+/- (band)

+/-, or Plus/Minus, is an American indietronic band formed in 2001. The band makes use of both electronic and traditional instruments, and has sought to use electronics to recreate traditional indie rock song forms and instrumental structures. The group has released two albums on each of the American indie labels Teenbeat Records and Absolutely Kosher, and their track "All I do" was prominently featured in the soundtrack for the major film Wicker Park. The group has developed a devoted following in Japan and Taiwan, and has toured there frequently. Although many artists append bonus tracks onto the end of Japanese album releases to discourage purchasers from buying cheaper US import versions, the overseas versions of +/- albums are usually quite different from the US versions - tracklists can be rearranged, artwork with noticeable changes is used, and tracks from the US version can be replaced as well as augmented by bonus tracks.

History

Bandō

Bandō may refer to:

People

Other

See also

Bando (disambiguation)

!!!

!!! is a dance-punk band that formed in Sacramento, California, in 1996 by lead singer Nic Offer. Its name is most commonly pronounced "Chk Chk Chk" ([/tʃk.tʃk.tʃk/]). Members of !!! came from other local bands such as The Yah Mos, Black Liquorice and Popesmashers. They are currently based in New York City, Sacramento, and Portland, Oregon. The band's sixth full-length album, As If, was released in October 2015.

Background and history

!!! is an American band formed in the summer of 1995 by the merger of part of the group Black Liquorice and Popesmashers. After a successful joint tour, these two teams decided to mix the disco-funk with more aggressive sounds and integrate the hardcore singer Nic Offer from the The Yah Mos. The band's name was inspired by the subtitles of the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, in which the clicking sounds of the Bushmens' Khoisan language were represented as "!". However, as the bandmembers themselves say, !!! is pronounced by repeating thrice any monosyllabic sound. "Chk Chk Chk" is the most common pronunciation, which the URL of their official website and the title of their Myspace page suggest is the preferred pronunciation.

SILK

SILK is an audio compression format and audio codec developed by Skype Limited. It was developed for use in Skype, as a replacement for the SVOPC codec. Since licensing out, it has also been used by others. It has been extended to the Internet standard Opus codec.

Details

Skype Limited announced that SILK can use a sampling frequency of 8, 12, 16 or 24 kHz and a bit rate from 6 to 40 kbit/s. It can also use a low algorithmic delay of 25 ms (20 ms frame size + 5 ms look-ahead). The reference implementation is written in the C programming language. The codec technology is based on linear predictive coding (LPC). The SILK binary SDK is available.

License

The SILK codec is patented and licensed separately from the SILK SDK. The codec is open-source, freeware, available royalty free with restrictions on use and distribution. The SDK was initially available only by application by giving details of name, address, phone, and description of how SILK will be used.As of 2012 (version 1.0.9) the SDK can by downloaded without application, but the licence restricts the use to internal evaluation and testing purposes only, excluding software distribution or use in any commercial product or service.

Silk (comics)

Silk (Cindy Moon) is a fictional superheroine appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics.

Publication history

The character first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man vol. 3 #1 (April 2014) as a faceless cameo and was created by Dan Slott and Humberto Ramos. She made several other faceless appearances throughout the volume's first story arc, before making her full debut in The Amazing Spider-Man vol. 3 #4 (July 2014), as part of a tie-in to the Original Sin storyline. An ongoing title featuring Silk started publishing in February 2015, with scripts by Supernatural writer Robbie Thompson and art by Stacey Lee.Silk volume 1 will come to an end with a "Last Days" story arc that ties into Secret Wars, after which Silk will star in a second volume of her solo series.

Fictional character biography

Thirteen years ago during a demonstration on the use of radioactive rays at a science exhibit, a spider was accidentally exposed to the radiation and absorbed large amounts of it. In its dying moments, the arachnid bit the nearest living thing to it, Peter Parker. As a result, the young teenager would gain amazing powers and become Spider-Man. However, this was not the end. As mere moments after biting Parker, the spider bites another young student by the name of Cindy Moon. Soon after, Cindy’s abilities manifested but she was unable to control them. Some time later, Ezekiel would approach the Moon family to offer his help and guide Cindy in controlling her newfound abilities. After six years since getting bit and training to use her powers, Cindy is locked up inside a facility by Ezekiel to protect her and the other “spiders” from Morlun and his family called the Inheritors.

Amazon Silk

Amazon Silk is a web browser developed by Amazon for Kindle Fire and Fire Phone. It uses a split architecture whereby some of the processing is performed on Amazon's servers to improve webpage loading performance. It is based on the open source Chromium project.

Architecture

For each webpage, Silk decides which browser subsystems (e.g. networking, HTML, page rendering) to run locally on the device and which to run remotely on the Amazon EC2 servers.

Silk uses Google's SPDY protocol to speed up the loading of web pages. Silk gives SPDY performance improvements for non-SPDY optimized websites if the pages are sent through Amazon's servers. Some early reviewers found that cloud-based acceleration did not necessarily improve page loading speed, most notably on faster connections or for simpler web pages.

Some privacy organizations raised concerns with how Amazon passes Silk traffic via its servers, effectively operating as an Internet service provider for those using the browser. The Silk browser includes the option to turn off Amazon server-side processing.