Wednesday, December 12, 2007

A 'special' kind of genius

I am continually trying to make sense of the ramblings of my younger sibling. We share a flat and work for the same company, so I inevitably end up spending a significant portion of my time with him. This, I thought was fucking priceless (bear in mind we both work in IT)....

Him: "If we pay for 24 meg broadband, why does this say my film is only downloading at 500kbps?"

Me: "Because we share that 24 meg with about 50 other people who are all probably doing the same thing as you right now"

Him: "I've been thinking about this, everybody wants more bandwidth. I've come up with a really simple idea, a cunning plan as it were..."

Me: "Is this going to be fucking stupid?"

Him: "No! (Looking hurt). Computers all still use binary yeah?"

Me: (in suspicious tone) "Yeeeees"

Him: "Well, all you have to do is write an application or something that cuts all the ones and zeros in half...you know, so they take up less space".

Me: (Totally fucking lost for words)..."um what the fuck are you on about you dribbler?"

Him: "No, listen...if they are cut horizontally and you get rid of the bottom half you can still tell from the top half whether it is a one or a zero!"


Now bearing in mind this chap was academically extremely successful and is almost savant at mathematics, statistics etc. You can see how I struggle to fathom his thought processes. What kind of brain comes up with an idea like that and thinks it could work? The mind boggles.

Read his blog and see for yourself.

2 comments:

m.a. said...

So wait. He's never taken a Networks class? I mean...even I know that the speed at which information travels through like ports and stuff can't be solved at machine language level, right?

Cute.

Vindico said...

Pure genius!
Of course you could tell him that, rather than attempt to land his ship on planet wtf?, the 24meg connection should be replaced with a lower contended service or leased line so as not to have to share the exchange's backhaul with the other plebs.