Comments on: Lazy Reading for 2015/05/03

By: Andrew Reilly

Andrew Reilly — Mon, 04 May 2015 00:34:03 +0000

Cool brochure for the Cray 2, thanks! Fun to think that you could probably run a dynamic recompilation style emulator (eg qemu) on a current generation phone and still exceed all of its design parameters and peak performance. Saves 195kW into the bargain. That isn’t even considering the GPU.

By: Justin Sherrill

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 03 May 2015 22:22:07 +0000

Exactly – we might say, “What is this interesting new verbal system you have come up with and what are its rules?”, and most anyone else would say, “You are coming up with fake words because you think I’m too dumb to notice.”

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 03 May 2015 16:09:49 +0000

Now that you mention it, I can see what you mean. Although the words are indeed completely made-up, I can imagine that they might sound like made-up by a child rather than by some scientist to a native speaker’s ear. It’s certainly something I wouldn’t have noticed though, had you not pointed it out.

By: Justin Sherrill

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 03 May 2015 15:32:05 +0000

Given that counting in hexidecimal is relatively rare, and speaking the numbers out loud happens even less, making up new words to express the value doesn’t have much value. In this specific case, the words and prefixes being used make it sound like completely made-up words. The words proposed even are phonetically similar to the same phrases in English that indicate imprecision or deliberately bogus information.

Using phrases like that to anyone not familiar with it – which would be almost everyone on the planet – would give the immediate impression that you are making up names to cover a lack of knowledge. This may be more apparent to a native English speaker.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 03 May 2015 15:09:55 +0000

Why do you discourage the use of that proposed pronounciation of hexadecimal numbers? As a non-native speaker of English, my notion of weirdness in that respect may differ from yours, but the proposed words don’t sound too bad to me, although I’d propose “chickety” instead of “city” for 0xC0. Conveys a nicer sound to me, since the number of syllables harmonizes better with the other words. Admittedly, I’m also in favour of a proper use of binary prefixes [1] as suggested by several standards bodies to distinguish KB from KiB and so on.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefixes