Free

Media

Arts and philosophy

Computing

Mathematics

Free: The Future of a Radical Price

Free: The Future of a Radical Price is the second book written by Chris Anderson, Editor in chief of Wired magazine. The book was published on July 7, 2009 by Hyperion. He is also the author of The Long Tail, published in 2006.

Overview

Free follows a thread from the previous work. It examines the rise of pricing models which give products and services to customers for free, often as a strategy for attracting users and up-selling some of them to a premium level. That class of model has become widely referred to as "freemium" and has become very popular for a variety of digital products and services.

Release

Free was released in the United States on July 7, 2009, though the night before, on his blog, Chris Anderson posted a browser readable version of the book and the unabridged audiobook version. Anderson generated controversy for plagiarizing content from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia in Free. Anderson responded to the claim on his The Long Tail blog, stating that there were disagreements between him and the publisher over accurate citation of Wikipedia due to the changing nature of its content, leading him to integrate footnotes into the text. Also on his blog, he took full responsibility for the mistakes and noted that the digital editions of Free were corrected. The notes and sources were later provided as a download on his blog.

Free (David Garrett album)

Free is a 2007 album by violinist David Garrett, released in Europe by Decca.

Track listing

References

PoweredUSB

PoweredUSB, also known as Retail USB, USB PlusPower, and USB +Power, is an addition to the Universal Serial Bus standard that allows for higher-power devices to obtain power through their USB host instead of requiring an independent power supply or external AC adapter. It is mostly used in point-of-sale equipment, such as receipt printers and barcode readers.

History

PoweredUSB, as a proprietary variant of USB, was developed and proposed by IBM, Berg (now FCI), NCR and Microsoft between 1998 and 1999, with the last revision (0.8g) issued in 2004. The specification is not endorsed by the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF). IBM, who owns patents to PoweredUSB, charges a licensing fee for its use.

PoweredUSB was licensed by Hewlett-Packard, Cyberdata, Fujitsu, Wincor and others.

Implementation

PoweredUSB uses a more complex connector than standard USB, maintaining the standard USB 1.x/2.0 interface for data communications and adding a second connector for power. Physically, it is essentially two connectors stacked such that the bottom connector accepts a standard USB plug and the top connector takes a power plug.

IBM Power (software)

POWER was an IBM operating system enhancement package that provided spooling facilities for the IBM System/360 running DOS/360 or retrofitted with modified DOS/360. Upgrades, POWER/VS and POWER/VSE were available for and the IBM System/370 running DOS/VS and DOS/VSE respectively. POWER is an acronym for Priority Output Writers, Execution processors and input Readers.

The product

POWER was an operating system enhancement available for DOS/360, DOS/VS, and DOS/VSE, and came packaged with some third party DOS-based operating systems. International Business Machines released POWER in 1969 following a public introduction at the IBM Wall Street Data Center.

It 'spooled' (queued) printer and card data, freeing programs from being dependent upon the speed of printers or punched card equipment.

POWER competed with non-IBM products, namely DataCorp's The Spooler and SDI's GRASP. Unlike the other products, POWER required a dedicated partition.

It allowed a single printer (1403/2311), punch (2520, 2540) or reader (2540, 2501) to be shared by two or more processing partitions. Input data was asynchronously loaded and directed to the proper partition by Job class. Output was directed to disk and stored there - then directed to a printer or punch by the writer type, (PRT, PUN), Job Class, Priority and form code. This was provided in PRT and PUN control cards in the input stream. Once the operator put the proper form in the printer/punch and told power to start (G PUN or G PRT on the console) the device would continue until no more output of that type was available. When a new form was encountered it would alert the operator to change forms and wait for the next go command.

Hydroelectric power in Himachal Pradesh

Himachal Pradesh is extremely rich in its hydroelectricity resources. The state is having about twenty five percent of the national potential in this aspect. It has been estimated that about 27,436 MW of hydel power can be generated in the state by the construction of various hydel projects on the five perennial river basins no matter they are major, medium or small. Out of total hydel potential of the state, 3934.74MW is harnessed so far, out of which only 7.6% is under the control of Himachal Pradesh Government while the rest being exploited by the Central Government. The state government has been giving the highest priority for its development, since hydel generation can meet the growing need of power for industry, agriculture and rural electrification. It is also the biggest source of income to the state as it provides electricity to the other states also.

Himachal has enough resources to generate surplus power but, sometimes this is a misconception as in winters the power shortage overshoots ten lakh units per day due to less flow of water in rivers and at the same time increase in lighting and heating load. Due to increased industrialization and rural electrification this figure is expected to rise even further.