Due to an earlier antitrust case forbidding it from entering the computer business, AT&T licensed the operating system's source code as a trade secret to anyone who asked. As a result, Unix grew quickly and became widely adopted by academic institutions and businesses. In 1984, AT&T divested itself of its regional operating companies, and was released from its obligation not to enter the computer business; freed of that obligation, Bell Labs began selling Unix as a proprietary product, where users were not legally allowed to modify it.[42][43]
infotech english for computer users teacher's book pdf 141
While attending the University of Helsinki in the fall of 1990, Torvalds enrolled in a Unix course.[51] The course utilized a MicroVAX minicomputer running Ultrix, and one of the required texts was Operating Systems: Design and Implementation by Andrew S. Tanenbaum. This textbook included a copy of Tanenbaum's MINIX operating system. It was with this course that Torvalds first became exposed to Unix. In 1991, he became curious about operating systems.[52] Frustrated by the licensing of MINIX, which at the time limited it to educational use only,[48] he began to work on his own operating system kernel, which eventually became the Linux kernel.
Today, Linux systems are used throughout computing, from embedded systems to virtually all supercomputers,[31][59] and have secured a place in server installations such as the popular LAMP application stack. Use of Linux distributions in home and enterprise desktops has been growing.[60][61][62][63][64][65][66] Linux distributions have also become popular in the netbook market, with many devices shipping with customized Linux distributions installed, and Google releasing their own ChromeOS designed for netbooks.
An access-control list (ACL), with respect to a computer file system, is a list of permissions associated with an object. An ACL specifies which users or system processes are granted access to objects, as well as what operations are allowed on given objects.
All information technologies record (store), transmit (communicate),organize and/or synthesize information. For example, a book is arecord of information, a telephone is used to communicate information,and the Dewey decimal system organizes information. Many informationtechnologies can accomplish more than one of the above functions and,most notably, the computer can accomplish all of them since it can bedescribed as a universal machine (see the entry on computability and complexity), so it can be programmed to emulate any form of informationtechnology. In section 2 we will look at some specific example technologies and applicationsfrom each of the three types of information technology listed aboveand track the moral challenges that arise out of the use and design ofthese particular technologies. In addition to the above we will needto address the growing use of information environments such as massivemultiplayer games, which are environments completely composed ofinformation where people can develop alternate lives filled withvarious forms of social activities (see section 3.3). Finally we will look at not only how information technology impactsour moral intuitions but also how it might be changing the very natureof moral reasoning. In section 4, we will look at information as a technology of morality and how wemight program applications and robots to interact with us in a moremorally acceptable manner.
In the case of Facebook we can see that some of the warnings of thecritics were prescient. In April of 2018, Mark Zuckerberg was calledbefore congress where he apologized for the actions of his corporationin a scandal that involved divulging a treasure trove of informationabout his users to an independent researcher, who then sold it toCambridge Analytica, which was a company involved in political dataanalysis. This data was then used to target political ads to the usersof Facebook. Many of which were fake ads created by Russianintelligence to disrupt the US election in 2016 (Au-Yeung, 2018).
Patrick Grim has been a longtime proponent of the idea that philosophyshould utilize information technologies to automate and illustratephilosophical thought experiments (Grim et al. 1998; Grim 2004). PeterDanielson (1998) has also written extensively on this subjectbeginning with his book Modeling Rationality, Morality, andEvolution with much of the early research in the computationaltheory of morality centered on using computer models to elucidate theemergence of cooperation between simple software AI or ALife agents(Sullins 2005). 2ff7e9595c
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