A zebra crossing is a road crossing for pedestrians, identified by studs and alternating black and white stripes on the carriageway and lighted yellow globes (normally flashing) at each end. Pedestrians take precedence over vehicles on crossings uncontrolled by police or traffic wardens, and it is an offence for vehicles to wait or overtake within their limits. Research Zebra Crossing
Robert Stevenson was a Scottish engineer. He was born in 1772 and died in 1850. Educated at the Andersonian Institute, Glasgow and at Edinburgh University, he learned lighthouse engineering from his stepfather, Thomas Smith and constructed some twenty lighthouses, including the Bell Rock lighthouse and made improvements in the lighting systems. He invented the flashing light for use in lighthouses. Research Robert Stevenson
The Alabama Virus is a computer virus which infects .EXE files. The virus is loaded into memory by executing an infected program and then affects the computer's runtime operation, corrupts program or overlay files. One hour after activation, the virus displays this message in a flashing box: SOFTWARE COPIES PROHIBITED BY INTERNATIONAL LAW Box 1055 Tuscambia ALABAMA USA. The virus manipulates the file allocation table and swaps file names so that files are slowly lost. The virus will infect .EXE files, increasing their size by 1,560 bytes. It moves into memory when any EXE containing the virus is executed. Unlike most other memory-resident viruses, the Alabama does not use the normal TSRfunction, but rather hooks interrupt 9 as well as IN and OUT commands. Upon detecting a Control-Alt-Delete, the virus generates what appears to be a warm boot, but remains in memory. The virus loads to the top 30K of memory, unlike other memory-resident programs, and does not reduce the available memory reported by DOS. The Alabama virus uses
a complex procedure during infection. It will first infect an EXE in the current directory, providing there is one which is uninfected. If all EXEs in the current directory are infected, then the Alabama virus will infect the program being executed - provided the system date is not Friday. On Fridays, the Alabama virus will swap entries in the FAT so that when the user attempts to execute an uninfected file, an infected file executes instead. Over time, files will be lost through this process. Research Alabama Virus
A buoy is a floating object used to mark channels for shipping or warn of hazards to navigation.
Buoys come in different shapes, such as a pole (spar buoy), cylinder (car buoy), and cone (nun buoy) . Light buoys carry a small tower surmounted by a flashinglantern, and bell buoys house a bell, which rings as the buoy moves up and down with the waves. Mooring buoys are heavy and have a ring on top to which a ship can be tied. Research Buoy
In architecture flashing is pieces of metal, built into the joints of a wall, so as to lap over the edge of the gutters or to cover the edge of the roofing; the term is also applied to similar pieces used to cover the valleys of roofs of slate, shingles, or the like. By extension the term applies to the metal covering of ridges and hips of roofs. Research Flashing
Abbreviations
Research Zebra Crossing
