Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index Originally a palladium is a statue of Pallas Athena, especially the one that Odysseus took from the citadel of Troy, on which the city's security was believed to depend. The word is a Latinization of the Greek word παλλαδιον, which can be transliterated as "palladion". By a usage derived from the foregoing, a palladium is a safeguard that protects a social institution. For example, the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli said that trial by jury is "the palladium of our liberties." In modern scientific usage, only about two centuries old, palladium is one of the chemical elements, a metal. See palladium. In an even newer usage, Palladium is Microsoft's codename for their new "trusted computing" architecture, the Palladium operating system. Following numerous critical comments about the system (which Microsoft says come from misunderstanding its goals) that gave Palladium a bad name, Microsoft is changing the name of the project into "Next-generation secure computing base." Palladium (XPD) is one of the ISO 4217 currency codess. This is a disambiguation page; that is, one that just points to other pages that might otherwise have the same name. If you followed a link here, you might want to go back and fix that link to point to the appropriate specific page. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.