Next message: Geoff Huston: "4-Byte ASNs from the perspective of the 2-Byte world"
[This isn't meant to be flippant or anything else of the kind, it's
a genuinely heartfelt thing, albeit maybe a bit off topic.]
What all things computer related has needed from day one is a way
of pronouncing ("reading out loud") hexadecimal. My first computer
was a 6502, and I've resented numbers larger than FF since then
(been working with AMD Opterons for a couple of years now, disturbing).
If you print and read in hex, you don't need dots or any other syntactic
aids, the human eye/brain can easily group the requisite number of digits,
at least for the time being.
The problem is that from and including A we can't talk about the
damned things any more -- we resort to spelling out each number, with
no inherent and natural feel for what we're taling about.
An A380 has a maximum take-off weight of around 24E (two-four-E) tonnes.
An A380 has a maximum take-off weight of around 590 (five hundred and ninety)
tonnes.
Solve that, and we don't need any new notations beyond subtle groupings,
just like we group thousands and millions in decimal notation.
- Per
