier. Altman left VPL Research in protest when it accepted contracts with the United States Department of Defense, Altman co-founded Silicon Valley start-up 3ware in February 1997 with J. Peter Herz and Jim MacDonald. Altman started Cornfield Electronics as a consulting company, after the launch of TV-B-Gone Altman gave the company the tagline We make Useful Electronics for a Better World. In 2004 Altman released a universal remote control called TV-B-Gone. Altman used money from the sale of 3ware to pay for the manufacture of the first 20,000 units of TV-B-Gone, by February 2014, he was reported to have sold more than 500,000 units. He is currently selling the TV-B-Gone generation 4 and he also invented a new product called the TV-B-Gone SHP. Mitch Altman is an important figure in the international hackerspace and maker movements, in October 2008 he co-founded Noisebridge, which was probably the third hackerspace formed in the US. Mitch Altman on Reddit, July 29th,2012
6.
International Standard Book Number
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The International Standard Book Number is a unique numeric commercial book identifier. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an e-book, a paperback and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, the method of assigning an ISBN is nation-based and varies from country to country, often depending on how large the publishing industry is within a country. The initial ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 based upon the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering created in 1966, the 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108. Occasionally, a book may appear without a printed ISBN if it is printed privately or the author does not follow the usual ISBN procedure, however, this can be rectified later. Another identifier, the International Standard Serial Number, identifies periodical publications such as magazines, the ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 in the United Kingdom by David Whitaker and in 1968 in the US by Emery Koltay. The 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108, the United Kingdom continued to use the 9-digit SBN code until 1974. The ISO on-line facility only refers back to 1978, an SBN may be converted to an ISBN by prefixing the digit 0. For example, the edition of Mr. J. G. Reeder Returns, published by Hodder in 1965, has SBN340013818 -340 indicating the publisher,01381 their serial number. This can be converted to ISBN 0-340-01381-8, the check digit does not need to be re-calculated, since 1 January 2007, ISBNs have contained 13 digits, a format that is compatible with Bookland European Article Number EAN-13s. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an ebook, a paperback, and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, a 13-digit ISBN can be separated into its parts, and when this is done it is customary to separate the parts with hyphens or spaces. Separating the parts of a 10-digit ISBN is also done with either hyphens or spaces, figuring out how to correctly separate a given ISBN number is complicated, because most of the parts do not use a fixed number of digits. ISBN issuance is country-specific, in that ISBNs are issued by the ISBN registration agency that is responsible for country or territory regardless of the publication language. Some ISBN registration agencies are based in national libraries or within ministries of culture, in other cases, the ISBN registration service is provided by organisations such as bibliographic data providers that are not government funded. In Canada, ISBNs are issued at no cost with the purpose of encouraging Canadian culture. In the United Kingdom, United States, and some countries, where the service is provided by non-government-funded organisations. Australia, ISBNs are issued by the library services agency Thorpe-Bowker
