Abstract: A Christmas tree lawn ornament has a pole with one end attached to a base which is anchored to the ground and a connector at the top. The pole is preferably assembled from several segments. Multiple guide wires are provided with one end attached to the connector and the other end anchored to the ground in a generally circular pattern at some distance from the base of the pole. Alternatively, a single stand of guide wire can be looped from headpiece, to stake, to headpiece, and so forth in a sinusoidal pattern. Multiple light holders are attached along the guide wires to which strings of decorative lights can be attached. A decorative star or other ornament is attached atop the connector.

Abstract: A data processor has a block-multiplexed system channel coupled to a processing engine and a byte-multiplexed bus coupled to multiple I/O devices. A multi-buffer adapter transfers data by cycle-steal (direct memory access) operations between the channel and the bus. The adapter has multiple buffers switchable to the channel in a burst mode by a channel interface and to the bus in a byte mode by a device-level interface.