Meaning of bit bucket | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A container for holding chad (“small punched-out pieces of paper”) from paper tape or punch cards used with teleprinters, early computers, and other machines.
   historical
2. An imaginary domain that accepts lost, discarded, or useless digital data that does not reach its intended destination, such as data lost in transmission or due to errors; the notional resting place of lost or missing digital information.
   broadly, humorous, slang

Equivalents

Examples

“The lost bits fall into a container called a bit bucket. They are emptied periodically and the collected bits are used for confetti at weddings, parties, and other festive occasions.”

“Applications [...] Overflow register (bit bucket)”

“bit bucket – the term for a routine or circuit that accepts binary signals and produces no output. Bit buckets are used for testing and to stand in for routines or circuits that have not been implemented at that particular point.”

“Inside the computer, every time a byte moves from one component to another the hardware performs a parity check by counting the number of ones. [...] But let's say a power surge or some other line noise is picked up by the computer and the byte is scrambled. [...] The errant byte, having failed the parity test, is unceremoniously dumped into the bit bucket, the computer's wastepaper basket.”

“Fortunately, "RTM" [Robert Tappan Morris] was not out to deliberately cause damage. What would have happened if he had been? Millions of dollars in time and research data gone into the bit-bucket?”

“An alternative is for the automated spacecraft to assume that tracking is always available and to have the spacecraft take its data and return it accepting that some fraction of the time communication will in fact not be available. Science data would then go into the "bit bucket." Since current spacecraft are complex and expensive, the latter solution is rarely used (intentionally!) today.”

“When a packet arrives, the first thing that is done is a cyclic redundancy check [...]. If the CRC does not match the one carried in the frame, then the packet is destroyed (sent to the "Bit Bucket" in Figure 16.1).”

“In [John] Watkinson's view, all recording should be done in non-specific "bit buckets," with a computer figuring out what got recorded where and when.”

“Shifting the contents of the register one bit to the right places a zero in the leftmost bit location and discards the rightmost bit. Conversely, a left-shift pads the rightmost bit with a zero and the upper, leftmost bit falls off into the "bit bucket".”

CEFR level