Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Manual Pin Setting (Score 1) 98

[quote]The article also remembers that once upon a time, bowling alleys reset their pins using pinboys, "actual humans — mostly teenagers... scrambling around behind the lanes, gathering and resetting by hand," before they were replaced by machines after World War II.[/quote]

I did that for a month at the bowling alley at Merrill Barracks, Nurnberg Germany. My companions were all DP's (displaced persons) from the East, and they were amazed that an American teen would be there doing that job! They thought we were all rich Americans, such things being beneath us!

'orrible job really. Sitting between two alleys, picking up to 10 pins each alley and lifting them into the mechanical racks at shoulder height, pushing the rack down every line. And of course the balls (up to 15 pounds each), one or two each line. It was years and years before I could go into a bowling alley without the sounds and smell making me nauseous.

But I was making 15 pfennnings a line (that was when the exchange rage was 4 DM = $1.14. Plus tips, except poor GIs didn't tip much. But hey, I'd make a couple bucks a night, more than I had before. I lasted a month, and just couldn't do it any more.

Comment Re:Random numbers are really hard (Score 1) 22

I was trying to write a random number generator back in the day, part of a data / file encryption scheme. But I wasn't sure how to test the output, to see if it really was random or not. (And we didn't have the Internet back then to look up answers.)

I decided to (1) generate a small block of data (like 256 bytes); (2) start up a stream of "encrypted" data; (3) check every 256 bytes against my test block to see if there were any matches. (I'd found a really fast data comparison algorithm; forget its name now.)

I let that thing run for five days, and not a single hit! I still don't know if I had the world's first software RNG, or if there was just a bug in my logic, or my code, or whatever.

I mentioned it to the NSA boyos when they wanted to see my source code for the final product (an honor, I guess), but they either didn't understand the code, or just didn't want to say. Sigh ...

Comment Ageng Orange all over again? (Score 1) 106

I always wondered about that stuff, suspicious since Back In The Day when I had to work a little with Agent Orange. Luckily I was a school-trained Staff Chemical NCO and knew enough to treat it like the dangerous chemical agent it was. I wonder how smart and careful many of the people working with Roundup are?

Comment Re:Here's the link (Score 1) 22

And DO check out the list of web sites and companies that have been breached. Damn, I'm not even through the "A's" yet, and I'm already disgusted :-( And yes, of course my own email address has been compromised. Undoubtedly that's where all the spam is coming from :-(

Slashdot Top Deals

Work without a vision is slavery, Vision without work is a pipe dream, But vision with work is the hope of the world.

Working...