Comment by ivanjermakov
8 hours ago
I just realised that all latin text is wasting 12% of storage/memory/bandwidth with MSB zero. At least is compresses well. Are there any technology that utilizes 8th bit for something useful, e.g. error checking?
8 hours ago
I just realised that all latin text is wasting 12% of storage/memory/bandwidth with MSB zero. At least is compresses well. Are there any technology that utilizes 8th bit for something useful, e.g. error checking?
See mort96's comments about 7-bit ASCII and parity bits (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45225911). Kind of archaic now, though - 8-bit bytes with the error checking living elsewhere in the stack seems to be preferred.