Protocol (pronounced proh-tuh-kawl, proh-tuh-kol or proh-tuh-kohl)
(1) In government (applied especially to the diplomatic
service), the customs and regulations dealing with diplomatic formality,
precedence, and etiquette.
(2) By extension, an accepted code of conduct; acceptable
behavior in a given situation or group.
(3) In diplomacy or other intra- & inter-governmental
relations, an original draft, minute, or record from which a document,
especially a treaty, is prepared.
(4) An agreement between states (or other national or
international entities) or a supplementary international agreement (some
notably being secret).
(5) An annex to a treaty containing technical data,
definitions etc.
(6) In clinical medicine, the plan of a patient's treatment
regimen (which can be a generalized document).
(7) In academic research (especially in medical trials
including living subjects), the details, standards & safeguards etc.
(8) In computing, a set of rules governing the format in
which data must exist to communicate between devices.
(9) In philosophy, a statement reporting an observation
or experience in the most fundamental terms (ie without any commentary or other
interpretative layers (and sometimes taken as the basis of empirical
verification, as of scientific laws). It’s
known also as the protocol statement, protocol sentence & protocol
proposition
(10) To draft, submit for consideration or issue a
protocol; to make a protocol of; to make or write protocols; to issue protocols
(actual use now probably extinct although such forms do still exist in some
diplomatic manuals).
(11) In the Roman Catholic Church, (1) the introduction
of a liturgical preface, immediately following the Sursum corda (lift up your hearts) dialogue & (2) an official list
(technical details or consequential documents) which, since the late nineteenth
century have sometimes been appended (at the beginning or end) to documents
such as charters and papal bulls.
1535–1545: From the earlier protocoll, from the Middle French protocolle & protocole
(document, record), from the Medieval Latin prōtocollum,
from the Byzantine Greek πρωτόκολλον (prōtókollon)
(the first kóllēma (a leaf or tag) glued
to a rolled papyrus manuscript, listing the contents), the construct being πρῶτος (prôtos) (first)
+ κόλλα (kólla) (glue). A kóllēma
was “something bound or glued together”.
Proto- was a learned borrowing from the Ancient Greek πρωτο- (prōto-) from πρῶτος (prôtos) (first),
superlative of πρό (pró) (before). In the mid-fifteenth century the spelling prothogol had been used (meaning
literally “prologue”) and by the 1540s prothogall
(draft of a document, minutes of a transaction or negotiation, original of any
writing”, again from the thirteenth century French prothocole (which in Modern French persists as protocole) was in use. Protocol
is a noun & verb, protocolar is a noun, protocoled & protocolled are
verbs and protocolary & protocolic are adjectives; the noun plural is
protocols.
The plural form was kollēmata
(sheets of papyrus glued together to form a roll) and on the basis of those extant
or referenced elsewhere, each was typically between 16-24 sheets which, when
un-rolled, extended to between 18-30 feet (5.5-9 m). It’s not clear when use began but the
earliest documented evidence of use is from the early medieval period. A tube-like prōtókollon (usually of a rougher form of parchment but some seem
to have been made from tree bark) protected a rolled-up scroll and the original
was similar to what in modern publishing came to be called the colophon
(containing variously copyright details, a mark of authentication, the date of
publication, the font and typesetting data and the name of the author) although
the usual function was to list a summary of the contents, any errata or the
purpose of the work.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (with preface and explanatory notes), The Patriotic Publishing Co., Chicago, 1934. Ludwig Rosenberger Library of Judaica.
All such things were of course those which comprised the framework of government & diplomacy and, by the mid-nineteenth century, French bureaucrats had formalized the protocol as (1) “an official record of a transaction & a diplomatic document” (especially an agreement between states to achieve certain things by peaceful means) and (2) “official norms of behavior or etiquette to be maintained between states and their ministers”. The later sense was understood in English by at least 1896 and by 1952 it was in common use to describe “civilized behavior” in society generally, becoming a popular word in the etiquette guides which proliferated (along with the middle class) in the post-war years. Long in thrall to all things French, the use relating to matters etiquette was late in the nineteenth century picked up by Russian diplomats and from the Tsar’s court it entered various state apparatuses (of which the Tsar had many), the foreign ministry creating protokóls for everything from the thickness of the carpet allowed in offices according to the rank of the occupant to the form of words to be used when declaring war. The police used protokól as a heading of “official police records of a case, interview or incident” although the use in Russia will forever be associated with the infamous forgery Протоколы сионских мудрецов (Protokoly sionskikh mudretsov) (The Protocols of the (Learned) Elders of Zion (1903)), an anti-Semitic tract published in English under the title The Jewish Peril (1920). Although debunked as a forgery as early as 1921, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion enjoyed a remarkable life in the twentieth century, accepted as authentic even by some otherwise respectable professors and it remains widely available. It purports to be the minutes of a secret meeting held by Jewish leaders (known as the Elders of Zion), who met allegedly to conspire to control the world, manipulate governments, and establish a global Jewish domination. There have been a number of theories about the origin of the protocols and its spread has been compared to the conspiracy theories published by QAnon on 4Chan and other places in that such things rely less on the authenticity of their content than the accessibility to an audience which, even in embryonic form, already maintains those views.
In computing, the terms "protocol" and
"parameter" are (casually) sometimes used interchangeably and while
it is true protocols contain many parameters, correctly, the two words refer to
different concepts. A protocol is a set
of rules and conventions, the best known of which are those which govern the
communication between devices in a network; it defines the format, timing,
sequencing, and error control of the data packets which are the messages
exchanged between these entities. The
significance of protocols is that they ensure diverse devices and systems can interact
effectively, removing the need for the hardware to be substantially similar and
in that they can be compared with operating systems which sit atop sometimes
very different hardware. The best known network
protocols include HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), TCP/IP (Transmission
Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) and SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol)
although two of the oldest (RS-232, RS-422 &
RS-485) serial communications protocols are still in use in the odd niche. By contrast, a parameter is a variable, a value passed
to a function, procedure, or command in order to customize its behavior or
provide input for its execution. Parameters
are helpful because they allow software to be flexible and adaptable by
accepting different inputs without demanding changes to the code. Parameters may be compared to the range of
adjustments offered by the driver’s seat in a car. Were no adjustments available, manufacturers
would have to produce different models for people of different heights.
Lindsay Lohan released NFTs based on Trons’s TRC-721 protocol (functionally similar to Ethereum’s ERC-721).
The recent collapse in the non fungible token (NFT) market
surprised few of the analysts who had predicted a bubble market based on
selling something “non-fungible” which merely referenced something inherently fungible
and infinitely duplicable wouldn’t long last and would be among the first
victims of any instability in the wider economy. Analysts always enjoy being able to say “I told you so”. Still, the NFTs themselves (in the sense of
the object on a blockchain) have a robustness which offers much promise as a kind
of macro-title document and, if regulators can agree, the concept may have a future
in fields like land title or ownership certificates for traded, high-value collectables. The infrastructure is certainly beyond the embryonic
because a number of blockchains have added support for NFTs since Ethereum
created its ERC-721 standard. ERC-721 is
an “inheritable” protocol which means developers can create contracts by
copying from a reference implementation, a contract able to be tracked to the owner
of a unique identifier and it includes a mechanism by which ownership can be
transferred. Ethereum also developed the
ERC-1155 protocol which (a little misleadingly), they described as offering a “semi-fungibility”
whereby a token represents a class of interchangeable assets. Ethereum did however demonstrate the inherent
flexibility of the NFT approach even if they did little to improve the transactional
speed although, if the protocols have a future in low-volume, high-value items
such as land or collectable physical objects, that really matters little. There were though other approaches and the Tron
Network released their NFT model using Proof-of-Stake (PoS) which differs from Ethereum’s
Proof-of-Work (PoW) based blockchain. PoS
& Tron’s TRC-721 protocol, cheaper and faster to use, attracted Lindsay
Lohan when she released some “collectables” as NFTs.
No comments:
Post a Comment