Tags / 11 quotes from 5 sources
#bits
A Third Industrial Revolution | The Economist
Digital manufacturing as a third industrial revolution
Everything in the factories of the future will be run by smarter software. Digitisation in manufacturing will have a disruptive effect every bit as big as in other industries that have gone digital, such as office equipment, telecoms, photography, music, publishing and films…
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
What 32-bit machines mean
You can begin to see why we refer to 64- and 32-bit machines to describe or classify computers—this corresponds naturally to the base two numbers. A 32-bit machine uses 32 bits to identify each address in its memory. This can also refer to the set of wires that connects the…
Shannon and the birth of the bit
A binary digit can be in one of two states. And this is the basis of the “bit”—which is a shortening of “binary digit”: 0 or 1. The information contained in a bit is a measure of how likely it is that the digit is one or zero. With all the talk about infinity so far, it should…
The sentence that invented bits
the sentence that is responsible for the conceptual framework that gave rise to computing. Shannon writes, “If the base 2 is used the resulting units may be called binary digits, or more briefly bits.”
True and false as mere convention
Returning to infinity, it turns out that there is at least a conceptual relationship between the infinity of values between one and zero, and the infinity of values that voltage can have on a computer switch. The binary logic that underlies the computer is an approximation of…
Ones and zeros mean nothing to the computer
From an electrical engineering perspective, the messy stuff in between one and zero does travel down wires, through chips, and in packets. Computer switches are actually not either on or off. Both physically and electrically, computer switches, transistors, or logic circuits…
Circuit designers chase steep voltage jumps
Circuit designers try to make the voltage jump as fast as possible from Logical Zero to Logical One by making the
The Logical ½ behind computer glitches
function represented by the sloping line in the grey area very steep. Nevertheless, in practice the line between one and zero is actually rather fuzzy. This situation recurs on every circuit, which means that at any point in the computer’s processors, a Logical ½ signal can be…
Digital Hhermeneutics
Digital ontology
Digital hermeneutics is based on digital ontology, a concept that Michael Eldred (2001) and the author developed some years ago (Capurro 2001). What is digital ontology? Eldred writes: As long as we remain 'embedded' unquestioningly in the digital casting, everything is…
The Semantic Web: An Introduction
Why RDF rather than XML
The answer to "why use RDF rather than XML?" is quite simple, and is twofold. Firstly, the benefit that one gets from drafting a language in RDF is that the information maps directly and unambiguously to a model, a model which is decentralized, and for which there are many…
Yet Another Post About Google (not Really) Removing The Url Bar From Chrome | Smethurst
URLs stopped being identifiers and became labels
A few years back I always used to say a good URL should be three things: - Persistent - Readable - Hackable And the greatest of these was persistent. Three is a nice number and I enjoy a biblical reference or two but I’m not sure I ever really thought hackable mattered. It’s a…