When we wrote the words you are now reading, we were typing on the best computers that technology now offers: machines that are terribly wasteful of energy and slow when tackling important scientific calculations. And they are typical of every computer that exists today, from the smartphone in your hand to the multimillion-dollar supercomputers humming along in the world's most advanced computing facilities.
We were writing in Word, a perfectly fine program that you probably use as well. To write “When we wrote the words you are now reading,” our computer had to move a collection of 0's and 1's—the machine representation of a Word document—from a temporary memory area and send it to another physical location, the central processing unit (CPU), via a bunch of wires. The processing unit transformed the data into the letters that we saw on the screen. To keep that particular sentence from vanishing once we turned our computer off, the data representing it had to travel back along that bunch of wires to a more stable memory area such as a hard drive.
*You must have purchased this issue or have a qualifying subscription to access this content
Chomsky: We Are All – Fill in the Blank.
This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service - if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at http://ift.tt/jcXqJW.
No comments:
Post a Comment