Slashback: 2600, X-Many Bytes, Results

Tonight: Reactions and reductions of previous Slashdot appearances, including but not limited to: in-dash video gaming for the less upwardly mobile; a CSS descrambler you could scratch as a crib onto the side of your #2 pencil; and more on the engineers vs. scientists brouhaha. Enjoy!

I like the driving game in front of the windshield. Not everyone has the cash or the gumption to outfit his Macintosh with a Pathfinder; for the computationally experimental on a more modest budget, there is an easier way. wing_king writes: "A fellow named Troy Kellogg managed to hack an actual Atari 2600 console into the dashboard of his 1978 Volkswagen. The "AtariMobile" even has controller ports and a screen built right into the dash! The AtariMobile site has some pictures of the unit and some details on its construction. What a way to kill all that time sitting at stoplights."

Please tell me this is only for passengers and while parked, ok? I own one of these micro televisions, and it seems like playing on a screen that size while hunched over the stickshift might constitute more work than this labor-intensive project took in the first place. Wow.

Stir, reduce and simmer, stir in indignation: Aimster has removed the Pig Latin Encoder software from its site. And if that wasn't enough trivial encoding for you ...

If just over 500 bytes still wasn't small enough for your new MPAA-mocking tattoo, note that the famous Content Scramble System most famously De-flated with DeCSS has fallen anew.

PotatoNO writes: "Charles H. Hannum has created an even smaller DeCSS decoder than the perl script posted a few days ago. This one is written in C and takes 442 bytes, beating the perl script by 30 bytes. It's small and in C, so of course it's speedy. Hannum's program can decode in excess of 21.5MBps which is faster than the DVD spec allows for. That means it can actually be used for realtime playback."

Now hold on a goldarned minute there! William Evans, of Clark University's Dept. of Computer Science, took issue with the report Tuesday night in which drhpbaldy wrote: "At the latest ACM meeting, scientists and engineers threw mud at computer scientists for not contributing anything useful."

Wrote Evans in response:

"There seems to be some confusion as to what computer science is, and who computer scientists are. Programmers and other IT workers are not, for the most part, computer scientists--they're programmers and other IT workers. This is by no means disparaging, but simply a delineation based on definition.

Computer scientists study the branch of mathematics dealing with computation.

In the terms of your story, it was perhaps 'computer scientists' throwing mud at 'programmers and other IT professionals.' In actuality, though, it was mud thrown at business executives, and the ages-old indictment of the larger culture of western corporate management."

What medal do you get for 11th? ;) Rathnor writes: "I've spent the last week or so in Vancouver, Canada in the lead up to the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World finals. I'm a reserve in the University of NSW Team from Australia. Its been a great week with lots of cool things done for us from IBM and UPE.

The results are officially out and presented: The winners were: St Petersberg State University Second place: Virginia Tech the rest of the standings can be found here. (We made 11th)"

Comments

Re:Why Was the Pig Latin Removed from Aimster?

[Blitherakt!]

Next time, I'll try to look for it before I post a reply.

The reasons were listed in a C|Net News.com article on March 12 of this year. Here's the relevant link and the quoted text (it's the second from the last paragraph in the article):

Napster has contacted some of the people spreading these anti-filter technologies and asked them to stop. Aimster confirmed late Monday that it was taking its Pig Latin system down at Napster's request and had stopped development of a more powerful program for evading the filters that had been dubbed "Scorpion."

So it looks like the hillarious Pig Latin encoder is no more, as well as their next generation technology. Ah, well...

Not Computer Scientists?

[kreyg]

Isn't that kind of like saying people who actually perform physics experiments are not physicists? That only theoretical physicists are really physicists?

I have a degree in computer science... 90% of what I did at university and 90% of what I do now is bang out code.

Theory is important, I would even say the cornerstone, of everything we do, but there's more to it than that...

MPAA Effective?

[Dyolf Knip]

I love this.

The MPAA has been pretty successful in repressing the distribution of DeCSS, viewing it as a threat to movie industry copyright - and movie industry profits.

In what way have they been pretty successful? Short of "Hello World", it's probably the most widely distributed short piece of code on the entire net. And this new version just goes to show how amazingly ineffective they've been.

--

Re:DeCSS smaller than ever

[the_quark]

There's another interesting point - it really seems to me that the competition to bum a few characters from DeCSS is arguably art. I'd say that the coders involved in this are involved in an artistic endeavor, and even could be considered to be making a political statement about how stupid the DMCA is on these matters.

I'm even poorer...

[Saint Aardvark]

A fellow named Troy Kellogg managed to hack an actual Atari 2600 console into the dashboard of his 1978 Volkswagen.

Luxury. I had to solder my VIC-20 to the front of my 3-speed. I carry around the car battery that powers it on my back. When the acid leaks, it hurts. But at least I have my email.

Re:I'm even poorer...

[Syberghost]

VIC-20? 3-speed? Those are for pussies.

I had to carry my abacus in my teeth while crawling on broken glass. Uphill.

But you tell that to the kids today, and they won't believe you.

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