Everybody Loves Raymond

Everybody Loves Raymond 1996 - 2005 IMDb

Everybody Loves Raymond is an Emmy, SAG, WGA winning and Golden Globe nominated American sitcom, originally broadcast on CBS from September 13, 1996 to May 16, 2005. Many of the situations from the show are based on the real-life experiences of Ray Romano (who is represented by the Ray Barone character he plays) and the writing staff. The main characters on the show are also loosely based on Romano's family members. It is one of the most critically acclaimed American sitcoms of its time. Everybody Loves Raymond was nominated for and won many awards.

Show background

The show revolves around the life of Italian-American Ray Barone, a newspaper sportswriter from Lynbrook, Long Island. Ray lives with his wife, Debra Barone, their daughter, Ally, and their identical twin sons, Michael and Geoffrey. Ray's parents and brother Robert frequently make their presence known to the frustration of Ray and especially Debra. Unfortunately for Ray, he always has to hear about it from Debra. A passive-aggressive woman, Debra particularly finds herself at odds with Ray's mother, Marie. Ray often finds himself in the middle of all the problems and arguments. His biggest nemesis is Robert, who is insecure about Ray being the favorite son. Although Robert and Ray are frequently seen fighting like children and picking on each other, the brothers are very devoted to each other. Robert frequently calls Ray "Cubby" and stands up for him, while Ray has a great admiration for Robert, who is a police officer. One very touching episode had Ray taking care of Robert after he was wounded in the line of duty. Their father, Frank, is very tough and does not like to show his feelings, but through the years several episodes were crafted to show how much he loves his family. Ray and Debra have their share of marital disagreements, with Debra frequently denying Ray sex, and Ray prefers watching sports television to talking to his wife. A recurring theme on the show has them having a long interaction each night while in bed, just before going to sleep, and sometimes there is a sweetness between them.

Main cast

* Ray Barone (Ray Romano)
* Debra Barone (Patricia Heaton)
* Robert Barone (Brad Garrett)
* Marie Barone (Doris Roberts)
* Frank Barone (Peter Boyle)

Achievements

Bravo placed the Barone family at number 41 on their list of 100 greatest TV icons of all time TV Land placed Frank's exclamation 'Holy Crap' at number 79 on their list of 100 greatest catchphrases of all time. TV Land and TV Guide placed Marie's vagina sculpture at number 62 on their list of 100 most unexpected moments in TV history. TV Guide placed Ray Barone at number 10 on their list of 50 greatest TV dads of all time.

Montauk, New York

Montauk, New York 41°2′18″N 71°57′2″W
town.east-hampton.ny.us

Montauk is a hamlet (and census-designated place) in Suffolk County, New York on the South Shore of Long Island. As of the United States 2000 Census, the hamlet population was 3,851. It is the easternmost area in Long Island, and thus the easternmost area in New York State.

Strategically located on the tip of the South Fork, Suffolk County, New York peninsula it has been used as an Army, Navy, Coast Guard and Air Force base. Located 20 miles off the Connecticut coast, it is home to the largest commercial and recreational fishing fleet in New York State.

The Montauk Point Lighthouse was the first lighthouse in New York state and is the fourth oldest active lighthouse in the United States.

Montauk is a major tourist destination and it boasts six state parks. It is particularly famous for its fishing (claiming to have more world saltwater fishing records than any other port in the world) and surfing.

The Deep Hollow Ranch is the oldest cattle ranch in the United States.

Montauk is in the Town of East Hampton.

Maggie Cheung

Maggie Cheung (born September 20, 1964) is a multi award-winning Chinese actress from Hong Kong. Raised in England, she has over 80 films to her credit since starting her career in 1983.

Biography

Born in Hong Kong, Maggie Cheung traces her ancestry to Shanghai, China. Her merchant-class family emigrated from Hong Kong to the United Kingdom when she was a child. Cheung spent part of her childhood and adolescence in the UK. She returned to Hong Kong in 1982 for vacation, but ended up staying for modeling assignments. Soon she got a salesgirl job at a Japanese department store as well. In 1983, she entered the Miss Hong Kong beauty pageant contest. She won second place and also bagged the Miss Photogenic award. She was a semi-finalist in the Miss World pageant the same year.

Prior to 1988, Maggie’s screen appearance was often limited to eye candy roles. One of Cheung's notable movie roles then is that of "Mei", the girlfriend of police detective "Kevin" Chan Ka Kui in Jackie Chan's Police Story movies (however, she did not reprise the role in Police Story 4: First Strike or New Police Story). Maggie frequently cited her performance in the movie As Tears Go By (1988), her first of many collaborations with film director Wong Kar-Wai 王家衛, as the piece that truly began her serious acting career. Maggie Cheung is famous for being a talented multi-lingual actress. In Centre Stage, she performed in Mandarin, Cantonese and Shanghainese fluently, switching languages with ease. In Clean, she performed in fluent English, Parisian French, Cantonese and a smattering of Mandarin. Unlike most traditional actors in Hong Kong who are Cantonese monolingual, she is a polyglot as a result of her cosmopolitan upbringing.

Audiences outside Asia have become increasingly familiar with her work, including her roles in Centre Stage (as Ruan Lingyu), In the Mood for Love, Irma Vep, 2046, Hero, and, most recently, Clean.

She married French director Olivier Assayas in 1998 but divorced him in 2001. Their relationship remained amicable, however, as in 2004 Cheung made her award-winning movie Clean with him. As part of her portrayal of the drug-addicted aspiring singer Emily Wang in Clean, Maggie Cheung performed songs written by David Roback of Mazzy Star.

On 7 February 2007, The New York Times rated Maggie Cheung as one of the 22 Great Performers in 2006 for her Cannes winning role Emily in Clean. After 25 years of making movies, Cheung is deciding to retire from acting and pursue a career as a film composer. She allows that there might be room for an occasional comedic role, but she would like to paint and compose music, after fulfilling her acting potential.

Awards

Hong Kong Film Awards
Best Actress
1989 A Fishy Story
1992 Centre Stage
1996 Comrades: Almost a Love Story
1998 The Soong Sisters
2001 In the Mood for Love

Golden Bauhinia Awards
Best Actress
1996 Comrades: Almost a Love Story

Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards
Best Actress
1996 Comrades: Almost a Love Story

Golden Horse Awards
Best Actress
1989 Full Moon in New York
1990 Red Dust
1991 Centre Stage
1996 Comrades: Almost a Love Story
2000 In the Mood for Love

Other Awards

Berlin International Film Festival
Best Actress
1992 Centre Stage

Cannes Film Festival
Best Actress
2004 Clean

Hawaii International Film Festival
Award for Achievement in Acting

HDRI

High Dynamic Range Image and Video Processing

In computer graphics and photography, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of exposures (the range of values between light and dark areas) than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention of HDRI is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to shadows.

HDRI was originally developed for use with purely computer-generated images. Later, methods were developed to produce a high dynamic range image from a set of photographs taken with a range of exposures. With the rising popularity of digital cameras and easy-to-use desktop software, the term "HDR" is now popularly used to refer to the process of tone mapping together with bracketed exposures of normal digital images, giving the end result a high, often exaggerated dynamic range. This composite technique is different from, and generally of lower quality than, the production of an image from a single exposure of a sensor that has a native high dynamic range. Tone mapping is also used to display HDR images on devices with a low native dynamic range, such as a computer screen.

OpenGL

OpenGL

OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a standard specification defining a cross-language cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics. The interface consists of over 250 different function calls which can be used to draw complex three-dimensional scenes from simple primitives. OpenGL was developed by Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) in 1992 and is widely used in CAD, virtual reality, scientific visualization, information visualization, and flight simulation. It is also used in video games, where it competes with Direct3D on Microsoft Windows platforms.

History

In the 1980s, developing software that could function with a wide range of graphics hardware was a real challenge. Software developers wrote custom interfaces and drivers for each piece of hardware. This was expensive and resulted in much duplication of effort.

By the early 1990s, Silicon Graphics (SGI) was a leader in 3D graphics for workstations. Their IRIS GL API was considered the state of the art and became the de facto industry standard, overshadowing the open standards-based PHIGS. This was because IRIS GL was considered easier to use, and because it supported immediate mode rendering. By contrast, PHIGS was considered difficult to use and outdated in terms of functionality.

SGI's competitors (including Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and IBM) were also able to bring to market 3D hardware, supported by extensions made to the PHIGS standard. This in turn caused SGI market share to weaken as more 3D graphics hardware suppliers entered the market. In an effort to influence the market, SGI decided to turn the IrisGL API into an open standard.

SGI considered that the IrisGL API itself wasn't suitable for opening due to licensing and patent issues. Also, the IrisGL had API functions that were not relevant to 3D graphics. For example, it included a windowing, keyboard and mouse API, in part because it was developed before the X Window System and Sun's NeWS systems were developed.

In addition, SGI had a large number of software customers; by changing to the OpenGL API they planned to keep their customers locked onto SGI (and IBM) hardware for a few years while market support for OpenGL matured. Meanwhile, SGI would continue to try to maintain their customers tied to SGI hardware by developing the advanced and proprietary Iris Inventor and Iris Performer programming APIs.

As a result, SGI released the OpenGL standard.

The OpenGL standardised access to hardware, and pushed the development responsibility of hardware interface programs, sometimes called device drivers, to hardware manufacturers and delegated windowing functions to the underlying operating system. With so many different kinds of graphic hardware, getting them all to speak the same language in this way had a remarkable impact by giving software developers a higher level platform for 3D-software development.

In 1992, SGI led the creation of the OpenGL architectural review board (OpenGL ARB), the group of companies that would maintain and expand the OpenGL specification for years to come. OpenGL evolved from (and is very similar in style to) SGI's earlier 3D interface, IrisGL. One of the restrictions of IrisGL was that it only provided access to features supported by the underlying hardware. If the graphics hardware did not support a feature, then the application could not use it. OpenGL overcame this problem by providing support in software for features unsupported by hardware, allowing applications to use advanced graphics on relatively low-powered systems.

In 1994 SGI played with the idea of releasing something called "OpenGL++" which included elements such as a scene-graph API (presumably based around their Performer technology). The specification was circulated among a few interested parties – but never turned into a product.

Microsoft released Direct3D in 1995, which would become the main competitor of OpenGL. On 17 December 1997, Microsoft and SGI initiated the Fahrenheit project, which was a joint effort with the goal of unifying the OpenGL and Direct3D interfaces (and adding a scene-graph API too). In 1998 Hewlett-Packard joined the project. It initially showed some promise of bringing order to the world of interactive 3D computer graphics APIs, but on account of financial constraints at SGI, strategic reasons at Microsoft, and general lack of industry support, it was abandoned in 1999.

SU-37

Sukhoi

Youtube.com SU-37 search

The Sukhoi Su-37 is a single-seat, all-weather, fighter and ground attack prototype aircraft, derived from the Su-27 'Flanker'. The Su-27 is a Russian fourth generation jet aircraft that has been exported to over 20 nations. The Su-37 test aircraft made its maiden flight in April 1996 from the Zhukovsky flight testing center near Moscow. The Su-37 is referred to as the Terminator.

The Su-37 includes several updates over the Su-27, including all-weather multi-mode passive electronically scanned array radar with synthetic aperture, terrain avoidance, terrain mapping and a rear facing radar. The airframe includes a percentage of parts made from composites, unlike the all-metal Su-27. Additionally, the Su-37 incorporates the AL-37FU engines equipped with thrust vectoring. The Su-37’s nozzles are variable in pitch only and travel plus or minus 15 degrees, but they can be operated differentially to provide a rolling moment.



In the cockpit the aircraft is the first Russian fighter aircraft with the Hands On Throttle and Stick, or HOTAS, system. The weapon system shares much with the Su-30"MK", but it lacks the large display in the back cockpit that is utilized by the weapons system officer. The cockpit features four multi-function cockpit displays instead of dial type analogue instruments and has an inclined (30 degree) pilot ejection seat. The two-grip flying control configuration was designed to prevent the pilot from flailing around when doing the manoeuvers associated with the vectored-thrust engines. Both the fixed throttle and the side-stick controller provide secure points for the pilot to brace his hands.

The Su-37 also stores a radar in the tailcone of the plane that allows it to fire missiles behind the plane.

The engine not only incorporates 2D TVC but also is tough and resistant to engine surge even during classic, inverted and flat spins, giving better reliability and maneuverability, such as when the AOA is as high as 180 degrees.

The Su-37 appeared at the 1996 Farnborough air show piloted by Sukhoi test pilot Eugeny Frolov. During the performance, the Su-37 was flipped on its back while flying at 350 km/h (217 mph) so that it faced the opposite direction, inverted and almost stationary. After pausing for two seconds the thrust vectoring was used to complete a 360 degree rotation and the aircraft moved off in its original direction of flight at only 60 km/h (37 mph).

The Su-37 can carry air-to-air and air-to-surface weapons on 12 stations. The number of missiles and bombs carried can be increased to 14 with the use of multi-payload racks.

Russia has not ordered Su-37s, but it might find customers abroad, a market that now constitutes a sizable share of Sukhoi’s income. Several prototypes have been built, but the aircraft is not in production.

SGI Indy

SGI Indy Info

Introduced in 1993, the Indy was the fruit of SGI's effort to muscle into the market for desktop publishing, low-end CAD, and multimedia. At the time, the market was mostly dominated by Apple. The Indy was the first computer to include a digital video camera, and was built with a (then) forward-looking architecture including an on-board ISDN adapter. With the inclusion of analog and digital I/O, SCSI, and standard composite and S-Video inputs, the Indy really was a multimedia machine.



At the beginning of its life, the Indy came standard with 16MB of RAM. IRIX 5.1, the first OS for the Indy, did not take full advantage of the hardware due to inadequate memory management. SGI realized this and quickly increased the base specification to 32 MB, at considerable cost. Subsequent IRIX releases made huge improvements in memory usage. The latest release of IRIX available for the Indy workstations is 6.5.22.