Z Channel

The Z Channel was one of the first pay television stations in the United States. Launched in 1974 from Los Angeles, California, this station was known for its devotion to the art of cinema due to the eclectic choice of films by the programming chief, Jerry Harvey. It also popularized the use of letterboxing on television, as well as showing 'director's cut' versions of films (which is a term popularized after Z Channel's showing of Heaven's Gate). Z Channel's devotion to cinema and choice of rare and important films had an important influence on such directors as Robert Altman, Quentin Tarantino, and Jim Jarmusch. Z Channel was owned by Theta Cable (a division of TelePrompTer Corporation) which was acquired by Group W (Westinghouse) in 1981. Operations were located in Santa Monica, California. In 1989, Z Channel faded to black and was replaced by SportsChannel Los Angeles.

The channel was the subject of the 2004 documentary Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession, which was directed by Alexandra Cassavetes, daughter of John Cassavetes.

Z Channel (disambiguation)

Z Channel may refer to:

See also

Channel (programming)

In computing, a channel is a model for interprocess communication and synchronization via message passing. A message may be sent over a channel, and another process or thread is able to receive messages sent over a channel it has a reference to, as a stream. Different implementations of channels may be buffered or not, and either synchronous or asynchronous.

Channels are fundamental to the process calculus approach to concurrency, and originated in communicating sequential processes (CSP), a formal model for concurrency, and has been used in many derived languages, such as occam, and Limbo programming language (via Newsqueak and the Alef programming language). They are also used in the C programming language threading library libthread, and in Plan 9 from Bell Labs, which uses libthread, as well as in Stackless Python and the Go programming language.

Channel implementations

Channels modeled after the CSP model are inherently synchronous: a process waiting to receive an object from a channel will block until the object is sent. This is also called rendezvous behaviour. Typical supported operations are presented below using the example of the libthread channel API.

Price channels

A price channel is a pair of parallel trend lines that form a chart pattern for a stock or commodity. Channels may be horizontal, ascending or descending. When prices pass through and stay through a trendline representing support or resistance, the trend is said to be broken and there is a "breakout".

References

See also

Channel (digital image)

Color digital images are made of pixels, and pixels are made of combinations of primary colors represented by a series of code. A channel in this context is the grayscale image of the same size as a color image, made of just one of these primary colors. For instance, an image from a standard digital camera will have a red, green and blue channel. A grayscale image has just one channel.

Overview

In the digital realm, there can be any number of conventional primary colors making up an image; a channel in this case is extended to be the grayscale image based on any such conventional primary color. By extension, a channel is any grayscale image the same size with the "proper" image, and associated with it.

"Channel" is a conventional term used to refer to a certain component of an image. In reality, any image format can use any algorithm internally to store images. For instance, GIF images actually refer to the color in each pixel by an index number, which refers to a table where three color components are stored. However, regardless of how a specific format stores the images, discrete color channels can always be determined, as long as a final color image can be rendered.