Thursday, March 24, 2005

(Potentially relevant link)

They had this large LCD representation of a processor. The registers were labeled 1, 2, 3, 4. . . .there was no 0.

When you told it '1+4=' it stored '1' in register 1, '+' in register 2, '4' in register 3, and '=' in register 4.

It's similar to the above link for this post. Great fun.

Pressing the 2 key alerts the microprocessor and signals the Prefetch Unit to ask the computer's main memory for a specific instruction on the new data since there is nothing about it in the Instruction Cache.
Ther user presses the the '2' key so the computer looks up the number 2 in memory?

And check out the technical glossary at the end:
DOS
An acronym for disk operating system. The term DOS can refer to any operating system, but it is most often used as a shorthand for MS-DOS (Microsoft disk operating system). Originally developed by Microsoft for IBM, MS–DOS was the standard operating system for IBM-compatible personal computers. It can apply to any /disk/ operating system. MS-DOS was not developed by Microsoft, for the most part.

gigabyte
1024 megabytes. Literally meaning one billion bytes. Abbreviated GB, Gbyte or G-byte.
Gibibyte != gigabyte.
Internet IP address
A unique number identifying each host machine on the Internet network. Also called the IP address or TCP/IP address. A numeric address such as 123.231.32.2 that the domain name server translates into a domain name
Internet Internet Protocol addresses, also called Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol Protoccol. The domain server translates from IP to domain.

navigate
To find one's way around on the World Wide Web by following hypertext links from document to document, and from computer to computer.
I have a friend who used to (~seventh grade) think that 'ambiguous' was computer term (from DOS), not a real word. I guess Intel has people thinking the same of 'navigate.

Fun!

Wednesday, March 16, 2005

(Potentially relevant link)

The 1913 edition of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary has this to say about 'Sufficience':

Suf*fi"cience (?), n.

Sufficiently.
[Obs.]
And this on 'Sufficiently':
Suf*fi"cient*ly, adv.

To a sufficient degree; to a degree that answers the purpose, or gives content; enough; as, we are sufficiently supplied with food; a man sufficiently qualified for the discharge of his official duties.
Last I checked, nouns and adjectives were rarely synonyms.

Friday, March 04, 2005

That was a fun test.

I figured I'd do quite poorly. Graduate-level Cryptography with one of the tougher professors. Yes, it was a Gopal test: a test that makes you think. I love those.

I studied more than usual, but considerably less than I should've. And the test half-killed me. I'd guess that I got a C. Or maybe a B, since he grades on a fifteen-point scale.

So I did poorly. But that's alright. I sat in that classroom with a bunch of graduate students and not one left before five+ minutes after the end of class. He finally kicked the last three of us out about twenty minutes after the class was supposed to end. And you could tell nobody was happily dotting their final 'i' and turning in their test with a cheerful 'I'm done!' No, it was clearly an 'I give up. I just don't know the answer to this question'. Nobody was on top of that test.

That was a fun test.