Jury nullification.
Posts by robn
9 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Mar 2011
Police arrest suspect in murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO, with grainy pics the only tech involved
China plans to toss foreign-made PCs from government agencies 'in two years'
Richard Branson uses two planes to make 170km round trip
Florida Man sues Facebook, Twitter, YouTube for account ban
Excuse me, what just happened? Resilience is tough when your failure is due to a 'sequence of events that was almost impossible to foresee'
'Chinese wall'? Who uses 'Chinese wall'? Well, IBM did, and it actually means 'firewall'
Lenovo's latest gaming monster: Eight cores, 3.2GHz, giant heat sink, two fans. Oh, and it has a phone bolted on
A paper clip, a spool of phone wire and a recalcitrant RS-232 line: Going MacGyver in the wonderful world of hotel IT
IBM tunes up Java for z196 mainframes
Friday 18th March 2011 10:02 GMT

re: 31 bit?
For backward compatibility with existing 24 bit applications!
The end of a list of parameter pointers is marked by setting the high-order bit in the last address. If they went to 32-bits, all 24 bit application would break since you could not determine whether an address with the high-order bit marked the end of the parameter list or was a value larger than 2GB.
Going with 31-bits only meant executables built in the 60's and 70's can (potentially) still run under current versions of the hardware and the OS.