praetorius@istari.DEC (03/18/86)
Geezzzz, can't a guy flame unintelligently in peace?
@begin(paranoia)
Well, I spaced the disclaimification of my last netmissive and was duly
and roundly castigated. I feel sure that I'm now dogfood (just call me Raoul
(I don't want to offend anyone named Raoul, this is just a reference to a
movie, OK?)) and that my company will be sued into Chapter N or N squared.
However, in a last ditch effort to preserve the health, well being and physical
configuration of near and distant relatives, I'm going to attempt to apologize
for or at least clarify some of what I said.
1) I did not mean to imply that DEC or Intel or representatives
thereof purchased votes on standards committees. I should
have said something more like "the practical affect was as
if {insert DEC or Intel here} had dominated the proceedings
of . . .", etc.
2) I appear to have stirred up some of the old VAX format versus
IEEE format vitriol. Sorry about that. Such was not my intent,
but I should have realized that the simultaneous presence of
the words DEC, Intel and floating in one message would have this
effect. My personal feelings on floating point standards are as
follows:
Implementors of CPUs, FPAs and vector and array
processors should be free use whatever format they
feel is appropriate to the task. I do think, however,
that the IEEE format makes somes sense as a medium of
information exchange between differing architectures.
My personal asthetic preference leans towards floating point
representations that can be compared and negated as if they
were integers, which leaves out both the VAX and IEEE formats.
I also think it's a bit weird to get so hopped up about
approximations, but, here I am doing it myself.
@end(paranoia)
Now, to remind everybody what my original message was about, anybody
out there (especially at MIT) have any interesting comments about the
applicability of the X window package to Amigas, or to inexpensive computers
in general?
oh well,
RP
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--> N.B.: Them are my opinions up there, not my employer's. <--
--> They don't represent (or even give any hint <--
--> about) my employer's policies or positions. <--
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