info

Selasa, 05 Januari 2010

Paypal

Paypal

PayPal is an e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet. PayPal serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper methods such as checks and money orders.

A PayPal account can be funded with an electronic debit from a bank account or by a credit card. The recipient of a PayPal transfer can either request a check from PayPal, establish their own PayPal deposit account or request a transfer to their bank account. PayPal is an example of a payment intermediary service that facilitates worldwide e-commerce.

PayPal performs payment processing for online vendors, auction sites, and other commercial users, for which it charges a fee. It sometimes also charges a transaction fee for receiving money (a percentage of the amount sent plus an additional fixed amount). The fees charged depend on the currency used, the payment option used, the country of the sender, the country of the recipient, the amount sent and the recipient's account type.[2] In addition, eBay purchases made by credit card through PayPal may incur a "foreign transaction fee" if the seller is located in another country, as credit card issuers are automatically informed of the seller's country of origin.

On October 3, 2002, PayPal became a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay.[3] Its corporate headquarters are in San Jose, California, United States at eBay's North First Street satellite office campus. The company also has significant operations in Omaha, Nebraska; Scottsdale, Arizona; and Austin, Texas in the U.S., Chennai, Dublin, Berlin and Tel-Aviv. As of July 2007, across Europe, PayPal also operates as a Luxembourg-based bank.

Beginnings
The current incarnation of PayPal is the result of a March 2000 merger between Confinity and X.com.[4] Confinity was founded in December 1998 by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, and Ken Howery, initially as a Palm Pilot payments and cryptography company.[5] X.com was founded by Elon Musk in March 1999, initially as an Internet financial services company. Both Confinity and X.com launched their websites in late 1999. Both companies were located on University Avenue in Palo Alto. Confinity's website was initially focused on reconciling beamed payments from Palm Pilots[6] with email payments as a feature and X.com's website initially featured financial services with email payments as a feature.

At Confinity, many of the initial recruits were alumni of The Stanford Review, also founded by Peter Thiel, and most early engineers hailed from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, recruited by Max Levchin. On the X.com side, Elon Musk recruited a wide range of technical and business personnel, including many that were critical to the combined company's success, such as Amy Klement, Sal Giambanco, Roelof Botha[7] of Sequoia Capital, Sanjay Bhargava and Jeremy Stoppelman.[8]

To block potentially fraudulent access by automated systems, PayPal used a system (see CAPTCHA) of making the user enter numbers from a blurry picture, which they coined the Gausebeck-Levchin test.[9]

eBay watched the rise in volume of its online payments and realized the fit of an online payment system with online auctions. eBay purchased Billpoint in May 1999, prior to the existence of PayPal. eBay made Billpoint its official payment system, dubbing it "eBay Payments," but cut the functionality of Billpoint by narrowing it to only payments made for eBay auctions. For this reason, PayPal was listed in many more auctions than Billpoint. In February 2000, the PayPal service had an average of approximately 200,000 daily auctions while Billpoint (in beta) had only 4,000 auctions.[10][9][11][12] By April 2000, more than 1,000,000 auctions promoted the PayPal service. [13] PayPal was able to turn the corner and become the first dot-com to IPO after the September 11 attacks.[1

Senin, 04 Januari 2010

Minggu, 03 Januari 2010

Internet movie database

Internet Movie Database

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is an online database of information related to movies, actors, television shows, production crew personnel, video games, and most recently, fictional characters featured in visual entertainment media. IMDb launched on October 17, 1990, and in 1998 was acquired by Amazon.com.
The IMDb website consists of one of the largest accumulations of data about films, television programs, direct-to-video products, and video games, reaching back to each medium's respective beginning. In many cases, the information goes beyond simple title and crew credit, but also includes data on uncredited personnel, production and distribution companies, plot summaries, memorable quotes, awards, reviews, box office performance, filming locations, technical specs, promotional content, trivia, and links to official and other websites. Furthermore, the IMDb tracks titles in production, including major announced projects still in development.

The database also houses filmographies for all persons, cast and crew, identified in listed titles. Filmographies include biographical details, awards listings, external links, and information about other professional work not covered by title entries in the database such as theatrical and commercial advertising appearances.

The IMDb also offers ancillary material such as daily movie and TV news, weekly box office reports, TV listings, cinema showtimes, user polls and ratings, and special features about various movie events such as the Academy Awards. The website also has an active message board system. There are message boards for each database entry, found at the bottom of each respective page, as well as general discussion boards on various topics.

All of the basic database information is available without registration and without providing any personal information. However, to submit information, to use the message boards, to search for information about adult movies or to use some other of the site's features requires registration. Some advanced features require verification which can sometimes require some personal financial information such as credit card details. IMDb has 57 million visitors, 17 million of which are registered users, as of October 10, 2007.[citation needed].

[edit] History
[edit] History before website
The IMDb originated from two lists started as independent projects in early 1989 by participants in the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies. In each case, a single maintainer recorded items emailed by newsgroup readers, and posted updated versions of his list from time to time. The founding ideas of the database began with a posting titled "Those Eyes", on the subject of actresses with beautiful eyes. Hank Driskill began to collect a list of attractive actresses and what movies they had appeared in, and as the size of the repeated posting grew far beyond a normal newsgroup article, it soon became known simply as "THE LIST". (The first code to manage this list was a Perl program written by Randal L. Schwartz to "invert the list", organizing the list by movies instead of actresses.[2]

The other project, started by Chuck Musciano, was briefly called the "Movie Ratings List" and soon became the "Movie Ratings Report". Musciano simply asked readers to rate movies on a scale of one to ten, and reported on the votes. He soon began posting "ballots" with lists of movies for people to rate, so his list also grew quickly.

In 1990, Col Needham collated the two lists and produced a "Combined LIST & Movie Ratings Report".[3] (His first posting of the database scripts is not available.) Needham soon started a (male) "Actors List", while Dave Knight began a "Directors List", and Andy Krieg took over THE LIST, which would later be renamed as the "Actress List". Both this and the Actors List had been restricted to people who were still alive and working, but retired people began to be added, and Needham also started what was then (but did not remain) a separate "Dead Actors/Actresses List". The goal now was to make the lists as inclusive as the maintainers could manage. In late 1990, the lists included almost 10,000 movies and television series. On October 17, 1990, Needham posted a collection of Unix shell scripts which could be used to search the four lists, and the database that would become the IMDb was born. At the time, it was known as the "rec.arts.movies movie database".

[edit] On the web
By 1992, the database had been expanded to include additional categories of filmmakers and other demographic material, as well as trivia, biographies, and plot summaries; the movie ratings had been properly integrated with the list data; and a centralized email interface for querying the database had been created. Later in the year, it moved onto the World Wide Web (a network in its infancy back then) under the name of Cardiff Internet Movie Database. The database resided on the servers of the computer science department of Cardiff University in the UK. Rob Hartill was the original web interface author. In 1994, the email interface was revised to accept the submission of all information, meaning that people no longer had to email the specific list maintainer with their updates. However, the structure remained that information received on a single film was divided among multiple section managers, the sections being defined and determined by categories of film personnel and the individual filmographies contained therein. Its management also continued to be in the hands of a small contingent of underpaid or volunteer "section managers" who were receiving ever-growing quantities of information on films from around the world and across time from contributors of widely varying levels of expertise and informational resources. Despite the annual claims of Needham, in a year-end report newsletter to the Top fifty contributors, that "fewer holes" must now remain for the coming year, the amount of information still missing from the database was vastly underestimated. Over the next few years, the database was run on a network of mirrors across the world with donated bandwidth.

[edit] As an independent company
In 1995, it became obvious to the principal site managers that the project had become too large to maintain merely through donations and in their spare time. The decision was made to become a commercial venture and in 1996, IMDb was incorporated in the United Kingdom, becoming the Internet Movie Database Ltd, with Col Needham the primary owner as well as identified figurehead. The section managers were offered "shares" in the company in exchange for the amount of work-time they put in, and sometimes for monetary donations by them. A couple of these went to work full time for salary, which Needham had already been drawing. General revenue for site operations was generated through advertising, licensing and partnerships.

This state of affairs continued until 1998. The database was growing every day, and it was again reaching a critical point in terms of quantity of data versus number of personnel, and the need for more full-time managers, who would of course want to be paid. Most revenues were being spent on equipment. The system was also suffering noticeable slowdowns both in accessing the site and in having new data posted. Offers were solicited from academic institutions but they were not interested; private enterprises with interests in the entertainment industry were also solicited, and from some of these offers were forthcoming to purchase IMDb. However, the shareholders were unwilling to sell if it could not be guaranteed that the information would be accessible to the internet community for free. None of this activity was made known to the several hundred volunteers who were contributing the vast majority of information now incoming to IMDb.

[edit] As a subsidiary company

Jumat, 01 Januari 2010

History web

History web

The World Wide Web ("WWW" or simply the "Web") is a global information medium which users can read and write via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet itself, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, as e-mail does. The history of the Internet dates back significantly further than that of the World Wide Web.

The hypertext portion of the Web in particular has an intricate intellectual history; notable influences and precursors include Vannevar Bush's Memex, IBM's Generalized Markup Language, and Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu.

The concept of a home-based global information system goes at least as far back as "A Logic Named Joe", a 1946 short story by Murray Leinster, in which computer terminals, called "logics," were in every home. Although the computer system in the story is centralized, the story captures some of the feeling of the ubiquitous information explosion driven by the Web.

1980–1991: Development of the World Wide Web

In 1980, the Englishman Tim Berners-Lee, an independent contractor at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Switzerland, built ENQUIRE, as a personal database of people and software models, but also as a way to play with hypertext; each new page of information in ENQUIRE had to be linked to an existing page.

In 1984 Berners-Lee returned to CERN, and considered its problems of information presentation: physicists from around the world needed to share data, and with no common machines and no common presentation software. He wrote a proposal in March 1989 for "a large hypertext database with typed links", but it generated little interest. His boss, Mike Sendall, encouraged Berners-Lee to begin implementing his system on a newly acquired NeXT workstation. He considered several names, including Information Mesh, The Information Mine (turned down as it abbreviates to TIM, the WWW's creator's name) or Mine of Information (turned down because it abbreviates to MOI which is "Me" in French), but settled on World Wide Web[1].


Robert Cailliau, Jean-François Abramatic and Tim Berners-Lee at the 10th anniversary of the WWW Consortium.He found an enthusiastic collaborator in Robert Cailliau, who rewrote the proposal (published on November 12, 1990) and sought resources within CERN. Berners-Lee and Cailliau pitched their ideas to the European Conference on Hypertext Technology in September 1990, but found no vendors who could appreciate their vision of marrying hypertext with the Internet

By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 0.9, the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the first Web browser (named WorldWideWeb, which was also a Web editor), the first HTTP server software (later known as CERN httpd), the first web server (http://info.cern.ch), and the first Web pages that described the project itself. The browser could access Usenet newsgroups and FTP files as well. However, it could run only on the NeXT; Nicola Pellow therefore created a simple text browser that could run on almost any computer. To encourage use within CERN, they put the CERN telephone directory on the web — previously users had had to log onto the mainframe in order to look up phone numbers.

Paul Kunz from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center visited CERN in September 1991, and was captivated by the Web. He brought the NeXT software back to SLAC, where librarian Louise Addis adapted it for the VM/CMS operating system on the IBM mainframe as a way to display SLAC’s catalog of online documents; this was the first web server outside of Europe and the first in North America[2].

On August 6, 1991, Berners-Lee posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet.
The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow all links to be made to any information anywhere. [...] The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data. Collaborators welcome!" —from Tim Berners-Lee's first message

An early CERN-related contribution to the Web was the parody band Les Horribles Cernettes, whose promotional image is believed to be among the Web's first five pictures[3].