metaphorm

metaphorm t1_j9vc4n8 wrote

Rule #4 from the sidebar

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>Explain for laypeople (but not actual 5-year-olds)
>
>Unless OP states otherwise, assume no knowledge beyond a typical secondary education program. Avoid unexplained technical terms. Don't condescend; "like I'm five" is a figure of speech meaning "keep it clear and simple."

I think I explained myself in my post at a level that someone who passed their high school physics class would understand.

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metaphorm t1_j9vbp62 wrote

no, that's wrong. you're confusing logical circuits with binary arithmetic. there's an algebraic equivalency between them (Boolean algebra) but they aren't the same thing.

binary is a base of number representation. 0 and 1 have the same meaning in this context as they do in any other number representation context.

in computer systems, binary numbers are used to encode all kinds of different information, not only the state of a logical circuit.

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metaphorm t1_j9vaa3r wrote

that's not true. electricity is a physical phenomenon that has all kinds of continuous quantities associated with it. Amps, Voltage, Resistance, Charge, etc. are all physical quantities associated with electricity that aren't binary at all.

what you might be thinking of is the way an electronic logic circuit uses electricity to determine the logical state of the system. electronic circuits measure voltage potentials on a wire to determine the signal on the wire. The convention is to map a "high" voltage to 1 and a "low" voltage to 0. The exact value of high and low don't matter here, the only thing that's important is that the circuit can reliably measure those values and reliably distinguish the high value from the low value. The wire is capable of having potentials that aren't the values mapped to 1 or 0. In a normal integrated electronic circuit, that would be a kind of error state, but it's still physically possible. It's physically possible because electricity is not inherently "on" or "off".

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metaphorm t1_j9v9gc5 wrote

Binary systems can perform all of the same computations as ternary systems. A ternary system has additional downsides (complexity) compared to a binary system and the additional upsides (certain computations, if implemented in a way that takes advantage of ternary logic, can be faster than the equivalent on a binary system) aren't a big enough upside to be worth the downside.

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metaphorm t1_j6jbzu3 wrote

Reply to Drip by lezwinHD

"He must be a king."

"How can you tell?"

"He ain't got shit all over him."

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metaphorm t1_j20i3uy wrote

A network port is a "channel" for information received over the network. Your computer has physical ports, where a wire is plugged in (or a wireless connection by radio in many cases), but this port is not the same thing as a port being referenced by software. From the perspective of software a network port is the location of a stream of data made available to the software by the operating system. The operating system takes the data coming in to the physical port and divides it up into thousands of different virtual locations that can be used by all the different software running on the system.

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