Wikipedia is a free, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning 'quick') and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's 12 million articles (2.8 million in the English Wikipedia) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone who can access the Wikipedia website. Launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, it is currently the most popular general reference work on the Internet.

Critics of Wikipedia accuse it of systemic bias and inconsistencies, and target its policy of favoring consensus over credentials in its editorial process. Wikipedia's reliability and accuracy are also an issue. Other criticisms are centered on its susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of spurious or unverified information, though scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived.

Jonathan Dee, of The New York Times, and Andrew Lih, in the 5th International Symposium on Online Journalism, have cited the importance of Wikipedia not only as an encyclopedic reference but also as a frequently-updated news resource.

When Time magazine recognized You as its Person of the Year for 2006, acknowledging the accelerating success of online collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, it cited Wikipedia as one of three examples of Web 2.0 services, along with YouTube and MySpace.

History

Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. Nupedia was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, Inc, a web portal company. Its main figures were Jimmy Wales, Bomis CEO, and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. Nupedia was licensed initially under its own Nupedia Open Content License, switching to the GNU Free Documentation License before Wikipedia's founding at the urging of Richard Stallman. Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales are the founders of Wikipedia. While Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia, Sanger is usually credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal. On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia. Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com, and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view" was codified in its initial months, and was similar to Nupedia's earlier "nonbiased" policy. Otherwise, there were relatively few rules initially and Wikipedia operated independently of Nupedia.

Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and search engine indexing. It grew to approximately 20,000 articles, and 18 language editions, by the end of 2001. By late 2002 it had reached 26 language editions, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the final days of 2004. Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers went down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. English Wikipedia passed the 2 million-article mark on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, eclipsing even the Yongle Encyclopedia (1407), which had held the record for exactly 600 years.

Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control in a perceived English-centric Wikipedia, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create the Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002. Later that year, Wales announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and its website was moved to wikipedia.org. Various other projects have since forked from Wikipedia for editorial reasons. Wikinfo does not require a neutral point of view and allows original research. New Wikipedia-inspired projects — such as Citizendium, Scholarpedia, Conservapedia, and Google's Knol — have been started to address perceived limitations of Wikipedia, such as its policies on peer review, original research, and commercial advertising.

The Wikimedia Foundation was created from Wikipedia and Nupedia on June 20, 2003. It applied to the United States Patent and Trademark Office to trademark Wikipedia on September 17, 2004. The mark was granted registration status on January 10, 2006. Trademark protection was accorded by Japan on December 16, 2004, and in the European Union on January 20, 2005. Technically a service mark, the scope of the mark is for: "Provision of information in the field of general encyclopedic knowledge via the Internet."^{[citation needed]} There are plans to license the use of the Wikipedia trademark for some products, such as books or DVDs.

Editing model

Unlike traditional encyclopedias such as Encyclopædia Britannica, no article in Wikipedia undergoes formal peer-review process and changes to articles are made available immediately. No article is owned by its creator or any other editor, or is vetted by any recognized authority. Except for a few vandalism-prone pages that can be edited only by established users, or in extreme cases only by administrators, every article may be edited anonymously or with a user account, while only registered users may create a new article (only in English edition). Consequently, Wikipedia "makes no guarantee of validity" of its content. Being a general reference work, Wikipedia also contains materials that some people, including Wikipedia editors, may find objectionable, offensive, or pornographic. For instance, in 2008, Wikipedia rejected an online petition against the inclusion of Muhammad's depictions in its English edition, citing this policy. The presence of politically sensitive materials in Wikipedia had also led the People's Republic of China to block access to parts of the site. (See also: IWF block of Wikipedia)

Wikipedia community

The community of editors has a power structure. Wikipedia's community has also been described as "cult-like", although not always with entirely negative connotations, and criticized for failing to accommodate inexperienced users. Editors in good standing in the community can run for one of many of levels of volunteer stewardship; this begins with "administrator", a group of privileged users who have the ability to delete pages, lock articles from being changed in case of vandalism or editorial disputes, and block users from editing. Despite the name, administrators do not enjoy any special privilege in decision-making and are prohibited from using their powers to settle content disputes. The roles of administrators, often described as "janitorial", are mostly limited to making edits that have project-wide effects and thus are disallowed to ordinary editors in order to minimize disruption, as well as banning users from making disruptive edits such as vandalism.

Adobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company headquartered in San Jose, California, USA.

Adobe was founded in December 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, who established the company after leaving Xerox PARC in order to develop and sell the PostScript page description language. In 1985, Apple Computer licensed PostScript for use in its LaserWriter printers, which helped spark the desktop publishing revolution. The company name Adobe comes from Adobe Creek, which ran behind the house of one of the company's founders. Adobe acquired its former competitor, Macromedia, in December 2005.

As of January 2007, Adobe Systems has 6,677 employees, about 40% of whom work in San Jose. Adobe also has major development operations in Seattle, Washington; San Francisco, California; Ottawa, Ontario; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Newton, Massachusetts; San Luis Obispo, California; Hamburg, Germany; Noida, India and Bangalore, India.

History

Adobe's first products after PostScript were digital fonts, which they released in a proprietary format called Type 1. Apple subsequently developed a competing standard, TrueType, which provided full scalability and precise control of the pixel pattern created by the font's outlines, and licensed it to Microsoft. Adobe responded by publishing the Type 1 specification and releasing Adobe Type Manager, software that allowed WYSIWYG scaling of Type 1 fonts on screen, like TrueType, although without the precise pixel-level control. But these moves were too late to stop the rise of TrueType. Although Type 1 remained the standard in the graphics/publishing market, TrueType became the standard for business and the average Windows user. In 1996, Adobe and Microsoft announced the OpenType font format, and in 2003 Adobe completed converting its Type 1 font library to OpenType.

In the mid-1980s, Adobe entered the consumer software market with Adobe Illustrator, a vector-based drawing program for the Apple Macintosh. Illustrator, which grew from the firm's in-house font-development software, helped popularize PostScript-enabled laser printers. Unlike MacDraw, then the standard Macintosh vector drawing program, Illustrator described shapes with more flexible Bézier curves, providing unprecedented accuracy. Font rendering in Illustrator, however, was left to the Macintosh's QuickDraw libraries and would not be superseded by a PostScript-like approach until Adobe released Adobe Type Manager.

In 1989, Adobe introduced what was to become its flagship product, Adobe Photoshop for the Macintosh. Stable and full-featured, Photoshop 1.0 was ably marketed by Adobe and soon dominated the market.

Arguably, one of Adobe's few missteps on the Macintosh platform was their failure to develop their own desktop publishing (DTP) program. Instead, Aldus with PageMaker in 1985 and Quark with QuarkXPress in 1987 gained early leads in the DTP market. Adobe was also slow to address the emerging Windows DTP market. However, Adobe made great strides in that market with release of InDesign and its bundled Creative Suite offering. In a failure to predict the direction of computing, Adobe released a complete version of Illustrator for Steve Jobs' ill-fated NeXT system, but a poorly produced version for Windows.

Despite these missteps, licensing fees from the PostScript interpreter allowed Adobe to outlast or acquire many of its rivals in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In December 1991, Adobe released Adobe Premiere, which Adobe rebranded to Adobe Premiere Pro in 2003. In 1994, Adobe acquired Aldus and added Adobe PageMaker and Adobe After Effects to its production line later in the year; it also controls the TIFF file format. In 1995, Adobe added Adobe FrameMaker, the long-document DTP application, to its production line after Adobe acquired Frame Technology Corp. In 1999, Adobe introduced Adobe InCopy as a direct competitor to QuarkCopyDesk.

Top competitors

According to Hoovers Adobe's top competitors are:

• Apple Inc.
• Microsoft
• Quark, Inc.

Company events

1992

• Acquired OCR Systems, Inc.

1999

• Acquired GoLive Systems, Inc. and released Adobe GoLive.
• Shipped Adobe InDesign as a direct competitor to QuarkXPress and eventual replacement for PageMaker.

2003

• May: Acquired Syntrillium Software, adding Adobe Audition to its product line.

2004

• December: Acquired French company OKYZ S.A., makers of 3D collaboration software. The acquisition added 3D technology and expertise to the Adobe Intelligent Document Platform.

2005

• December 12, 2005: Acquired its main rival Macromedia in a stock swap valued at about $3.4 billion adding: Adobe ColdFusion, Adobe Contribute, Adobe Captivate, Adobe Acrobat Connect (formerly Macromedia Breeze), Adobe Director, Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe Fireworks, Adobe Flash, Macromedia FlashPaper, Adobe Flex, Macromedia FreeHand, Macromedia HomeSite, Macromedia JRun, Adobe Presenter, and Macromedia Authorware to Adobe's production line.

2006

• October: Adobe acquires Serious Magic, makers of Visual Communicator and video blogging application, Vlog It!
• December: The firm's headquarters buildings in San Jose received three Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design platinum certifications.

2007

• January: Released Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to assist photographers in managing digital images and doing post production work. The product was intended as a competitor to Apple's Aperture in the RAW image editing market.
• May 2007: Acquired Scene7, which makes an image processing and display platform used in many retail sites on the web.
• July: Adobe released Adobe Soundbooth. This product was not intended to replace the existing Adobe Audition but merely to provide an environment for professionals not specializing in audio.
• August 3, 2007: announced their plans to discontinue development of Authorware, the “visual authoring tool for creating rich-media e-learning applications for delivery on corporate networks, CD/DVD, and the Web.” Authorware was one of the development tools acquired in the Macromedia/Adobe merger. No comparable eLearning development tool in terms of capabilities is being offered at this time by Adobe.
• October 2007: Acquired Virtual Ubiquity, with its online word processor, Buzzword.
• November 12, 2007: CEO, Bruce Chizen resigns. Effective December 1, he is to be replaced by Shantanu Narayen, Adobe's current president and Chief Operating Officer. Bruce Chizen is expected to serve out his term on Adobe's Board of Directors, and then continue in a strategic advisory role until the end of Adobe's 2008 fiscal year.
• In December 2007, Apple Inc. released a security update for Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server to address vulnerabilities in the Adobe products Flash and Shockwave and in Tar, a GNU utility. Among the problems addressed were the ability to "execute arbitrary code" and to "surreptitiously initiate a video conference".

2008

• 27 April: Adobe discontinues development and sales of its older HTML/web development software, GoLive in favor of Dreamweaver. Adobe offers a discount on Dreamweaver for GoLive users and supports those who still use GoLive with online tutorials and migration assistance.
• 1 June: Adobe launches Acrobat.com, a series of web applications geared for collaborative work.

• Creative Suite 4 which includes Design, Web, Production Premium and Master Collection is due in October 2008 in six configurations at prices from about USD $1,700 to $2,500or by individual application. The Windows version of Photoshop includes 64-bit processing.

Corporate leadership

Products

Adobe's products include

• desktop software, such as Adobe Photoshop (part of the Adobe Creative Suite) and Adobe Audition
• server software, such as Adobe ColdFusion and Adobe LiveCycle
• technologies, such as Portable Document Format (PDF), PDF's predecessor PostScript, and Flash

Corporate history

Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married couple that worked in computer operations staff at Stanford University, later joined by Richard Troiano, founded cisco Systems in 1984. The name "Cisco" was derived from the city name, San Francisco, which is why the company insisted using the lower case 'cisco' in the early days. Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software originally written by William Yeager, another staff employee who had begun the work years before Bosack arrived from the University of Pennsylvania, where Bosack had received his bachelor's degree.

While Cisco was not the first company to develop and sell a router, it was one of the first to sell commercially successful routers supporting multiple network protocols. As the Internet Protocol (IP) has become a standard, the importance of multi-protocol routing as a function has declined. Today, Cisco's largest routers are marketed to route primarily IP packets and MPLS frames.

In 1990, the company went public and was listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Lerner was fired and because of that, Bosack quit but not before receiving $200 million. Most of those profits were given to charities and the two later divorced.

Cisco acquired a variety of companies to bring in talent and innovation into the company. Several acquisitions, e.g. Stratacom, were the biggest deals at the time when it happened. During the Internet boom in 1999, the company acquired Cerent Corp., a start-up company located in Petaluma, California, for about US$7 billion. It was the most expensive acquisition made by Cisco at that time. Since then, only Cisco's acquisition of Scientific-Atlanta has been bigger. Although not every acquisition is equally successful, Cisco has been on the successful side integrating its acquisitions compared to its competitors. Several acquired companies has grown into the backbone business units for Cisco in the LAN switching, VOIP, and home networking area.

In late March 2000, at the height of the dot-com boom, Cisco was the most valuable company in the world, with a market capitalization of more than US$500 billion. In 2007, with a market cap of about US$180 billion, it is still one of the most valuable companies. CSCO was voted stock of the decade on NASDAQ. The company's 7500 Series router was voted 3rd in the product of the decade 1990-2000 behind the Mosaic web browser and the Novell LAN manager.

Cisco has made inroads into many network equipment markets outside routing, including Ethernet switching, remote access, branch office routers, ATM networking, security, IP telephony, and others. In 2003, Cisco acquired Linksys, a popular manufacturer of computer networking hardware and positioned it as a leading brand for the home and end user networking market (SOHO).

The company's first two CEOs are John Morgridge and John Chambers (active).

The company was a 2002-03 recipient of the Ron Brown Award.

Corporate affairs

The company has its corporate headquarters in San Jose, California, with many buildings in the area near North First Street and Tasman. Cisco also has outposts in many other countries such as Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Belize, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Kuwait, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malaysia, Mexico, Monaco, Montenegro, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico and The Caribbean, Romania, Russia, Senegal, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam.

Cisco's vision is "Changing the Way We Work, Live, Play and Learn." Cisco's current tagline is "Welcome to the human network."

Products and services

Partial list of hardware products

• Application Network Services
• Broadband Cable products: uBR7100 series, uBR7200 series, uBR10012 CMTSes. A line of Cable modems, the uBR900 series and CVA122 series, were also made in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but have since been discontinued.
  • Clean Access Server
• Content Networking
• DSL & Long Reach Ethernet
• Interoperability Systems
• Cisco LocalDirector load-balancing appliance
• Optical Networking series: 15xxx Series: 15302, 15305, 15310, 15327, 15454, 15600, 1580x, 15900(wavelength router, but end for sale)
• Routers: AGS, AGS+, MGS, IGS, CGS, SB107, 700, 800, 837, 1000 Series, 1600 Series, 1700, 1800, 2500 Series, 2600 Series, 2800, 3600, 3700, 3800, 4000 Series, 4500, 7000 Series, 7100/7200/7300/7400 Mid Range Customer Edge/Service Provider Edge family, 7500, 7600, 10000, 12000, and CRS-1
• Security & VPN products: Anomaly Detection and Mitigation Appliances, Cisco AVS 3110 Application Velocity System, Cisco ASA 5500 Series Adaptive Security Appliances, Cisco PIX 500 Series Security Appliances, Cisco VPN 3000 Series Concentrators, Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series/7600 Series WebVPN Services Module, IPSec VPN Services Module (VPNSM) for Cisco Catalyst 6500 Switches and Cisco 7600 Series Routers
• Server Networking & Virtualization
• SPA Phone Adapters
• Storage networking
• Switches
  • Catalyst series: 500 and 520 Express, 1900 Series, 2900, 2950, 2960, 3560 and 3560E, 3750 and 3750E, 4500, 6500 Nexus 7000 switch and 5000 switch (from the Nuova Systems Inc. acquisition] etc..
  • Metro Ethernet ME 3400 Series Access Switches
  • MGX 8800 Series Multiservice Switches: MGX 8830, MGX 8850
  • MDS 9000 Series Multilayer SAN Switches
  • Nexus 1000V distributed virtual software switch
• Universal Gateways & Access Servers
• Video
• Cisco Telepresence
• Voice & IP Communications: 7900 Series IP Phones: 7936, 7906G, 7912G, 7911G, 7920, 7921G, 7911G, 7921G, 7931G, 7940G, 7941G, 7941G-GE, 7960G, 7961G, 7961G-GE, 7970G, 7971G-GE, 7975G and 7985G
• Wireless: Wireless Integrated Switches and Routers,Wireless IP Telephony, Wireless LAN Access, Aironet Wireless Bridges and Workgroup Bridges, Cisco Wireless LAN Client Adapters (PCI and PCMCIA), Wireless LAN Controllers, Wireless Network Management, Wireless LAN Management, Wireless Security Servers, Wireless IP Phone 7920

Partial list of software products

• Internet Operating System (IOS), IOS-XR
• Cisco Active Network Abstraction (ANA)
• Cisco Network Assistant (CNA)
• Cisco Configuration Assistant (CCA)
• Cisco CallManager / Unified Communications Manager (CUCM)
• Cisco Emergency Responder (CER)
• Cisco IP Transfer Point (ITP)
• Cisco Multimedia Conference Manager (MCM)
• Cisco Fabric Manager
• CiscoView
• CiscoWorks Network Management software
• IP SLAs
• Cisco Intelligent Contact Management
• Cisco Secure Access Control Server (ACS)
• Cisco Access Registrar (AR)
• Cisco Security MARS (Monitoring, Analysis and Response System)
• Cisco Clean Access Agent, Cisco Clean Access Manager, Cisco NAC Appliance
• Content Loadbalancers (acquired from Arrowpoint)
• Content Engine
• Wireless LAN Solution Engine
• Cisco VPN Client
• Packet Tracer, a didactic network simulator
• Cisco IP/TV
• Cisco IP/VC
• Cisco NX-OS
• Cisco Unified Contact Center
• Cisco MeetingPlace
• Cisco Unity
• Cisco Unified Communications Manager
• Cisco Unified Personal Communicator
• Cisco Unified Presence Server
• Cisco Unified Application Environment
• Cisco IP Communicator
• Cisco Unified Video Advantage
• Cisco Secure Desktop
• Cisco Security Manager
• WebEx Collaboration Tools
• Cisco Transport Manager
• Cisco Router and Security Device Manager
• Cisco Enhanced Device Interface
• Wireless Control System
• Wide Area Application Services (WAAS)
• BTS 10200 [PacketCable specifications based SoftSwitch with Class 4/5 and IMS functionalities]
• PGW 2200
• HSI

The National Cadet Corps (India) is the Indian military cadet corps. It is open to school and college students on voluntary basis.

The National Cadet Corps in India is a voluntary organization which recruits cadets from high schools and colleges. The Cadets are given basic military training in small arms and parades. The officers and cadets have no liability for active military service. The motto of NCC is "Unity and Discipline".

History

The NCC in India was formed with the National Cadet Corps Act of 1948. It was raised on 15 July 1948 The National Cadet Corps can be considered as a successor of the University Officers Training Corps (UOTC) which was established by the British in 1942. During World War II, the UOTC never came up to the expectations set by the British. This led to the idea that some better schemes should be formed, which could train more young men in a better way, even during peace times. A committee headed by Pandit H.N. Kunzru recommended a cadet organisation to be established in schools and colleges at a national level. The National Cadet Corps Act was accepted by the Governor General and on 15 July 1948 the National Cadet Corps came into existence.

During the 1965 and 1971 wars with Pakistan, NCC cadets were the second line of defence. They organised camps to assist the ordnance factories, supplying arms and ammunition to the front, and also were used as patrol parties to capture the enemy paratroopers. The NCC cadets also worked hand in hand with the Civil Defence authorities and actively took part in rescue work and traffic control. After the 1965 and 1971 Indo-Pak wars the NCC syllabus was revised. Rather than just being the second line of defence, NCC syllabus laid a greater stress on developing qualities of leadership and Officer-like qualities. The military training which the NCC cadets received was reduced and greater importance was given to other areas like social service and youth-management.

Aim

The aims of NCC are:

1. To develop qualities of Character, Courage, Comradeship, Discipline, Leadership, Secular Outlook, Spirit of Adventure and the ideals of Selfless Service amongst the Youth of the Country.

2. To Create a Human Resource of Organized, Trained and Motivated Youth, to Provide Leadership in all Walks of life and be Always Available for the Service of the Nation.

3. To Provide a Suitable Environment to Motivate the Youth to Take Up a Career in the Armed Forces.

Oath

[English] "I do hereby solemnly promise that I will serve my motherland most truly and loyally and that, I will abide by the rules and regulations of the National Cadet Crops. Further under the command and control of my commanding officer I will participate in every camp most sincerely and wholeheartedly. "

[Hindi] "Main pratignya karta hoon ki main sachchai aur shraddha se apne desh ki seva karoonga, tatha rashtriya cadet corps ke niyamon tatha adhiniyamon ka paalan karoonga; aur apne commanding officer ke aadesh ke anusaar har parade aur har camp mein poori shakti ke saath sammilit rahoonga. "

Divisions

There are four distinct divisions in the NCC:

1. Senior Division for boys (SD) — This consists of cadets recruited from colleges and are under the command of a lecturer called the Associated NCC Officer (ANO). This is called a company and consists of a maximum of 160 cadets.
2. Junior Division for boys (JD) — This consists of cadets recruited from high schools and are under the command of an ANO who is a teacher in that school. This is called a group and consists of a maximum of 160 cadets.
3. Senior Wing for girls (SW) — This is similar to the SD and consists of girls recruited from colleges.
4. Junior Wing for girls (JW) — Cadets in the JW are girls recruited from schools.

The divisions are further divided into Army, Navy and Airforce wings. For example a school could have a naval junior division (JD) squad commanded by an ANO.