The New and Improved "Bovine Adjustment Implement"
Is he repurposing his barbecue igniter to make a more powerful cattle prod?
BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns "What do you think?" the PFY asks, as the Boss slips into the office. "I think it'd work. It's a game-changer!" "What's a game-changer?" the Boss asks. "Oh, uh, nothing," the PFY says. "Come on, something must be a game-changer." "Uh … we were talking about the … new Monopoly rules …
Is that an Incremental Bovine Situation? I hear so many people complain about IBS.
Or is it a Bovine Excremental Development. I could certainly drop my current task and return to BED if required!
----------> Just in case the BED gets sprayed around a bit!
10 feet of 4" pipe, u-bend, 2" sprinkler valve, 10 feet of 2" schedule 80 electrical conduit sleved on the inside with 1.5" SDR 21 irrigation line.
Golfball relocation device that will surprise and terrify.
Standard warning that DWV or foam core 4" is not desigbed to be used for pressure applications, and solid core is not designed to be used for air applications due to shrapnel vs split on overpressure.
Liked that, it has been a while. I thought I picked up the signs of bringing management stack theory into practice and wasn't disappointed. Extra thumbs up for making the boss think he has a cunning plan.
Ternary logic is the most efficient base because 3 is the closest integer to e. Oh, and clearly the boss didn't know that various people have created ternary computers.
I think if you read the first of phuzz's links, you'll see that (given certain idealized assumptions and a modest amount of handwaving) you can minimize the component count by choosing a base close to e. Given the currently available integers, that would make ternary optimal.
And if you live in a jurisdiction where the Biblical value of π = 3 is accepted, then ternary has yet another advantage.
>various people have created ternary computers
What's that got to do whether the idea is patentable or not? All you have to do is file it and let the system do the rest. (Depending on where you live you can always amend the application to include any ideas that might broaden its scope).
The next stage in the game is wait for a Big Tech to use something like it. You could sue them but what you do is typically hand the thing off to specialists who are financed by investors -- often hedge funds these days -- who work for a percentage (most) of the take.
(ElReg missed a good story a week or two back when there was the annual conference of the patent troll industry -- yes, it is an industry, that's what they call themselves -- down on the Gulf Coast.)
Three-valued logic is not as alien as one might think. It's – as far as I remember – the only sound basis on which to give a mathematical semantics of certain formal methods such as the venerable VDM (Vienna Development Method). See the 1994 Acta informatica article by Jones and Middelburg (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01178666).
I think they're actually on to something. I would very much like my PC to have a "Mehbe" option for things, particularly where you've been worn down by years of being asked the same questions and just don't care any more.
"Windows needs to install updates", hrmph, mehbe. I just don't care any more to explicitly click OK.
"Do you want Excel to show you a list of auto-recover files, even though you usually save everything regularly?" <shrug>, mehbe - I'll let the PC decide, I really can't be arsed with it any more.
"A fractionally improved GeForce driver has been released. Do you want to install it?" Whatever, mehbe.
upgraded my home pc bios on a dont-really-need-to whim the other day
result: A lot of whinging about bitlocker and total refusal to boot from the C drive , despite the data being plainly visible and unencrypted , resulting in a reformat.
luckily mydocs etc kept elsewhere and backed up.
In your defense, Applying windows updates will break Bitlocker half the time, unless you've taken the ~20 minutes to turn it off before installing the updates, and then remembering to turn it back on.
Which nominally results in most people just leaving the damn thing turned off. :)
It sounds like the ideal platform for performing fuzzy logic.
When I were a lad, I developed my own balanced ternary (or trinary, as I called it at the time) arithmetic well before I heard of Setun or any other implementations. (I didn't really expect it was something new to the world, but I knew I hadn't seen it elsewhere.) It actually has some surprising advantages, especially when it comes to long division. And of course, there's the aforementioned (by phuzz, in another comment thread) base efficiency, although I didn't know about that until that kind of thing became something one could read about on the Web.
> After a few pints everything starts to seem very clear and absolute, to me: there are very few problems that can't be solved by culling.
I've lost track of the number of problems we have solved during discussions at the pub - only problem is that we seem to have a memory commit issue as we can't remember anything the next morning.
Such an entertaining BOFH PFY tale highlights the enigmatic quandary patently evident to all novel inventors and stellar imagineers both flattered and extremely well paid to both deceive and flourish and furnish the future with that which is clearly missing and so desperately needed to avert and/or divert what are newly uncovered/discovered/rediscovered possibilities harbouring the potential to deliver and escape responsibility and accountability for suddenly approaching unconventional disasters ...... the parasitic hanger-on chasing the ambulance of opportunity that supplies such unprincipled deplorable third parties riches/profit for nothing worthwhile in return for first party compliance and core proprietary intellectual property source secrets.
And that is always destined to fly like a lead balloon in any future developing future derivatives for global market interest in Almighty Interventions.
Have you any idea how much further that would progress over the course of a pint or three or more at the likes of a "The Patent Office" – a "Traditional Old English Pub” . Cheers, m’dears! TGIF again :-)
Maths such as division using Roman numerals becomes rather more interesting than expected because we'd naturally try and use our modern positional number techniques and these are not transferrable to number systems with discrete values. This didn't mean that Roman mathematicians and engineers couldn't do maths, just that their techniques were different to compensate.
Interesting. I was a self-taught oik when my customer-facing office had "personal computers" issued (one between 2 or 3 initially) in the mid '80s, so my technical knowledge started from nil. A few of us did learn enough to usefully supplement the corporate mainframe system but we got little or no official support.
..."the bit state of the Cosmos and the anterior projection of digitized sine waves?"
Did Prof Hawking really write that? If I had the faintest idea of what it meant I would probably know.
Hugh Everett's Many Worlds paper was titled "The Theory of the Universal Wave Function" so Cosmic bit states might be a thing.
I hadn't considered the BOFH and PFY as instruments of the dark side of the Force - "the force is strong in that one."
CP/M & DOS had the dread trinary "abort, retry, ignore" none of which were particularly useful. abort = accept your data loss, retry = hope springs eternal, ignore = pretend a great chunk of missing data won't make a difference.
While commonly laughed at, and often for good reason, Abort, Retry, Ignore were quite a sensible set of options when attempting to read data from an testy storage medium - such as floppy disk.
Abort - just give up entirely
Retry - try getting the data again, just in case the god of magnetism and motor whirring are feeling generous today
Ignore - ignore this error knowing that the data is crap and move onto the next bit of data (and hope).
Just what I needed to enliven a trip to a customer this morning with the boss.... and he said "Lets bring the PFY too".. so she snaffles the front passenger seat and both USB power outlets and I'm left to fester in the back (and giggle while reading the BoFH.)
Which brings me to make el-reg an offer, your PFY for mine... yours is devious and cunning and not afraid to baffle with bullshit when blinding someone with science would have done, mine is rather ruthless and charming and comes with a finacee who you could take his shirt off and paint him green and he'd make a good stand in for the hulk (and not the wimpy 1970's TV series one either)
Incredible Hulk debuted in 1978.
Just to put that into perspective - The Incredible Hulk TV show debuted closer in time to the release of the original King Kong than to today.
And while Lou Ferrigno is not "wimpy" compared to any actual human, I think the point of comparison was either (a) the comic or (b) the more recent CGI version(s), which in either case make any mere human, regardless of physique, look wimpy.
Long ago -- mid 1980s -- a friend wrote something up where he argued that "BIT" was an acronym for Binary digIT (yes, the I coming out of "digIT"), and thus a Trinary digIT would be called ... ok, you get it.
And what were these Trinary digITs stored? A bra, of course. Floppy bras, hard bras, and if you weren't quite picturing a hard bra, he suggested referring to the 1970s Linda Carter Wonder Woman TV show. As I recall, he went on a lot longer than this, and much funnier.
The problem with ternary computing has always been that the hardware sucked. It is theoretically the most efficient, but was shafted by the failure to develop hardware as cheap and practical as binary logic devices. Beer glasses are no good; does that half-pint in there mean the glass is half-full or half-empty or, err... falling fast perhaps?
I've always assumed that there is no tri-state digital electronic device or circuit that isn't basically a 4-state device used inefficiently. Any electronics engineers care to comment?
Afterthought: This may not be true for quantum computers, since there most certainly are triplets and singlets for systems of two spins.
TIL: my father was not wrong, just misinformed. When he (a good RCA computer engineer) taught me binary in the early 1960s, I asked about Base 3. Not quite the same, but he told me that G.E. (the competition) was working on a 3-state computer. (We now know the Russians did it before that, but it was dangerous to know too much.)