Nerds: What's wrong with this Jeopardy question?

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Oct 1, 2004
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"What is resolution, Alex?"

The irony that its a shitty picture? The fact resolution is only detail and not sharpness? The fact it doesn't apply to CRTs?
 
elpmis said:
could be more of a semantics issue ... they should have said "fineness" instead of "sharpness"
those terms really have more to do with the quality of the image. sharpness and fineness both have to do more with contrast than resolution.
 
theacoustician said:
those terms really have more to do with the quality of the image. sharpness and fineness both have to do more with contrast than resolution.
websters is something like this

resolution - The fineness of detail that can be distinguished in an image, as on a video display terminal

contrast - The difference in brightness between the light and dark areas of a picture, such as a photograph or video image.

sharpness - the quality of being sharp and clear

edit: you can see where there is room for error if you don't look at resolution just by the numbers
 
elpmis said:
websters is something like this

resolution - The fineness of detail that can be distinguished in an image, as on a video display terminal

contrast - The difference in brightness between the light and dark areas of a picture, such as a photograph or video image.

sharpness - the quality of being sharp and clear

edit: you can see where there is room for error if you don't look at resolution just by the numbers
it doesn't help that manufacturer's call the same adjustments different things either.
 
What is wrong with the question? Especially if you know the target audience, it is perfectly acceptable. I've seen another that was just as incorrect, but perfectly acceptable before. The answer basically said "The number of bits in a byte," or something similar. Anybody know what is wrong with that?
 
taeric said:
What is wrong with the question? Especially if you know the target audience, it is perfectly acceptable. I've seen another that was just as incorrect, but perfectly acceptable before. The answer basically said "The number of bits in a byte," or something similar. Anybody know what is wrong with that?
While "What is 8?" is the common answer, it isn't a set thing. I've heard of machines using 4, 6, or 12 bit bytes. All a byte is, is the smallest addressable unit and the number of bits is determined by architecture. Right?
 
It isn't the smallest addressable unit, either. :) That is typically a word nowdays.

It is now pretty much 8-bits, although that is just a historical slang that has stuck. It has no physical meaning in most computers.
 
taeric said:
It isn't the smallest addressable unit, either. :) That is typically a word nowdays.

It is now pretty much 8-bits, although that is just a historical slang that has stuck. It has no physical meaning in most computers.
You can't address in bytes anymore or its just not common?
 
theacoustician said:
You can't address in bytes anymore or its just not common?

You never could address in bytes. On older machines you could address in bits, but most would have you address in words. Now, on many machines a word used to be 8 bits. Thus, bytes were addressable. On the newer stuff... I honestly don't know what they consider word length. Especially on the VLIW nature of some of the PS2 stuff.

Nibbles used to refer to the fact that a word used to be twice the width of a bus (the bus typically being 4 bits), so that you could operate on a "nibble."
 
ChikkenNoodul said:
In 8086 assembler you could address the four 16 bit general purpose registers as eight 8 bit registers (low and high), so you could work one byte at a time

How did you load the registers, though? Typically I've always seen addressing the data referring to how it is addressed in memory, not in registers.

Though, this does further point out how worthless referring to the "bit-ness" of a system is. Thank goodness we stopped that around the N64 era. :) I still rememer the debates about what the SNES was. 16 bit proc with an 8-bit bus. Then there were the subcomponents. Ah the joy. :)
 
taeric said:
How did you load the registers, though? Typically I've always seen addressing the data referring to how it is addressed in memory, not in registers.
Either directly within the code or with a pointer to a memory location.

Could do it live using debug in the DOS days :fly:

And the traditional 'char' variable type (non unicode) in C is an 8 bit value