Absolutely NOT!
[sub]godIhatethatfuckingsong[/sub]
O.K.
Here are two pairs of tits.
Fine, fine…
WHIPPIN’ POST!
Um, me too on “Which concert?”. I would hate to think I missed something good.
You’re using it right now. It’s a way to store text in binary form for computers to use.
(Yes, it is an abbreviation. It stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. But you knew that.)
As Derleth said, ASCII is a way that computers store information in binary form.
It translates 256 different 8 bit (1 byte) sequences in order to represent characters (letters, numerals, spaces, periods, etc).
Kind of limited because it represents each character with only 8 bits and can therefore only store 256 characters, it’s since been sort of wiped out by Unicode, which uses 16 bits. However, the first 256 combinations are the same, so if your computer does Unicode, it’ll represent ASCII and if it does ASCII it’ll represent the first 256 characters in Unicode.
Next week: EBCDIC.
I believe it was the Topless Philharmonic.
Please. As much as I like “Whipping Post”, the appropriate shout-out-a-request-when-you’re-drunk-or-at-the-end-of-a-concert-or-both song is
STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN!!!
Someone yelled “Show us your tits!” when a student was giving an informal talk.
He took it in his stride and continued the presentation. 
“SHOW US YOUR TIMPANIS!”
I saw a group of guys get smacked around next to a mosh pit at a Kittie concert when they pulled this one. Kittie used to draw some craaaazy chicks. That and the simulated castrations onstage sort of led to an anti-male-asshole kind of mood.
LC
Man, I saw Page and Plant play. I yelled “STAIRWAY!” between songs (like everyone else). Finally, Page ran through the first few notes, but that was all. Robert Plant’s apparently never going to do that song live again, or so he says.
catsix: No, actually ASCII is a seven-bit encoding scheme. There are various ASCII extensions that define the characters to print when the high bit is set, but those are not ASCII.
Therefore, ASCII only has 128 codepoints. Even more limited than the admittedly crappy 256 eight bits gives you.
`Why is ASCII seven bit?’, I hear nobody asking. Well, I’ll tell you anyway and you’ll like it! It’s because in the early days, the communications lines used to transmit text (from the teletype on your desk to the minicomputer across town, say) weren’t the models of efficiency they are now. The high-order bit was used to check parity, so the receiving end could tell if the character had been corrupted. (Would this detect everything? Of course not. But it gave the system a chance, despite the essential simplicity of the whole operation.)
Hey baby SHOW US YOUR ASCII !!!
(.) (.)
This thread is great. A discussion of what to yell at concerts, a detailed history of ASCII, and ASCII boobies.
Derleth, ASCII is stored in computers as an 8 bit code, not as seven. The parity bit is still part of the ASCII scheme, and is still stored in memory when your computer allocates space for ASCII encoded characters.
I can tell you for certain then when allocating memory and designing assembly languages, using ASCII, it’s treated as an 8 bit scheme because all 8 bits are stored. Codes above 7Fx0 may not be used to represent characters or control characters, but still can exist in the computer’s memory.
Using only 128 (NULL 00 still counts) of the possible bit patterns does not mean that the other 128 bit patterns don’t exist. You just don’t need them to represent American English.
Parity or not, the high order bit is a part of the ASCII encoding scheme, as all high order parity bits are part of any encoding scheme. If you treat it as if it’s not there part of the encoding scheme makes it pretty impossible to get your hardware designs to work right. (Not enough lines.)
Boobies!
When we doin’ Hollerith?
So, is this ok?
To clarify, the parity bit is no longer stored in the high-order bit. Computer memories are now 9 bits wide, (oversimplification - I’m not sure how 16 and 32 bit schemes work) and the 9th bit stores the parity for the other 8. Since it’s on a hardware level, it’s transparent to the user and the programmer.
Oh and - 0101000 0101100 0101001 0101000 0101100 0101001. 