Grit bin

A grit bin or salt bin is an item of street furniture, commonly found in countries where freezing temperatures and snowfall occur, which holds a mixture of salt and grit which is spread over roads if they have snow or ice on them. A grit bin improves winter road safety on roads which are not gritted by other means, such as from a winter service vehicle.

How it works

Anyone may use a grit bin to clear a public path or road, though they are generally not intended for personal use. Typically, a spade or shovel is used to spread a thin layer of grit onto the road surface, covering any snow or ice. The salt lowers the melting point of the snow causing it to melt (see sodium chloride). The grit component improves the friction between a vehicle's tires and the road.

Some grit bins have a small compartment, which could be used for storing a spade or shovel. The one featured in the photograph at the top of the page is filled through the top hatch.

Construction of grit bins

Grit bins were originally made of concrete, wood or even stone, though these are now increasingly being replaced by models constructed from plastic partly from safety concerns: vehicles/people hitting a plastic grit bin will suffer less damage. However, the lower weight of plastic makes grit bins easier to steal or tip over.

Binə

Binə may refer to:

Binary file

A binary file is a computer file that is not a text file. Many binary file formats contain parts that can be interpreted as text; for example, some computer document files containing formatted text, such as older Microsoft Word document files, contain the text of the document but also contain formatting information in binary form.

Structure

Binary files are usually thought of as being a sequence of bytes, which means the binary digits (bits) are grouped in eights. Binary files typically contain bytes that are intended to be interpreted as something other than text characters. Compiled computer programs are typical examples; indeed, compiled applications are sometimes referred to, particularly by programmers, as binaries. But binary files can also mean that they contain images, sounds, compressed versions of other files, etc. — in short, any type of file content whatsoever.

Some binary files contain headers, blocks of metadata used by a computer program to interpret the data in the file. The header often contains a signature or magic number which can identify the format. For example, a GIF file can contain multiple images, and headers are used to identify and describe each block of image data. The leading bytes of the header would contain text like GIF87a or GIF89a that can identify the binary as a GIF file. If a binary file does not contain any headers, it may be called a flat binary file.

Unix filesystem

In Unix and operating systems inspired by it, the file system is considered a central component of the operating system. It was also one of the first parts of the system to be designed and implemented by Ken Thompson in the first experimental version of Unix, dated 1969.

Like in other operating systems, the filesystem provides information storage and retrieval, as well as interprocess communication, in the sense that the many small programs that traditionally comprise a Unix system can store information in files so that other programs can read these, although pipes complemented it in this role starting with the Third Edition. Additionally, the filesystem provides access to other resources through so-called device files that are entry points to terminals, printers, and mice.

The rest of this article uses "Unix" as a generic name to refer to both the original Unix operating system as well as its many workalikes.

Principles

The filesystem appears as a single rooted tree of directories. Instead of addressing separate volumes such as disk partitions, removable media, and network shares as separate trees (as done in MS-DOS and Windows: each "drive" has a drive letter that denotes the root of its file system tree), such volumes can be "mounted" on a directory, causing the volume's file system tree to appear as that directory in the larger tree. The root of the entire tree is denoted /.

Grit

Grit or Grits may refer to:

Transformers (toy line)

The Transformers (トランスフォーマー, Toransufomā) is a line of toys produced by the Japanese company Takara (now known as Takara Tomy) and American toy company Hasbro. The Transformers toyline was created from toy molds mostly produced by Japanese company Takara in the toylines Diaclone and Microman. Other toy molds from other companies such as Bandai were used as well. In 1984, Hasbro bought the distribution rights to the molds and rebranded them as the Transformers for distribution in North America. Hasbro would go on to buy the entire toy line from Takara, giving them sole ownership of the Transformers toy-line, branding rights, and copyrights, while in exchange, Takara was given the rights to produce the toys and the rights to distribute them in the Japanese market. The premise behind the Transformers toyline is that an individual toy's parts can be shifted about to change it from a vehicle, a device, or an animal, to a robot action figure and back again. The taglines "More Than Meets The Eye" and "Robots In Disguise" reflect this ability.

Grit (grain)

Grit (going back to Old English grytt or grytta or gryttes) is an almost extinct word for bran, chaff, mill-dust also for oats that have been husked but not ground, or that have been only coarsely ground—coarse oatmeal. The word continues to exist in modern dishes like grits, a Native American corn-based food common in the Southern United States, consisting of coarsely ground corn; and the German red grits, Rote Grütze, a traditional pudding made of summer berries and starch and sugar. Grit here was the cheap supplier of starch.

Gruels of grit, oatmeal grit preferably, were standard European nutrition of the lower classes in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period.

See also

References

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