omniomni/omni-engineering huggingface dataset:
Matra Alice. The Matra & Hachette Ordinateur Alice is a home computer sold in France beginning in 1983.  It was a clone of the TRS-80 MC-10, produced through a collaboration between Matra and Hachette in France and Tandy Corporation in the United States.

The Alice is distinguished by its bright red casing.  Functionally, it is equivalent to the MC-10, with a Péritel (SCART) connector replacing the RF modulator for video output.

The Alice never became a popular computer in its home country. It tried to invade schools by being part of the country's Plan Informatique pour Tous ("Information technology for everyone") programme, but Thomson won the whole deal. Less than 50 games were released for the system.

The original model had 4 kB of RAM and used a Motorola 6847 video display generator chip, as used in the Dragon 32 and Acorn Atom among others.

At least three emulators for the system exist.

Specifications 
The machine is similar to the TRS-80 MC-10, with the following specifications: 
 CPU: Motorola 6803 at 0.89 MHz
 RAM: 4 KiB on-board, expandable to 20 KiB with a plug-in memory module
 ROM: 8 KiB (Microsoft BASIC)
 I/O Ports:
 RS-232C serial interface
 Cassette interface
 Péritel video output
 Expansion interface
 AZERTY keyboard layout
 Display: Motorola 6847, 32 x 16 or 64 x 32 with 8 colors, 160 x 125 with 4 colors (with expanded RAM) 
 Sound: 1 channel, 5 octaves

Successor Models 

Matra later released two successor models:
 The Matra Alice 32 released in 1983 shared the case style of the original, but was a different computer inside, due to using the EF9345 video chip. The Alice 32 had 8 kilobytes of main RAM, 8 kilobytes of dedicated video RAM, and 16 kilobytes ROM (the ROM incorporated an assembler). The CPU was clocked at 1 MHz. Higher resolution graphic modes included 320 X 192 with 16 colors from a 256 color palette.
 The Matra Alice 90 released in late 1984 was an upgrade to the Alice 32, which featured 32 kilobytes of RAM and a full-size case and keyboard.  Its video cable included video-in, so EF9345 graphics could be overlaid onto the input video.
 The Matra Alice 8000 released in 1985 was a more powerful machine with two CPUs, a 6803 at 4,9152MHz and a Intel 8088. It had 64 kB of RAM.

The Thomson EF9345 video chip in the Matra Alice 32/90 was capable of displaying 8 colors, 128 alphanumeric characters, and 128 semi-graphic characters with a semigraphic mode and 40- and 80-column text modes. It could address up to 16 KiB of dedicated VRAM although the Alice 32 and 90 only included 8 KiB. The 32x16 semigraphic mode of the original Alice was simulated in software by the Alice 32/90 system ROM.

References

External links

Le wiki d'Alice - Everything about Alice 
Matra Alice — information from The Machine Room
Matra Alice32 — Alice 32 information complete 
DCAlice — Alice 32 emulator and information site
My First Alice32 — Alice 32 emulator
FAQ on Alice32 — comprehensive FAQ regarding Alice

Home computers
Computers designed in France
Computer-related introductions in 1983
Bomber destroyer. Bomber destroyers were World War II interceptor aircraft intended to destroy enemy bomber aircraft. Bomber destroyers were typically larger and heavier than general interceptors, designed to mount more powerful armament, and often having twin engines. They differed from night fighters largely in that they were designed for day use.

The United States Army Air Corps considered powerfully armed destroyers, like the Bell YFM-1 Airacuda prototype, to counter a potential attack of high-performance bombers. The Lockheed P-38 Lightning and Bell P-39 Airacobra were also initially specified to carry very heavy armament based on a central 37 mm cannon, specified as interceptor aircraft working in the anti-bomber role.

In the pre-war era the UK, by contrast, favored development of the "turret fighter", such as the Boulton Paul Defiant, which mounted the armament in a rotating turret. Turret fighters were expected to work together to coordinate fire on unescorted bombers (due to limits of German fighter range), able to attack from all quarters, and not be limited by the brief firing opportunity of a single seat fighter in a high speed attack. 

The P-38, a small, single-crewed example of the bomber destroyer type, was eventually outfitted with a 20 mm cannon and four .50-caliber machine guns in a central nacelle instead of a heavier cannon; it proved itself a highly competent fighter aircraft in the early phase of World War II. 

A deceptively similar, although completely different, designation was the German Zerstörer (meaning "destroyer"). Introduced on 1 May 1939, the term did specifically exclude the defensive anti-bomber role (leaving it for the light fighters), and envisaged a heavy fighter for offensive missions: escorting the bombers, long-range fighter suppression, and ground attack. The German designs suffered performance deficits as they were weighed down by a two- or three-man crew and extra cockpit accommodations.

After World War II, improvements in engine power and armament led to a loss of interest in building bomber destroyers as a specific class of aircraft. Even small fighters were able to carry enough firepower to deal effectively with enemy bombers, and high-performance all-purpose late-war fighters—the P-51 Mustang being the prime example—excelled at all fighter roles: pursuit, bomber escort, interception, and ground attack. The interest in interceptors was renewed during the Cold War; both the United States and the Soviet Union designed and produced dedicated "pure" interceptors such as the Convair F-106 Delta Dart and the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25. These aircraft were generally never referred to as "bomber destroyers", even though their primary mission was the destruction of enemy strategic bombers. Few dedicated interceptors have been designed or produced since the 1960s.

See also
 Escort fighter
 Focke-Wulf Fw 190A Sturmbock
 Schräge Musik

References

Fighter aircraft
Sensible heat. Sensible heat is heat exchanged by a body or thermodynamic system in which the exchange of heat changes the temperature of the body or system, and some macroscopic variables of the body or system, but leaves unchanged certain other macroscopic variables of the body or system, such as volume or pressure.

Usage

The term is used in contrast to a latent heat, which is the amount of heat exchanged that is hidden, meaning it occurs without change of temperature. For example, during a phase change such as the melting of ice, the temperature of the system containing the ice and the liquid is constant until all ice has melted. Latent and sensible heat are complementary terms. 

The sensible heat of a thermodynamic process may be calculated as the product of the body's mass (m) with its specific heat capacity (c) and the change in temperature ():

Sensible heat and latent heat are not special forms of energy. Rather, they describe exchanges of heat under conditions specified in terms of their effect on a material or a thermodynamic system.

In the writings of the early scientists who provided the foundations of thermodynamics, sensible heat had a clear meaning in calorimetry. James Prescott Joule characterized it in 1847 as an energy that was indicated by the thermometer.

Both sensible and latent heats are observed in many processes while transporting energy in nature. Latent heat is associated with changes of state, measured at constant temperature, especially the phase changes of atmospheric water vapor, mostly vaporization and condensation, whereas sensible heat directly affects the temperature of the atmosphere.

In meteorology, the term 'sensible heat flux' means the conductive heat flux from the Earth's surface to the atmosphere. It is an important component of Earth's surface energy budget. Sensible heat flux is commonly measured with the eddy covariance method.

See also
 Eddy covariance flux (eddy correlation, eddy flux)
 Enthalpy
 Thermodynamic databases for pure substances

References

Atmospheric thermodynamics
Thermodynamics

ja:顕熱
Guarded suspension. In concurrent programming, guarded suspension is a software design pattern for managing operations that require both a lock to be acquired and a precondition to be satisfied before the operation can be executed. The guarded suspension pattern is typically applied to method calls in object-oriented programs, and involves suspending the method call, and the calling thread, until the precondition (acting as a guard) is satisfied.

Usage
Because it is blocking, the guarded suspension pattern is generally only used when the developer knows that a method call will be suspended for a finite and reasonable period of time. If a method call is suspended for too long, then the overall program will slow down or stop, waiting for the precondition to be satisfied.  If the developer knows that the method call suspension will be indefinite or for an unacceptably long period, then the balking pattern may be preferred.

Implementation
In Java, the Object class provides the wait() and notify() methods to assist with guarded suspension. In the implementation below, originally found in , if there is no precondition satisfied for the method call to be successful, then the method will wait until it finally enters a valid state.

public class Example {
    synchronized void guardedMethod() {
        while (!preCondition()) {
            try {
                // Continue to wait
                wait();
                // …
            } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                // …
            }
        }
        // Actual task implementation
    }
    synchronized void alterObjectStateMethod() {
        // Change the object state
        // …
        // Inform waiting threads
        notify();
    }
}

An example of an actual implementation would be a queue object with a get method that has a guard to detect when there are no items in the queue. Once the put method notifies the other methods (for example, a get method), then the get method can exit its guarded state and proceed with a call. Once the queue is empty, then the get method will enter a guarded state once again.

See also
Balking pattern is an alternative pattern for dealing with a precondition
Guarded Command Language includes a similar language construct
Readers–writer lock

Notes

References
.

Software design patterns
Strike fighter. In current military parlance, a strike fighter is a multirole combat aircraft designed to operate both as an attack aircraft and as an air superiority fighter. As a category, it is distinct from fighter-bombers, and is closely related to the concept of interdictor aircraft, although it puts more emphasis on aerial combat capabilities.

Examples of notable contemporary strike fighters are the American McDonnell Douglas F-15E Strike Eagle, Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, the Russian Sukhoi Su-34, and the Chinese Shenyang J-16.

History
Beginning in the 1940s, the term "strike fighter" was occasionally used in navies to refer to fighter aircraft capable of performing air-to-surface strikes, such as the Westland Wyvern, Blackburn Firebrand and Blackburn Firecrest.

The term "light weight tactical strike fighter (LWTSF)" was used to describe the aircraft to meet the December 1953 NATO specification NBMR-1. Amongst the designs submitted to the competition were the Aerfer Sagittario 2, Breguet Br.1001 Taon, Dassault Étendard VI, Fiat G.91 and Sud-Est Baroudeur.

The term entered normal use in the United States Navy by the end of the 1970s, becoming the official description of the new McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet. In 1983, the U.S. Navy even renamed each existing Fighter Attack Squadron to Strike Fighter Squadron to emphasize the air-to-surface mission (as the "Fighter Attack" designation was confused with the "Fighter" designation, which flew pure air-to-air missions).

This name quickly spread to non-maritime use. When the F-15E Strike Eagle came into service, it was originally called a "dual role fighter", but it instead quickly became known as a "strike fighter".

Joint Strike Fighter

In 1995, the U.S. military's Joint Advanced Strike Technology program changed its name to the Joint Strike Fighter program. The project consequently resulted in the development of the F-35 Lightning II family of fifth generation multirole fighters to perform ground attack, reconnaissance, and air defense missions with stealth capability.

Modern strike fighters 
 Boeing F-15EX Eagle II 
 McDonnell Douglas F-15E Strike Eagle
 Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II
 Sukhoi Su-34
 Shenyang J-16

See also
Interdictor aircraft
Interceptor aircraft
Fighter-bomber
Attack aircraft
Multirole combat aircraft

References

Citations

Bibliography

 Polmar, Norman. The Naval Institute Guide to the Ships and Aircraft of the U.S. Fleet. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 1997. .

Fighter aircraft
Attack aircraft
Ampere-turn. The ampere-turn (symbol A⋅t) is the MKS (metre–kilogram–second) unit of magnetomotive force (MMF), represented by a direct current of one ampere flowing in a single-turn loop. Turns refers to the winding number of an electrical conductor composing an electromagnetic coil. 
For example, a current of  flowing through a coil of 10 turns produces an MMF of .
The corresponding physical quantity is NI, the product of the number of turns, N, and the current, I; it has been used in industry, specifically, US-based coil-making industries.

By maintaining the same current and increasing the number of loops or turns of the coil, the strength of the magnetic field increases because each loop or turn of the coil sets up its own magnetic field.  The magnetic field unites with the fields of the other loops to produce the field around the entire coil, making the total magnetic field stronger. 

The strength of the magnetic field is not linearly related to the ampere-turns when a magnetic material is used as a part of the system. Also, the material within the magnet carrying the magnetic flux "saturates" at some point, after which adding more ampere-turns has little effect. 

The ampere-turn corresponds to  gilberts, the corresponding CGS unit.

In Thomas Edison's laboratory Francis Upton was the lead mathematician. Trained with Helmholtz in Germany, he used weber as the name of the unit of current, modified to ampere later:
When conducting his investigations, Upton always noted the Weber turns and with his other data had all that was necessary to put the results of his work in proper form.
He discovered that a Weber turn (that is, an ampere turn) was a constant factor, a given number of which always produced the same effect magnetically.

See also 
 Inductance
 Solenoid

References 

Units of measurement
Magnetism
Bölkow. Bölkow was a West German aircraft manufacturer based in Stuttgart, Germany, and later Ottobrunn.

History
The company was founded in 1948 by Ludwig Bölkow, who since 1955 with Emil Weiland had developed helicopters for Bölkow Entwicklungen KG.
In June 1968, Bölkow merged with the Messerschmitt AG to form Messerschmitt-Bölkow, a combination that created West Germany's largest aircraft company, with sales approaching $150 million (1968 dollars). The move was encouraged by the West German government. In May 1969, the new company merged with Hamburger Flugzeugbau (HFB), becoming Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm (MBB). MBB was bought by Daimler-Benz in the early 1990s, becoming part of DASA, which became part of EADS in 2000.

Products

Aircraft

 Bölkow Bo 207
 Bölkow Bo 208 Junior
 Bölkow Bo 209 Monsun
 Bölkow Phoebus, variants A, A1, B, B1, B3, C gliders

Helicopter
 Bölkow Bo 46
 Bölkow Heidelbergrotor experimental rotor system
 Bölkow Bo 70 Project with experimental "Heidelberg Rotor"
 Bölkow Bo 102
 Bölkow Bo 103
 MBB Bo 105
 MBB/Kawasaki BK 117 Joint project with Kawasaki

Missiles
 Cobra
 HOT
 MILAN
 Roland

References

 

Manufacturing companies based in Stuttgart
Defunct aircraft manufacturers of Germany
Defunct helicopter manufacturers of Germany
Companies based in Bavaria
 
German companies established in 1948
LADSPA. The Linux Audio Developer's Simple Plugin API (LADSPA) is an application programming interface (API) standard for handling audio filters and audio signal processing effects, licensed under LGPL-2.1-or-later. Originally designed through consensus on the Linux Audio Developers mailing list, it now works on a variety of platforms. It is used in many free audio software projects, and there is a wide range of LADSPA plug-ins available.

LADSPA exists primarily as a header file written in the programming language C.

There are many audio plugin standards and most major modern software synthesizers and sound editors support a variety. The best known standard is probably Steinberg's Virtual Studio Technology. LADSPA is unusual in that it attempts to provide only the "Greatest Common Divisor" of other standards. This means that its scope is limited, but it is simple and plugins written using it are easy to embed in many other programs. The standard has changed little with time, so compatibility problems are rare.

DSSI extends LADSPA to cover instrument plugins.

LV2 is a successor, based on LADSPA and DSSI, but permitting easy extensibility, allowing custom user interfaces, MIDI messages, and custom extensions.

Competing technologies 
Apple Inc.'s Audio Units
Digidesign's Real Time AudioSuite
Avid Technology's Avid Audio eXtension
Microsoft's DirectX plugin
Steinberg's Virtual Studio Technology
CLever Audio Plug-in (Open Source)

References

External links 

 

Application programming interfaces
Free audio software
Free software programmed in C
Music software plugin architectures
Linux APIs
Audio libraries
Petrol engine. A petrol engine (gasoline engine in American and Canadian English) is an internal combustion engine designed to run on petrol (gasoline). Petrol engines can often be adapted to also run on fuels such as liquefied petroleum gas and ethanol blends (such as E10 and E85). They may be designed to run on petrol with a higher octane rating, as sold at petrol stations.

Most petrol engines use spark ignition, unlike diesel engines which run on diesel fuel and typically use compression ignition. Another key difference to diesel engines is that petrol engines typically have a lower compression ratio.

History

The first practical petrol engine was built in 1876 in Germany by Nicolaus August Otto and Eugen Langen, although there had been earlier attempts by Étienne Lenoir in 1860, Siegfried Marcus in 1864 and George Brayton in 1873.

Design

Thermodynamic cycle 

Most petrol engines use either the four-stroke Otto cycle or the two-stroke cycle. Petrol engines have also been produced using the Miller cycle and Atkinson cycle.

Layout 
Most petrol-powered piston engines are straight engines or V engines. However, flat engines, W engines and other layouts are sometimes used. 

Wankel engines are classified by the number of rotors used.

Compression ratio

Cooling

Petrol engines are either air-cooled or water-cooled.

Ignition

Petrol engines use spark ignition. High voltage for the spark this may be provided by a magneto or an ignition coil.  In modern car engines, the ignition timing is managed by an electronic Engine Control Unit. Ignition modules can also function as a rev limiter in some cases to prevent overrevving and the consequences of it, such as valve float and connecting rod failure.

Primer 

Primers may be used to help start the engine. They can draw fuel from fuel tanks and vaporize fuel directly into piston cylinders. Engines are difficult to start during cold weather, and the fuel primer helps because otherwise there will not be enough heat available to vaporize the fuel in the carburetor.

Power output and efficiency 

The power output of small- and medium-sized petrol engines (along with equivalent engines using other fuels) is usually measured in kilowatts or horsepower.

Typically, petrol engines have a thermodynamic efficiency of about 20-30% (approximately half that of some diesel engines).

Applications
Applications of petrol engines include automobiles, motorcycles, aircraft, motorboats and small engines (such as lawn mowers, chainsaws and portable generators). Petrol engines have also been used as "pony engines", a type of engine used to start a larger, stationary diesel engine.

See also
 Diesel engine
 Electric motor
 Hydrogen engine
 Jet engine

References

1876 introductions
Internal combustion piston engines
Gasoline engines
German inventions
Generator. Generator may refer to:
 Signal generator, electronic devices that generate repeating or non-repeating electronic signals
 Electric generator, a device that converts mechanical energy to electrical energy.
 Tidal stream generator, a machine that extracts energy from moving masses of water
 Generator (circuit theory), an element in an abstract circuit providing a source of electricity
 Engine-generator, an electric generator with its own engine
 Wearable generator, a hypothetical generator that can be worn on the human body
 Gas generator a device, often similar to a solid rocket or a liquid rocket that burns to produce large volumes of relatively cool gas
 Motor–generator, a device for converting electrical power to another form
 Atmospheric water generator, a device capable of extracting water from air

Mathematics 
 Generator (mathematics)
 Generator matrix, a matrix used in coding theory
 Generator (category theory) of a category, in category mathematics
 Generating set of a group, group generators in abstract algebra
 Infinitesimal generator (stochastic processes), in stochastic analysis

Computing 
 Application generator, software that generates application programs from descriptions of the problem rather than by traditional programming
 Generator (computer programming), a routine that acts like an iterator
 Pseudorandom number generator, a producer of random numbers
 Code generator, part of a compiler
 Natural-language generator, generating natural language from a machine representation system such as a knowledge base or a logical form
 Random test generator, used in software testing

Music 
 The Generators, a 1997 punk rock band from Los Angeles
 Kix (band), an American glam metal band also known as The Generators
 Generator (Bad Religion album), and the album's opening track
 Generator (Aborym album), the fourth studio album by the Italian/Norwegian industrial black metal band Aborym
 "Generator" (Foo Fighters song), 2000
 "Generator" (The Holloways song), 2006
 "Generator", a 2015 song by Doomtree from All Hands
 "Generator", a 1995 song by Elastica from The Menace
 "Generator", a 2007 song by Minipop from A New Hope
 "Generator", a 2017 song by Turnstile from Time & Space
 "Generator", a 2024 song by Justice from their album, Hyperdrama

 Tuning generator

Politics
 Generator Collective, American campaign group

See also 
 Gener8tor, an American venture capital firm
 Generation (disambiguation)
 Generate (disambiguation)
 Regenerative heat exchanger