On 31 July 2015 at 14:18, D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh@mimosa.com> wrote:

On Fri, 31 Jul 2015, Russell Reiter wrote:

| I first heard the term as "Windows Desktop Sprite." I first heard
| about sprites in old fairytales.
|
| Here's a googled definition.

| 2. a computer graphic that may be moved on-screen and otherwise
| manipulated as a single entity.

Not a particularly good definition.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_%28computer_graphics%29>
isn't great, but it is better.

Sprites date way back; I recall them from the 6502 days...

http://www.randomterrain.com/atari-2600-memories-tutorial-andrew-davie-21.html

"What are sprites? By now, sprites are well-known in the gaming industry. They are small, independently movable objects which are drawn by hardware anywhere over the top of playfield graphics. The Atari 2600 was the first console to introduce general-purpose sprites—back in the day they were called 'player missile graphics'. It was the Commodore 64 which introduced the term 'sprites', which we know and love."

I remember using the "Player/Missile Graphics" system on Atari 8 bit systems.

Probably smarter things arrived in more modern hardware, though I

would be unsurprised to find that, in modern contexts, sprites might

be mostly programming constructs residing in GUI libraries rather than

being "first class objects" at the computer hardware level.

It was pretty neat, back in the day, to have PMG in hardware; you could

write code to tell the objects to move around, and get back reports of

overlaps (e.g. - that missile hit your ship) reported back by one of the

graphics chips...

| I'm still looking for a table of sic sigma recommendations, often the
| service manuals are available somewhere deep in the bowels of the
| internet.

I think you mean "six sigma".

Uneducated prejudice:

Six sigma started out as a somewhat arbitrary quality metric. Sigma
is the standard deviation of a distribution. Six sigma is meant to be
six standard deviations away from the mean. I think that the
distribution is assumed to be Gaussian (Bell Curve), which is usually
safe, but probably not so far from the centre.

Now six sigma is a religious movement for improving manufacturing and
various other business processes.

I don't actually understand your usage.

The "Six sigma" stuff is a dogma about making processes so much better

as to essentially eliminate defects. Assuming a normal distribution,

six sigmas (6 standard deviations) better than the mean indicates a

near-zero defect rate. In the usual distribution, it should be exceeded

in 1 out of about 507 million events.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rule

The intent is clear enough ("effective elimination of defects") that

quibbles over exactly which distribution is appropriate is mostly

beside the point. (Not least of the issues being that some number of
standard deviations worth of the people trying to "do six sigma"
are most likely not sufficiently literate in statistics to distinguish
between statistical distributions...)

When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"