Comment Better, faster encryption engine. (Score 1) 277
char
EncryptChar(char x)
{
return 0;
}
char
EncryptChar(char x)
{
return 0;
}
I started serious programming (at around age 14) on the Pet. First in BASIC, but once I found out you could break into a machine language monitor by wiring up a NMI button (we called it the two-button salute), there began my machine coding. In HEX, directly. Didn't even have a relocator at the beginning. It was a year before I could buy the expansion rom to add disassembly and relocation features to the machine language monitor.
Ultimately I wrote an assmbler too. I don't think I have any of that code any more, it's been lost in time. Kinda makes me sad.
The PETs 8-bit IEEE-488 bus was pretty awesome. The PET had a 1 MHz 6502. The external floppy drive also had a 1 MHz 6502 in it, and you could reprogram it. So one of my many projects was to speed up the data transfer between the two by synchronizing the processors with a series of handshakes and then pushing or pulling the sector data without any further handshakes (using processor timing).
My friend did the same thing for the C64's serial interface (which didn't even have a uart) and sold a product called '1514 Flash!' that sped up the serial interface. Basically a little messing around at the beginning of each transfer to get the two sides synchronized within 1 clock cycle of each other and then pushing/pulling bits as fast as the little cpus would go without any further handshaking. The clocks would stay synchronized long enough to copy a whole sector.
Other projects on the PET... it had a character generator rom which I replaced with a static ram. so when I powered it up I had to load a copy of the original rom into the ram blindly (because the display was total garbage due to it being an uninitialized ram).
The PET had built-in CRT screen but the key was that the data input for the screen was actually a TTL input! So I could pop the wire off the connector and use it like a digital oscilloscope to probe various TTL-based projects (as well as the PET's motherboard itself).
Another project...the character generator rom had something called quarter-block graphics. Basically 16 characters that had all 16 combinations of four quarter-blocks (2x2), so you could (I think) 320x200 graphics on it. I spent many hours optimizing the machine code to generate a pixel pusher.
I got so good at writing editors from scratch, once when I went to computer camp and forgot to bring the tape I rewrote the text editor in machine code in less than an hour.
Met Richard Garriott at that camp too, we were both on staff. He was working on (I think) Ultima II at the time (on an Apple II I think) and had an awesome ram disk for storing code temporarily while he was working on it. Once his computer stopped responding and after unsuccessfully trying to resurrect it he finally gave up and power cycled it, losing his work in the ram disk. It turned out he had accidentally disconnected the keyboard and the computer was actually fine. Oh well! Richard taught a class at that camp on human-interface parsing... basically had people write a dungeon game where you typed in what you wanted to do in English. Primitive of course, but the kids had a blast.
I wrote a centipede game in machine code, incredibly fast and awesome (the last level the centipede was invisible and only blinked into existence for a second or two every few seconds), and submitted it to Cursor magazine. They rejected it because they thought I had stolen it from someone
The 6502 had two awesome indirect EA modes. (TABLE,X) and (ADDR),Y, along with the standard modes.
Decimal mode wasn't as interesting, I wound up not using it for display conversion at all.
The 6522 I/O chip was an incredibly powerful chip for its time, with multiple timers and timer-driven events. It had a few bugs, too.
I remember all the unsupported machine codes the 6502 had. It was a hardwired cpu so all instruction codes did *something* (even if it was mostly to just crash the cpu). LDAX was my favorite. Mostly, though, the hidden codes were not very useful.
The list goes on. Twas an awesome time, a time before PCs took over the world.
-Matt
SSD $/GB is gonna be going down across the board. It's nice to see the competition heat up.
-Matt
Not sure what that guy was complaining about but I love my Razer Blackwidow ultimate (2013) keyboard. I grew up on heavy n-key-rollover IBM keyboards and then had to make due with horrible light, cheap, keyboards for many years until I found the Razer. It's worth the price for me. And I've gone through probably 30 or 40 keyboards over the last 35 years.
* Heavy, it doesn't move around.
* USB extension port on the right hand side is perfect for my wireless mouse's transceiver plug.
* N-key rollover that actually works, solid tactile (mechanical) response. I can type at 80+ WPM again.
* And doesn't have thousands of useless extra buttons.
Since a Razer engineer is listening. My suggestions:
* Have a usb port on the left side as well as the right side.
* Change the middle-bottom symbol. I don't quite remember... it might have been backlit before and I took the keyboard apart to disconnect it. It was a distraction.
* Don't reverse the upper and lower-case symbols on the keycaps. That was kinda silly.
* The bottom feet could be a little more robust.
In terms of mice, I use a simple microsoft or logitech wireless mouse now. Simple three button w/wheel... I don't like extra buttons or left/right buttons and when I play games I tend to map most features to the left-hand side of the keyboard rather than to a complex mouse. That way I can bang the mouse around without accidental button pushes. I prefer wired mice but for the last few years I couldn't find any at the stores I frequent.
The wireless mice are fine as long as (A) the tranceiver is within a few inches of the mouse, which it is hanging off the keyboard's RHS usb port. and (B) You use a AA alkaline (non rechargeable) battery. Rechargeable batteries just don't last due to charge leakage. And of course keep a spare battery within reach or replace every month whether or not it needs replacing.
-Matt
Whenever Radio Shack asked me for my address I just said I wasn't interested in giving it to them. But a friend of mine did one better... he always wrote down the address of the White house and signed it Mickey Mouse. And the sales person dutifully entered it into the computer, no questions asked.
-Matt
That is not a correct description. Lower frequency radio waves are no less 'quantum' or 'classical' than higher frequency radio waves. AM radios can penetrate objects primarily because they have a wavelength on the order of 400 meters (up to around 1 MHz), whereas FM radios have a wavelength of only a few meters (through around 100 MHz). The longer wavelength of AM effectively allows the radio wave to bypass even relatively large objects such as mountains.
The same effect can be seen even within your house if you have a dual-band WIFI router. The 2.4 GHz band is able to penetrate walls and go around corners and reach the second floor far more easily than the 5 GHz band can.
-Matt
What morons. Sorry, but they are. They are writing to a file through the operating system which means that it is being spooled out to disk asynchronously, so obviously piecemeal writes are going to be faster because they will run concurrently with the string generation algorithm. Plus their 'writes' are probably being buffered in ram anyway.
Writes to files generally do not stall programs. These people are morons.
-Matt
No, the ApplePay CC number is not transmitted in any way, only the one-time token is transmitted. If the credit card reader is compromised it is theoretically possible to issue a payment using the one-time token before the payment can be issued by the vendor, but not really practical. And once a payment has been issued the token becomes worthless so the vendor will find out very quickly that they have been compromised (as in, within a few hours, possibly even in real time, rather than months later).
-Matt
Well, its pretty obvious that the so-called fraud rate is a made-up number. It would be insane if it were true. But most likely... it's insane because the author made it up.
-Matt
In terms of convenience, ApplePay is about as easy as a contactless credit card. It takes me about 3 seconds to pay with ApplePay and at least for me it's faster than even a contactless card because I keep my phone in a more accessible pocket than I do my wallet.
More importantly, ApplePay is significantly easier to use than chip-and-pin or traditional cards, which is where its competition really is (because that is what most people use in the U.S. who are just now starting to migrate). And also significantly more secure for the user.
It is certainly far more convenient to use than Google Wallet or any Android payment scheme to-date which require you to turn on your phone and/or push into an App to use. Not sure why anyone is even arguing about Google Wallet or other Android pay schemes any more, they've already very obviously have lost that war and will need significant hardware upgrades to even come close to ApplePay's convenience or security.
Touching your wallet to the reader is a bit of a misnomer... works great if you have just one card in your wallet. Doesn't work reliably if you have more than one. Another interesting little tidbit on the contactless payment cards is that if you are standing in line and the person in front of you is paying, and your card is anywhere near the reader, the reader can pick up your card accidently. That has happened to a friend of mine several times, to the point where he now keeps his contactless card in a faraday-cage card slip. That doesn't happen with ApplePay because you have your finger on the fingerprint reader to complete the transaction.
-Matt
I just squiggle when I have to sign a credit card slip. I don't bother using my signature at all, and haven't for about 20 years (even longer). Nobody cares. I did try using a big 'X' a few times but actually got some pushback on that. But I've never gotten pushback when I use a random scribble.
-Matt
Wish more people would leave, its getting crowded here. But, alas, idiotic opinions on slashdot don't translate into reality.
-Matt
Well, I think it was a combination of things, and Linux was certainly a part of the reason. But not the whole reason. There are several reasons why Sun finally died:
(1) Sun hardware just couldn't keep up with Intel. The many-threads model really only worked well for parallelization of database operations and not much else. Each individual cpu thread simply became too slow. And people stopped caring about database benchmarks because they were more a function of rapidly improving storage and networking technology than anything else. CPU performance stopped mattering so much and Sun's super-optimized core hardware advantage went right out the door along with it.
(2) Sun's utility software quickly fell behind linux and the BSDs. I began noticing this long before Sun actually sold out to Oracle. Sun's kernel stayed fairly relevant, Solaris wasn't bad... very solid in fact. But competing operating systems were also becoming more solid. But, OMG, the utililties were all 80s crap. Nobody growing up in today's world (or even the world of a decade ago) would be happy with a base Solaris install.
(3) Sun basically became like IBM... corporate only sales and screw making anything that could be bought by up-and-coming students. Solaris for x86 was never taken seriously by Sun, and thus never taken seriously by people outside of Sun. With students growing up on Linux (the younger age group) and the BSDs (my age group), Sun started losing market power as these generational shifts began moving into the workplace. Also, system needs by the web began changing. Sure there are still huge backend databases, but most of the services (and the related hardware) were becoming heavily distributed and Sun's hardware just didn't fit the model.
In fact, this is similar to the problems that SGI had. They were married to their hardware (don't get me started on Solaris for x86), the hardware became non-competitive and unpurchasable by smaller businesses or individuals, and the base software was locked into an 80's snapshot of hell. The system programmers lost sight of what people wanted and got tunnel vision, super-optimizing database paths and ignoring everything else. Problem is, people were more interested in the 'everything else' part.
It might be fine for the older IT types, but all the newcomers had grown up on Linux and the middle-agers had grown up on the BSDs. Their rotation into the workplace spelled Sun's death in very loud, clear terms that Sun pretty much ignored.
-Matt
While some things have improved in Firefox, much of the browser has gotten worse over time. Simple illustration... it leaks huge amounts of memory. After only 3 days of sitting around:
UID PID PPID CPU PRI NI VSZ RSS WCHAN STAT TT TIME COMMAND
101 164892 1738 128 230 0 1.45G 1.02G - R2L ?? 3d09:44 firefox -geometry +2820+80
After around 2 weeks the machine starts to swap. I've seen the image grow to over 6GB (with 4GB *active*) before I've had to kill it and start a fresh copy. WTF is firefox using all that memory for? It makes no sense whatsoever.
Other problems include severe instability, particularly with the file requestor (when uploading files), which results in seg-faults. And even with all the threading there seem to be severe interdependencies between tabs running javascript, so if one tab is javascript-heavy, it messes up the performance of other tabs.
The menu system is in a complete shambles, and I was really unhappy when the last upgrade changed my default search preferences to Yahoo without so much as a by-your-leave.
-Matt
To donate funds to Conservancy GPL compliance efforts see here:
1 + 1 = 3, for large values of 1.
