Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment What counts as 'prevention'? (Score 4, Insightful) 78

Does a DoS attack count as prevention?

Shannon-Hartley's theory-- Capacity Limit: As noise approaches infinity relative to signal, capacity approaches zero, meaning reliable communication becomes impossible without increasing power.

So, DoS attacks effectively prevent communication.

Is AI slop a DoS attack? It sure as heck feels that way...

Comment Wrong assumption in the article (Score 5, Interesting) 83

I, Steve Wozniak, did not participate in the theft of the BASIC. It was funny to me to see others enjoying doing this. I had never used BASIC myself, at that time, only the more-scientific languages like Fortran, Algol, and PL-1, and several assembly languages. I sniffed the air and sensed that you needed BASIC to sell computers into homes, because of the book 101 Games in BASIC. I loved games and saw games as the key. It was the [MS] BASIC that inspired me to write a BASIC interpreter for my 6502 processor, in order to have a more useful computer.

Comment Old-school asm and C programmers for the win? (Score 1) 152

I started PC programming in 1982, had to teach myself asm almost immediately in order to write a hardware interrupt handler for the serial port.
Back in those days code size was important, and for any driver/TSR type program it was simply crucial. Here in Norway we needed to load the KEYBNO.COM program which took over the keyboard interrupt and provided the official Norwegian layout, including the 'æÃÃ¥ÃÃÃ...' keys for our 3 extra letters in the alphabet.
Over the years, Microsoft/IBM had many version of this driver, the final one which also did text more font layout changes (at least for the default 25x80 mode) was up to 60 kB. This was large enough that lots of US-developed engineering/DB applications simply didn't fit, so I wrote a replacement:

All keys (including Ctrl- and Alt- modified combos) were handled, along with font remapping for 25x80, 43x80 (EGA only) and 50x80 (VGA only) screen layouts, using a total of 704 bytes. It became so popular that Compaq/HP stole it to give to their customers, then when we caught them red-handed (they had not figured out how to get rid of my startup Copyright message) they refused to pay but promised to not do it again.

Half a year later we caught them again, they had started telling customers that they had to keep it a secret.

Terje Mathisen

Comment This is a _very_ big deal! (Score 5, Insightful) 63

NIST have always been the world leader in creating ever more accurate clocks, the current masers work in picoseconds and below, so allowing the reference to drift by 4.8 microseconds means that precision dropped by at least 6 orders of magnitude.

If allowed to propagate to the GPS control clocks, this would have been enough to totally destroy the navigation system since a clock that is off by 4.8 us corresponds to a position error of 1500 kilometers. (OTOH, USNO has its own large ensemble of atomic clocks, so they don't depend short term on NIST updates.)

Full disclosure: I worked with the NTP Hackers (network time protocol) team for 20+ years, so I'm probably a bit more interested in precise timekeeping than most. I have personally soldered together 4 or 5 GPS-based reference clocks that would deliver 25-35 ns RMS precision.

Comment Re:But why a smart garage door opener? (Score 5, Informative) 126

With RATGDO (or the one or two other things that do the same thing), you can:
- View status of door
- Open/Close door (this includes positioning it to some position, like 5% up, or 50%, etc)
- 'Lock/Unlock' the RF side. RF stuff is relatively insecure, so being able to 'lock' it is helpful

And you can do all of this without cloud, without paying subscriptions, and without worrying about the vendor going "poof" (open source is cool that way) and leaving you stranded, and without requiring an app (the device serves a basic webpage that you can access from your LAN (or IoT lan)).

You can use it with (local!) home automation like Home Assistant too.,

Submission + - Python Software Foundation refuses $1.5 million grant with anti DEI provision. (blogspot.com) 1

Jeremy Allison - Sam writes: The PSF has withdrawn a $1.5 million proposal to US government grant program.

"We became concerned, however, when we were presented with the terms and conditions we would be required to agree to if we accepted the grant. These terms included affirming the statement that we “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.”

Comment Re:Sold his stock (Score 5, Informative) 98

I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.

Comment As a programmer: Quake (Score 1) 228

Full disclosure: I was somewhat involved with the Quake development, helped Mike Abrash a little bit to optimize the asm code that actually made a pure SW 3D rasterizer fast enough to be playable.

The Castle Wolfenstein - Doom - Quake progression might seem from the outside to be a fairly linear upgrade path, but in reality Quake was at least an order of magnitude harder to achieve.

Just the number of amazing ideas John Carmack managed to come up with in order to make a real 3D game possible will forever give Quake a special place in my programming heart.

Terje

Slashdot Top Deals

Crazee Edeee, his prices are INSANE!!!

Working...