RANDOMIZE TIMER was a statement on the old Microsoft GW-BASIC. There was never such a statement on the BASIC 2.0 of the C64.
The proper way to seed the pseudo-RNG on the C64 was to fire up the SID's 3rd oscillator, set it to a noise waveform and a somewhat high frequency, and PEEK the one register that would output the state of the oscillator to RND, after negating it.
You could also use the CIA #1 or #2 TOD registers, if you started the TOD clock manually, or use the C64's software timer, accessible from the variable TI.
There's a small chance your program could cause some interesting effects if it hit memory locations 1024 to 2023, where the default screen memory is located, the corresponding locations in the $D000 bank where "color memory" was located, any of the VIC registers, or possibly the two CIA bits that selected which 16Kbyte "bank" the VIC was pointed to. Randomly hitting CIA registers could disable interrupts, or cause an IRQ or NMI interrupt storm. Poking random values into memory location 1, which controls RAM/ROM banking, is not a good idea either.
There's no way you could do this on a modern computer not because it's going to write over system files, but because all modern CPUs have a built-in MMU that prevents programs from running at the userland level from overwriting anything the kernel has not given it permission to do so. So all your program will do is shit on itself segfault.
Communicating with peripherals these days usually entails obeying a protocol, which requires multiple coordinated register reads and writes at proper times. Disobeying this usually won't have terribly catastrophic events but may cause the system to lock up or really have no effect. You could still do visually interesting stuff by writing random things to video RAM but that's about it these days.
That's fine. I'd rather have an industry that can't afford to sustain itself without violating my rights, privacy, and freedom collapse. *Especially* if it is one that is not needed for human survival.
Movies, music, and video games are entertainment. Entertainment. Nothing more. Something to occupy your time when you have nothing else to do. It's not the end of the world if no one can make money of off any of them.
Let the industries behind them die if they are unsustainable. I love movies, music, and games, but they can exist outside of a traditional for-profit corporate structure. None of those three things, to be honest, should be an "industry." Yes, there would probably be far less movies, music and games, and patronage models would likely become the best way of an individual or group getting what they want out of entertainment. I don't think that would be a bad thing.
Doesn't Dalvik give Android apps CPU independence like Java does, though? I mean, you never know when x86 might actually gain a foothold in mobile, or maybe Hitachi might rise from the ashes with another SuperH chip...
The people that look at what's popular to buy seem to comprise of thirty/fourtysomething females who are out of touch with pop culture and want to rejoin it after not having young kids consume every moment of their time, and a certain class of young usually small- to mid-town teenage girls. The older women want to indulge in something that seems younger and fresher, and the younger girls want to indulge in something that seems more "adult" - and this fits that bill perfectly I guess.
No one else buys into this shit, not that I know of. As a male growing up in the 90's I've NEVER understood the term "popular music" because no one I know listens to it or follows it. Were I live now the "Top 40" radio station is among the lowest rated. Yet it stays alive.
Unfortunately Microsoft has learned a lot over the decades. The Xbox 360 is very secure (per CPU keys in ROM internal to the CPU, RAM encryption, a small, lean, and easy-to-secure hypervisor) and has yet to have a modding solution available that doesn't require tweaking the hardware. This is in contrast to the original Xbox which was a massive failure from a security standpoint.
uCLinux, a port of Linux, does run on architectures without MMUs, especially the m68k.
m68k may be on the way out but what I want to run Linux on my Sega Genesis or Atari Jaguar, or any number of old arcade boards?
Predicative if and unless
on
Perl Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
Really like how in Perl I can do "{blah blah} if (condition)", and Perl's the only language I know of that has an "unless" keyword. I know it's basically an "if" with it's condition negated, but I still like it.
Software freedom is important, and more so than ever, when corporations increasingly sell you computing devices that ostensibly you own, but are not free to do anything you like (within the law, of course), with regard to the software running on them. It's more important than ever in a world where hardware is a commodity and what (and I'm trying to say 'range of possible actions' rather than 'range of scale') a given blob of silicon can do is not dictated so much by hardware limitations but rather the particular instructions that happen to live on the non-volatile memory of the device at a given moment. It's important when it is commonplace that we surrounded by devices with CPUs and memory, but no way to verify the device is programmed to do what we want to do and no more, no less. So I'd say the right to exert control over devices you own via installing whatever software you want, whenever you want, is pretty fundamental.
Maybe the time for indirectly funded content has passed.
Maybe it's time those who want content should fund it directly and get what they really want, rather than content industries herding people together through marketing and lawsuits and delivering homogenized, controlled content that often caters to the lowest common denominator.
The pinnacle of game design is the old arcade game Robotron 2084. Here's why:
- Put in a quarter, game starts. No bullshit story, no waiting 5 minutes for the game to let me do something. Gimme gimme now. - Everything is constantly flashing colors. You never saw an 4-bit indexed RRRGGGBB pallette worked so hard. I love that. Fuck realism. Reality sucks. - Objective is simple but has an element of depth to it. Shoot anything that moves except humans. - This game has two joysticks, one for movement and one for fire. You have unlimited ammunition and can shoot many fast-moving missiles in any direction. Instantly. I don't have to turn around to shoot backwards. Yes. - The balance is that you have anywhere from 10 to 100 enemies surrounding you trying to run into you and/or shoot you. So you get to blow up a lot of things. You HAVE to blow up a lot of things. - So the game is HARD. The unlimited ammo does not help you as much as you think. You are constantly needing to move and keep one step ahead of everything. - Because there are many things attacking you, and shooting at you, you will die a lot. So you HAVE to rescue the humans to earn extra lives. - A multiplier is at work when you rescue humans. So the first is 1000, 2000, etc. up to 5000. Starts over when you die. Gives you a LOT of incentive to not just shoot absolutely everything that moves, but keep maneuvering through this always changing morass of robots trying to kill you and humans needing to be saved. Also, due to this, you are always forced to evaluate whether it's better to try to rescue a human or simply let them go. But you must keep an eye on your lives.
It's really the most engaging game I've ever played. Nothing else comes close to it.
NES had built-in 2Kbytes "work RAM" and 2Kbytes VRAM (to hold "name tables"). Work RAM was directly addressable and useable by the CPU, VRAM accesses needed to "go through" the PPU and could not hold executable code or otherwise be directly accessed.
It also had 256 bytes of OAM RAM that the PPU used to determine sprite attributes such as X position, Y position, pattern index, and other attributes. Also only indirectly accessible via PPU. Using this for any other purpose was difficult put probably possible - supposedly the contents of this RAM would fade if not refreshed - meant to be done per-frame using a PPU DMA feature.
NES by default had 32k of ROM accessible unless external mapper chips were used, which could also provide additional RAM.
I wish there was a.gif file of that guy in the commercial that makes a "fireworks" gesture when mentioning that the new iPhone has a headphone jack on the bottom.
Most of what I said was in a humorous context... Honestly, I can see some advantages to the registry - being able to assign ACLs on a key level being one of them.
>It's centralized. You don't have to search the whole disk, just the registry itself, which is pretty fast. You call tens of.dat files everywhere centralized?
>It's strongly typed. Strings are strings, integers are integers (well, DWORDs), and while arbitrary binary data is permitted, it's not the default. Big fucking deal. Why do various Windows apps then store string data as binary? Everything should be plaintext anyway.
>It's compact. Text files are wasteful of space in several ways (representing numbers as unicode characters, filesystem entries, etc.). This may have mattered in 1993 in the age of 250MB hard drives but whofuckingcares.jpg in this age of 1TB+ hard drives.
>It's hierarchical So is a (gasp) filesystem?
>It's fast. God damn, a well written program should need to read configuration files ONCE. ONCE. The speed of THAT may have mattered on your 75Mhz Pentium Pro with that 250MB hard drive but I refer you again to whofuckingcares.jpg. Using the registry to store anything else? Dumb.
>It's a standard format. . So is Unicode? And since the specs are owned by MS you can't count on it remaining standard.
Not the IPhone, but many, many phones and wireless broadband USB dongles have had external antenna connectors. Usually never labeled as such, it looks like a small gold socket.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks (X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it (X) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats (X) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email (X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Super Nintendo was better than the Genesis, and it's still better than the PS3. Super Nintendo had 32,000 colors, Mode 7, and never lost features. Also the games loaded instantly.
Slashdot Mirror
RANDOMIZE TIMER was a statement on the old Microsoft GW-BASIC. There was never such a statement on the BASIC 2.0 of the C64.
The proper way to seed the pseudo-RNG on the C64 was to fire up the SID's 3rd oscillator, set it to a noise waveform and a somewhat high frequency, and PEEK the one register that would output the state of the oscillator to RND, after negating it.
You could also use the CIA #1 or #2 TOD registers, if you started the TOD clock manually, or use the C64's software timer, accessible from the variable TI.
There's a small chance your program could cause some interesting effects if it hit memory locations 1024 to 2023, where the default screen memory is located, the corresponding locations in the $D000 bank where "color memory" was located, any of the VIC registers, or possibly the two CIA bits that selected which 16Kbyte "bank" the VIC was pointed to. Randomly hitting CIA registers could disable interrupts, or cause an IRQ or NMI interrupt storm. Poking random values into memory location 1, which controls RAM/ROM banking, is not a good idea either.
There's no way you could do this on a modern computer not because it's going to write over system files, but because all modern CPUs have a built-in MMU that prevents programs from running at the userland level from overwriting anything the kernel has not given it permission to do so. So all your program will do is shit on itself segfault.
Communicating with peripherals these days usually entails obeying a protocol, which requires multiple coordinated register reads and writes at proper times. Disobeying this usually won't have terribly catastrophic events but may cause the system to lock up or really have no effect. You could still do visually interesting stuff by writing random things to video RAM but that's about it these days.
That's fine. I'd rather have an industry that can't afford to sustain itself without violating my rights, privacy, and freedom collapse. *Especially* if it is one that is not needed for human survival.
Movies, music, and video games are entertainment. Entertainment. Nothing more. Something to occupy your time when you have nothing else to do. It's not the end of the world if no one can make money of off any of them.
Let the industries behind them die if they are unsustainable. I love movies, music, and games, but they can exist outside of a traditional for-profit corporate structure. None of those three things, to be honest, should be an "industry." Yes, there would probably be far less movies, music and games, and patronage models would likely become the best way of an individual or group getting what they want out of entertainment. I don't think that would be a bad thing.
Desire to have "Microsoft" or "Windows" in user agent string at any cost?
Doesn't Dalvik give Android apps CPU independence like Java does, though? I mean, you never know when x86 might actually gain a foothold in mobile, or maybe Hitachi might rise from the ashes with another SuperH chip ...
The people that look at what's popular to buy seem to comprise of thirty/fourtysomething females who are out of touch with pop culture and want to rejoin it after not having young kids consume every moment of their time, and a certain class of young usually small- to mid-town teenage girls. The older women want to indulge in something that seems younger and fresher, and the younger girls want to indulge in something that seems more "adult" - and this fits that bill perfectly I guess.
No one else buys into this shit, not that I know of. As a male growing up in the 90's I've NEVER understood the term "popular music" because no one I know listens to it or follows it. Were I live now the "Top 40" radio station is among the lowest rated. Yet it stays alive.
Unfortunately Microsoft has learned a lot over the decades. The Xbox 360 is very secure (per CPU keys in ROM internal to the CPU, RAM encryption, a small, lean, and easy-to-secure hypervisor) and has yet to have a modding solution available that doesn't require tweaking the hardware. This is in contrast to the original Xbox which was a massive failure from a security standpoint.
uCLinux, a port of Linux, does run on architectures without MMUs, especially the m68k.
m68k may be on the way out but what I want to run Linux on my Sega Genesis or Atari Jaguar, or any number of old arcade boards?
Really like how in Perl I can do "{blah blah} if (condition)", and Perl's the only language I know of that has an "unless" keyword. I know it's basically an "if" with it's condition negated, but I still like it.
I can finally watch Steven Segal's Letterbox 2000 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHzPVNO5jKU - the way it was meant to be.
I think RMS had a lot of foresight.
Software freedom is important, and more so than ever, when corporations increasingly sell you computing devices that ostensibly you own, but are not free to do anything you like (within the law, of course), with regard to the software running on them. It's more important than ever in a world where hardware is a commodity and what (and I'm trying to say 'range of possible actions' rather than 'range of scale') a given blob of silicon can do is not dictated so much by hardware limitations but rather the particular instructions that happen to live on the non-volatile memory of the device at a given moment. It's important when it is commonplace that we surrounded by devices with CPUs and memory, but no way to verify the device is programmed to do what we want to do and no more, no less. So I'd say the right to exert control over devices you own via installing whatever software you want, whenever you want, is pretty fundamental.
Maybe the time for indirectly funded content has passed.
Maybe it's time those who want content should fund it directly and get what they really want, rather than content industries herding people together through marketing and lawsuits and delivering homogenized, controlled content that often caters to the lowest common denominator.
You misunderstood him. He was saying that recursion shares characteristics with a particular entity of excrement, rather than giving recursion.
Iteration is the bee's knees.
404ERR~1.HTM
The pinnacle of game design is the old arcade game Robotron 2084. Here's why:
- Put in a quarter, game starts. No bullshit story, no waiting 5 minutes for the game to let me do something. Gimme gimme now.
- Everything is constantly flashing colors. You never saw an 4-bit indexed RRRGGGBB pallette worked so hard. I love that. Fuck realism. Reality sucks.
- Objective is simple but has an element of depth to it. Shoot anything that moves except humans.
- This game has two joysticks, one for movement and one for fire. You have unlimited ammunition and can shoot many fast-moving missiles in any direction. Instantly. I don't have to turn around to shoot backwards. Yes.
- The balance is that you have anywhere from 10 to 100 enemies surrounding you trying to run into you and/or shoot you. So you get to blow up a lot of things. You HAVE to blow up a lot of things.
- So the game is HARD. The unlimited ammo does not help you as much as you think. You are constantly needing to move and keep one step ahead of everything.
- Because there are many things attacking you, and shooting at you, you will die a lot. So you HAVE to rescue the humans to earn extra lives.
- A multiplier is at work when you rescue humans. So the first is 1000, 2000, etc. up to 5000. Starts over when you die. Gives you a LOT of incentive to not just shoot absolutely everything that moves, but keep maneuvering through this always changing morass of robots trying to kill you and humans needing to be saved. Also, due to this, you are always forced to evaluate whether it's better to try to rescue a human or simply let them go. But you must keep an eye on your lives.
It's really the most engaging game I've ever played. Nothing else comes close to it.
NES had built-in 2Kbytes "work RAM" and 2Kbytes VRAM (to hold "name tables"). Work RAM was directly addressable and useable by the CPU, VRAM accesses needed to "go through" the PPU and could not hold executable code or otherwise be directly accessed.
It also had 256 bytes of OAM RAM that the PPU used to determine sprite attributes such as X position, Y position, pattern index, and other attributes. Also only indirectly accessible via PPU. Using this for any other purpose was difficult put probably possible - supposedly the contents of this RAM would fade if not refreshed - meant to be done per-frame using a PPU DMA feature.
NES by default had 32k of ROM accessible unless external mapper chips were used, which could also provide additional RAM.
Global translation lookaside buffers
Know something about i9 we don't?
Application "Sarcasm" has stopped responding.
[Force Close] [Wait]
I wish there was a .gif file of that guy in the commercial that makes a "fireworks" gesture when mentioning that the new iPhone has a headphone jack on the bottom.
I also wish I could post it here.
In lieu of this, I will just post a Youtube link pointing to that: http://youtu.be/QR8A3T6sPzU?t=7s
Most of what I said was in a humorous context ... Honestly, I can see some advantages to the registry - being able to assign ACLs on a key level being one of them.
>It's centralized. You don't have to search the whole disk, just the registry itself, which is pretty fast. .dat files everywhere centralized?
You call tens of
>It's strongly typed. Strings are strings, integers are integers (well, DWORDs), and while arbitrary binary data is permitted, it's not the default.
Big fucking deal. Why do various Windows apps then store string data as binary? Everything should be plaintext anyway.
>It's compact. Text files are wasteful of space in several ways (representing numbers as unicode characters, filesystem entries, etc.).
This may have mattered in 1993 in the age of 250MB hard drives but whofuckingcares.jpg in this age of 1TB+ hard drives.
>It's hierarchical
So is a (gasp) filesystem?
>It's fast.
God damn, a well written program should need to read configuration files ONCE. ONCE. The speed of THAT may have mattered on your 75Mhz Pentium Pro with that 250MB hard drive but I refer you again to whofuckingcares.jpg. Using the registry to store anything else? Dumb.
>It's a standard format. .
So is Unicode? And since the specs are owned by MS you can't count on it remaining standard.
Not the IPhone, but many, many phones and wireless broadband USB dongles have had external antenna connectors. Usually never labeled as such, it looks like a small gold socket.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (X) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
(X) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Super Nintendo was better than the Genesis, and it's still better than the PS3. Super Nintendo had 32,000 colors, Mode 7, and never lost features. Also the games loaded instantly.
There was "Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs" but I don't know if they still offer it, or will after the XP EOL date ...
Firefox Issues Workaround for IE 0-Day
http://getfirefox.com/
Chrome Issues Workaround for IE 0-Day
https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/