16 Jan 2013
We've all read the joke.
There are 10 types of people in the world... Those who understand binary and those who don't."
Or the one people who pride themselves to be a bit more nerdy than the nerdy ones prefer:
There are 10 types of people in the world ... Those who understand hexadecimal and 15 others."
There's even a quote about this on bash.org.
kow: "There are 10 types of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't."
SpaceRain: That's only 2 types of people, kow.
SpaceRain: STUPID
I'll tell you; this SpaceRain dude has a point.
In fact, I'd say:
As xkcd put it:
Communicating badly and then acting smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness.
Of course, "In base 2 there are 10 types of people in the world..." isn't very funny, but - in all fairness - the original joke isn't very funny anymore either. However, "There are 010 types of people in the world... Those who can use google to look up octal numbering conventions and 7 others", is a bit funny to my fancy, even if it's a very strange way of classifying people.
Maybe we all should just move on from this joke or at least bring it to the next level.
I'll end this with a version that is actually funny and which I regret to say I will probably never find the original source of.
"There are 2 types of people in the world... Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data"
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