Regret is not a choice that you make... You can tell yourself that you won't regret this drastic, irreversible, bizarre decision, but you cannot say for certain that you "will not regret" it. You won't know for sure until you're old and grey, and hopefully a lot wiser than you are now. I can say with near certainty that you will regret it. Hell, I've talked to old guys who have tattoos that they regret. "Yeah, that dragon crushing the skull in it's mouth seemed cool back when I was 18." Of course, lots of people are happy with their tattoos, but the point is that regret is something that comes much later, not at the moment you make the permanent, life-altering decision, whatever it may be.
I had to write this very same algorithm about a year ago, in a BIOS. Yeah, I went with brute force at first: Loop over all X, loop over all Y, divide X/Y, compare result to target value. Then you just keep a running "current best" X and Y.
Well, that takes way too long in a BIOS (running in ROM). In fact, it took about five seconds, which is obviously unacceptable. So, I worked on the math, and found that I only needed to loop over one of the two variables. You can see it if you write it out like this:
X/Y = T
Where T is your target value. So, you loop over X, and for each value of X, you can compute the best corresponding value of Y as:
Y = X/T
In BIOS world, it's all assembly code. So to do the division here, I just used the x86 "DIV" instruction, which gives both the result (in EAX) and the remainder (in EDX). If you're using C or any floating-point math, this is all much easier, of course. Anyway, if you take the remainder of that division and divide that value by X, you'll get E (the error). So you just keep track of the smallest value of E and use the corresponding X and Y. So the algorithm looks like this:
for each X {
..Y = X / T; ..R = remainder of (X / T);
..if (Y is NOT within the acceptable range) then next X;
(Sorry about the dots, Slashdot won't let me indent the code with spaces.)
Yeah, it's not perfect, and there are probably faster ways, but this was lightning fast for the system I was working on. I also added an "early out" condition if E was small enough.
Yes, it's an odd case, but why does the guy have to be "mentally off" just because he supsects that the government is covering up UFO evidence? He may be "mentally off" for thinking that he wouldn't get caught, but belief in UFOs hardly qualifies as a mental disease. How many regular viewers did the X-Files have? And they certainly weren't watching because of the stellar acting. Yeah, I know it's just a silly, fictional TV series, but I'm just pointing out that lots of people at least entertain the idea that UFOs exist.
So, if a guy wanted to build a more "modern" homebrew CPU, what options are there? Are there any decent CAD tools that don't cost a thousand million dollars? And once a layout is done, is there anywhere you can get just one single chip made for a reasonable price?
"Oh look! This 850GB disc can store 850GB files on a single disc!"
Yeah, true. Everyone on Earth knows the painfully obvious bitrate of uncompressed 1080p video. You can hardly find a thread these days about HDTV without a dozen posts droning on about "186624000 bytes per second, blah blah blah."
Of course. All posts should be restricted to discussing only the most common, practical uses of technology. Things like this and this simply have no place in this world.
Yeah, it's 80 minutes, not 80 hours. Still, it's almost enough for a full-length film. And I'm not sure I'd call that "completely wrong." I'd call it missing one division.
Second, what in the hell is the point of uncompressed video?... MPEG-2 has so little compression that it takes more power to DISPLAY it than to decode it... If your HDTV MPEG-2 video looks poor...
What's the point of uncompressed audio? What's the point of spending $30000 on a pair of speaker cables? What's the point of spending $500 on a twenty-year-old bottle of wine? What's the point of spending $200K on a Ferrari when the speed limit is still 65MPH on the highway? Who said that there was a point? I was just pointing out what you could do. And anyway, people spend lots of money on audio/video/gaming/automotive/whatever technology that they don't need, just because it's better "in theory." Who knows why. Who cares.
Besides that, there's no way you could read data fast enough...
Over what interface? Yeah, current DVDs can't read 186MB/s, but we're talking about this imaginary 850GB DVD, so who knows what the transfer rate will be in 2075, when it actually hits the store shelves. Current 16X DVD drives are within an order of magnitude of that speed. The transfer rate of IDE and SATA drives is already fast enough. Hell, gigabit ethernet is almost fast enough.
So, tell me again why would you even want an uncompressed video stream?
So tell me again who said that they "wanted" an uncompressed video stream? I was just pointing out that it's possible. And besides, audio CDs that you buy in the store are uncompressed, even though the most sensitive, highly trained ears in the world can't tell the difference between high bit-rate MP3 and pure CD. Why compress if you don't have to?
Re:Better ones are out there
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· Score: 1
Looks like it's only available to OEMs. Where can I actually buy one?
Re:Better ones are out there
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Sounds cool... Got a link to this? I browsed Logitech's keyboards, and at a glance it looks like they all have regular-sized keys. Those nice, flat laptop keys would be really sweet.
Re:Still not right: Feature List
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You forgot the most important thing (to me, anyway):
Sealed!
Keyboards get so much disgusting stuff between the keys -- even if you're a clean person with clean hands. Crap just magically gathers between keys somehow, from the air. Why not make them sealed so that you can just run it under the sink for a few seconds?
Yeah, I've seen the articles about putting keyboards in the dishwasher, but that's too much trouble. You have to removed the keys to really get it clean, and then you have to pop all the keys back on, it sucks. Give me a sealed keyboard that I can just blast with a garden hose every month or so.
That "touchstream" thing almost got it right, but they had to go and use a completely non-standard key layout, among other weirdnesses.
Yeah, I know, this is probably just another article about vaporware. But, if it were true, imagine what you could do with an 850GB DVD:
- A single frame of 1080p HD video is 1920 x 1080 pixels, or 2073600 pixels. - Each pixel is 24 bits of RGB, so 2073600 x 3 bytes = 6220800 bytes for each frame of video. - at 30 frames per second, one second of video would take 186624000 bytes.
So with 850GB of space, you could store about 80 hours of completely uncompressed, high-definition, true-color video. Wow... Is my math right there? I didn't expect it to be that much. Anyway, that would look pretty spiffy on your fancy 60" HDTV. Plenty of room left over for a few dozen tracks of completely uncompressed digital audio, too.:)
A cool way to always have good passwords is to just choose a short phrase that you'll remember and run the text through MD5. So, if you're creating an account for your PC at work, you might use something like "Work PC password, May 2005" and then just run it throgh something like this.
This will give you a good mixed-case, alphanumeric password, and you can always retrieve it if you forget it, as long as you can remember the phrase that you used (which is much easier than remembering Qwy4%!Xx). The only other caveat is that you must have access to the web or to a machine with an MD5 generator.
And, being an uber-geek, you can even go one step further and eliminate that last requirement. You can make up your own algorithm for converting a phrase into pseudo-random characters. Keep it simple, and something that you can do with pencil and paper! You have to be able to remember the algorithm a month from now (when IT forces you to change your password) or else it's useless. But if you keep it simple, you'll have no trouble remembering how to do it. I've been using this system for a while now and it works like a charm.
Trust me -- this is a road you don't want to go down. Your wife will die in childbirth, your children will be hidden from you, and the guy who used to be your best friend in the world will hack your limbs off. And then, just to rub salt in the wound, he'll tell your son that you're "more machine than man now, twisted and evil." What a prick.
I think that you are indirectly asking the ultimate question here: What part of the human body houses the conciousness? If someone loses an arm or a leg, their conciousness is not lost. But on the other hand, if you go without oxygen for a few minutes, conciousness is permanently lost -- even though nothing physical has been removed. So where are the cells that actually matter?
Is it somewhere in the brain? Probably. Is it the mysterious thing that weighs 21 grams? If you could find the "organ" or whatever it is that makes you concious, then all you'd need to do is keep that clump of cells alive, and everything else could be replaced.
This is completely unrelated to the MPAA issue, but anyway...
I'd argue that nothing is analog. Electrons and photons are finite things. When you look at a piece of copper wire, you'll never see some fractional number of electrons zipping by -- there ether is an electron or there isn't. Some scientists and mathematicians are leaning more and more towards the possibility that nothing in the universe is truly "analog." Wolfram's "A New Kind Of Science" suggests that the whole universe (physics, time, etc...) is a digital computer of sorts. The "Digital Philosophy" crowd (website) makes a similar argument. Chaitin even argued that real numbers don't exist in his most excellent book. The book was available for free online for a long time, but it looks like it's gone now. It's well worth whatever he's asking for it, though.
They should be given the option, and they should also have the option to opt in to caching or to not. It is not our place to go them and say: I am going to link to my own copy of your article, tough luck if you loose out on the ad money that your content should be creating.
But isn't that better than saying, "I am going to crash your server. Sorry." And in fact, it's worse than that, because Slashdot doesn't even tell them that they are about to br DDOSed. They just wake up one morning to find that their entire site is gone, either to a 503 error or because their bandwidth limits have been completely annihilated. But my main point is that this hypothetical lost ad revenue only exists in extremely rare situations, if at all. All of the following have to be true:
1) You have to have paying advertisers (fairly common). 2) You have to have a beefy enough server to actually withstand the slashdotting (rare). 3) Your advertisements -- the banners themselves -- have to be dumb enough to not work properly in a cached version of the page.
I guess (3) is fairly common, as many banner ads are just jpegs. But there are simple ways to fix this. Slashdot could avoid caching any images that come from other domains ("other" meaning domains other than the one hosting the article itself). That way, all of the ad images still get pulled directly from the advertisers site. To be extra careful, Slashdot could avoid caching any image that is a link to another domain, just in case some sites host their banner images locally. But honestly, I think item (2) is so rare that (3) is hardly even worth mentioning. And if your site is already strong enough to survive a Slashdotting, then you are already generating tons of advertising revenue.
IE's caching is entirely different though: IE only caches a page when each user views it. An IE cached pages does not mask 10,000 other views.
But if IE didn't cache pages, sites would get several times as many hits as they do now. So it is a similar issue, but yes, it's a different type of caching.
But, Slashdot would also cache the advertisements, so every user who reads the story would still see those precious ads. And, assuming they do something similar to Mirrordot, the links would be unchanged from the original site. So if someone clicks on an ad in the cached version, they would still be taken to the advertiser's site.
The more correct analogy is this: You run a free newspaper that relies on advertising revenue. One day, the NYT sees an article in your crummy little paper that they like. They decide that they want to reprint your article. Hey, you were giving it away for free, anyway. So, they have two choices: 1) Grab every single copy of your free paper that they can find, or 2) Just buy one copy and then use their own massive printing presses to reproduce the article, along with all the ads on the page, giving full credit to your paper as being the original source of the article.
Option 1 just isn't feasable, because your presses can't supply enough papers, and more importantly, you (the free paper) don't gain anything from option 1, anyway. You could argue that the Internet is a different ballgame, because advertising revenue is based strictly on the number of hits to your site, but it's only that way because the advertisers have chosen to structure it that way. Caching is a painfully obvious way to improve the Internet, and it just makes sense. If advertisers can't find a way to adapt to it, well, they suck. Advertisers shouldn't restrict the advancement of technology just because it doesn't fit their model, especially when it's something that's such an obvious solution to such an obvious problem.
If I write a book and the NY Review of Books reviews it should they be able to give out free versions of the book?
But there's a critical difference. If you publish your book on the web, then you've already given out free copies of the book to the whole world. What people do with it from there is beyond your control. Besides, even Internet Exploder keeps cached copies of pages. You could argue that Microsoft is depriving sites of the hits they deserve. The bottom line is that once you post your "content" on the web, the cat is out of the bag. Google can cache it, IE can cache it, so why can't Slashdot cache it?
Yeah, right, because no one ever, ever, ever uses a PC for anything but typing in text. All drawing is done with pencil and paper, only. All 3D modelling is done with clay. PCs are strictly for running Word. Tablets are useless.
I guess so, but I think the whole question of giving the site the hits that it "deserves" is bogus, because all those hits are coming from Slashdot users. In other words, the site wouldn't even get those hits if not for Slashdot. So if Slashdot chooses to cache the page for its own users, how can the owner of the site complain?
Besides, The traffic to the site will still increase, simply because the site will be getting free advertising on Slashdot. The story will fall off the Slashdot front page in a day or so, at which point people will go to the original site, if they're still interested. Even better, Slashdot could just destroy their cached version at that point.
Yep. This is why Slashdot should cache pages along with the associated images and videos. Presto! No more slashdot effect. And saying "But what about mirrordot?" is not valid, because people only go to mirrordot after the original sight has already been crushed into oblivion. And the argument in the FAQ is total BS, too. Oh sure, Slashdot is really concerned that the site in question won't get its precious ad revenue when people are viewing the cached version.
NEWS FLASH: The only people who will be viewing the cached version are... wait for it... Slashdot users! That's right! And more importantly, you don't generate a lot of advertisement revenue when your site is offline due to the Slashdot effect.
So the Slashdot editors' argument (here) basically boils down to this:
Private: Sir, we've accidentally launched a nuke that's headed for downtown Maimi. General: Boy, that sucks for Miami. Private: Well, sir, we've got twenty minutes before the detonation -- shouldn't we at least sound some sirens or something and at least give them a chance to evacuate? General: Sure, I know that evacuation sounds like a great idea, but think about it -- you'd be depriving all those people of their right to see the beautiful mushroom cloud that forms. And anyway, lots of people will probably survive the explosion. Only the unfortunate (half million or so) people who live right in the downtown area and don't have proper nuclear-bomb-proof apartment buildings will actually die. I mean, hey, maybe we could try to just evacuate those unfortunate few, but do we really want to go to all that trouble? In the end, private, evacuating Miami is "a complicated issue that would need to be thought through in great detail before being implemented." Private: Excellent point, sir. Poor bastards.
I've done that! When I was in college, on an internship, one of the other interns thought it would be a cool contest to see who could crash a PC with the smallest amount of code. (This was back in the Windows 3.1 days.) So he wrote a batch file that called itself (or something along those lines), and sure enough, it eventually blew up the DOS stack and crashed. It was pretty small, maybe 20 bytes or so. Being a real programmer, I did this:
COPY CON X.EXE
[Crtl-A][Ctrl-Z][Enter]
Which creates a one-byte file with ASCII character 0x01, which is the smiley face (just to be cute). One of the wonderful things about Win 3.1 and DOS is that they don't do any sanity checking of EXE files. They just jump right in there and start executing. So trying to execute the single smiley-face character did in fact hang the system.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, well said.
Regret is not a choice that you make... You can tell yourself that you won't regret this drastic, irreversible, bizarre decision, but you cannot say for certain that you "will not regret" it. You won't know for sure until you're old and grey, and hopefully a lot wiser than you are now. I can say with near certainty that you will regret it. Hell, I've talked to old guys who have tattoos that they regret. "Yeah, that dragon crushing the skull in it's mouth seemed cool back when I was 18." Of course, lots of people are happy with their tattoos, but the point is that regret is something that comes much later, not at the moment you make the permanent, life-altering decision, whatever it may be.
Well, that takes way too long in a BIOS (running in ROM). In fact, it took about five seconds, which is obviously unacceptable. So, I worked on the math, and found that I only needed to loop over one of the two variables. You can see it if you write it out like this:
X/Y = T
Where T is your target value. So, you loop over X, and for each value of X, you can compute the best corresponding value of Y as:
Y = X/T
In BIOS world, it's all assembly code. So to do the division here, I just used the x86 "DIV" instruction, which gives both the result (in EAX) and the remainder (in EDX). If you're using C or any floating-point math, this is all much easier, of course. Anyway, if you take the remainder of that division and divide that value by X, you'll get E (the error). So you just keep track of the smallest value of E and use the corresponding X and Y. So the algorithm looks like this:
(Sorry about the dots, Slashdot won't let me indent the code with spaces.)
Yeah, it's not perfect, and there are probably faster ways, but this was lightning fast for the system I was working on. I also added an "early out" condition if E was small enough.
Yes, it's an odd case, but why does the guy have to be "mentally off" just because he supsects that the government is covering up UFO evidence? He may be "mentally off" for thinking that he wouldn't get caught, but belief in UFOs hardly qualifies as a mental disease. How many regular viewers did the X-Files have? And they certainly weren't watching because of the stellar acting. Yeah, I know it's just a silly, fictional TV series, but I'm just pointing out that lots of people at least entertain the idea that UFOs exist.
So, if a guy wanted to build a more "modern" homebrew CPU, what options are there? Are there any decent CAD tools that don't cost a thousand million dollars? And once a layout is done, is there anywhere you can get just one single chip made for a reasonable price?
Of course. All posts should be restricted to discussing only the most common, practical uses of technology. Things like this and this simply have no place in this world.
Yeah, thanks, I Left out a divide-by-sixty there. I knew 80 hours seemed like too much. Guess I'll have to wait for the 2TB blu-ray disks. :)
Looks like it's only available to OEMs. Where can I actually buy one?
Sounds cool... Got a link to this? I browsed Logitech's keyboards, and at a glance it looks like they all have regular-sized keys. Those nice, flat laptop keys would be really sweet.
- Sealed!
Keyboards get so much disgusting stuff between the keys -- even if you're a clean person with clean hands. Crap just magically gathers between keys somehow, from the air. Why not make them sealed so that you can just run it under the sink for a few seconds?Yeah, I've seen the articles about putting keyboards in the dishwasher, but that's too much trouble. You have to removed the keys to really get it clean, and then you have to pop all the keys back on, it sucks. Give me a sealed keyboard that I can just blast with a garden hose every month or so.
That "touchstream" thing almost got it right, but they had to go and use a completely non-standard key layout, among other weirdnesses.
Yeah, I know, this is probably just another article about vaporware. But, if it were true, imagine what you could do with an 850GB DVD:
:)
- A single frame of 1080p HD video is 1920 x 1080 pixels, or 2073600 pixels.
- Each pixel is 24 bits of RGB, so 2073600 x 3 bytes = 6220800 bytes for each frame of video.
- at 30 frames per second, one second of video would take 186624000 bytes.
So with 850GB of space, you could store about 80 hours of completely uncompressed, high-definition, true-color video. Wow... Is my math right there? I didn't expect it to be that much. Anyway, that would look pretty spiffy on your fancy 60" HDTV. Plenty of room left over for a few dozen tracks of completely uncompressed digital audio, too.
A cool way to always have good passwords is to just choose a short phrase that you'll remember and run the text through MD5. So, if you're creating an account for your PC at work, you might use something like "Work PC password, May 2005" and then just run it throgh something like this.
This will give you a good mixed-case, alphanumeric password, and you can always retrieve it if you forget it, as long as you can remember the phrase that you used (which is much easier than remembering Qwy4%!Xx). The only other caveat is that you must have access to the web or to a machine with an MD5 generator.
And, being an uber-geek, you can even go one step further and eliminate that last requirement. You can make up your own algorithm for converting a phrase into pseudo-random characters. Keep it simple, and something that you can do with pencil and paper! You have to be able to remember the algorithm a month from now (when IT forces you to change your password) or else it's useless. But if you keep it simple, you'll have no trouble remembering how to do it. I've been using this system for a while now and it works like a charm.
Trust me -- this is a road you don't want to go down. Your wife will die in childbirth, your children will be hidden from you, and the guy who used to be your best friend in the world will hack your limbs off. And then, just to rub salt in the wound, he'll tell your son that you're "more machine than man now, twisted and evil." What a prick.
I think that you are indirectly asking the ultimate question here: What part of the human body houses the conciousness? If someone loses an arm or a leg, their conciousness is not lost. But on the other hand, if you go without oxygen for a few minutes, conciousness is permanently lost -- even though nothing physical has been removed. So where are the cells that actually matter?
Is it somewhere in the brain? Probably. Is it the mysterious thing that weighs 21 grams? If you could find the "organ" or whatever it is that makes you concious, then all you'd need to do is keep that clump of cells alive, and everything else could be replaced.
This is completely unrelated to the MPAA issue, but anyway...
I'd argue that nothing is analog. Electrons and photons are finite things. When you look at a piece of copper wire, you'll never see some fractional number of electrons zipping by -- there ether is an electron or there isn't. Some scientists and mathematicians are leaning more and more towards the possibility that nothing in the universe is truly "analog." Wolfram's "A New Kind Of Science" suggests that the whole universe (physics, time, etc...) is a digital computer of sorts. The "Digital Philosophy" crowd (website) makes a similar argument. Chaitin even argued that real numbers don't exist in his most excellent book. The book was available for free online for a long time, but it looks like it's gone now. It's well worth whatever he's asking for it, though.
1) You have to have paying advertisers (fairly common).
2) You have to have a beefy enough server to actually withstand the slashdotting (rare).
3) Your advertisements -- the banners themselves -- have to be dumb enough to not work properly in a cached version of the page.
I guess (3) is fairly common, as many banner ads are just jpegs. But there are simple ways to fix this. Slashdot could avoid caching any images that come from other domains ("other" meaning domains other than the one hosting the article itself). That way, all of the ad images still get pulled directly from the advertisers site. To be extra careful, Slashdot could avoid caching any image that is a link to another domain, just in case some sites host their banner images locally. But honestly, I think item (2) is so rare that (3) is hardly even worth mentioning. And if your site is already strong enough to survive a Slashdotting, then you are already generating tons of advertising revenue.
But, Slashdot would also cache the advertisements, so every user who reads the story would still see those precious ads. And, assuming they do something similar to Mirrordot, the links would be unchanged from the original site. So if someone clicks on an ad in the cached version, they would still be taken to the advertiser's site.
The more correct analogy is this: You run a free newspaper that relies on advertising revenue. One day, the NYT sees an article in your crummy little paper that they like. They decide that they want to reprint your article. Hey, you were giving it away for free, anyway. So, they have two choices: 1) Grab every single copy of your free paper that they can find, or 2) Just buy one copy and then use their own massive printing presses to reproduce the article, along with all the ads on the page, giving full credit to your paper as being the original source of the article.
Option 1 just isn't feasable, because your presses can't supply enough papers, and more importantly, you (the free paper) don't gain anything from option 1, anyway. You could argue that the Internet is a different ballgame, because advertising revenue is based strictly on the number of hits to your site, but it's only that way because the advertisers have chosen to structure it that way. Caching is a painfully obvious way to improve the Internet, and it just makes sense. If advertisers can't find a way to adapt to it, well, they suck. Advertisers shouldn't restrict the advancement of technology just because it doesn't fit their model, especially when it's something that's such an obvious solution to such an obvious problem.
Yeah, right, because no one ever, ever, ever uses a PC for anything but typing in text. All drawing is done with pencil and paper, only. All 3D modelling is done with clay. PCs are strictly for running Word. Tablets are useless.
I guess so, but I think the whole question of giving the site the hits that it "deserves" is bogus, because all those hits are coming from Slashdot users. In other words, the site wouldn't even get those hits if not for Slashdot. So if Slashdot chooses to cache the page for its own users, how can the owner of the site complain?
Besides, The traffic to the site will still increase, simply because the site will be getting free advertising on Slashdot. The story will fall off the Slashdot front page in a day or so, at which point people will go to the original site, if they're still interested. Even better, Slashdot could just destroy their cached version at that point.
Yep. This is why Slashdot should cache pages along with the associated images and videos. Presto! No more slashdot effect. And saying "But what about mirrordot?" is not valid, because people only go to mirrordot after the original sight has already been crushed into oblivion. And the argument in the FAQ is total BS, too. Oh sure, Slashdot is really concerned that the site in question won't get its precious ad revenue when people are viewing the cached version.
NEWS FLASH: The only people who will be viewing the cached version are... wait for it... Slashdot users! That's right! And more importantly, you don't generate a lot of advertisement revenue when your site is offline due to the Slashdot effect.
So the Slashdot editors' argument (here) basically boils down to this:
Private: Sir, we've accidentally launched a nuke that's headed for downtown Maimi.
General: Boy, that sucks for Miami.
Private: Well, sir, we've got twenty minutes before the detonation -- shouldn't we at least sound some sirens or something and at least give them a chance to evacuate?
General: Sure, I know that evacuation sounds like a great idea, but think about it -- you'd be depriving all those people of their right to see the beautiful mushroom cloud that forms. And anyway, lots of people will probably survive the explosion. Only the unfortunate (half million or so) people who live right in the downtown area and don't have proper nuclear-bomb-proof apartment buildings will actually die. I mean, hey, maybe we could try to just evacuate those unfortunate few, but do we really want to go to all that trouble? In the end, private, evacuating Miami is "a complicated issue that would need to be thought through in great detail before being implemented."
Private: Excellent point, sir. Poor bastards.
I've done that! When I was in college, on an internship, one of the other interns thought it would be a cool contest to see who could crash a PC with the smallest amount of code. (This was back in the Windows 3.1 days.) So he wrote a batch file that called itself (or something along those lines), and sure enough, it eventually blew up the DOS stack and crashed. It was pretty small, maybe 20 bytes or so. Being a real programmer, I did this:
COPY CON X.EXE
[Crtl-A][Ctrl-Z][Enter]
Which creates a one-byte file with ASCII character 0x01, which is the smiley face (just to be cute). One of the wonderful things about Win 3.1 and DOS is that they don't do any sanity checking of EXE files. They just jump right in there and start executing. So trying to execute the single smiley-face character did in fact hang the system.
That was the point I was making. :)
Gotta work on my sarcasm, I guess.