Imagine standing on a very tall hill in middle of a thick forest. Your hill is tall enough to take you above the trees; when you look out over the trees, you can see for miles around you. Ahead you can see another hill sticking above the trees; this is your goal.
You want to reach that hill.
A question arises; you are asked, “How long will it take to reach yon hill? What will you need along the way?”
The ship sailed when I was moved to rant about cable news, but I originally had some idea that Sideband #32 should be another rumination on bits and binary (like Sidebands #25 and #28). After all, 32-bit systems are the common currency these days, and 32 bits jumps you from the toy computer world to the real computer world. Unicode, for example, although it is not technically a “32-bit standard,” fits most naturally in a 32-bit architecture.
When you go from 16-bit systems to 32-bit systems, your counting ability leaps from 64 K (65,536 to be precise) to 4 gig (full precision version: 4,294,967,296). This is what makes 16-bit systems “toys” (although some are plenty sophisticated). Numbers no bigger than 65 thousand (half that if you want plus and minus numbers) just don’t cut very far.
Computer Programming is hard! It’s at least as hard as what commercial architects do, and I will argue that it’s as intellectually difficult as what doctors and lawyers do.
Many people think it’s easy, because they know some nine-year-old who “programs,” but there’s a difference between fooling around with the computer and building good software applications.
Here’s the deal…
I’d planned to do this later, probably for Sideband #64, but in honor of my parents 64th wedding anniversary (2 parents, 64 years, okay!) this numerical rumination gets queue-bumped to now.
Just recently I wrote about 64-bit numbers and how 64 bits allows you to count to the (small, compared to where we’re going) number:
That’s 18 exabytes (or 18 giga-gigabyes). Just to put it into perspective, if we were counting seconds, it amounts to 584,942,417,355 years; more than 500 billion years! (That’s the American, short-scale billion.)
A long, long time ago on a USENET far, far away, I was part of a debate that started with the idea that, even if we had disk drives with 64-bit addressing, people would still fill them up with videos, images and whatnot.
The idea grew from some of us old-timers reminiscing about our first brick-sized 5-meg hard drive and how we thought, “Gee, I’ll never fill that up!” (And look how that turned out; I have single image files that wouldn’t fit on that drive!)
The premise was that, even with seriously gigantic hard drives, we’d still manage to fill them and need more, more, more…
I’ve been a computer programmer for 33 years. Some of my early work is still stored on punched paper tape! And if this computer programmer has a particular skill, it is probably in the area of debugging.
Those who know me know I suffer from a life-long hearing defect and have, thus, grown up being pretty good at figuring stuff out based on scant evidence. This is precisely one of the required skills for debugging, and let me just say that I’ve gotten very, very good at it over the last 33 years.
But for the first time, I have an actual bug in my machine. An honest-to-god, six-legged thing crawling around in my machine.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was…”
Many of you will recognize that as the first words of John 1:1 in the Christian New Testament Bible. There’s also a cross-reference to the very first words of that Bible (Old Testament in this case), “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
This is about words and about beginnings.
Others might recognize it as a conflation of the lead-in to a Moody Blues tune, OM, from In Search of the Lost Chord, and the title of a song from another album, In the Beginning, from On the Threshold of a Dream.
(Yes “album.” I’m old!)
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