The writers of Tron Legacy appear to agree with you - Wargames is given a sneaky reference when Old Flynn describes CLUs scheme as a game where 'the only way to win is not to play.' A direct quote of a famous line from Wargames.
I think he was a bit clueless, though - he obviously knew nothing about the real world. I would have been most amused had he 'won' and successfully migrated to the real world... only to discover that we have things here like the law of gravity, and none of his purely simulated war machines would be able to function. That's assuming he was somehow able to laser out an entire battleship into a room too small to contain it. There was never any real danger outside of the computer - worst case scenario, both Flynn's die, CLU gets out, drops a battleship on the city and is soon arrested by the national guard.
It is your word against mine. One of us is going to have to provide a citation. Let me ask google.
http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Remnant_Data Well, it works on floppy disks. So that supports my account: That this technique was once viable, long ago, on drives of very low bit density compared to todays. It is viable no longer.
Yes, it's a wiki. But it links to an actual paper if you want to research further.
Lawyers are just mercinaries of another field. They are paid to do whatever they can, within the law, to advance the interest of their client. This can mean they fight dirty, exploit loopholes, manipulate juries emotionally, threaten or harass - but that is their job. Their personal ideas of ethics don't come into play - to not use a trick because they consider it unethical would be professionally irresponsible. It's lawyer vs lawyer - and may the most skilled, and therefore highest paid, win.
I nearly got expelled from school over a difference in language. I was accused of 'hacking' after writing some fancy but harmless program or other that a teacher couldn't understand. I then refused to deny the claim of 'hacking,' instead trying to deliver a lecture upon the historical definition of the term and explain that my inventive little piece of quickbasic was indeed an example of hacking, but not an effort to break security. This proved completly incompehendable to the teachers, who instead interpreted the attempt as a confession of guilt - I had, after all, just told them that I was a hacker. It took over an hour and the intervention of another teacher to get it cleared up.
This actually seems like the perfect analogy here. If this act was committed without the use of a computer, it would never be prosecuted. But it was, and thus is is just called 'hacking' and made out to be some scarey new thing that must be stopped with the full force of the law.
Or perhaps they turned it off because, while it works almost all the time, it'll fail one in ten million floating point operations at random, or is prone to fail at moderatly high temperatures or workloads. If you want to use the 'disabled' core, I suggest you run your own tests to determine if there is some minor fault. Slow the fans so it runs hot and calculate pi. If it can run for 24 hours and produce the right result, it's probably good.
I should have said electronic interface. I meant that the data cable uses the same voltages, timeings, etc. Thus connecting between them is a simple dumb adaptor.
I imagine someone already has - I have (somewhat misleadingly named) ROM files for old computer emulators made from tapes. They must have been made somehow.
I tried winrar, of course. It wouldn't even open the file. The problem is that a zip file stores it's main index at the end of the file, so if the file is trunctuated then the index is gone. Thus winrar wouldn't open it.
I did not know of the 'r' option, though. Perhaps that would have done it. From what you describe, it sounds like it does exactly the same as mine.
And how are they supposed to do that? They could make the seating more comfortable and the snacks cheaper, but there is no overcoming the fundamental flaw in the cinema experience - other people. Lots of other people.
If you can get the drive itsself, interfacing them to a modern motherboard isn't that hard. You need an old, obscure cable. That's all. They use the same electrical interface as 3.5" floppy drives.
Not quite as bad, but I recently had to assist someone who works in the medical profession. They just got a shiny new blood gas analyser, and it's only interface is a serial port. The department laptops don't have serial ports.
I leant them a USB-RS232 cable from my server cooling system (It's december, I don't need it for a few months), but I get the impression the IT department at their workplace, with access to the admin account needed to install drivers, probably will refuse to allow in any hardware that hasn't been through a three-month-long official procurement process.
I have programmed for exactly one microcontroller, for a steampunk electronic die. I didn't enable the read protection on the chip - so long as the chip is intact, it's easy to read the program out again, even if it is in machine code. If all the code is somehow lost, well... someone will have to figure out what the three input and eight output pins do and just write it from scratch.
Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 documents. I work in tech support, and twice I've had users accidentially trunctuate these files by hitting save then yanking out the USB stick before it's ready. There are lots of (Invariably for-pay) utilities available to recover corrupted office documents, and none of them worked for me. In the end I had to grab a copy of the 30-year-old specification for the ZIP file upon which Office 2007/10 documents are based and write my own program to do the job.
Amazingly, it works. You can feed it a trunctuated zip file, and it'll allow you to recover all the files held within up to the point where the input ends. Turning the XML-based muddle of text and formatting into something readable is an exercise I didn't package up so tidily.
Actually, that could work... divide the screen into 8x8 blocks, each block one of four possible colors. That gives you 8x8x2 = 128 bits, or 16 bytes. Send at half the frame rate to keep sync simple, you're looking at 48bytes per second transmission. A one-meg file would only take six hours, and given how small files were in that era, that's quite practical.
There is always a way, if you have a compiler for the system. Even if it involves flashing the screen in binary code while a modern system films it on a webcam.
I still have some old games preserved in just such a manner. I've also looked at the waveforms, and I can see how the information is encoded. It's a simple phase-shift keying.
Punchcards should be easy. You don't need the old hardware. Just a scanner and a bit of software fun. Even if all the specs are long lost, it should be quite easy to rederive them all.
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The writers of Tron Legacy appear to agree with you - Wargames is given a sneaky reference when Old Flynn describes CLUs scheme as a game where 'the only way to win is not to play.' A direct quote of a famous line from Wargames.
I think he was a bit clueless, though - he obviously knew nothing about the real world. I would have been most amused had he 'won' and successfully migrated to the real world... only to discover that we have things here like the law of gravity, and none of his purely simulated war machines would be able to function. That's assuming he was somehow able to laser out an entire battleship into a room too small to contain it. There was never any real danger outside of the computer - worst case scenario, both Flynn's die, CLU gets out, drops a battleship on the city and is soon arrested by the national guard.
It is your word against mine. One of us is going to have to provide a citation. Let me ask google.
http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Remnant_Data
Well, it works on floppy disks. So that supports my account: That this technique was once viable, long ago, on drives of very low bit density compared to todays. It is viable no longer.
Yes, it's a wiki. But it links to an actual paper if you want to research further.
It does. Like many people, she wrote all her passwords down in a little book in case she forgot them. He just looked in the book.
He was already convicted of a beating. In this case, when you ask 'When did you stop beating your wife?' all he has to answer is 'Some time ago.'
Lawyers are just mercinaries of another field. They are paid to do whatever they can, within the law, to advance the interest of their client. This can mean they fight dirty, exploit loopholes, manipulate juries emotionally, threaten or harass - but that is their job. Their personal ideas of ethics don't come into play - to not use a trick because they consider it unethical would be professionally irresponsible. It's lawyer vs lawyer - and may the most skilled, and therefore highest paid, win.
I nearly got expelled from school over a difference in language. I was accused of 'hacking' after writing some fancy but harmless program or other that a teacher couldn't understand. I then refused to deny the claim of 'hacking,' instead trying to deliver a lecture upon the historical definition of the term and explain that my inventive little piece of quickbasic was indeed an example of hacking, but not an effort to break security. This proved completly incompehendable to the teachers, who instead interpreted the attempt as a confession of guilt - I had, after all, just told them that I was a hacker. It took over an hour and the intervention of another teacher to get it cleared up.
Microsoft made the MCSE a lot harder a few years back because it had such a reputation for being stupidly easy.
It's still not really difficult, either. But it's not a walkthrough any more.
This actually seems like the perfect analogy here. If this act was committed without the use of a computer, it would never be prosecuted. But it was, and thus is is just called 'hacking' and made out to be some scarey new thing that must be stopped with the full force of the law.
I think I used the clock-modifying tool too... on my old FX5200. I got Half Life 2 to play on that card with a bit of overclocking.
Or perhaps they turned it off because, while it works almost all the time, it'll fail one in ten million floating point operations at random, or is prone to fail at moderatly high temperatures or workloads. If you want to use the 'disabled' core, I suggest you run your own tests to determine if there is some minor fault. Slow the fans so it runs hot and calculate pi. If it can run for 24 hours and produce the right result, it's probably good.
I should have said electronic interface. I meant that the data cable uses the same voltages, timeings, etc. Thus connecting between them is a simple dumb adaptor.
I imagine someone already has - I have (somewhat misleadingly named) ROM files for old computer emulators made from tapes. They must have been made somehow.
I tried winrar, of course. It wouldn't even open the file. The problem is that a zip file stores it's main index at the end of the file, so if the file is trunctuated then the index is gone. Thus winrar wouldn't open it.
I did not know of the 'r' option, though. Perhaps that would have done it. From what you describe, it sounds like it does exactly the same as mine.
And how are they supposed to do that? They could make the seating more comfortable and the snacks cheaper, but there is no overcoming the fundamental flaw in the cinema experience - other people. Lots of other people.
If you can get the drive itsself, interfacing them to a modern motherboard isn't that hard. You need an old, obscure cable. That's all. They use the same electrical interface as 3.5" floppy drives.
We've an old DOS machine running the library loans database at my workplace. One day it is going to fail. But hopefully not for another day.
Not quite as bad, but I recently had to assist someone who works in the medical profession. They just got a shiny new blood gas analyser, and it's only interface is a serial port. The department laptops don't have serial ports.
I leant them a USB-RS232 cable from my server cooling system (It's december, I don't need it for a few months), but I get the impression the IT department at their workplace, with access to the admin account needed to install drivers, probably will refuse to allow in any hardware that hasn't been through a three-month-long official procurement process.
I have programmed for exactly one microcontroller, for a steampunk electronic die. I didn't enable the read protection on the chip - so long as the chip is intact, it's easy to read the program out again, even if it is in machine code. If all the code is somehow lost, well... someone will have to figure out what the three input and eight output pins do and just write it from scratch.
We have a winner. Not for the oldest, but geekiest.
Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 documents. I work in tech support, and twice I've had users accidentially trunctuate these files by hitting save then yanking out the USB stick before it's ready. There are lots of (Invariably for-pay) utilities available to recover corrupted office documents, and none of them worked for me. In the end I had to grab a copy of the 30-year-old specification for the ZIP file upon which Office 2007/10 documents are based and write my own program to do the job.
Amazingly, it works. You can feed it a trunctuated zip file, and it'll allow you to recover all the files held within up to the point where the input ends. Turning the XML-based muddle of text and formatting into something readable is an exercise I didn't package up so tidily.
And should anyone in future have happened upon this post while trying to recover a similar problem, http://sharedserv.no-ip.org/utils_dat.html
Actually, that could work... divide the screen into 8x8 blocks, each block one of four possible colors. That gives you 8x8x2 = 128 bits, or 16 bytes. Send at half the frame rate to keep sync simple, you're looking at 48bytes per second transmission. A one-meg file would only take six hours, and given how small files were in that era, that's quite practical.
There is always a way, if you have a compiler for the system. Even if it involves flashing the screen in binary code while a modern system films it on a webcam.
I still have some old games preserved in just such a manner. I've also looked at the waveforms, and I can see how the information is encoded. It's a simple phase-shift keying.
Punchcards should be easy. You don't need the old hardware. Just a scanner and a bit of software fun. Even if all the specs are long lost, it should be quite easy to rederive them all.