As to the danger of buffer overflows, not existent in VAX assembly code. Macro-32 made extensive use of descriptors, rather than the null terminated strings so popular in C. This is one of the many reasons I often refer to Macro-32 as a higher level language than C.
Well, consider the case of VAX assembly language. I may be in a situation where I need to move a byte out of a string from a location - MOVB src,dst. Later on, I'm modding that program, I need two bytes...MOVW src,dst. Now they want a whole longword MOVL src,dst. Heck, the requirements change, and I need 48 bytes out of that string MOVC3 #48,src,dst. At no time did I have to even think about the byte ordering - the next character in the string was the next character in memory. The same logic applies if the data at address src is not a string, but a number - if I start out needing to add bytes - ADDB src,dst. If the requirement for precision is increased, ADDW src,dst, ADDL src,dst gives me 16 and 32 bit precision. If I need to move the table of 12 longwords at src to dst, character move isntrustions work seamlessly - MOVC3 #48,src,dst. Never even have to think about byte order in all of these changes, and never had to think, lessee, I'm dealing with longwords so if I want to deal with it as 16 bit data, I have to address into the middle of the word (address wise) to get it. Now, I agree, it takes a little while to get used to reading dumps, but, with a little practice, that's no sweat either...and if you're doing it right, you'll spend more time coding than reading dumps, nicht wahr?
--
There is no god, and Diract is his Prohet.
As prior art, I submit the data structures of the RSX-11m executive. It's one big bunch of linked lists, with many nodes having multiple pointers and exisitng in multiple lists at the same time...and it's been a round since the mid 70s....
That's good - if they find what specific brain structures and neurochemistry is involved in religious belief, then science can start working on a cure for it.
You were lucky to live where you do - some states (eg, Texas) have no process that allows for expungement of records under any circumstances. Here, if you're a convicted felon, that's it for life.
Yawn...if Microsoft could write an OS that had decent multi tasking, a responsive scheduler, and adequate memory allocation and protection, the appeal of running a bunch of virtual machines just to run a bunch of different jobs and keep them from interfering with each other would be much less. This has been done before, most notably by VMS..I used to manage a cluster of large VMS systems, each of which had dozens of Oracle databasea on them, supported interactive editing of documents for hundreds of people, and ran a mixed bag of financial, accounting, engineering and program development applications...all on the same machines....looks like Microsoft and Cutlerdidn't incorporate enough of it in Windows...
The very most expensive place to get to in the solar system is the sun, due to the delta-V required to get there. It wouild be cheaper and easier to eject it from the solar system entirely than to dumpo it in the sun.
I got my first job in the computer industry after dropping out of school and being unemployed for 18 months. I ran into an old college drinking buddy at 3:00 AM at a funky all night grocery store. He was drunk out of his mind, felt nostalgic about our old hanging around days at school, and hired me to be a computer operator on the spot...it's worked out great from there...who I used to drink with was far more important than any of my coursework in school...
Pretty clever use of the terminal string. I set mine to log me in with one keystroke, back in the day. As to messing about with PDP-11 boot capabilities...the PDP-11/84 has a tiny bit of EEPROM built into it, that allows one to store small boot programs. I was at a DEC school one time, that dealt with hardware maintenance of the PDP-11/84 (I was taking the course so I could then train some Bulgarian customers of our systems, but that's another story). One of the guys in the class was a demon at writing small programs in binary for the PDP-11. During a break, he wrote one into the EEPROM for the class machine that cause it to pause, beep out "shave and a ahaircut - two bits", then proceed with a normal boot. Drove the instructior crazy until she figured out what was going on. The instructor was a pretty good sport - she didn't even get mad when, after she left her terminal logged in unattended on her normal machine, we changed the first line of her loginc.cmd to be "logout"....
Back in the day, I used to have to go in late on Saturday nights and copy & compress the system disk on our PDP-11/70 system. It was located in the typical loud, cold computer room. THe copy process could take anywhere from 1 to 5 hours, depending on the amount of fragmentation on the system disk. I didn't want to wait in the loud room, and I didn't want to get up from my comfy chair in my office at the other end of the building to continually check on the progress. One night, tuning around on my FM radio in my office, I heard a funny sort of noise at 98.5 MHz. Its rythmic structure reminded me of the sound the disks made while they were seeking during this copy process. Sure enough, thise old school disk drives, with their Emitter Coupled Logic (which uses about a pound of electrons to do anything) were generating lots of EM noise, which was, I'm guessing, getting coupled to the power line and thence to my radio. After that, I could kick back and have a few beers, and listen to the radio to know when the copy was over, without going back and forth to check.
The Poul Anderson book was "Satan's World". Like any of his books that feature the Solar Spice & Liquors Trader Team (David Falkayn, Adzel, and Chee Lan), it was quite excellent...
Any list of famous movie computers that omits "Alpha 60" from "ALphaville", or the PDP-10 from "THX-1138" is...incomplete. There's one scene in "THS-1138" where you can see the console lights light up to spell out "TILT".
Well, if you throw away the gamma source, you have to keep the neutron source...and you sure as hell don't want to keep that - since a neutron source will emit neutrons that smash into other atoms. Being neutral in charge, they will not be repelled by the positive charge of the nuclei of the atoms of your body, clothes, etc, and in some cases, will be absorbed into the nuclei it hits, causing an atom of something harmless to become an isotope, often a radioactive one....so it will gradually make things more radioactive as time goes by. The particles from the alpha and beta emitters are charged, and will be repelled by atomic nuclei, and are thus not going to "activate" the material around them. Gamma rays are photons, not matter(as a first approximation for the purposes of this example - neglecting the issue of pair production - gotta mention it so some whippersnapper doesn't correct me again...), and will not activate things they hit.
It's like the old physics problem - if you have a gamma source, a neutron source, a beta emitter, and an alpha emitter, all of equal "intensity", and you have to eat one, put one in your pocket, hold one at arms length, and throw one away, which do you do? Easy...since the neutron source will activate other materials and make them radioactive, you throw it away. Beta particles only travel a foot or so in air, so you hold it at arm's length. The alpha particles will be stopped by a layer of cloth, so you put it in your pocket - and the gamma source, being equally deadly at any of those three ranges, you might as well eat it. Having said that, of all the types of emitters, the alpha would be the safest to eat, as long as you're not constrained by those other choices.
Ruth Goldenberg, famous VMS developer and documenter (VMS is more richly documented in the "Internals and Data Structures" books than any flavor of unix could ever dream of being).
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Almost any vehicle is submersible...once.
As to the danger of buffer overflows, not existent in VAX assembly code. Macro-32 made extensive use of descriptors, rather than the null terminated strings so popular in C. This is one of the many reasons I often refer to Macro-32 as a higher level language than C.
Well, consider the case of VAX assembly language. I may be in a situation where I need to move a byte out of a string from a location - MOVB src,dst. Later on, I'm modding that program, I need two bytes...MOVW src,dst. Now they want a whole longword MOVL src,dst. Heck, the requirements change, and I need 48 bytes out of that string MOVC3 #48,src,dst. At no time did I have to even think about the byte ordering - the next character in the string was the next character in memory. The same logic applies if the data at address src is not a string, but a number - if I start out needing to add bytes - ADDB src,dst. If the requirement for precision is increased, ADDW src,dst, ADDL src,dst gives me 16 and 32 bit precision. If I need to move the table of 12 longwords at src to dst, character move isntrustions work seamlessly - MOVC3 #48,src,dst. Never even have to think about byte order in all of these changes, and never had to think, lessee, I'm dealing with longwords so if I want to deal with it as 16 bit data, I have to address into the middle of the word (address wise) to get it. Now, I agree, it takes a little while to get used to reading dumps, but, with a little practice, that's no sweat either...and if you're doing it right, you'll spend more time coding than reading dumps, nicht wahr? -- There is no god, and Diract is his Prohet.
Because little endian is vastly superior...especially if you're an assembly language programmer.
Great quote - but. Like I've pointed out before, it's not such a bad situation...you just have to make sure that you're the one wearing the boot.
As prior art, I submit the data structures of the RSX-11m executive. It's one big bunch of linked lists, with many nodes having multiple pointers and exisitng in multiple lists at the same time...and it's been a round since the mid 70s....
That's good - if they find what specific brain structures and neurochemistry is involved in religious belief, then science can start working on a cure for it.
You were lucky to live where you do - some states (eg, Texas) have no process that allows for expungement of records under any circumstances. Here, if you're a convicted felon, that's it for life.
Yawn...if Microsoft could write an OS that had decent multi tasking, a responsive scheduler, and adequate memory allocation and protection, the appeal of running a bunch of virtual machines just to run a bunch of different jobs and keep them from interfering with each other would be much less. This has been done before, most notably by VMS..I used to manage a cluster of large VMS systems, each of which had dozens of Oracle databasea on them, supported interactive editing of documents for hundreds of people, and ran a mixed bag of financial, accounting, engineering and program development applications...all on the same machines....looks like Microsoft and Cutlerdidn't incorporate enough of it in Windows...
If you consider that defense contractors hire lots and lots of IT people, it's hard for me to consider this a total waste of money....
I wish Jack Black was actually as funny as he thinks he is. Thank the ghods that the Green Lantern project with him as GL got derailed.
Landings are an important subject in learning to fly. My instructor told me they are so important, they include at least one in every flying lesson.
Interviewed the winner and asked him or her how they felt about owning the Death WII.
The very most expensive place to get to in the solar system is the sun, due to the delta-V required to get there. It wouild be cheaper and easier to eject it from the solar system entirely than to dumpo it in the sun.
I got my first job in the computer industry after dropping out of school and being unemployed for 18 months. I ran into an old college drinking buddy at 3:00 AM at a funky all night grocery store. He was drunk out of his mind, felt nostalgic about our old hanging around days at school, and hired me to be a computer operator on the spot...it's worked out great from there...who I used to drink with was far more important than any of my coursework in school...
Pretty clever use of the terminal string. I set mine to log me in with one keystroke, back in the day. As to messing about with PDP-11 boot capabilities...the PDP-11/84 has a tiny bit of EEPROM built into it, that allows one to store small boot programs. I was at a DEC school one time, that dealt with hardware maintenance of the PDP-11/84 (I was taking the course so I could then train some Bulgarian customers of our systems, but that's another story). One of the guys in the class was a demon at writing small programs in binary for the PDP-11. During a break, he wrote one into the EEPROM for the class machine that cause it to pause, beep out "shave and a ahaircut - two bits", then proceed with a normal boot. Drove the instructior crazy until she figured out what was going on. The instructor was a pretty good sport - she didn't even get mad when, after she left her terminal logged in unattended on her normal machine, we changed the first line of her loginc.cmd to be "logout"....
Back in the day, I used to have to go in late on Saturday nights and copy & compress the system disk on our PDP-11/70 system. It was located in the typical loud, cold computer room. THe copy process could take anywhere from 1 to 5 hours, depending on the amount of fragmentation on the system disk. I didn't want to wait in the loud room, and I didn't want to get up from my comfy chair in my office at the other end of the building to continually check on the progress. One night, tuning around on my FM radio in my office, I heard a funny sort of noise at 98.5 MHz. Its rythmic structure reminded me of the sound the disks made while they were seeking during this copy process. Sure enough, thise old school disk drives, with their Emitter Coupled Logic (which uses about a pound of electrons to do anything) were generating lots of EM noise, which was, I'm guessing, getting coupled to the power line and thence to my radio. After that, I could kick back and have a few beers, and listen to the radio to know when the copy was over, without going back and forth to check.
The Poul Anderson book was "Satan's World". Like any of his books that feature the Solar Spice & Liquors Trader Team (David Falkayn, Adzel, and Chee Lan), it was quite excellent...
That reminds me of the sweetest sound I ever heard...the sound of a banjo hitting an accordion as it was being thrown into a dumpster.
Any list of famous movie computers that omits "Alpha 60" from "ALphaville", or the PDP-10 from "THX-1138" is...incomplete. There's one scene in "THS-1138" where you can see the console lights light up to spell out "TILT".
Well, if you throw away the gamma source, you have to keep the neutron source...and you sure as hell don't want to keep that - since a neutron source will emit neutrons that smash into other atoms. Being neutral in charge, they will not be repelled by the positive charge of the nuclei of the atoms of your body, clothes, etc, and in some cases, will be absorbed into the nuclei it hits, causing an atom of something harmless to become an isotope, often a radioactive one....so it will gradually make things more radioactive as time goes by. The particles from the alpha and beta emitters are charged, and will be repelled by atomic nuclei, and are thus not going to "activate" the material around them. Gamma rays are photons, not matter(as a first approximation for the purposes of this example - neglecting the issue of pair production - gotta mention it so some whippersnapper doesn't correct me again...), and will not activate things they hit.
It's like the old physics problem - if you have a gamma source, a neutron source, a beta emitter, and an alpha emitter, all of equal "intensity", and you have to eat one, put one in your pocket, hold one at arms length, and throw one away, which do you do? Easy...since the neutron source will activate other materials and make them radioactive, you throw it away. Beta particles only travel a foot or so in air, so you hold it at arm's length. The alpha particles will be stopped by a layer of cloth, so you put it in your pocket - and the gamma source, being equally deadly at any of those three ranges, you might as well eat it. Having said that, of all the types of emitters, the alpha would be the safest to eat, as long as you're not constrained by those other choices.
Don't make fun of the Great Magnet, lest his might B-field reach out and deflect you at right angles to your intended path!
Ruth Goldenberg, famous VMS developer and documenter (VMS is more richly documented in the "Internals and Data Structures" books than any flavor of unix could ever dream of being).
The very shortest horror story was "It bit". Can't get any shorter...