Point carrom

A variant often popular with children or an odd number of players. Play is as above accepted that all players try to sink all carrom men, regardless of color. The nine carrom men of one color are worth one point each and the nine carrom men of the other color are worth two points each. The red queen is worth five points and may only be captured by pocketing another carrom man on the same or subseqent strike. A player reaching 17 or more points is the winner; otherwise the winner is the player with the most points after all carrom men have been pocketed.

Tape drive

A tape drive, also known as a streamer, is a data storage device that reads and writes data stored on a magnetic tape or a punched tape. It is normally used for archival storage of data stored on hard drives. Tape media usually has a favorable unit cost and long archival stability. Instead of allowing random-access to data as hard disk drives do, tape drives only allow for sequential-access of data. A hard disk drive can move its read/write heads to any random part of the disk platters in a very short amount of time, but a tape drive must spend a considerable amount of time winding tape between reels to read any one particular piece of data. As a result, tape drives have very slow average seek times. Despite the slow seek time, tapes drives can stream data to tape very quickly. For example, modern LTO drives can reach continuous data transfer rates of up to 80 MB/s, which is as fast as most 10,000 rpm hard disks.

RISC (reduced instruction set computer)

In the mid-1980s to early-1990s, a crop of new high-performance RISC microprocessors appeared, which were initially used in special purpose machines and UNIX workstations, but have since become almost universal in all roles except the Intel-standard desktop.

The first commercial design was released by MIPS Technologies, the 32-bit R2000. The R3000 made the design truly practical, and the R4000 introduced the world's first 64-bit design. Opposing projects would result in the IBM POWER and Sun SPARC systems, respectively. Soon every major vendor was releasing a RISC design, including the AT&T CRISP, AMD 29000, Intel i860 and Intel i960, Motorola 88000, DEC Alpha and the HP-PA.

Market forces have "weeded out" many of these designs, leaving the PowerPC as the main desktop RISC processor, with the SPARC being used in Sun designs only. MIPS continue to supply some SGI systems, but are first and foremost used as an embedded design, notably in Cisco routers. The rest of the original crop of designs have either disappeared, or are about to. Other companies have attacked niches in the market, notably ARM, originally intended for home computer use but since focused at the embedded processor market. Today RISC designs based on the MIPS, ARM or PowerPC core are the vast majority of computing devices.

Landscape Archaeology

Landscape archaeology refers to a method of studying past people and their material culture in the context of the wider environment. The landscape may be large, such as a wide marshy river delta or small, like a back garden. It is often employed in cultural resources management to recognize exposed sites. Landscape archeology addresses the difficult issues of the behavior that people intentionally and deliberately shaped the land around them. The inquiry of what exactly constitutes a site has been discussed at length by generations of archaeologists.. Areas of examination are not restricted to the boundaries of an excavation but can instead stretch for many miles. Excavation is typically impractical on such a scale and landscape archaeologists hub on the visible features that can be recognized and recorded on the ground surface to create a picture of human activity across a region. Archaeological features covered just below the surface often leave tell-tale 'lumps and bumps', plough action in fields can lift archaeological material to the surface, in areas of restricted human activity, worked flint scatters can survive untouched for many centuries and standing buildings and field boundaries can be of great antiquity yet archaeologically unexamined.

History of Mainframe computer

More than a few manufacturers formed mainframe computers from the late 1950s through the 1970s. In those "glory days" it was "IBM and the Seven Dwarfs": Burroughs, Control Data Corporation, General Electric, Honeywell, NCR, RCA, and UNIVAC. IBM's dominance grew out of their development of the 360 series mainframes; this basic architecture has sustained to develop into their current zSeries/z9 mainframes which are debatably the only mainframe architecture still extant that dates from this early period. That said; while they can still run 24-bit System/360 code, the 64-bit series and System z9 CMOS servers have almost nothing physically in common with the older systems. The larger of the latter IBM competitors were also often referred to as "The BUNCH" from their initials.