> Yeah I tried to build the original test ( but GCC 2.95 just wouldn't compile them:)
No shit. You require a bug-compatible compiler to build older kernels.
I don't remember what version of GCC I used to build slackware back in '96, but it was a mighty small number.
*thinking*
[~] polaris# gcc --version 2.7.2.1 [~] polaris# ls -l `which gcc` -rwxr-xr-x 2 root other 148768 Jan 17 1999/usr/local/bin/gcc...So you'll need to go back farther than 2.7 series. Probably 2.5.
(Yes, I keep historical dev boxes. You never know when some jackass is going to want support on ancient crap. But that's my oldest one.)
> What are the chances of it being pulled in by the Earths gravity?
As it stands now, the moon is moving four inches away from the earth every year. All we have to do is extract mass at a rate which would cause it to stay in its current orbit, and we'd be good to go.
I did the same thing, except coffee and caffeine pills instead of Jolt cola.
Now I'm 10 years older, thoroughly chemically dependant on caffeine (really -- a few hours late in the morning and my day is ruined.. and probably the next one, too), and in NO WAY CAPABLE of doing that anymore.
In fact, I recently tried to pull a 70 hour week, and wound up with the Pepto Five.
That said, I get more done in 40-50 hours now than I did 10 years ago working 80+. I guess experience is helpful.;)
The comma-operator is good, but you can save a character by making Dig() an argument to Picture(). Just ignore the compiler warnings.
Note: will only work as expected on platforms where the callER cleans up the stack (cdecl). "Pascal"-style calling convention (common in m$ crap) where the callEE cleans up the stack will probably run out of heap eventually.
> That's pretty good, but it still doesn't guarantee that the machine's firmware isn't > tampering with the code after it's in the machine.
You could allow each of the N parties to supply Required/(N+1) PCs to run the voting software, and the electoral commision would supply Required/N+1 PCs of its own. The software records which machine was used and a firmware hash of some kind on the voter's receipt.
Then statistical analysis could be used to determine if one or both parties are cheating; it will be easy to detect and VERY hard to do.
You could also hash the running total on the voter's receipts, along with timestamps. That might also prove to be very interesting.
I'm assuming you're talking about a C64 since you've got the bottom of basic at 2049 (Although I think it was actually 2048 with programs loading at 2049 for some inexplicable reason). That said, the C64 has a VIC-II chip, not a VIC chip.
You're right, though, there is only 4KB of "usable" RAM at $C000. Ah, how quickly we forget. FWIW, 4KB = 4096 bytes.
Y'know, every byte counts on one of those babies!
That said, I don't think that would have caused any horrible side effects. IIRC, $D000 was just 4K character map ROM -- so you would just be wiping out the underlying RAM which is normally unused.
I suppose for your application you may have had the character ROM bank switched out, though, and been using that RAM for colour RAM.
You know what's scary? I haven't touched one of those things in well over decade, but I still know what's at addresses 53280, 53281, 646, 780-783, 828, 56577, 56579... and of course 0 and 1.
Can your Windows debugger even load core dumps, so you can see what went wrong with the application in production?
As for compilation speed - that is absolutely, totally, and completely irrelevant (unless you are a Gentoo user). What matters is how fast and correct the output is.
> Make the debugger faster.
The only thing that needs to be faster is watched expressions. But then again, they're not fast on ANY platform if you're watching at the global scope.
My debugger runs as fast as I can type. Any faster would be counterproductive, because it would have to make up what to do.
> I don't remember anything about pointers in BASIC 20 years ago
Sure it did. We just didn't call 'em pointers.
10 FOR I=49152 TO 49152 + 8192 20 POKE I,0 30 NEXT I
I here is clearly a pointer. Now, mind you, the pointer read/write operators were a little clumsy (POKE and PEEK), and it was a pain in the ass to have pointers to native language variables (but doable if you knew your interpreter well enough), but the concept was clearly there.
You should apply for another patent based on your original patent on -1 for taking the square root of negative one.
Then, you would own the letter i, and Bill would have to pay you a royalty for every "IsNot" patent license. Better yet, he'd have to pay you every time he signed a cheque.
Re:From the memory hole...
on
Sun-isms Debunked
·
· Score: 2, Informative
2.5.1 - UNIX(r) System V Release 4.0 (polaris) 7/x86 - SunOS 5.7 8 - SunOS 5.8 9 - SunOS 5.9
I don't have any 2.6 boxes around any more, and don't remember which way it was.
If you're the guy who made the documentary with the selection on the Star Trek dentist -- I liked it very much.:)
I'm no insane Trekker, but I'm forced to admit I was once the First Office of the local Trek club, and I went as Data last year for Halloween (and I'm 31 years old).
My Data costume was awesome, too. Cheap, effective, and EVERYBODY knew who I was. I guess that says something about TNG!
Ask your dad how well his "tone generator" would work with PVC pipe.
Actually, I should *my* dad what he'd do. He's been known to douse for pipe in the field before -- successfully.
I have a sneaking suspicion, though, that his dousing success is due in no small part to his unbelievably fanastic memory.
Re:Umm, using a tool is a hack?
on
Knoppix Hacks
·
· Score: 1
From one eight-bit guy to another -- You wanna REALLY have a good idea how it works?
Pick up the yellow Operating Systems book by Andy Tannenbaum. WONDERFUL book.
True, there are many, many, many differences between Minix and Linux -- but once you have a good grasp of that text, you'll be able to piece together whatever you decide you want to know about Linux from the mismash out there in webland.
Why is this so hard to understand?
on
Netscape Reborn?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Let's say you and your buddies decide to write a book, and you call yourselves "Netscape Communications Corp.". You start with a short story that was called "Mosaic" written by a bunch of nerds called the NCSA.
Now, you wrote this book, and called it "Netscape". It was pretty good, but you kept updating it through revisions 1.2, 2, , and 4, each a few months or years apart. While you were at it, you released a couple of special "Gold" editions which had a bunch of extra crap in it, and maybe a "Communicator" edition which was really a trilogy.
By the time you've realeased version 4 of the book/trilogy (and a few subrevisions to correct the awful spelling mistakes and grammatical errors), you realize that it sucks pretty hard.. you've added pointless plot twists, introduced internal inconsistencies, and basically, it's not all that great any more.. so people stop buying it.
You decide to work on version 5 of your book, only realize it's going to be a LOT of work to make anything worth reading, and your publisher has told you to stuff it. So, you stop working on it, and say, "Hey! You want rights to a book?" to the first group of bearded hippies that walks buy.
So, the hippies take the book, some chips, smoke a lot of dope, and make friends with you and your crew. They pour through it carefully, keeping the good parts and ditching the crap. These hippies release a version of your triology and call it "Mozilla".
But; the story's not over yet. Your publisher has been sold, along with your name. The new owner of your name asks the hippies for a copy, which they gladly provide. This copy is put through the spin cycle on a washing machine along with some gum and wax crayons, and is released as version 6 of the trilogy.
Now, a bunch of other hippies come along (while the Mozilla hippies are fiddling with this and that -- trying to get the book "perfect", as only hippies can do), and decide they want a book, too... only the Mozilla book is the size of the freakin' family bible and they're too frail to lift it. So, they release the Reader's Digest version of the first book of the trilogy -- which, due to the editorial skill of this second set of long-hairs, happens to be quite good.
This second group of hippies called the book by a variety of names. First, they called it Phoenix, but an evil company that made typewrite daisy wheels told them to change it, or they'd sue. Next, they called it Firebird, and another evil company (this time making filing cabinets) told them the same thing. Then one of the hippies was on an acid trip, and thought he saw a red panda in his vision quest. Looking up "red panda" in warezed version of Microsoft Encarta, he saw that it was also known as a "Fire Fox". Taking this as a sign from Budha (or at least a Karma-earning omen), the hippies called their latest book "Firefox".
And lo, they editted and polished Firefox for many moons, until the publisher who bought your original publisher who went tits up when your Netscape Communicator "trilogy" failed decided THEY wanted a book of their own. But rather than fix that steaming pile of crap, they dropped by to see the second group of hippies.
The hippies weren't home, so they couldn't ask if they could use the book, but there is it was -- sitting on top of the photocopier, along with a sign that said "Yo - wanna book? Have one. If you've got some extra, we'd appreciate if you'd stick around for a toke".
And so, this distant relative of your original publisher, using your name (Netscape Communications Corp) makes some photocopies of the Firebird book, splashes some paint on the cover, sticks a couple of coupons in, and releases a "new" book on newstands everywhere.
He would be correct if there were only 5 users, which is possible if the number is "in the single digits". Unfortunately, that expression can mean any number from 0 to 9, so any percentage in the range 1/9, 1/8, 1/7,... 1/1 is possible (I am using that has is not claiming to be part of a group of zero users).
Slashdot Mirror
> Yeah I tried to build the original test ( but GCC 2.95 just wouldn't compile them :)
/usr/local/bin/gcc ...So you'll need to go back farther than 2.7 series. Probably 2.5.
No shit. You require a bug-compatible compiler to build older kernels.
I don't remember what version of GCC I used to build slackware back in '96, but it was a mighty small number.
*thinking*
[~] polaris# gcc --version
2.7.2.1
[~] polaris# ls -l `which gcc`
-rwxr-xr-x 2 root other 148768 Jan 17 1999
(Yes, I keep historical dev boxes. You never know when some jackass is going to want support on ancient crap. But that's my oldest one.)
> Any suggestion you might offer
.html file; either on the disk on a public webserver.
How about an asinine suggestion?
The icon on the desktop is a link to a
The html file tries via JS to load two (hidden) images, one from each address.
Whichever image's onload event triggers first causes a document.replace() with the full site URL corresponding to that image.
Another option, if you're already tied to IE, would be to have an HTA/ActiveX control check the machine's IP number and make a decision from there.
Or, if they're already going through a proxy, use proxy autoconfiguration/name resolution to sort the mess out.
Lots of solutions out there.
> What are the chances of it being pulled in by the Earths gravity?
As it stands now, the moon is moving four inches away from the earth every year. All we have to do is extract mass at a rate which would cause it to stay in its current orbit, and we'd be good to go.
Holy crap, I thought I was the only on here who remembered that show!
I did the same thing, except coffee and caffeine pills instead of Jolt cola.
;)
Now I'm 10 years older, thoroughly chemically dependant on caffeine (really -- a few hours late in the morning and my day is ruined.. and probably the next one, too), and in NO WAY CAPABLE of doing that anymore.
In fact, I recently tried to pull a 70 hour week, and wound up with the Pepto Five.
That said, I get more done in 40-50 hours now than I did 10 years ago working 80+. I guess experience is helpful.
We still haven't had Linux 4.3/Reno
The comma-operator is good, but you can save a character by making Dig() an argument to Picture(). Just ignore the compiler warnings.
Note: will only work as expected on platforms where the callER cleans up the stack (cdecl). "Pascal"-style calling convention (common in m$ crap) where the callEE cleans up the stack will probably run out of heap eventually.
Beats me.
Look at the picture.
If that's a 12" magnet, those folks are Lilliputians.
Argh.
:)
Of course, you're right. I've been coding in nothing but C for so long, I natively think
char i;
for (i=0; i 4096; i++)
*(0xc000 + i) = 0;
for that loop
Since I'm using the less than operator and starting at zero, the result is as expected.
Of course, the other problem he didn't point out is that I started my FOR..NEXT loop at 1 instead of 0, missing the first byte of the address.
> That's pretty good, but it still doesn't guarantee that the machine's firmware isn't
> tampering with the code after it's in the machine.
You could allow each of the N parties to supply Required/(N+1) PCs to run the voting software, and the electoral commision would supply Required/N+1 PCs of its own. The software records which machine was used and a firmware hash of some kind on the voter's receipt.
Then statistical analysis could be used to determine if one or both parties are cheating; it will be easy to detect and VERY hard to do.
You could also hash the running total on the voter's receipts, along with timestamps. That might also prove to be very interesting.
I'm assuming you're talking about a C64 since you've got the bottom of basic at 2049 (Although I think it was actually 2048 with programs loading at 2049 for some inexplicable reason). That said, the C64 has a VIC-II chip, not a VIC chip.
You're right, though, there is only 4KB of "usable" RAM at $C000. Ah, how quickly we forget. FWIW, 4KB = 4096 bytes.
Y'know, every byte counts on one of those babies!
That said, I don't think that would have caused any horrible side effects. IIRC, $D000 was just 4K character map ROM -- so you would just be wiping out the underlying RAM which is normally unused.
I suppose for your application you may have had the character ROM bank switched out, though, and been using that RAM for colour RAM.
You know what's scary? I haven't touched one of those things in well over decade, but I still know what's at addresses 53280, 53281, 646, 780-783, 828, 56577, 56579... and of course 0 and 1.
No wonder my brain feels full.
"click click" is not what makes a debugger good.
Can your Windows debugger even load core dumps, so you can see what went wrong with the application in production?
As for compilation speed - that is absolutely, totally, and completely irrelevant (unless you are a Gentoo user). What matters is how fast and correct the output is.
> Make the debugger faster.
The only thing that needs to be faster is watched expressions. But then again, they're not fast on ANY platform if you're watching at the global scope.
My debugger runs as fast as I can type. Any faster would be counterproductive, because it would have to make up what to do.
> I don't remember anything about pointers in BASIC 20 years ago
Sure it did. We just didn't call 'em pointers.
10 FOR I=49152 TO 49152 + 8192
20 POKE I,0
30 NEXT I
I here is clearly a pointer. Now, mind you, the pointer read/write operators were a little clumsy (POKE and PEEK), and it was a pain in the ass to have pointers to native language variables (but doable if you knew your interpreter well enough), but the concept was clearly there.
You should apply for another patent based on your original patent on -1 for taking the square root of negative one.
Then, you would own the letter i, and Bill would have to pay you a royalty for every "IsNot" patent license. Better yet, he'd have to pay you every time he signed a cheque.
2.5.1 - UNIX(r) System V Release 4.0 (polaris)
:)
7/x86 - SunOS 5.7
8 - SunOS 5.8
9 - SunOS 5.9
I don't have any 2.6 boxes around any more, and don't remember which way it was.
Like it really matters.
If you're the guy who made the documentary with the selection on the Star Trek dentist -- I liked it very much. :)
I'm no insane Trekker, but I'm forced to admit I was once the First Office of the local Trek club, and I went as Data last year for Halloween (and I'm 31 years old).
My Data costume was awesome, too. Cheap, effective, and EVERYBODY knew who I was. I guess that says something about TNG!
> wow the man still douses?
Used to; he retired about five years ago. Does it with a pair of 3' copper brazing rods bent in an L-shape.
> he does this as SOP or just for
> kicks to see the looks on the other guys faces?
A bit of both: SOP when the standard equipment fails or is unavailable for whatever reason.
Ask your dad how well his "tone generator" would work with PVC pipe.
Actually, I should *my* dad what he'd do. He's been known to douse for pipe in the field before -- successfully.
I have a sneaking suspicion, though, that his dousing success is due in no small part to his unbelievably fanastic memory.
From one eight-bit guy to another -- You wanna REALLY have a good idea how it works?
Pick up the yellow Operating Systems book by Andy Tannenbaum. WONDERFUL book.
True, there are many, many, many differences between Minix and Linux -- but once you have a good grasp of that text, you'll be able to piece together whatever you decide you want to know about Linux from the mismash out there in webland.
Dude, in American they're called Tubes.
Let's say you and your buddies decide to write a book, and you call yourselves "Netscape Communications Corp.". You start with a short story that was called "Mosaic" written by a bunch of nerds called the NCSA.
Now, you wrote this book, and called it "Netscape". It was pretty good, but you kept updating it through revisions 1.2, 2, , and 4, each a few months or years apart. While you were at it, you released a couple of special "Gold" editions which had a bunch of extra crap in it, and maybe a "Communicator" edition which was really a trilogy.
By the time you've realeased version 4 of the book/trilogy (and a few subrevisions to correct the awful spelling mistakes and grammatical errors), you realize that it sucks pretty hard.. you've added pointless plot twists, introduced internal inconsistencies, and basically, it's not all that great any more.. so people stop buying it.
You decide to work on version 5 of your book, only realize it's going to be a LOT of work to make anything worth reading, and your publisher has told you to stuff it. So, you stop working on it, and say, "Hey! You want rights to a book?" to the first group of bearded hippies that walks buy.
So, the hippies take the book, some chips, smoke a lot of dope, and make friends with you and your crew. They pour through it carefully, keeping the good parts and ditching the crap. These hippies release a version of your triology and call it "Mozilla".
But; the story's not over yet. Your publisher has been sold, along with your name. The new owner of your name asks the hippies for a copy, which they gladly provide. This copy is put through the spin cycle on a washing machine along with some gum and wax crayons, and is released as version 6 of the trilogy.
Now, a bunch of other hippies come along (while the Mozilla hippies are fiddling with this and that -- trying to get the book "perfect", as only hippies can do), and decide they want a book, too... only the Mozilla book is the size of the freakin' family bible and they're too frail to lift it. So, they release the Reader's Digest version of the first book of the trilogy -- which, due to the editorial skill of this second set of long-hairs, happens to be quite good.
This second group of hippies called the book by a variety of names. First, they called it Phoenix, but an evil company that made typewrite daisy wheels told them to change it, or they'd sue. Next, they called it Firebird, and another evil company (this time making filing cabinets) told them the same thing. Then one of the hippies was on an acid trip, and thought he saw a red panda in his vision quest. Looking up "red panda" in warezed version of Microsoft Encarta, he saw that it was also known as a "Fire Fox". Taking this as a sign from Budha (or at least a Karma-earning omen), the hippies called their latest book "Firefox".
And lo, they editted and polished Firefox for many moons, until the publisher who bought your original publisher who went tits up when your Netscape Communicator "trilogy" failed decided THEY wanted a book of their own. But rather than fix that steaming pile of crap, they dropped by to see the second group of hippies.
The hippies weren't home, so they couldn't ask if they could use the book, but there is it was -- sitting on top of the photocopier, along with a sign that said "Yo - wanna book? Have one. If you've got some extra, we'd appreciate if you'd stick around for a toke".
And so, this distant relative of your original publisher, using your name (Netscape Communications Corp) makes some photocopies of the Firebird book, splashes some paint on the cover, sticks a couple of coupons in, and releases a "new" book on newstands everywhere.
Now? What the hell was that book about?
Oh yeah. It's the source code for a web browser.
> That makes you (100/9)% of the users.
... 1/1 is possible (I am using that has is not claiming to be part of a group of zero users).
Not, it makes him at LEAST (100/9)% of the users.
He would be correct if there were only 5 users, which is possible if the number is "in the single digits". Unfortunately, that expression can mean any number from 0 to 9, so any percentage in the range 1/9, 1/8, 1/7,
> The stupid thing is that somebody already did all
> the work for them but they STILL don't fix it.
There is a *world* of difference between fixing HTML output and fixing the code which generates it.
> Slashdot's developers suck.
Yes, that's true, but if you don't understand the issue above.. well, then you suck too.
How about sucking less, and fixing slashcode?
All my Windows boxes are 5+ year old crap with the cream of the crop being a PIII 600.
I have plenty of unused cycles on 4-way Sun boxes with gigs of spare RAM, though.
It would be nice if they released a client in portable C.
I'm beginning to suspect my wife is a polygamist. :)