Slide (musical ornament)

The slide (Schleifer in German, Coulé in French, Superjectio in Latin) is a musical ornament often found in baroque musical works, but used during many different periods. It instructs the performer to begin two or three scale steps below the marked note and "slide" upward—that is, move stepwise diatonically between the initial and final notes. Though less frequently found, the slide can also be performed in a descending fashion.

History

In The Interpretation of Early Music, Robert Donington surveys many treatises to ascertain the history of the slide. Writing in 1654, John Playford noted that the slide can be used in ascending (he called it "elevation") or in descending (he called it "double backfall") forms.Christopher Simpson described the figure in his Division Violist: "Sometimes a note is graced by sliding to it from the third below, called an 'elevation', now something obsolete. Sometimes from the third above; which we call a double-backfall. This sliding a third, up, or down, is always done upon one string."Thomas Mace (1676) notes that the + sign above a note indicates its use.

Pistol slide

The slide is the part of the weapon on a majority of semi-automatic pistols that moves during the operating cycle and generally houses the firing pin or striker and the extractor, and serves as the bolt. It is spring-loaded so that once it has moved to its rearmost position in the firing cycle, spring tension brings it back to the starting position chambering a fresh cartridge during the motion provided that the magazine is not empty.

Through the principles of recoil or blowback operation, the slide is forced back with each shot. Generally, this action serves three purposes: ejecting the spent casing, cocking the hammer or striker for the next shot, and loading another cartridge into the chamber when the slide comes forward.

Once the magazine and chamber both are empty, the slide will lock back, released only when the slide stop is depressed; if a new magazine is inserted before the slide stop is depressed then a new cartridge will be chambered.

Some handguns also utilise the slide stop as a means of releasing the slide, when the slide stop is held upwards for purposes such as field stripping eliminating the need for any further lock mechanisms and the room that these may use inside the gun.

Slide (footwear)

A slide is a shoe that is backless and open-toed, essentially an open-toed mule. Generally, all slides are not sandals. Thongs and flip flops are normally classified separately. Slides can be high-heeled, flat-heeled or somewhere in between, and may cover nearly the entire foot from ankle to toe, or may have only one or two narrow straps. They usually include a single strap or a sequence of straps across the toes and the lower half of the foot to hold the shoe on the foot. The term is descriptive in that this shoe is easy to 'slide' on and off the foot when the wearer wants to do so.

References

COM file

A COM file is a type of simple executable file. On the Digital Equipment operating systems of the 1970s, .COM was used as a filename extension for text files containing commands to be issued to the operating system (similar to a batch file). With the introduction of CP/M (a microcomputer operating system), the type of files commonly associated with COM extension changed to that of executable files. This convention was later carried over to MS-DOS. Even when complemented by the more general .exe file format for executables, the compact COM files remain viable and frequently used in MS-DOS.

The .COM file name extension has no relation to the .com (for "commercial") top-level Internet domain name. However, this similarity in name has been exploited by malicious computer virus writers.

MS-DOS binary format

The COM format is the original binary executable format used in CP/M and MS-DOS. It is very simple; it has no header (with the exception of CP/M 3 files), and contains no standard metadata, only code and data. This simplicity exacts a price: the binary has a maximum size of 65,280 (FF00h) bytes (256 bytes short of 64 KB) and stores all its code and data in one segment.

56.com

56.com is one of the largest video sharing websites in China, where users can upload, view and share video clips.

A fully owned subsidiary of Sohu, the company is headquartered in Tianhe District, Guangzhou, Guangdong.

The domain 56.com attracted at least 3.2 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com survey.

Access to the Chinese online video provider 56.com was suspended since 18:00 on June 3, 2008. 56.com made an explanation at 10:00 on June 4, 16 hours after the website's access was stopped, and said that the website had experienced a server failure and was being repaired, but it did not give a clear time for when the site's services would be fully resumed. Some media, such as Hexun.com and Sina.com, reported that as 56.com had frequently violated relevant government rules with its video content, it had therefore been issued a warning by the government and might be closed for a few days. However, this was denied by 56.com. By July 11, 2008, 56.com was back and operational.

FiveThirtyEight

FiveThirtyEight, sometimes referred to as 538, is a website that focuses on opinion poll analysis, politics, economics, and sports blogging. The website, which takes its name from the number of electors in the United States electoral college, was founded on March 7, 2008, as a polling aggregation website with a blog created by analyst Nate Silver. In August 2010 the blog became a licensed feature of The New York Times online. It was renamed FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver's Political Calculus. In July 2013, ESPN announced that it would become the owner of the FiveThirtyEight brand and site, and Silver was appointed as editor-in-chief. The ESPN-owned FiveThirtyEight began publication on March 17, 2014. In the ESPN era, the FiveThirtyEight blog has covered a broad spectrum of subjects including politics, sports, science, economics, and popular culture.

During the U.S. presidential primaries and general election of 2008, the site compiled polling data through a unique methodology derived from Silver's experience in baseball sabermetrics to "balance out the polls with comparative demographic data." He weighted "each poll based on the pollster's historical track record, sample size, and recentness of the poll".

Slide.com

Slide, Inc., operator of the Slide.com website, was a Web 2.0 company founded by Max Levchin and based in San Francisco, California. Originally formed to make photo sharing software for social networking services such as MySpace, the company achieved its greatest success as the largest developer of third-party applications for Facebook. The company was acquired by Google on August 4, 2010 and shut down on March 6, 2012.

History

Slide began in 2004 and was incorporated in 2005 by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, who personally invested $1 million in the new company.

Slide was one of the companies invited to participate in F8, the event at which Facebook announced an open platform allowing third parties to develop and operate their own software applications on the Facebook website.

Slide's first institutional funder was the Founders Fund, a San Francisco venture capital firm operated by former PayPal executive Peter Thiel to invest in Web 2.0 start-ups. Subsequent investors included the Mayfield Fund, Khosla Ventures, and BlueRun Ventures. In January 2008, Slide received a further $50 million in financing from undisclosed institutional investors, rumored to be Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price. The investment was based on a $500 million valuation.