Norman four notrump

Norman four notrump (also Norman) is a slam bidding convention in the partnership card game contract bridge designed to help the partnership choose among the five-, six-, and seven-levels for the final contract. Norman four notrump is an alternative to the Blackwood convention family.

Used when the contract level can be better determined by knowing the numbers of aces and kings that are "missing" in the partnership's two hands, the convention is initiated by a bid of 4NT to ask that partner provide information about his ace and king holdings. The response is coded to enable inference about the precise numbers of aces and kings in the replying hand.

The Norman scale, where an ace counts as one control and a king as half a control, is the basis of the following responses to the 4NT asking bid:

Norman 4NT was a component of the Vienna System developed in the 1930s and the sixth edition of The Official Encyclopedia of Bridge of 2001 noted that it "once was popular in England, where it is credited to Norman de Villiers Hart and Sir Norman Bennet."

Radio National

ABC Radio National, known on-air as RN, is an Australia-wide non-commercial radio network run by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Radio National broadcasts national programming in subjects that include news and current affairs, the arts, social issues, science, drama and comedy. Some programs are relayed on Radio Australia, the ABC's international free-to-air shortwave service.

Radio National currently has 327 transmitter sites and covers over 98% of the permanently inhabited areas of Australia. Remote areas are served by satellite service.

All radio programs are available for live streaming over the Internet, and most (excluding drama, poetry and music) as audio-on-demand, or for download as MP3s for at least four weeks after broadcast. Some programs are available as MP3s going back to 2005, when Radio National commenced podcasting. About 25% of shows, mainly the flagship weekly shows, have written transcripts archived back to 1996.

History

From 1928, the National Broadcasting Service, as part of the federal Postmaster-General's Department, gradually took over responsibility for all the existing stations that were sponsored by public licence fees ("A" Class licences). The outsourced Australian Broadcasting Company supplied programs from 1929. In 1932 a commission was established, merging the original ABC company and the National Broadcasting Service. It is from this time that Radio National dates as a distinct network within the ABC, in which a system of program relays was developed during the subsequent decades to link stations spread across the nation.

Take Command Console

Take Command Console (TCC), formerly known as 4DOS for Windows NT (4NT), is a command line interpreter by JP Software, designed as a substitute for the default command interpreter in Microsoft Windows, CMD.EXE.

History

TCC is based on the earlier 4DOS command shell for DOS, and 4OS/2 for OS/2.

The NDOS interpreter and batch file extensions included with several Norton Utilities implementations prior to 2000 is a lightly modified and extended 4DOS interpreter.

Beginning with version 12 of 4NT, support for Windows 95, 98, ME, NT and 2000 were removed. Beginning with version 16 of TCC, support for Windows XP was removed, although it might still run in XP. 4NT was renamed to Take Command Console as part of JP Software's Take Command version 9.

Features

TCC provides a rich set of command line and batch programming capabilities. It can work in conjunction with other scripting languages, such as REXX, Ruby and Perl, or Windows Scripting languages, in the form of Active Scripting engines such as VBScript and JScript as well as PerlScript (via ActivePerl), TclScript (via ActiveTcl), PythonScript (via ActivePython), and the scripting engine version of Object REXX to provide greater access to the operating system.