09.26.07chmod syntax for Restaurants?
I can’t decide whether or not Ian Hickson’s system for remembering ratings at restaurants (R3 anyone) is awesome or lame.
It reminds me of the unix command chmod, which is used to specify the permissions of a file.
You see the filesystem has three bits for any given file (this is a generalization of course, but bear with me): read, write, and execute. If you assign a 1 or a 0 to each bit you get 8 unique positions for the permissions of any given file: 000 to 111.
Since base 2 is not the way humans think, chmod lets you use base 10 so you get 0 to 7 with the most interesting numbers being perhaps 4, 5, 6, and 7 (read-only, read+execute, read+write, everything).
Hickson is applying this idea to his restaurant bill. Amazing.
tom says,
chmod is using octal (base 8), e.g. 123 in octal is 1×8x8 + 2×8 + 3 = 83 in decimal, and 001 010 011 in binary.
on September 27, 2007 at 2:07 am
Josh Peters says,
In this case it could really be any base greater than 8, but you’re probably right.
on September 27, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Bryan says,
Geez, I can’t decide either. It sounds like something the author of xkcd would do, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and go with “awesome.” However, I wonder if waiters might take a tip ending in .23 to be kind of cheap or insulting. I always go for a full dollar amount, because it just seems lame not to be willing to round up a bit. (Given your chmod comments, I guess I just made an unintentional pun!)
I find the idea of writing the tip in such a way to verify that you were charged properly to be more useful. I always wonder if I’ll be charged correctly, but I never care enough to save my receipt and check it.
on September 27, 2007 at 2:28 am
Travis says,
I think it’s a cool idea – however, having worked in the serving industy for a little while, I think many of the “career” servers might not think so
(if they don’t know what’s going on they tend to think you’re either being cheap or trying to get away with something.
Also, you’re right on about the even dollar amount. A few of the servers where I worked would do that (if a customer left a $5.07 tip, they’d just make it $5)
on September 27, 2007 at 2:49 pm