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Saxon
built 238 days ago
Saxon is a British heavy metal band, formed in 1976 in Barnsley, Yorkshire. As leading lights in the New Wave of British Heavy Metal they had a brief period of U.K. Top 40 success in the early 1980s, and ... tasted success in Europe and Japan. They are still performing in the new millennium.
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![Saxon Very Best of Saxon [2007]](http://retrieverimages.lycos.com/images/s/a/x/saxon/i/005.gif)
Saxon was one of the early leaders of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, along with Iron Maiden and Def Leppard. The band was formed in Barnsley in 1977 by vocalist Biff Byford, guitarists Graham Oliver and Paul Quinn, bassist Steve Dawson, and drummer Pete Gill. Originally calling themselves Son of a Bitch, they soon decided to find a more subtle name, settling on Saxon.
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Saxon-SA has an advanced optimizer which recognizes joins in XPath expressions, XQuery FLOWR expressions, and in XSLT templates (nested xsl:for-each instructions). Whereas Saxon-B always implements these as nested loops, Saxon-SA uses a variety of strategies including indexes and hash joins. This can give dramatic improvements in execution time for large documents: some of the queries in the XMark benchmark improve by a factor of 300 (from 16 seconds to 45 milliseconds) to process a 10Mbyte source file.
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Saxon kicked off their bike building process, a year ago, with two man teams in cells building bikes. Each team built a bike from start to finish and they produced eight bikes a week. Saxon bikes began to sell and the crew sensed a need for elevated numbers. The Saxon partners hired John Bishopp, with a vast 17-year background in the auto industry. John grew up in engineering, program management, to become a product line director and ultimately the director of operations for an automotive plant.
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Saxon's popularity had been in decline since about 1983. As part of his program, Goldsmith wanted to try and restore their popularity and cement their reputation as a great band once again. He claimed their music was just like Iron Maiden's and they should have similar levels of success (Iron Maiden are one of the top selling heavy metal acts of all time). He went on a 6 month make over of Saxon, including their look, sound and stage set. He drafted in two new producers to overlook the production of the new single If I Was You (a song about gun culture), which went straight to number one of the Rock Charts in over 10 countries (becoming their most successful single for over 12 years).
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Although Saxon 6.5.x has proved highly stable, there was demand for a maintenance release that incorpated published fixes. This release is produced by Michael Kay of Saxonica Limited, with generous support from Crane Softwrights Limited, specialists in XML, XSLT, and XSL-FO training.
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Saxon