SSE plc

SSE plc (formerly Scottish and Southern Energy plc) is a British energy company headquartered in Perth, Scotland. It is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.

SSE operates in Ireland and the United Kingdom. It is involved in the generation and supply of electricity and gas, the operation of gas and telecoms networks and other energy-related services such as gas storage, E&P, contracting, connections and metering.

It is considered as one of the Big Six, that dominate the energy market in the United Kingdom.

History

Origins

The company has its origins in two public sector electricity supply authorities. The former North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board was founded in 1943 to design, construct and manage hydroelectricity projects in the Highlands of Scotland, and took over further generation and distribution responsibilities on the nationalisation of the UK's electricity industry in 1948. The former Southern Electricity Board was created in 1948 to distribute electricity in Southern England.

SSE2

SSE2, Streaming SIMD Extensions 2, is one of the Intel SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) processor supplementary instruction sets first introduced by Intel with the initial version of the Pentium 4 in 2001. It extends the earlier SSE instruction set, and is intended to fully replace MMX. Intel extended SSE2 to create SSE3 in 2004. SSE2 added 144 new instructions to SSE, which has 70 instructions. Competing chip-maker AMD added support for SSE2 with the introduction of their Opteron and Athlon 64 ranges of AMD64 64-bit CPUs in 2003.

Features

Most of the SSE2 instructions implement the integer vector operations also found in MMX. They use the XMM registers instead of the MMX registers, which are wider and allow for significant performance improvements in specialized applications. Another advantage of replacing MMX with SSE2 is avoiding the mode switching penalty for issuing x87 instructions present in MMX because it is sharing register space with the x87 FPU. The SSE2 also complements the floating-point vector operations of the SSE instruction set by adding support for the double precision data type.

SSE4

SSE4 (Streaming SIMD Extensions 4) is a CPU instruction set used in the Intel Core microarchitecture and AMD K10 (K8L). It was announced on 27 September 2006 at the Fall 2006 Intel Developer Forum, with vague details in a white paper; more precise details of 47 instructions became available at the Spring 2007 Intel Developer Forum in Beijing, in the presentation. SSE4 is fully compatible with software written for previous generations of Intel 64 and IA-32 architecture microprocessors. All existing software continues to run correctly without modification on microprocessors that incorporate SSE4, as well as in the presence of existing and new applications that incorporate SSE4. The SSE4 Programming Reference is available from Intel.

SSE4 subsets

Intel SSE4 consists of 54 instructions. A subset consisting of 47 instructions, referred to as SSE4.1 in some Intel documentation, is available in Penryn. Additionally, SSE4.2, a second subset consisting of the 7 remaining instructions, is first available in Nehalem-based Core i7. Intel credits feedback from developers as playing an important role in the development of the instruction set.

Arena (Australian publishing co-operative)

Arena is an independent Australian radical and critical publishing group. It has been publishing continuously since 1963. Currently, its principal publications are the political and cultural Arena Magazine (6 times per year), and the twice-yearly theoretical publication Arena Journal. Their concerns initially found expression in the practical and theoretical quarterly, Arena, which ran from 1963 to 1992 and was then transformed into the two different publications that continue today.

Though the quarterly Arena commenced as a New Left magazine with a commitment to extending Marxist approaches by developing an account of intellectual practices, its subsequent debates and theoretical work, and engagements with critical theory, media theory, post-structuralism and postmodernism, have led it to develop an approach known as the 'constitutive abstraction' approach. This is connected to an associated lineage of engaged theory. All of these are underpinned by a preoccupation with the questions of social abstraction, including the abstraction of intellectual practices. They include a special emphasis on the cultural and social contradictions of globalised hi-tech society, which the Arena editors took to be misrepresented within prevailing media theory and post-structuralism.

Arena (Todd Rundgren album)

Arena is an album by rock musician Todd Rundgren that was released in 2008.

Like several of his earlier albums, this was entirely a solo effort, with Rundgren playing all the instruments. In contrast to his earlier albums, he produced this album entirely on an Apple laptop computer using Propellerhead's Reason software for composition and Sonoma Wire Works' RiffWorks for recording. All audio processing was done with software tools as well, except for a Line 6 Toneport guitar input box.

Track listing

References

Arena, Calabria

Arena is a comune (municipality) in the Province of Vibo Valentia in the Italian region Calabria, located about 50 kilometres (31 mi) southwest of Catanzaro and about 15 kilometres (9 mi) southeast of Vibo Valentia. As of 31 December 2004, it had a population of 1,678 and an area of 32.4 square kilometres (12.5 sq mi).

Arena borders the following municipalities: Acquaro, Dasà, Fabrizia, Gerocarne, Mongiana, Serra San Bruno.

Demographic evolution

References

External links