I was just about to say the same thing. Having done a lot of serial comms around that time, 16550s weren't really commonplace until the early 90s. I'd say you'd be guaranteed 9600, with 19200 if you're lucky, but as others have pointed out, that's plenty fast enough to transfer 10MB.
However I notice from the article describing the computer concerned that it actually has a Z80-SIO in it. Never used one of those but from memory I think it might do 19200. Whether the operating system on board the box will is another matter though...
It doesn't surprise me. I'm from the UK, and "Visiting the US" was always one of those things on my life's "to-do" list - seeing New York, going to the West Coast, visiting friends in Washington state, maybe even driving Route 66 one day if I had money enough and time.
But now? Well, I've heard enough horror stories by now from friends and colleagues about entering the USA that, despite me having no criminal convictions whatsoever, I'm afraid it ain't on my "to-do" list any more.
> (Nintendo's GameCube, which was the most dependable system last generation, suffered because quality control took it and its games longer to reach the market)
I think it also suffered badly because it wouldn't play DVD-movies; in an era when DVD players were still a couple-hundred notes, a lot of people justified the purchase price of a PS2 because it played DVDs as well.
Perhaps the guard noticed the interference on his cellphone...when he was using it to listen to FM Radio, as some of them are capable of doing? Or perhaps it wasn't his cellphone at all, but just his in-store walkie-talkie, and the article has it slightly wrong. Or maybe it really was his cellphone and he just has a very good ear for interference!
I thought step 4 was illegal, in that you're not allowed to do a balance transfer that would result in the target card ending up in credit? I remember a couple of years ago when I paid off one credit card with another (that had a much lower interest rate, but not zero), I had to make very sure that I didn't accidentally pay too much off. Do they really not check the balance of the target card?
The compilers that converted AL to binary machine language ran on minicomputers, were state of the art, expensive, hard to acquire, and difficult to use. Developing under these conditions, and attempting to fit working programs into 4, 8, or even a glorious 16 kilobytes of RAM, was an art form that no one has had to practice in more than 30 years.
Heh, I know in another reply you've already acknowledged those of us who work with embedded systems, but even so, some of those development computers back then were running later than you think! My first job was writing code in assembler & PL/M for an embedded 8085 system. (The 8085 was basically just a better integrated 8080A that didn't need so many/any support chips, I'm surprised it's not been mentioned in the article or this topic so far.)
How? Well between me and my fellow programmers, using several Intel Series IIs running ISIS-II, an Intel Series IV running iNDX, an even an old Intel MDS-800 running ISIS-II, all connected to an Intel Network Box (I forget the name of it) running a variant of iNDX whose name I also forget.
When? As late as 1988!! It wasn't until then that we finally began the migration to PCs - the catch had been the difficulty of finding an 8080/8085 PL/M compiler that would run on a PC. Intel didn't do such a beast, and anybody else who might have done an MS-DOS-based PL/M compiler were targeting Z80s, not 8085s (after all, who would use an 8085 when a Z80 was available?). Unfortunately, with an installed base of about 6000 units, and several thousand lines of PL/M code (we had a paged memory system), changing either the processor or the language was not an option; especially as our hardware was third-party.
In the end, we discovered a company called Warrenpoint Software had exactly such a beast lurking half-forgotten at the back of their catalogue. When we enquired about it, it turned out they didn't even really know they had it themselves - at first they denied all knowledge. But they did have it, and - although we had to write a small proggy to auto-tweak our source code because their compiler had different ideas about a couple of things (which symbols were allowable in identifiers comes to mind) - it worked, and we could finally dump the big ol' "blue boxes".
Not without some regret, however. I still miss some features of the ISIS/iNDX operating systems, such as the ability to have user-definable attribute flags - basically after the usual Archive, Read-Only, System etc. ones, all the free bits in the attribute byte were yours to set as you liked, and you could DIR, COPY, DEL, etc. files based on whether or not they had certain attribute bits set. The COPY command was also quite advanced compared to DOS; we had to wait years for DOS's XCOPY to come along and put us out of our misery. I'm always amazed there's not more nostalgia sites on the web about ISIS & iNDX and the rest of the Intel Development Family. They may have produced crap microprocessors at times, but by god their development tools were rock solid, they missed their true vocation as a software company! Even if the ICE-85 emulator manual was written by an alien from a higher dimension.
A final little story before I retire to bed with my cup of hot cocoa - the Series IV MDS we had contained an 8085 co-processor board for assembling/compiling 8-bit code. On that board was, as usual on these sorts of boxes, a little debugging monitor that had a built in disassembler. Whereas other Intel disassemblers tended to produce "???" or just a blank space when confronted with an invalid opcode, this one did something just a wee bit different. It disassembled it as "NFG", tame now I suppose, but not so much back then, and gave a 22-year-old me a lot of chuckles when I saw that.
Sounds like Greg Bear's "Eon". An absolutely wonderful book, but Bear himself pissed on it with the first sequel, "Eternity", which did indeed "travel down the tube, then dump off into one portal to tell his own story that had nothing to do with the main 'universe'", as you put it. Eon, I couldn't put down. Eternity, I've never managed to finish.
I didn't even know there'd been guest authors in that series...the mind shudders.
He's actually off by a factor of a million. He divided 2500 million by 0.24, rather than 2500 million by 0.24 million. So the real figure is about 10,000 period. Not 10,000 million. (Or around 40,000, if you're looking at what he calls "Level 4", which gives your factor of being 250,000 off.)
I'm amazed that only one person picked him up on this in the article comments.
> > white on British OS maps (as opposed to yellow) means no tarmac
>
> A common misconception, but no, it doesn't. White means unclassified.
Yes, of course it does, my mistake. And I was about to say "I didn't mean 'white', I meant 'transparent' as in the road you can see on the map.", but checking the map legend reveals that that might not be true either. You'd think I'd know better after years of reading Landrangers, but that's what happens when you post in the wee small hours of the morning.
And yet you and I both know that any uncoloured;-) road with dashed edges outside a town or city generally means trouble, unless it's a driveway to a posh house or something. So OK then...white roads that aren't marked as being in built-up areas (i.e. surrounded by orangey-brown). All this just goes to show how difficult it all is. I mean, if you look at the 1:50,000 or 1:10,000 views of the place on Multimap, that track is shown as a full-blown road on both of them; yet both the OS 1:50,000 and 1:25,000 (zoom in from here) maps show the true situation very clearly.
And yes, I do live on a white road...and yes, it's tarmaced, or "metalled" as the OS legend likes to put it.:-) Um, or used to, they don't seem to draw that distinction any more, maybe that's where I'm going wrong. Did they used to do that on the old 1" to a mile maps (showing my age there!)?
> Well, if it excluded single-track roads, it would be basically useless in some parts of Scotland (Westeross,
> but others too), which only have single track roads. Sometimes even without passing places (Applecross).
Yup. See my reply to the previous poster...but in the case of Westeross (but not Applecross, granted) they're not marked as thin yellow roads anyway, but as red-and-white-striped A-roads.
> > It's even debatable whether the narrow yellow roads on that map
> > (which mean single-track with passing places) should be used by
> > a GPS as through routes, let alone the white ones!
>
> Depends who you are marketing it to...tourists drive on these roads up here in
> Scotland a lot.
I know, I'm one of them.:-) My Dad was born in Scotland and we used to go back there most years for a holiday.
> There's a few out-of-the-way places where you have no choice.
Yup, but in those cases they'd be through-routes, wouldn't they? I'm just saying that it shouldn't use "thin yellow roads" unless there's no other option, in which case it obviously has to use them. "Thick yellow" ones are fine, they're often very good and useful shortcuts.
Besides, I did say it was debatable.:-)
The problem for the map software then of course, is if it has the choice of a "thin yellow road" that lasts 1 mile, or a circuitous route involving bigger roads that takes 40 or 50 miles, it would choose the latter. It's a difficult balancing act (a bit like the poor bastards driving up past Crackpot!).
And of course, as a poster below points out, in towns and cities you have lots of little white roads that are just fine. I guess that these things really should have gradient and fencing information included in their databases.
Here's a map of the place. Check out those contour lines (in metres), and the chevrons on the roads, which indicate steep gradients (for those not versed in British OS map symbols).
I guess it's that pale-white track on the bottom left, just below the "Summer Lodge [Farm]" that was mentioned in the article, in which case no GPS system should take you down one of those - white on British OS maps (as opposed to yellow) means no tarmac. And the dotted edges of the road indeed mean "unfenced". Lovely stuff. It's even debatable whether the narrow yellow roads on that map (which mean single-track with passing places) should be used by a GPS as through routes, let alone the white ones!
Still, it reinforces the stupidity of the drivers, as there's obviously a point there, just past the farm, where the character of the road changes, and they blindly believe the GPS rather than turn back and let it find another route.
>> 1) Put up a sign reading "Don't go down this road,
>> even if your GPS tells you to; Dangerous conditions ahead".
>
> 1) good idea - but they're going to also need to provide
> directions for an alternate route
Re. the grandparent's post...from the article:
> Grinton Parish Council has now asked North Yorkshire County Council > to look into the problem and see if safety signs can be erected.
>
> A county council spokesman said: "We will look at the signing issue > and any appropriate action that needs to be taken will be taken."
Re. the parent's post...if you just ignore a turning and keep going straight down a main road, then all the SatNavs I've met (not many, admittedly) will then reroute and take you down another turning a bit further down the road, rather than yelling at you to hang a U-ey and take the turning you just missed.
He does actually say in the article that that's what he's going to do next but that (like you) he hasn't yet had time to do it. From the article:
So this is not my last report on this. I expect to have a much better sense for this a week from now...
...I'm going to continue looking at this. The unanswered question is, when was this installed in Windows? My hunch is it actually wasn't ever in the earlier versions of Windows. I'm going to look for it and see what I can find. But it feels to me like this was something added later and that the older versions are, in fact, not vulnerable and have never been vulnerable...
...But again, I haven't looked there. I don't know for sure. I haven't also looked at Windows code itself. So far my work has just been from the outside, you know, poking at this, trying to get the behavior from Windows that I expect. So, again, it may be that a week from now I come back with my tail between my legs and say, Leo, you know, I told what I believed to be the case at the time. I now see how this makes sense, and something that I see in the code didn't occur to me. I haven't done that yet. So that's what I'll be doing. We'll certainly know more in a week. But everything to me looks like this had to have been put in Windows, in many versions of Windows, for a long time, and that someone just discovered it, so Microsoft had to take it out.
The first series (i.e. Series 27) of the new Doctor Who was definitely NOT filmed in HD - they were criticised at the time for being a bit short-sighted about that. It was shot on DigiBeta, I believe.
Rumour has it that the second series might have been shot on HD, but that's only a rumour.
They wanted to sell it in the US right from the word go, but the Sci-Fi channel passed on it when they were originally offered it, and nobody else wanted to know.
It took it being a rip-roaring success in the UK, Canada, Australia and several other countries for the Sci-Fi channel to change their mind.
Slashdot Mirror
I was just about to say the same thing. Having done a lot of serial comms around that time, 16550s weren't really commonplace until the early 90s. I'd say you'd be guaranteed 9600, with 19200 if you're lucky, but as others have pointed out, that's plenty fast enough to transfer 10MB.
However I notice from the article describing the computer concerned that it actually has a Z80-SIO in it. Never used one of those but from memory I think it might do 19200. Whether the operating system on board the box will is another matter though...
It doesn't surprise me. I'm from the UK, and "Visiting the US" was always one of those things on my life's "to-do" list - seeing New York, going to the West Coast, visiting friends in Washington state, maybe even driving Route 66 one day if I had money enough and time.
But now? Well, I've heard enough horror stories by now from friends and colleagues about entering the USA that, despite me having no criminal convictions whatsoever, I'm afraid it ain't on my "to-do" list any more.
Are you sure about that?
http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/2008/03/daily-mail-dont-do-brown-acid.html
http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/2008/05/daily-fail-what-is-your-major.html
and many more.
And what was his reaction when you told him that? (No hidden agenda, I'm just genuinely curious.)
A bit of a late reply, but no, our Sky+ box (Pace, 80GB/40hr) was fine.
I think it also suffered badly because it wouldn't play DVD-movies; in an era when DVD players were still a couple-hundred notes, a lot of people justified the purchase price of a PS2 because it played DVDs as well.
Perhaps the guard noticed the interference on his cellphone...when he was using it to listen to FM Radio, as some of them are capable of doing? Or perhaps it wasn't his cellphone at all, but just his in-store walkie-talkie, and the article has it slightly wrong. Or maybe it really was his cellphone and he just has a very good ear for interference!
I thought step 4 was illegal, in that you're not allowed to do a balance transfer that would result in the target card ending up in credit? I remember a couple of years ago when I paid off one credit card with another (that had a much lower interest rate, but not zero), I had to make very sure that I didn't accidentally pay too much off. Do they really not check the balance of the target card?
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/prang http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/prang
Yeah, only they're not. Wal-Mart own Asda. Tesco is a completely different company.
They ARE arch-rivals, though.
The compilers that converted AL to binary machine language ran on minicomputers, were state of the art, expensive, hard to acquire, and difficult to use. Developing under these conditions, and attempting to fit working programs into 4, 8, or even a glorious 16 kilobytes of RAM, was an art form that no one has had to practice in more than 30 years.
Heh, I know in another reply you've already acknowledged those of us who work with embedded systems, but even so, some of those development computers back then were running later than you think! My first job was writing code in assembler & PL/M for an embedded 8085 system. (The 8085 was basically just a better integrated 8080A that didn't need so many/any support chips, I'm surprised it's not been mentioned in the article or this topic so far.)
How? Well between me and my fellow programmers, using several Intel Series IIs running ISIS-II, an Intel Series IV running iNDX, an even an old Intel MDS-800 running ISIS-II, all connected to an Intel Network Box (I forget the name of it) running a variant of iNDX whose name I also forget.
When? As late as 1988!! It wasn't until then that we finally began the migration to PCs - the catch had been the difficulty of finding an 8080/8085 PL/M compiler that would run on a PC. Intel didn't do such a beast, and anybody else who might have done an MS-DOS-based PL/M compiler were targeting Z80s, not 8085s (after all, who would use an 8085 when a Z80 was available?). Unfortunately, with an installed base of about 6000 units, and several thousand lines of PL/M code (we had a paged memory system), changing either the processor or the language was not an option; especially as our hardware was third-party.
In the end, we discovered a company called Warrenpoint Software had exactly such a beast lurking half-forgotten at the back of their catalogue. When we enquired about it, it turned out they didn't even really know they had it themselves - at first they denied all knowledge. But they did have it, and - although we had to write a small proggy to auto-tweak our source code because their compiler had different ideas about a couple of things (which symbols were allowable in identifiers comes to mind) - it worked, and we could finally dump the big ol' "blue boxes".
Not without some regret, however. I still miss some features of the ISIS/iNDX operating systems, such as the ability to have user-definable attribute flags - basically after the usual Archive, Read-Only, System etc. ones, all the free bits in the attribute byte were yours to set as you liked, and you could DIR, COPY, DEL, etc. files based on whether or not they had certain attribute bits set. The COPY command was also quite advanced compared to DOS; we had to wait years for DOS's XCOPY to come along and put us out of our misery. I'm always amazed there's not more nostalgia sites on the web about ISIS & iNDX and the rest of the Intel Development Family. They may have produced crap microprocessors at times, but by god their development tools were rock solid, they missed their true vocation as a software company! Even if the ICE-85 emulator manual was written by an alien from a higher dimension.
A final little story before I retire to bed with my cup of hot cocoa - the Series IV MDS we had contained an 8085 co-processor board for assembling/compiling 8-bit code. On that board was, as usual on these sorts of boxes, a little debugging monitor that had a built in disassembler. Whereas other Intel disassemblers tended to produce "???" or just a blank space when confronted with an invalid opcode, this one did something just a wee bit different. It disassembled it as "NFG", tame now I suppose, but not so much back then, and gave a 22-year-old me a lot of chuckles when I saw that.
God, I miss those days.
Bah, beaten to it! That'll teach me not to refresh the page before posting!
Sounds like Greg Bear's "Eon". An absolutely wonderful book, but Bear himself pissed on it with the first sequel, "Eternity", which did indeed "travel down the tube, then dump off into one portal to tell his own story that had nothing to do with the main 'universe'", as you put it. Eon, I couldn't put down. Eternity, I've never managed to finish. I didn't even know there'd been guest authors in that series...the mind shudders.
I'm amazed that only one person picked him up on this in the article comments.
>
> A common misconception, but no, it doesn't. White means unclassified.
Yes, of course it does, my mistake. And I was about to say "I didn't mean 'white', I meant 'transparent' as in the road you can see on the map.", but checking the map legend reveals that that might not be true either. You'd think I'd know better after years of reading Landrangers, but that's what happens when you post in the wee small hours of the morning.
And yet you and I both know that any uncoloured ;-) road with dashed edges outside a town or city generally means trouble, unless it's a driveway to a posh house or something. So OK then...white roads that aren't marked as being in built-up areas (i.e. surrounded by orangey-brown). All this just goes to show how difficult it all is. I mean, if you look at the 1:50,000 or 1:10,000 views of the place on Multimap, that track is shown as a full-blown road on both of them; yet both the OS 1:50,000 and 1:25,000 (zoom in from here) maps show the true situation very clearly.
And yes, I do live on a white road...and yes, it's tarmaced, or "metalled" as the OS legend likes to put it. :-) Um, or used to, they don't seem to draw that distinction any more, maybe that's where I'm going wrong. Did they used to do that on the old 1" to a mile maps (showing my age there!)?
> but others too), which only have single track roads. Sometimes even without passing places (Applecross).
Yup. See my reply to the previous poster...but in the case of Westeross (but not Applecross, granted) they're not marked as thin yellow roads anyway, but as red-and-white-striped A-roads.
> > (which mean single-track with passing places) should be used by
> > a GPS as through routes, let alone the white ones!
>
> Depends who you are marketing it to...tourists drive on these roads up here in
> Scotland a lot.
I know, I'm one of them. :-) My Dad was born in Scotland and we used to go back there most years for a holiday.
> There's a few out-of-the-way places where you have no choice.
Yup, but in those cases they'd be through-routes, wouldn't they? I'm just saying that it shouldn't use "thin yellow roads" unless there's no other option, in which case it obviously has to use them. "Thick yellow" ones are fine, they're often very good and useful shortcuts.
Besides, I did say it was debatable. :-)
The problem for the map software then of course, is if it has the choice of a "thin yellow road" that lasts 1 mile, or a circuitous route involving bigger roads that takes 40 or 50 miles, it would choose the latter. It's a difficult balancing act (a bit like the poor bastards driving up past Crackpot!).
And of course, as a poster below points out, in towns and cities you have lots of little white roads that are just fine. I guess that these things really should have gradient and fencing information included in their databases.
I guess it's that pale-white track on the bottom left, just below the "Summer Lodge [Farm]" that was mentioned in the article, in which case no GPS system should take you down one of those - white on British OS maps (as opposed to yellow) means no tarmac. And the dotted edges of the road indeed mean "unfenced". Lovely stuff. It's even debatable whether the narrow yellow roads on that map (which mean single-track with passing places) should be used by a GPS as through routes, let alone the white ones!
Still, it reinforces the stupidity of the drivers, as there's obviously a point there, just past the farm, where the character of the road changes, and they blindly believe the GPS rather than turn back and let it find another route.
>> even if your GPS tells you to; Dangerous conditions ahead".
>
> 1) good idea - but they're going to also need to provide
> directions for an alternate route
Re. the grandparent's post...from the article:
> Grinton Parish Council has now asked North Yorkshire County Council
> to look into the problem and see if safety signs can be erected.
>
> A county council spokesman said: "We will look at the signing issue
> and any appropriate action that needs to be taken will be taken."
Re. the parent's post...if you just ignore a turning and keep going straight down a main road, then all the SatNavs I've met (not many, admittedly) will then reroute and take you down another turning a bit further down the road, rather than yelling at you to hang a U-ey and take the turning you just missed.
The latest version of Bitcomet is v0.61, which fixes the "DHTing torrents marked as private" bug that got so many people worked up.
So this is not my last report on this. I expect to have a much better sense for this a week from now...
...I'm going to continue looking at this. The unanswered question is, when was this installed in Windows? My hunch is it actually wasn't ever in the earlier versions of Windows. I'm going to look for it and see what I can find. But it feels to me like this was something added later and that the older versions are, in fact, not vulnerable and have never been vulnerable...
...But again, I haven't looked there. I don't know for sure. I haven't also looked at Windows code itself. So far my work has just been from the outside, you know, poking at this, trying to get the behavior from Windows that I expect. So, again, it may be that a week from now I come back with my tail between my legs and say, Leo, you know, I told what I believed to be the case at the time. I now see how this makes sense, and something that I see in the code didn't occur to me. I haven't done that yet. So that's what I'll be doing. We'll certainly know more in a week. But everything to me looks like this had to have been put in Windows, in many versions of Windows, for a long time, and that someone just discovered it, so Microsoft had to take it out.
(emphasis mine)
Rumour has it that later series will be shot in HD, but that's unconfirmed as far as I know.
Rumour has it that the second series might have been shot on HD, but that's only a rumour.
It took it being a rip-roaring success in the UK, Canada, Australia and several other countries for the Sci-Fi channel to change their mind.
Any particular reason to choose Radio 4 LW over Radio 4 FM? The delay in adding RDS? Thanks in advance.