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From: zben@umd5.umd.edu (Ben Cranston)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Re: /dev/null: The final frontier
Message-ID: <1705@umd5.umd.edu>
Date: Mon, 25-May-87 23:21:34 EDT
Article-I.D.: umd5.1705
Posted: Mon May 25 23:21:34 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 26-May-87 05:43:10 EDT
References: <7488@brl-adm.ARPA>
Reply-To: zben@umd5.umd.edu.UUCP (Ben Cranston)
Organization: University of Maryland, College Park
Lines: 49
Summary: Bit recycling

In article <7488@brl-adm.ARPA> art@acc.arpa writes:

> Where do you think that all those bits you write to the null device came 
> from?  They are extracted from the ETHER and that is precisely where they 
> end up when written to the null device or written over in a machine register.

Yes, many people do not know this, but most modern computers have Ethernet 
interfaces, which not only communicate with other computers, but also have
a side-effect of drawing new bits from the Ether.  Thus newer computers do
not need to be loaded with zero-bits each weekend (see below).

> Some of the newer Binary Unified Gauge System (BUGS) theories predict that
> a bit with no external perturbations may spontaneously change its state.

Unfortunately experiments with 6.023 x 10^23 molecules of water in a
baggie in my basement conclusively prove that the decay of one-bits to
zero-bits proceeds so slowly that bit conversion is not a feasable way
to recycle bits.

It has been proposed that the bit-bucket hardware of most computers be
enhanced to sort the zero-bits and one-bits into separate buckets.  If
this be done, these buckets can be the source for new bits needed by the
major bit-consuming instructions of the computer, namely the shifting
instructions (note rotate instructions do not need a source of new bits).

Careful modeling and experimentation with actual computer programs shows
that "logical" shifts (those that fill with zero-bits) are much more used
than "arithmetic" shifts (those that fill with zero or one bits depending
on the sign of the quantity).  Thus computers are always running out of
zero-bits, and always have an excess of one-bits that must be removed each
weekend by customer engineering.

Those of us who are environmentally active often wonder just what happens
to those one-bits.  One "urban myth" is that they are shipped to Israel,
where not only do the bits go from right to left, but one-bits and zero-
bits are interchanged (i.e. a zero sign bit means negative, etc).   

My colleagues and I suspect that IBM has been collecting them for the 
past 20 years, and dumped them one dark night on a certain garbage barge,
which has been wandering the coast like a Flying Dutchman ever since...

OK, enough time wasted on this, M*A*S*H is on...  See ya!
("It's just a JOKE!")

-- 
Copyright 1987 Ben Cranston (you may redistribute ONLY if your recipients can).
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