Numeral (linguistics)

In linguistics, a numeral is a member of a word class (or sometimes even a part of speech) designating numbers, such as the English word 'two' and the compound 'seventy-seven'.

Identifying numerals

Numerals may be attributive, as in two dogs, or pronominal, as in I saw two (of them).

Many words of different parts of speech indicate number or quantity. Quantifiers do not enumerate, or designate a specific number, but give another, often less specific, indication of amount. Examples are words such as every, most, least, some, etc. There are also number words which enumerate but are not a distinct part of speech, such as 'dozen', which is a noun, 'first', which is an adjective, or 'twice', which is an adverb. Numerals enumerate, but in addition have distinct grammatical behavior: when a numeral modifies a noun, it may replace the article: the/some dogs played in the park → twelve dogs played in the park. (Note that *dozen dogs played in the park is not grammatical, so 'dozen' is not a numeral.)

Zero (name)

Zero or Zéro is surname, given name or pseudonym of the following people:

Zero is name of the following notable fictional characters:

Zero (Yeah Yeah Yeahs song)

"Zero" is a song by American indie rock band Yeah Yeah Yeahs, released as the lead single from their third studio album, It's Blitz! (2009). The song received critical acclaim from music critics for its production, and was named the best track of 2009 by both NME and Spin magazines.

The single had minor commercial success, peaking at numbers four and eighteen on the Billboard Alternative Songs and Hot Dance Singles Sales charts, as well as number forty-nine on the UK Singles Chart. A music video for the single, which shows lead singer Karen O walking the streets of San Francisco at night, was released in March 2009.

Critical reception

"Zero" received acclaim from music critics. Paula Carino of AllMusic described the song as "an exhilarating and wide-open expanse of pure electro-pop". Mary Bellamy of Drowned in Sound viewed the track as "the call to arms of a band who desperately want to teleport the refugees of fashion-fizzled pop, the hippest of hipsters and the weirdest outsiders to the dancefloor of their sweaty spaceship", stating it is "perhaps one of the band's finest moments ever committed to tape."

Xerox

Xerox Corporation /ˈzɪərɒks/ is an American global corporation that sells business services and document technology products to businesses and governments of all sizes. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (moved from Stamford, Connecticut in October 2007), though its largest population of employees is based around Rochester, New York, the area in which the company was founded. On September 28, 2009, Xerox announced the intended acquisition of Affiliated Computer Services for $6.4 billion. The deal closed on February 8, 2010. As a large developed company, it is consistently placed in the list of Fortune 500 companies.

Researchers at Xerox and its Palo Alto Research Center invented several important elements of personal computing, such as the desktop metaphor GUI, the computer mouse and desktop computing. These features were frowned upon by the then board of directors, who ordered the Xerox engineers to share them with Apple technicians. The features were taken on by Apple and, later, Microsoft. Partly thanks to these features, these two firms would then go on to duopolize the personal computing world. Xerox also invented Ethernet.

Xerox Star

The Star workstation, officially known as the Xerox 8010 Information System, was the first commercial system to incorporate various technologies that have since become standard in personal computers, including a bitmapped display, a window-based graphical user interface, icons, folders, mouse (two-button), Ethernet networking, file servers, print servers and e-mail.

Introduced by Xerox Corporation in 1981, the name "Star" technically refers only to the software sold with the system for the office automation market. The 8010 workstations were also sold with LISP- and Smalltalk-based software, for the smaller research and software development market.

History

The Xerox Alto

The Xerox Star systems concept owes much to the Xerox Alto, an experimental workstation designed by the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The first Alto became operational in 1972. At first, only few Altos were built. Although by 1979 nearly 1,000 Ethernet-linked Altos were in use at Xerox and another 500 at collaborating universities and government offices, it was never intended to be a commercial product. While Xerox had started in 1977 a development project which worked to incorporate those innovations into a commercial product, their concept was an integrated document preparation system, centered around the (then expensive) laser printing technology and oriented towards large corporations and their trading partners. When that system was announced in 1981, the cost was about $75,000 ($195,000 in today's dollars) for a basic system, and $16,000 ($42,000 today) for each additional workstation.

Xerox 820

The Xerox 820 was an 8-bit desktop computer sold by Xerox in the early 1980s. The computer ran under the CP/M operating system and used floppy disk drives for mass storage. The microprocessor board was a licensed variant of the Big Board computer.

The original 820

The original Xerox 820 used a Zilog Z80 processor clocked at 2.5 MHz, and had 64 kiB of RAM.

Xerox chose CP/M for the computer because of the large software library for the operating system. Dealers reportedly were pleased to sell a computer from a well-known Fortune 500 company but the Rosen Electronics Letter unfavorably reviewed the 820 in June 1981, describing it as a disappointing, "me too" product for a leading technology company like Xerox. In November it stated that the new IBM PC was much more attractive; "we think the bulk of the sales will go to IBM".

The 820-II

Overview

The Xerox 820-II followed in 1982, featuring a Z80A processor clocked at 4.0 MHz. Pricing started at $3000.

Hardware: The processor board was located inside the CRT unit, and included the Z80A, 64 kiB of RAM and a boot ROM which enabled booting from any of the supported external drives in 8-bit mode.