Pretenders

Pretenders may refer to:

See also

Pretenders (album)

Pretenders is the debut studio album by the British-American band the Pretenders, released on 7 January 1980 under Real Records (Sire Records in the United States). A combination of rock, punk and pop music, this album made the band famous. The album features the singles "Stop Your Sobbing", "Kid" and "Brass in Pocket".

Nick Lowe produced the Pretenders' first single, "Stop Your Sobbing", but decided not to work with them again as he thought the band was "not going anywhere".Chris Thomas took over on the subsequent recording sessions.

Pretenders debuted at number 1 on the UK Albums Chart in the week of its release and stayed there for four consecutive weeks. It also made the top 10 on the Billboard 200 and was certified Platinum during 1982 by the RIAA. Pretenders has been named one of the best albums of all time by VH1 (#52). In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine ranked the album number 155 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, and, in 1989, ranked it the 20th best album of the 1980s. In 2012, Slant Magazine listed the album at #64 on its list, "Best Albums of the 1980s".

Pretenders (Transformers)

Pretenders is a subline within the Transformers toy line, introduced in 1988. The concept behind the toy was that the Transformers were capable of disguising their robotic forms through the use of synthetic organic outer shells.

Transformers: Generation 1

Standard Pretenders (1988)

While the Autobots' outer shells all resemble human beings clad in armor, the Decepticons' shells are all in the form of monstrous animalistic creatures. The robot figure is contained entirely within the shell, invisible to the outsider observer. After the shell splits apart to release it, the shell can be recombined for a second figure. Although the first set of Pretenders was released early in 1988, a second set of 6, exclusive to North America, was also sold. Metalhawk, named so because his inner robot was constructed partially of die-cast metal (a rarity in 1988), was only sold in Japan.

Autobots

Cloudburst

Groundbreaker

Packed!

Packed! is the fifth album by rock group The Pretenders, released in 1990. For this album, the only real member of the group is Chrissie Hynde; no other person is pictured anywhere within the album package, and a rotating cast of session musicians (rather than a set band) is used to back Hynde throughout, essentially making this a de-facto solo album by Hynde, only using the Pretenders name to satisfy contractual obligations. However, drummer Blair Cunningham plays on all tracks, though he is not credited as part of the band.

Track listing

All songs by Chrissie Hynde, except as noted.

Personnel

Additional personnel

Data structure alignment

Data structure alignment is the way data is arranged and accessed in computer memory. It consists of two separate but related issues: data alignment and data structure padding. When a modern computer reads from or writes to a memory address, it will do this in word sized chunks (e.g. 4 byte chunks on a 32-bit system) or larger. Data alignment means putting the data at a memory address equal to some multiple of the word size, which increases the system's performance due to the way the CPU handles memory. To align the data, it may be necessary to insert some meaningless bytes between the end of the last data structure and the start of the next, which is data structure padding.

For example, when the computer's word size is 4 bytes (a byte means 8 bits on most machines, but could be different on some systems), the data to be read should be at a memory address which is some multiple of 4. When this is not the case, e.g. the data starts at address 14 instead of 16, then the computer has to read two or more 4 byte chunks and do some calculation before the requested data has been read, or it may generate an alignment fault. Even though the previous data structure end is at address 13, the next data structure should start at address 16. Two padding bytes are inserted between the two data structures at addresses 14 and 15 to align the next data structure at address 16.