Background is brought to foreground in a wealth of reminiscences, interviews with surviving members, film clips from the distant past and superb concert footage from the recent past, when the reunited Funk Brothers played at Detroit's Royal Oak Music Theater behind such singers as Joan Osborne, Ben Harper, Bootsy Collins, Chaka Khan and Meshell Ndegeocello.

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As soon as you back off, say by switching off the background music and allowing your foreground process to have all the processing power (and thereby complete its task more quickly), the benefits of having a dual-core machine will become far less tangible.

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With the flash on, the camera automatically merges an image of the subject illuminated with the flash in the foreground with a separate image of the background nightscape, to produce a single, clear night photo.

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Though there is sometimes rather more background than is entirely necessary to illuminate Titian in the foreground, a sense of history differentiates this biography from academic studies, and is one of its strengths.

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Martel shoots her movie with rapt attention to faces and bodies in the foreground while the life of the hotel spins loosely in the background.

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Web Workers, for instance, is an emerging system for isolating a browser's individual tasks into separate "threads, " making it easier for a browser-based program to perform a computationally intensive task such as photo-editing in a background tab while the user is attending to something else, like e-mail, in the foreground.

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