Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 18:11, 2 June 2012

There. Now our delicate sense of self-esteem will not be damaged by that horrible man's hidden page o' lies.

Forbidden

If it were allowed, I'd add the observation that the Misplaced Pages teaches you that ferrite is metal, and that a coil with DC going through it has no inductance. Oh, and you can make anything a conductor if you silver-plate it. And 1 metre equals 3 yards.

Once a Misplaced Pages argument is reduced to an appeal to common sense, it will never end. (Godwin's law revisited.)

Warts

Burn off these warts where ever found. These are some of the signs of an article that needs copyediting.

• "due to being" is wordy and passive, rephrase
• "a.k.a." is for police reports not for encyclopedias.
• "moniker" --> "nickname" or something more formal.
• "results in an increase of" --> "increases"
• and/or
• "the fact that", "despite the fact that" (and see Pleonasm which has one of these in it!)
• "Note that... and it's kin.
• "prevents the possibility of using" --> "prevents using" nearly always what was wanted.
• "There are..." is a weak way to start a sentence.
• "comprised of"
• "by means of"
• "technically" (nearly always used vacuously)
• "is used for signalling" --> "signals"
• "in order to" --> "to" - empty word
• "e.g.", "i.e" --> eliminate, often used incorrectly anyway, and a sign of turgid writing
• "In other words" means it was written wrong to start with.
• "have the advantage of", "have the disadvantage of" - elminate (nearly always), just padding
• "utilze"--> "use", nearly always
• "In practice" - nearly always delete unless contrasting "in theory"
• "Of course" - kill it with fire.
• "The scenario is a setup where" - nuke from orbit and rewrite.
• "In short, Libya is a land of contrasts." Remove padding.
• "The purpose is to..." - padding, rewrite.
• "in essence" - rewrite
• a foo is based on a type of...a foo is a

Mathematical instruments

see Category:Mathematical tools but concentrate on the classical kind, not the electronics or softwre

Angles

• Astrolabe
• Alidade
• Backstaff
• Mural instrument
• Sextant
• Quadrant (instrument)
• Octant (instrument)

Areas

• Planimeter

Drawing instruments

• Centrolinead
• T-square
• Set square

Calculation

• Sector (instrument)
• Slide rule

Surveying

• Dioptra
• Theodolite
• Tripod (surveying)

Navigation

How long would an article on DOS memory be?

Memory on the IBM PC compatibles:

8088 processors (PC, XT): (only 20 address lines) - conventional memory - ROM BIOS - adapters - 640 K line - Expanded memory

80286 (AT): (24 address lines) - High memory area - A20 handlers - Extended memory

80386 and later: - Virtual 8088 modes

Windows - MS DOS hosted varieties - Windows 95 and later (32-bit)

Uses of memory:

• Application programs
• MS DOS code and data structures, and buffers
• Device drivers
• Terminate and stay resident programs
• ROM BIOS
• Peripheral ROM
• Peripheral RAM, video RAM, network cards, etc.

In a 5150, not every address that could be generated by the 8088 accessed a populated memory location; holes were present depending on the exact hardware configuration.

In IBM compatibles, programs such as spread sheets soon needed more memory than was directly available to the processor in any 5150. Bank switching was a traditional solution, since the 8088 did not have virtual memory. Explain difference between virtual memory and bank switching.

Conventional memory, also called base memory, is the first 640 kilobytes (640 × 1024 bytes) of the memory on IBM PC or compatible systems. It is the read-write memory usable by the operating system and application programs. As memory prices rapidly declined, this design decision became a limitation in the use of large memory capacities until the introduction of operating systems and processors that made it irrelevant.

• 640 KB barrier
• Additional memory
• DOS driver software and TSRs
• Expanded memory
• Upper memory area
• Driver/TSR optimization
• DOS extenders
• Extended memory
  • eXtended Memory Specification (XMS)
• Usage
• Windows
• Implementation
• Virtual x86 Mode
• Shadow RAM
• High memory area

References