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No More Leap Second?
WerewulfX writes "CNN reports: "In a phenomenon that has scientists puzzled, the Earth is right on schedule for a fifth straight year." Update yeah, this is a repost. Whatever- it's a holiday. Nothing else to post :)
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Are they going to post this story? Damn....
Here.
I sent an email about that and nobody cared...
Ack - no more extra second to sleep in!!!
does it matter?
Those poor souls who are born on that second aren't going to have a birthday. T_T
Slashdot dupes are, as always, right on time!
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the dupe second?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
MORONS!
This is a dupe. Not only that, I emailed about this being a dupe, 10 minutes before it went live.
TEN MINUTES!
Not only does Slashdot not even bother to correctly check for dupes, they don't even read their email that says "YOUR UPCOMING STORY IS A DUPE!".
Just what is the "email the editor if you see a problem with this story" link for, then, anyhow?
Just for the hell of it?
BAH!
...but the dupes keep on coming! We'll always have the dupes. You can't take that away.
This proves that the Earth is NOT female.
two days behind
Who says that the extra second wasn't just deja vu? I know that I could have sworn I saw this post before.
I would have been funny if they posted a dupe
one second after the original post...
Setec Astronomy
The Earth has the uncanny ability to heal itself.
must've been posted the first time on the leap second, so it no longer exists and had to be reposted.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Slashdot isn't that complex of a site. You'd think that someone could take that extra 10 brain cycles a day to weed out dupes. Quality is just going downhill lately. When it's not a dupe, it's yet another boring SCO story.
Any suggestions on a sucessor to slashdot?
+1 Insightful
So, does this mean that the acceleration of the earth has changed, and if so, does that that mean we will continue to slow? If we do slow, won't the gravity of the sun effect out orbit? Will we see more el ninjo effects, or other wierd phenomenon? One second could be a big deal.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Many happy reposts...
Reading Slashdot? Checking stories to see if they've been posted? Reading emails from paying subscribers about stories being duplicates? No, of course not. This is Slashdot.
Karma Whore! I can't believe that people still think that large sites like CNN will become slashdotted. It shows ignorance on your part and it infuriates me to see duplicate posts of an article. Your post was not helpful. Save the whoring for a time when a server really is in jeopardy.
We're only gonna die from our own arrogance, that's why we might as well take our time...
any post that cricizes the crappy job the editors do around here, especially for paying subscribers is CENSORED.
this should be modded up so that the truth is known and the lies exposed
Slashdot Dupes Another Story; baffles Readers Everywhere.
nothing.can.stop.me.now
And the giant flood of lame-ass posts about dupes is right on time too.
Glad I could read about duplicate stories 117 fucking times.
10 Bits= $.25
100 Bits= $.50
110 Bits= $.75
1000 Bits= 1 byte
...with repeating patterns of the message '2.' It has lead me to the shocking conclusion that Slashdot might be caught in an endlessly repeating time loop. I'm not crazy! What can we do about it?
In what has completely baffled geeks and nerds of the world, CmdrTaco has proven once again for the nth straight year that he can post duplicate stories right on time.
2 /3 0/2317231
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/1
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
Scientists have known about this leap second since the early 70s. So there has been atomic clocks made that take leap seconds into account. If my calculations are correct, doesn't this mean that there may be atomic clocks around that contain 5 extra seconds?
Calm down... breathe... Think happy thoughts.
there, isn't that better?
Exactly how do they figure out where the Earth is supposed to be down to a given second?
I understand Atomic clocks and how they work - but I don't understand how scientists can deduce where the earth should be to the exact second and correct it as such.
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
Where's JC Denton when you need him!?
The fact he seemed to have got so upset is ridiculous!
Feeding the trolls only encourages them. Perhaps something like a 'super offensive' troll rating should be introduced so when modded to the extent a post was a 'super troll' the IP address would be logged somewhere publically available, that way even ACs wouldn't get around it.
Just a thought.
Although OT, I do not post AC, but have disabled my karma-bonus.
karma karma karma karma karma chameleon, you come and go, you come and go.
And I only had 107,993 years left before my nefarios plan to come to work a half-hour late every day.
the dupe was an intentional one to get slashdot on the front of google news?
That CmdrTaco is the first-duper of 2004? No..
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
...or some such is messing with the cesium. Maybe the atomic clocks are wrong.
this article is soooo last year
Traditionally, a byte is "only" 8 bits. A nibble, is 4 bit.
There is also something called a word, I guess its 4 bytes for 32bit machines, but I am not sure of it.
Hence:
I don't think this should be that suprising. It is widely known that the moon's orbit is increasing. The effects of this is slowly causing the tides to be less severe. It is also slowing the earth's rotation. Eventually the moon will be in orbit around the equator, and there will be no more tide. I think there might be a good chance that the loss of the leap second could be related to this.
Don't waste time... procrastinate now!
Spare me please. You all are the biggest bunch of need-something-to-whine-about babies I have seen in a good long time. So what if something was double posted? It takes half a second to scan the headline and realize that its a repeat. You take more time crawling all over each other to be the first to whine/complain/joke about the repeated story. For God sakes, ignore the post if your time is so precious! "HELLO? What is the problem? I doubt I'll donate to Slashdot again!" That is the saddest sentence I have ever had the misfortune of reading. Slashdot pours all kinds of blessings upon us geeks daily and you refuse to contribute BECAUSE A STORY WAS REPEATED? GOD FORBID! Burn them at the stake! They have wasted your precious half of a second! Seriously folks, cry me a river.
i'm bad with physics, but i guess the sun's mass isn't constant over time, which can cause such effects that the planet earth's orbit will change. or have the other planets in our solar system changed somehow? or something like this. anyone smarter try to explain this?
It is true that people have been getting fatter. Blame McDoanlds for slowing down the Earth's spin. Class action lawsuit
And all that energy to matter conversion has increased the mass of the Earth. Which has increased its gravatational field, and the effects of everything elses field on it. Thus the earth is moving faster.
Or possibly space dust.
To be sure, this is merely that there was no leap second yesterday. Slashdot has previously seen another story about the possibility that leap seconds might be discontinued permanently. Within the confines of that are links to everything that you could ever want to know about leap seconds, earth rotation, history of internecine wars between astronomers and physicists about time, etc.
If you shift mass from the mid latitutes to penguin country, the earth speeds up. Software = orderliness = Gibbs Free Energy = a tiny bit of mass. So the only way we can get leap seconds back is for Windows not only to bloat, but to give value for bloat. Otherwise, we may have to have a negative leap second. Is there a word for this? Say, a pael second.
If I cut and paste all of the insightful, interesting, etc. comments from the previous dupe, will I get free karma?
True story.
The CNN article suggests that the speed of rotation around the sun behaves "strange".
most scientists agree the Earth's orbit around the sun has been gradually slowing for millennia.
But IMHO what can be changed by tidal, climatic geophysical effects is the speed of the rotatation about its own axis (leap seconds are introduced to correct the duration of the day, not the year).
Unfortunately CNN did not provide any way to comment/correct their article.
"It all depends" - a bit is the only constant here across platforms - a binary digit that can hold one of two possible values. There have been machines with 9-bit bytes (DEC PDPs), 16-bit words, 36-bit words and so on. Some obscure languages have been devised around base 3 representation ("trits"?) and people experimented with trinary logic in the early days of computing.
"The slave who knows his master's will and does not get ready...will be be beaten with many blows."Luke 12:47-48
If the Earth is assumed to be a homogeneous sphere and the rotational axis is assumed to be the straight line passing through the north and south geographic poles, the moment of inertia of the Earth is I = MR^2 where M is the total mass of the Earth and R is its radius. The kinetic energy of a rotating Earth is given by K = 1/2 I w^2, where w is the angular velocity.
The energy associated with an angular velocity which is increased by 1 second over a year is equivalent to an extra 1.6e22 Joules of energy or 40 times the annual energy consumption of mankind (DoE 1999). A detailed analysis and matlab script are available here
Yeah, this is a rereply. Whatever. It's a holiday. Nothing else to reply to.
Michael.
Linux : Mac
But haven't you seen their new advertising campaign? They've reformed! Everyone likes AOL now, even Snoop Dogg!
I personally expected them to give up on their CDs a while ago, but there's no accounting for marketing...
True story.
If a slashdot post is duped within the leap second does the world implode?
haha crying bitch
So true Cmdr.
Why people complain about it is beyond me. Duplication of effort is a tradition in the open source world! Plus, I've already wasted more than 30 earth-orbit-leap-seconds posting this.
You think anybody really gives a fuck about all the dead sandniggers? GNAA sucks balls, too. Didn't you see how bad their bitch asses got whipped in the FP challenge on Monday? TK fucked them in their gay nigger asses.
Update yeah, this is a repost. Whatever- it's a holiday. Nothing else to post
Sure there is. You could post about how the Stardust probe is about to enter a comet's tail, or perhaps India's plans for a hypersonic plane, or even the chnaging face of offshore programming...
Off-the-cuff curiosity question and yes, at risk of appearing ignorant, but what better way to start out the new year? Is it possible that for 28 years we added a second even though only, say, .93 second was needed and now, for five years, no full second is needed? A second is a pretty big full unit of time for the calculation to always come out even.
From the article: "Possible explanations include the tides, weather and changes in the Earth's core, he said."
IANA physics expert, but all these things happen within the earth which is a closed system. Why the hell would they have an impact on the speed of rotation of the earth around the Sun?
Someone's overclocking the Matrix!
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
This ranks right up there with the folks that were supposed to prevent 9/11 and with doctors that let people die just because they have injuries too serious to fix! Dupes on Slashdot SHOULD ruin everyone's day - neigh - LIFE!!! Editors on Slashdot that allow dupes on a holiday should be shot, burned, and their ashes scattered over the local sewage treatment plant. This is seriously a serious situation. A free (unless you're a subscriber) service that posts a duplicate story. I think we should outright boycott this damn site until they get things right! Or, we could maybe - just maybe - calm the hell down a little. Do YOU sit in front of your email client 24/7? If you do, get a life, but I bet some of you sleep sometimes, eat other times and MAYBE even go out with friends once in a while - especially around the holidays. I see this kind of hyper-reactivity a lot on Slashdot. I'd be willing to bet a whole lot of money that each and every one of you has made a mistake at some point in your lives. If not, you're either still in college (where you are never, ever wrong and only other people mess things up) or you get paid a whole shitload of money since you're perfect. Why is this such a big deal, anyway? Skip it and move on...
"Announcing new Nabisco Trits (TM)"
Also try the Cheese Trits and Cool Ranch Trits
Unknown host pong.
Well the earth is on time due to the massively successful launching into space of all the world's boy bands and all that casts of all the reality shows.
I mean NASA did actually get that done right?
Trits are for kids!
http://news.google.com/url?ntc=04SD0&q=http://scie nce.slashdot.org/science/04/01/01/202208.shtml%3Ft id%3D134
A few things can cause this, but the most likely is that we're about to crash into the sun. There have been fluctuations in the molten iron core, possibly signaling a magnetic pole reversal. There have been some unprecedented major solar storms recently. The number of reality and confrontational talk shows on television is now greater than all other programming combined. This is surely a signal of the Apocalypse.
I have searched for it on google and it has nothing to do with ADD..?
CNN Says:
For 28 years, scientists repeated the procedure [of adding a leap second]. But in 1999, they discovered the Earth was no longer lagging behind.
Um, not exactly true. Not every year over the last 28 years has had a leap second. For example, 1984, 1986 and 1987 didn't have a leap second. It's generally determined if a leap second is necessary about 6 months ahead of time by IERS. However, this is the first 5 year gap of no leap seconds.
It's interesting to note that the "leap second protocol" permits a "reverse" leap second - meaning a "short" minute. This is because the folks involved in defining the leap second realized that the rotation of the earth is not 100% predictable, and therefore they theorized that there could be a "fast spinning year" that would merit the loss of a second. This hasn't happened yet.
This whole rotation-of-earth-isn't-constant idea is pretty new (50 years). So just because we have a 5 year period of smaller rotaional speed deltas isn't totally unexpected.
How many idiots are going to say "repost!"
Honestly, you guys are about as creative as a metronome.
No great science expertise here, but the article mentions that they have to deal with discrepancies between the atomic clock and the earths orbit around the sun by using leap seconds.
Out of curiousity, how do they know for sure that the atomic clock doesn't change over time, as opposed to the earth's orbit? Isn't it possible for the cesium decay (or whatever it is they use) to fluctuate a little bit?
Actually, not only is the article a dupe, but I just saw the old article linked on google news!
My new year's prediction: this article, having found a niche, will be continually resubmitted by clueless slashdot readers, reposted, and picked up by automated news services in a never-ending cycle of google-reader-slashdot that will ultimately threaten the very fabric of the internet itself!!
Hey. It's as plausible of any other prediction I've read today...
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
...that we're fast? How do we know the rest of the universe isn't slowing down?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Just maybe, the rest of the universe has moved? It's not wallpaper, you know...
Spare me please. You all are the biggest bunch of need-something-to-whine-about babies I have seen in a good long time. So what if something was double posted? It takes half a second to scan the headline and realize that its a repeat. You take more time crawling all over each other to be the first to whine/complain/joke about the repeated story. For God sakes, ignore the post if your time is so precious! "HELLO? What is the problem? I doubt I'll donate to Slashdot again!" That is the saddest sentence I have ever had the misfortune of reading. Slashdot pours all kinds of blessings upon us geeks daily and you refuse to contribute BECAUSE A STORY WAS REPEATED? GOD FORBID! Burn them at the stake! They have wasted your precious half of a second! Seriously folks, cry me a river.
hate titty pee colon slash slash
Nancy Lieder is going to have a field day with this?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I was on a committe at NIST that analyzed this issue. Basically leap seconds are compensatory measures taken by government (mainly scientists) to keep time running the way it does. The system of hours/minutes/seconds we have set up is quite arbitrary and so this doesn't really affect it critically, but even a fraction of a second can impact our lives in the strangest of ways. (Our biological clocks, bird migration patterns...) NIST wields quite a bit of power, if you think about it.
Every time you bother to suggest something to CmdrTaco, he'll either never reply or respond with a really nasty, sarcastic e-mail.
Taco really abhors change that isn't his. Especially if it's something that's already implemented elsewhere (i.e., Kuro5hin), they'll claim it "doesn't scale well."
Slashdot is behind the times. Its userbase has become a joke of groupthink and trolls, and the editors don't even read their links or posted stories anymore. It still has the momentum of a large fanbase, however, which just increases the stupidity because we have all these mistakes happening in front of a huge readership.
"Sufferin' succotash."
I'm not following the parent post, but it is a dead news day.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
should be modded as redundant.
To make the world's official time agree with where the Earth actually is in space, scientists in 1972 started adding an extra "leap second" on the last day of the year.
"Where earth actually is in space"?
As HopeOS said when the previous article was posted:
"Leap seconds, as pointed out, are an entirely different beast, and are meant to shore up the discrepency between our actual rotation and the atomic clocks we use."
That's why. This has nothing to do with rotations around our sun, just around our own axis.
At the National Institute for Science and Technology in Boulder, spokesman Fred McGehan said most scientists agree the Earth's orbit around the sun has been gradually slowing for millennia.
Assuming this is true and this is the actual news here, the reporter (and the writer of the other article) shouldn't have started talking about leap seconds in the first place since these aren't added to compensate for that.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
"At the National Institute for Science and Technology in Boulder, spokesman Fred McGehan said most scientists agree the Earth's orbit around the sun has been gradually slowing for millennia. But he said they don't have a good explanation for why it's suddenly on schedule."
"Orbit around the sun" doesn't sound like they are talking about rotation to me.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
What it says in the subject.
Perhaps. In terms of Physics, every time a spacecraft/probe uses a planet to get a gravity-assist (to conserve fuel, etc), the planet's rotation slows by some amount. Like 1 foot per 1 trillion years.
So maybe all our Earth-based gravity assists for all the probes, shuttles, and satellites have collectively slowed the Earth down enough to = 1 second?
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
Obviously, the population of the planet was a victim of alien abduction during this "mising second."
tits?
blame the terrorists! ghastly move changing the royation of the earth on it's axis - clever foes be they.
It is all the space debris we've dropped off in space. They made use lighter and now we're spinning right on track :)
Most of the dupes are Taco's. For him to take your suggestions would require Taco to actually read his own website... which he's never shown any evidence of doing.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Particularly, the monsoon season I believe has the largest effect, particularly because the generated winds impact the himalayan mountains.
The combination of a large (albeit distributed) force impacting a large object (himalayas) affects the angular velocity of the earth.
I learned this first because a friend was writing an ephermeris program and got in contact with the guy an NIST who tracks these things. I beleive they can make some predictions of change in rotational velocity based on the force of observed storms.
Also the Navy has built an array of (radio or laser, I forget) interferrometers located in (I believe) the rocky mountains which are used to measure the actual variances against star positions.
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
Is a re-reply.
Yeah. It's the new-year.
Nothing new to reply.
When (greater) Sweden was going to change from Julian to Gregorian calendar they stuffed it up, got one day out of sync with all Julian countries, so to get back in sync they added an extra leap day, creating the only 30th Feb in history.
They eventually made the change from Julian in 1753 by having (gregorian) 1st Mar 1753 after (julian) 17 Feb 1753 removing ten days.
Makes a leap second seem a bit insignificant....
If you have no idea about Julian (as in Ceasar) and Gregorian (as in pope) calendars, have a look here
And you're one of those trolls. How the hell this got modded as insightful instead of offtopic (as it is) is something only the crack smoking moderators can answer.
Isn't there some pesky law about action/reaction? Isn't the Earth a closed system? How then can an Earthly force affect the Earth? Isn't that a little like picking yourself up by your bootstraps?
Just because there are people studying some 'self proclaimed' phenomenon doesn't mean that the phenomenon exists. Ever hear of "Publish or Perish" and government grants? That's what makes the impossible merely costly.
Happy New Year
Keeper of the terrible karma ---
find me one single creditable published article refuting the science behind global warming. there is a massive, massive consensus in the scientific community about this, only tin foil hat slashdot trolls like you are blind to this.
Yeah, whatever. What a moron.
magnetic pole flipping around?
-- No sig for you!
Possible explanations include the tides, weather and changes in the Earth's core, he said.
I can see how these things could affect the spin around the Earths axis. For example, melting glaciers would tend to speed up the spin because of the mass getting closer to the Earth's center like a skater pulling her arms in. But how can they affect the rotation around the Sun?
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
Yes, you can change rotational velocity in a closed system:
Repeat as needed to accelerate rotational velocity. The effect is more pronounced if done while holding small barbells, and it even works for astronauts in free-fall.
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
Well it's called bootstrapping for a reason ;-) And yes this amounts to someone's job but its more useful (necessary) than your post suggests.
Anyhow no, this is not bogus, here roughly was my friend's conversation with the guy at NIST:
Engineer How do you calculate spatial position (exactly)?
....
NIST Obviously first we know precession and nutation, these are easily predictable.
Engineer So that's exact, the whole story?
NIST No, there are some additional varriations.
Engineer What are those?
NIST That's my job
I don't know what was discussed about tides etc
discussion of effects of e.g. monsoon -> himalayas
It shouldn't be too hard to think why this is useful. A one second error in time frame of reference can result in a .24 nautical mile (444 meter) navigational meter.
When doing offshore navigation manually by sextant of course this might be acceptable, it's damned hard to shoot a LOP to better than a half mile accuracy anyway. However GPS obviously is intended to be accurate down to a few meters.
Whether or not you agree that the ability to drop weapons at precise locations is important, the military certainly does consider it to be so( remember, that a conventional weapon dropped with meter-accuracy can be more effective than a far more expensive nuclear munition if dropped with say 200 meter accuracy.
Because the variations we're discussing have matierial impact on precision navigation which is probably how they found out that some of the larger variations are generated by monsoon and other 'large' weather patterns. I find it interesting whether or not it's useful but that's how science often is: someone cares about a phenomenon, usually for a practical reason, and often the answer is not what was expected (i.e. it's science).
And not it's probably not even a fully closed system. at some scale the solar wind must act to provide friction against the atmosphere which in turn transmits the resultant shear forces to the globe and how those forces are transmitted in turn would depend on global weather patterns.
Personally I see value, not pork-barrel cost in tools which allow the military to fulfill it's mission with weapons involving far less collateral damage than would be otherwise possible.
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
Yeah, OK, I understand all that. The tides are a gravitational effect of the moon - that's outside the Earth so of course the Earth can be effected. Ditto for the solar wind.
My skepticism was about weather, such as monsoons, having a rotational effect on the Earth. My comments, vis-a-vis government grants to effectively go snipe hunting, was to do with just that: Earth originated phenomena effecting it's rotation.
Calculating special position is necessary and tricky as well; remember that the stars are also moving!
It is also my understanding that leap-seconds were an artifact of atomic clocks and has been discontinued due to the disruptions they were having on the scientific community and navigation in general. The atomic clocks, you see, are more accurate than the Earth; what are we trying to measure after all?
That's $0.02 more.
Keeper of the terrible karma ---
I thought redundancy was a big movement in the systems biz. Maybe this story is in case the first one disappears. They are mirrored!
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
You're confusing bytes with words. Words vary, but I don't think bytes do as much. There may have been some weirdos but most people measure words in terms of bytes, which are almost invariably octects these days. So, when you say bytes and words in the same sentence above, you're confusing people who don't already know what you're talking about. some words are 2 bytes, some words are 1 byte, but in both cases byte still means octet.
The earth isn't closed, theres that pesky sun out there which causes all the weather on earth.
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
I've now read a few of your other posts and seen that you have a bit of mistrust of government spending, not a bad thing in and of itself. However in this case as in many others the assumption that something is unwarranted leads to erroneous conclusions.
I'm reminded of the US Senator who used to hand out the 'Golden Fleece' awards standing before congress waiving a swatch of Kevlar(tm) and complaining that it was not an effective armor for battleships. Great soundbite, smart politics, stupid and wrong point.
It is also my understanding that leap-seconds were an artifact of atomic clocks and has been discontinued .... The atomic clocks, you see, are more accurate than the Earth; what are we trying to measure after all?
We already established that, we're establishing the frame of reference with a degree of accuracy necessary to hit a target with meter-accuracy. Because CEP directly limits the effectiveness of weaponry (each time you reduce the target-delivery error by half you increase the payload effectiveness by a factor of 4). I would think that someone with military experience would grok this.
Before even considering the political advantages of being able to use conventional weapons for tasks that used to require tactical nukes, the direct savings of lives and money is obviously paid off by the ability to use smaller payloads.
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
because there is the Sun pouring energy to the earth every second.
So it is not strictly a bootstrap argument.
No, you're the one who is confused, I am afraid. Those "weirdos" you speak of were highly influential architectures from the history of computing (I'm 22 but I know my history :-) 8-bit bytes are standard on most architectures today, but there are still certain embedded platforms and the like which have non 8-bit bytes. The machine word size is typically the size of the data bus on the machine, and it is the "natural" unit of data storage on a machine - typically the amount of data it is possible to read and write in a single instruction (although, for example, i386 has vector instructions that can operate on multiple words, and likewise, FP units). So, when you term a machine a 32-bit machine, it almost invariably means that the machine word size is 32 bits. This, however, *can* differ from address sizes (i.e. pointer widths) etc.
"The slave who knows his master's will and does not get ready...will be be beaten with many blows."Luke 12:47-48
Modern processors tend toward powers of two, but lots of very important hardware (including the PDP-10) used 18 or 36 bit words. Bytes tended to be either six or nine bits, depending on whether you needed to represent lowercase letters and punctuation. Thus we have C specifying that a char is at least eight bits....
Yes, I did know this but wasn't thinking about it with relation to monsoons blowing on the Himalayas. Hmmm... I'm still having trouble with the latter but I'll bow to reasonable doubt. More research needed, I wonder if I can get a grant? ;->
Keeper of the terrible karma ---
Having just seen the scifi movie "The Core", I wonder why I find this story strangely intriguing?
I was born on Feb 30, 1969. At least my fake ID says so. Funny; not one person noticed it in the five years or so I used that fake ID consistently. Not even when I asked them straight out what was wrong with the data they were looking at.
:-)
People react immediately at Feb 29 of whatever year and check if it's a leap year. Feb 30 just passes as another date.
Hell, I even have a library card using that fake ID. Even though it's been a long time since I used (or needed) the older identity, I still think it's kind of funny that nobody noticed.
Well, you've been vindicated in meta-mod, at least. Offtopic mod meta-modded as unfair. Love 604793.