Sonic

Sonic or Sonic may refer to:

Companies

Music

Science and technology

Sonic the Hedgehog (series)

Sonic the Hedgehog (ソニック・ザ・ヘッジホッグ, Sonikku za Hejjihoggu) is a video game franchise created and owned by Sega. The franchise centers on a series of speed-based platform games, but several are spin-offs in different genres. The protagonist of the series is an anthropomorphic blue hedgehog named Sonic, whose peaceful life is often interrupted by the series's main antagonist, Doctor Eggman. Typically, Sonic—usually along with some of his friends, such as Tails, Amy, and Knuckles—must stop Eggman and foil any plans of world domination. The first game in the series, published in 1991, was conceived by Sega's Sonic Team division after Sega requested a mascot character; the title was a success and spawned sequels, and transformed Sega into a leading video game company during the 16-bit era in the early to mid-1990s.

Sonic Team has since developed many titles in the franchise. Prominent members of its initial staff included Naka, character designer Naoto Ohshima, and level designer Hirokazu Yasuhara. Other developers of Sonic games have included Japanese Dimps, American Sega Technical Institute, Backbone Entertainment, Big Red Button Entertainment, and Sanzaru Games, Canadian BioWare, and British Sumo Digital and Traveller's Tales. While the first games in the series were side-scrolling platform games, the series has expanded into other genres such as action-adventure, fighting, racing, role-playing, and sports. Including packaged game software and downloads, the franchise has sold 335 million units as of April 2015, with the mobile game Sonic Dash being downloaded over 100 million times by June 2015, making it one of the best-selling video game franchises of all time.

Sonic the Hedgehog (2006 video game)

Sonic the Hedgehog (ソニック・ザ・ヘッジホッグ, Sonikku za Hejjihoggu) is a 2006 platform video game developed by Sonic Team and published by Sega for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The game primarily allows the player to use Sonic, Shadow and Silver across several stages. Other secondary characters also become playable across the game. The plot follows Sonic's quest to protect Princess Elise after she is kidnapped by his rival Dr. Eggman and is aided by new and returning allies.

The game shares its name with two earlier Sonic games, a manga, a television series, a comic book series, and their eponymous main character. To disambiguate, the game has been referred to as Sonic '06. It was produced in commemoration of the 15th anniversary of the Sonic the Hedgehog series. The game faced multiple issues during development, which resulted in rushing the product despite existing bugs. Both versions were heavily criticized for long loading times, poor camera system, gameplay glitches, complicated plot and sloppy character control.

DATA (band)

DATA were an electronic music band created in the late 1970s by Georg Kajanus, creator of such bands as Eclection, Sailor and Noir (with Tim Dry of the robotic/music duo Tik and Tok). After the break-up of Sailor in the late 1970s, Kajanus decided to experiment with electronic music and formed DATA, together with vocalists Francesca ("Frankie") and Phillipa ("Phil") Boulter, daughters of British singer John Boulter.

The classically orientated title track of DATA’s first album, Opera Electronica, was used as the theme music to the short film, Towers of Babel (1981), which was directed by Jonathan Lewis and starred Anna Quayle and Ken Campbell. Towers of Babel was nominated for a BAFTA award in 1982 and won the Silver Hugo Award for Best Short Film at the Chicago International Film Festival of the same year.

DATA released two more albums, the experimental 2-Time (1983) and the Country & Western-inspired electronica album Elegant Machinery (1985). The title of the last album was the inspiration for the name of Swedish pop synth group, elegant MACHINERY, formerly known as Pole Position.

Data (word)

The word data has generated considerable controversy on if it is a singular, uncountable noun, or should be treated as the plural of the now-rarely-used datum.

Usage in English

In one sense, data is the plural form of datum. Datum actually can also be a count noun with the plural datums (see usage in datum article) that can be used with cardinal numbers (e.g. "80 datums"); data (originally a Latin plural) is not used like a normal count noun with cardinal numbers and can be plural with such plural determiners as these and many or as a singular abstract mass noun with a verb in the singular form. Even when a very small quantity of data is referenced (one number, for example) the phrase piece of data is often used, as opposed to datum. The debate over appropriate usage continues, but "data" as a singular form is far more common.

In English, the word datum is still used in the general sense of "an item given". In cartography, geography, nuclear magnetic resonance and technical drawing it is often used to refer to a single specific reference datum from which distances to all other data are measured. Any measurement or result is a datum, though data point is now far more common.

Data URI scheme

The data URI scheme is a uniform resource identifier (URI) scheme that provides a way to include data in-line in web pages as if they were external resources. It is a form of file literal or here document. This technique allows normally separate elements such as images and style sheets to be fetched in a single Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request, which may be more efficient than multiple HTTP requests. Data URIs are sometimes referred to incorrectly as "data URLs". As of 2015, data URIs are fully supported by most major browsers, and partially supported in Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge.

Syntax

The syntax of data URIs was defined in Request for Comments (RFC) 2397, published in August 1998, and follows the URI scheme syntax. A data URI consists of: