Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Embed, Dougal, FireWire
Reality is just an illustrator's concept. In regards to the speculative piece about what animals will look like in the future, Ken Colangelo writes: "The author of After Man was Dougal Dixon, not Dougal Adams. He's got a pretty long track record as an amazing bio-illustrator.
He had, at one point, spoken of a book he was working on called "Man After Man" I believe. This would discuss what man would evolve into. In any case, I am probably his biggest (only?) fan and would appreciate it if you'd tell slashdot to correct his name ... This guy clearly needs to be working in speculative evolution again, now that computer graphics have caught up to his abilities. Animal Planet just doesn't seem to be that great at it."
A bit more on that secret FireWire, since it's no longer secret. cwill1004 writes "As was speculated yesterday, it turns out that Apple is indeed including a new higher-speed FireWire on its new laptops. Dubbed IEEE1394b, it appears to be primarily for external storage devices. One article on the Storage Supersite says that LaCie, Maxtor, SmartDisk, and Indigita have already hopped on board. The best part: IEEE1394b is backwards compatible, and available on both Mac and PC."
Perl undoes simplicity itself.
ljb writes " I've re-written Tom Murphy's
'embed' bit-flipping program
in Perl. At 76 characters (shorter than a standard
80-character width terminal line),
I believe this qualifies as a Perl "one-liner". Heck, you could even fit this on an old IBM punchcard
(ignoring character set limitations). Here's the Perl script --
$/=\4;map{?OS/2?|$f&&$f++==2?$c-=2+vec($_,0,32)/4: ++$c||s/../\0\0/s;print}<>"
So get distributed crackin' ... scubacuda writes "On. Off. Now it's on again? According to PC World (et al), The Neo Project again tackles the challenge of cracking Microsoft's encryption key."
The new Firewire is signal compatible, but it has a new plug. So you need adapters to plug old cables into the new PowerBooks.
Haven't heard of why they did this, but I guess they had a reason. Hopefully a good one.
I was in Best Buy, or The Good Guys the other day, and happened to see a display of stereo equipment. The manufacturer was pitching the product line as using Firewire to interconnect all the devices. Personally I think this is a great design. Suddenly each device has a power cord, and a single data cable. And then the reciever has a "hub" built in. FAR less spaghetti behind the system, FAR less opportunities for noise to leak into the wiring, etc.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
His one-liner doesn't seem to update the checksum? There is a checksum someplace in there.
How do I know this interesting fact? Because last year I tried writing my own one-liner, but couldn't squeeze it down to one line because of the checksum.
Here's what I came up with at the time, which according to diff produces identical output to the C code:
121 bytes if you take out the newlines. And any slashdot-inserted spaces.
No, I have no idea how it works any more. The code is placed in $_, the '-' is not as it seems, eval() runs the code in $_, and that's all I can tell you. Welcome to Perl!