Month: January 2022

FTP “Ascii” Vs “Binary” Mode — What It Means, and Why You Want to Use One or the Other (taken from Support Newsletter 32 June 1998)

Jovan Stosic January 16, 2022

There are two different modes for transferring files with FTP: “ASCII” and “binary” mode. The reason for the two different modes is that there are two distinct means of representing the end of a line in a text, or ASCII, file. On UNIX machines, the end of a line is represented by the character. This character is a control-J. Some UNIX commands, like od(1), represent this character with a “\n”. For example, if you have a UNIX file named “foo”:

$ cat foo this is a test of the terminal that is shot from guns. $ od -c foo 00000000000 t h i s i s a t e s t o 00000000020 f \n t h e t e r m i n a l t 00000000040 h a t i s \n s h o t f r o m 00000000060 g u n s . \n 00000000067

On PCs (and on Mainframe computers) the end of a line is represented by a <carriage return> followed by a <newline> character. This is a control-M followed by a control-J.

In FTP, if you specify “ASCII” mode, if you are sending a file from a UNIX system to a PC, a control-M will be added before every control-J in the file. This will ensure that the ASCII/text file will be readable on the PC. Conversely, if you send a file in “ASCII” mode from a PC to a UNIX system, the combination control-M control-J will get changed into a control-J. File size will decrease by one byte per line when sending from a PC to a UNIX system; file size will increase by one byte per line when sending from a UNIX system to a PC. When sending between two PCs — or two UNIX systems — files send in “ASCII” mode will be unchanged.

Files sent in “binary” mode are sent from one system to another with no modification. The file size will always be unchanged on a binary transfer.

“ASCII” mode is appropriate when using FTP to send a single text file between two PCs. “binary” mode is appropriate when sending anything else: TAR files, compressed files, gzip’d files, CA-Alexandria binaries, etc. If a binary file is sent between a PC and a UNIX system in “ASCII” mode, the contents of the binary file will be modified such that it will no longer be readable; the file will have to be re-sent from the originating system in binary mode. Typically, this is the source of the problem when a customer sends us TAR or compressed files that are not readable on our machines.

 

Source: FTP “Ascii” Vs “Binary” Mode — What It Means, and Why You Want to Use One or the Other (taken from Support Newsletter 32 June 1998)

FTP “Ascii” Vs “Binary” Mode — What It Means, and Why You Want to Use One or the Other (taken from Support Newsletter 32 June 1998) was last modified: January 16th, 2022 by Jovan Stosic

Joseph Black

Jovan Stosic January 15, 2022

Joseph Black (16 April 1728 – 6 December 1799) was a Scottish physicist and chemist, known for his discoveries of magnesium, latent heat, specific heat, and carbon dioxide. He was Professor of Anatomy and Chemistry at the University of Glasgow for 10 years from 1756, and then Professor of Medicine and Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh from 1766, teaching and lecturing there for more than 30 years.

The chemistry buildings at both the University of Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow are named after Black.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Black

Joseph Black was last modified: January 15th, 2022 by Jovan Stosic

Carl Linnaeus

Jovan Stosic January 15, 2022

Carl Linnaeus (/lɪˈniːəs, lɪˈneɪəs/; 23 May 1707 – 10 January 1778), also known after his ennoblement as Carl von Linné(Swedish pronunciation: [ˈkɑːɭ fɔn lɪˈneː], was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist, and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming organisms. He is known as the “father of modern taxonomy“. Many of his writings were in Latin, and his name is rendered in Latin as Carolus Linnæus (after 1761 Carolus a Linné).

Linnaeus was born in Råshult, the countryside of Småland, in southern Sweden. He received most of his higher education at Uppsala University and began giving lectures in botany there in 1730. He lived abroad between 1735 and 1738, where he studied and also published the first edition of his Systema Naturae in the Netherlands. He then returned to Sweden where he became professor of medicine and botany at Uppsala. In the 1740s, he was sent on several journeys through Sweden to find and classify plants and animals. In the 1750s and 1760s, he continued to collect and classify animals, plants, and minerals, while publishing several volumes. He was one of the most acclaimed scientists in Europe at the time of his death.

Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau sent him the message: “Tell him I know no greater man on earth.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote: “With the exception of Shakespeare and Spinoza, I know no one among the no longer living who has influenced me more strongly.” Swedish author August Strindberg wrote: “Linnaeus was in reality a poet who happened to become a naturalist.” Linnaeus has been called Princeps botanicorum (Prince of Botanists) and “The Pliny of the North”. He is also considered one of the founders of modern ecology.

In botany and zoology, the abbreviation L. is used to indicate Linnaeus as the authority for a species’ name.[9] In older publications, the abbreviation “Linn.” is found. Linnaeus’s remains constitute the type specimen for the species Homo sapiens following the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, since the sole specimen that he is known to have examined was himself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Linnaeus

Carl Linnaeus was last modified: January 15th, 2022 by Jovan Stosic

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

Jovan Stosic January 15, 2022

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (French: [ʒɔʁʒ lwi ləklɛʁ kɔ̃t də byfɔ̃]; 7 September 1707 – 16 April 1788) was a French naturalist, mathematician, cosmologist, and encyclopédiste.

His works influenced the next two generations of naturalists, including two prominent French scientists Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Georges Cuvier. Buffon published thirty-six quarto volumes of his Histoire Naturelle during his lifetime, with additional volumes based on his notes and further research being published in the two decades following his death.

Ernst Mayr wrote that “Truly, Buffon was the father of all thought in natural history in the second half of the 18th century”. Credited with being one of the first naturalists to recognize ecological succession, he was later forced by the theology committee at the University of Paris to recant his theories about geological history and animal evolution because they contradicted the Biblical narrative of Creation.

Buffon held the position of intendant (director) at the Jardin du Roi, now called the Jardin des Plantes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges-Louis_Leclerc,_Comte_de_Buffon

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon was last modified: January 15th, 2022 by Jovan Stosic

I, Robot

Jovan Stosic January 15, 2022

I, Robot is a fixup novel of science fiction short stories or essays by American writer Isaac Asimov. The stories originally appeared in the American magazines Super Science Stories and Astounding Science Fiction between 1940 and 1950 and were then compiled into a book for stand-alone publication by Gnome Press in 1950, in an initial edition of 5,000 copies. The stories are woven together by a framing narrative in which the fictional Dr. Susan Calvin tells each story to a reporter (who serves as the narrator) in the 21st century. Although the stories can be read separately, they share a theme of the interaction of humans, robots, and morality, and when combined they tell a larger story of Asimov’s fictional history of robotics.

Several of the stories feature the character of Dr. Calvin, chief robopsychologist at U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc., the major manufacturer of robots. Upon their publication in this collection, Asimov wrote a framing sequence presenting the stories as Calvin’s reminiscences during an interview with her about her life’s work, chiefly concerned with aberrant behaviour of robots and the use of “robopsychology” to sort out what is happening in their positronic brain. The book also contains the short story in which Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics first appear, which had large influence on later science fiction and had impact on thought on ethics of artificial intelligence as well. Other characters that appear in these short stories are Powell and Donovan, a field-testing team which locates flaws in USRMM’s prototype models.

The collection shares a title with the 1939 short story “I, Robot” by Eando Binder (pseudonym of Earl and Otto Binder), which greatly influenced Asimov. Asimov had wanted to call his collection Mind and Iron and objected when the publisher made the title the same as Binder’s. In his introduction to the story in Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories (1979), Asimov wrote:

It certainly caught my attention. Two months after I read it, I began ‘Robbie’, about a sympathetic robot, and that was the start of my positronic robot series. Eleven years later, when nine of my robot stories were collected into a book, the publisher named the collection I, Robot over my objections. My book is now the more famous, but Otto’s story was there first.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Robot

I, Robot was last modified: April 10th, 2022 by Jovan Stosic