Alphaville
Alphaville may refer to:
Alphaville (band)
Alphaville is a German group which gained popularity in the 1980s. The founding members were lead singer Marian Gold (real name: Hartwig Schierbaum, born 26 May 1954 in Herford, North Rhine-Westphalia), Bernhard Lloyd (real name: Bernhard Gößling, born 2 June 1960 in Enger, North Rhine-Westphalia), and Frank Mertens (real name: Frank Sorgatz, born 26 October 1961 in Enger, North Rhine-Westphalia). The band was at first named "Forever Young" before being changed to "Alphaville". They achieved chart success with the singles "Big in Japan", "Jet Set", "Dance With Me" and "Forever Young".
Biography
Formation
Alphaville formed in early 1982, when Marian Gold and Bernhard Lloyd met at the music project Nelson Community. Many months later, Frank Mertens joined the project. Together the three wrote Forever Young and recorded their first demo of the same name. In 1984, the newly renamed Alphaville released their debut single, "Big in Japan", which Gold wrote in 1979 after hearing the music of Holly Johnson's band Big in Japan.
Alphaville (film)
Alphaville: une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Alphaville: A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution) is a 1965 French science fiction noir film directed by Jean-Luc Godard. It stars Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Howard Vernon and Akim Tamiroff. The film won the Golden Bear award of the 15th Berlin International Film Festival in 1965.
Alphaville combines the genres of dystopian science fiction and film noir. There are no special props or futuristic sets; instead, the film was shot in real locations in Paris, the night-time streets of the capital becoming the streets of Alphaville, while modernist glass and concrete buildings (that in 1965 were new and strange architectural designs) represent the city's interiors. The film is set in the future but the characters also refer to twentieth century events; for example, the hero describes himself as a Guadalcanal veteran.
Expatriate American actor Eddie Constantine plays Lemmy Caution, a trenchcoat-wearing secret agent. Constantine had already played this or similar roles in dozens of previous films; the character was originally created by British pulp novelist Peter Cheyney. However, in Alphaville, director Jean-Luc Godard moves Caution away from his usual twentieth century setting, and places him in a futuristic sci-fi dystopia, the technocratic dictatorship of Alphaville.
Dreamscapes
Dreamscapes is a limited edition eight-CD set of rare Alphaville recordings, released in 1999. It features 124 tracks with a total playing time of around 9.5 hours. 43 of the songs had never been available before, and all of the remainder had been remixed.
The four double CDs were packaged in a large (A4-sized) box, and accompanied by a large 64-page booklet, containing lyrics, rare photographs and original short fiction. Inside the box were 4 double-CDs, the cover of each was 1/4 of the overall box art.
A promotional copy called "Visions of Dreamscapes" was released to accompany the album.
Track listing
CD - 1: Dreamscape 1ne
Windows DreamScene
Windows DreamScene is a utility that allows videos and .gif and other optimized animations to be used as desktop wallpapers. It is one of the Windows Ultimate Extras. Prior to its official announcement, DreamScene was rumored to be in creation under the names Motion Desktop and Borealis. After several months of testing, the final version was released on September 25, 2007.
Rendered content included with DreamScene (such as an animated realization of the Windows Aurora background) was produced by Stardock, while photographic content was provided by the Discovery Channel. Third-party video content in MPEG or WMV format may also be used. In addition, AVI files can be played by altering the file extension.
One of the purported advantages of DreamScene over previous methods of desktop animation is that it makes use of the GPU for display instead of the CPU, leaving the latter free to perform user tasks. To what extent this is achieved is not specified. When a full-screen program is run, such as a game or any window that is maximized, the video will automatically stop since the video will not be seen; this means it uses less GPU and CPU. The video can also be stopped manually. Content encoders need to strive for a balance between compression and file size; decompression requires the CPU, but larger files take up more memory and may cause the disk to be accessed more frequently.
Podcasts:
