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Comment Re:I had Prodos on My Apple][e in 1983-84 (Score 1) 81

by La Gris (#52906483) Attached to: 23 Years Later: the Apple II Receives Another OS Update

There were at least two versions of the LC ROM and there was multiple revisions of the Apple][ Motherboards. Some had a socketed dip chip.
If you used the wrong LC ROM, you got garbled font display as the data alignment/interleave was wrong. One version of the ROM required piggy-backing a line to the IC so it could address the char values range for lowercase.

About the graphical text environment that allowed you, lowercase text and mixed text and graphic. It was brought by a software suit named like Mibbit.

Comment I had Prodos on My Apple][e in 1983-84 (Score 3, Insightful) 81

by La Gris (#52904767) Attached to: 23 Years Later: the Apple II Receives Another OS Update

> is pretty remarkable, considering the Apple ][ and ][+ don't even support lower-case characters.

Wrong, there was a Prodos for the Apple][

> Apple ][ and ][+ don't even support lower-case characters

There was a program that piggy-backed the char display and used graphic mod to display lowercase characters, even supported accentss. Had bee used by word-processors back then. AppleWord and the Jane environment.

And Yes I affirm, there was a Prodos for the Apple][ back then.

Comment Re:Old Saying (Score 1) 460

by La Gris (#51913179) Attached to: Man Deletes His Entire Company With One Line of Bad Code

One solution would be having prepared statements for shell commands instead of doing those risky string concatenations.

And I have stopped using rm to delete files because this command is way too stupid and can take options from file-names.

I use find command,
run it dry once to show what is found
then run find stuffs-to-trash -delete

Comment Re:Make them all Caddys and Priuses (Score 5, Interesting) 748

by La Gris (#51143525) Attached to: The Humans Crashing Into Driverless Cars are Exposing a Key Flaw

Disguise all self driving cars as police cars... That should keep the drivers in the cars around them from driving as if there are no rules...

You have a good point with your funny comment.

Autonomous cars should have a very distinctive indicator light marker.
Slow vehicles have to use an orange rotating beacon here.
Cars operating autonomously should have something similar.

Comment Was not Oracle code in the first place (Score 0) 229

by La Gris (#50294685) Attached to: Oracle Exec: Stop Sending Vulnerability Reports

Not to defend the Devil but:
She basically acknowledge their product is highly bugged.
She says they prefer to deal with it internally and are doing quite well. (fair)
Given the base Flash code was not their own in the first place, and given their very uncomfortable posture:
I'd say, She is doing pretty well as an Executive. Not the brightest possible communication but still decent.

No need to beat a dead horse. It will not go any faster.

Submission + - Opening Fixed-Code Garage Doors With a Toy in 10 Seconds

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: It may be time to upgrade your garage door opener. Security researcher Samy Kamkar has developed a new technique that enables him to open almost any garage door that uses a fixed code–and he implemented it on a $12 child’s toy.

The attack Kamkar devised, known as OpenSesame, reduces the amount of time it takes to guess the fixed code for a garage door from several minutes down to less than 10 seconds. Most openers in commercially available garage door openers have a set of 12 dip switches, which are binary, and provide a total of 4,096 possible code combinations. This is a highly limited keyspace and is open to brute-force attacks. But even on such a small keyspace, those attacks take some time.

With a simple brute-force attack, that would take 29 minutes, Kamkar said. To begin reducing that time, he eliminated the retransmission of each code, bringing the time down to about six minutes. He then removed the wait period after each code is sent, which reduced the time even further, to about three minutes. Looking to further reduce the time, Kamkar discovered that many garage door openers use a technique known as a bit shift register. This means that when the opener receives a 12-bit code, it will test that code, and if it’s incorrect, the opener will then shift out one bit and pull in one bit of the next code transmitted.

Kamkar implemented an algorithm known as the De Bruijn sequence to automate this process and then loaded his code onto a now-discontinued toy called the Mattel IM-ME. The toy was designed as a short-range texting device for kids, but Kamkar reprogrammed it using the GoodFET adapter built by Travis Goodspeed. Once that was done, Kamkar tested the device against a variety of garage door openers and discovered that the technique worked on systems manufactured by several companies, including Nortek and NSCD. It also works on older systems made by Chamberlain, Liftmaster, Stanley, Delta-3, and Moore-O-Matic.

Comment Already within power circuit or useless (Score 2, Insightful) 243

by La Gris (#49836463) Attached to: Company Extends Alkaline Battery Life With Voltage Booster

When a device power circuit already integrate a voltage regulator, this is yet another battery scam.
If not, it is either a cheap or old piece of electronic.

This battery extender _is_ yet another battery scam.

Next expand your car mileage by adding a water sprayer, magic canister?

This is not news for nerds.

_This_ is scamvertisement.

Comment Our universe is an artifact from our consciousness (Score 1) 226

by La Gris (#48946223) Attached to: There Is No "You" In a Parallel Universe

We are just trying to describe and define it based on our consciousness and from what our senses can feel about it.
And given our consciousness and our senses are themselves artifacts of the universe. I think we will never be able to understand and describe outside of the thin domain of our own being.

Submission + - The Pentagon's $399 Billion Plane to Nowhere (foreignpolicy.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: On July 3 the the entire F-35 Joint Strike Fighter fleet was being grounded after a June 23 runway fire.

The grounding could not have come at a worse time as costs have soared to an estimated $112 million per aircraft.

One thing the grounding won't do, however, is derail the F-35, a juggernaut of a program that apparently has enough political top cover to withstand any storm.

Part of that protection comes from the jaw-dropping amounts of money at stake. The Pentagon intends to spend roughly $399 billion to develop and buy 2,443 of the planes. However, over the course of the aircrafts' lifetimes, operating costs are expected to exceed $1 trillion. Lockheed has carefully hired suppliers and subcontractors in almost every state to ensure that virtually all senators and members of Congress have a stake in keeping the program — and the jobs it has created — in place.

"An upfront question with any program now is: How many congressional districts is it in?" said Thomas Christie, a former senior Pentagon acquisitions official.

Counting all of its suppliers and subcontractors, parts of the program are spread out across at least 45 states. That's why there's no doubt lawmakers will continue to fund the program even though this is the third time in 17 months that the entire fleet has been grounded due to engine problems.

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