The term is also used for a friend of President Bill Gates (William H. Gates III). That is probably the dominant use already in 1997, as Bill C. is a lame duck with a lame foot.
Hmmm. There's been some water under the bridge since I wrote that line.
Cf. ABC, ABCD, and CBC. In less acronymic times, a century ago, a common equivalent of FOB was green-horn or greenhorn.
Not a technical term in electrostatics.
For example, there are about two trillion barrels of recoverable oil in US deposits of oil shale. Oil shale is currently used in Germany, Israel, China, Brazil, and Estonia, but we haven't been able to overcome the technical hurdles. Also, there are about 10 billion barrels of petroleum under Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, but we mustn't drill there because of the lush biodiversity at Arctic latitudes.
And there are an estimated 85 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas under the outer continental shelf, but we mustn't drill there either. We mustn't build more refineries or nuclear or coal-burning power plants, because in the long run it makes more sense to send trillions of dollars to unstable third world kleptocracies and theocrazies. We must build windmills, but not if they can be seen from Martha's Vineyard. The only ugly thing allowed in my back yard is my legislator, so long as he's on a short leash. We should make alcohol by fermenting corn and grasses, and it will generate enough fuel to power the tractors that harvest it. As a side benefit, it will raise the price of grain and save the small family farm.
So what power sources can supply a foe of energy? Well, a typical star -- like the Sun, for instance -- radiates on the order of a foe of energy over the course of its entire life. Unfortunately, it lives billions of years, so you can wait a long time to get what you want. It's kind of like having a rich uncle in excellent health.
Another problem is that the drip-drip-drip of energy is not delivered direct to us; instead, it is scattered as light radiating in all directions, so that heedless aliens on distant worlds could see one more twinkling star in their sky, if they bothered to turn any of their eyes in our direction. What a waste. As it is, the power flux density of light from the Sun, at a distance of one astronomical unit (here we are, baby), is about 1000 watts per square meter. Plants collect this by using chlorophyll and some Rube Goldberg-like chemical cycles, with an overall efficiency of a fraction of a percent.
Little of this has anything really to do with foe, of course, but that sort of thing never stopped me before. Apparently the foe unit was coined by the astrophysicist Gerry Brown of SUNY-Stony Brook. It's a convenient unit for describing the energy released in the explosion of a supernova over the course of its lifetime (measured in seconds).
foobar', where foobar is the name of the
variable defined by a set command.''
The syllables foo (q.v.) and bar, as well as various others are used as alternate variables.
It is just barely conceivable that this might have some etymological connection to fubar. The decisive flaw in this hypothesis is that hackers are much too clean-minded to descend to such vulgarity.
When I wrote the preceding paragraph, it was meant ironically. Boy, do I have foo on my face. According to the Jargon file, which represents thousands of hours of speculation and also some research by subscribers to relevant newsgroups, foo has an independent origin preceding the WWII-vintage fubar. Presumably the use of foo and foobar as metasyntactic led to similar use of bar.
See the foo and foobar entries in the Jargon File.
Did you say food bar?
Cf. foobar.
I used to think that was the only meaning, but the other day I noticed that the classroom doors in O'Shag have plastic plaques advising
Food and drink items are not allowed in the classrooms.
I'm not sure that's really clear enough. You know, words can convey information, so it's a mathematical fact that more words can convey more information. Let's try it, shall we not?
Things that are food and drink items are not allowed in the classrooms.
Food and drink were also forbidden in Hesburgh Library. (And the aluminum-can recycling bins were on the second floor.)
Cf. the thoughts at this food product.
At the store, food items like meat and potato chips are ``groceries'' for tax purposes. Food items are theoretically consumed in portions or helpings called serving sizes, which often differ from the quantities in which they are packaged and sold.
In Pennsylvania prisons, a breakfast loaf contains prunes, eggs, toast, hash browns, bacon and orange juice. That's what Fox News reports, but perhaps the loaf is served with orange juice.
Many years ago, in a book of anecdotes about great chemists, I read about an experiment done by Robert Williams Wood. Wood (1868-1955) was famous as a spectroscopist and is usually described as a physicist, but we won't quibble. I seemed to remember that this this experiment was done when he was at Harvard, but he was only there for his B.A. Second guess: Johns Hopkins. He was living in a boardinghouse, and he suspected that the woman who ran it was recycling scraps from one meal into the next. One day at dinner he left a nice morsel of meat uneaten, but salted with strontium chloride. The next morning for breakfast he brought the necessary equipment -- I imagine a candle would have sufficed -- took a bit of the hash they was served and put it in the flame. It burned with the characteristic reddish hue of strontium (Sr).
(I can't recall the title of the book, from before -- probably way before -- 1982, so details here and in the preceding paragraph are from memory.) The strontium story suggests that Wood was a tough customer. None of the stories about him suggested that he was a nice guy. During one of the Solvay conferences (I guess the second, in October 1913 in Brussels), Marie Curie demanded that no one smoke cigars. Wood and some other cretin did, and she walked out.
The origin of the WWII term is plausibly associated with Bill Holman's ``Smokey Stover'' comic strip, begun in 1935 and syndicated through the Chicago Tribune. Foo was one of a number of recurring nonsense words used in the strip, in various apparent senses. Smokey rode a two-wheeled firetruck called the Foomobile. The wheels were side-by-side, as on a modern Segway scooter, rather than fore-and-aft, as on a bicycle. So the word foo was associated with paradoxical or apparently technologically advanced vehicles. It was also associated with smoke, particularly in Smokey's oft-repeated ``Where there's foo there's fire.'' It's been suggested that this foo is related to the French feu (`fire'). (The common English word curfew, of course, is ultimately from an Old French expression, spelled variously as cuevre-fu, quevre-feu, covre-feu, and coevrefu in Anglo-French, `covered fire.')
[The most obvious intellectual sloppiness in the F.O.O.L. is that the poles represent two points in what is really an at least a two-dimensional ``spectrum.'' It is posited that hero worship is indicates externally-directed decision-making behavior focused on admired others, and ``blame'' indicate externally-directed analysis (and failure to take personal responsibility) focused on despised others. The admiration/contempt variable and the decision/analysis variable don't always coincide in this way, and it's not clear that the second variable (decision-making or normative, final-cause analysis, versus positive or efficient-cause analysis) can be usefully regarded as a continuous variable.]
I bought Your Erroneous Zones second-hand in 1980 or so, and just decided to skim it now (December 2, 2003, around 8pm). Chapter IX (pp. 176ff) is entitled ``Putting an End to Procrastination--Now.'' Maybe that should have been chapter I.
On Columbus Day (well, October 12, anyway), 2000, Australia's Advertiser included the following in a basketball news round-up:
AT last it can be revealed. The reason NBA scouts have not swarmed all over 215cm Italian sensational Gregor Fucka is because of concerns over acceptability of his name.
But Fucka - pronounced Foosh-ka - says he is comfortable with ``Gregor'' and will not change it for anybody.
![[Football icon]](icons/football.gif){kind=icon}
If you can't be out of town, you can root against the home team. If rooting has some effect, that might help them lose and lower attendance.
Because you've been good and read all the way down to here, you get a treat! I'm going to reward you with a taste of my favorite footnote, a model of mincingly careful word selection, of fancy foot(note)work. It has been extensively reprinted, along with the text it is an ornament to. It's footnote number 1, on page 13 of my paperback second edition of the 1931 work mentioned at the .ru entry.
As an illustration of the danger of disregarding the historical background we may quote the following example taken at random. The authoritative and useful volume, Soviet Russia in the Second Decade (A Joint Survey of the Technical Staff of the First American Trade Union Delegation, edited by Stuart Chase, Robert Dunn, and Rexford Guy Tugwell, New York, 1928), contains an interesting article by Professor Tugwell on Soviet agriculture. The author puts considerable emphasis upon land surveying, the creation of enclosed holdings, the organization of experimental farms, and the advancement of general education among the peasants. These developments, it seems, are among the chief reasons which led Professor Tugwell to form his very optimistic conclusions as to the outlook of Russian farming. No indication is given in the article that all these measures are not new. Professor Tugwell is undoubtedly perfectly familiar with the land reforms of Stolypin which revolutionized land tenure, and were directed against communal ownership. He must also know of the immense work carried on by the zemstvos in the field of education, public health, and the spread of agricultural knowledge among the farmers; and also that before the War an ever increasing number of experimental stations and model farms were opened every year by the Department of Agriculture, especially in connection with the Stolypin land settlement plan. None of these facts, however, is mentioned by Professor Tugwell, probably for lack of space; and those of his readers who have little knowledge of pre-revolutionary Russia will get the impression that all of these important measures originated with the Soviet government when, as a matter of fact, they are merely a revival, and not infrequently a very inadequate one, of a policy pursued by Imperial Russia for a great many years. The optimistic forecast by Professor Tugwell, we venture to suggest, will lose some of its point if the developments he describes are connected with their historical setting.
Sometimes authors detonate such things in parenthetical remarks. For example, Arthur E. Gordon begins chapter V (``Summary and Criticism of Modern Views'') of his The Letter Names of the Latin Alphabet thus:
[Friedrich] Marx is easy to criticize. He was only twenty-three when he published his dissertation, so his failure to present the evidence of Ausonius, Terentianus Maurus, and the other grammarians whose testimony favors the sonant/syllabic names of the semivowels as against ef, el, em, etc., is perhaps understandable (though it does seem rather strange that he was so consistent in presenting only one side of the case, and even stranger that his edition of twenty-two or twenty-three years later does not present the missing evidence, and that, despite having Schulze's paper by the time he published volume 2 of his edition, he answers only one point made by Schulze, about the credibility of the anonymous commentator on Donatus on the subject of Varro).
Gordon himself is also easy to criticize. His entire book consists of stating and repeatedly restating others' arguments, and other others' counterarguments. It's one of those books where you find yourself asking, ``well, what does the author think?'' Eventually, you flip forward to page 65 and read:
I end therefore with no confidence that I have all the facts or, if I have, that I have interpreted them correctly. But I have presented all the evidence available to me.
Willard R. Espy reportedly addressed the pressing problem of difficult-to-rhyme words in The Game of Words (New York: Bramhall House, 1971). I don't happen to have that work handy, but among his many works of word play is An Almanac of Words at Play (New York: C.N. Potter, 1975), which is handy. For 18 February the almanac has ``Impossible Rhymes.'' Espy quotes
To find a rhyme for silver
Or any ``rhymeless'' rhyme
Requires only will, ver-
bosity and time.
This solution to the silver rhyming challenge was devised by Steven Sondheim and published in the correspondence section of Time magazine, incidentally demonstrating the importance of such rhyming problems, and the eminence of the heroes who attack them. Inspired by Sondheim's achievement, Ira Levin came up with two solutions to the penguin rhyming problem as well as another silver rhyme. It begins to appear, or be clear, that color words, while prominent in the difficult-rhyme discipline (witness orange and silver, and also purple), do not exhaust the subject.
Place names in particular are also a rich source of challenges. Espy offers solutions for three of these. F.P.A. rhymed Massachusetts with ``or two sets.'' Espy himself rhymes Speonk (a town on Long Island) with he-onk and she-onk. This strikes me as highly unnecessary. Timbuctoo (as it was spelled by Samuel Wilberforce -- I suppose by the Samuel Wilberforce -- back in the day) was rhymed with characteristically religious-themed ``hymn-book too.'' Thomas Huxley observed that Bishop Wilberforce had an unfortunate prediliction for wading in over his head in unfamiliar waters (not Huxley's words); this might be another instance, but I'm not familiar with all the pronunciations of Timbuktu or Tombouctou.
Among other difficult rhymes from the Victorian era: R.H. Barham rhymed velocity with ``cross it, he'' and Lord Byron rhymed intellectual with ``hen-pecked you all.'' Evidently, the Victorians talked funny. (And we won't even get into Lord Byron's ``Don Juan.'')
A private communication from O. V. Michaelsen provides some important information from his book Words at Play: Quips, Quirks & Oddities. It turns out that there are a number of less-well-known words that rhyme with silver and purple. They only rhyme with one: either the word silver or the word purple. So far, no word has been found which rhymes both with purple and the word silver. Or indeed with purple and with any word that doesn't rhyme with purple. It's that hard. Rhyme would be an equivalence relation if words were considered to rhyme with themselves. Oh yes, some of the words: curple is a horse's ass -- its buttocks, rather, and sometimes the buttocks of another animal. In the right sort of sentence, I suppose it could refer to the hindquarters of both a horse and an animal that is not a horse, but we're not going to get into that. Don't look a gift horse...
Another purple rhyme is hirple, a British word meaning `hobble' or `walk lamely.' You wonder if there wasn't some influence one way or the other between hirple and curple (which sounds like a scrambled cripple). I guess if your knees pointed backwards you'd hobble too. That reminds me of Mickey Rivers, who played outfield for the New York Yankees in the late 1970's. He only seemed to flow smoothly when he ran. The best description I ever heard of him loping back to home after beating a foul to first was this:
(Exercise for the reader: rephrase this using curple.) His odd appearance walking is easy to understand. Rivers (``Mick the Quick'') was like one of those racecars that doesn't have a low gear -- he had two speeds: FAST! and off. He couldn't actually walk, so what he would do was turn on the speed for a millisecond and then coast for a few steps. They say that if you're running low on gas along a flat road, one way to make the remaining gas last is to do something similar: periodically take the car up to speed (gently), turn off the ignition, coast down to very low speed, and start over. Sounds pretty chancy to me. Many early airplanes, including some that flew in WWI, had no throttles; the only way to slow the engine (other than a little bit, by climbing) was to turn it off. (Here's some QuickTime footage.) That sounds even chancier to me.
Anyway, chilver, a British dialectal term, means ewe lamb or ewe mutton.
There are proper nouns that rhyme orange, purple, and silver, and you can find a bunch of them (both toponyms and personal names) in Michaelsen's Words at Play. I like Blorenge, the name of a 1,833-foot hill -- one of seven in the vicinity of Abergavenny, Wales. And take this hint from a pro: don't wear your erudition on your sleeve -- just ease Blorenge into your everyday rhyme conversations (cf. I did, did I?) without all the added information. If someone challenges you, you can toss off the wisdom in bits, like crumbs to the pigeons: ``a hill in Wales ... oh, it's pretty prominent for thereabouts -- more than half a kilometer high ... mmm, near Abergavenny ... there are some others ... seven all told ....'' You'll look that much more impressive, and everyone will be sure to have died of boredom before the depth of your shallow erudition is plumbed. If no one challenges you, hire a shill.
Michaelsen's next book also dealt with month (another tough rhyme, if millionth doesn't do it for you). (Espy cites a couplet by Christina Rossetti that rhymes month with ``runn'th.'') This Michaelsen book has this limerick:
There once was a dunce known as Orange
Who got his toe caught in a door hinge.
Said he, turning purple,
Proceeding to hirple,
Now how will I get back to Blorenge?
and its palinode:
A passerby named Mr. Wilver,
Who traded his horse for a chilver,
Offered Orange the lamb,
But he mounted a ram
And rode home yelling, Oh, Hiyo Silver!
Many years ago, the Stammtisch Beau Fleuve sponsored a search to find `the' other word that ends in -gry, in addition to angry and hungry. We found a couple, but they're not exactly common words. The alt.english.usage FAQ has an exhaustive discussion. See also the rec.puzzles FAQ list and ``archive.''
In case you're not satiated yet, we have a little more on rhyme at the rhyme entry. In German, a difficult ending to match is nf. Yes, there's even a rhyming pair; it's discussed at the fünf entry.
Although Kong appeared huge, the full figure was really only 18 inches tall. Miss Wray knew him by the arm, which was 8 feet long.``I would stand on the floor,'' she recalled, ``and they would bring this arm down and cinch it around my waist, then pull me up in the air. Every time I moved, one of the fingers would loosen, so it would look like I was trying to get away. Actually, I was trying not to slip through his hand.''
Lying on the ground, Charlie Brown yelled at Lucy, ``There's no body-checking in golf!!!''
Forecheck, backcheck, paycheck.
``Backcheck,'' particularly in this context, sounds a bit like back pay. Back pay is something pro hockey players will not get when the circumstances described under GOODENOW are resolved.
Writers of science fiction seldom spare their characters: they may slam their heroes' ships into planets or send their heroines to kill tigers with knives; they may freeze them into statues on Pluto or shoot them through exploding suns. Hardly any degradation or suffering is spared -- with the exception of exposing them to the rigors of learning a foreign language.
Among the retorts when I quoted this to the Classics List:
- C. J. Cherryh [sic] writes science fiction that often deals with language issues. Her Foreigner series looks at the problems of alien-human communication and language, and has a translator as protagonist. She offers a Latin tutorial on her website.
- In Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, Valentine Michael Smith, as part of starting a sort of religion, makes his devotees learn Martian.
- Janet Kagan (``Hellspark'') and Suzette Haden Elgin (``Native Tongue,'' et al.)'' are other science fiction writers who write in depth about alien languages.
- Languages are important to Ursula LeGuin in, for example, A Wizard of Earthsea, Left Hand of Darkness, and The Author of the Acacia Seeds.
- Jack Vance uses the idea of language itself in sophisticated ways, often making his hero go through the drudgery of learning a language.
- In Star Trek, of course, the language problem was eventually addressed explicitly by the contrivance of implanted universal translators, but Spock's experience of Vulcan mind meld certainly seemed to be almost as agonizing as learning a new language.
- Not to mention J.R.R. Tolkien.
No quiet murmur like the tremulous wail Of the lone bird, the querulous nightingale---which he had copied out up to the first five letters of the word nightingale. Later in the Ode are written the words
When reason's day sets sunless, rayless, joyless, Better to die and sleep.This seems to be the point that he was trying to make. Maybe while writing the long word nightingale he just got impatient. How many potential suicides have been saved by abbreviations of other long words, like viz.?
The Stammt... err SBF acronym and abbrev. glossary: a free public service, paid for by funds embezzled from a widows-and-orphans trust.
You probably don't want to read that the translation he transcribed was that of the 19th c. poet William Mackworth Praed, reprinted in Mark Van Doren's Anthology of World Poetry, but now it's too late -- you already did. You should have stopped reading after the words ``don't want to read.''
He had been a businessman until 1944, when he began a three-year stint as Secy. of the Navy.
The name FORTH was intended to suggest software for the fourth (next) generation computers, which Moore saw as being characterized by distributed small computers. The operating system he used at the time restricted file names to five characters, so the "U" was discarded. FORTH was spelled in upper case until the late 70's because of the prevalence of upper-case-only I/O devices. The name "Forth" was generally adopted when lower case became widely available, because the word was not an acronym.[It's a quote, okay? I'm not endorsing it, but for the motivation of the name it should be authoritative: it's from an article by Elizabeth D. Rather, Donald R. Coburn, and the selfsame Moore: ``The Evolution of Forth,'' in History of Programming Languages (ACM Press/Addison-Wesley, 1996).]
There's an email list named FIRE, and an FAQ is available.
For a flavor of the language, see Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages. It includes nine Forth programs.
There have been a number of versions off the main line of development. Perhaps the most influential was the Fortran created for Digital's vaxen. Others include WATFOR (well you might ask), WATFIV, Formac, RATFOR (RATional FORtran), FORTRAN-D, F, LIFT, HPF, UNICOS, and Vienna Fortran (VF).
A moderately reliable fortune file attributes the following substantially correct observation to Alan J. Perlis:
You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing viability of FORTRAN.
Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages includes four Fortran programs.
The introductory comments at the beginning of a book, directed to the reader and often written by a person different from the author of the book's main text, are not a ``forward.'' Forward is an adverb indicating direction. The word you want is the noun is
FORE...WORD, get it? A WORD (or two, metonymically speaking) beFORE.
If you want to think of the forepart of this word (fore) as a golf term, fine. Just don't write ``forward.'' If you still have trouble remembering how to spell the word correctly, use ``preface,'' or if that's too hard, just use prolegomena or prolegomenon.
Or mix and match! The following is presented as an existence demonstration, and not as an endorsement of any sort (other than of the spelling of the word foreword). My text is entitled Your Neighbor as Yourself (1997). (Actually, it has a double-colon title, with capitalization and punctuation inconsistent between cover and title page. What do you expect? It was published by the small-to-nonexistent Cross Cultural Publications, Inc.: CrossRoads Books, with a PO box in Notre Dame, Indiana. Setting aside the content, it's not a bad book considering that it obviously hasn't had the benefit of editing.) Anyway, about a dozen pages into the section titled Introduction, there's a collection of items entitled ``Introduction,'' compiled by Michael McLuhan (son of the famous Marshall McLuhan). The first item is a ``preface'' (by McLuhan -- the sixth and youngest child, by the way). The second item is in the form of a letter from John Kenneth Galbraith, containing remarks that he eventually decided to leave out of his book The Good Society. This is the ``foreword.'' The third item is a ``prologue'' by the author.
This expression is generally used in two ways. The original sense is simply a lie told to secure ``your'' cooperation. For example, if the traffic-court prosecutor calls and offers you a plea bargain ``for your convenience,'' so you can avoid the hassle of showing up in court, etc., it means that the cops in that jurisdiction are even less likely than usual to show up for a minor court appearance. This usage at least shows thought, and a minimal sort of transparent cunning.
Over time, a second usage has arisen, in which ``for your convenience'' is thoughtlessly used in lieu of explanation of something manifestly inconvenient for you. An excellent example of this is a reduction of office hours for your convenience.
It's okay in English to say that you are ``full'' after eating (though it's appreciated if you're not very specific about what you are full of). In German, it doesn't sound too good to say ``voll.'' Better say ``ich bin sat.''
For that matter, don't translate ``I am hot'' too literally either.
The four zebras are a referee, umpire, linesman, and line judge, (in approximately that ranking, in cases where overlapping responsibilities require a pecking-order resolution). A back judge, field judge, and side judge may be added, usually in that order. The chain and down-marker crew is normally provided by the home team and supervised by the linesman (who is supposed to caution them, as ad hoc though junior members of the officiating crew, not to cheer or coach).
- A small depression. (We're not talking dysphoria here, more topography.) From the Latin word with the same meaning and spelling, whoa!
- A small region in the center of the retina that has a high density of cones and no rods, and which provides high-acuity vision in the center of the eye's FOV. From the New Latin fovea centralis.
- Hunting foxes.
- Hunting foxes of a, you know, nonvulpine sort -- vixens. It helps to be a good horseman.
- Locating hidden radio transmitters.
No, no; just kidding. `Pitch' also has the meaning of spacing. Fine pitch means close spacing of repeated features (in microelectronic and nanoelectronic lithography, at least.)
Also: a strike, if yours is the team in the field.
The alternative to floating point is fixed point. This is essentially an integer representation: one chooses a smallest storable value, and every number is represented approximately by an integer multiple of that small value. Monetary systems are like that.
Cf. mantissa.
The preceding judgements are relevance-weighted and guaranteed off by no more than about 8%.
Here's an FPGA links page.
Sometimes people call them Xilinx (pronounced ``zai links''), after the dominant maker of FPGA's.
The main functional components of an FPGA are an array of configurable logic blocks (CLB's), switch matrix blocks (SM's), and Input/Output Blocks (IOB's). The interconnect lines form a rectangular lattice with SM's at the intersections (where vertical and horizontal connect lines cross).
CLB's occupy the rectangular cells defined by the interconnect lattice, but are connected locally only to the four SM's at the nearest corners.
IOB's anchor the connect lines at the edges of the chip.
Other schools in Mons: FUCAM, UMH.
Once, over champagne after an FPO (I think it was Joe Abeles's), the most senior professor present (Prof. Rubby Sherr) was asked if anyone ever failed the FPO. He replied that once, one of his own students failed,
``because he was uncommunicative -- he fainted.''
Central Florida has the Florida Orchestra, but this has no standard initialism, so it's impossible to include any information about it in this glossary. According to the running footer on its webpages, ``[t]he Florida Orchestra is recognized as Tampa Bay's leading performing arts institution, one of the leading professional symphony orchestras in Florida, and one of the best regional orchestras in America.'' There was also a Central Florida Philharmonic Orchestra, apparently short-lived (2003-2004?), apparently formed in the Summer of 2001 out of the still-warm ruins of the Central Florida Symphony. I haven't sorted out the relations among all these symphonies, but there personnel picture is probably roiling.
Now where wuz I? Oh yeah, so there was a time when ``computer'' meant someone who used a calculator, and for a while after that, a ``page designer'' referred not to a computer application but only to a person. That person would lay out a page on paste-up boards, sort of like the graphics equivalent of a draft. Cheap, bad pictures could be used on the paste-up, since they were only there to help determine where the high-quality illustrations would go in the final layout. To avoid any mistake, the pictures in the paste-up were labeled ``FPO.'' You remember what that stands for?
Good, because it seems a lot of people didn't. They remembered what it meant, but not what it stood for, so they'd write stuff like ``For FPO'' or ''For FPO Only.'' This kind of thing happens a lot.
The speed change came with the new projectors needed for sychronized sound. Synchronized sound was achieved by encoding the sound as a transparent line to one side of the images. The width of this line, or the amount of probe light it transmits, is the amplitude in an AM encoding.
Later, a second line was added for two-channel stereo. Intuitively, one might expect the two lines to correspond to the two channels. A major problem with this approach, however, is that old projector machines would have to play one or the other channel. Instead, stereo is encoded as sum and difference signals, with the sum signal located where the old monaural track was located and old projectors would play the sum signal. In stereo-capable projectors, the difference signal is separately added to or subtracted from a copy of the sum signal to produce two channels. A similar approach is used in radio, with the difference signal multiplexed at a distance in frequency (from the sum signal's center frequency) that is greater than the highest audible frequencies.
The AM scheme for talkies described above is analog encoding, and movies for general distribution still carry these sound stripes for backward compatibility. (Hence, two levels of backward compatibility are built in -- for analog stereo in the digital stereo era, and for mono in a stereo era.) The digital sound signal is encoded in packets along the line of sprocket-holes -- that is, between the sprocket holes.
When NexGen came out with a pentium clone (the Nx586), they only offered FPU as an option and focused on integer performance. They put their justification on the web. Their basic point is that FPU calls are rare in ``the most popular programs...''
There are two FPU's on a Pentium III, three on an AMD K7.