Kartel (electoral alliance)

A kartel is the Dutch term for an electoral alliance between two or more parties in Belgium.

In a system of proportional representation in which the country is divided in multiple electoral districts, such as Belgium the threshold to obtain one seat can be very high (5% of votes since 2003), which also favours larger parties. Therefore some parties pool their voters in order to gain more (or any) seats.

The SP.A-Spirit cartel between the Socialist Party - Different (SP.A) and the left-liberal Spirit (later FlemishProgressives, then Social-Liberal Party) is an example of such a cartel.

Vlaams Kartels in Brussels

On several occasions some or all Flemish parties bundled forces on 'Vlaams Kartel' lists for municipal elections in Brussels (in Dutch Vlaams Kartel), sometimes getting together one or two seats in the municipal council, sometimes getting none. As these parties are minority parties in every Brussels municipality, i.e., the parties of an ethnic or linguistic minority (on the average 10-15% of the population), this is a case of an electoral coalition of ethnic parties.

Power!

Power! (known as Critical Mass in Europe) is a computer game developed by Simon Francis in 1985 for the Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum.

Plot

The player operates a rocket-powered hovercraft whose mission is to destroy an enemy transfer beam that is protected not only by long-distance enemy raiders and mines, but also molecular disorientation that sucks the energy from the player's attack craft.

Gameplay

The player may control the hovercraft in either a normal joystick operational mode or with vectored movement. When the player pushes forward on the joystick, the hovercraft accelerates, and when pulling back on the joystick, speed decreases.

Reception

In 1988, Dragon reviewed Power!, and gave the game 4 out of 5 stars.

References

External links

PoweredUSB

PoweredUSB, also known as Retail USB, USB PlusPower, and USB +Power, is an addition to the Universal Serial Bus standard that allows for higher-power devices to obtain power through their USB host instead of requiring an independent power supply or external AC adapter. It is mostly used in point-of-sale equipment, such as receipt printers and barcode readers.

History

PoweredUSB, as a proprietary variant of USB, was developed and proposed by IBM, Berg (now FCI), NCR and Microsoft between 1998 and 1999, with the last revision (0.8g) issued in 2004. The specification is not endorsed by the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF). IBM, who owns patents to PoweredUSB, charges a licensing fee for its use.

PoweredUSB was licensed by Hewlett-Packard, Cyberdata, Fujitsu, Wincor and others.

Implementation

PoweredUSB uses a more complex connector than standard USB, maintaining the standard USB 1.x/2.0 interface for data communications and adding a second connector for power. Physically, it is essentially two connectors stacked such that the bottom connector accepts a standard USB plug and the top connector takes a power plug.

IBM Power (software)

POWER was an IBM operating system enhancement package that provided spooling facilities for the IBM System/360 running DOS/360 or retrofitted with modified DOS/360. Upgrades, POWER/VS and POWER/VSE were available for and the IBM System/370 running DOS/VS and DOS/VSE respectively. POWER is an acronym for Priority Output Writers, Execution processors and input Readers.

The product

POWER was an operating system enhancement available for DOS/360, DOS/VS, and DOS/VSE, and came packaged with some third party DOS-based operating systems. International Business Machines released POWER in 1969 following a public introduction at the IBM Wall Street Data Center.

It 'spooled' (queued) printer and card data, freeing programs from being dependent upon the speed of printers or punched card equipment.

POWER competed with non-IBM products, namely DataCorp's The Spooler and SDI's GRASP. Unlike the other products, POWER required a dedicated partition.

It allowed a single printer (1403/2311), punch (2520, 2540) or reader (2540, 2501) to be shared by two or more processing partitions. Input data was asynchronously loaded and directed to the proper partition by Job class. Output was directed to disk and stored there - then directed to a printer or punch by the writer type, (PRT, PUN), Job Class, Priority and form code. This was provided in PRT and PUN control cards in the input stream. Once the operator put the proper form in the printer/punch and told power to start (G PUN or G PRT on the console) the device would continue until no more output of that type was available. When a new form was encountered it would alert the operator to change forms and wait for the next go command.