Power!

Power! (known as Critical Mass in Europe) is a computer game developed by Simon Francis in 1985 for the Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum.

Plot

The player operates a rocket-powered hovercraft whose mission is to destroy an enemy transfer beam that is protected not only by long-distance enemy raiders and mines, but also molecular disorientation that sucks the energy from the player's attack craft.

Gameplay

The player may control the hovercraft in either a normal joystick operational mode or with vectored movement. When the player pushes forward on the joystick, the hovercraft accelerates, and when pulling back on the joystick, speed decreases.

Reception

In 1988, Dragon reviewed Power!, and gave the game 4 out of 5 stars.

References

External links

PoweredUSB

PoweredUSB, also known as Retail USB, USB PlusPower, and USB +Power, is an addition to the Universal Serial Bus standard that allows for higher-power devices to obtain power through their USB host instead of requiring an independent power supply or external AC adapter. It is mostly used in point-of-sale equipment, such as receipt printers and barcode readers.

History

PoweredUSB, as a proprietary variant of USB, was developed and proposed by IBM, Berg (now FCI), NCR and Microsoft between 1998 and 1999, with the last revision (0.8g) issued in 2004. The specification is not endorsed by the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF). IBM, who owns patents to PoweredUSB, charges a licensing fee for its use.

PoweredUSB was licensed by Hewlett-Packard, Cyberdata, Fujitsu, Wincor and others.

Implementation

PoweredUSB uses a more complex connector than standard USB, maintaining the standard USB 1.x/2.0 interface for data communications and adding a second connector for power. Physically, it is essentially two connectors stacked such that the bottom connector accepts a standard USB plug and the top connector takes a power plug.

Power (2014 Telugu film)

Power is a 2014 Telugu action comedy film written and directed by K. S. Ravindra and produced by Rockline Venkatesh under the banner Rockline Entertainments, both marking their debut in Telugu cinema. It features Ravi Teja playing a dual role with Hansika Motwani and Regina Cassandra playing the female lead roles. S. Thaman composed the music while Gautham Raju edited the film. Arthur A. Wilson and Jayanan Vincent handled the film's cinematography. The film revolves around two similar looking people, Baldev Sahay - a corrupt ACP in Kolkata and Tirupathi - a person aspiring to become a police officer in Hyderabad. The home minister of Kolkata recruits Tirupathi to play as Baldev to catch a gangster rescued by Baldev. Rest of the story is all about why Baldev became a corrupt cop and how Tirupathi executed the unfinished mission of Baldev.

Production began on 11 December 2013. The film's talkie part was shot in Hyderabad, Bangalore, Kolkata, Chennai and Bangkok while two songs were shot in Bulgaria marking it the first Telugu film to be shot there. Principal photography ended on 14 August 2014. The film released on 12 September 2014 to positive reviews from critics and was a commercial success.

TRIX (operating system)

TRIX is a network-oriented research operating system developed in the late 1970s at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) by Professor Steve Ward and his research group. It ran on the NuMachine and had remote procedure call functionality built into its kernel, but was otherwise a Version 7 Unix workalike.

Design and implementation

On startup, the NuMachine would load the same program on each CPU in the system, passing each instance of the program the numeric ID of the CPU it was running on. TRIX relied on this design to have the first CPU set up global data structures and then set a flag to signal when initialization completed. After that, each instance of the kernel was able to access global data. The system also supported data private to each CPU. Access to the filesystem was provided by a program in user space.

The kernel supported unnamed threads running in domains. A domain was the equivalent of a Unix process without a stack pointer (each thread in a domain had a stack pointer). A thread could change domains, and the system scheduler would migrate threads between CPUs in order to keep all processors busy. Threads had access to a single kind of mutual exclusion primitive, and one of seven priorities. The scheduler was designed to avoid priority inversion. User space programs could create threads through a spawn system call.