Environmental issues and the importance of standards Component 1.5 Environmental issues and the importance of standards

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Starter: Entry Ticket Complete the Entry Ticket for your Privacy and Cyber Security Extension: Define the following keywords: Recycle Explain the difference between a De Facto and a De Jure Standard.

Environmental Impacts The technologies we use every day consume a lot of resources and power and can present health hazards such as obesity and RSI arising from technology addiction. Building the hardware can cause harm to the environment, including air, water, heat and noise pollution arising from manufacturing processes and the use of non-renewable resources, including precious metals such as gold used in circuitry.

How are these positive impacts maintained? One of the ways that companies makes sure that the positive impacts of technology is maintained is by using “standards” of operation. Standards set what should be done by a company and they are written either by the company itself, the industry, or by the government! Standards do much more than maintain the environment however! They help to make the computing industry run better by setting up how things should work, good design practice, etc.

The importance of standards In computing, standards are an agreed way of doing things. Standards make it easier for people to build programs and software that work on different systems in different countries. Standards affect many areas of computing, eg software files, formats and hardware. Some common standards include: MP3 - a file format for audio files supported by most media-playing software HTML - a markup language for creating websites Unicode - a form of representing text There are advantages to using standards if you are a creating a program or a product. For instance, the program or product will be more popular if it is widely compatible. Also, it is easier to work with other people if you work to the same standards.

Open Standards Open standards are usually controlled by a Creative Commons licence or they are unlicensed. They can be used by anyone and are not owned by a commercial organisation or individual. Normally, they will have been developed by experts collaborating online. The source code behind files and programs created using open standards will normally be open source which means the code should be freely available. Anyone could look at the code and make improvements.

Proprietary Standards These are designed, created, maintained and controlled by a licence agreement which is owned by an organisation or individual, ie privately owned. Proprietary standards may be free to use, but the file specification is often closed rather than being open. Some popular proprietary standards include: DOC files (Microsoft Word Document file format). This has become a de facto standard used for most word- processing software. MP3. MPEG Audio is a de jure standard patented by the Fraunhofer Society. An important benefit of proprietary standards is that products developed around these standards should work well with each other. For example, all Microsoft software should work well on Microsoft Windows.

De Facto and De Jure Standards De facto standards are those which have been accepted as the best standard for their purpose. They have evolved to be accepted because of wide public support and market forces. This is often because they have a proven track record for efficiency and reliability. De facto standards which become accepted by an industry are also known as industry standards or professional standards. Anyone can attempt to create a standard if they wish. You could try to invent a new audio file format to rival AAC and MP3, or invent a new internet markup language to replace HTML. However, it would not necessarily become de facto unless it gained popularity. De jure standards are those which have been approved by formal authorities like the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). These standards are critically assessed before being approved. An example of a de jure standard is the ASCII character set. Some de jure hardware standards include USB, FireWire and HDMI

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Homework Graded Exercises Complete up to your year 11 target grade Revision At least 2 pages of revision resources. For example: Cue Cards Mind Maps Notes Posters