31 July 2009 the European Commission adopted a decision on a single standard charger for cell phone manufacturers. Starting in 2010, all cell phones imported to the European market, was to support the connection of a universal charger. Such measures as the legislators went because of problems with the disposal of huge quantities of discarded “chargers”, whose number increased every year.
The decision of the European Commission eliminated the chaos in the market chargers. Almost eliminated.
Under the new law, the phones had to be charged via Mini USB (a temporary measure) or Micro USB. Nokia, Samsung and LG in a short time introduced a new connector, all released in 2010, phone models, and Apple has decided not to abandon its own design called Lightning and released for the European market the adaptor with the existing connector to Micro USB — so the owners of iPhone 5, iPod touch 5, iPod nano 7, iPad 4th generation and iPad mini can charge your device from a standard network adapter.
And in this day…
July 31, 2007, Japanese companies have teamed up to create a unified automotive OS. The intention to participate in the development stated by the experts of Toyota, Honda and Nissan. It was assumed that the centralized system will take over control of fuel delivery, braking, electrical system, ignition system and self-diagnosis vehicle.
Operating system JasPar was prepared for the worldwide standard
The idea that “reinventing the wheel” should not be, and it’s time to move to the standards, supported by the Japanese government and the automakers received a 1 billion yen ($8.4 million) for the development in 2008, and in 2009, the planned implementation of the system in production vehicles.
But then beautiful talk is not particularly advanced: car manufacturers are unable to come to a common denominator for several reasons. First, each car brand had its own suppliers, because of what the purchase of standardized hardware and, especially, installation of a unified control system in the car was difficult to implement. Second, while automakers tried to “give birth” to the auto system that will be relevant at least 10 years, the computer industry Chagall by leaps and bounds by conservative automakers. That is, advanced automotive system is outdated even before it was released.
After this project JasPar went into ‘hibernation’ and turned into an analogue of the W3C (world wide web Consortium) in the automotive industry with the declared set of standards for implementing security systems, wireless protocols and security encryption in the car. International recognition of the Japanese initiative and has not received, and the German automakers (Mercedes and BMW in particular) refused to cooperate, because for the fifth consecutive year has developed its own system of driving.
By the way, BMW already had in those years set the tone in this area: the debut of iDrive system in 2002 (remember how stupid the mobile phone was produced? that’s the same) 7 Series E65 was a very bold step. Then the opponents of the computerization of car engines began to create analogs and a BMW by the time tried hard to “humanize” too fancy and overloaded iDrive first revision.
Contrary to what Apple and Google are applying for a place at the head of the multimedia system of the car, in 2015, increasingly there is talk about the necessity of creation of unmanned vehicles. Watch how it sees the Swedish automaker Rinspeed.
Computerized car of the future through the eyes Rinspeed
July 31, 1991, Apple, IBM and Motorola started the joint development of processors PowerPC. The PowerPC family has become rare in consumer computers by the representative of RISC architecture (Reduced Instruction Set Computer — processor with a reduced set of commands). The narrow specialization of the platform to have a positive impact on its performance other things being equal the RISC processors were 2-4 times faster familiar and more universal CISC counterparts (known by the Intel and AMD processors).
In the above-mentioned Union was standing in front of IBM task of designing a new chip, Motorola was engaged in their production, embody and Apple hardware platforms in their serial computers. Until 2005, all devices running MacOS worked exclusively under the control of the PowerPC processor.
But in the early 2000s, the development of the platform slowed down, while Motorola and IBM were not eager to pour finances in the competition to actively develop the mass x86-processors. And the difficulty of developing for the RISC architecture has not been canceled — the amount of code in the programs for processors with a reduced set of commands on average 30% higher than the one needed for CISC-processors by Intel and AMD. A performance of a “dying” platform has not been so impressive that the developers wanted to port their x86 chips.
Apple Power Mac G5 — the latest Apple computer for PowerPC
It is not surprising that in the current situation, Apple did not “pull the ears” hopeless iron and in 2005 switched to Intel, and to smooth the complexity of recycling programs under the new architecture, the cupertinos have developed a technology Rosetta is a dynamic translator that simplify porting software.