The world went to hell when we lost PEEK and POKE
It's my damn computer and I will read and write anything, anywhere in its memory that I want!
All that security crap, worse than even the TSA!
88 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Nov 2013
Lucky you, you had a terminal with a CRT...
As an undergraduate in the 70's I decided I wanted to do image processing. The hardware available consisted of a Univac 1106, card punch machines, a line printer the size of a Volkswagen beetle (but significantly louder than that beetle sans muffler.) The software development environment was paper pads and marker pens (to draw diagonal lines across the top of card decks.)
I chose 100 x 100 resolution (line printer was 132 characters wide) at 32 gray levels. As it was rather hard to find image data (where was Lenna when you needed her?) I wrote code to generate patterns including stripes and gradients to begin testing. (I remember one of them was based on the diamond shaped Renault emblem, easy to generate.)
To output grey levels on the paper I used the FORTRAN-IV '1H+' Hollerinth at the beginning of each line, This caused a carriage return without linefeed. Then I sent multiple overlaid lines to the printer. At each character position a 0 level would be a blank, a 1 would be a period, and so on... I think level 31 was something like overlaid {M, W, E, 3, O, S, Z, \, /, [, ], +} or some such dark sequence. This meant each line was printed 12 times using that '1H+', before a line feed occurred.
I submitted the deck of cards, and went away to lunch. When I came back, there was a note for me where the output printouts were placed. it said to immediately see the Professor in charge of the computer center. I had shredded a spool of their expensive ink ribbon and put the line printer out of action for the rest of the day - pending a service call from Univac.
What no one had told me was that the line printer had a full width ink ribbon, and that it advanced only with a line feed. So it was getting banged on 12 times in quick succession and this was happening 100 times for each image printed.
And that's how you cut an ink ribbon on a line printer...
I am a leaf on the wind, watch how I code... :-)
To make my life a lot easier, I use C or C++ and
a- I usually avoid 'private's. I have everything declared as 'public'.
b- I also have most 'important' variables (except small local things like i, j, n, etc.) as globals...
c- I try to avoid #include of anything other than standard libs. I make a single huge .cpp file from everything of mine that I would have included. (Obviously including .h are OK.)
But then again...
1- I am the only one using the code which I write.
2- I never deliver. No one else ever gets their hands on it...
3- It is for research, not production or distribution.
4- It only ever runs on my own computers.
I use tabs and I use spaces and sometimes I mix them just because I feel like it at the time. Never had a problem, never thought about it.
If your compiler can't handle that, you need a better compiler.
If your interpreter can't handle that, you need to be using a compiled language. (In any case, independent of this reason...)
Merry Christmas. Thank you for this gift:
"When you're in a full-screen CLI, especially editing, what you get above all is focus. Compared to a GUI desktop or, heaven help our grasshopper minds, an in-browser task, it is supremely quiet and uncluttered. It is you and your keyboard, and text that wants to be free of variant forms and options. If you're coding or writing text where actual content is more important than form, it is a zone for reason and thought like none other in modern computing."
The ad blocking plug-in we really need is one that also examines the blockes ads and makes a list of the advertisers and products they advertise. Then, in addition to us not seeing the ad, we would know who tried to put an ad for what on our screen - so we can boycott them... You ask, who would pay for the servers and the creators? I don't really give a damn. If I like the content enough, I will donate directly to the creator (e.g. Tom Voelk of Driven fame.)
As a new hire Assistant Professor I was tasked with keeping minutes of a faculty meeting. I did so, verbatim. Examples: "Professor X said the Dean supported us for opening a new faculty position, but he would like to not let Mechanical Engineering know about it for now." Or, "Dr. Y said we should put EEyyy on the schedule, even though there will probably not be enough students to open it." and on and on. Was never asked to do minutes again...
Packing chads (acquired from the big waste drawer built into the punch machine) into a car's exhaust was always fun. Especially when it was parked with the aft end pointing where people were likely to line up, like the student lot at the university, right by where everybody lined up for ride share...
Bank of America had a feature that generated a new credit card number for use in online purchasers. It was good for a single merchant, you could set the monthly credit limit, you could set the expiration date, and the charges would appear in your regular credit card. Best thing ever! I used it, and never had need for PayPal, or any other payment processor.
Why BoA took it away last year, I'll never know...
... and elsewhere... From almost 5 centuries ago...
"The large fireplace with gilded hood (ocak) stands opposite a two-tiered fountain (çeşme), skilfully decorated in coloured marble. The flow of water was meant to prevent any eavesdropping,[65] while providing a relaxed atmosphere to the room. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topkap%C4%B1_Palace#Privy_Chamber_of_Murat_III
Absolutely, first thing that crossed my mind!
I had one and in 1995. When receiving a security briefing, I told the briefer I had one, and that we should update the briefing materials to talk about these watches.
She was not delighted at the prospect... :-) :-)
If you are running flash, especially in full screen kiosk mode, it is not feasible to upgrade Chrome.
Because Google took out a user's ability to always allow flash from specific sites using the chrome://flags/#enable-ephemeral-flash-permission flag in v. 69, anyone using flash in an unattended kiosk needs to use an earlier version. (Never mind that Google doesn't even have an ftp site for old versions, you need to get them from who.knows.what.malware.lies.here.com.)
See https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/chrome/7y0gbgs06L8/3ehByJReGQAJ or many other posts from aggravated users.
So much for doing no evil. I wish I could take back the many thousands of $ I gave Google, buying many Nexus'es, Pixels, storage, Fi subscriptions, etc...
"When software authors pull the "we know better, so no configuration for you" stunt, users get angry!"
Well said! After 5 years, I still have not forgiven Mathworks for going from the perfectly functional menu interface in Matlab to the Microsoft inspired 'ribbon' abomination.
(The drone, I mean, not the desk.)
So, which craft landed without incident, the drone, the King Air, or both?
"There's also no news of where the drone struck. As the craft landed without incident, The Register's aviation desk will assume it wasn't chopped up by the plane's propellors with attendant spray of plastic and metal."
A King Air prop, with a PT6A driving it, could probably shred a DJI and never know it.
Let me get this straight, if he were to get a CAA commercial drone operator license, then the railway would have no standing in the matter, right? (Unless he actually hit a train or landed on their tracks or right of way.)
Obviously, the easy solution is to give it a static address that is in a segment blocked from routing to outside the LAN subnet. There is no need for most drives to face the cloud - as long as you have one machine on the network providing ntp service so that they can keep reasonable time/date synch,
When the My Book Live's cry that they can't reach the WD mothership to get their update, it makes me so sad. :-)
The first My Cloud I bought had an arbitration clause in the terms and conditions that a customer had to accept to be able to use the drive. So I sent it back.
I have bought about a dozen of the old My Book Live drives (seven of which are right in front of me now) Only one of the MBL's has so far failed - not the disk itself, but the partition. (MBL uses a goofy block size) so I just converted to an internal drive, reformatted and reloaded it. (Seven days of the week, seven drives, each backed up weekly = daily backup,)
As long as that arbitration clause is there, I'm not buying any more WD stuff.
I am sure it can fly. It can get up to the required INDICATED airpeed and fly about.
Tougher on landing or takeoff though. The actual speed over ground would be hundreds of miles per hour. So even if there were a 10 mile long runway on Mars, the tuchdown speed would be something like 600 mph.
Austin Meyer wrote about this long ago: http://www.x-plane.com/adventures/mars.html
OK, it was a small board, but Excel was the most convenient thing I had right then.
Select all, set column heights and row widths to 0.05", and use borders/lines with 0.025" thickness, and voila PCB design tool... Can do multiple layers using different colors.
Here is a sample I just did in 5 minutes...
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6XOKbodr2nOVDV6a014X2JjRVk