Friday night death slot
The Friday night death slot is a notable graveyard slot in American television, the term referring to the concept that a television program in the United States scheduled on Friday evenings is destined for imminent cancellation.The term possibly began as a reflection of certain shows’ dominance of Friday night in the 1980s, which condemned to death any show scheduled opposite those programs. Today it reflects the belief that Americans rarely watch TV on Friday or Saturday nights, as these are days people (especially younger people) tend to leave home for other activities, thereby removing the most lucrative demographics for advertisers from the household.
via Friday night death slot – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The Aggregate Magic Algorithms
A useful and interesting collection of low-level algorithms in C and assembly.
The Aggregate Magic Algorithms – There are lots of people and places that create and collect algorithms of all types. Unfortunately, in building systems hardware and software, we in The Aggregate often have found it necessary to do relatively obscure low-level things very efficiently. Many of the tricks we’ve devised or collected either require assembly language coding or are not entirely portable when coded in HLLs like C, but these techniques are still valuable because they can yield significant performance improvements over the more obvious ways of doing things.
Update LXML on OS X
The Python scripting language is used for many extentions, add-ons and filters in the Inkscape vector graphics application. Unfortunately, Mac OS X doesn’t ship with very recent versions of some commonly used Python libraries, most notably an XML and HTML processing library called LXML. To install a more recent version, you can issue this command from the terminal:
sudo easy_install lxml
Therac-25
The Therac-25 was a radiation therapy machine produced by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) after the Therac-6 and Therac-20 units (the earlier units had been produced in partnership with CGR of France). It was involved with at least six accidents between 1985 and 1987, in which patients were given massive overdoses of radiation, approximately 100 times the intended dose. Three of the six patients died as a direct consequence. These accidents highlighted the dangers of software control of safety-critical systems, and they have become a standard case study in health informatics and software engineering.
Richard Pearse
Richard William Pearse was a New Zealand farmer and inventor who performed pioneering experiments in aviation.
Pearse appears to have successfully flown and landed a powered heavier-than-air machine on 31 March 1903, some nine months before the Wright brothers. The documentary evidence to support such a claim remains open to interpretation, however, and he does not appear to have developed his aircraft to match the Wrights’ achievement of sustained, controlled flight. Pearse himself made contradictory statements which for many years led the few who knew of his feats to accept 1904 as the date of his first flight. The lack of any chance of industrial development, such as spurred the Wrights to develop their machine, seems to have suppressed any recognition of Pearse’s achievements.