14 Mar
2005
14 Mar
'05
6:06 p.m.
Off topic:
What's really interesting is that the conversation below earned a rating of
two chilli peppers from my mail program for possible offensive language! I
looked hard for cuss words, naughty bits, rude implications, etc. and
didn't see any. The message it is in reply to didn't earn any chillies.
Hmmm....
At 01:56 PM 3/14/2005 -0800, you wrote:
On Mon, 14 Mar 2005, Eric Smith wrote:
[Computing] A successful tool is one that was used to do something
undreamed of by its author. --S. C. Johnson
--... ...-- -.. . -. ----. --.- --.- -...
tpeters at nospam.mixcom.com (remove "nospam") N9QQB (amateur radio)
"HEY YOU" (loud shouting) WEB ADDRESS http//www.mixweb.com/tpeters
43? 7' 17.2" N by 88? 6' 28.9" W, Elevation 815', Grid Square
EN53wc
WAN/LAN/Telcom Analyst, Tech Writer, MCP, Cisco Certified CCNA
Any size from 0 to 36 bits.
Yeah, why is everyone so hung up on defining "byte"? It's not like
it's part of some natural order. It's whatever the designers made
up off the top of their head for some particular task.
It's utterly arbitrary. There's varied interaction with the
'character' unit over time, but the two are not the same.
Sometimes they coincide; often they do not.
And with UNICODE, who cares any more? Byte don't mean shit no
more, it's just an historic leftover.
* When you ask how many bits in a byte, you have to ask "for what
machine?".
6-bit characters encompass the old ITA2 (aka "baudot") teleprinter
codes, which were five bits (*) plus a state maintained in
parallel in both sender and receiver (aka FIGS and LTRS). Five
bits fits the roman alphabet 26 letters plus a few punctuation
characters.
(*) Rarely did anyone people before approx. WWII consider the five
time intervals that make up the data portion of a
telegraph/teletype character to be "bits". That's a modern
interpretation.