Abstract: A display device (10) is provided for displaying an article (50) of interest in a substantially opaque member (46) such as a table having a utility surface (47). The display device (10) includes a spectacle element (52) incorporated in the opaque member (46) such that the utility surface (47) is substantially uninterrupted at least in the vicinity of the spectacle element (52), and the article (50) to be displayed is capable of being placed behind the spectacle element (52), or at least partly encapsulated in the spectacle element (52), to facilitate viewing of the article (50) from the utility surface (47). A method of displaying an article interest in a substantially opaque member is also disclosed.

Abstract: A printing system for high fidelity printing of an image is provided comprising a print grid including a combination of the color black and five discrete basic ink colors, at least three colors having at least a portion of fluorescent. The printing system includes a spectrophotometer for measuring the color combination in the print grid. A plotter is used to plot readings from the spectrophotometer in CIE color space and creates a look up table based on the readings. A scanner then scans the image in RGB format and converts the scanned information into XYZ coordinates to be plotted in CIE color space. Thereafter, the scanner determines from the look up table the color combination for each scanned spot. In an exemplary embodiment, the five basic ink colors may be selected from a group of colors from the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM.RTM., while the fluorescent may be selected from a group consisting of PANTONE Fluorescents.

Abstract: A file store for use as a work-in-progress store. Each block in the store is designated as a free block, a data block, or a forget block. When it is required to write data to the file store, a data area is created, by assigning free blocks. When it is required to discard a data area, a forget block is written into the filestore, pointing to the data area, and all the data blocks in that area are freed and added to a free chain. If at least one of the blocks in the data area pointed to by a forget block is reused, the forget block is freed and added to the free chain. The file store has advantages of a serial file organization while avoiding the garbage collection problems associated with conventional serial files.

Abstract: A data processing system includes at least one transaction processing application and a plurality of data managers which can be accessed by the transaction processing application. Each data manager is responsible for managing a separate data base. The system further includes a work-in-progress store and a work-in-progress store manager for managing the work-in-progress store. Whenever the transaction processing application instructs a data manager to perform an update, the data manager passes information concerning the update to the work-in-progress store manager which records this information in the work-in-progress store, and whenever the application completes a transaction, the data managers perform updates to their respective databases and the work-in-progress store manager is instructed to discard the contents of the work-in-progress store relating to this transaction.