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.

Slug (railroad)

A railroad slug is an accessory to a diesel-electric locomotive. It has trucks with traction motors but, unlike a B unit, is unable to move about under its own power, as it does not contain a prime mover to produce electricity, nor is there a cab for an operator. Instead, it is connected to a locomotive, called the mother, which provides the needed electrical power to operate the traction motors, and the motor controls.

Basic principles

A slug is used to increase adhesive weight, allowing full power to be applied at a lower speed, thus allowing a higher maximum tractive effort. They are often used in low-speed operations such as switching operations in yards. At low speeds, a diesel-electric locomotive prime mover is capable of producing more electricity than its traction motors can use effectively. Extra power would simply cause the wheels to slip and possibly overheat the traction motors. A slug increases the number of traction motors available to the locomotive, increasing both the pulling and braking power. In addition the load on each traction motor is reduced, which helps prevent overheating from excess current. Slugs typically carry ballast to increase their weight and improve traction. Large blocks of concrete are frequently used for this purpose, substituting for the weight of the now-absent prime mover.

Slug (band)

Slug was a noise rock group that formed in Los Angeles in 1988 by DJs from Loyola Marymount University campus radio station KXLU. Originally formed as an experimental noise collage trio utilizing metal percussion, feedback and primitive sound loops created via gouged children's and sound effect records, they subsequently added traditional instrumentation (2 basses, 2 guitars, drums, vocals) to the mix.

Slug self-released their first single on their own label Magnatone Recordings. After the release of their first album Swingers, guitarist Rich Alvarez left to pursue his own band Jackknife, and was replaced by Collin Rae, formerly of 4AD artist Ultra Vivid Scene.

Before the recording of their third album The 3 Man Themes, bassist Michael B.© left to be replaced by David Scott Stone.

Slug disbanded in 1996. Stone would go on to work with The Melvins, LCD Soundsystem and other groups. Bassist Damian Romero continued his side noise/ambient project under the name Speculum Fight. Guitarist Todd Williams relocated to New York City to work as a film editor. Drummer Tomás Palermo moved to the San Francisco Bay area as a freelance writer on reggae for URB magazine and other publications. Guitarist Collin Rae moved to the Bay Area as well, performing in other groups as well as continuing his work as a professional photographer.

Semantic URL

Semantic URLs, also sometimes referred to as clean URLs, RESTful URLs, user-friendly URLs, or search engine-friendly URLs, are Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) intended to improve the usability and accessibility of a website or web service by being immediately and intuitively meaningful to non-expert users. Such URL schemes tend to reflect the conceptual structure of a collection of information and decouple the user interface from a server's internal representation of information. Other reasons for using clean URLs include search engine optimization (SEO), conforming to the representational state transfer (REST) style of software architecture, and ensuring that individual web resources remain consistently at the same URL. This makes the World Wide Web a more stable and useful system, and allows more durable and reliable bookmarking of web resources.

Semantic URLs also do not contain implementation details of the underlying web application. This carries the benefit of reducing the difficulty of changing the implementation of the resource at a later date. For example, many non-semantic URLs include the filename of a server-side script, such as example.php, example.asp or cgi-bin. If the underlying implementation of a resource is changed, such URLs would need to change along with it. Likewise, when URLs are non-semantic, if the site database is moved or restructured it has the potential to cause broken links, both internally and from external sites, the latter of which can lead to removal from search engine listings. The use of semantic URLs presents a consistent location for resources to user-agents regardless of internal structure. A further potential benefit to the use of semantic URLs is that the concealment of internal server or application information can improve the security of a system.