About Computers and Computer Companies

Email ... An email message consists of three components, the message envelope, the message header, and the message body. The message header contains control information, including, minimally, an originator's email address and one or more recipient addresses...

Natural Language Processing ... Whether NLP is distinct from, or identical to, the field of computational linguistics is a matter of perspective. The Association for Computational Linguistics defines the latter as focusing on the theoretical aspects of NLP...

Cryptography ... Cryptography prior to the modern age was effectively synonymous with encryption, the conversion of information from a readable state to apparent nonsense. The originator of an encrypted message shared the decoding technique needed to recover the original information only with intended recipients, thereby precluding unwanted persons to do the same...

Speech Recognition ... Speech recognition applications include voice user interfaces such as voice dialing (e.g., "Call home"), call routing (e.g., "I would like to make a collect call"), domotic appliance control, search (e.g., find a podcast where particular words were spoken), simple data entry (e.g., entering a credit card number), preparation of structured documents (e.g., a radiology report), speech-to-text processing (e.g., word processors or emails), and aircraft (usually termed Direct Voice Input). The term voice recognition refers to finding the identity of "who" is speaking, rather than what they are saying...

Supercomputer ... in grid computing the processing power of a large number of computers in distributed, diverse administrative domains, is opportunistically used whenever a computer is available... History The history of supercomputing goes back to the 1960s when a series of computers at Control Data Corporation (CDC) were designed by Seymour Cray to use innovative designs and parallelism to achieve superior computational peak performance...

Linux Adoption ... Several national governments have passed policies moving governmental computers to Linux from proprietary systems in the last few years... History Gartner claimed that Linux-powered personal computers accounted for 4% of unit sales in 2008... Lenovo announced it would ship select models with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop pre-installed HP announced that it would begin shipping computers preinstalled with Red Hat Enterprise Linux in Australia ASUS launched the Linux-based ASUS Eee PC 2008 Dell announced it would begin shipping Ubuntu-based computers to Canada and Latin America Dell began shipping systems with Ubuntu pre-installed in China Acer launched the Linux-based Acer Aspire One In June 2008 the Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (ELCOT), a bulk computer buyer for students in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, decided to switch entirely to supplying Linux after Microsoft attempted to use its monopoly position to sell the organization Windows bundled with Micr...

History Of Chemistry ... Early attempts to explain the nature of matter and its transformations failed. The protoscience of chemistry, Alchemy, was also unsuccessful in explaining the nature of matter...

Cryptanalysis ... Even though the goal has been the same, the methods and techniques of cryptanalysis have changed drastically through the history of cryptography, adapting to increasing cryptographic complexity, ranging from the pen-and-paper methods of the past, through machines like Bombes and Colossus computers at Bletchley Park in World War II, to the computer-based schemes of the present...

Machine Learning ... In addition to performance bounds, computational learning theorists study the time complexity and feasibility of learning. In computational learning theory, a computation is considered feasible if it can be done in polynomial time...

Graphics ... Graphics can be functional or artistic. The latter can be a recorded version, such as a photograph, or an interpretation by a scientist to highlight essential features, or an artist, in which case the distinction with imaginary graphics may become blurred...

Intel ... Intel was an early developer of SRAM and DRAM memory chips, and this represented the majority of its business until 1981. Although Intel created the world's first commercial microprocessor chip in 1971, it was not until the success of the personal computer (PC) that this became its primary business...

Website ... A webpage is a document, typically written in plain text interspersed with formatting instructions of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML, XHTML). A webpage may incorporate elements from other websites with suitable markup anchors...

Federated Database System ... McLeod and Heimbigner were among the first to define a federated database system, as one which "define the architecture and interconnect databases that minimize central authority yet support partial sharing and coordination among database systems". Through data abstraction, federated database systems can provide a uniform user interface, enabling users and clients to store and retrieve data in multiple noncontiguous databases with a single query -- even if the constituent databases are heterogeneous...

Mobile Device ... Early pocket sized ones were joined in the late 2000s by larger but otherwise similar tablet computers... Types Mobile devices have been designed for many applications and include: Mobile computers Mobile collaboration Mobile internet device Mobile Web Smartphone, Tablet computer Personal digital assistant/enterprise digital assistant Calculator Handheld game console Portable media player Digital still camera (DSC) Digital video camera (DVC or digital camcorder) Mobile phone Smartphone, Feature phone Pager Personal navigation device (PND) Tablet computer Uses Handheld devices have become ruggedized for use in mobile field management...

Engineering ... The American Engineers' Council for Professional Development (ECPD, the predecessor of ABET) has defined "engineering" as: The creative application of scientific principles to design or develop structures, machines, apparatus, or manufacturing processes, or works utilizing them singly or in combination; or to construct or operate the same with full cognizance of their design; or to forecast their behavior under specific operating conditions; all as respects an intended function, economics of operation and safety to life and property.. ...

Google ... Google was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998, and its initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. At that time Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for 20 years, until the year 2024...

IBM ... The company was founded in 1911 as the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation through a merger of three companies: the Tabulating Machine Company, the International Time Recording Company, and the Computing Scale Corporation. CTR adopted the name International Business Machines in 1924, using a name previously designated to CTR's subsidiary in Canada and later South America...

Artificial Intelligence ... The field was founded on the claim that a central property of humans, intelligence—the sapience of Homo sapiens—can be so precisely described that it can be simulated by a machine. This raises philosophical issues about the nature of the mind and the ethics of creating artificial beings, issues which have been addressed by myth, fiction and philosophy since antiquity...

Information Technology ... Technological capacity and growth Hilbert and Lopez identify the exponential pace of technological change (a kind of Moore's law): machines’ application-specific capacity to compute information per capita has roughly doubled every 14 months between 1986-2007; the per capita capacity of the world’s general-purpose computers has doubled every 18 months during the same two decades; the global telecommunication capacity per capita doubled every 34 months; the world’s storage capacity per capita required roughly 40 months to double (every 3 years); and per capita broadcast information has doubled roughly every 12.3 years...

Music ... The creation, performance, significance, and even the definition of music vary according to culture and social context. Music ranges from strictly organized compositions (and their recreation in performance), through improvisational music to aleatoric forms...