Cathay Pacific Limited is an airline based in Hong Kong. It transports passengers and cargo to over 120 cities world-wide. Its main base and hub is at Hong Kong International Airport. It is one of the six airlines in the world to get a five star rating from Skytrax. It won "Airline of the Year" award from Skytrax in 2003, 2005 and 2009. Its sister airline is Dragonair which serves destinations in mainland China and Asia.
Talent (measurement)
A talent (Latin: "talentum", from Ancient Greek: "scale, balance") is an ancient unit of mass. It corresponded generally to the mass of water in the volume of an amphora, i.e. a one-foot cube.
The Babylonians and Sumerians had a system in which there were 60 shekels in a mina and 60 minas in a talent (in Ancient Greece one talent was 26 kg of silver). The Roman talent consisted of 100 libra (pounds) which were smaller in magnitude than the mina.
When used as a measure of money, it refers to a talent-weight of gold or of silver. The gold talent is reported as weighing roughly the same as a person, and so perhaps 50 kg (>110 lb avoirdupois). Some authorities say that the talent typically weighed about 33 kg (>72 lb) varying from 20 to 40 kg. In June, 2018, the international price of gold was about US $41,155.69 per kilogram. One gram costs about $38. At this price, a talent (33 kg) would be worth about $1,400,116.57. Similarly, in February 2016, the price of silver was about $15 per troy ounce or about 50 cents per gram, so a 33 kg silver talent would be worth about $16,500. Thus when we read that King Auletes of Egypt paid Gaius Julius Caesar the sum of 6,000 talents of gold to grant him the status of a "Friend and Ally of the Roman People," this amount would be worth about $8,400,000,000 USD today! These estimates are only rough values, because they are based on modern estimates.The value of silver in comparison to gold drastically changed. This is because of the output of the Spanish silver mines in the New World. In ancient times the same amount of silver was often worth more than gold. The estimates do not account for the less technical mining ability of the time, nor that there were still native deposits available. Later in Roman history, during the medieval Byzantine period, the emperor Basil II was said to have stockpiled the legendary amount of 200,000 talents of gold which, in modern terms, would be worth approximately $280,023,314,760 USD. At any rate, he did save enough money that the Byzantine government was able to remit all taxes paid during the final two years of his reign.
Another way to calculate the modern equivalent to a talent is from its use in estimating military pay. During the Peloponnesian war in Ancient Greece, a talent was the amount of silver needed to pay the crew of a trireme for one month. Hellenistic mercenaries were commonly paid one drachma for every day of service, which was a good salary in the post-Alexander (III) days. 6,000 drachma made a talent.
The talent as a unit of coinage is mentioned in the New Testament in Jesus' . One talent was an incredible amount of money.
Bede
Bede (also Saint Bede, or the Venerable Bede) (673–735), was a monk and an early historian of the Church in England. He was a member of the sister Northumbrian monasteries of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow. He spent a great deal of time at Jarrow with its large library. Both were in the English county of Durham (now Tyne and Wear). He is well known as an author and scholar, whose best-known work, "Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum" ("The Ecclesiastical History of the English People") gained him the title "The father of English history".
Bede became respectfully known as "Venerable Bede" soon after his death, but this was not linked to consideration for sainthood by the Roman Catholic Church. Bede himself said he was born in 673 and on the lands of the monastery of Wearmouth. At age seven he was presented by his family to the Abbot of Wearmouth, Benedict Biscop, to be educated. Bede doesn't say if his family was noble or not. Bede was ordained a deacon when he was nineteen and at age thirty he was ordained a priest. While he was active in his community Bede found study, writing and teaching his favorite activities. He studied the Bible and Latin. He learnt Latin because that was the language of the Bible and other books in the monastery library. His teaching would have been very basic and his opinions were very conventional (not radical in any way).
At the end of his life, Bede became ill and had difficulty breathing. He went about the tasks of finishing some writings and giving away the few things that he owned. Bede died on Ascension Day, 26 May 735.
Bede wrote many scientific, historical and theological works in his time. Many were copied and used by other monasteries in England and Western Europe. He had one work in particular that he is famous for. One of the most valuable and important sources on Anglo-Saxon history is Bede's "Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation". Bede spent most of his life at Jarrow and this is where he wrote his history. The History is made up of five books and about 400 pages written in Latin. It contains 800 years of the history of England from the time of Caesar to the date of its completion (731). The last chapter is about Bede himself.
One man who made Bede's work possible was Benedict Biscop. He founded the Wearmouth and Jarrow monasteries. More importantly he created the library that Bede's got most of his information from. By the time of his death in 689 he had completed four trips to Rome and the south and brought back large collections of books each time. Bede's work would still not be possible if not for Ceolfrid, the fourth abbot. He doubled the size of the library left by Benedict Biscop. Bede himself traveled no farther than York and Lindisfarne. There is no record of his ever visiting libraries in distant places. Bede says the following about his sources:
Phototroph
Phototrophs ("photo" = light, "troph" = nutrition) or photoautotrophs are organisms which carry out photosynthesis.
With their plastids and the help of energy from sunlight, carbon dioxide and water are converted into sugar by photosynthesis. Sugar is then converted into other organic molecules which can be used in cellular functions. Such a function might be, for example, respiration.
NTFS
NTFS is a file system developed by Microsoft. NTFS stands for New Technology File System. A file system is a way of storing computer files. Microsoft introduced it with the Windows NT operating system.
It was made to replace the old file-system used by earlier versions of Windows, like Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows 98SE. That file system was also used by MS-DOS and is called FAT.
A newer version of NTFS (v3.1) was used in Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, and the most recent version of operating system, Windows 10. NTFS can be accessed from non-Windows operating systems such as Linux using the NTFS-3G driver.
File system
A File system (or filesystem) is a way of storing all data on a data storage device. The data is usually organized in computer files in directories. Below the file system there is usually a physical device where the files are stored. This might be a hard disk, USB flash drive, compact disc, or DVD. The file system might also talk to a remote server over a network where the file is stored. The file system might also only use RAM to store the files.
The underlying storage mechanism usually has no concept of a file. A hard disk knows of disk blocks, which are numbered in a certain way. These disk blocks contain binary data (usually: large numbers).
The file system does the "translation" between the large numbers, and the view the users see, that is that of files, organized in a certain way.
More recently, concepts from databases have been used to develop file systems. That way, there are two different kinds of data: