Metal: A Headbanger's Journey

Metal: A Headbanger's Journey is a 2005 documentary directed by Sam Dunn with Scot McFadyen and Jessica Wise. The film follows 31-year-old Dunn, a Canadian anthropologist, who has been a heavy metal fan since the age of 12. Dunn sets out across the world to uncover the various opinions on heavy metal music, including its origins, culture, controversy, and the reasons it is loved by so many people. The film made its debut at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival, and was released as a two-disc special edition DVD in the US on September 19, 2006.

A follow-up to the film titled Global Metal premiered at the Bergen International Film Festival on October 17, 2007, and saw limited release in theatres in June 2008. Dunn has also elaborated upon his "Heavy Metal Family Tree" in the VH1 series Metal Evolution, which focuses on one subgenre per episode.

Contents

The film discusses the traits and originators of some of metal's many subgenres, including the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, power metal, nu metal, glam metal, thrash metal, black metal, and death metal. Dunn uses a family-tree-type flowchart to document some of the most popular metal subgenres. The film also explores various aspects of heavy metal culture. Notable segments include Dunn taking a trip to the Wacken Open Air festival, an interview with Dee Snider providing an analysis of the PMRC attack on heavy metal music, and an interview with several Norwegian black metal bands.

Metal (song)

"Metal" is a song by Gary Numan from his 1979 album The Pleasure Principle. Lyrically the song is science fiction, inspired by the works of Phillip K. Dick and William S. Burroughs, and is about an android who wishes to be human, but never can be. The song was the B-side of "Cars" in the USA.

The song has been a regular feature at Numan's live shows since his first tour in 1979, and appears on the majority of his live albums. In 1981 Numan wrote new lyrics to the tune of "Metal" for his album Dance, and renamed the song "Moral". Numan often performs this version. The song was reworked into his aggressive new style in 1998, and this version is still being performed today. "Metal" has been covered by many artists, including Nine Inch Nails on their Things Falling Apart album (2000) and Afrika Bambaataa (with Numan himself) on Dark Matter Moving at the Speed of Light (2004). Numan also collaborated on a reinterpretation by Kraftwerk.

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Metal (API)

Metal is a low-level, low-overhead hardware-accelerated graphics and compute application programming interface (API) that debuted in iOS 8. It combines functionality similar to OpenGL and OpenCL under one API. It is intended to bring to iOS some of the performance benefits of similar APIs on other platforms, such as Khronos Group's cross-platform Vulkan and Microsoft's Direct3D 12 for Windows. Since June 8, 2015, Metal is available for iOS devices using the Apple A7 or later, as well as Macs (2012 models or later) running OS X El Capitan. Metal also further improves the capabilities of GPGPU programming by introducing compute shaders.

Metal uses a new shading language based on C++11; this is implemented using Clang and LLVM.

Support for Metal on OS X was announced at WWDC 2015.

Performance

Metal should have better performance than OpenGL, for several reasons:

DIRECT

DIRECT was a late-2000s proposed alternative heavy lift launch vehicle architecture supporting NASA's Vision for Space Exploration, which would replace the space agency's planned Ares I and Ares V rockets with a family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles named "Jupiter".

DIRECT was advocated by a group of space enthusiasts who asserted that they represented a broader team of dozens of NASA and space industry engineers who actively worked on the proposal on an anonymous, voluntary basis in their spare time. September 2008, the DIRECT Team was said to consist of 69 members, 62 of whom were NASA engineers, NASA-contractor engineers, and managers from the Constellation Program. A small number of non-NASA members of the team publicly represented the group.

The project name "DIRECT" referred to a philosophy of maximizing the re-use of hardware and facilities already in place for the Space Shuttle program (STS), hence a "direct" transition. The DIRECT Team asserted that using this approach to develop and operate a family of high-commonality rockets would reduce costs and the gap between retirement of the Space Shuttle and the first launch of Orion, shorten schedules, and simplify technical requirements for future US human space efforts.

Direct 8

Direct 8 was a national French TV channel, owned by Vincent Bolloré. It was available through digital terrestrial television network "TNT" and the Astra 1H satellite position.

As the name suggests ('direct' is French for 'live'), Direct 8 was originally intended to broadcast live shows only (except during night times and holiday seasons). This is no longer the case.

Following its purchase by Canal Group, the channel closed down on 7 October 2012 and relaunched as D8.

See also

Television portal

References

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