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Sunan Kudus

2008-01-26T09:28:00.000+07:00

Sunan Kudus (or Ja'far Shadiq, d. 1550), founder of Kudus, is considered to be one of the Wali Sanga of Java, Indonesia

He is said to have originated the wayang golek, and founded the masjid at Kudus using (it is said) the doors from the palace of Majapahit. He took the place of his father, Sunan Ngudung.

History

He was Jaafar As-Sadiq son of Sunan Ngudung and Syarifah (sibling of Sunan Bonang), sons Nyi Ageng Maloka. It is said that he was a son of the Egytian sultan who migrated to Java. In the kingdom of Demak he was appointed as Commander in Chief of the army battalion. He went forth with Sultan Prawata, battling against Adipati Jipang, Arya Penangsang.

Dawah

He learned a lot from Sunan Kalijaga and apply most of the methods in dawah taught by Kalijaga. Kudus then fled to Central Java to the most empty place there such as Sragen, Simo and also Gunung Kidul.

He was so tolerant to the local culture and even more softer than the other wali up to the point that if someone said to have be having difficulty making dawah in Kudus they will refer back to Sunan Kudus as the most successful person in this area. He makes good use of the symbols appeared in Hinduism and Buddhism and manifested it into architecture especially mosques, minarets, entrance gates and ablutions symbolizing the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism. This is a compromising kowtow made by Kudus to his people.

On one occasion he deliberately called the locals to listen to his sermon by tying his cow named "Kebo Gumarang" in the mosque courtyard, the Hindus whom revered cows as their deity soon became sympathetic after listening to the explanation made by him in Sura al-Baqara. Up until then those people in Kudus refuse to slaughter bulls and cows because of their ancient beliefs in the sanctity of cows.

Sunan Kudus also complied stories on tawhid into series and made the crowd became enthusiastic in listening to those stories. This is the Javanese version of 1001 Arabian Night prior to the The Book of One Thousand and One Nights during the Abassid Caliphate.

Sunan Giri

2008-01-21T14:21:00.000+07:00

Sunan Giri (also called Raden Paku), Muhammad Ainul Yakin (b. AD 1442 in Blambangan (now Banyuwangi)) is considered to be one of the Wali Sanga of Java in Indonesia.

History

He was the son of Dewi Sekardadu and Maulana Ishak of Melaka (brother of Maulana Malik Ibrahim, but later adopted as a son by Nyai Semboja). A traditional story says that he was the son of a Hindu princess, who had come to Balambangan as a missionary. The princess was forced to abandon him in a crisis and set him adrift on the ocean in a small boat, from which he was rescued by sailors (a story reminiscent of the Biblical Moses).

Education and contributions

As a young man Sunan Giri studied in the school of Sunan Ampel, whose daughter he eventually married, and where Raden Patah was his fellow student.

He looked forward to migrate into Melaka and Pasai and later established his own school in Desa Sidomukti at Southern Gresik in East Java—a location from which he got his name ("Giri" means "hill"). The Islamic School which he established was not only an institute of religious studies, but also center for various local civic activities and social development.

Political leadership

It is said that the king of Majapahit became anxious and worried about the increase of Sunan Giri's influence. To forestall the possibility of his eventaully leading a rebellion, the king granted Giri the authority to expand his role in political leadership, which later on to lead to the greater development of the school, popularly known as Giri Kedaton. Sunan Giri was also known as Prabu Satmata, due to his remarkable record.

Sunan Giri foretold the rise of Mataram, and spread Islam to Lombok, Sulawesi, and Maluku. He was a proponent of orthodox Islam, and disapproved of innovation (much like "modernist" Islamic scholars of the 1800s and 1900s).

Later history of the Giri Kedaton school

Giri Kedaton, as a center of religious and political authority led by century head Pangeran Singosari was known for his most persistent resistance to the Dutch VOC and to Amangkurat II, who collaborated with the Dutch colonization efforts.

The creation of popular children's toys and games such as Jelungan, Jamuran, lir-ilir and Cublak Suweng is attributed to Sunan Giri. His name is also associated with Gending Asmaradana and Pucung (Javanese poetry)—although they had been mostly influenced by pre-Islamic Javanese beliefs and traditions, but show signs of eventual Islamization.

Sunan Gunungjati

2008-01-18T09:11:00.000+07:00

Sunan Gunungjati was a Javanese wali who founded the city of Cirebon and the Banten Sultanate. Born as Syarif Hidayatullah in AD 1448, he was the son of Nyai Rara Santang, who was the daughter of Prabu Siliwangi (the ruler of Sunda kingdom). His father was Syarif Abdullah Maulana Huda, a leader in Egypt of Hashimite descedent from Palestine.

Sunan Gunungjati worked at Demak and Banten, and was the founder of Banten Sultanate. Many stories say that he was originally from Pasai in Aceh, others say that he was from Pajajaran (the capital of Sunda Kingdom) in West Java. He married the sister of Sultan Trenggono of Demak, and led military expeditions for Demak against Banten, a port of Sunda Kingdom (which was still Hindu at that time). As "Fatahillah" he defeated the Portuguese when they tried to take Sunda Kelapa (now Jakarta) in 1527.

Some stories have Sunan Gunungjati active around the 1470s and 1480s, under the name "Hidayatullah", other stories have him active around the 1520s, and associate him with the name "Fatahillah". In the 1480s he would have been the grandson of the king of Sunda Kingdom from Pajajaran; in the late 1520s he would have fought the Portuguese near what is today Jakarta. The problem is that some stories say that he passed away in 1568, by which time he would have been as old as 120 years! Some scholars think that there may have been more than one Gunungjati.

Ancestry

As for his ancestry, another source from the Hadhramaut ulamas' (religious scholars) has it that Sunan Gunung Jati, who is also identified as Syarif Hidayatullah was born at around 1450 CE.

His lineage is traced through a descendant of Hadhrami sayyids who had started to migrate to India possibly at about the 12th and/or 13th CE. References can be obtained from the Arabic genealogy books Shams Al-Zahirah, Mushajjar al-Ansab and Khidmat al-Ashirah among others.

Syarif Hidayatullah @ Sunan Gunung Jati bin Abdullah (Cambodia) bin Ali Nur al-Alam (Siam) bin Jamaludin Akbar @ Syaikh Jamaluddin Akbar (Gujerat, India) bin Ahmad Jalaludin Khan bin Abdullah Khan bin Abdul Malik bin Alawi Ammil Faqih bin Muhammad Sohib Mirbath.

Muhammad Sohib Mirbath is a descendant from Ahmad Al-Muhajir bin Isa, who is in turn a descendant of Ali Zainal Abidin bin Al-Hussain the son of Ali bin Abu Talib and Fatimah binte Muhammad the Messenger of Islam. Ahmad bin Isa migrated from Baghdad, Iraq to Medina/Mecca first before proceeding to Hadhramaut, Yemen at around 898 CE.

This seems to be more plausible lineage compared to the proposal that he is a descendant of a Hashemite clan from Palestine. One reason is that the Islamisation of Indonesia, in fact of the whole South East Asian region, is often accompanied by traders mainly from the Indian continent. Indian influence on South-East Asia especially Indonesia prior to the spread of Islam is also a well-known fact.

As is most Indonesian adopts the Shafii sect just like the Hadhramis. Traditions like visiting tombs of saints, known as ziarah wali, is also one that is practised in large scales in India and Hadhramaut especially.

Genealogical record keeping has also been a strict discipline among the sayyids of Hadhramis, even if they have migrated to India as in the past, or to Indonesia.

Education

Syarif Hidayatullah studied Islam through venerated scholars in Egypt during his fourteen years of living and travelled to many countries including Indonesia. Egypt is not his only place of learning, as naturally he must have done his pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina and at the same time, met and studied under the various scholars which must have included Sufis.

Leadership

During the dawn of the Kingdom of Bintoro in Demak, he, under the patronage of the ulama established the kingdom of Cirebon known as Kingdom of Pakungwati. He was the only Sunan to have become a king. Gunungjati fully utilizes his kingship to propagate Islam along the coastal area of Cirebon to the most remote area of Pasundan or Priangan.

Dawah

In his dawah he uphold the strict methodology propagated by the sheikh in middle east but still he remain close to the local people by developing basic instructures for them and built road connecting the isolated provinces.

He and his price Maulana Hasanuddin went into several expeditions particularly in Banten. The leader there then voluntarily submit the leadership to him but eventually was appointed as the new leader of the province which later became the kingdom of Banten.

During his 89 year old age he started to focus on dawah and began appointing a new successor. Pangeran Pasarean later became the new king.

Death

In 1580 A.D Sunan Gunungjati died at the age of 120 in Cirebon. He was buried in Gunung Sembung, Gunung Jati, around 15 kilometer from Cirebon to the west.

Protein

2008-01-16T18:04:00.000+07:00

A representation of the 3D structure of myoglobin, showing coloured alpha helices. This protein was the first to have its structure solved by X-ray crystallography.

This article is about the class of biomolecules. For alternate uses, such as protein in nutrition, see Protein (disambiguation).

Proteins are large organic compounds made of amino acids arranged in a linear chain and joined together by peptide bonds between the carboxyl and amino groups of adjacent amino acid residues. The sequence of amino acids in a protein is defined by a gene and encoded in the genetic code. Although this genetic code specifies 20 "standard" amino acids, the residues in a protein are often chemically altered in post-translational modification: either before the protein can function in the cell, or as part of control mechanisms. Proteins can also work together to achieve a particular function, and they often associate to form stable complexes.

Like other biological macromolecules such as polysaccharides and nucleic acids, proteins are essential parts of organisms and participate in every process within cells. Many proteins are enzymes that catalyze biochemical reactions, and are vital to metabolism. Proteins also have structural or mechanical functions, such as actin and myosin in muscle, and the proteins in the cytoskeleton, which forms a system of scaffolding that maintains cell shape. Other proteins are important in cell signaling, immune responses, cell adhesion, and the cell cycle. Protein is also necessary in animals' diets, since they cannot synthesise all the amino acids and must obtain essential amino acids from food. Through the process of digestion, animals break down ingested protein into free amino acids that are then used in metabolism.

The word protein comes from the Greek πρώτα ("prota"), meaning "of primary importance" and these molecules were first described and named by the Swedish chemist Jöns Jakob Berzelius in 1838. However, proteins' central role in living organisms was not fully appreciated until 1926, when James B. Sumner showed that the enzyme urease was a protein. The first protein to be sequenced was insulin, by Frederick Sanger, who won the Nobel Prize for this achievement in 1958. The first protein structures to be solved included hemoglobin and myoglobin, by Max Perutz and Sir John Cowdery Kendrew, respectively, in 1958. Both proteins' three-dimensional structures were first determined by x-ray diffraction analysis; the structures of myoglobin and hemoglobin won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discoverers.

Fish

2008-01-14T09:24:00.000+07:00

Fish are aquatic vertebrates that are cold-blooded, covered with scales, and equipped with two sets of paired fins and several unpaired fins. Fish are abundant in the sea and in fresh water, with species being known from mountain streams (e.g., char and gudgeon) as well as in the deepest depths of the ocean (e.g., gulpers and anglerfish). They are of tremendous importance as food for people around the world, either collected from the wild (see fishing) or farmed in much the same way as cattle or chickens (see aquaculture). Fish are also exploited for recreation, through angling and fishkeeping, and fish are commonly exhibited in public aquaria. Fish have an important role in many cultures through the ages, ranging as widely as deities and religious symbols to subjects of books and popular movies.

Definition

The term "fish" is most precisely used to describe any non-tetrapod chordate, i.e., an animal with a backbone that has gills throughout life and has limbs, if any, in the shape of fins. Unlike groupings such as birds or mammals, fish are not a single clade but a paraphyletic collection of taxa, including hagfishes, lampreys, sharks and rays, ray-finned fishes, coelacanths, and lungfishes.

A typical fish is cold-blooded; has a streamlined body that allows it to swim rapidly; extracts oxygen from the water using gills or an accessory breathing organ to enable it to breath atmospheric oxygen; has two sets of paired fins, usually one or two (rarely three) dorsal fins, an anal fin, and a tail fin; has jaws; has skin that is usually covered with scales; and lays eggs that are fertilized internally or externally.

Fish come in many shapes and sizes. This is a sea dragon, a close relative of the seahorse. Their leaf-like appendages enable them to blend in with floating seaweed

To each of these there are exceptions. Tuna, Swordfish, and some species of sharks show some warm-blooded adaptations, and are able to raise their body temperature significantly above that of the ambient water surrounding them. Streamlining and swimming performance varies from highly streamlined and rapid swimmers which are able to reach 10-20 body-lengths per second (such as tuna, salmon, and jacks) through to slow but more maneuverable species such as eels and rays that reach no more than 0.5 body-lengths per second. Many groups of freshwater fish extract oxygen from the air as well as from the water using a variety of different structures. Lungfish have paired lungs similar to those of tetrapods, gouramis have a structure called the labyrinth organ that performs a similar function, while many catfish, such as Corydoras extract oxygen via the intestine or stomach. Body shape and the arrangement of the fins is highly variable, covering such seemingly un-fishlike forms as seahorses, pufferfish, anglerfish, and gulpers. Similarly, the surface of the skin may be naked (as in moray eels), or covered with scales of a variety of different types usually defined as placoid (typical of sharks and rays), cosmoid (fossil lungfishes and coelacanths), ganoid (various fossil fishes but also living gars and bichirs, cycloid, and ctenoid (these last two are found on most bony fish. There are even fishes that spend most of their time out of water. Mudskippers feed and interact with one another on mudflats and are only underwater when hiding in their burrows. The catfish Phreatobius cisternarum lives in underground, phreatic habitats, and a relative lives in waterlogged leaf litter.

Fish range in size from the 16 m (51 ft) whale shark to the 8 mm (just over ¼ of an inch) long stout infantfish.

Many types of aquatic animals commonly referred to as "fish" are not fish in the sense given above; examples include shellfish, cuttlefish, starfish, crayfish and jellyfish. In earlier times, even biologists did not make a distinction - sixteenth century natural historians classified also seals, whales, amphibians, crocodiles, even hippopotamuses, as well as a host of aquatic invertebrates, as fish. In some contexts, especially in aquaculture, the true fish are referred to finfish to distinguish them from these other animals.

Classification

Fish are a paraphyletic group: that is, any clade containing all fish also contains the tetrapods, which are not fish. For this reason, groups such as the "Class Pisces" seen in older reference works are no longer used in formal classifications.

Fish are classified into the following major groups:

Subclass Pteraspidomorphi (early jawless fish)
Class Thelodonti
Class Anaspida
(unranked) Cephalaspidomorphi (early jawless fish)
- (unranked) Hyperoartia
  - Petromyzontidae (lampreys)
- Class Galeaspida
- Class Pituriaspida
- Class Osteostraci
Infraphylum Gnathostomata (jawed vertebrates)
- Class Placodermi (armoured fishes, extinct)
- Class Chondrichthyes (cartilaginous fish)
- Class Acanthodii (spiny sharks, extinct)
- Superclass Osteichthyes (bony fish)
  - Class Actinopterygii (ray-finned fish)
  - Class Sarcopterygii (lobe-finned fish)
    - Subclass Coelacanthimorpha (coelacanths)
    - Subclass Dipnoi (lungfish)

Some palaeontologists consider that Conodonta are chordates, and so regard them as primitive fish. For a fuller treatment of classification, see the vertebrate article.

The various fish groups taken together account for more than half of the known vertebrates. There are almost 28,000 known extant species of fish, of which almost 27,000 are bony fish, with the remainder being about 970 sharks, rays, and chimeras and about 108 hagfishes and lampreys. A third of all of these species are contained within the nine largest families; from largest to smallest, these families are Cyprinidae, Gobiidae, Cichlidae, Characidae, Loricariidae, Balitoridae, Serranidae, Labridae, and Scorpaenidae. On the other hand, about 64 families are monotypic, containing only one species. It is predicted that the eventual number of total extant species will be at least 32,500.

Muhammad SAW

2008-01-13T10:20:00.000+07:00

Muhammad ibn ‘Abd Allāh (Arabic: محمد‎ Muḥammad; (Mohammed, Muhammed, Mahomet) (c. 570 Mecca - June 8, 632 Madina), was the founder of Islam and is regarded by Muslims as the last messenger and prophet of God (Arabic: الله Allah), and is also regarded as a prophet by the Druze and as a Manifestation of God by the Baha'i Faith. Muslims do not believe that he was the creator of a new religion, but the restorer of the original, uncorrupted monotheistic faith of Adam, Abraham and others. They see him as the last and the greatest in a series of prophets of Islam.

Sources on Muhammad’s life concur that he was born ca. 570 CE in the city of Mecca in Arabia. He was orphaned at a young age and was brought up by his uncle, later worked mostly as a merchant, and was married by age 26. At some point, discontented with life in Mecca, he retreated to a cave in the surrounding mountains for meditation and reflection. According to Islamic tradition, it was here at age 40, in the month of Ramadan, where he received his first revelation from God. Three years after this event, Muhammad started preaching these revelations publicly, proclaiming that "God is One", that complete "surrender" to Him (lit. islām) is the only way (dīn), acceptable to God, and that he was a prophet and messenger of God, in the same vein as Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus, and other prophets.

Muhammad gained few followers early on, and was largely met with hostility from the tribes of Mecca; he was treated harshly and so were his followers. To escape persecution, Muhammad and his followers migrated to Yathrib (Medina) in the year 622. This historic event, the Hijra, marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar. In Medina, Muhammad managed to unite the conflicting tribes, and after eight years of fighting with the Meccan tribes, his followers, who by then had grown to ten thousand, conquered Mecca. In 632, on returning to Medina from his 'Farewell pilgrimage', Muhammad fell ill and died. By the time of his death, most of Arabia had converted to Islam.

The revelations (or Ayats, lit. Signs of God), which Muhammad reported receiving till his death, form the verses of the Qur'an, regarded by Muslims as the “word of God”, around which the religion is based. Besides the Qur'an, Muhammad’s life (sira) and traditions (sunnah) are also upheld by Muslims.

Sources for Muhammad's life

11th century Persian Qur'an folio page in kufic script

From a scholarly point of view, the most credible source providing information on events in Muhammad's life is the Qur'an. The Qur'an has some, though very few, casual allusions to Muhammad's life. The Qur'an, however, responds "constantly and often candidly to Muhammad's changing historical circumstances and contains a wealth of hidden data that are relevant to the task of the quest for the historical Muhammad." All or most of the Qur'an was apparently written down by Muhammad's followers while he was alive, but it was, then as now, primarily an orally related document, and the written compilation of the whole Qur'an in its definite form was completed early after the death of Muhammad. The Qur'an in its actual form is generally considered by academic scholars to record the words spoken by Muhammad because the search for variants in Western academia has not yielded any differences of great significance.

Next in importance are the traditional Muslim biographies of Muhammad and quotes attributed to him (the sira and hadith literature), which provide further information on Muhammad's life. The earliest surviving written sira (biographies of Muhammad and quotes attributed to him) is Ibn Ishaq's Sirah Rasul Allah (Life of God's Messenger). Although the original work is lost, portions of it survive in the recensions of Ibn Hisham (Sirah al-Nabawiyyah, Life of the prophet) and Al-Tabari. According to Ibn Hisham, Ibn Ishaq wrote his biography some 120 to 130 years after Muhammad's death. Many, but not all, scholars accept the accuracy of these biographies, though their accuracy is unascertainable. The hadith collections, accounts of the verbal and physical traditions of Muhammad, date from several generations after the death of Muhammad. Western academics view the hadith collections with caution as accurate historical sources.

There are a few non-Muslim sources which, according to S. A. Nigosian, confirm the existence of Muhammad. The earliest of these sources date to shortly after 634, and the most interesting of them date to some decades later. These sources are valuable for corroboration of the Qur'anic and Muslim tradition statements.

meganthropus (photos)

2008-01-12T09:25:00.001+07:00

Pharaoh (novel)

2008-01-12T09:02:00.000+07:00

Pharaoh (Polish title: Faraon) is the fourth and last major novel by the Polish writer Bolesław Prus. Composed over a year's time in 1894-95, it was the sole historical novel by an author who had previously disapproved of historical novels.

Prus had as a 15-year-old fought in Poland's 1863 Uprising, directed at restoring the country's independence. In Pharaoh he transmuted his experiences and his subsequent reflections on human societies into a unique novel on politics. Pharaoh is a study of mechanisms of political power, set in the Egypt of 1087-85 BCE as the country experiences internal upheavals and external threats that will culminate in the fall of its Twentieth Dynasty and New Kingdom.

"Through his analysis of the dynamics of an ancient Egyptian society," writes Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz, "[Prus] suggests an archetype of the struggle for power that goes on within any state."^[1] The ancient setting also permitted Prus to evade the depredations of the Russian censor, and to achieve a distance conducive to a dispassionate analysis of man and society.

Prus immersed himself in Egyptian history, art and writings, and produced perhaps the most compelling literary depiction ever of life at every level of ancient Egyptian society. Pharaoh's abiding popularity is attested by translations into 20 languages and by a 1966 feature film.

Publication

Pharaoh comprises a compact but substantial introduction, 67 chapters and an evocative epilogue (the latter omitted at original publication). Like Prus' previous novels, Pharaoh debuted (1895-96) in newspaper serialization. Unlike them, however, it had first been composed in its entirety rather than being written in chapters from issue to issue.

The 1897 and some subsequent book editions divided the novel's text into three volumes; later editions have presented it in two volumes or in a single one. Except in wartime, the book has never been out of print in Poland.

Plot

Pharaoh begins with one of the more memorable openings in a novel — an opening written in the style of an ancient chronicle:

Bolesław Prus, 1897.

“

In the thirty-third year of the happy reign of Ramses XII, Egypt celebrated two events that filled her loyal inhabitants with pride and joy.

In the month of Mechir, in December, there returned to Thebes laden with sumptuous gifts the god Khonsu, who had traveled three years and nine months in the land of Bukhten, restoring to health the local king's daughter called Bent-res and exorcising the evil spirit not only from the king's family but even from the fortress of Bukhten.

And in the month of Pharmouthi, in February, the Lord of Upper and Lower Egypt, the ruler of Phoenicia and of the nine nations, Mer-amen-Ramses XII, after consulting the gods, to whom he is equal, named as his Successor to the Throne his twenty-two-year-old son Ham-sem-merer-amen-Ramses.

This choice delighted the pious priests, eminent nomarchs, valiant army, faithful people and all creatures living on Egyptian soil. For the Pharaoh's elder sons, born of the Hittite princess, had, due to spells that could not be investigated, been visited by an evil spirit. One, twenty-seven years old, had been unable to walk from his majority; another had cut his veins and died; and the third, after drinking tainted wine that he had been unwilling to give up, had gone mad and, fancying himself an ape, spent days on end in the trees.

The fourth son Ramses, however, born of Queen Nikotris, daughter of High Priest Amenhotep, was strong as the Apis bull, brave as a lion and wise as the priests....

”

Pharaoh combines features of several literary genres: the historical novel, the political novel, the Bildungsroman and the sensation novel. It also comprises a number of interbraided strands — including the plot line, Egypt's cycle of seasons, the country's geography and monuments, and ancient Egyptian practices (e.g. mummification rituals and techniques) — each of which rises to prominence at appropriate moments.

The fate of the novel's protagonist, the future "Ramses XIII" (historically there were only eleven Ramesside pharaohs), is known from the beginning. Prus closes his introduction with the statement that the story "relates to the eleventh century before Christ, when the Twentieth Dynasty fell and when, after the demise of the Son of the Sun the eternally living Ramses XIII, the throne was seized by, and the uraeus came to adorn the brow of, the eternally living Son of the Sun Sem-amen-Herhor, High Priest of Amon."^[4] What the novel will subsequently reveal is the elements that lead to this denouement: the character traits of the principals, the social forces in play.

Ancient Egypt at the end of its New Kingdom period is experiencing adversities. The deserts are eroding Egypt's arable land. The country's population has declined from eight to six million. Foreign peoples are entering Egypt in ever-growing numbers, undermining its unity. The chasm between the peasants and craftsmen on one hand, and the ruling classes on the other, is growing, exacerbated by the ruling classes' fondness for luxury and idleness. The country is becoming ever more deeply indebted to Phoenician merchants as imported goods destroy native industries.

The Egyptian priesthood, backbone of the bureaucracy and virtual monopolists of knowledge, have grown immensely wealthy at the expense of the pharaoh and the country. Egypt is facing prospective peril at the hands of rising powers to the north: Assyria and Persia.

Ramses II ("the Great") at the Battle of Kadesh. (Bas relief at Abu Simbel.)

The 22-year-old Crown Prince Ramses, having as his father's viceroy made a careful study of Egypt and of the challenges that it faces, evolves a strategy that he hopes will arrest the decline of his own political power and of Egypt's internal viability and international standing as a world power. Ramses plans to win over or subordinate the priesthood, especially the High Priest of Amon, Herhor; obtain for the country's use the treasures that lie stored in the Labyrinth; and, emulating Ramses the Great's military exploits, wage war against Assyria.

Ramses proves himself a brilliant military commander in a victorious lightning war against the invading Libyans. On succeeding to the throne, he encounters the adamant opposition of the priestly hierarchy to his planned reforms. The broad masses of Egyptian society are instinctively drawn to him, but he must still win over or crush the priesthood and their adherents.

In the course of the political intrigue, Ramses' private life becomes hostage to the conflicting interests of the Phoenicians and the Egyptian high priests.

Ramses' ultimate downfall is caused by his underestimation of his opponents and by his impatience with priestly obscurantism: along with the chaff of the priests' myths and rituals, he has inadvertently discarded a crucial piece of scientific knowledge.

Ramses is succeeded to the throne by his arch-enemy Herhor, who paradoxically ends up raising treasure from the Labyrinth to finance the very social reforms that had been planned by Ramses.

Song

2008-01-11T16:36:00.001+07:00

A song is a musical composition. Songs contain vocal parts that are performed with the human voice and generally feature words (lyrics), commonly accompanied by other musical instruments (exceptions would be a cappella and scat songs). The words of songs are typically of a poetic, rhyming nature, although they may be religious verses or free prose.

Songs are typically for a solo singer, though there may also be a duet, trio, or more voices (works with more than one voice to a part, however, are considered choral). Songs can be broadly divided into many different forms, depending on the criteria used. One division is between "art songs", "popular music songs", and "folk songs". Other common methods of classification are by purpose (sacred vs secular), by style (dance, ballad, Lieder, etc), or by time of origin (Renaissance, Contemporary, etc).

Colloquially, song is sometimes used as slang to refer to any music composition, even those without vocals. In European classical music, jazz, brass band, popular music, and many other musical styles however, this usage is considered incorrect. "Song" should only be used to describe a composition for the human vocals. In music styles that are predominantly vocal-based, a composition without vocals is often called an instrumental. A musical piece that may be either with or without vocals can be called a melody, a tune, or a composition.

Art songs

Art songs are songs created for performance in their own right, or for the purposes of a European upper class, usually with piano accompaniment, although they can also have other types of accompaniment such as an orchestra or string quartet, and are always notated. Generally they have an identified author(s) and require voice training for acceptable performances. The German-speaking communities to refer to the serious art song, whereas in German-speaking communities the word "Kunstlied" (plural: "Kunstlieder") is used to distinguish art song from folk song ("Volkslied"). The lyrics are often written by a lyricist and the music separately by a composer. Art songs may be more formally complicated than popular or folk songs, though many early Lieder by the likes of Franz Schubert are in simple strophic form. They are often important to national identity. Art songs feature in many European cultures, including but not limited to: Russian (romansy), Dutch (lied), Italian (canzoni), French (mélodies), Scandinavian (sånger), Spanish (canciones). There are also highly regarded British and American art songs in the English language. Cultures outside of Europe may have what they consider to be a classical music tradition, such as India, and thus feature art songs. good and very usefull. The accompaniment of pieces of this period is considered as an important part of the composition. The art song of this period is often a duet in which the vocalist and accompanist share in interpretive importance. The pieces were most often written to be performed in a home setting although today the works enjoy popularity as concert pieces. The emergence of poetry during this era was much of what inspired the creation of these pieces by Brahms, Schumann, Schubert and other period composers. These composers set poems in their native language. Many works were inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich Heine. Another method would be to write new music for each stanza to create a unique form, this was through-composed form known in German as durchkomponiert. A combination of both of these techniques in a single setting was called a modified strophic form. Often romantic art songs sharing similar elements were grouped as a song cycle. (Kamien, 217–18)

Folk songs

Folk songs are songs of often anonymous origin (or are public domain) that are transmitted orally. They are frequently a major aspect of national or cultural identity. Art songs often approach the status of folk songs when people forget who the author was. Folk songs are also frequently transmitted non-orally (that is, as sheet music), especially in the modern era. Folk songs exist in almost every, if not all, culture(s). For more on folk songs, see Folk music.

Popular songs

Popular songs or phonograph records and radio, though all other mass media that have audio capability are involved. The popularity of popular songs is inferred from commercially significant sales of recordings, ratings of stations and networks that play popular songs, and ticket sales for concerts by the recording artists. A popular song becomes a modern folk song when members of the public who learn to sing it from the recorded version teach their version to others. Popular songs may be called pop songs for short, although pop songs or pop music may instead be considered a more commercially popular genre of popular music as a whole.

2008-01-11T16:36:00.000+07:00

Art songs

Folk songs

Popular songs

Islamic view of Abraham

2008-01-09T09:03:00.000+07:00

Ibrāhīm (Arabic: ابراهيم), the biblical patriarch Abraham (circa born between 1900 BC to 1861 BC – died between 1814 BC to 1716 BC), is an important prophet in Islam. He is the son of Tarakh and the father of the Prophet Ismail (Ishmael), his firstborn son who is considered the Father of the Arabs. Ibrahim is commonly termed Khalil Allah, or "Friend of God". His father died when he was very young and he was subsequently brought up by his polytheist uncle, Azar.

Islam regards many of the biblical patriarchs as prophets of Allah, and hence as Muslims (i.e., monotheists). Ibrahim is regarded as a Hanif (meaning a discoverer of monotheism without being taught by a messenger).

Because of their mutual veneration for Abraham, Islam, Christianity and Judaism are sometimes summarized under the term "Abrahamic religions".

Commemoration of Ibrahim

The faith of Ibrahim is called Millat-e-Ibrahim in the Qur'an. Muslims believe that Ibrahim is a prophet of God, in accordance with the narrative of his life in the Qur'an. Ibrahim and his son Ismail are said to have fixed the Kaaba in Mecca. (Qur'an 2:125). Ibrahim also has an important role in one of the Pillars of Islam, the Hajj, which is a pilgrimage to the Holy Mosque. The principal aspect of the Hajj is remembering Ibrahim's sacrifice of Ismail (Ibrahim's firstborn son) and his path to the altar where Iblees (Satan) attempted to dissuade him three times. Those places where Satan appeared are marked with three symbolic pillars where pilgrims throw stones. Moreover a part of the Hajj is a commemoration of the sacrifice and efforts of the wife of Ibrahim Hajre, Hagar, to find water for her son Ismail, when he was near dead with thirst. She ran between the two hills, Safa and Marwa, seven times and this ritual, Saaee (means effort/struggle in Arabic) is mandatory for all pilgrims to Mecca. During her quest for water she saw that a spring of fresh water had erupted near where her son Ismail lay. That spring became the basis of founding the city of Mecca, since fresh water was scarce in that barren land, and many tribes settled around there. This spring has been running for thousands of years. Ibrahim settled his wife and son in the valley of Mecca by God's order, to pioneer a civilization. It was from this civilization that the final prophet of Islam, Muhammad, was later born.

In Islamic prayer, Salat, that occurs five times a day, Muslims have a specific dua that they recite asking God to bless both Ibrahim and Muhammad and their household. According to Islamic tradition, Ibrahim is buried in Hebron. In the Masjid al Haram in Mecca, there is an area known as the "station of Ibrahim" (Maqam Ibrahim مقام), which is said to bear an impression of his footprints.

Ibrahim in the Qur'an

There are numerous references to Ibrahim in the Qur'an. According to the Qur'an, Ibrahim is the spiritual father of all the believers. He is mentioned as an upright person who was neither a polytheist nor a Christian or a Jew (Qur'an 3:67). An example is like the one below:

O ye who believe! Bow down and prostrate yourselves, and worship your Lord, and do good, that haply ye may prosper And strive for Allah with the endeavor which is His right. He hath chosen you and hath not laid upon you in religion any hardship; the faith of your father Ibrahim (is yours). He hath named you Muslims of old time and in this (Scripture), that the messenger may be a witness against you, and that ye may be witnesses against mankind. So establish worship, pay the poor due, and hold fast to Allah. He is your Protecting Friend. A blessed Patron and a blessed Helper. (Qur'an 22:78)

According to the Qur'an, Ibrahim reached the conclusion that anything subject to disappearance could not be worthy of worship, and thus became a monotheist (Qura'n 6:76–83). Some Sunni Muslims — like Jews — believe that Azar who was an idol-maker was the father of Ibrahim and some Sunnis and Shias believe that Tarakh was his father and Azar was Ibrahim's uncle (Father of Ibrahim). One should recognise the word Ab is used in the Quran not only to denote somebody's father but other close family relations too. For example,

Nay! were you witnesses when death visited Yaqoub, when he said to his sons: What will you serve after me? They said: Well will serve your God and the God of your fathers, Ibrahim and Ismail.

The word Ab here is used to describe Isma'il/Ishmael as the uncle of Yaqub/Jacob as Yaqub/Jacob is the son of Ishaq/Isaac.

Nevertheless, whether Azar or Tarakh was his father, both were polytheists, as the infidelity of Azar is mentioned in the Qur'an (6:74) and that of Tarakh in the Bible (Joshua 24:2). Ibrahim broke his father's idols, calling on his community to worship God instead. They then cast him into a fire, which miraculously failed to burn him (Qur'an 37:83–98). The well-known but non-canonical Qisas al-Anbiya (Ibn Kathir) records many more details of his life, which are commonly referred to in Islamic accounts.

The sacrifice

Traditionally, Muslims believe that it was Ishmael rather than Isaac whom Ibrahim was told to sacrifice. In support of this, Muslims note that the text of Genesis, despite specifying Isaac, appears to state that Ibrahim was told to sacrifice his only son ("Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest, even Isaac" Genesis/Bereshit 22:2) to God. Since Isaac was Ibrahim's second son, it is arguable there was no time at which he would have been Ibrahim's "only son", and that this supports the Muslim belief that there was an original text that must have named Ishmael rather than Isaac as the intended sacrifice. Although, theologians tend to interpret this to be referring to the fact that Isaac would be the only one of his descendants counted as a Jew. Because Judaism is passed down matrilineally. In other words most theologians think since Ishmael who had already left to the desert would not be reckoned as a Jew because his mother wasn't a Jew the extra inface is there. The Qur'an itself does not specify by name which son Ibrahim nearly sacrificed saying only that it was his only son (Qur'an 37:99–111). Isaac (Ishaq in Islam) is also considered a prophet in Islam.

Muslims believe Ibrahim's dream was a test from God. When Ibrahim told his dream to Ismail, it was Ismail who convinced Ibrahim to fulfill God's order. So this was a test for both Ibrahim, who had longed for a son for such a long time, and for Ismail. Shayṭān (Satan, according to Christianity) appeared before Ibrahim and Ismail to try and deceive them. Ibrahim and Ismail threw stones at Shayṭān as a response. This is commemorated during the jumrah, one of the rites undertaken by Muslims making the required pilgrimage to Mecca. As Shaytaan had failed to deceive Ibrahim and Ismail, he went to Ibrahim's wife, and mother of Ismail, Hajar. When he told her what had happened she did not believe him, but when he told her that Ibrahim believed he was carrying out God's will, Hajar said: "If it is God's will, let what God wills be done". Their faith had overcome Shaytaan and in the end, God stopped Ibrahim and gave him a sheep to slaughter instead.

The entire episode of the sacrifice is regarded as a trial that Ibrahim had to face from God. It is celebrated by Muslims on the day of Eid ul-Adha.

Tea

2008-01-08T14:30:00.000+07:00

Tea is a beverage made by steeping processed leaves, buds, or twigs of the tea bush, Camellia sinensis, in hot water for a few minutes. The processing can include oxidation, heating, drying, and the addition of other herbs, flowers, spices, and fruits. The four basic types of true tea are (in order from most to least processed): black tea, oolong tea, green tea, and white tea. The term "herbal tea" usually refers to infusions of fruit or of herbs (such as rosehip, chamomile, or jiaogulan) that contain no Camellia sinensis . (Alternative terms for herbal tea that avoid the word "tea" are tisane and herbal infusion.) This article is concerned exclusively with preparations and uses of the tea plant C. sinensis.

Tea is a natural source of the amino acid theanine, methylxanthines such as caffeine and theobromine, and polyphenolic antioxidant catechins. It has almost no carbohydrates, fat, or protein. It has a cooling, slightly bitter, and astringent flavor.

Cultivation

Camellia sinensis is an evergreen plant and grows in tropical to sub-tropical climates. In addition to tropical climates (at least 50 inches of rainfall a year), it also prefers acidic soils. Many high quality tea plants grow at elevations up to 1500 meters (5,000 ft), as the plants grow more slowly and acquire a better flavor. Only the top 1-2 inches of the mature plant are picked. These buds and leaves are called flushes, and a plant will grow a new flush every seven to ten days during the growing season.

Tea is commercially cultivated as far north as Tregothnan in Cornwall on the UK mainland.

Tea plants will grow into a tree if left undisturbed, but cultivated plants are pruned to waist height for ease of plucking.

Two principal varieties are used, the small-leaved China plant (C. sinensis sinensis) and the large-leaved Assam plant (C. sinensis assamica).

Processing and classification

Tea plant (Camellia Sinensis) from Köhler's Medicinal Plants.

These types of tea are distinguished by the processing they undergo. Leaves of Camellia sinensis soon begin to wilt and oxidize if not dried quickly after picking. The leaves turn progressively darker because chlorophyll breaks down and tannins are released. This process, enzymatic oxidation, is called fermentation in the tea industry although it is not a true fermentation: it is not caused by micro-organisms, and is not an anaerobic process. The next step in processing is to stop the oxidation process at a predetermined stage by heating, which deactivates the enzymes responsible. With black tea this is done simultaneously with drying. Without careful moisture and temperature control during its manufacture and thereafter, fungi will grow on tea. This form of fungus causes real fermentation that will contaminate the tea with toxic and sometimes carcinogenic substances and off-flavours, rendering the tea unfit for consumption.

Tea is traditionally classified based on producing technique:

Green tea: Un-wilted and unoxidized
Yellow tea: Un-wilted and unoxidized but allowed to yellow
White tea: Wilted and unoxidized
Oolong: Wilted, bruised, and partially oxidized
Black tea/Red tea: Wilted, crushed, and fully oxidized
Post-fermented tea: Green Tea that has been allowed to ferment/compost

Blending and additives

Almost all teas in bags and most other teas sold in the West are blends. Blending may occur in the tea-planting area (as in the case of Assam), or teas from many areas may be blended. The aim is to obtain better taste, better price or both, as more expensive, better-tasting tea may cover the inferior taste of cheaper varieties. Blending may also achieve more consistent taste of the blend, regardless of the variation of taste among pure teas.

Various teas, as sold, are not pure varieties but have been enhanced through additives or special processing. Tea is indeed highly receptive to inclusion of various aromas; this may cause problems in processing, transportation and storage, but also allows for the design of an almost endless range of scented variants, such as vanilla-flavored, caramel-flavored and many others.

Content

Tea contains catechins, a type of antioxidant. In a fresh tea leaf, catechins can be up to 30% of the dry weight. Catechins are highest in concentration in white and green teas, while black tea has substantially less due to its oxidative preparation. Tea contains theanine, and the stimulant caffeine at about 3% of its dry weight, translating to between 30mg and 90mg per 8oz (or 0.25 L) cup depending on type and brand and brewing method. Tea also contains small amounts of theobromine and theophylline. Tea also contains fluoride, with certain types of brick tea made from old leaves and stems having the highest levels.

Acne vulgaris

2008-01-08T14:07:00.000+07:00

Acne Vulgaris (commonly called Acne) is an inflammatory disease of the skin, caused by changes in the pilosebaceous units (skin structures consisting of a hair follicle and its associated sebaceous gland). Acne lesions are commonly referred to as pimples, spots, or zits.

Acne is most common during adolescence, affecting more than 85% of teenagers, and frequently continues into adulthood. For most people, acne diminishes over time and tends to disappear, or at least decrease, after one reaches his or her early twenties. There is, however, no way to predict how long it will take for it to disappear entirely, and some individuals will continue to suffer from acne decades later, into their thirties and forties and even beyond.

The term acne comes from a corruption of the Greek άκμή (acme in the sense of a skin eruption) in the writings of Aëtius Amidenus. The vernacular term bacne or backne is often used to indicate acne found specifically on one's back.

Symptoms

The most common form of acne is known as "acne vulgaris", meaning "common acne." Many teenagers get this type of acne.

The face and upper neck are the most commonly affected, but the chest, back and shoulders may have acne as well. The upper arms can also have acne, but lesions found there are often keratosis pilaris, not acne. The typical acne lesions are comedones and inflammatory papules, pustules, and nodules. Some of the large nodules were previously called "cysts" and the term nodulocystic has been used to describe severe cases of inflammatory acne.

Aside from scarring, its main effects are psychological, such as reduced self-esteem and, according to at least one study, depression or suicide. Acne usually appears during adolescence, when people already tend to be most socially insecure. Early and aggressive treatment is therefore advocated by some to lessen the overall impact to individuals.

Causes of acne

Acne develops as a result of blockages in follicles. Hyperkeratinization and formation of a plug of keratin and sebum (a microcomedo) is the earliest change. Enlargement of sebaceous glands and an increase in sebum production occur with increased androgen (DHEA-S) production at adrenarche. The microcomedo may enlarge to form an open comedo (blackhead) or closed comedo (whitehead). In these conditions the naturally occurring largely commensual bacteria Propionibacterium acnes can cause inflammation, leading to inflammatory lesions (papules, infected pustules, or nodules) in the dermis around the microcomedo or comedo, which results in redness and and may result in scarring or hyperpigmentation.

There are many misconceptions and myths about acne.

Primary causes

Exactly why some people get acne and some do not is not fully known. It is known to be partly hereditary. Several factors are known to be linked to acne:

Family history. The tendency to develop acne runs in families. For example, school-age boys with acne have other members of their family with acne. A family history of acne is associated with an earlier occurrence of acne and an increased number of retentional acne lesions.
Hormonal activity, such as menstrual cycles and puberty. During puberty, an increase in male sex hormones called androgens cause the glands to get larger and make more sebum.
Stress, through increased output of hormones from the adrenal (stress) glands.
Hyperactive sebaceous glands, secondary to the three hormone sources above.
Accumulation of dead skin cells.
Bacteria in the pores. Propionibacterium acnes (P. acnes) is the anaerobic bacterium that causes acne. In-vitro resistance of P. acnes to commonly used antibiotics has been increasing.
Skin irritation or scratching of any sort will activate inflammation.
Use of anabolic steroids.
Any medication containing halogens (iodides, chlorides, bromides), lithium, barbiturates, or androgens.
Exposure to high levels of chlorine compounds, particularly chlorinated dioxins, can cause severe, long-lasting acne, known as Chloracne.
Exposure to certain drugs and chemical compounds, including narcotics (opiates and opioids), especially when taken intravenously.

Several hormones have been linked to acne: the androgens testosterone, dihydrotestosterone (DHT) and dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate (DHEAS), as well as insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-I). In addition, acne-prone skin has been shown to be insulin resistant^{[citation needed]}.

Development of acne vulgaris in later years is uncommon, although this is the age group for Rosacea which may have similar appearances. True acne vulgaris in adults may be a feature of an underlying condition such as pregnancy and disorders such as polycystic ovary syndrome or the rare Cushing's syndrome. Menopause-associated acne occurs as production of the natural anti-acne ovarian hormone estradiol fails at menopause. The lack of estradiol also causes thinning hair, hot flashes, thin skin, wrinkles, vaginal dryness, and predisposes to osteopenia and osteoporosis as well as triggering acne (known as acne climacterica in this situation).

Satay (Sate)

2008-01-06T14:05:00.000+07:00

Satay (spelled as sate in both Indonesian and Malay and the Netherlands) is a dish consisting of chunks or slices of dice-sized meat (chicken, goat, mutton, beef, pork, fish, etc.) on bamboo skewers. These are grilled over a wood or charcoal fire, then served with various spicy seasonings (depends on satay recipe variants).

Satay may have originated in Java or Sumatra, Indonesia, but it is also popular in many other Southeast AsianMalaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and Thailand, as well as in The Netherlands which was influenced through its former colonies.

Satay is a very popular delicacy in Indonesia, with a rich variety among Indonesia’s diverse ethnic groups’ culinary art (see Cuisine of Indonesia). In Indonesia, satay can be obtained from a traveling satay vendor, from a street-side tent-restaurant, in an upper-class restaurant, or during traditional celebration feasts. In Malaysia, satay is a popular dish - especially during celebrations - and can be found throughout the country. A close analog in Japan is yakitori. Shish kebab from Turkey and sosaties from South Africa are also similar to satay.

Although recipes and ingredients vary from country to country, satay generally consists of chunks or slices of meat on bamboo or coconut-leaf-spine skewers, grilled over a wood or charcoal fire. Turmeric is often used to marinate satay and gives it a characteristic yellow color. Meats used include: beef, mutton, pork, venison, fish, shrimp, squid, chicken, and even tripe. Some have also used more exotic meats, such as turtle, crocodile, and snake meat.

It may be served with a spicy peanut sauce dip, or peanut gravy, slivers of onions and cucumbers, and ketupat.

Pork satay can be served in a pineapple-based satay sauce or cucumber relish, to be eaten only by non-Muslims. An Indonesian version uses a soy-based dip.

The Philippines has two versions of Satay, the first is marinated then brushed on with a thick sweet sauce consisting of soy sauce and banana ketchup (which gives its red colour) then grilled, due to American influence, this version is simply called Barbecue/Barbikyu. The second, Satti is native to the peoples of Mindanao, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi, and is much more similar to traditional Satay, except that it is served with a thick peanut infused soup as well. This dish is well renowned by locals in the main southern Philippine cities of Zamboanga and Davao.

Satay is not the same as the Vietnamese condiment, “Sate”, which typically includes ground chili, onion, tomato, shrimp, oil, and nuts. Vietnamese sate is commonly served alongside noodle and noodle-soup dishes.

Carbon Dioxide (O2)

2008-01-06T14:01:00.000+07:00

Carbon dioxide is a chemical compound composed of two oxygen atoms covalently bonded to a single carbon atom. It is a gas at standard temperature and pressure and exists in Earth's atmosphere in this state. It is currently at a globally averaged concentration of approximately 383 ppm by volume in the Earth's atmosphere, although this varies both by location and time. Carbon dioxide's chemical formula is CO₂.

Carbon dioxide is produced by all animals, plants, fungi and microorganisms during respiration and is used by plants during photosynthesis to make sugars which may either be consumed again in respiration or used as the raw material for plant growth. It is, therefore, a major component of the carbon cycle. Carbon dioxide is generated as a byproduct of the combustion of fossil fuels or vegetable matter, among other chemical processes. Inorganic carbon dioxide is output by volcanoes and other geothermal processes such as hot springs.

Carbon dioxide is an important greenhouse gas because it transmits visible light but absorbs strongly in the infrared.

Carbon dioxide has no liquid state at pressures below 5.1 atm, but is a solid at temperatures below -78 °C. In its solid state, carbon dioxide is commonly called dry ice.

Chemical and physical properties

Carbon dioxide pressure-temperature phase diagram showing the triple point of carbon dioxide

For more details on this topic, see Carbon dioxide (data page).

Carbon dioxide is a colorless, odorless gas. When inhaled at concentrations much higher than usual atmospheric levels, it can produce a sour taste in the mouth and a stinging sensation in the nose and throat. These effects result from the gas dissolving in the mucous membranes and saliva, forming a weak solution of carbonic acid. This sensation can also occur during an attempt to stifle a burp after drinking a carbonated beverage. Amounts above 5,000 ppm are considered very unhealthy, and those above about 50,000 ppm (equal to 5% by volume) are considered dangerous to animal life.

At standard temperature and pressure, the density of carbon dioxide is around 1.98 kg/m³, about 1.5 times that of air. The carbon dioxide molecule (O=C=O) contains two double bonds and has a linear shape. It has no electrical dipole, and as it is fully oxidized, it is moderately reactive and is non-flammable, but will support the combustion of metals such as magnesium.

Small pellets of dry ice subliming in air.

At −78.51° C or -109.3° F, carbon dioxide changes directly from a solid phase to a gaseous phase through sublimation, or from gaseous to solid through deposition. Solid carbon dioxide is normally called "dry ice", a generic trademark. It was first observed in 1825 by the French chemist Charles Thilorier. Dry ice is commonly used as a cooling agent, and it is relatively inexpensive. A convenient property for this purpose is that solid carbon dioxide sublimes directly into the gas phase leaving no liquid. It can often be found in groceries and laboratories, and it is also used in the shipping industry. The largest non-cooling use for dry ice is blast cleaning.

Liquid carbon dioxide forms only at pressures above 5.1 atm; the triple point of carbon dioxide is about 518 kPa at −56.6 °C (See phase diagram, above). The critical point is 7,821 kPa at 31.1 °C.

An alternative form of solid carbon dioxide, an amorphous glass-like form, is possible, although not at atmospheric pressure. This form of glass, called carbonia, was produced by supercooling heated CO₂ at extreme pressure (40–48 GPa or about 400,000 atmospheres) in a diamond anvil. This discovery confirmed the theory that carbon dioxide could exist in a glass state similar to other members of its elemental family, like silicon (silica glass) and germanium. Unlike silica and germania glasses, however, carbonia glass is not stable at normal pressures and reverts back to gas when pressure is released.

Budha

2008-01-06T11:23:00.000+07:00

In Hindu mythology, Budha (Sanskrit: बुध, not to be confused with Buddha) is the name for the planet Mercury, a son of Chandra (the moon) with Tara or Rohini. He is also the god of merchandise and protector of Merchants.

He is represented as being mild, eloquent and of greenish colour. He is represented holding a scimitar, a club and a shield, riding a winged lion in Ramghur temple. In other illustrations , he holds a sceptre and lotus and rides a carpet or an eagle or a chariot drawn by lions..^[1]

Budha presides over 'Budhavara' or Wednesday. In modern Hindi, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi,Kannada and Gujarati, Wednesday is called Budhavara; in Tamil and Malayalam it is Budhan.

Budha married Ila, the daughter of Vaivasvata Manu and fathered a son Pururava.

In astrology

In Vedic astrology Budha is considered a benefic, unless he is joined with another malefic planet, in which case he becomes malefic also. Mercury rules over Mithuna (Gemini and Kanya (Virgo), is exalted in Kanya and in his fall in Meena (Pisces). Budha is friendly with the sun and Venus, hostile to the Moon and neutral towards the other planets. Budha represents intelligence, intellect, communication, analysis, the senses (especially the skin), science, mathematics, business, education and research. The written word and journeys of all types fall within his domain. Budha is lord of three nakshatras or lunar mansions: Ashlesha, Jyeshtha and Revati. Budha has the following associations: the color green, the metal brass and gemstone emerald. The direction associated with Budha is north, the season is autumn and the element is earth.

Trail: Custom Networking (Java Tutorial)

2008-01-05T08:49:00.000+07:00

The Java platform is highly regarded in part because of its suitability for writing programs that use and interact with the resources on the Internet and the World Wide Web. In fact, Java-compatible browsers use this ability of the Java platform to the extreme to transport and run applets over the Internet.

This trail walks you through the complexities of writing Java applications and applets that can be used on the Internet.

Overview of Networking has two sections. The first describes the networking capabilities of the Java platform that you may already be using without realizing that you are using the network. The second provides a brief overview of networking to familiarize you with terms and concepts that you should understand before reading how to use URLs, sockets, and datagrams.

Working With URLs discusses how your Java programs can use URLs to access information on the Internet. A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the address of a resource on the Internet. Your Java programs can use URLs to connect to and retrieve information over a network. This lesson provides a more complete definition of a URL and shows you how to create and parse a URL, how to open a connection to a URL, and how to read from and write to that connection.

All About Sockets explains how to use sockets so that your programs can communicate with other programs on the network. A socket is one endpoint of a two-way communication link between two programs running on the network. This lesson shows you how a client can connect to a standard server, the Echo server, and communicate with it via a socket. It then walks you through the details of a complete client/server example, which shows you how to implement both the client side and the server side of a client/server pair.

All About Datagrams takes you step by step through a simple client/server example that uses datagrams to communicate. It then challenges you to rewrite the example using multicast socket instead.

Programmatic Access to Network Parameters explains why you might want to access network interface parameters and how to do so. It gives examples of how to list all the IP addresses assigned to the machine as well as other useful information such as whether the interface is running.

Working With Cookies discusses how cookies are used to create a session between a client and server, and how you can take advantage of cookies in your HTTP URL connections.

Global Warming Controversy

2008-01-05T08:36:00.000+07:00

The global warming controversy is a dispute regarding the nature and consequences of global warming. The disputed issues include the causes of increased global average air temperature, especially since the mid-20th century; whether the increase is real or partially an artifact of poor measurements; whether this warming trend is unprecedented or within normal climatic variations. Additional disputes concern estimates of climate sensitivity; predictions of additional warming; what the consequences are; and what action should be taken (if any). Individuals, corporations, and political organizations are involved, so the debate is vigorous in the popular media and on a policy level.

History of public opinion

In the European Union, global warming has been a prominent and sustained issue. All European Union member states ratified the 1990 Kyoto Protocol, and many European countries had already been taking action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions prior to 1990 (for example, Margaret Thatcher advocated action against man-made climate change in 1988 and Germany started to take action after the Green Party took seats in Parliament in 1983). Both "global warming" and the more politically neutral "climate change" were listed by languagemonitor.com as political buzzwords or catch phrases in 2005. In Europe, the notion of human influence on climate gained wide acceptance more rapidly than in many other parts of the world, most notably the United States.^[3]^[4]

There has been a debate among public commentators about how much weight and media coverage should be given to each side of the controversy. Andrew Neil of the BBC stated that "There's a great danger that on some issues we're becoming a one-party state in which we're meant to have only one kind of view. You don't have to be a climate-change denier to recognise that there's a great range of opinion on the subject."

The table below shows how public perceptions about the existence and importance of global warming have changed in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Statement	% agreeing	Who
Global warming is probably occurring.	85	US/2006
Global warming is probably occurring.	80	US/1998
Human activity is a significant cause of climate change.	71	US/2007
Human activity is a significant cause of climate change.	79	World/2007
Climate change is a serious problem.	76	US/2006
Climate change is a serious problem.	90	World/2006
Climate change is a serious problem.	78	World/2003
It's necessary to take major steps starting very soon.	59	US/2007
It's necessary to take major steps starting very soon.	65	World/2007

A June 2007 Mori poll conducted in the UK found 56% believed scientists were still questioning climate change. The survey suggested that terrorism, graffiti and crime were all of more concern than climate change. Ipsos Mori's head of environmental research, Phil Downing, said people had been influenced by counter-arguments.

The Canadian science broadcaster and environmental activist, David Suzuki, reported that focus groups organized by the David Suzuki Foundation showed the public has a poor understanding of the science behind global warming.^[11] This is despite recent publicity through different means, including the films An Inconvenient Truth and The 11th Hour. An example of this poor understanding is public confusion between global warming and ozone depletion.

A 15-nation poll conducted in 2006 by Pew Global found that there "is a substantial gap in concern over global warming – roughly two-thirds of Japanese (66%) and Indians (65%) say they personally worry a great deal about global warming. Roughly half of the populations of Spain (51%) and France (46%) also express great concern over global warming, based on those who have heard about the issue. But there is no evidence of alarm over global warming in either the United States or China – the two largest producers of greenhouse gases. Just 19% of Americans and 20% of the Chinese who have heard of the issue say they worry a lot about global warming – the lowest percentages in the 15 countries surveyed. Moreover, nearly half of Americans (47%) and somewhat fewer Chinese (37%) express little or no concern about the problem." A 47-nation poll conducted in 2007 found that "Substantial majorities 25 of 37 countries say global warming is a 'very serious' problem".

Java War

2008-01-05T08:27:00.000+07:00

The Java War or Diponegoro War was fought in Java between 1825 and 1830. It started as a rebellion led by the illustrious Prince Diponegoro. The trigger was the Dutch decision to build a road across a piece of his property that contained his parent's tomb. Among other causes was a sense of betrayal by the Dutch felt by members of the Javanese aristocratic families, as they were no longer able to rent land at high prices. There were also some problems with the succession of the throne in Yogyakarta: Diponegoro was the oldest son, but as his mother was not the queen, he did not have any right to succeed his father.

The troops of Prince Diponegoro were very successful in the beginning, controlling the middle of Java and besieging Yogyakarta. Furthermore the Javanese population was supportive of Prince Diponegoro's cause, whereas the Dutch colonial authorities were initially very indecisive.

However, as the Java war prolonged, Prince Diponegoro had difficulties in maintaining the numbers of his troops.

The Dutch colonial army however was able to fill its ranks with troops from Sulawesi and later on with troops from the Netherlands. The Dutch commander, General De Kock, was able to end the siege of Yogyakarta on September 25, 1825.

Prince Diponegoro started a fierce guerilla war and it was not until 1827 that the Dutch army gained the upper hand.

It is estimated that 200,000 died over the course of the conflict, 8,000 being Dutch. The rebellion finally ended in 1830, after Prince Diponegoro was tricked into entering Dutch custody near Magelang, believing he was there for negotiations for a possible cease-fire, and exiled to Manado on the island of Sulawesi.

Because of the large number of European soldiers who perished in the war, the Dutch government decided to recruit African soldiers in Gold Coast, the so-called "Belanda Hitam" ("Black Dutchies").

Diponegoro

Portrait of Prince Diponegoro (1835)

Pangeran Diponegoro (born Yogyakarta 1785- died Makassar 1855) was a Javanese prince who opposed the Dutch colonial rule. He played an important role in the Java War (1825-1830). In 1830, the Dutch exiled him to Manado.

Diponegoro was a prince in the Javanese court of Yogyakarta. In the early 19th century the Javanese nobles were deprived of their right to lease land, which right was taken over by the Dutch colonial authority in order to improve their finances. Infuriated by the loss of prestige, and also by not having been chosen for promotion, Diponegoro believed that he had been chosen by divine powers to lead a rebellion against the secular colonials and started a holy war against them. Dipenogoro was widely believed to be the Ratu Adil, the Just Ruler predicted in the Pralembang Joyoboyo.

The beginning of the war saw large losses on the side of the Dutch, due to their lack of coherent strategy and commitment in fighting Diponegoro's guerrilla warfare. Ambushes were set up, and food supplies were denied to the Dutch troops. Diponegoro also enjoyed popular support among the population of Central Java.

The Dutch finally committed themselves to controlling the spreading rebellion by increasing the number of troops and sending General De Kock to stop the insurgencies. De Kock developed a fortress wherein he established a series of heavily-fortified and well-defended soldiers to limit the movement of Diponegoro's troops. Then Diponegoro was invited to negotiate. He accepted but later it was known that it was only Dutch trick to abduct him. He was placed under arrest while meeting under the auspices of negotiation in 1830. The Dutch exiled him to Makassar.

Today Diponegoro is a National Hero in Indonesia, and The Central Java Military Region is named after him.

Vitamin

2008-01-05T08:06:00.000+07:00

A vitamin is a nutrient that is an organic compound required in tiny amounts for essential metabolic reactions in a living organism. Most vitamins cannot be obtained in sufficient quantities by synthesis in the body, and therefore must be obtained from the diet. Thus, the term is conditional on the circumstances and the particular living organism. For example, ascorbic acid functions as vitamin C for some animals but not others, and vitamins D and K are required in the human diet only in certain circumstances. Vitamins are defined by their biological activity, not their structure. Thus, each "vitamin" actually refers to a number of vitamer compounds, which form a set of distinct chemical compounds that show the biological activity of a particular vitamin. Such a set of chemicals are grouped under an alphabetized vitamin "generic descriptor" title, such as "vitamin A," which (for example) includes retinal, retinol, and many carotenoids. Vitamers are often inter-convertible in the body. The term vitamin does not include other essential nutrients such as dietary minerals, essential fatty acids, or essential amino acids, nor does it encompass the large number of other nutrients that promote health but that are not essential for life.

Vitamins have diverse biochemical functions, including function as hormones (e.g. vitamin D), antioxidants (e.g. vitamin E), and mediators of cell signaling and regulators of cell and tissue growth and differentiation (e.g. vitamin A). The largest number of vitamins (e.g. B complex vitamins) function as precursors for enzyme cofactor bio-molecules (coenzymes), that help act as catalysts and substrates in metabolism. When acting as part of a catalyst, vitamins are bound to enzymes and are called prosthetic groups. For example, biotin is part of enzymes involved in making fatty acids. Vitamins also act as coenzymes to carry chemical groups between enzymes. For example, folic acid carries various forms of carbon group – methyl, formyl and methylene - in the cell. Although these roles in assisting enzyme reactions are vitamins' best-known function, the other vitamin functions are equally important.

Until the 1900s, vitamins were obtained solely through food intake, and changes in diet (which, for example, could occur during a particular growing season) can alter the types and amounts of vitamins ingested. Vitamins have been produced as commodity chemicals and made widely available as inexpensive pills for several decades, allowing supplementation of the dietary intake.

The value of eating certain foods to maintain health was recognized long before vitamins were identified. The ancient Egyptians knew that feeding a patient liver would help cure night blindness, an illness now known to be caused by a vitamin A deficiency. The advancement of ocean voyage during the Renaissance resulted in prolonged periods without access to fresh fruits and vegetables, and made illnesses from vitamin deficiency common among ship's crew.

In 1749, the Scottish surgeon James Lind discovered that citrus foods helped prevent scurvy, a particularly deadly disease in which collagen is not properly formed, causing poor wound healing, bleeding of the gums, severe pain, and death. In 1753, Lind published his Treatise on the Scurvy, which recommended using lemons and limes to avoid scurvy, which was adopted by the British Royal Navy. This led to the nickname Limey for sailors of that organization. Lind's discovery, however, was not widely accepted by individuals in the Royal Navy's Arctic expeditions in the 19th century, where it was widely believed that scurvy could be prevented by practicing good hygiene, regular exercise, and by maintaining the morale of the crew while on board, rather than by a diet of fresh food. As a result, Arctic expeditions continued to be plagued by scurvy and other deficiency diseases. In the early 20th century, when Robert Falcon Scott made his two expeditions to the Antarctic, the prevailing medical theory was that scurvy was caused by "tainted" canned food.

In 1881, Russian surgeon Nikolai Lunin studied the effects of scurvy while at the University of Tartu in present-day Estonia. He fed mice an artificial mixture of all the separate constituents of milk known at that time, namely the proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and salts. The mice that received only the individual constituents died, while the mice fed by milk itself developed normally. He made a conclusion that "a natural food such as milk must therefore contain, besides these known principal ingredients, small quantities of unknown substances essential to life". However, his conclusions were rejected by other researchers when they were unable to reproduce his results. One difference was that he had used table sugar (sucrose), while other researchers had used milk sugar (lactose) that still contained small amounts of vitamin B.

In the Orient where polished white rice was the common staple food of the middle class, beriberi resulting from lack of vitamin B was endemic. In 1884, Takaki Kanehiro, a British trained medical doctor of Japanese Navy observed that beriberi was endemic among low ranking crew who often ate nothing but rice while crews of Western navies and officers who were entitled to a Western style diet did not. Kanehiro initially believe that lack of protein was the chief cause of beriberi. With the support of Japanese navy, he experimented using crews of two battleships, one crew was fed only white rice, while the other was fed a diet of meat, fish, barley, rice, and beans. The group that ate only white rice documented 161 crew with beriberi and 25 deaths, while the latter group had only 14 cases of beriberi and no deaths. This convinced Kanehiro and the Japanese Navy that diet was the cause of beriberi. This was confirmed in 1897, when Christiaan Eijkman discovered that feeding unpolished rice instead of the polished variety to chicken helped to prevent beriberi in chicken. The following year, Frederick Hopkins postulated that some foods contained "accessory factors"—in addition to proteins, carbohydrates, fats, et cetera—that were necessary for the functions of the human body. Hopkins was awarded the 1929 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Christiaan Eijkman for their discovery of several vitamins.

In 1910, Japanese scientist Umetaro Suzuki succeeded in extracting a water-soluble complex of micronutrients from rice bran and named it aberic acid. He published this discovery in a Japanese scientific journal. When the article was translated into German, the translation failed to state that it was a newly discovered nutrient, a claim made in the original Japanese article, and hence his discovery failed to gain publicity. Polish biochemist Kazimierz Funk isolated the same complex of micronutrients and proposed the complex be named "Vitamine" (a portmanteau of "vital amine") in 1912. The name soon became synonymous with Hopkins's "accessory factors", and by the time it was shown that not all vitamins were amines, the word was already ubiquitous. In 1920, Jack Cecil Drummond proposed that the final "e" be dropped to deemphasize the "amine" reference after the discovery that vitamin C had no amine component.

(RiboflavinVitamin B₂)

Throughout the early 1900s, the use of deprivation studies allowed scientists to isolate and identify a number of vitamins. Initially, lipid from fish oil was used to cure rickets in rats, and the fat-soluble nutrient was called "antirachitic A". The irony here is that the first "vitamin" bioactivity ever isolated, which cured rickets, was initially called "vitamin A", the bioactivity of which is now called vitamin D.^[11] What we now call "vitamin A" was identified in fish oil because it was inactivated by ultraviolet light. In 1931, Albert Szent-Györgyi and a fellow researcher Joseph Svirbely determined that "hexuronic acid" was actually vitamin C and noted its anti-scorbutic activity. In 1937, Szent-Györgyi was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery. In 1943 Edward Adelbert Doisy and Henrik Dam were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery of vitamin K and its chemical structure.

Diabetes Mellitus

2008-01-04T10:39:00.000+07:00

Diabetes mellitus, often simply diabetes (Greek: διαβήτης), is a syndrome characterized by disordered metabolism and inappropriately high blood sugar (hyperglycaemia) resulting from either low levels of the hormone insulin or from abnormal resistance to insulin's effects coupled with inadequate levels of insulin secretion to compensate. The characteristic symptoms are excessive urine production (polyuria), excessive thirst and increased fluid intake (polydipsia), and blurred vision; these symptoms are likely absent if the blood sugar is only mildly elevated.

The World Health Organization recognizes three main forms of diabetes mellitus: type 1, type 2, and gestational diabetes (occurring during pregnancy), which have different causes and population distributions. While, ultimately, all forms are due to the beta cells of the pancreas being unable to produce sufficient insulin to prevent hyperglycemia, the causes are different. Type 1 diabetes is usually due to autoimmune destruction of the pancreatic beta cells. Type 2 diabetes is characterized by insulin resistance in target tissues, this causes a need for abnormally high amounts of insulin and diabetes develops when the beta cells cannot meet this demand. Gestational diabetes is similar to type 2 diabetes in that it involves insulin resistance; the hormones of pregnancy can cause insulin resistance in women genetically predisposed to developing this condition.

Gestational diabetes typically resolves with delivery of the child, however types 1 and 2 diabetes are chronic conditions. All types have been treatable since insulin became medically available in 1921. Type 1 diabetes, in which insulin is not secreted by the pancreas, is directly treatable only with injected or inhaled insulin, although dietary and other lifestyle adjustments are part of management. Type 2 may be managed with a combination of dietary treatment, tablets and injections and, frequently, insulin supplementation. While insulin was originally produced from natural sources such as porcine pancreas, most insulin used today is produced through genetic engineering, either as a direct copy of human insulin, or human insulin with modified molecules that provide different onset and duration of action. Insulin can also be delivered continuously by a specialized pump which subcutaneously provides insulin through a changeable catheter.

Diabetes can cause many complications. Acute complications (hypoglycemia, ketoacidosis or nonketotic hyperosmolar coma) may occur if the disease is not adequately controlled. Serious long-term complications include cardiovascular disease (doubled risk), chronic renal failure, retinal damage (which can lead to blindness), nerve damage (of several kinds), and microvascular damage, which may cause impotence and poor healing. Poor healing of wounds, particularly of the feet, can lead to gangrene, which may require amputation. Adequate treatment of diabetes, as well as increased emphasis on blood pressure control and lifestyle factors (such as not smoking and keeping a healthy body weight), may improve the risk profile of most aforementioned complications. In the developed world, diabetes is the most significant cause of adult blindness in the non-elderly, the leading cause of non-traumatic amputation in adults, and diabetic nephropathy is the main illness requiring renal dialysis in the United States.

Java Island

2008-01-04T09:59:00.000+07:00

Java (Indonesian, Javanese, and Sundanese: Jawa) is an island of Indonesia and the site of its capital city, Jakarta. Once the centre of powerful Hindu kingdoms and the core of the colonial Dutch East Indies, Java now plays a dominant role in the economic and political life of Indonesia. Housing a population of 124 million, it is the most populous island in the world. Java is also one of the most densely populated regions on Earth.

Formed mostly as the result of volcanic events, Java is the 13th largest island in the world and the fifth largest island of Indonesia. A chain of volcanic mountains forms an east-west spine along the island. It has three main languages, and most residents are bilingual, with Indonesian as their second language. While the majority of Javanese are Muslim (or at least nominally Muslim), Java has a diverse mixture of religious beliefs and cultures.

Etymology

The origins of the name 'Java' is not clear. One possibility is early travellers from India named the island after the jáwa-wut plant, which was said to be common in the island during the time, and that prior to Indianization the island had different names. There are other possible sources: the word jaú and its variations mean "beyond" or "distant". And, in Sanskrit yava means barley, a plant for which the island was famous. Other source states that the "java" word is derived from a Proto-Austronesian root word, meaning 'home'.
Outsiders often referred to Java and the neighboring islands by the same name, or use names inconsistently for different islands. For example, Marco Polo refers to neighbouring Sumatra as "little Java"^[5] and Ptolemy refers to Sumatra as Jaba-diu.

History

Java is known for several important finds of early hominid specimens. In particular, the 1891 discovery of cranial fossil remains commonly known as "Java man" (now designated as Trinil 2, after the Trinil site on the Bengawan Solo River) is notable as the first early hominid specimen found outside Europe. In the following course of human history, several kingdoms existed on Java. The first kingdoms ruled there were Indianized kingdoms like Tarumanagara and Sunda, influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism. Sailendra (8–9th century), Mataram (752–1045), Kediri (1045–1221), Singhasari (1222–1292) and Majapahit (1293–1500) were among them, leaving evidence of their existence throughout Java. Among many other temples in Java, Borobudur (a Buddhist temple) and Prambanan (a Hindu temple) are the most famous relics of the old Javanese kingdoms, both of which are listed in the UNESCO world heritage site.

Islam spread into the Indonesian archipelago in the thirteenth century, including Java, where Wali Songo (the "nine ambassadors") were the most prominent Muslim evangelists at that time. The spread of Islam (1200–1600) first took place at coastal cities before they grew into Muslim states, such as Sultanate of Demak (1475–1518) and Mataram Sultanate (1500s–1700s).

In 1602, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) arrived in the archipelago and subsequently occupied and maintained control of trade and power for more than 300 years. VOC established Batavia (present-day Jakarta) on the northern coast of Java as its trading center and administrative headquarters. Coastal cities, such as Semarang and Surabaya, developed into major trading harbors and the Dutch also developed Bandung in the inner mountainous region of west Java while they planned to move the capital from Batavia.

Java was briefly governed by the British East India Company (1811–1816) under the appointed Lieutenant Governor General Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, while Holland was occupied by France during the Napoleonic wars. During Raffles' administration he introduced partial self-government, a land-tenure system, and abolished the slave trade. Besides that, Raffles developed a strong interest in Javanese culture and restored several temples, including Borobudur. Raffles also wrote the famous book of "The History of Java", the first book that described Java's civilization and culture to the outside world.

After Indonesian independence in 1945 Jakarta remained as the capital, while Java itself has grown into the most crowded area in Indonesia. Although parts of rural Java are still underdeveloped, the urban areas are the wealthiest and most developed parts of Indonesia.

Geography

Sumatra to the northwest and Bali to the east. Borneo lies to the north and Christmas Island to the south. It is the world's 13th largest island.

Java is almost entirely of volcanic origin; it contains no fewer than thirty-eight mountains forming an east-west spine which have at one time or another been active volcanoes. The highest volcano in Java is Mount SemeruMerapi (2,914 m). See Volcanoes of Java. Further mountains and highlands help to split the interior into a series of relatively isolated regions suitable for wet-rice cultivation; the rice lands of Java are among the richest in the world. (3,676 m). The most active volcano in Java and also in Indonesia is Mount

The area of Java is approximately 132,000km². The island's longest river is the 600 km long Bengawan Solo River. The river rises from its source in central Java at the Tawu volcano, the flows north and eastwards to its mouth in the Java Sea near the city of Surabaya.

The island is administratively divided into four provinces (Banten, West Java, Central Java, and East Java), one special region (Yogyakarta), and one special capital district (Jakarta).

Popular tourist destinations include the city of Yogyakarta, the huge Buddhist stupa complex of Borobudur, the Hindu temples at Prambanan, and Mount Bromo in East Java.

Demographics

Java is by far the most populous island in Indonesia, with approximately 62% of the country's population,^[11] and is the most populous island in the world. With 130 million inhabitants at 1026 people per km², it is also one of the most densely-populated parts of the world. If it were a country, it would be the second-most densely-populated country of the world after Bangladesh, if very small city-states are excluded. Approximately 45% of the population of Indonesia is ethnically Javanese.

Since the 1970s, the Indonesian government has run transmigration programs aimed at resettling the population of Java on other less-populated islands of Indonesia. This program has met with mixed results, and sometimes caused conflicts between the locals and the recently arrived settlers.

Culture

Generally speaking, the three major cultures of Java are the Sundanese culture of West Java, the Central Javanese culture, and the Eastern Javanese culture. In the southwestern part of Central Java, usually named the Banyumasan region, a cultural mingling occurred; bringing together Javanese culture and Sundanese culture to create the Banyumasan culture.

In the central Javanese court cities of Yogyakarta and Surakarta, contemporary kings trace their lineages back to the pre-colonial Islamic kingdoms that ruled the region, making those places especially strong repositories of classical Javanese culture. Classic arts of Java include gamelan music and wayang puppet shows.

Java was the site of many influential kingdoms in the Southeast Asian region, and as a result, many literary works have been written by Javanese authors. These include Ken Arok and Ken Dedes, the story of the orphan who usurped his king, and married the queen of the ancient Javanese kingdom; and translations of Ramayana and Mahabarata. Pramoedya Ananta Toer is a famous contemporary Indonesian author, who has written many stories based on his own experiences of having grown up in Java, and takes many elements from Javanese folklore and historical legends.

Languages

The three major languages spoken on Java are Javanese, Sundanese and Madurese. Other languages spoken include Betawi (a Malay dialect local to the Jakarta region), Osing and Tenggerese (closely related to Javanese), Badui (closely related to Sundanese), Kangeanese (closely related to Madurese), and Balinese. The vast majority of the population also speaks Indonesian, generally as a second language.

Religion

More than 90 percent of Javanese are Muslims, on a broad continuum between abangan (more nominal or syncretic) and santri (more orthodox). Small Hindu enclaves are scattered throughout Java, but there is a large Hindu population along the eastern coast nearest Bali, especially around the town of Banyuwangi. There are also Christian communities, mostly in the larger cities, though some rural areas of south-central Java are strongly Roman Catholic. Buddhist communities also exist in the major cities, primarily among the Chinese Indonesian. The Indonesian constitution recognises six official religions. (See Religion in Indonesia.)

Java has been a melting pot of religions and cultures, which has created a broad range of religious belief. IndianShivaism and Buddhism penetrating deeply into society, blending with indigenous tradition and culture. One conduit for this were the ascetics, called resi, who taught mystical practices. A resi lived surrounded by students, who took care of their master's daily needs. Resi's authorities was merely ceremonial. At the courts, Brahmin clerics and pudjangga (sacred literati) legitimised rulers and linked Hindu^[15] influences came first with cosmology to their political needs.

Islam, which came after Hinduism, strengthened the status structure of this traditional religious pattern. The Muslim scholar of the writ (kyai) became the new religious elite as Hindu influences receded. Islam recognises no hierarchy of religious leaders nor a formal priesthood, but the Dutch colonial government established an elaborate rank order for mosque and other Islamic preaching schools. In Javanese Islamic schools (pesantren), kyai prepertuated the tradition of resi. Students around him provided his needs, even peasants around the school.

Pre-Islamic Javanese traditions have encouraged Islam in a mystical direction. There emerged in Java a loosely structured society of religious leadership, revolving around kyais, possessing various degrees of proficiency in pre-Islamic and Islamic lore, dogma and practice. The kyais are the principal intermediaries between the villages masses and the realm of the supernatural. However, this very looseneess of kyai leadership structure has promoted schism. There were often sharp divisions between orthodox kyais, who merely instructed in Islamic law, with those who taught mysticism and those who sought reformed Islam with modern scientific concepts. As a result, there is a division between santri, who believe that they are more orthodox in their Islamic belief and practice, with abangan, who has mixed pre-Islamic animistic and Hindu-Indian concepts with a superficial acceptance of Islamic dogma.

A wider effect of this division is the number of sects. In the middle of 1956, the Department of Religious Affairs in Yogyakarta reported 63 religious sects in Java other than the official Indonesian religions. Of these, 35 were in Central Java, 22 in West Java and 6 in East Java. These include Kejawen, Sumarah, Subud, etc. Their total membership is difficult to estimate as many of their adherents identify themselves with one of the official religions.

Discover Card

2008-01-04T08:58:00.000+07:00

Discover Card is one of the four major credit card brands issued primarily in the United States, with over 50 million cardholders. The Discover Card was originally introduced by Sears in 1985, and was part of Dean Witter, and then Morgan Stanley, until 2007, when Discover Financial Services became an independent company. Most cards with the Discover brand are issued by Discover Bank. Discover Card transactions are processed through the Discover Network payment network. As of February 2006, the company announced that it would begin offering Discover Debit cards to banks, made possible by the Pulse payment system, which Discover acquired in 2005.

History

At the time the Discover Card was introduced, Sears was the largest retailer in the United States. It had purchased the Dean Witter Reynolds Organization (brokerage) and Coldwell, Banker & Company (real estate) in 1981, as an attempt to add financial services to its portfolio of customer services. Together with the Discover Card, this was named the Sears Financial Network. Early Discover Cards bore a small embossed symbol representing the Sears Tower, the company's headquarters at the time.
Unlike other attempts at creating a credit card to rival MasterCard and VISA, such as Citibank's Choice card, which was test-marketed prior to the introduction of the Discover Card but reissued as a Visa card in late 1987, the Discover Card quickly gained a large national consumer base. It carried no annual fee, which was uncommon at the time, and offered a typically higher credit limit than similar cards. Cardholders could earn a "Cashback Bonus," in which a percentage of the amount spent would be refunded to the account (as high as 1%), depending on how much the card was used. The Discover Card was also noteworthy for being the only credit card accepted by the U.S. Customs Service to pay customs duty.

However, the plan to create a one-stop financial-services center in Sears stores was not as successful as Sears had hoped, and its promotion of the Discover Card was thought both to hurt Sears turnover and to restrict the card's potential. Other retailers resisted it, as they believed they would be helping their competitor. After Discover was introduced, Sears stopped accepting competing credit cards, alienating customers and adversely affecting sales.

In light of these developments, and of strong competition both from Wal-Mart and from so-called category killers such as Toys "R" Us, Sears began to face difficulties in the late 1980s. Sears sold its financial businesses in 1993, and began to accept MasterCard and Visa again. The Discover Card became part of the Dean Witter financial services firm. Dean Witter Discover merged with Morgan Stanley in 1997.

Discover Card also has a sign located on the top of One Times Square below the flagpole which drops the New Year's ball. It displays information and new offers for the company and also displays the countdown during the New Year celebration.

Raising Rates

In the latter part of 2007, Discover Card began raising interest rates on many of its longer-term customers, typically to the Prime Rate plus 14.74% (which in October 2007 equated to a 22.99% annual percentage rate). Customers who request the reasons in writing for the decision are notified that the increase is based on any (and not necessarily all) of the following characteristics:

Account open longer than 12 months
APR less than 20.00%
Account not used monthly

Thus, Discover Card is turning upside-down the traditional "brand loyalty" model, by penalizing long-term, value-conscious customers, citing that this is a "competitive business decision." Customers affected by the rate increase are able to opt out by canceling their accounts.

Business Developments

In October of 2004, the Supreme Court upheld a ruling in Discover Card's favor that challenged exclusionary policies of Visa and MasterCard. In 2005, Discover Card acquired PULSE, an electronic funds transfer association, allowing it to issue and market debit and ATM cards. Before this ruling, Visa and MasterCard would not allow banks to issue a Discover Card if they issued a Visa or MasterCard. Within days of the court ruling Discover Card filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking damages from Visa and MasterCard.

Shortly after the ruling, Discover also struck its first deal to have its card issued by another bank, GE Consumer Finance, which now issues three cards for retailer Wal-Mart and its wholesale warehouse stores, Sam's Club; transactions for both cards are processed on the Discover Network. Sam's Club exclusively accepted Discover Card for many years, although, since November 2006, it has also accepted MasterCard for purchases.

HSBC has also issued credit cards processed through the Discover Network, and branded with the Discover logo, since its acquisition of card issuer Metris in late 2005. Metris had originally signed an agreement with Discover in September 2005, only three months prior to the HSBC acquisition.

Morgan Stanley was long thought to want to sell the Discover Card business, and in April 2005, it announced that it would divest Discover Financial Services as an independent company within six months. However, by June industry sources reported that Morgan Stanley was reassessing its plan to spin-off Discover. Finally, in August 2005, the company confirmed it would not sell Discover. In yet another reversal, in December 2006, Morgan Stanley announced it would, again, spin-off Discover as a standalone company by the end of August 2007. The spin-off was finalized ahead of schedule, on June 30, 2007.

Brand Acceptance

Discover Card has over 50 million cardmembers and the Discover Network has more than 4 million merchant and cash access locations. The Pulse ATM network currently serves more than 4,100 banks, credit unions, and savings institutions. However, unlike its competitors, the Discover Card is neither issued nor widely accepted outside the U.S., although it can be used to obtain cash from ATM locations worldwide. Owing to its heritage at Sears, an additional benefit of the Discover Card is the ability to pay off the debt, in person, at any Sears store.^{[citation needed]}

In Canada, Discover brand cards are accepted at few locations, usually at businesses catering to American tourists, such as car rental agencies and hotels, as well as major American merchants like Sears and Wal-Mart. Some Canadian businesses do accept Discover cards but opt to favor Visa, Mastercard and American Express. ATM service offered by Discover is not currently available in Canada although cardmembers apparently could access cash at any Sears Canada store.

While Discover brand cards are not currently accepted in Europe, the company's presence continues to grow in Mexico, Costa Rica, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, Belize, Palau, and many of the Caribbean Island nations.

Additionally, in May 2005 Discover Network announced an alliance with China UnionPay Network. The two companies have signed a long-term agreement that will lead to acceptance of Discover Network brand cards at UnionPay ATMs and point-of-sale terminals in China and acceptance of China UnionPay cards on the PULSE network in the U.S. CUP cards have been accepted in the US since December 2005, and Discover Cards have been accepted in China since November 8, 2006. This partnership makes Discover Card the most widely accepted American card in China, beating out competitors Visa, MasterCard, and American Express. Neither Discover Financial Services nor China UnionPay have stated whether there had any plans to eventually expand acceptance to the other nations where the CUP network is in place, i.e. Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and South Korea. A similar agreement was made in August, 2006, when the Discover Network announced an alliance with Japan’s JCB Network. JCB Cards will be accepted on the Discover Network in the United States, Puerto Rico, Guam and Northern Mariana Islands starting October 12, 2007 and China UnionPay Cards will be accepted on the Discover Network in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean starting November 1, 2007.

On August 24, 2006, Discover’s PULSE network and the UK’s LINK ATM network announced a reciprocal agreement that will allow the 4,200 financial institution participants in the PULSE network to offer their cardholders access to all but a handful of the more than 58,000 cash machines across the UK and allow LINK to offer its 38 participating financial institution members access to an additional 250,000 PULSE cash machines in the United States.

Borobudur Temple

2008-01-03T13:07:00.001+07:00

Borobudur is a ninth century Mahayana Buddhist monument in Magelang, Central Java, Indonesia. The monument comprises six square platforms topped by three circular platforms, and is decorated with 2,672 relief panels and 504 Buddha statues. A main dome is located at the center of the top platform, and is surrounded by seventy-two Buddha statues seated inside perforated stupa.

The monument is both a shrine to the Lord Buddha and a place for Buddhist pilgrimage. The journey for pilgrims begins at the base of the monument and follows a path circumambulating the monument while ascending to the top through the three levels of Buddhist cosmology, namely, Kamadhatu (the world of desire); Rupadhatu (the world of forms); and Arupadhatu (the world of formless). During the journey, the monument guides the pilgrims through a system of stairways and corridors with 1,460 narrative relief panels on the wall and the balustrades.

Evidence suggests Borobudur was abandoned following the fourteenth century decline of Buddhist and Hindu kingdoms in Java, and the Javanese conversion to Islam. It was rediscovered in 1814 by Sir Thomas Raffles, the British ruler of Java. Borobudur has since been preserved through several restorations. The largest restoration project was undertaken between 1975 and 1982 by the Indonesian government and UNESCO, following which the monument was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Borobudur is still used for pilgrimage, where once a year Buddhists in Indonesia celebrate Vesak at the monument, and Borobudur is Indonesia's single most visited tourist attraction.

Etymology

In Indonesian, temples are known as candi, thus "Borobudur Temple" is locally known as Candi Borobudur. The term candi is also used more loosely to describe any ancient structure, for example, gates and bathing structures. The origins of the name Borobudur however are unclear, although the original names of most ancient Indonesian temples are no longer known. The name 'Borobudur' was first written in the Sir Thomas Raffles book on Java history. Raffles wrote about a monument called borobudur, but there are no older documents suggesting the same name. The only old Javanese manuscript that hints at the monument as a holy Buddhist sanctuary is Nagarakertagama, written by Mpu Prapanca in 1365.

The name 'Bore-Budur', and thus 'BoroBudur', is thought to have been written by Raffles in English grammar to mean the nearby village of Bore; most candi are named after a nearby village. If it followed Javanese language, the monument should have been named 'BudurBoro'. Raffles also suggested that 'Budur' might correspond to the modern Javanese word Buda ('ancient') - i.e., 'ancient Boro'. However, another archaeologist suggests the second component of the name ('Budur') comes from Javanese term bhudhara (or mountain).

Location

Approximately 40 kilometers (25 mi) northwest of Yogyakarta, Borobudur is located in an elevated area between two twin volcanoes, Sundoro-Sumbing and Merbabu-Merapi, and two rivers, the Progo and the Elo. According to local myth, the area known as Kedu Plain is a Javanese 'sacred' place and has been dubbed 'the garden of Java' due to its high agricultural fertility. Besides Borobudur, there are other Buddhist and Hindu temples in the area, including the Prambanan temples compound. During the restoration in the early 1900s, it was discovered that three Buddhist temples in the region, Borobudur, Pawon and Mendut, are lined in one straight line position. It might be accidental, but the temples' alignment is in conjunction with a native folk tale that a long time ago, there was a brick-paved road from Borobudur to Mendut with walls on both sides. The three temples (Borobudur–Pawon–Mendut) have similar architecture and ornamentation derived from the same time period, which suggests that ritual relationship between the three temples, in order to have formed a sacred unity, must have existed, although exact ritual process is yet unknown.

Unlike other temples, which were built on a flat surface, Borobudur was built on a bedrock hill, 265 m (869 ft) above sea level and 15 m (49 ft) above the floor of the dried-out paleolake. The lake's existence was the subject of intense discussion among archaeologists in the twentieth century; Borobudur was thought to have been built on a lake shore or even floated on a lake. In 1931, a Dutch artist and a scholar of Hindu and Buddhist architecture, W.O.J. Nieuwenkamp, developed a theory that Kedu Plain was once a lake and Borobudur initially represented a lotus flower floating on the lake. Lotus flowers are found in almost every Buddhist work of art, often serving as a throne for buddhas and base for stupas. The architecture of Borobudur itself suggests a lotus depiction, in which Buddha postures in Borobudur symbolize the Lotus Sutra, mostly found in many Mahayana Buddhism (a school of Buddhism widely spread in the east Asia region) texts. Three circular platforms on the top are also thought to represent a lotus leaf.^[13] Nieuwenkamp's theory, however, was contested by many archaeologists because the natural environment surrounding the monument is a dry land.

Geologists, on the other hand, support Nieuwenkamp's view, pointing out clay sediments found near the site. A study of stratigraphy, sediment and pollen samples conducted in 2000 supports the existence of a paleolake environment near Borobudur, which tends to confirm Nieuwenkamp's theory. The lake area fluctuated with time and the study also proves that Borobudur was near the lake shore circa thirteenth and fourteenth century. River flows and volcanic activities shape the surrounding landscape, including the lake. One of the most active volcanoes in Indonesia, Mount Merapi, is in the direct vicinity of Borobudur and has been very active since the Pleistocene.

Principles of insurance

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A large number of homogeneous exposure units. The vast majority of insurance policies are provided for individual members of very large classes. Automobile insurance, for example, covered about 175 million automobiles in the United States in 2004.^[2] The existence of a large number of homogeneous exposure units allows insurers to benefit from the so-called “law of large numbers,” which in effect states that as the number of exposure units increases, the actual results are increasingly likely to become close to expected results. There are exceptions to this criterion. Lloyd's of London is famous for insuring the life or health of actors, actresses and sports figures. Satellite Launch insurance covers events that are infrequent. Large commercial property policies may insure exceptional properties for which there are no ‘homogeneous’ exposure units. Despite failing on this criterion, many exposures like these are generally considered to be insurable.
Definite Loss. The event that gives rise to the loss that is subject to insurance should, at least in principle, take place at a known time, in a known place, and from a known cause. The classic example is death of an insured on a life insurance policy. Fire, automobile accidents, and worker injuries may all easily meet this criterion. Other types of losses may only be definite in theory. Occupational disease, for instance, may involve prolonged exposure to injurious conditions where no specific time, place or cause is identifiable. Ideally, the time, place and cause of a loss should be clear enough that a reasonable person, with sufficient information, could objectively verify all three elements.
Accidental Loss. The event that constitutes the trigger of a claim should be fortuitous, or at least outside the control of the beneficiary of the insurance. The loss should be ‘pure,’ in the sense that it results from an event for which there is only the opportunity for cost. Events that contain speculative elements, such as ordinary business risks, are generally not considered insurable.
Large Loss. The size of the loss must be meaningful from the perspective of the insured. Insurance premiums need to cover both the expected cost of losses, plus the cost of issuing and administering the policy, adjusting losses, and supplying the capital needed to reasonably assure that the insurer will be able to pay claims. For small losses these latter costs may be several times the size of the expected cost of losses. There is little point in paying such costs unless the protection offered has real value to a buyer.
Affordable Premium. If the likelihood of an insured event is so high, or the cost of the event so large, that the resulting premium is large relative to the amount of protection offered, it is not likely that anyone will buy insurance, even if on offer. Further, as the accounting profession formally recognizes in financial accounting standards (See FAS 113 for example), the premium cannot be so large that there is not a reasonable chance of a significant loss to the insurer. If there is no such chance of loss, the transaction may have the form of insurance, but not the substance.
Calculable Loss. There are two elements that must be at least estimable, if not formally calculable: the probability of loss, and the attendant cost. Probability of loss is generally an empirical exercise, while cost has more to do with the ability of a reasonable person in possession of a copy of the insurance policy and a proof of loss associated with a claim presented under that policy to make a reasonably definite and objective evaluation of the amount of the loss recoverable as a result of the claim.
Limited risk of catastrophically large losses. The essential risk is often aggregation. If the same event can cause losses to numerous policyholders of the same insurer, the ability of that insurer to issue policies becomes constrained, not by factors surrounding the individual characteristics of a given policyholder, but by the factors surrounding the sum of all policyholders so exposed. Typically, insurers prefer to limit their exposure to a loss from a single event to some small portion of their capital base, on the order of 5 percent. Where the loss can be aggregated, or an individual policy could produce exceptionally large claims, the capital constraint will restrict an insurers appetite for additional policyholders. The classic example is earthquake insurance, where the ability of an underwriter to issue a new policy depends on the number and size of the policies that it has already underwritten. Wind insurance in hurricane zones, particularly along coast lines, is another example of this phenomenon. In extreme cases, the aggregation can affect the entire industry, since the combined capital of insurers and reinsurers can be small compared to the needs of potential policyholders in areas exposed to aggregation risk. In commercial fire insurance it is possible to find single properties whose total exposed value is well in excess of any individual insurer’s capital constraint. Such properties are generally shared among several insurers, or are insured by a single insurer who syndicates the risk into the reinsurance market.

Windows NT

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Windows NT (New Technology) is a family of operating systems produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released in July 1993. It was originally designed to be a powerful high-level-language-based, processor-independent, multiprocessing, multiuser operating system with features comparable to Unix. It was intended to complement consumer versions of Windows that were based on MS-DOS. NT was the first fully 32-bit version of Windows, whereas its consumer-oriented counterparts, Windows 3.1x and Windows 9x, were 16-bit/32-bit hybrids. Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 (beta), and Windows Home Server are based upon the Windows NT system, although they are not branded as Windows NT.

Major features

A main design goal of NT was hardware and software portability. Versions of NT were available for a variety of processor architectures, namely Intel IA-32, MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, SPARC, Intel i860, and Intel i960. Broad software compatibility was achieved with support for several API "personalities", including the primary Win32 API and limited support for POSIX and OS/2 APIs. For secure multiuser server solutions, NT supported per-object (file, function, and role) access control lists allowing a rich set of security permissions to be applied to systems and services. NT supported Windows network protocols, inheriting the previous OS/2 LAN Manager networking, as well as Unix's TCP/IP networking (for which Microsoft would implement a TCP/IP stack derived from the BSD Unix stack).

Windows NT 3.1 was the first version of Windows to utilize 32-bit "flat" virtual memory addressing on 32-bit processors. Its companion product, Windows 3.1, used segmented addressing and switches from 16-bit to 32-bit addressing in pages.

Windows NT 3.1 featured a core kernel providing a system API, running in supervisor mode, and a set of user-space environments with their own APIs which included the new Win32 environment, an OS/2 1.3 text-mode environment and a POSIX environment. The full preemptive multitasking kernel could interrupt running tasks to schedule other tasks, without relying on user programs to voluntarily give up control of the CPU, as in Windows 3.1.

Notably, in Windows NT 3.x, several I/O driver subsystems, such as video and printing, were user-mode subsystems. In Windows NT 4, the video, server and printer spooler subsystems were integrated into the kernel. Windows NT's first GUI was strongly influenced by (and programmatically compatible with) that from Windows 3.1; Windows NT 4's interface was redesigned to match that of the brand new Windows 95, moving from the Program Manager to the Start Menu/Taskbar design.

NTFS, a journaled, secure file system, was created for NT. NT also allows for other installable file systems, and with versions 3.1 and 3.51, NT could also be installed on DOS's FAT or OS/2's HPFS file systems. Later versions could be installed on a FAT partition gaining speed at the expense of security, but this option is no longer present in Windows Vista.

Development

When development started in November 1988, Windows NT was to be known as OS/2 3.0, the third version of the operating system developed jointly by Microsoft and IBM. In addition to working on three versions of OS/2, Microsoft continued parallel development of the DOS-based and less resource-demanding Windows environment. When Windows 3.0 was released in May 1990, it was eventually so successful that Microsoft decided to change the primary application programming interface for the still unreleased NT OS/2 (as it was then known) from an extended OS/2 API to an extended Windows API. This decision caused tension between Microsoft and IBM and the collaboration ultimately fell apart. IBM continued OS/2 development alone while Microsoft continued work on the newly renamed Windows NT. Though neither operating system would immediately be as popular as Microsoft's DOS or Windows products, Windows NT would eventually be far more successful than OS/2.

Microsoft hired a group of developers from Digital Equipment Corporation led by Dave Cutler to build Windows NT, and many elements of the design reflect earlier DEC experience with Cutler's VMS and RSX-11. The operating system was designed to run on multiple instruction set architectures and multiple hardware platforms within each architecture. The platform dependencies are largely hidden from the rest of the system by a kernel mode module called the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer).

Windows NT's kernel mode code further distinguishes between the "kernel", whose primary purpose is to implement processor and architecture dependent functions, and the "executive". This has led some writers to refer to the kernel as a microkernel, but the Windows NT kernel no longer meets many of the criteria of a "microkernel", although this was the original goal of chief architect Cutler. Both the kernel and the executive are linked together into the single loaded module ntoskrnl.exe; from outside this module there is little distinction between the kernel and the executive. Routines from each are directly accessible, as for example from kernel-mode device drivers.

API sets in the Windows NT family are implemented as subsystems atop the publicly undocumented "native" API; it was this that allowed the late adoption of the Windows API (into the Win32 subsystem). Windows NT was the first operating system to use Unicode internally.

Releases

Version	Marketing Name	Editions	Release Date	RTM Build
NT 3.1	Windows NT 3.1	Workstation (named just Windows NT), Advanced Server	July 27, 1993	528
NT 3.5	Windows NT 3.5	Workstation, Server	September 21, 1994	807
NT 3.51	Windows NT 3.51	Workstation, Server	May 30, 1995	1057
NT 4.0	Windows NT 4.0	Workstation, Server, Server Enterprise Edition, Terminal Server, Embedded	July 29, 1996	1381
NT 5.0	Windows 2000	Professional, Server, Advanced Server, Datacenter Server	February 17, 2000	2195
NT 5.1	Windows XP	Home, Professional, 64-bit (original), Media Center (original, 2003, 2004 & 2005), Tablet PC (original and 2005), Starter, Embedded, Home N, Professional N	October 25, 2001	2600
NT 5.1	Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs	N/A	July 8, 2006	2600
NT 5.2	Windows Server 2003	Standard, Enterprise, Datacenter, Web, Storage, Small Business Server, Compute Cluster	April 24, 2003	3790
NT 5.2	Windows XP (5.2)	64-bit 2003, Professional x64	April 25, 2005	3790
NT 5.2	Windows Home Server	N/A	July 16, 2007	3790
NT 6.0	Windows Vista	Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, Ultimate, Home Basic N, Business N	Business: November 30, 2006 Consumer: January 30, 2007	6000
NT 6.0	Windows Server 2008	Standard, Enterprise, Datacenter, Web, Storage, Small Business Server	February 27, 2008 (expected)	6001
NT 7.0	Windows 7 (formerly codenamed Blackcomb, later Vienna)	Unknown	2010	Unknown

Note: NT 3.1 to 3.51 incorporate Program Manager and File Manager. NT 4.0 to 6.0 replace this with Windows Explorer (including a taskbar and Start menu).

The first release was given version number 3.1 to match the contemporary 16-bit Windows; magazines of that era claimed the number was also used to make that version seem more reliable than a '.0' release. There were also some issues related to Novell IPX protocol licensing, which was apparently limited to 3.1 versions of Windows software.

The NT version number is no longer used for marketing purposes, but is still used internally, and said to reflect the degree of changes to the core of the operating system.^[1] The build number is an internal figure used by Microsoft's developers and beta testers.

Supported platforms

NT was written in C, a mid-level language. This means that it can be compiled to run on several processor systems; however, the code produced by the compiler is larger and slower than assembler code written for a particular processor^{[citation needed]}. For this reason, NT was not favored initially for use with slower processors with less memory. It also proved far more difficult to port applications such as Microsoft Office which were sensitive to issues such as data structure alignment on RISC processors. Unlike Windows CE which routinely runs on a variety of processors, the lack of success of RISC-based systems in the desktop market has resulted in nearly all actual NT deployments being on x86 architecture processors.

In order to prevent Intel x86-specific code from slipping into the operating system by developers used to developing on x86 chips, Windows NT 3.1 was initially developed using non-x86 development systems and then ported to the x86 architecture. This work was initially based on the Intel i860-based Dazzle system and, later, the MIPS R4000-based Jazz platform. Both systems were designed internally at Microsoft.^[2]

Windows NT 3.1 was released for Intel x86 PC compatible, DEC Alpha, and ARC-compliant MIPS platforms. Windows NT 3.51 added support for the PowerPC processor in 1995, specifically PReP-compliant systems such as the IBM Power Series desktops/laptops and Motorola PowerStack series; but despite meetings between Michael Spindler and Bill Gates, significantly not on the Power Macintosh.

Intergraph Corporation ported Windows NT to its Clipper architecture and later Windows NT 3.51 was ported to SPARC,^[3] but neither version was sold to the public as a retail product.

Windows NT 4.0 was the last major release to support Alpha, MIPS, or PowerPC, though development of Windows 2000 for Alpha continued until August 1999, when Compaq stopped support for Windows NT on that architecture; and then three days later Microsoft also canceled their AlphaNT program, even though the Alpha NT 5 (Windows 2000) release had reached RC2 (build 2128). Released versions of NT for Alpha were 32-bit only, although Alpha hardware was used internally at Microsoft during early development of 64-bit Windows 2000 for IA-64.^[1] Only two of the Windows NT 4.0 variants (IA-32 and Alpha) have a full set of service packs available. All of the other ports done by third parties (Motorola, Intergraph, etc.) have few, if any, publicly available updates.

Windows XP 64-Bit, Windows Server 2003 Enterprise, and Windows Server 2003 Datacenter support Intel's IA-64 processors. As of April 25, 2005 Microsoft had released four editions for 'x64' (see x86-64 architecture): Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, Windows Server 2003 Standard x64 Edition, Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition, and Windows Server 2003 Datacenter x64 Edition.

The Xbox uses a heavily modified and stripped down Windows 2000 kernel.^[4] This kernel was heavily modified again for the Xbox 360 which runs on PowerPC^[5] . This version is not for separate sale, and is only available through acquiring an Xbox. Little is known about it.

Hardware requirements

The minimum hardware specification required to run each release of the professional workstation version of Windows NT has been fairly slow-moving until the 6.0 Vista release, which requires a minimum of 15 GB of free disk space plus an additional 5 GB of extra space for 6.0, a 10-fold increase in free disk space alone over the previous version.

Windows NT desktop (x86) minimum hardware requirements
NT Version	CPU	RAM	Free disk space
NT 3.51 Workstation	386, 25 MHz	8 MB	90 MB
NT 4.0 Workstation	486, 33 MHz	12 MB	110 MB
2000 Professional	Pentium, 133 MHz	32 MB	650 MB
XP	Pentium MMX, 233 MHz	64 MB	1.5 GB
FLP	Pentium MMX, 233 MHz	64 MB	500 MB
Vista	Pentium III, 800 MHz	512 MB	15 GB

'NT' designation

It is popularly believed that Dave Cutler intended the initialism 'WNT' as a pun on VMS, incrementing each letter by one, similar to the apocryphal story of Arthur C. Clarke's deriving HAL 9000's name by decrementing each letter of IBM. While this would have suited Cutler's sense of humor, the project's earlier name of NT OS/2 belies this theory. Another of the original OS/2 3.0 developers, Mark Lucovsky, states that the name was taken from the Intel i860 processor—code-named N10 (or 'N-Ten')—which served as the original target hardware.^[6] Various Microsoft publications, including a 1998 question-and-answer session with Bill Gates,^[7] reveal that the letters were expanded to 'New Technology' for marketing purposes but no longer carry any specific meaning.

The letters were dropped from the name of Windows 2000, though literature contained the phrase 'Built on NT technology' and the system folder retained the WINNT designation. This action ostensibly reflected Microsoft's intent to unify its home and business lines, then represented by Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0, but this goal would not be achieved until the introduction of Windows XP.

by : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT