Environment may refer to:
• Environment (biophysical), the physical and biological factors along with their chemical interactions that affect an organism
• Environment (systems), the surroundings of a physical system that may interact with the system by exchanging mass, energy, or other properties
• Environments (series), a series of LPs, cassettes and CDs depicting natural sounds
• Built environment, constructed surroundings that provide the setting for human activity, ranging from the large-scale civic surroundings to the personal places
• Knowledge environment
• Natural environment
• Social environment, the culture that an individual lives in, and the people and institutions with whom they interact
In computing:
• Desktop environment, in computing, the graphical user interface to the computer
• Environment variables, the dynamic set of variables defined in a process
• Integrated development environment, a type of computer software that assists computer programmers in developing software
• Runtime environment, a virtual machine state which provides software services for processes or programs while a computer is running
• In Functional programming, the environment is “a function which maps variable names on to their values” [1]
The Term Paper on Why Software Systems Fail
1.0 Introduction In this report I will be concentrating on the failure of software systems. To understand why software systems fail we need to understand what are software systems. Software systems are a type of information system. This is because a software system is basically a means for hardware to process information. Flynns definition of an information system is: "An information system ...
• In Unified Process the Environment discipline “refers to the tools and customizing the process for the project”
Natural environment
The natural environment encompasses all living and non-living things occurring naturally on Earth or some region thereof. It is an environment that encompasses the interaction of all living species.[1] The concept of the natural environment can be distinguished by components:
• Complete ecological units that function as natural systems without massive human intervention, including all vegetation, microorganisms, soil, rocks, atmosphere and natural phenomena that occur within their boundaries.
• Universal natural resources and physical phenomena that lack clear-cut boundaries, such as air, water, and climate, as well as energy, radiation, electric charge, and magnetism, not originating from human activity.
The natural environment is contrasted with the built environment, which comprises the areas and components that are strongly influenced by humans. A geographical area is regarded as a natural environment.
It is difficult to find absolutely natural environments, and it is common that the naturalness varies in a continuum, from ideally 100% natural in one extreme to 0% natural in the other. More precisely, we can consider the different aspects or components of an environment, and see that their degree of naturalness is not uniform.[2] If, for instance, we take an agricultural field, and consider the mineralogic composition and the structure of its soil, we will find that whereas the first is quite similar to that of an undisturbed forest soil, the structure is quite different.
Natural environment is often used as a synonym for habitat. For instance, when we say that the natural environment of giraffes is the savanna.
