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An Ada exception is when a routine gets in trouble and says 'Beam me up, Scotty'.
An Ada exception is when a routine gets in trouble and says 'Beam me up, Scotty'.
tattoo (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Great (Score:4, Interesting)
Just wondering...
23 years ago... (Score:5, Interesting)
The final solution was to have no keyboard at all, but rather a computer whose motherboard was embedded in a 3-ring binder, with sheets.
On the sheets, were some barcodes, arranged in roughly the same layout the mark-sense cards were.
(For the geeks, the machine was MC6809-based, and had 56K CMOS RAM. The LCD display was always powered, but the computer shut down after it finished decoding a barcode and processing the "keystroke".)
Re:tattoo (Score:3, Interesting)
yeah, but why does that remind me of soemthing in the Bible? seems kinda apocalyptic if you ask me, and if he personally brought the beginning of the end of the world, i'd kick his ass.....
will eat script kiddies for fun....
rainman
Re:your house as a semi-permeable membrane (Score:5, Interesting)
The 'sending a JPG' to the baby-sitter starts out as a very neat idea, but what happens when baby-sitter has a popular e-mail virus which sends her e-mail to 100 people in her address book? Instant house party? Naturally they would only have the same access time slice as the baby-sitter, but they could just wait until after he/she is alone in the house and walk on in.
but without the major hassles (specialized equipment to punch holes or re-stripe a card)
It also means any Joe with a printer can make themselves a valid access card. I thought for quite a while about putting a similar setup at my house, but I decided instead to go with an extremely similar method, except instead of bar-codes I use hand prints. A lot of the advantages (time slices for the maid and sitters) without being able to be so easily produced (until advanced cloning techniques allow people to commonly grow copies of my hand).
And w.r.t. the people who keep asking about 'power outages' for (1) ever heard of generators of batteries and (2) naturally a physical key still works in the lock, duh!
$10 and I'm in (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Honestly, really (Score:5, Interesting)
Slashdot really, truly, utterly needs to have a local cache of the
pages it references. It's getting to where Slashdotting is as bad as a
denial of service attack - and that's a terrible thing to inflict
on *anyone*.
Probably 50% of web sites referenced from main news items are down within
an hour of Slashdot mentioning them - and they stay down until a couple
of days have passed. That sucks.
They could easily implement some kind of opt-in thing where you put a META tag
in your web page telling Slashdot that you grant them explicit permission
to mirror the site for (say) a week after mentioning it - so Slashdot would
have no legal/copyright come-backs. At the end of the week the Slashdot
mirror could revert to become a redirect to the real site so you don't have
problems with people bookmarking the Slashdot cache instead of the real
site.
The whole process could be automated.
People who do cool things like this door lock would surely be aware that
they could get Slashdotted and prepare for the event in advance by
inserting the tag - and private individuals are the people who are
most likely to have their server die.
Companies that want to profit from their slashdotting by advertising from
their page or taking orders off of it could just leave off the META tag
and handle the traffic as now.
An opt-in cache mechanism is a win-win-win solution. Slashdot wins because
more people will use the service if it doesn't continually refer to dead
sites. Readers will win because less sites will be dead-on-arrival - and
web site operators will win (if they want to) by not having their site
die from Slashdotting.
Proposal (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems to me Slashdot could offer to mirror the content for a price, so that the linkee gets ad money, while slashdot carries the bandwidth burden.
Is there no way to:
1) Contact the website owner
2) Alert him of the amount of bandwidth he's going to need
3) Offer to mirror his pages such that ad referals still go to him
4) Everybody profits?
Re:Not very secure (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't go betting all your wordly possessions on this. An experienced locksmith (or someone who knows what they are looking for) can come up with a reasonable facsimile of your key based on the key cuts and the type of lock (probably imprinted on your key as well) if given a chance to look at your key. Keys can be traced and/or photocopied as well. A good reason why you should never leave your house key on the key ring when you hand over your car keys to someone you don't know or trust (valet, mechanic, etc.)
Re:What A Beautiful Mind (Score:3, Interesting)
Read properly. I said 23 years ago, so that's 1980. I was only 18 at the time, but I had experience in computer graphics programming plotters (I volunteered for a computer graphics art group - this was waaaaay before Postscript) so it was only natural that I'd be the one they turn to to generate the barcode sheets.
They were done on a HP-9847 graphics terminal (a company oddball that was lying in a corner 'cause no one had any use for it. I learned years later that it was a demo unit THAT HP FORGOT THERE!!!!) onto which you could load a (surprisingly good - compared to the usual Microsoft crap - yes, Microsoft used to do crap then) BASIC interpreter, all this driving a IEEE-488 plotter. But eventually, I found the setup so disgusting (can't stand BASIC) that I wrote a device driver for the mainframe and I reprogrammed the barcode sheet programs. All in PL-1. Needless to say, that pretty well annoyed the dinosaur tenders of the time that I'd be using THEIR big iron to make graphics... Not to mention asking them all sorts of technical information in order to hack this...
In that project, I eventually also programmed the database on the mainframe that received the data, as well as the mainframe-side communication program, after my bosses saw that I managed to write a plotter driver for the dinosaur...
Anyway, the project was eventually canned because there was to much high-management interference (this was for a Fortune-500 ** CANDY ** company!!!) which brought the progress to a crawl. Only 10 prototypes of the computer were built, and I believe some still exist to this day.
* * *
Nowadays, I manage the computer department for a design company which designs museums (we're currently doing a museum for the Smithsonian, amongst other things), and I have a tax-credit consulting sideline.
For fun, I troll on Slashdot and NANAE, and have plenty of sex.
Now, for those who imply that there is no life beyond 30 years, I say you're fucking bunch of peepsqueaks whippersnappers; first of all, my sex drive went waaaay up when I hit 32 (went from 5 screws/week to 3/day), and I don't have any problems to pick-up; heck, a few months ago, a 19 year old jumped on me, and whas subsequently duly fully fucked by myself (and this happenned in a city park).