Get ready for another exciting new series from best-selling manga creators, CLAMP (Chobits, Clover, Cardcaptor Sakura)! Chikahito Takamoto has always read about the beauty and mystique of Japan''s ancient capital city, Kyoto. Now, two years into high school, he''s finally visiting there for real. But wandering the grounds of Kyoto''s legendary Shinto shrine of Kita no Tenmangu, he chances upon a mystery that his guidebooks didn''t prepare him for - two handsome men and an attractive woman, all strangely-garbed, wielding powers...and fighting monsters!
A secondary school student's strong interest in history brings him to Kyoto, where he meets a trio who are members of the Urashichiken Hanamachi, a secret society that battles against otherworldly creatures.
The Seventh Gate is the thrilling conclusion to the New York Times bestselling Death Gate Cycle by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. In this tale of treachery, power, and heroism, Alfred, Haplo, and Marit embark on a journey of death and discovery as they seek to enter the dreaded Seventh Gate. Encountering enemies both old and new, they unleash a magic no power can control, damning themselves to an apocalypse of unimagined proportion in a final struggle between good and evil.
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Anathem, Reamde, and Cryptonomicon comes an exciting and thought-provoking science fiction epic—a grand story of annihilation and survival spanning five thousand years. What would happen if the world were ending? A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space. But the complexities and unpredictability of human nature coupled with unforeseen challenges and dangers threaten the intrepid pioneers, until only a handful of survivors remain . . . Five thousand years later, their progeny—seven distinct races now three billion strong—embark on yet another audacious journey into the unknown . . . to an alien world utterly transformed by cataclysm and time: Earth. A writer of dazzling genius and imaginative vision, Neal Stephenson combines science, philosophy, technology, psychology, and literature in a magnificent work of speculative fiction that offers a portrait of a future that is both extraordinary and eerily recognizable. As he did in Anathem, Cryptonomicon, the Baroque Cycle, and Reamde, Stephenson explores some of our biggest ideas and perplexing challenges in a breathtaking saga that is daring, engrossing, and altogether brilliant.
With the advance of semiconductors and ubiquitous computing, the use of system-on-a-chip (SoC) has become an essential technique to reduce product cost. With this progress and continuous reduction of feature sizes, and the development of very large-scale integration (VLSI) circuits, addressing the harder problems requires fundamental understanding
Microcomputers are having, and will have in the future, a significant impact on the technology of all fields of engineering. The applications of micro computers of various types that are now integrated into engineering include computers and programs for calculations, word processing, and graphics. The focus of this book is on still another objective-that of control. The forms of microcomputers used in control range from small boards dedicated to control a single device to microcomputers that oversee the operation of numerous smaller computers in a building complex or an industrial plant. The most dramatic growth in control applications recently has been in the microcom puters dedicated to control functions in automobiles, appliances, production machines, farm machines, and almost all devices where intelligent decisions are profitable. Both engineering schools and individual practicing engineers have re sponded in the past several years to the dramatic growth in microcomputer control applications in thermal and mechanical systems. Universities have established courses in computer control in such departments of engineering as mechanical, civil, agricultural, chemical and others. Instructors and students in these courses see a clear role in the field that complements that of the com puter specialist who usually has an electrical engineering or computer science background. The nonEE or nonCS person should first and foremost be com petent in the mechanical or thermal system being controlled. The objectives of extending familiarity into the computer controller are (1) to learn the char acteristics, limitations, and capabilit.
