Graffiti is the third studio album by American R&B and pop recording artist Chris Brown. It is the follow-up to his successful second album Exclusive (2007). The album was produced during 2008 to 2009 by several record producers, including Polow Da Don, Swizz Beatz, The Runners, and Brian Kennedy. Primarily an R&B and pop outing, Graffiti incorporates elements of hip hop music with synthesizers.
The album debuted at number seven on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart, selling 102,489 copies in its first week. To date, "Graffiti" has sold 360,000 copies in the US. It became his third consecutive top-ten debut in the United States and produced three singles that achieved moderate chart success. Upon its release, Graffiti received generally negative reviews from most music critics. Graffiti was nominated for two Grammy Awards, one for Best Contemporary R&B Album and Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals for the track, "Take My Time" featuring fellow R&B singer Tank.
Graffiti is an essentially single-stroke shorthand handwriting recognition system used in PDAs based on the Palm OS. Graffiti was originally written by Palm, Inc. as the recognition system for GEOS-based devices such as HP's OmniGo 100 and 120 or the Magic Cap-line and was available as an alternate recognition system for the Apple Newton MessagePad, when NewtonOS 1.0 couldn't recognize handwriting very well. Graffiti also runs on the Windows Mobile platform, where it is called "Block Recognizer", and on the Symbian UIQ platform as the default recognizer and was available for Casio's Zoomer PDA.
The software is based primarily on a neography of upper-case characters that can be drawn blindly with a stylus on a touch-sensitive panel. Since the user typically cannot see the character as it is being drawn, complexities have been removed from four of the most difficult letters. "A'" "F", "K" and "T" all are drawn without any need to match up a cross-stroke.
Graffiti was developed by Jeff Hawkins, who had previously created "PalmPrint" (the character recognition system used by the Casio Zoomer) to recognize natural handwriting. By using a simpler alphabet, computers could easily recognize handwriting. Hawkins believed that people would take the time to learn Graffiti just as people learn to touch-type. Hawkins recalled his insight: "And then it came to me in a flash. Touch-typing is a skill you learn."
Italian may refer to:
The Ping-Pong virus (also called Boot, Bouncing Ball, Bouncing Dot, Italian, Italian-A or VeraCruz) is a boot sector virus discovered on March 1, 1988 at the University of Turin in Italy. It was likely the most common and best known boot sector virus until outnumbered by the Stoned virus.
Computers could be contaminated by an infected diskette, showing up as a 1 KB bad cluster (the last one on the disk, used by the virus to store the original boot sector) to most disk checking programs. Due to being labelled as bad cluster, MS-DOS will avoid overwriting it. It infects disks on every active drive and will even infect non-bootable partitions on the hard disk. Upon infection, the virus becomes memory resident.
The virus would become active if a disk access is made exactly on the half hour and start to show a small "ball" bouncing around the screen in both text mode (the ASCII bullet character "•") and graphical mode. No serious damage is incurred by the virus except on '286 machines (and also V20, '386 and '486), which would sometimes crash during the ball's appearance on the screen. The cause of this crash is the "MOV CS,AX" instruction, which only exists on '88 and '86 processors. For this reason, users of machines at risk were advised to save their work and reboot, since this is the only way to temporarily get rid of the virus.
Italy is home to some of the oldest wine-producing regions in the world, and Italian wines are known worldwide for their broad variety. Italy, closely followed by France, is the world’s largest wine producer by volume. Its contribution is about 45–50 million hl per year, and represents about ⅓ of global production.Italian wine is exported around the world and is also extremely popular in Italy: Italians rank fifth on the world wine consumption list by volume with 42 litres per capita consumption. Grapes are grown in almost every region of the country and there are more than one million vineyards under cultivation.
Etruscans and Greek settlers produced wine in Italy before the Romans started their own vineyards in the 2nd century B.C. Roman grape-growing and winemaking was prolific and well-organized, pioneering large-scale production and storage techniques like barrel-making and bottling.
Although vines had been cultivated from the wild Vitis vinifera grape for millennia, it wasn't until the Greek colonization that wine-making flourished. Viticulture was introduced into Sicily and southern Italy by the Mycenaean Greeks, and was well established when the extensive Greek colonization transpired around 800 BC. It was during the Roman defeat of the Carthaginians (acknowledged masters of wine-making) in the 2nd century BC that Italian wine production began to further flourish. Large-scale, slave-run plantations sprang up in many coastal areas and spread to such an extent that, in AD 92, emperor Domitian was forced to destroy a great number of vineyards in order to free up fertile land for food production.