Civil Rights
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
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Explore the people, places, events, achievements, struggles and stories that shaped our journey.
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
Innovation, patents, science, technology and world-changing contributions.
Pioneers, champions, Negro Leagues, records, activism and excellence.
Meet the people whose lives, choices and achievements shaped the journey.
Black towns, communities, institutions and places where history happened.
Moments that changed communities, movements, institutions and the nation.
Wilmington, North Carolina once had a thriving Black middle class and an elected interracial government. In 1898 white supremacists used violence to overthrow that government, kill Black residents and drive many others from the city.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM, initially LDDM as Longhorn Display Driver Model and then WVDDM in times of Windows Vista) is the graphic driver architecture for video card drivers running Microsoft Windows versions beginning with Windows Vista. It is a replacement for the previous display driver model of Windows 2000 (called XDDM) and Windows XP (called XPDM) and is aimed at enabling better performance graphics and new graphics functionality and stability. Display drivers in Windows Vista and Windows 7 can choose to either adhere to WDDM or to XDDM. With the removal of XDDM from Windows 8, however, WDDM became the unified option. In Windows 2000 and Windows XP, the XDDM/XPDM is based on WDM. WDDM provides the functionality required to render the desktop and applications using Desktop Window Manager, a compositing window manager running on top of Direct3D. It also supports new DXGI interfaces required for basic device management and creation. The WDDM specification requires at least Direct3D 9-capable video card and the display driver must implement the device driver interfaces for the Direct3D 9Ex runtime in order to run legacy Direct3D applications; it may optionally implement runtime interfaces for Direct3D 10 and higher.
DirectX Graphics Infrastructure (DXGI) is a user-mode component of Microsoft Windows (for Windows Vista and above) which provides a mapping between particular graphics APIs such as Direct3D 10.0 and above (known in DXGI parlance as producers) and the graphics kernel, which in turn interfaces with the user-mode Windows Display Driver Model driver. DXGI provides objects for tasks such as enumerating graphics adapters and monitors, enumerating display modes, choosing buffer formats, sharing resources between processes (such as between applications and the Desktop Window Manager), and presenting rendered frames to a window or monitor for display. Both Direct3D 10 and OpenGL applications in Windows Vista work through DXGI. Windows 8 introduced a notably useful DXGI-based API called Desktop Duplication API for hardware accelerated video capture using DirectX. Using it with a hardware video encoder provides a low-latency, high-performance solution for screen capturing and encoding, freeing up the CPU for gaming or other tasks such as Miracast screencasting, streaming, remote desktop scenarios. DXGI 1.1 added surface sharing between the various Windows graphics API. The newest version is DXGI 1.6, introduced with Windows 10 Creators Update and updated with Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. DXGI 2 preview was released alongside the Oculus Rift SDK, containing improvements for stereoscopic rendering. DirectX Graphics Infrastructure(''DXGI") is a Microsoft Windows graphics infrastructure that provides support for low level graphics API shared operations. It offers the ability to enumerate graphics adapters and the supported display modes, select buffer formats, share graphics resources between processes, and present the frames rendered to the displays.The Direct3D 10 graphics architecture is the introduction of DXGI, which takes care of these low-level tasks, and it is a separation from the Direct3D runtime.
scRGB is a wide color gamut RGB color space created by Microsoft and HP that uses the same color primaries and white/black points as the sRGB color space but allows coordinates below zero and greater than one. The full range is −0.5 through just less than +7.5. Negative numbers enables scRGB to encompass most of the CIE 1931 color space while maintaining simplicity and backward compatibility with sRGB by not changing the primary colors. However this means approximately 80% of the scRGB color space consists of imaginary colors. Numbers greater than 1.0 allow high dynamic range images to be represented, though the dynamic range is less than other formats.
Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft Windows. It was released to manufacturing on November 8, 2006, and over the following two months, it was released in stages to business customers, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and retail channels. On January 30, 2007, it was released internationally and was made available for purchase and download from the Windows Marketplace; it is the first release of Windows to be made available through a digital distribution platform. Development of Windows Vista began in 2001 under the codename "Longhorn"; originally envisioned as a minor successor to Windows XP, it gradually included numerous new features from the then-next major release of Windows codenamed "Blackcomb", after which it was repositioned as a major release of Windows, and it subsequently underwent a period of protracted development that was unprecedented for Microsoft. Most new features were prominently based on a new presentation layer codenamed Avalon, a new communications architecture codenamed Indigo, and a relational storage platform codenamed WinFS — all built on the .NET Framework; however, this proved to be untenable due to incompleteness of technologies and ways in which new features were added, and Microsoft reset the project in 2004. Many features were eventually reimplemented after the reset, but Microsoft ceased using managed code to develop the operating system. New features of Windows Vista include a graphical user interface and visual style referred to as Windows Aero; a content index and desktop search platform called Windows Search; new peer-to-peer technologies to simplify sharing files and media between computers and devices on a home network; and new multimedia tools such as Windows DVD Maker. Windows Vista included version 3.0 of the .NET Framework, allowing software developers to write applications without traditional Windows APIs. There are major architectural overhauls to audio, display, network, and print sub-systems; deployment, installation, servicing, and startup procedures are also revised. It is the first release of Windows built on Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing initiative and emphasized security with the introduction of many new security and safety features such as BitLocker and User Account Control. General reception to Windows Vista was mixed; while the design quality and addition of new features earned positive reception, Windows Vista was the subject of frequent criticism and negative press review. Criticism of Windows Vista focused on driver, peripheral, and program incompatibility; digital rights management; excessive authorization from the new User Account Control; inordinately high system requirements when contrasted with Windows XP; its protracted development; longer boot time; and more restrictive product licensing. Windows Vista deployment and satisfaction rates were consequently lower than those of Windows XP, and it is considered a market failure; however, its use surpassed Microsoft's pre-launch two-year-out expectations of achieving 200 million users (with an estimated 330 million users by 2009). Two service packs were released, in 2008 and 2009 respectively. Windows Vista was succeeded by Windows 7 in 2009, and on October 22, 2010, Microsoft ceased retail distribution of Windows Vista; OEM supply ceased a year later. Mainstream support for Windows Vista ended on April 10, 2012, and extended support ended on April 11, 2017.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →The Greenwood District.
