Larry wrote,
S> Once again I have to go along with Ratman. CD's are digital storage.
For a change I'm going along with Larry, with whom I've disagreed in some
other recent threads.
The rodent had written,
r> All true. But the underlying substrate is ultimately analog, as is just
r> about any recording medium, which is the point the twice times previous
r> poster was trying to make.
Yes, but are there any media for discrete storage that couldn't have been
used for continuous data, and about which we can't say the same thing? The
underlying substrate of a CD is a cuttable medium into which a groove could
theoretically be etched representing an analog waveform, just like a phono-
graph record. But it's used to write discrete information, not continuous
information, so the medium could go either way but the storage is digital.
There's nothing amazing in that: given any particular pencil and any particu-
lar piece of paper with available space, you can use them to represent the
value eight by drawing a bar eight centimeters long or by writing the numeral
8. There is an "underlying analog medium" because within the limits of the
precision of the pencil tip and your dexterity you can darken or leave bare
any point on the page, but by choosing to write a numeral 8 (or the word
"eight" for that matter) you've used it for discrete, rather than continuous,
information. If you don't close the upper right extreme of the numeral it's
still recognizable as an 8 rather than any other digit; if you forget to dot
the `i' it's still recognizable as the word "eight" rather than any other
word. But if you try to represent it with a bar 8 cm long and you make it a
little too long or a little too short, it reports a different value.
Larry asked Jim,
S> What the hell is a weak one one or zero?
I think Jim meant "weak" as imprecise and unsure, and "strong" as highly ac-
curate and certain. In digital storage, a value of .0001 or -.0001 can be
trusted as a zero: poorly written or poorly read, perhaps both, but still a
zero; and a value of 1.0001 or .9999 can be trusted as a one. But in analog
storage .9999 could be a precise .9999 or an imprecise .9998 or 1.0000.
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