Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Alternative terms for free software have been a controversial issue among free software users from the late 1990s onwards. Coined in 1983 by Richard Stallman, "free software" is used to describe software which can be used, modified, and redistributed with little or no restriction. These freedoms are formally described in The Free Software Definition, first published in February 1986.

Alternatives for "free software" were sought because some businesses were uncomfortable with the word "free"s association with the ideas of freedom/liberty. A second problem was that the "available at no cost" ambiguity of the word "free" was seen as discouraging business adoption. In a 1998 strategy session in California, "open-source software" was selected by Todd Anderson, Larry Augustin, Jon Hall, Sam Ockman, Christine Peterson, and Eric S. Raymond. Richard Stallman had not been invited. The session was arranged in reaction to Netscape's January 1998 announcement of a source code release for Navigator (as Mozilla). Those at the meeting described "open source" as a "replacement label" for free software and founded the Open Source Initiative to promote the term as part of "a marketing program for free software" . Stallman and others object to the term "open-source software" because it does not describe all of the freedoms associated with the free software definition.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Psychosynthesis

Psychosynthesis is an original approach to psychology that was developed by Roberto Assagioli. He considered it an Existential psychology which includes spiritual goals and concepts. Psychosynthesis was not intended to be a school of thought or an exclusive method but many conferences and publications had it as central theme and centers were formed in Italy and the USA in the 1960s.

Psychosynthesis departed from the empirical foundations of psychology in that it studied a person as a personality and a soul but Assagioli continued to insist that it was scientific. Assagioli developed therapeutic methods other than what was found in psychoanalysis. Although the unconscious is an important part of the theory, Assagioli was careful to maintain a balance with rational, conscious therapeutical work.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Cellular automaton

A cellular automaton (plural: cellular automata) is a discrete model studied in computability theory, mathematics, theoretical biology and microstructure modeling. It consists of a regular grid of cells, each in one of a finite number of states. The grid can be in any finite number of dimensions. Time is also discrete, and the state of a cell at time t is a function of the states of a finite number of cells (called its neighborhood) at time t − 1. These neighbors are a selection of cells relative to the specified cell, and do not change (though the cell itself may be in its neighborhood, it is not usually considered a neighbor). Every cell has the same rule for updating, based on the values in this neighbourhood. Each time the rules are applied to the whole grid a new generation is created.

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

New Mobility Agenda

The New Mobility Agenda is an international institution which while virtual and an open collaborative was originally set up by an international working group meeting at the Abbey de Royaumont near Paris with the support of the OECD in Paris in 1974 to challenge old ideas and practices in the field of urban transport through a long term collaborative program of information exchange, education and peer support. The Agenda today draws together the experience, expertise and support of more than four thousand individuals and groups world wide in an open collaborative peer network. One of the original proponents of this approach, Professor Mikoto Usui then director of the OECD Development Centre, referred to it in the founding meeting at the “Abbé de Royaumont as an “invisible college”. Drawing together the experience and expertise of more than four thousand individuals and groups world wide, who are networked via a combination of websites, discussion groups and fora, and collaborative projects, the Agenda takes an approach to transportation planning, policy and practice that has gained considerable force over the last two decades -- provides a leading-edge alternative to earlier (20th century) methods of looking at and providing mobility for people and goods in cities. The Agenda has received prestigious awards for its contributions, including the Stockholm Environment Challenge Prize (2000) and the World Technology Environment Award (2002).

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Cost overrun

Cost overrun is defined as excess of actual cost over budget. Cost overrun is also sometimes called "cost escalation," "cost increase," or "budget overrun." However, cost escalation and increases do not necessarily result in cost overruns if cost escalation is included in the budget.

Cost overrun is common in infrastructure, building, and technology projects. One of the most comprehensive studies of cost overrun that exists found that 9 out of 10 projects had overrun, overruns of 50 to 100 percent were common, overrun was found in each of 20 nations and five continents covered by the study, and overrun had been constant for the 70 years for which data were available. For IT projects, an industry study by the Standish Group (2004) found that average cost overrun was 43 percent, 71 percent of projects were over budget, over time, and under scope, and total waste was estimated at US$55 billion per year in the US alone.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Containerization

Although having its origins in the late 1780s or earlier, the global standardisation of containers and container handling equipment was one of the important innovations in 20th century logistics.

By the 1830s, railroads on several continents were carrying containers that could be transferred to trucks or ships, but these containers were invariably small by today's standards. Originally used for shipping coal on and off barges, 'loose boxes' were used to containerize coal from the late 1780s, on places like the Bridgewater Canal. By the 1840's, iron boxes were in use as well as wooden ones. The early 1900s saw the adoption of closed container boxes designed for movement between road and rail.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Snapshot isolation

In databases, snapshot isolation is a guarantee that all reads made in a transaction will see a consistent snapshot of the database, and the transaction itself will successfully commit only if no updates it has made conflict with any concurrent updates made since that snapshot.

Snapshot isolation (SI) has been adopted by several major database management systems, such as SQL Anywhere, InterBase, Firebird, Oracle, PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server. The main reason for its adoption is that it allows better performance than serializability, yet still avoids the kind of concurrency anomalies that cannot easily be worked around. SI has also been to critique the ANSI SQL-92 standard's definition of isolation levels, as it exhibits none of the "anomalies" that the SQL standard prohibited, yet is not serializable (the anomaly-free isolation level defined by ANSI).

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

In computing, an integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of a source code editor, a compiler and/or interpreter, build automation tools, and (usually) a debugger. Sometimes a version control system and various tools are integrated to simplify the construction of a GUI. Many modern IDEs also have a class browser, an object inspector, and a class hierarchy diagram, for use with object oriented software development.

Friday, April 04, 2008

Database security

Database security is the system, processes, and procedures that protect a database from unintended activity. Unintended activity can be categorized as authenticated misuse, malicious attacks or inadvertent mistakes made by authorized individuals or processes. Database security is also a specialty within the broader discipline of computer security.

Traditionally databases have been protected from external connections by firewalls or routers on the network perimeter with the database environment existing on the internal network opposed to being located within a demilitarized zone. Additional network security devices that detect and alert on malicious database protocol traffic include network intrusion detection systems along with host-based intrusion detection systems.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Reverse proxy

A reverse proxy or surrogate is a proxy server that is installed within the neighborhood of one or more servers. Typically, reverse proxies are used in front of Web servers. All connections coming from the Internet addressed to one of the Web servers are routed through the proxy server, which may either deal with the request itself or pass the request wholly or partially to the main web servers.

A reverse proxy dispatches in-bound network traffic to a set of servers, presenting a single interface to the caller. For example, a reverse proxy could be used for load balancing a cluster of web servers. In contrast, a forward proxy acts as a proxy for out-bound traffic. For example, an ISP may use a proxy to forward HTTP traffic from its clients to external web servers on the internet; it may also cache the results to improve performance.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

MySQL

MySQL (pronounced /maɪˌɛskjuːˈɛl/ "my S-Q-L") is a multithreaded, multi-user SQL database management system (DBMS) which has more than 11 million installations. The basic program runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases.

Originally financed in a similar fashion to the JBoss model, MySQL was owned and sponsored by a single for-profit firm, the Swedish company MySQL AB, now a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, which holds the copyright to most of the codebase. The project's source code is available under terms of the GNU General Public License, as well as under a variety of proprietary agreements.

Monday, March 10, 2008

Computational chemistry

Computational chemistry is a branch of chemistry that uses computers to assist in solving chemical problems. It uses the results of theoretical chemistry, incorporated into efficient computer programs, to calculate the structures and properties of molecules and solids. While its results normally complement the information obtained by chemical experiments, it can in some cases predict hitherto unobserved chemical phenomena. It is widely used in the design of new drugs and materials.

Examples of such properties are structure (i.e. the expected positions of the constituent atoms), absolute and relative (interaction) energies, electronic charge distributions, dipoles and higher multipole moments, vibrational frequencies, reactivity or other spectroscopic quantities, and cross sections for collision with other particles.

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Aviation

Aviation encompasses all the activities relating to airborne devices created by human ingenuity, generally known as aircraft. These activities include the organizations and regulatory bodies as well as the personnel related with the operation of aircraft and the industries involved in airplane manufacture, development, and design.

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Liquid Inkjet Printers

Liquid inkjet printers very small, exact amounts (generally a few picolitres) of ink onto the media. These droplet of ink will carry a small electrical charge. The situation of the ink on the page is then determined by the accuse of a cathode and electrode between which the ink moves towards the paper. Inkjet printing (and the related bubble-jet technology) are the most general -quality inkjet printers are inexpensive to produce.

Almost all recent inkjet printers are color devices; some, known as photo printers, include extra pigments to better reproduce the color range needed for high-quality photographic prints (and are additionally capable of printing on photographic card stock, as opposed to plain office paper).

Inkjet printers consist of nozzles that create very small ink bubbles that turn into tiny droplets of ink. The dots shaped are the size of tiny pixels. Ink-jet printers can be able to print high fineness text and graphics. They are also more or less silent in operation. Inkjet printers have a much lesser initial cost than do laser printers, but have a much higher cost-per-copy, as the ink needs to be regularly replaced.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

United Kingdom

Until decimalization in the United Kingdom in 1971, the abbreviation., from solidus, was used to represent a shilling, worth one-twentieth of a Pound genuine, just as d. stood for denarii (pennies) and £ stood and still stands for Libra (pound). Though the shilling and its short form are no longer used, a slang word for shilling, "bob", is still occasionally used in expressions like "a few bobble", i.e. a bit of money.

Monday, January 07, 2008

Sustainable transportation concerns systems, policies, and technologies. It aims for the efficient transit of goods and serivces, and sustainable freight and delivery systems. The design of vehicle-free city planning, along with pedestrian and bicycle frendly design of neighbourhoods is a critical aspect for grassroots activities, as are telework and teleconferencing.

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Football (soccer)

Association football, commonly known as football or soccer, is a team sport played between two teams of eleven players, and it is the most fashionable sport in the world. It is a ball game played on a rectangular grass or artificial turf field, with a goal at each of the short ends. The purpose of the game is to score by manoeuvring the ball into the opposing goal. In general play, the goalkeeper is the only player permitted to use their hands or arms to propel the ball; the rest of the team usually use their feet to kick the ball into position, occasionally using their torso or head to intercept a ball in mid air. The team that scores the most goals by the end of the match wins. If the score is tied at the end of the game, either a draw is declared or the game goes into extra time and/or a penalty shootout, depending on the format of the competition.
The modern game was codified in England following the formation of The Football Association, whose 1863 Laws of the Game created the foundations for the way the sport is played today. Football is governed internationally by the Federation Internationale de Football Association (International Federation of Association Football), commonly known by the acronym FIFA. The most prestigious international football competition is the World Cup, held every four years. This event, the most widely viewed in the world, boasts an audience twice that of the Summer Olympics.

Friday, December 14, 2007

Uses of Ginger

There are array of uses suggested for ginger. A tea brewed from the is a folk medicine for colds. Ginger ale and ginger beer have been suggested as "stomach settlers" for generation in countries where the beverages are made and ginger water was commonly used to avoid heat cramps in the US. Ginger has also been historically used to take care of inflammation which some scientific studies support, though one arthritis trial showed ginger to be no better than a placebo or ibuprofen. Research on rats suggests that ginger may be valuable for treating diabetes.

Thursday, December 06, 2007

Cricket in India

without doubt the first sport that comes to mind when one thinks of Indian sports today is cricket. Brought to India by her British colonisers, cricket so captured the nation’s thoughts that observers are more or less agreed that today it is the one religion that unites India.
In cities like Calcutta, with everybody glued to their TV sets, life grinds to a stop the progress of the days the Indian team is playing. One-day gear and test matches stimulate equal eagerness; for together, if the match is being played on Indian earth, which by the way supports spin slightly than pace, you’ll get aptitude crowds and a emotional atmosphere seldom matched anywhere outside the subcontinent. Allegations of murky match fixing and a fixed string of matches where the team managed to “grab defeat from the jaws of victory” notwithstanding, the attractiveness of the game continues to rise. Such is the strength of participation with the game that it even affects India’s international relationships. In the result of the 1999 Kargil war, India unilaterally overhanging cricketing relations with Pakistan. The discuss on whether politics and sports should mix enlivens many a discussion, and is yet unresolved.

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Abraham Lincoln

The brave man of the familiar People. It had been an extended time coming. Terribly separated by the issue of slavery, thirty-one million American citizens were in 1860
Called upon to vote for 16th President of the United States. The Democratic Party meets at its National Party Convention in Charleston, South Carolina, in order to choose their candidate in favor of the presidency. Split over slavery, each section, Northern Democrats on the one hand and Southern Democrats on the other, presented its own conflicting proposal for the party platform.
In February 1860, Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi claimed that neither the Congress of the United States nor the territorial parliaments had the control to handle slavery.