Re: Temporal database - no end date

From: Frank Hamersley <terabitemightbe_at_bigpond.com>
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2007 12:32:41 GMT
Message-ID: <Jfnth.5205$u8.582_at_news-server.bigpond.net.au>


Marshall wrote:
[..]
> Another example of dividing the undividable:
>
> I can't think of anything more indivisible than the bit. Can't
> have less than a bit, can you? I mean, what could a third
> of a bit even mean? The very idea is ridiculous. And yet...
>
> I used to work on a system that had a character encoding
> that used 5 1/3 bits per character. That's right: five and
> one third bits for each character. 2^5.333 ~= 40.32;
> the character set consisted of 40 characters, each consuming
> about 5 1/3 bits. If you had 3 characters, that was 16 bits.
> 5 1/3 * 3 = 16.

OK - back it with enough detail to dispell all my concerns about the veracity of your claim. And please do not resort to averages.

[..]

Cheers, Frank. Received on Tue Jan 23 2007 - 13:32:41 CET

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