History.

The voivodeship comprised the eastern lands of the historic Pomerania region, which since the Teutonic takeover of Gdańsk in 1308 had been held by the State of the Teutonic Order. After the 1454 uprising of the Prussian Confederation and the Thirteen Years' War, the area fell back to the Polish Crown according to the Second Peace of Thorn in 1466. Together with the Chełmno (former "Kulmerland") and Malbork ("Marienburg") voivodeships and the Prince-Bishopric of Warmia ("Ermland") it formed the autonomous province of Royal Prussia. The autonomy of the region was later abolished as a result of the Union of Lublin in 1569 and the area was incorporated into the Polish Crown.  In older English sources and generally in German language use, for this region the appellation of Pomerelia (German: "Pommerellen" or "Pomerellen", rendered as "Pomorze Gdańskie" in Polish) prevails, because the name Pomerania (German: "Pommern") usually refers to the western Duchy of Pomerania (Polish: "Księstwo Pomorskie"), ruled by the House of Griffins, who had become vassals of the Holy Roman Emperor in 1181. In turn for their support in the Thirteen Years' War, the Griffin dukes in 1455 gained the Pomerelian Lauenburg and Bütow Land as a Polish fief, which upon the extinction of the dynasty in 1637 fell back to the Polish Crown and by the 1657 Treaty of Bromberg was given to the Brandenburg margraves, who also ruled over the adjacent Imperial Pomerania Province.  For the Polish Crown the fact turned out to be fatal, that after the 1525 establishment of Ducal Prussia on the remaining territory of the Teutonic Order, the Pomeranian Voivodeship separated two territories, which were both held by the rising House of Hohenzollern, since 1618 in the personal union of Brandenburg-Prussia. After the Polish crown had given up suzerainty over Ducal Prussia by the 1657 Treaty of Wehlau and the Brandenburg margraves had assumed the title of a King in Prussia in 1701, the Hohenzollerns sought to link their territories. On the eve of the Polish partitions, King Frederick II of Prussia in 1771 finally incorporated Lauenburg and Bütow into the Pomerania Province. In the course of the First Partition the next year, he furthermore annexed the Pomeranian voivodeship with Royal Prussia, then renamed as the Province of West Prussia – except for the City of Gdańsk ("Danzig"), which was not incorporated until the Second Partition of 1793.  Today the historic administrative region roughly corresponds to the present-day Pomeranian Voivodeship of Poland, which also comprises the Lands of Słupsk ("Stolp"), that formerly belonged to the Duchy of Pomerania, as well as the territory of the former Malbork Voivodeship.

Administration.

Voivodeship Governor (Wojewoda) seat:  Regional council (sejmik generalny)  Regional councils (sejmik poselski i deputacki)  Administrative divisions:  From 1637 to 1657, the Lębork-Bytów Land.

The Pomeranian Voivodeship () was a unit of administrative division and local government in the Kingdom of Poland and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth from 1454/1466 until the First partition of Poland in 1772. From 1613 the capital was at Skarszewy.

波美拉尼亚省(波兰语:Województwo pomorskie),为1454年(或1466年)建立,在1772年至1795年瓜分波兰时期撤销的波兰王国行政区划和地方政府。


Route.

The Highway began in Heliopolis, Egypt and then went eastward to Clysma (modern Suez), through the Mitla Pass and the Egyptian forts of Nekhl and Themed in the Sinai desert to Eilat and Aqaba. From there the Highway turned northward through the Arabah, past Petra and Ma'an to Udhruh, Sela, and Shaubak. It passed through Kerak and the land of Moab to Madaba, Rabbah Ammon/Philadelphia (modern Amman), Gerasa, Bosra, Damascus, and Tadmor, ending at Resafa on the upper Euphrates.

History.

Iron Age.

Numerous ancient states, including Edom, Moab, Ammon, and various Aramaean polities depended largely on the King's Highway for trade.

Classical antiquity.

The Nabataeans used the road as a trade route for luxury goods such as frankincense and spices from southern Arabia. It was possibly the cause of their war with Hasmonean Alexander Jannaeus and with Iturea in the beginning of the 1st century BC.  During the Roman period the road was called "Via Regia". Emperor Trajan rebuilt and renamed it "Via Traiana Nova", under which name it served as a military and trade road along the fortified Limes Arabicus.

Byzantine period.

In the Byzantine period, the road was an important pilgrimage route for Christians, as it passed next to Mount Nebo, Moses' death and burial site according to the Bible. Another road connected it with Jerusalem passing by Livias and the traditional site of Jesus' baptism by John the Baptist on the Jordan River near, known today in Arabic as al-Maghtas, and on via Jericho.

Muslim period.

During Muslim rule from the 7th century, the road was the main Hajj route from Syria to Mecca, until the Ottoman Turks built the Tariq al-Bint in the 16th century.  During the Crusader period, use of the road was problematic. The road passed through the province of Oultrejordain of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. During periods of truce, the Hajj caravans were usually left unharmed by the Crusader lords of Oultrejourdain; however, Raynald of Châtillon attacked and plundered the pilgrims twice. His deeds eventually led to his own death at the hands of Saladin, and to the fall of the Crusader kingdom in 1187 in the Battle of Hattin.

In the Bible.

The King’s Highway is alluded to in the Book of Genesis (Chapter 14), which recounts how an alliance of four kings (Amraphel king of Shinar, Arioch king of Ellasar, Chedorlaomer king of Elam, and Tidal king of Goiim) marched along the highway toward the Valley of Siddim from the north to do battle against another alliance of five kings (Bera king of Sodom, Birsha king of Gomorrah, Shinab king of Admah, Shemeber king of Zeboiim, and the king of Bela).  The King's Highway ("Derech HaMelech") is referred to in the Book of Numbers (, ), where it is related that the Israelites, in their Exodus journey needed to use the road. They had left from Kadesh, and requested right of way from the King of Edom but were refused passage. He vowed he would attack them if they used the road. They even offered to pay for any water their cattle drank. Still the King of Edom refused them passage and advanced against them with a large and heavily armed force. After making a detour and coming to the Transjordan area between River Arnon and River Jabbok, they made the same request to Amorite King Sihon, and for the second time on the same road they were denied passage and King Sihon engaged them in battle at Jahaz, where they won that battle "by the edge of the sword". As a result, they gained control in that land and to the north of it. The tribes of Manasseh (eastern half), Gad, and Reuben subsequently settled those territories.  Many of the wars of the Israelites against the kingdoms of the trans-Jordanian highlands during the period of the Kingdom of Israel (and its sister-kingdom, the Kingdom of Judah) were probably fought, at least in part, over control of the Highway.

The King’s Highway was a trade route of vital importance in the ancient Near East, connecting Africa with Mesopotamia. It ran from Egypt across the Sinai Peninsula to Aqaba, then turned northward across Transjordan, to Damascus and the Euphrates River.

君王大道(阿拉伯语:الطريق الملوكي;英语:King’s Highway),古代近东地区一个极为重要的贸易通道。它从埃及开始穿越西奈半岛经过约旦南部的亚喀巴,往北向外约旦和大马士革直到幼发拉底河。除了作为贸易经商的通道,君王大道也是近东朝圣者的主要路线。


History.

The Alliance's motivations for creating AV1 included the high cost and uncertainty involved with the patent licensing of HEVC, the MPEG-designed codec expected to succeed AVC. Additionally, the Alliance's seven founding members – Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla and Netflix – announced that the initial focus of the video format would be delivery of high-quality web video. The official announcement of AV1 came with the press release on the formation of the Alliance for Open Media on 1 September 2015. Only 42 days before, on 21 July 2015, HEVC Advance's initial licensing offer was announced to be an increase over the royalty fees of its predecessor, AVC. In addition to the increased cost, the complexity of the licensing process increased with HEVC. Unlike previous MPEG standards where the technology in the standard could be licensed from a single entity, MPEG-LA, when the HEVC standard was finished, two patent pools had been formed with a third pool was on the horizon. In addition, various patent holders were refusing to license patents via either pool, increasing uncertainty about HEVC's licensing. According to Microsoft's Ian LeGrow, an open-source, royalty-free technology was seen as the easiest way to eliminate this uncertainty around licensing.  The negative effect of patent licensing on free and open-source software has also been cited as a reason for the creation of AV1. For example, building an H.264 implementation into Firefox would prevent it from being distributed free of charge since licensing fees would have to be paid to MPEG-LA. Free Software Foundation Europe has argued that FRAND patent licensing practices make the free software implementation of standards impossible due to various incompatibilities with free software licenses.  Many of the components of the AV1 project were sourced from previous research efforts by Alliance members. Individual contributors started experimental technology platforms years before: Xiph's/Mozilla's Daala already published code in 2010, Google's experimental VP9 evolution project VP10 was announced on 12 September 2014, and Cisco's Thor was published on 11 August 2015. Building on the codebase of VP9, AV1 incorporates additional techniques, several of which were developed in these experimental formats. The first version 0.1.0 of the AV1 reference codec was published on 7 April 2016.  Although a soft feature freeze came into effect at the end of October 2017, development continued on several significant features. One of these in-progress features, the bitstream format, was projected to be frozen in January 2018 but was delayed due to unresolved critical bugs as well as further changes to transformations, syntax, the prediction of motion vectors, and the completion of legal analysis. The Alliance announced the release of the AV1 bitstream specification on 28 March 2018, along with a reference, software-based encoder and decoder. On 25 June 2018, a validated version 1.0.0 of the specification was released. On 8 January 2019 a validated "version 1.0.0 with Errata 1" of the specification was released.  Martin Smole from AOM member Bitmovin said that the computational efficiency of the reference encoder was the greatest remaining challenge after the bitstream format freeze had been completed. While still working on the format, the encoder was not targeted for production use and speed optimizations were not prioritized. Consequently, the early version of AV1 was orders of magnitude slower than existing HEVC encoders. Much of the development effort was consequently shifted towards maturing the reference encoder. In March 2019, it was reported that the speed of the reference encoder had improved greatly and within the same order of magnitude as encoders for other common formats.

Purpose.

AV1 aims to be a video format for the web that is both state of the art and royalty free. The mission of the Alliance for Open Media is the same as that of the WebM project.  A recurring concern in standards development, not least of royalty-free multimedia formats, is the danger of accidentally infringing on patents that their creators and users didn't know about. The concern has been raised regarding AV1, and previously VP8, VP9, Theora and IVC. The problem is not unique to royalty-free formats, but it uniquely threatens their "status" as royalty-free.  To fulfill the goal of being royalty free, the development process requires that no feature can be adopted before it has been confirmed independently by two separate parties to not infringe on patents of competing companies. In cases where an alternative to a patent-protected technique is not available, owners of relevant patents have been invited to join the Alliance (even if they were already members of another patent pool). For example, Alliance members Apple, Cisco, Google, and Microsoft are also licensors in MPEG-LA's patent pool for H.264. As an additional protection for the royalty-free status of AV1, the Alliance has a legal defense fund to aid smaller Alliance members or AV1 licensees in the event they are sued for alleged patent infringement.  Under patent rules adopted from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), technology contributors license their AV1-connected patents to anyone, anywhere, anytime based on reciprocity (i.e. as long as the user does not engage in patent litigation). As a defensive condition, anyone engaging in patent litigation loses the right to the patents of "all" patent holders.  This treatment of intellectual property rights (IPR), and its absolute priority during development, is contrary to extant MPEG formats like AVC and HEVC. These were developed under an IPR uninvolvement policy by their standardization organisations, as stipulated in the ITU-T's definition of an open standard. However, MPEG's chairman has argued this practice has to change, which it is: EVC is also set to have a royalty-free subset, and will have switchable features in its bitstream to defend against future IPR threats.  The creation of royalty-free web standards has been a long-stated pursuit for the industry. In 2007, the proposal for HTML5 video specified Theora as mandatory to implement. The reason was that public content should be encoded in freely implementable formats, if only as a "baseline format", and that changing such a baseline format later would be hard because of network effects. The Alliance for Open Media is a continuation of Google's efforts with the WebM project, which renewed the royalty-free competition after Theora had been surpassed by AVC. For companies such as Mozilla that distribute free software, AVC can be difficult to support as a per-copy royalty easily is unsustainable given the lack of revenue stream to support these payments in free software (see FRAND § Excluding costless distribution). Similarly, HEVC has not successfully convinced all licensors to allow an exception for freely distributed software (see HEVC § Provision for costless software).  The performance goals include "a step up from VP9 and HEVC" in efficiency for a low increase in complexity. NETVC's efficiency goal is 25% improvement over HEVC. The primary complexity concern is for software decoding, since hardware support will take time to reach users. However, for WebRTC, live encoding performance is also relevant, which is Cisco's agenda: Cisco is a manufacturer of videoconferencing equipment, and their Thor contributions aim at "reasonable compression at only moderate complexity".  Feature wise, AV1 is specifically designed for real-time applications (especially WebRTC) and higher resolutions (wider color gamuts, higher frame rates, UHD) than typical usage scenarios of the current generation (H.264) of video formats where it is expected to achieve its biggest efficiency gains. It is therefore planned to support the color space from ITU-R Recommendation BT.2020 and up to 12 bits of precision per color component. AV1 is primarily intended for lossy encoding, although lossless compression is supported as well.

Technology.

AV1 is a traditional block-based frequency transform format featuring new techniques. Based on Google's VP9, AV1 incorporates additional techniques that mainly give encoders more coding options to enable better adaption to different types of input.  The Alliance published a reference implementation written in C and assembly language (codice_1, codice_2) as free software under the terms of the BSD 2-Clause License. Development happens in public and is open for contributions, regardless of AOM membership.  The development process was such that coding tools were added to the reference codebase as "experiments", controlled by flags that enable or disable them at build time, for review by other group members as well as specialized teams that helped with and ensured hardware friendliness and compliance with intellectual property rights (TAPAS). When the feature gained some support in the community, the experiment was enabled by default, and ultimately had its flag removed when all of the reviews were passed. Experiment names were lowercased in the "configure" script and uppercased in conditional compilation flags.  To better and more reliably support HDR and color spaces, corresponding metadata can now be integrated into the video bitstream instead of being signaled in the container.

Partitioning.

Frame content is separated into adjacent same-sized blocks referred to as superblocks. Similar to the concept of a macroblock, superblocks are square-shaped and can either be of size 128×128 or 64×64 pixels. Superblocks can be divided in smaller blocks according to different partitioning patterns. The four-way split pattern is the only pattern whose partitions can be recursively subdivided. This allows superblocks to be divided into partitions as small as 4×4 pixels. "T-shaped" partitioning patterns are introduced, a feature developed for VP10, as well as horizontal or vertical splits into four stripes of 4:1 and 1:4 aspect ratio. The available partitioning patterns vary according to the block size, both 128×128 and 8×8 blocks can't use 4:1 and 1:4 splits. Moreover, 8×8 blocks can't use "T" shaped splits.  Two separate predictions can now be used on spatially different parts of a block using a smooth, oblique transition line ("wedge-partitioned prediction"). This enables more accurate separation of objects without the traditional staircase lines along the boundaries of square blocks.  More encoder parallelism is possible thanks to configurable prediction dependency between tile rows (codice_3).

Prediction.

AV1 performs internal processing in higher precision (10 or 12 bits per sample), which leads to compression improvement due to smaller rounding errors in reference imagery.  Predictions can be combined in more advanced ways (than a uniform average) in a block ("compound prediction"), including smooth and sharp transition gradients in different directions ("wedge-partitioned prediction") as well as implicit masks that are based on the difference between the two predictors. This allows combination of either two inter predictions or an inter and an intra prediction to be used in the same block.  A frame can reference 6 instead of 3 of the 8 available frame buffers for temporal (inter) prediction while providing more flexibility on bi-prediction (codice_4).  The "Warped Motion" (codice_5) and "Global Motion" (codice_6) tools in AV1 aim to reduce redundant information in motion vectors by recognizing patterns arising from camera motion. They implement ideas that were tried to be exploited in preceding formats like e.g. MPEG-4 ASP, albeit with a novel approach that works in three dimensions. There can be a set of warping parameters for a whole frame offered in the bitstream, or blocks can use a set of implicit local parameters that get computed based on surrounding blocks.  "Switch frames" (S-frame) are a new inter-frame type that can be predicted using already decoded reference frames from a higher-resolution version of the same video to allow switching to a lower resolution without the need for a full keyframe at the beginning of a video segment in the adaptive bitrate streaming use case.

Intra Prediction.

Intra prediction consists of predicting the pixels of a given blocks only using information available in the current frame. Most often, intra predictions are built from the neighboring pixels above and to the left of the predicted block. The DC predictor builds a prediction by averaging the pixels above and to the left of block.  Directional predictors extrapolate these neighboring pixels according to a specified angle. In AV1, 8 main directional modes can be chosen. These modes start at an angle of 45 degrees and increase by a step size of 22.5 degrees up until 203 degrees. Furthermore, for each directional mode, six offsets of 3 degree can be signalled for bigger blocks, three above the main angle and three below it, resulting in a total of 56 angles (codice_7).  The "TrueMotion" predictor got replaced with a Paeth predictor which looks at the difference from the known pixel in the above left corner to the pixel directly above and directly left of the new one and then chooses the one that lies in direction of the smaller gradient as predictor. A palette predictor is available for blocks with very few (up to 8, dominant) colors like in some computer screen content. Correlations between the luminosity and the color information can now be exploited with a predictor for chroma blocks that is based on samples from the luma plane (codice_8). In order to reduce visible boundaries along borders of inter-predicted blocks, a technique called overlapped block motion compensation (OBMC) can be used. This involves extending a block's size so that it overlaps with neighboring blocks by 2 to 32 pixels, and blending the overlapping parts together.

Data transformation.

To transform the error remaining after prediction to the frequency domain, AV1 encoders can use square, 2:1/1:2, and 4:1/1:4 rectangular DCTs (codice_9), as well as an asymmetric DST for blocks where the top and/or left edge is expected to have lower error thanks to prediction from nearby pixels, or choose to do no transform (identity transform).  It can combine two one-dimensional transforms in order to use different transforms for the horizontal and the vertical dimension (codice_10).

Quantization.

AV1 has new optimized quantization matrices (codice_11). The eight sets of quantization parameters that can be selected and signaled for each frame now have individual parameters for the two chroma planes and can use spatial prediction. On every new superblock, the quantization parameters can be adjusted by signaling an offset.

Filters.

For the in-loop filtering step, the integration of Thor's constrained low-pass filter and Daala's directional deringing filter has been fruitful: The combined "Constrained Directional Enhancement Filter" (codice_12) exceeds the results of using the original filters separately or together.  It is an edge-directed conditional replacement filter that smoothes blocks with configurable (signaled) strength roughly along the direction of the dominant edge to eliminate ringing artifacts.  There is also the "loop restoration filter" (codice_13) based on the Wiener filter and self-guided restoration filters to remove blur artifacts due to block processing.  "Film grain synthesis" (codice_14) improves coding of noisy signals using a parametric video coding approach. Due to the randomness inherent to film grain noise, this signal component is traditionally either very expensive to code or prone to get damaged or lost, possibly leaving serious coding artefacts as residue. This tool circumvents these problems using analysis and synthesis, replacing parts of the signal with a visually similar synthetic texture, based solely on subjective visual impression instead of objective similarity. It removes the grain component from the signal, analyzes its non-random characteristics, and instead transmits only descriptive parameters to the decoder, which adds back a synthetic, pseudorandom noise signal that's shaped after the original component. It is the visual equivalent of the Perceptual Noise Substitution technique used in AC3, AAC, Vorbis, and Opus audio codecs.

Entropy coding.

Daala's entropy coder (codice_15), a non-binary arithmetic coder, was selected for replacing VP9's binary entropy coder. The use of "non-binary" arithmetic coding helps evade patents, but also adds bit-level parallelism to an otherwise serial process, reducing clock rate demands on hardware implementations. This is to say that the effectiveness of modern binary arithmetic coding like CABAC is being approached using a greater alphabet than binary, hence greater speed, as in Huffman code (but not as simple and fast as Huffman code). AV1 also gained the ability to adapt the symbol probabilities in the arithmetic coder per coded symbol instead of per frame (codice_16).

Quality and efficiency.

A first comparison from the beginning of June 2016 found AV1 roughly on par with HEVC, as did one using code from late January 2017.  In April 2017, using the 8 enabled experimental features at the time (of 77 total), Bitmovin was able to demonstrate favorable objective metrics, as well as visual results, compared to HEVC on the "Sintel" and "Tears of Steel" animated films. A follow-up comparison by Jan Ozer of "Streaming Media Magazine" confirmed this, and concluded that "AV1 is at least as good as HEVC now".  Ozer noted that his and Bitmovin's results contradicted a comparison by Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications from late 2016 that had found AV1 38.4% less efficient than HEVC, underperforming even H.264/AVC, and justified this discrepancy by having used encoding parameters endorsed by each encoder vendor, as well as having more features in the newer AV1 encoder.  Tests from Netflix showed that, based on measurements with PSNR and VMAF at 720p, AV1 was about 25% more efficient than VP9 (libvpx). Similar conclusions with respect to quality were drawn from a test conducted by Moscow State University researchers, where VP9 was found to require 31% and HEVC 22% more bitrate than AV1 for the same level of quality. The researchers found that the used AV1 encoder was operating at a speed "2500–3500 times lower than competitors", while admitting that it has not been optimized yet.  In a comparison of AV1 against H.264 (x264) and VP9 (libvpx), Facebook showed about 45–50% bitrate savings over H.264 and about 40% over VP9 when using a constant quality encoding mode.  Decoding performance was at about half the speed of VP9 according to internal measurements from 2017.  AOMedia provides a list of test results on their website.

Profiles and levels.

Profiles.

AV1 defines three profiles for decoders which are Main, High, and Professional. The Main profile allows for a bit depth of 8- or 10-bits per sample with 4:0:0 (greyscale) and 4:2:0 chroma sampling. The High profile further adds support for 4:4:4 chroma sampling. The Professional profile extends capabilities to full support for 4:0:0, 4:2:0, 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 chroma sub-sampling with 8, 10 and 12 bit color depths.

Levels.

AV1 defines levels for decoders with maximum variables for levels ranging from 2.0 to 6.3. The levels that can be implemented depend on the hardware capability.  Example resolutions would be 426×240@30fps for level 2.0, 854×480@30fps for level 3.0, 1920×1080@30fps for level 4.0, 3840×2160@60fps for level 5.1, 3840×2160@120fps for level 5.2 and 5.3, and 7680×4320@120fps for level 6.2. Level 7 has not been defined yet.

Adoption.

Content providers.

YouTube has begun rolling out AV1, starting with its AV1 Beta Launch Playlist. According to the description, the videos are (to begin with) encoded at high bitrate to test decoding performance, and YouTube has "ambitious goals" for rolling out AV1. Application "YouTube for Android TV" supports AV1 codec on capable platforms since 20 April 2020 and version 2.10.13.  Vimeo's videos in the "Staff picks" channel are available in AV1. Vimeo is using and contributing to Mozilla's Rav1e encoder, and expects, with further encoder improvements, to eventually provide AV1 support for all videos uploaded to Vimeo as well as the company's "Live" offering.  In October 2016, Netflix stated they expected to be an early adopter of AV1. On February 5, 2020, Netflix began using AV1 to stream select titles on Android, providing 20% improved compression efficiency over their VP9 streams.  Following very positive own test results, Facebook said to gradually roll out AV1 as soon as browser support emerges, starting with their most popular videos.  Twitch plans to roll out AV1 for its most popular content in 2022 or 2023, with universal support projected to arrive in 2024 or 2025.  On April 30, 2020 iQIYI announced support for AV1 for users on PC web browsers and Android devices, becoming "the first and the only Chinese video streaming site to adopt the AV1 format to date."

Software implementations.

Several other parties have announced to be working on encoders, including EVE for AV1 (in beta testing), NGCodec, Socionext, Aurora and MilliCast.

Hardware.

Several Alliance members demonstrated AV1 enabled products at IBC 2018, including Socionext's hardware accelerated encoder. According to Socionext, the encoding accelerator is FPGA based and can run on an Amazon EC2 F1 cloud instance, where it runs 10 times faster than existing software encoders.  According to Mukund Srinivasan, chief business officer of AOM member Ittiam, early hardware support will be dominated by software running on non-CPU hardware (such as GPGPU, DSP or shader programs, as is the case with some VP9 hardware implementations), as fixed-function hardware will take 12–18 months after bitstream freeze until chips are available, plus 6 months for products based on those chips to hit the market. The bitstream was finally frozen on 28 March 2018, meaning chips could be available sometime between March and August 2019. According to the above forecast, products based on chips could then be on the market at the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020.  On January 7, 2019, NGCodec announced AV1 support for NGCodec accelerated with Xilinx FPGAs.  On April 18, 2019, Allegro DVT announced its AL-E210 multi-format video encoder hardware IP, the first publicly announced hardware AV1 encoder. The AL-E210 supports, aside from VP9, H.265/HEVC, H.264/AVC and JPEG, the AV1 Main profile, with which it can encode 4:2:0 Chroma subsampling with 8 and 10 bit color depth. A single core can encode 4K with 30 fps, with multiple cores that should even be higher.  On May 9, 2019, Amphion announced a video decoder with AV1 support up to 4K 60fps On May 28, 2019, Realtek announced the RTD2893, its first integrated circuit with AV1 decoding, up to 8K.  On June 17, 2019, Realtek announced the RTD1311 SoC for set-top boxes with an integrated AV1 decoder.  On October 20, 2019, a roadmap from Amlogic was shown which includes 3 set-top box SoCs that are able to decode AV1 content, the S805X2, S905X4 and S908X. The S905X4 was used in the SDMC DV8919 by December.  On October 21, 2019, Chips&Media announced the WAVE510A VPU supporting decoding AV1 at up to 4Kp120.  On November 26, 2019, MediaTek announced world's first smartphone SoC with an integrated AV1 decoder. The Dimensity 1000 is able to decode AV1 content up to 4K 60fps.  On January 3, 2020, LG Electronics announced that its 2020 8K TVs, which are based on the α9 Gen 3 processor, support AV1.  At CES 2020, Samsung announced that its 2020 8K QLED TVs, featuring Samsung's "Quantum Processor 8K SoC," are capable of decoding AV1. D = decode, E = Encode

Patent claims.

Sisvel, a Luxembourg-based company, has formed a patent pool, and are selling a patent license for AV1. The pool was announced in early 2019, but a list of claimed patents was first published on March 10, 2020. This list contains over 1050 patents. The substance of the patent claims remains to be challenged.  Sisvel's prices are 0.32 € for display devices and 0.11 € for non-display devices using AV1. Sisvel has stated that they won't seek content royalties, but their license makes no exemption for software. , the Alliance for Open Media has not responded to the list of patent claims. Their statement after Sisvel's initial announcement reiterated the commitment to their royalty-free patent license and made mention of the "AOMedia patent defense program to help protect AV1 ecosystem participants in the event of patent claims", but did not mention the Sisvel claim by name.

AV1 Image File Format (AVIF).

The AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) is a specification for storing images or image sequences compressed with AV1 in the HEIF file format. It competes with HEIC which uses the same container format, build upon ISOBMFF, but HEVC for compression. Version 1.0.0 of the specification was finalized in February 2019.  AVIF supports features like:

AVIF support.

On 14 December 2018 Netflix published the first.avif sample images, and support was added in VLC. Microsoft also announced support with the Windows 10 "19h1" preview release, including File Explorer, Paint and multiple APIs, together with sample images. Mozilla and Google are also working on support for the new image format in Firefox and Chrome. On September 18, 2019, paint.net added support for opening AVIF files, however saving is not supported yet. The Colorist format conversion and Darktable RAW image data have each released support for and provide reference implementations of libavif, and a GIMP plugin implementation has been developed supporting both 3.x and 2.10.x plugin APIs.  On 14 February 2020, Netflix published a blog article with objective measurements on AVIF's image quality & compression efficiency in comparison to JPEG.

AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) is an open, royalty-free video coding format designed for video transmissions over the Internet. It was developed as a successor to VP9 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium founded in 2015 that includes semiconductor firms, video on demand providers, video content producers, software development companies and web browser vendors. The AV1 bitstream specification includes a reference video codec. In 2018 Facebook testing that approximates real world conditions, AV1 achieved 34%, 46.2% and 50.3% higher data compression than libvpx-vp9, x264 high profile, and x264 main profile respectively.

AOMedia Video 1(简称AV1)是一个开放、免专利的影片编码格式,专为通过网络进行串流传输而设计。它由开放媒体联盟(AOMedia)开发,该联盟由半导体企业、随选视讯供应商和网页浏览器开发商于2015年成立。因特网工程任务组(IETF)也将这项工作标准化为因特网视频编解码器(NetVC)。


Career.

Early years, Winter Youth Olympics.

Lim Hyo-jun started competing as a swimmer, but later switched to short track speed skating after suffering damage to his tympanum. During his early career during middle school, he underwent seven surgeries after multiple injuries sustained during competitions caused numerous hiatuses, including a period in which Lim did not compete for a year, following a leg injury. During his early career, Lim represented South Korea in his first international competition at the 2012 Winter Youth Olympics in Innsbruck. There, he won the gold medal on his debut in the Boys' 1000 m event, and the silver medal behind fellow South Korean Yoon Su-min in the Boys' 500 m event. In the unique Mixed team relay event, where athletes of different countries and sexes competed together, Lim's "Team H" reached the gold medal final, but ultimately did not place after they were penalised for dropping the baton during the race.

Universiade, World Cup, Winter Olympics.

After a four-year absence from international competition, Lim returned during the 2017 Winter Universiade in Almaty, once again representing South Korea. He competed in the Men's 500 m event, where he reached the final following respective first and second-place finishes in the heats and quarterfinals, and the disqualification of Kazakhstan's Nurbergen Zhumagaziyev for obstructing Lim in the semifinal. In the final, however, Lim failed to make a podium finish, placing fourth behind South Korea's Kim Do-kyoum and Kazakhstan's Abzal Azhgaliyev and Denis Nikisha. In the Men's 5000 m relay event, the South Korean team, which initially didn't include Lim due to his occupation with the 500 m event the same day of the semifinal, were successful in qualifying for the final. Lim was chosen to replace Lee Mun-hyeon for the final race the next day, though they were ultimately unsuccessful, conceding a penalty in a performance that would've otherwise saw them place third.  Prior to his debut at the 2018 Winter Olympics, Lim won the 1000 m and 1500 m events at the September 2017 Budapest leg of the 2017–18 ISU Short Track Speed Skating World Cup, where he placed ahead of fellow South Korean skater Hwang Dae-heon both times. In the same leg, Lim also placed second in the 500m event ahead of Hwang and behind Hungary's Sándor Liu Shaolin. Lim continued on to the Seoul leg of the World Cup in November, where he was relatively less successful, reaching only the placement final in the 500 m event, and being disqualified in the 1000 m event following a collision with Russia's Alexander Shulginov in the quarterfinal. Lim reached the gold medal final of the 1500 m event, but was also similarly disqualified. He solely found success during the Seoul leg through the South Korean 5000 m relay team, alongside Seo Yi-ra, Kwak Yoon-gy, and Kim Do-kyoum, placing second in their heat and semifinal, before winning the final race.  At the 2018 Winter Olympics, Lim Hyo-jun competed in the Men's 1500 m event, and is due to compete as part of the Korean team for the Men's 5000 m relay. In the heats of the individual 1500 m event, Lim placed first in a race that saw Japan's Kazuki Yoshinaga disqualified after a stumble; Hungary's Shaoang Liu, who placed fourth, qualified with Lim to the semifinals. In the semifinals, Lim again placed first along with fellow Korean Hwang Dae-heon, who placed second behind him. In the gold medal final, Canada's Charles Hamelin collided with Hwang with three laps left in the race, leaving Lim the last Korean in the field. He nevertheless finished the race seven hundredths of a second ahead of the Netherlands' Sjinkie Knegt, the World record holder, to claim the gold medal in the event; the third time in the event's history that a South Korean had placed first. Lim also claimed the Olympic record for the event, recording a time of 2:10.485 in the final, beating Lee Jung-su's record of 2:10.949 set at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

Lim Hyo-jun (, born 29 May 1996) is a South Korean short track speed skater. He is the current champion of the Men's 1500 m event in short track speed skating at the Winter Olympics, and also currently holds the Olympic record for the event. Originally starting as a swimmer, Lim took up skating at a young age. Despite multiple injuries early on in his career, he notably won gold at the 2012 Winter Youth Olympics upon his international debut in the Boys' 1000 m event. He would later win the 1000 m and 1500 m events in the Budapest leg of the 2017–18 ISU Short Track Speed Skating World Cup and earn selection for the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. Upon his Olympic debut, Lim won the gold medal, setting a new Olympic record of 2:10.485 in the process, beating Lee Jung-su's previous record set at the 2010 games.

林孝俊(,1996年-5月29日)生于大邱,是一名韩国短道速滑运动员。最初他练习的是游泳项目,然而由于他的鼓膜受到损坏,他于小学二年级时转而练习短道速滑,并曾在四年级时击败过六年级学生。在中学一年级时,他因右胫骨受伤,有约一年半没有上冰训练,高中时也一直受伤病困扰。2017年4月,他在国家选拔赛中脱颖而出,首次入选国家队。


Early history.

The Votadini or Gododdin are thought to have been the first to defend this site as its original Brythonic name, "dyn barr", means 'the fort of the point'. By the 7th century, Dunbar Castle was a central defensive position of the Kings of Bernicia, an Anglian kingdom that took over from the British Kingdom of Bryneich.

Northumbria.

During the Early Middle Ages, Dunbar Castle was held by an Ealdorman owing homage to either the Kings at Bamburgh Castle, or latterly the Kings of York. In 678 Saint Wilfrid was imprisoned at Dunbar, following his expulsion from his see of York by Ecgfrith of Northumbria.  Later, Dunbar was said to have been burnt by Kenneth MacAlpin, King of the Scots. Certainly he is on record in possession of the castle.

Kingdom of the Scots.

In the 10th and early 11th centuries, the Norsemen made increasing inroads in Scotland and in 1005 a record exists of a Patrick de Dunbar, under Malcolm II, engaged against the Norse invaders in the north at Murthlake a town of Marr where alongside Kenneth, Thane of the Isles, and Grim, Thane of Strathearn, he was slain.  The first stone castle is thought to have been built by Gospatric, Earl of Northumbria, after his exile from England, following the Harrowing of the North, by William the Conqueror after Gospatric took refuge at the court of Malcolm III of Scotland. Gospatric was a powerful landowner in both kingdoms and could summon many men, which encouraged Malcolm to give him more lands in East Lothian, the Merse and Lauderdale, as recompense for those lost further south and in return for loyalty as is usual under the feudal system. Sir Walter Scott argued that Cospatric or Gospatrick was a contraction of "Comes Patricius". In any case, King Malcolm III is recorded as bestowing the manor of Dunbar &c., on "the expatriated Earl of Northumberland".

Structure.

The body of buildings measured in excess of one hundred and sixty five feet from east to west, and in some places up to two hundred and ten feet from north to south. The South Battery, which Grose supposes to have been the citadel or keep, is situated on a detached perpendicular rock, only accessible on one side, seventy two feet high, and is connected to the main part of the castle by a passage of masonry measuring sixty nine feet. The interior of the citadel measures fifty four feet by sixty within the walls. Its shape is octagonal. Five of the gun-ports remain, which are called the 'arrow-holes'. They measure four feet at the mouth and only sixteen inches at the other end. The buildings are arched and extend eight feet from the outer walls, and look into an open court, whence they derive their light.  About the middle of the fortress, part of a wall remains, through which there is a gateway, surmounted with armorial bearings. ths gate seems to have led to the principal apartments. In the centre, are the arms of George, 10th Earl of Dunbar, who succeeded his father in 1369, and who besides the earldom of Dunbar and March, inherited the Lordship of Annandale and the Isle of Man from his heroic aunt, Black Agnes of Dunbar. They must have been placed there after his succession, as he was the first who assumed those sculptured Arms: viz, a large triangular shield, and thereon a lion "rampant", within a bordure charged with eight roses. The shield is adorned with a helmet, carrying a crest: a horse's head bridled. On the right are the Arms of the Bruces, and on the left those of the Isle of Man.  The castle towers had communication with the sea, and dip low in many places. North-east from the front of the castle is a large natural cavern, chiefly of black stone, which looks like the mouth of the Acheron – a place that leads to melancholy streams. This spot is supposed to have formed part of the dungeon where prisoners were confined, such as Gavin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, who was a prisoner here in 1515. There is, however, also a dark postern which gives access to a rocky inlet from the sea, and it seems probable that it was through this that Sir Alexander Ramsay and his followers entered with a supply of provisions to the besieged in 1338.  It was long said the castle was invulnerable, possibly because of the many sieges it sustained. The castle was built with a red stone similar to that found in the quarries near Garvald. Large masses of walls, which have fallen beneath the weight of time, appear to be vitrified or run together. In the north-west part of the ruins is an apartment about twelve feet square, and nearly inaccessible, which tradition states was the apartment of Mary, Queen of Scots.

Later history.

The Castle remained the stronghold of the Earls of Dunbar until the forfeiture of George, Earl of March, in 1457, when the Castle was dismantled to prevent its occupation by the English. It was restored by James IV later in the century. The castle came under the control of the Duke of Albany and it was during this period that the bulwark to the west was built. It may have been designed by Antoine d'Arces, Sieur de la Bastie who was placed in charge of the castle in December 1514. Albany organised further repairs and amendments in July 1527. An Italian drawing for a fortification of this period by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, marked as an opinion for "il Duca D'Albania," has been associated with Dunbar. An article by the historian Bryony Coombs further explores the activities of the Duke of Albany and his architectural and artistic connections that informed the design of the blockhouse and situates the building in a European context.

Rough Wooing.

The castle was burnt by the Earl of Shrewsbury on a punitive raid during the Rough wooing in 1548. Further re-fortifications in 1548 were directed by Piero Strozzi and Migliorino Ubaldini. The English soldier Thomas Holcroft described the activities of Peter Landstedt, a lieutenant of the German mercenary Courtpennick (Konrad Pennick), on 24 September 1549. Despite cannon fire from the castle, Landstedt got a foothold in a house in Dunbar, and used the furniture to start fires in the town. Landstedt planned to make an entrenchment in front of the castle to place his guns, and he thought the walls of the castle near the town were "very old and low," and now "revised with earth and mounds", these old walls being stone on the natural rock. He thought the old high walls of the inner court could be broken by bombardment to destroy the "first walls" of the castle. These plans were not realised.

Reformation crisis.

In May 1560, an Italian engineer was working on further improvements for the French garrison. These works were inspected by Robert Hamilton in Briggs, keeper of Linlithgow Palace and Master of the Royal Artillery, and Robert Montgomery in July 1560 on behalf of the Lords of the Congregation who reported that it was "more ample by the double than it was of before" and capable of holding 500 more soldiers. The new work was immediately demolished as a provision of the Treaty of Edinburgh. Local landowners were tasked with the demolition of part of a "rampire," a rampart with its ditch and counter scarp, and a great platform for artillery. However, the French captain of the Castle, Corbeyran de Sarlabous refurbished the cavern which was within the area scheduled for demolition. The Castle remained garrisoned by 60 French troops under the command of Sarlabous until September 1561.

Mary, Queen of Scots.

Shortly after her return to Scotland in August 1561, Mary, Queen of Scots appointed her half-brother Lord John keeper of the castle. In August 1565, during the rebellion against Mary, Queen of Scots called the Chaseabout Raid, she ordered repairs to the gun emplacements and artillery, and hand tools that might be needed to re-build the ramparts during a siege. She was brought to the castle by the Earl of Bothwell and then confronted her enemies at the battle of Carberry Hill on 15 June 1567.  There was a siege in September 1567 to eject Bothwell's supporters and the captain, Patrick Whitelaw or Quhytelaugh, and William Kirkcaldy of Grange was made keeper of the castle. Dunbar Castle was finally slighted by order of the Parliament of Scotland in December 1567. Dunbar and the fortress on Inchkeith were to be "cast down utterly to the ground and destroyed in such a way that no foundation thereof be the occasion to build thereupon in time coming." In September 1568, some of the stone was selected for reuse at the quayside of the Shore of Leith.

Dunbar Castle is the remnants of one of the strongest fortresses in Scotland, situated in a prominent position overlooking the harbour of the town of Dunbar, in East Lothian.

邓巴城堡(Dunbar Castle)是位于苏格兰东洛锡安邓巴海边的一个城堡,建造于1070年左右,苏格兰宗教改革中被毁,现仅存遗址。


Background.

"CryptoKitties" operates on Ethereum's underlying blockchain network, as a non-fungible token (NFT), unique to each CryptoKitty. Each CryptoKitty is unique and owned by the user, validated through the blockchain, and its value can appreciate or depreciate based on the market. CryptoKitties cannot be replicated and cannot be transferred without the user's permission even by the game developers. Users can interact with their CryptoKitties, having the ability to buy, sell, and sire (breed) them. However, the CryptoKitty art is not on the blockchain and is instead owned by Axiom Zen. The company released some of the art under a new 'Nifty' license that lets players use the image of their CryptoKitty in a limited way.  A test version of "CryptoKitties" was unveiled at ETH Waterloo on October 19, 2017, an Ethereum hackathon. As of December 2, 2017, Genesis, the first and highest selling cat was sold for ETH246.9255 (~US$117,712) on that day.  The virtual cats are breedable and carry a unique number and 256 bit distinct genome with DNA and different attributes (cattributes) that can be passed to offspring. Several traits can be passed down from the parents to the offspring. There are a total of 12 'cattributes' for any cat, including pattern, mouth shape, fur, eye shape, base color, accent color, highlight color, eye color, and optional wild, environment, 'purrstige' and'secret'. Other features like cool down times are not passed down but are instead a function of the 'generation' of the offspring, which is one higher than the maximum generation between the two parents. In December 2017 a CryptoKitty sold for $100,000.  On March 20, 2018, it was announced that "CryptoKitties" would be spun off into its own company, Dapper Labs, and raised $12 million from several top venture capital firms and angel investors. The investment round was led by New York based Union Square Ventures and San Francisco based Andreessen Horowitz.  On May 12, 2018, a CryptoKitty was sold for $140,000. In May 2018, "CryptoKitties" launched their first celebrity-branded CryptoKitty with Stephen Curry, an American professional basketball player. As part of the partnership, Curry was given three CryptoKitties with special imagery, the first of which he put up for auction. The company later suspended the auction, claiming that Stephen Curry was not as involved as they initially thought. The company was later sued for trade secret theft over the Stephen Curry collectibles. The court ruled in the company's favour, stating that "[t]he evidence demonstrates that Defendant, not Plaintiff, developed the idea to license digital collectibles using the likeness of celebrities first...".  In October 2018, "CryptoKitties" reached the milestone of 1 million cats being bred with a volume of 3.2 million transactions on its smart contracts. In November 2018, Dapper Labs, which was spun out of Axiom Zen as the developer of "CryptoKitties", raised an additional $15 million in a venture round led by Venrock. The company doubled its valuation in this round.  In 2018, "CryptoKitties" was used by the German museum ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe to showcase blockchain technology.

Technology.

A CryptoKitty's ownership is tracked via a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain. Each CryptoKitty is represented as a non-fungible token using the ERC-721 token standard on Ethereum. Generation 0 CryptoKitties were sold to players in an auction at the rate of one every 15 minutes (672 per week) for one year. New CryptoKitties are created by breeding existing CryptoKitties.  Based on the limited number of cats going into circulation and their limited genomes, there is a limit of around 4 billion total cats that can be bred. Each cat has a distinct visual appearance ("phenotype") determined by its immutable genes ("genotype") stored in the smart contract. Because cats are tokens on a blockchain, they can be bought, sold, or transferred digitally, with strong guarantees of ownership. A CryptoKitty does not have a permanently assigned gender. While they can only engage in one breeding session at one time, each cat is able to act as either matron or sire. There is a 'cooldown' time that indicates how soon the cat can breed again, which goes up with the number of breeds, capped at one week.  Axiom Zen developed the game. Until November 2018, Axiom Zen intended to continually release a new CryptoKitty every 15 minutes, with the rest of supply determined by breeding of CryptoKitties. CryptoKitty owners may put them up for sale via an auction for a price set in Ether (ETH). They could also put them up for sire, where another player can pay to breed with a specific CryptoKitty.

Reception.

Shortly after launch, there were concerns that "CryptoKitties" was crowding out more serious, significant businesses that use the Ethereum platform. The game caused an increase in pending transactions on Ethereum, and at one point accounted for over 10% of network traffic on Ethereum. Ethereum miners increased the gas limit in response to "CryptoKitties", which allowed for more data per block and increasing transactions per second. A variety of similar websites such as Etheremon, Ethertulips, and CryptoBots, were also created. Marketplace sites such as OpenSea and RareBits were also created as a response.

CryptoKitties is a blockchain game on Ethereum developed by Axiom Zen that allows players to purchase, collect, breed and sell virtual cats. It is one of the earliest attempts to deploy blockchain technology for recreation and leisure. The game's popularity in December 2017 congested the Ethereum network, causing it to reach an all-time high in number of transactions and slowing it down significantly.

谜恋猫(先前的非正式中文释名有加密猫、乙太猫、以太猫、虚拟猫等),是一款以加密货币以太币(Ether)交易的虚拟猫咪休闲游戏,2017年11月28日公开上线营运。


Gameplay.

In "The Sims FreePlay", players "build" and design houses and customize and create (a maximum of 34) virtual people called "Sims". Players can control their Sims to satisfy their wishes, and let them complete different kinds of actions to gain "Simoleons", "Lifestyle Points", and "Social Points" (all three currencies in the game). The game runs in real-time, and takes real time to complete actions. All actions must be instructed by players, unlike in the Windows version, where Sims have some degree of autonomy. Players can progress through 55 levels to unlock content (such as furniture for the Sims’ houses) that can be purchased with the virtual currencies previously mentioned. Families of Sims can have children provided there is one adult; there is a limit on the amount of allowable couples due to a limit on the people in the player's town. However, if the player buys items from the online store, they become a VIP that will allow them to increase the number of Sims they can have in their town. In the game, there are "quests" that players are required to complete as well as optional quests ("discovery quests") that they may choose to pursue. Sims must bake a cake to age until completion of a certain quota of discovery quests. There are four types of currency:  This game has more detail than "The Sims Mobile", but choices on Sim Customization can be limited (unless bought with real currency) and actions take real time to complete. These actions can take up to 3 days.

Updates.

The game is regularly updated with new content, and has many events and competitions announced at FreePlay's official Facebook page. Updates commonly include elements from various expansion packs and stuff packs from the main series.  As of April 2017, Windows Phones no longer receive updates from the game.  In June 2018, pregnancy and baby showers were added to the game. It was said that fans had requested the feature be added to the game ever since "FreePlay" launched. Before this update, Sims had to marry for an option to be given to add a baby to the family.  On October 15, 2018, augmented reality multiplayer was added.  In July 2019, autosave function was available.

The Sims FreePlay is a strategic life simulation game developed by EA Mobile and later with Firemonkeys Studios. It is a free version of "The Sims" for mobile devices; it was released for iOS on December 15, 2011, released for Android on February 15, 2012, released for BlackBerry 10 on July 31, 2013, and released for Windows Phone 8 on September 12, 2013. The game was released for Fire OS in October 2012.

《模拟人生免费版》(又称“The SimsTM FreePlay”、“模拟人生FreePlay”或模拟人生畅玩版)是由美国艺电和后来加入的火猴工作室开发的模拟生活游戏,是模拟人生系列在移动设备上的的免费版,2011年12月15日在iOS平台发布,2012年2月15日在Android平台发布,2013年7月31日在BlackBerry 10平台发布,同年12月12日在Windows Phone 8平台发布。本作与以往的模拟人生系列有所不同。


太空探索科技公司南德克萨斯发射场

History.

Private discussions between SpaceX and various state officials about a future private launch site began at least as early as 2011, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk mentioned interest in a private launch site for their commercial launches in a speech in September 2011. The company publicly announced in August 2014, that they had decided on Texas as the location for their new non-governmental launch site. Site soil work began in 2015 but major construction of facilities began only in late 2018, with rocket engine testing with flight testing beginning in 2019.

Launch site selection and environmental assessment.

As early as April 2012, at least five potential locations were publicly known, including "sites in Alaska, California, Florida, Texas and Virginia." In September 2012, it became clear that Georgia and Puerto Rico were also interested in pursuing the new SpaceX commercial spaceport facility. The Camden County, Georgia, Joint Development Authority voted unanimously in November 2012 to "explore developing an aero-spaceport facility" at an Atlantic coastal site to support both horizontal and vertical launch operations. The main Puerto Rico site under consideration at the time was land that had formerly been the Roosevelt Roads Naval Station. By September 2012, SpaceX was considering a total of seven potential locations for the new commercial launch pad around the United States. For much of the time since, the leading candidate location for the new facility was a parcel of land adjacent to Boca Chica Beach near Brownsville, Texas.  By early 2013, Texas remained the leading candidate for the location of the new SpaceX commercial launch facility, although Florida, Georgia and other locations also remained in the running. Legislation was introduced in the Texas Legislature to enable temporary closings of State beaches during launches, limit liability for noise and some other specific commercial spaceflight risks, as well as considering a package of incentives to encourage SpaceX to locate at the Brownsville, Texas location. 2013 economic estimates showed SpaceX investing approximately in the development and construction of the facility A incentive package was approved by the Texas Legislature in 2013.  From the beginning, one of the proposed locations for the new commercial-mission-only spaceport had been south Texas. In April 2012, the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation initiated a Notice of Intent to conduct an Environmental Impact Statement and public hearings on the new launch site, which would be located in Cameron County, Texas. The summary then indicated that the Texas site would support up to 12 commercial launches per year, including two Falcon Heavy launches. The first public meeting was held in May 2012, and the FAA released a draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the location in south Texas in April 2013. Public hearings on the draft EIS occurred in Brownsville, followed by a public comment period ending in June 2013. The draft EIS identified three parcels of land—total of —that would notionally be used for the control center. In addition, SpaceX had leased of land adjacent to the terminus of Texas State Highway 4, of which would be used to develop the vertical launch area; the remainder would remain open space surrounding the launch facility. In July 2014, the FAA officially issued its Record of Decision concerning the Boca Chica Beach facility, and found that "the proposal by Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies would have no significant impact on the environment," approving the proposal and outlining SpaceX's proposal. The company formally announced selection of the Texas location in August 2014.  In September 2013, the State of Texas General Land Office (GLO) and Cameron County signed an agreement outlining how beach closures would be handled in order to support a future SpaceX launch schedule. The agreement is intended to enable both economic development in Cameron County and protect the public's right to have access to Texas state beaches. Under the 2013 Texas plan, beach closures would be allowed but were not expected to exceed a maximum of 15 hours per closure date, with no more than three scheduled space flights between the Saturday prior to Memorial Day and Labor Day, unless the Texas GLO approves.  In 2019, the FAA completed a reevaluation of the SpaceX facilities in South Texas, and in particular the revised plans away from a commercial spaceport to more of a spaceship yard for building and testing rockets at the facility, as well as flying different rockets—SpaceX Starship and prototype test vehicles—from the site than the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy envisioned in the original 2014 environmental assessment. In May and August 2019, the FAA issued a written report with a decision that a new supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) would not be required.

Land acquisition.

Prior to a final decision on the location of the spaceport, SpaceX began purchasing a number of real estate properties in Cameron County, Texas beginning in June 2012. By July 2014, SpaceX had purchased approximately and leased near Boca Chica Village and Boca Chica Beach through a company named "Dogleg Park LLC", a reference to the type of trajectory that rockets launched from Boca Chica will be required to follow.  Prior to May 2013, five lots in the Spanish Dagger Subdivision in Boca Chica Village, adjacent to Highway 4 which leads to the proposed launch site, had been purchased. In May 2013, SpaceX purchased an additional three parcels, adding another, plus four more lots with a total of in July 2013, making a total of 12 SpaceX-purchased lots. In November 2013, SpaceX substantially "increased its land holdings in the Boca Chica Beach area from 12 lots to 72 undeveloped lots" purchased, which encompass a total of approximately, in addition to the leased from private property owners. An additional few acres were purchased late in 2013, raising the SpaceX total "from 72 undeveloped lots to 80 lots totaling about 26 acres." In late 2013, SpaceX completed a replat of 13 lots totaling into a subdivision that they have named "Mars Crossing."  In February 2014, they purchased 28 additional lots that surround the proposed complex at Boca Chica Beach, raising the SpaceX-owned land to approximately in addition to the lease. SpaceX's investments in Cameron County continued in March 2014, with the purchase of more tracts of land, bringing the total number of lots it now owns to 90. Public records showed that the total land area that SpaceX then owned through Dogleg Park LLC was roughly. This is in addition to that SpaceX then had under lease. By September 2014, Dogleg Park completed a replat of lots totaling into a second subdivision, this one named "Launch Site Texas", made up of several parcels of property previously purchased. This is the site of the launch site itself while the launch control facility is planned two miles west in the Mars Crossing subdivision. Dogleg Park has also continued purchasing land in Boca Chica, and now owns a total of "87 lots equaling more than 100 acres".  SpaceX has also bought and is modifying several residential properties in Boca Chica Village, but apparently planning to leave them in residential use, about west of the launch site.  In September 2019, SpaceX extended an offer to buy each of the houses in Boca Chica Village for three times the fair market value along with an offer of VIP invitations to future launch events. The 3x offer was said to be "non-negotiable." Homeowners were given two weeks for this particular offer to remain valid.

Construction.

Major site construction at SpaceX's launch site in Boca Chica got underway in 2016, with site soil preparation for the launch pad in a process said to take two years, with significant additional soil work and significant construction beginning in late 2018. By September 2019, the site had been "transformed into an operational launch site – outfitted with the ground support equipment needed to support test flights of the methane-fueled Starship vehicles." Lighter construction of fencing and temporary buildings in the control center area had begun in 2014.  The Texas launch location was projected in the 2013 "draft" EIS to include a vertical launch area and a area for a launch control center and a launch pad directly adjacent to the eastern terminus of Texas State Highway 4. Changes occurred based on actual land SpaceX was able to purchase and replat for the control center and primary spaceship build yard.  SpaceX broke ground on the new launch site in September 2014, but indicated then that the principal work to build the facility was not expected to ramp up until late 2015 after the SpaceX launch site development team completed work on Kennedy Space Center Launch Pad 39A, as the same team was expected to manage the work to build the Boca Chica facility. Advance preparation work was expected to commence ahead of that., SpaceX anticipated spending approximately over three to four years to build the Texas facility, while the Texas state government expected to spend to extend utilities and infrastructure to support the new spaceport. The design phase for the facility was completed by March 2015. In the event, construction was delayed by the destruction of one of SpaceX two Florida launch facilities in a September 2016 rocket explosion, which tied up the launch site design/build team for over a year.  In order to stabilize the waterlogged ground at the coastal site, SpaceX engineers determined that a process known as soil surcharging would be required. For this to happen, some of new soil was trucked to the facility between October 2015 and January 2016. In January 2016, following additional soil testing that revealed foundation problems, SpaceX indicated they were not planning to complete construction until 2017, and the first launch from Boca Chica was not expected until late 2018. In February 2016, SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell stated that construction had been delayed by poor soil stability at the site, and that "two years of dirt work" would be required before SpaceX could build the launch facility, with construction costs expected to be higher than previously estimated. The first phase of the soil stabilization process was completed by May 2016. Two S-band tracking station antennas, were installed at the site in 2016–2017, Formerly used to track the Space Shuttle during launch and landing, and made operational as tracking resources for manned Dragon missions in 2018.  A SpaceX-owned photovoltaic power station was installed on site to provide off-grid electrical power near the control center, The solar farm was installed by SolarCity in January 2018.  Progress on building the pad had slowed considerably through 2017, much slower than either SpaceX or Texas state officials had expected when it was announced in 2014. Support for SpaceX, however, remained fairly strong amongst Texas public officials. In January 2018, COO Shotwell said the pad might be used for "early vehicle testing" by late 2018 or early 2019 but that additional work would be required after that to make it into a full launch site. SpaceX achieved this new target, with prototype rocket and rocket engine ground testing at Boca Chica starting in March 2019, and suborbital flight tests starting in July 2019.  In late 2018, construction ramped up considerably, and the site saw the development of a large propellant tank farm, a gas flare, more offices, and a small flat square launch pad. The "Starhopper" prototype was relocated to the pad in March 2019, and first flew in late July 2019.  In late 2018, the "Mars Crossing" subdivision developed into a shipyard, with the development of several large hangars, and several concrete jigs, on top of which large steel rocket airframes were fabricated, the first of which became the Starhopper test article. In February 2019, SpaceX confirmed that the first orbit-capable Starship and Super Heavy test articles would be manufactured nearby, at the "SpaceX South Texas build site." By September 2019, the facility had been completely transformed into a new phase of an industrial rocket build facility, working multiple shifts and more than five days a week, able to support large rocket ground and flight testing. As of November 2019 the SpaceX south Texas Launch Site crew has been working on a new launch pad for its Starship/Super Heavy rocket; the former launch site has been transformed to an assembly site for the Starship rocket.

Operation.

The South Texas Launch Site is SpaceX's fourth active suborbital launch facility, and its first private facility., SpaceX leased three US government-owned launch sites: Vandenberg SLC 4 in California, and Cape Canaveral SLC-40 and Kennedy Space Center LC39A both in Florida.  The launch site is in Cameron County, Texas, approximately east of Brownsville, with launch flyover range over the Gulf of Mexico. The launch site is planned to be optimized for commercial activity, as well as used to fly spacecraft on interplanetary trajectories.  Launches on orbital trajectories from Brownsville will have a constrained flight path, due to the Caribbean Islands as well as the large number of Oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX has stated that they have a good flight path available for the launching of satellites on trajectories toward the commercially valuable geosynchronous orbit.  Although SpaceX initial plans for the Boca Chica launch site are to loft robotic spacecraft to geosynchronous orbits, Elon Musk indicated in September 2014 that "the first person to go to another planet could launch from [the Boca Chica launch site]", but did not indicate which launch vehicle might be used for those launches. In May 2018, Elon Musk clarified that the South Texas launch site will be used exclusively for Starship.  By March 2019, two test articles of Starship were being built, and three by May. The low-altitude, low-velocity Starship test flight rocket was used for initial integrated testing of the Raptor rocket engine with a flight-capable propellant structure, and was slated to also test the newly designed autogenous pressurization system that is replacing traditional helium tank pressurization as well as initial launch and landing algorithms for the much larger rocket. SpaceX originally developed their reusable booster technology for the 3-meter-diameter Falcon 9 from 2012 to 2018. The "Starhopper" prototype was also the platform for the first flight tests of the full-flow staged combustion methalox Raptor engine, where the hopper vehicle was flight tested with a single engine in July/August 2019, but could be fitted with up to three engines to facilitate engine-out tolerance testing.  By March 2020, SpaceX had doubled the number of employees onsite for Starship manufacturing, test and operations since January, with over 500 employees working at the site. Four shifts are working 24/7—in 12-hour shifts with 4 days on then 3 off followed by 3 days on and 4 off—to enable continuous Starship manufacturing with workers and equipment specialized to each task of serial Starship production.

Social and economic impact.

The new launch facility was projected in a 2014 study to generate of economic activity in the city of Brownsville and eventually generate approximately in annual salaries from some 500 jobs projected to be created by 2024.  A local was created for south Texas in 2014—the Cameron County Space Port Development Corporation (CCSPDC)—in order to facilitate the development of the aerospace industry in Cameron County near Brownsville. The first project for the newly established board is the SpaceX project to develop a launch site at Boca Chica Beach. In May 2015, Cameron County transferred ownership of 25 lots in Boca Chica to CCSPDC, which may be used to develop event parking.

Effects on nearby homeowners.

The launch facility was approved to be constructed two miles from approximately thirty homes, with no indication that this would cause problems for the homeowners. Five years later in 2019, following an FAA revaluation of the environmental impact and the issuance of new FAA requirements that residents be asked to voluntarily stay outside their houses during particular tanking and engine ignition tests, SpaceX decided that a couple dozen of these homes were now too close to the launch facility over the long term and began seeking market acquisition of these properties. It was not disclosed why SpaceX did not seek a more remote location for its launch facility at the outset of their location search, or if SpaceX did in fact know in 2014 that it would eventually seek to displace these homeowners. Use of eminent domain to acquire the properties has not been ruled out. It was not known if the two dozen homes would be enough to satisfy SpaceX, or if eventually SpaceX would seek to rid the entire area of homes. An attorney with expertise on such situations referred to the timeframe given by SpaceX for homeowners to consider their purchase offer as "aggressive".

Research facilities.

The Brownsville Economic Development Council (BEDC) is building a space tracking facility in Boca Chica Village on a site adjacent to the SpaceX launch control center. The STARGATE tracking facility is a joint project of the BEDC, SpaceX, and the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (formerly the University of Texas at Brownsville at the time the agreement was reached).

Tourism.

In January 2016, the South Padre Island Convention and Visitors Advisory Board (CVA) recommended that the South Padre Island City Council "proceed with further planning regarding potential SpaceX viewing sites."

The SpaceX South Texas Launch Site is a rocket production facility, test site, and spaceport near Brownsville, Texas, on the US Gulf Coast approximately east of Brownsville, Texas, for the private use of SpaceX. When conceptualized, its stated purpose was "to provide SpaceX an exclusive launch site that would allow the company to accommodate its launch manifest and meet tight launch windows." The launch site was originally intended to support launches of the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles as well as "a variety of reusable suborbital launch vehicles", but in 2018, SpaceX announced a change of plans, stating that the launch site would be used exclusively for SpaceX's next-generation launch vehicle, Starship. In 2019 and 2020, the site added significant rocket production and test capacity. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk indicated in 2014 that he expected "commercial astronauts, private astronauts, to be departing from South Texas," and he foresaw launching spacecraft to Mars from there.

太空探索科技公司南德克萨斯发射场(英语:SpaceX South Texas Launch Site)是一所航天发射和实验中心。它位于德克萨斯州,靠近布朗斯维尔市的波卡其卡村,隶属于从事商业外层空间飞行的太空探索科技公司(下文简称为‘SpaceX’)。其用途是:“为SpaceX提供一个独立的发射场地,进而为公司的商业运载能力提供更大的空间。并满足其未来所需的密集发射窗口。”


Composition and production.

"Perfect" was the first track Sheeran wrote for his third studio album "÷". The song was recorded in 2016 and first appeared online in early March 2017. The song is a romantic ballad written about his wife-to-be Cherry Seaborn, whom he knew from school and then reconnected with when she was working in New York. Sheeran revealed that the inspiration for the lyrics came after visiting James Blunt's house in Ibiza, where the two singers had listened to the rapper Future's music at six in the morning. He said: "Barefoot on the grass, listening to our favorite song, which happened to be Future's "March Madness"... I booked the studio for the day, and I had that and I was like, right, let me just flesh that out. And the song happened and was sort of finished that day. I knew it was special."  In an interview with Zane Lowe, Sheeran said that he needed to write the best love song of his career with "Perfect". He said: "I need to do it 100% me, so everyone will listen to that will be like, "Ah! He can actually do it!"... I wanted to beat "Thinking Out Loud", 'cause I know that song was going to define me."  Sheeran produced the song himself with help from Will Hicks. It was recorded with strings orchestration from his brother Matthew Sheeran. This is the first time the brothers had collaborated on a song as it was the final wish of their grandmother to see the brothers working together before she died. The full string orchestration was later used for the recording with Andrea Bocelli.  The song is written in the key of A major (G major in live performances) with a tempo of 63.5 beats per minute in time (if not using triplets) or time (if using triplets). "Perfect" moves at a chord progression of A–Fm–D–E. The vocals span from E to A in the song.

Commercial performance.

In March 2017, Sheeran broke the record set by Frankie Laine in 1953, occupying all of the top five positions in the United Kingdom, and placing nine songs in the top ten of the UK Singles Chart. Also, every single one of the sixteen tracks from his new album "÷" entered the top twenty. "Perfect" debuted at number four, selling 62,599 copies. After Sheeran's performance of "Perfect" on "The X Factor" on 26 November 2017, the song reached a new peak in the UK, advancing to number three and selling 32,507 units. The Beyoncé version, released on 1 December 2017, drove consumption of the track to 89,359 sales (including 45,460 from sales-equivalent streams) as it became Sheeran's second number-one song from "÷", following "Shape of You" – and his fourth number-one single in total. With UK sales of 1,048,313, "Perfect" became Sheeran's tenth million-selling single. It was the Christmas number-one song for 2017, and held the summit for six consecutive weeks before being displaced by Eminem's "River", which features Sheeran as a guest artist.  In the United States, ten songs from "÷" debuted on the "Billboard" Hot 100 in March 2017, including "Perfect" at number thirty-seven. In October, the song ascended to number eighteen and became the third song from "÷" to reach the country's top twenty. It also lifted 4–3 on Digital Songs (50,000 downloads sold), 34–30 on Radio Songs (45 million) and 46–35 on Streaming Songs (11.5 million). On 30 October 2017, "Perfect" soared to the top ten on the "Billboard" Hot 100. The ballad gained in all metrics, holding at number three on Digital Song Sales (53,000, up 7 percent) and climbing 30-22 on Radio Songs (53 million, up 16 percent) and 35–27 on Streaming Songs (13.1 million, up 14 percent). On 20 November 2017, "Perfect" pushed to a new "Billboard" Hot 100 high (8–7) and reached the Radio Songs top ten (17–10; 73 million, up 16 percent). Sheeran scored his seventh Radio Songs top ten and the third from his album "÷", following "Shape of You" and "Castle on the Hill". The next week, "Perfect" hit top five on the "Billboard" Hot 100, becoming the second-highest-charting hit from his album "÷", following "Shape of You". "Perfect" became Sheeran's third top five hit overall; his first, "Thinking Out Loud", rose to number two in 2015. "Perfect" remained at number three on Digital Song Sales (60,000, down 6 percent) and powered 10–6 on Radio Songs (80 million, up 10 percent) and 38–15 on Streaming Songs (18.9 million, up 61 percent).  On 4 December 2017, "Perfect" pushed to a new number three "Billboard" Hot 100 high, and became Sheeran's third number one on Digital Song Sales (69,000, down 1 percent). He previously topped the chart for a week in 2015 with "Thinking Out Loud" and for ten weeks earlier in 2017 with "Shape of You". "Perfect" reached number one on Digital Song Sales, aided by the first few hours of tracking for its duet version, released before the end of the sales (and streaming) tracking week at 7 p.m. ET on 30 November. For the full week, the Beyoncé version accounted for 18 percent of the song's sales. On 11 December 2017, after a full tracking week, the single topped the "Billboard" Hot 100 chart, becoming Sheeran's second number-one song in the United States and Beyoncé's sixth as a solo act. "Perfect" remained at number-one on the Digital Songs chart with sales of 181,000 copies (up 202 percent). The duet version accounted for 63 percent of the song's total sales for the week. "Perfect" also rose 11–3 on the Streaming Songs chart with 34.9 million US streams, up 87 percent, while on Radio Songs, it pushed 4–3 (102 million in audience, up 14 percent). The duet topped the Hot 100 for five weeks. The original version of the song would later take over at the top on the week ending 20 January 2018. After six total weeks at number one, the song was dethroned by "Havana" by Camila Cabello featuring Young Thug. "Perfect" was the seventh best-selling song of 2017 in the US, with 1,340,000 copies sold that year. It was the best-selling song of 2018, with 1,300,000 copies sold.  The original version peaked at number one in Austria, Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Netherlands, Philippines, Poland, Scotland, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Switzerland. After the Beyoncé duet release, "Perfect" also reached number one in Australia, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The song is Sheeran's fourth to reach number one in Australia, and held the country's top spot for eight consecutive weeks before "God's Plan" by Drake displaced it. It went to number one as well in Canada, becoming Sheeran's second number one there and Beyoncé's first. As of 3 January 2019, the song has sold 207,000 digital copies in Canada.

Music video.

On 22 September 2017, a lyric video for "Perfect" was released on Sheeran's YouTube channel. The music video for "Perfect" was released on Sheeran's YouTube channel on 9 November 2017. The video stars Zoey Deutch and was directed by Jason Koenig, who also directed the video for "Shape of You". The video was filmed at the Austrian ski resort of Hintertux and shows Sheeran and Deutch going on a ski trip with friends, with the two dancing in the snow and ending up in a cabin together. Ross McNeilage who writes for MTV UK called the video a "Christmas dream" for its wintery visual. While praising the simple story and the video's cinematography, McNeilage noted that Zoey Deutch acts opposite to the superstar as his love interest and we watch as they "coyly flirt until they realise their love for one another and slow dance in the snow together." As of May 2020, the music video has received over 2.4 billion views on YouTube, making it the 31st most viewed video on the site. It received nominations for Song of the Year, Best Pop Video and Best Direction at the 2018 MTV Video Music Awards.

Remixes.

In November 2017, Sheeran released an acoustic version of "Perfect" and two remixes by Mike Perry and Robin Schulz.

Certifications.

! scope="row"| Portugal (AFP)

Perfect Duet.

On 1 December 2017, a duet by American singer Beyoncé titled "Perfect Duet" was made available worldwide.  The song is a stripped down, acoustic version of the original, with Beyoncé singing the second verse from a female perspective. Sheeran stated the song was Beyoncé's favorite from the album, and reached out to her to re-record the song. Beyoncé agreed, and the two recorded the song in May 2017.

Live performances.

Beyoncé performed her verse as part of the setlist during the On the Run II Tour in 2018. On 2 December 2018, almost exactly a year since the release of the duet version, Ed Sheeran and Beyoncé performed the first-ever live rendition of "Perfect Duet" at the 2018 Global Citizen Festival in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Certifications.

! scope="row"| Portugal (AFP)

Perfect Symphony.

An operatic version of "Perfect" with Andrea Bocelli, titled "Perfect Symphony" and sung partly in Italian, was released on 15 December 2017.

Composition.

A fully orchestral version of the song was recorded at Abbey Road Studios although only parts of it were used in the original release of the song. The full orchestral version was used in the duet with Andrea Bocelli.

Music video.

On 15 December 2017, a music video for "Perfect Symphony" (duet with Andrea Bocelli) was also released.

"Perfect" is a song by English singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran from his third studio album, "÷" (2017). After the album's release, it charted at number four on the UK Singles Chart. On 21 August 2017, "Billboard" announced that "Perfect" would be the fourth single from the album. The song was serviced to pop radio on 26 September 2017 as the third single from the album in the United States (fourth overall). The song eventually reached number one on the UK Singles Chart and the US "Billboard" Hot 100 in December 2017. "Perfect" became the UK Christmas number-one song for 2017 and also peaked at number one in sixteen other countries, including Australia, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand.

《完美无瑕》(英语:Perfect)为艾德·希兰2017年9月推出的单曲,于同年圣诞节流行。此单曲包含在专辑《÷》内,作家为他本人。


Beginnings and early history.

Giphy was founded by Alex Chung and Jace Cooke in February 2013. The idea for the business came when the pair was having breakfast, musing on the rising trend of purely visual communication.  When Chung and Cooke first launched Giphy, the website functioned solely as a search engine for GIFs. According to Chung, Giphy attracted around a million users during its first week and the figure leveled out to 300,000.  Giphy features what its founders called as "conversational search" wherein contents are brought to users' conversations through a search box found in their messaging applications.

Growth.

In August 2013, Giphy expanded beyond a search engine to allow users to post, embed and share GIFs on Facebook. Giphy was then recognized as a Top 100 Website of 2013, according to "PC Magazine". Three months later Giphy integrated with Twitter to enable users to share GIFs by simply sharing a GIF's URL.  In May 2014, Giphy raised $2.4 million in a Series A funding round from investors, including Quire, CAA Ventures, RRE Ventures, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, and Betaworks.  In January 2015, Giphy received another $17 million in a Series B funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from General Catalyst and former investors. In addition, Giphy raised a large portion of the Series B round via Alphaworks’s equity crowdfunding platform.  In March 2015, Giphy acquired Nutmeg, a GIF messaging service, as one of the company's first major steps towards the mobile industry. This coincided with the launch of Facebook Messenger's own development platform, in which Giphy joined a few exclusive apps in its debut.  In August 2015, Giphy launched its second mobile app, GIPHY Cam, which allows users to create and share GIFs on a social network.  In February 2016, Giphy raised $55 million in funding at a $300 million valuation.  In October 2016, Giphy announced several statistics, including the statement that it had 100 million daily active users, that it served over 1 billion GIFs per day, and that visitors watched more than 2 million hours of GIF content every day.  In July 2017, Giphy announced that it had 200 million daily active users between both the API and website, with around 250 million monthly active users on the website.  Chung announced in a February 2019 New York event that Giphy was exploring an advertising scheme that is distinguished from the Google model, which shows ads according to users' search histories. The idea is to embed advertising in private messages. Giphy is seeking to take advantage of this landscape since the GIG database has been integrated into most messaging services.  In May 2020, it was announced that Giphy would be purchased by Facebook and integrated into Instagram. The reported purchase price was $400 million.

Partnerships.

Giphy partners with brands to host GIFs that can be shared as marketing promotions via social media channels. Giphy also has a parent company called Facebook The company also created artist profiles on the website, which allow GIFs to be attributed to the artist(s) who created them.  In September 2014, Giphy partnered with Line to host the inaugural sticker design competition. LINE and GIPHY enlisted a team of digital partners, including Tumblr, Fox ADHD, Frederator, Cut & Paste, New Museum, Eyebeam, Rhizome, The Webby Awards, Pratt, The Huffington Post and Dribbble to support the event.  In August 2015, Universal Studios partnered with Giphy to release six GIFs promoting the new NWA-based movie, Straight Outta Compton.  Giphy has partnered with over 200 companies and brands to host all their existing content on their own branded channel. Giphy's partners include Disney, Calvin Klein, GE, and Pepsi.

Giphy, styled as GIPHY, is an American online database and search engine that allows users to search for and share short looping videos with no sound, that resemble animated GIF files. On 15 May 2020, GIPHY was acquired by Facebook for a reported $400 million. There is rising controversy surrounding the platform after Facebook acquired it, with many arguing that Giphy is in the process of making the GIF format propietary and serves to harm copyright holders, due to its restrictive Terms of Service and its inherent inaccessibility by prohibiting users from downloading the GIF files they potentially created. It has been argued to be acting as a giant filter of the vast majority of GIF files on the internet with many of them now subject to usage rights determined by Facebook.

Giphy,一般写成GIPHY,是美国的一个GIF搜索引擎,用户可以在这里通过输入文字来搜寻对应的GIF。


Cancellation.

On May 11, 2017, the series was cancelled after one season.

Premise.

The series takes place in an alternate world where traditional animated characters co-exist with real-life humans. Zorn is a barbarian warrior from the fictional island nation of Zephyria who moves to Orange County, California, to reconnect with his ex-wife and teenage son Alangulon, "Alan" for short.  Within the show, Zorn and things native to Zephyria are animated, following the style of "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe", while the rest of the world is live-action. The series' opening title cards are rendered in the style of fantasy cartoons of the 1980s such as "He-Man" and "ThunderCats."

Production.

The show was created by Reed Agnew and Eli Jorné who wrote the pilot episode while Eric Appel directed. Initially Agnew and Jorne were set to be co-showrunners, however after Fox ordered the series to air Agnew backed out and was made co-executive producer instead. At this point, Sally McKenna was brought in to replace Agnew; McKenna would later, in April 2016, become the sole showrunner after Jorne also left the project.  Artemis Pebdani and Tim Meadows' casting was announced in July 2015, with Jason Sudeikis, Cheryl Hines, and Johnny Pemberton's involvement announced the following November.

Reception.

"Son of Zorn" has received generally mixed reviews from television critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, the series holds a 58% approval rating based on 38 critics, and a 6.3/10 rating. The critical consensus reads: ""Son of Zorn" earns points for originality, a talented cast, and intermittent laughs, but they aren't quite enough to prop up a gimmick that's still in search of a workable premise for an ongoing series." On Metacritic, the show holds a score of 56 out of 100 based on 18 critical media reviews indicating "mixed or average reviews".

Son of Zorn is an American animated/live action hybrid sitcom created by Reed Agnew and Eli Jorné for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series stars Cheryl Hines, Johnny Pemberton, Tim Meadows, Artemis Pebdani, and Jason Sudeikis as the voice of Zorn. "Son of Zorn" is a joint production by Agnew Jorné Productions, Lord Miller Productions, and 20th Century Fox Television.

《佐恩之子》(英语:"Son of Zorn")是一部由瑞德·阿格纽与伊莱·乔奈开创,于2016年9月11日在FOX开播的美国真人/动画情景喜剧。2017年5月11日,FOX宣布取消本剧。


2018年至2019年英格兰足球超级联赛

Summary.

Manchester City claimed the league title on the final day of the season with a 4–1 win at Brighton & Hove Albion, finishing on 98 points after a run of 14 wins. Liverpool held a 7-point lead over Manchester City on 3 January, but finished runners-up with 97 points – the third highest total in Premier League history and the highest in English top-flight history for a second-placed team, having lost only one league match all season – to eventual champions City.  Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur claimed the other two Champions League berths, finishing in third and fourth place respectively. Tottenham were in third place for much of the season and were considered potential title challengers until a 1–2 loss to Burnley in February. Chelsea would go on to win the season's UEFA Europa League, defeating Arsenal in the final 4–1. Arsenal had gone on a fourteen-game unbeaten run near the start of the season and began April in third place, but a run of four points in six matches saw them drop to fifth place, finishing outside of the Champions League spots. Manchester United's worst start to the season for 28 years led to the sacking of manager José Mourinho in December, with former player Ole Gunnar Solskjær replacing him, initially as a caretaker. Solskjær was appointed permanently after an impressive run of results which culminated in United's away goals victory over Paris Saint-Germain in the UEFA Champions League, but the team's poor form soon returned, and they eventually finished sixth after the team had won none of their final five league matches. Newly promoted Wolverhampton Wanderers achieved their highest finish since 1980 by finishing seventh, having taken points off every team in the league except Liverpool and Huddersfield Town.  Huddersfield were the first team to be relegated, following their 0–2 defeat at Crystal Palace on 30 March 2019, coinciding with victories for Burnley and Southampton. They were relegated with six games remaining. This made Huddersfield the second team in Premier League history to be relegated before March ended, following Derby County in 2007–08. Fulham joined them after a 1–4 defeat at Watford on 2 April, relegated with five games remaining. Cardiff City were the final team to be relegated following a 2–3 loss at home to Crystal Palace on 4 May with one game remaining.  The fastest goal in Premier League history was scored this season on 23 April by Shane Long in a 1–1 draw between his side Southampton and Watford after 7.69 seconds. On 4 May 2019, Fulham's Harvey Elliott became the youngest ever Premier League player at 16 years and 30 days. Tottenham Hotspur had a run of 28 games without a draw, the longest ever recorded from the start of a Premier League season. Manchester City did not draw any of their final 30 matches.  The season saw two aviation incidents involving Premier League personnel. On 27 October 2018, Leicester City owner Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha was killed in a helicopter crash outside the King Power Stadium, shortly after a 1–1 home draw against West Ham United. Almost three months later, on 21 January 2019, Cardiff City player Emiliano Sala, en route to join the club following his record signing from Nantes, died on board a Piper PA-46 Malibu aircraft that crashed off Alderney.

Teams.

Twenty teams competed in the league – the top seventeen teams from the previous season and the three teams promoted from the Championship. The promoted teams were Wolverhampton Wanderers (returning to the top flight after a six-year absence), Cardiff City and Fulham (both teams returning after a four-year absence). They replaced Swansea City, Stoke City and West Bromwich Albion, ending their top flight spells of seven, ten and eight years respectively.

League table.

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The 2018–19 Premier League was the 27th season of the Premier League, the top English professional league for association football clubs, since its establishment in 1992. The season started on 10 August 2018 and concluded on 12 May 2019. Fixtures for the 2018–19 season were announced on 14 June 2018. The league was contested by the top 17 teams from the 2017–18 season as well as Wolverhampton Wanderers, Cardiff City and Fulham, who joined as the promoted clubs from the 2017–18 EFL Championship. They replaced West Bromwich Albion, Swansea City and Stoke City who were relegated to the 2018–19 EFL Championship.

2018年至2019年英格兰足球超级联赛(2018–19 Premier League)是第27届英格兰超级足球联赛赛事。英超联赛是英格兰顶级足球联赛,创建于1992年。本届英超联赛于2018年8月11日开锣。