What is Your Best Tech Joke?

3770 asks: "There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary numbers and those who don't. -- OK, I'm having a slow day at work. What is your favorite techie joke? I'm asking you! Make me laugh!"

Ok, I don't get it

[OzPixel]

In any normal /. article, there are always Frist Posts, trolls, and the usual array of off-topic regular /. jokes.

Now someone posts an open invitation to go berserk, and I haven't (in the first 60-odd replies) seen a single Natalie Portman, hot grits, AYB or beowulf cluster. At least someone managed to sneak in an "In Soviet Russia".

Weird, huh.

David.

Base three

[Gerry Gleason]

Not really a joke, but my favorite way to count in base 3 is a system where the digits are +, 0 and -. You can represent positive and negative numbers without an extra symbol. Place values are just like regular base 3 numbers (1, 3, 9, 27, ...). 2 (base 10) would be '+-', or 8 -> '+0-', etc.

Re:Six letters:

[jpsst34]

Think you're bitter now? Wait until after you graduate and find yourself asking, "Paper or plastic?"

Re:Lotteries

[tmasssey]

It's not.

I'm not sure that the odds of PowerBall are only 120 Million to 1: that sounds **WAY** too low. But even if that is correct, then yes, if the jackpot is more than $120 Million, you will make money if you buy every possible lottery ticket.

There are two things that go with this. 1) If someone *else* hits the jackpot and you have to split it, you lose money. So, it's not guaranteed to make money. 2) The lottery people don't care who wins, or how much. They get 50% of the income no matter what. So if you spend $120 Million to win a, say, $200 Million jackpot, so what? They still made $60 Million off of you, and next week they have a $60 Million jackpot!

In fact, this has been done: an investment company bought all 42 Million tickets in a lottery worth quite a bit more than that (something like $100 Million?). They were lucky: nobody else hit the jackpot. They had problems, though: several thousand numbers were left uncovered when a lottery ticket machine broke down and they couldn't get more tickets in time.

Interesting. I just checked Google. According to this [powerball.com], you're right: the odds are slightly higher than one in 120 Million...

Re:Base three

[Gerry Gleason]

Exactly!

If you had a natural three valued technology for digital storage, transmision and logic gates, this would be the most natural digital representation system. Few people realize that the map between physical symbols (high vs low volts, current on vs off (or reversed), stored charge, magnetic domains, ...) and logical value is arbitrary. We only have binary because a two valued system is the easiest for most technologies to implement, but three valued systems have a number of interesting symmetries (integer_max == -(neg_integer_max) for one) that binary systems don't.