All I can find is the usual journalistic garbage, some fear mongering here and there, some harsh comments about RSA, some financial "news" commentary. No real information.
Can anyone on/. with technical knowledge, comment on the hack breaking the entire system (essentially, rooting the auth system) or is it just breaking one of the two factors, that being able to predict the "random" number generation of the keyfobs, so I'm down to merely having a pretty good "one factor"?
Also is the protocol poorly enough designed that the attackers don't need to know anything about the keyfobs, or rephrased, does keeping the serial number info etc about individuals keyfobs secret prevent the break?
The simplest way would be an RS-232 line with only the ground and transmit data wires connected. Unfortunately, no one seems to have something like this.
Oh come on, wire cutters / diagonal cutters and some heat shrink tubing later... Or you can needle nose pliers to remove the, uh, male part of the connector.
The expensive way is to buy a managed ethernet switch (not a dumb switch) and set up port mirroring or whatever (tm) (c) name they have for the protocol analyzer port feature where you only get to see not touch the traffic.
The cheap way, is buy a slightly dumber switch, force the port to 10 megs, cut open the ethernet cable, and clip the pair going the wrong direction. 10 megs used separate pairs for each direction, more modern modulation methods or whatever use all the pairs both ways. If you are at a "crimp yer own" facility, not crimping one of the pairs is not all that difficult. Of course your average cable-monkey will probably skip the wrong pair about 3/4 of the time, or split pair them, etc etc.
The in between, completely off the shelf answer is anyone who's ever worked even tangentially in industrial IT or IT at one of our few remaining industries (raises hand) knows that out on the floor you exclusively run ethernet using these ether-fiber transceivers on each end and coincidentally, 15 years ago when I was doing this kind of stuff, all of those devices used two fibers, one for each direction. Since you "need" to use these transceivers anyway to get around interference probs and distance limitations (uh, the cat-5 spec says 100 meters, and the printing press is 300 meters long, yes I know that's a fifth of a mile, no sh!t, wore out a pair of boots at that job...), its not exactly hard to figure out that you just use one strand of fiber instead of two...
Don't forget the sort of people who proudly proclaim their ignorance as well. In the past people tended to keep quiet about being ignorant, but it seems to be something to brag about in some circles now.
Looking at the Venn diagram of them and "socially and economically irrelevant so there is no need to pander to them", there is nearly 100% overlap.
I sure hope they can develop this concept into a design that can be used by consumers.
Get prepared for plenty of toxic waste spills. I did some research on vanadium flow batteries a decade or so ago, and they're just too toxic for the average redneck or the average MBA to be placed in charge of. Like giving matches to a little kid.
The bad news is the vanadium-based chemistries are probably the safest, least reactive, least corrosive of the flow batteries. The others are worse. Lithium chemistries that occasionally burst into flame, iron based chemistries that are basically controlled rust (yeah as if GM can control rust...) etc.
"The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has recommended that 35 mg/m3 of vanadium be considered immediately dangerous to life and health."
"Vanadium traces in diesel fuels present a corrosion hazard; it is the main fuel component influencing high temperature corrosion."
PIck a text adventure that fits your interests... big LotR fan, OK zork isn't the worst choice although Enchanter or Sorcerer might do better. Like mystery novels/movies/Scooby Doo? Try Deadline. Like weird British comedy? Try infocoms HHGttG.
in GENERICAIRLINE you can enjoy our in-flight intertainment system on every flight.
Almost as lame as this comment.
Lame, but knowing the type of people running this, I'm guessing the really lame part of this will be ads screaming the speed of 10 megs/sec in 50 point font and the download cap of 250 kilobytes per flight in 4 point font.
The whole wireless industry is such a dilbertian confuse-opoly whenever I hear anything about it, I assume they're trying to screw over the customer, more so than any other industry out there. So I avoid it as much as humanly possible. A pity, as I'd probably be a good profitable customer if I were not so repelled by industry practices.
Except for writing programs, I would have to say that just about all those tasks are now done solely in the web browser for a large majority of people, and the vast majority of people will never write a program.
And for those that want to write a program anyway, at least at the level of introductory learning, there's
Three societal / cultural trends / beliefs / needs across all areas of human endeavor:
1) Talk down to the noobs. "Hay n00b U R dum so ur UI will B 1 button". Its a public display of profound intellectual arrogance. "The average gutter dwelling noob could never understand the rarefied nobility and intellectual challenge of the maximize button, so I, as their superior, as a shining example of Nietzsche's overman, will take away that dangerous option from them for their own good"
2) Everyone gets a participation trophy, so we must drag everyone down to the noob level. There must not be a learning curve or the people at the bottom of it might have hurt feelings. If that means the entire population must only be given tools equivalent to lincoln logs and playdough, the frustration of almost everyone is inferior to the feelings of one individual.
3) Eternal September has finally sunk in, around a decade too late, and now completely obsolete, and its going to take a long time to get rid of it. People that have not already had their "eternal september" moment years or decades ago are either about 5 years old or are socially and economically irrelevant so there is no need to pander to them, unfortunately people still insist that "everyone knows" that 99% of the population has never clicked a mouse. Its an meme thats obsolete and just won't die. Maybe when the Gen-Xers have all died of old age and the Gen-Y finally get it pounded into their heads that there's no one alive on the planet that was born before facebook... but that could take decades...
In other words, expect to be held back for quite awhile.
While I've not studied Go nearly enough as a civilized person ought to (or even as much as I'd like to), I don't really see the connection. What do cost calculations of projects have to do with an understanding of Go? What aspect of understanding Go (which I clearly do not have) applies here, and is a direct consequence of studying Go (as opposed to fencing, chess, etc)?
Worst case scenario it means the author support eastern mysticism and/or likes being "indie". If the author isn't completely ignorant of Go, sometimes it implies a class-ist outlook on humanity, as Go players cluster themselves into ranks and pretty much each rank can crush the rank below them and a lot of time is spent playing king of the mountain... Its interesting that humanity supports about 30 ranks of Go skill, as opposed to only about 2 in tic tac toe. Why not 100? Humans just don't have that much intelligence variation..
Best case scenario, it means the author knows there are other games that require intense pattern matching, and there are games that require intense memorization, and there are games that require intense long term strategic planning, but none require ALL THREE simultaneously quite as much as Go...
The biggest challenge to this method is that detail of the power consumption/generation would have to be exposed to the consumer so that these device would understand when to best consume or release energy.
Nah thats trivial. Noobs assume the transmission lines magically have zero resistance. They don't. All you need to do is set a fuzzy setpoint where when the wall outlet drifts above 117V it spins up and below 117V and it spins down. Put in some "fuzzy thinking fuzzy logic" so it spends about half its time in each mode, and you're golden.
The REAL problem is what to do when the kid unplugs it from the wall and sticks the cord in its mouth, what happens during a fire or flood, etc.
Your talking points suck. Stop moving the goalposts and do some fucking math.
Ahh of all my math classes at university, that was my favorite.
The problem is, the math is unclear.
For example, my wife's prius cost about 20K and I pay about 8 cents/KWh because I live in a civilized part of the country, so if every penny of the cost went to energy in its most polluting form, fossil fuel electricity, that would be about 250 megawatt-hr... at 2 pounds of CO2 per KWh at a fossil fuel plant, thats about half a million pounds of CO2 per "car cost equivalent of electricity". For the money I gave them, they literally cannot spew more than 500K-pounds of CO2 per prius as a very hard limit. Probably WAY the heck less. How much further? Who knows.
In comparison, if it runs 150K-miles, at 60 MPG, thats 2.5K-gallons of gas, at 20 pounds of CO2 per gallon of gas, thats a cool 50K-pounds of CO2 out the tailpipe. Of a car that only weighs 3000 pounds.
From a purely economic standpoint, the prius can't be much fitter or much worse than a plain ole car. If it were, either the entire industry would have cut over, or it would have gone out of business. So its probably about the same. The only difference is buying GM detroit iron means you'd send an extra $5K to Saudi Arabia, where they spend it on one way airplane tickets landing in our skyscrapers, whereas buying Toyota hybrids means you'd send an extra $5K to Japan where they spend it on creepy animated films of women and tentacles, and, apparently, not on extra tall reactor tsunami seawalls. Personally I am better off with more tentacle pr0n than collapsing skyscrapers, and so is the planet due to less wasted CO2. So if you want to go far enough in your CO2 analysis, you have to budget in the CO2 effects of the middle eastern war for oil, or "the crusades" or whatever its called now.
You can do this math estimating in your head, but it still doesn't really answer the problem. Quoting paid PR spokesmen from both sides doesn't really answer anything either.
Does an obese cat in a giant hamster wheel count as a flywheel? No? What if I just hooked up a DC generator to it and dangled some liver on a stick? How many Watts could I get?
One horsepower is about the average sustained power output of a horse (imagine that!). There are always substantial energy conversion losses, and a fat cat is non-optimal compared to a born and bred working horse, so I feel comfortable saying you'll get about 500 watts per horsepower.
Long term power output probably scales as weight, short term probably as surface area. A fat cat probably weighs more than 10 pounds and a hard core work horse probably weighs more than 1000 pounds. So I feel confident that you'll get somewhat less than 1/100th of a horsepower out of a fat cat.
Doing all the estimating in my head, I think it very realistic for a fat cat to sustainably long term generate about 5 watts. Enough to charge an ipod or run a cablemodem or an ethernet switch. A bit weak to run a giant modern laptop, but enough to slowly charge it....
If you could herd a hundred cats, like those crazy cat ladies, you could probably run a nice big screen TV off catpower.
What happens if the 'digital ants` are hijacked by the.cyber->terrorists:)
This will be the inevitable outcome. Random software is not allowed inside, or at least we put a measurable although microscopic effort into it. Digital ants are allowed in. Therefore they will be the infection vector of the future. "who watches the watchers"
A much more interesting story than a bunch of increasing marketing numbers by a company that benefits from increasing numbers, would be an explanation of how they made up these numbers...
It seems that $300,000 to $400,000 and up is not unheard of in the financial industry
I've "heard of" people completing a couple week certification course getting a $75000/yr job in IT because they now have an A+ cert and there are huge shortages of personnel. Of course I "heard of" that exclusively in TV and radio commercials by for-profit schools charging outrageous fees. The reality of it is the typical BS degree holder can hope for and possibly even get a $8/hr helpdesk job; The cream of the crop will do better, but then again, they always do. Such is to be expected toward the end of the educational-industrial complex bubble. How reliable are the reports of $400K/yr cobol coders and $75K/yr A+ cert password resetters and what kind of numbers are we talking about? I can totally see a CEO's son getting a really special deal, but thats just an anecdote compared to the other 300 million citizens and non-citizens here.
Or maybe it's the name of the game. "1943" was quite a popular game long before you were born, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and video games were played in strange darkened rooms called "Arcades".
LOL I expect that stuff I did in the 80s such as computers would be considered "old" now, but I expected Old Arcade Machines as in "Bringing Old Arcade Machines Into the Internet Age" to mean something like an ancient (to me) electromechanical pinball machine. Other than being in somewhat higher res and having somewhat better sound, most modern arcade games have not changed much since the 80s, so I didn't think of them as meeting the "old" criteria.
From a five-digit ID, at that. Maybe it's just been too long since fourth grade for you.
I thought it was a young whipper-snapper using the more modern rule of "italics means emphasis" as in 1943 is really F-ing old if you were born post 2000. Now you kids get off my lawn....
then it comes down to whether you are doing a more "technical" introduction to computer programming, or a more "abstract" introduction to computer science.
In other words, are you trying to provide training, or provide education? Either are fine, just don't confuse the two or try to mix them up.
Standard/. car analogy is in the field of automotive suspension components you can either:
1) Train the kid to replace the shocks on one specific 1998 GM model, noting that other cars are of course different, but all are vaguely similar. If the kid is looking for a mechanics job at a GM dealership, this is experience is valuable, but if at a Toyota dealership, this experience is mostly (yet not entirely) useless.
2) Educate the kid to simulate the car suspension parts using a computer and differential equations, and then run the simulated car over simulated cobblestones at various speeds, potholes of various depths, etc, and try to tune the suspension for either smoothest ride or most traction. This is a useful experience for a future engineering employee of any wheeled vehicle manufacturer.
To give a concrete example, consider the something as simple as basic mathematics
A much better example would be the mandatory standard/. car analogy. Combustion is a chemical process. Cars burn gas. Therefore teaching drivers ed is part of the continuum of chemistry training.
I did a quick Excel class in my freshman year; it had pointed me to various features that I simply hadn't dealt with while stumbling through the program on my own.
An Excel class was a requirement for CS where I went... It was extremely hard core, not noob how to add a column of numbers, but absolutely crazy excursions into the strangest depths. Stuff so useless all I can remember is the names, like pivot tables and such. They were giving us an "easy" environment to learn how to push the boundaries, learn how to "hack" or "grok" or whatever name you want to call it, how to read manuals, how to search the internet, how to experiment and figure it out yourself. Also we were told the Excel class taught us what its like to learn a certification... endless hours of stuff you'll never use, but confidence building that you'll know all there is to know about the subject. It was strangely interesting. I can say with certainty that about 99% of the capabilities of Excel are both unknown to well over 99.9% of users, and also 100% completely useless.
We also did something I've never seen outside of school, probably because I don't do financial programming, we drew simple financial "programs" in flowchart form inside excel, and then inserted formulas so the flowchart "worked", and then "debugged" with various input data. Obviously not much control flow is possible, but I remember an ultra-simplified income tax flowchart that used IF statements to insert 1 or 0 multiplication coefficients to simulate control flow, kinda.
Frighteningly, I knew one such person in Canada. A sociopathic, psychopathic, manic-depressive, evil genius, and unrestrained by the legal impediments which would limit a sane person's actions. Acts of violence repeatedly went unpunished by the criminal system, and attempts for redress were rejected by the civil courts. The legal system was trumped by the certificate of incompetence.
I expected a politician joke a the end of this, what a let down.
Slashdot Mirror
All I can find is the usual journalistic garbage, some fear mongering here and there, some harsh comments about RSA, some financial "news" commentary. No real information.
Can anyone on /. with technical knowledge, comment on the hack breaking the entire system (essentially, rooting the auth system) or is it just breaking one of the two factors, that being able to predict the "random" number generation of the keyfobs, so I'm down to merely having a pretty good "one factor"?
Also is the protocol poorly enough designed that the attackers don't need to know anything about the keyfobs, or rephrased, does keeping the serial number info etc about individuals keyfobs secret prevent the break?
The simplest way would be an RS-232 line with only the ground and transmit data wires connected. Unfortunately, no one seems to have something like this.
Oh come on, wire cutters / diagonal cutters and some heat shrink tubing later... Or you can needle nose pliers to remove the, uh, male part of the connector.
The expensive way is to buy a managed ethernet switch (not a dumb switch) and set up port mirroring or whatever (tm) (c) name they have for the protocol analyzer port feature where you only get to see not touch the traffic.
The cheap way, is buy a slightly dumber switch, force the port to 10 megs, cut open the ethernet cable, and clip the pair going the wrong direction. 10 megs used separate pairs for each direction, more modern modulation methods or whatever use all the pairs both ways. If you are at a "crimp yer own" facility, not crimping one of the pairs is not all that difficult. Of course your average cable-monkey will probably skip the wrong pair about 3/4 of the time, or split pair them, etc etc.
The in between, completely off the shelf answer is anyone who's ever worked even tangentially in industrial IT or IT at one of our few remaining industries (raises hand) knows that out on the floor you exclusively run ethernet using these ether-fiber transceivers on each end and coincidentally, 15 years ago when I was doing this kind of stuff, all of those devices used two fibers, one for each direction. Since you "need" to use these transceivers anyway to get around interference probs and distance limitations (uh, the cat-5 spec says 100 meters, and the printing press is 300 meters long, yes I know that's a fifth of a mile, no sh!t, wore out a pair of boots at that job...), its not exactly hard to figure out that you just use one strand of fiber instead of two...
Don't forget the sort of people who proudly proclaim their ignorance as well. In the past people tended to keep quiet about being ignorant, but it seems to be something to brag about in some circles now.
Looking at the Venn diagram of them and "socially and economically irrelevant so there is no need to pander to them", there is nearly 100% overlap.
I sure hope they can develop this concept into a design that can be used by consumers.
Get prepared for plenty of toxic waste spills. I did some research on vanadium flow batteries a decade or so ago, and they're just too toxic for the average redneck or the average MBA to be placed in charge of. Like giving matches to a little kid.
The bad news is the vanadium-based chemistries are probably the safest, least reactive, least corrosive of the flow batteries. The others are worse. Lithium chemistries that occasionally burst into flame, iron based chemistries that are basically controlled rust (yeah as if GM can control rust...) etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium
"The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has recommended that 35 mg/m3 of vanadium be considered immediately dangerous to life and health."
"Vanadium traces in diesel fuels present a corrosion hazard; it is the main fuel component influencing high temperature corrosion."
I'd say Zork
PIck a text adventure that fits your interests... big LotR fan, OK zork isn't the worst choice although Enchanter or Sorcerer might do better. Like mystery novels/movies/Scooby Doo? Try Deadline. Like weird British comedy? Try infocoms HHGttG.
passion and romance ... periodic table
That sounds like the plot of a xkcd comic...
in GENERICAIRLINE you can enjoy our in-flight intertainment system on every flight.
Almost as lame as this comment.
Lame, but knowing the type of people running this, I'm guessing the really lame part of this will be ads screaming the speed of 10 megs/sec in 50 point font and the download cap of 250 kilobytes per flight in 4 point font.
The whole wireless industry is such a dilbertian confuse-opoly whenever I hear anything about it, I assume they're trying to screw over the customer, more so than any other industry out there. So I avoid it as much as humanly possible. A pity, as I'd probably be a good profitable customer if I were not so repelled by industry practices.
Except for writing programs, I would have to say that just about all those tasks are now done solely in the web browser for a large majority of people, and the vast majority of people will never write a program.
And for those that want to write a program anyway, at least at the level of introductory learning, there's
http://tryruby.org/
http://tryhaskell.org/
and probably many more....
Do you think the minimalist trend is temporary?
Three societal / cultural trends / beliefs / needs across all areas of human endeavor:
1) Talk down to the noobs. "Hay n00b U R dum so ur UI will B 1 button". Its a public display of profound intellectual arrogance. "The average gutter dwelling noob could never understand the rarefied nobility and intellectual challenge of the maximize button, so I, as their superior, as a shining example of Nietzsche's overman, will take away that dangerous option from them for their own good"
2) Everyone gets a participation trophy, so we must drag everyone down to the noob level. There must not be a learning curve or the people at the bottom of it might have hurt feelings. If that means the entire population must only be given tools equivalent to lincoln logs and playdough, the frustration of almost everyone is inferior to the feelings of one individual.
3) Eternal September has finally sunk in, around a decade too late, and now completely obsolete, and its going to take a long time to get rid of it. People that have not already had their "eternal september" moment years or decades ago are either about 5 years old or are socially and economically irrelevant so there is no need to pander to them, unfortunately people still insist that "everyone knows" that 99% of the population has never clicked a mouse. Its an meme thats obsolete and just won't die. Maybe when the Gen-Xers have all died of old age and the Gen-Y finally get it pounded into their heads that there's no one alive on the planet that was born before facebook... but that could take decades...
In other words, expect to be held back for quite awhile.
Wow, have you even done the math?
"At just over 1,000 pages, the book is a treasure-trove of invaluable information"
From $1.50 to 8 CENTS... PER PAGE. UNBELIEVABLE!
8 cents per page? I can't photocopy a borrowed library book for 8 cents per page...
While I've not studied Go nearly enough as a civilized person ought to (or even as much as I'd like to), I don't really see the connection. What do cost calculations of projects have to do with an understanding of Go? What aspect of understanding Go (which I clearly do not have) applies here, and is a direct consequence of studying Go (as opposed to fencing, chess, etc)?
Worst case scenario it means the author support eastern mysticism and/or likes being "indie". If the author isn't completely ignorant of Go, sometimes it implies a class-ist outlook on humanity, as Go players cluster themselves into ranks and pretty much each rank can crush the rank below them and a lot of time is spent playing king of the mountain... Its interesting that humanity supports about 30 ranks of Go skill, as opposed to only about 2 in tic tac toe. Why not 100? Humans just don't have that much intelligence variation..
Best case scenario, it means the author knows there are other games that require intense pattern matching, and there are games that require intense memorization, and there are games that require intense long term strategic planning, but none require ALL THREE simultaneously quite as much as Go...
The biggest challenge to this method is that detail of the power consumption/generation would have to be exposed to the consumer so that these device would understand when to best consume or release energy.
Nah thats trivial. Noobs assume the transmission lines magically have zero resistance. They don't. All you need to do is set a fuzzy setpoint where when the wall outlet drifts above 117V it spins up and below 117V and it spins down. Put in some "fuzzy thinking fuzzy logic" so it spends about half its time in each mode, and you're golden.
The REAL problem is what to do when the kid unplugs it from the wall and sticks the cord in its mouth, what happens during a fire or flood, etc.
Your talking points suck. Stop moving the goalposts and do some fucking math.
Ahh of all my math classes at university, that was my favorite.
The problem is, the math is unclear.
For example, my wife's prius cost about 20K and I pay about 8 cents/KWh because I live in a civilized part of the country, so if every penny of the cost went to energy in its most polluting form, fossil fuel electricity, that would be about 250 megawatt-hr... at 2 pounds of CO2 per KWh at a fossil fuel plant, thats about half a million pounds of CO2 per "car cost equivalent of electricity". For the money I gave them, they literally cannot spew more than 500K-pounds of CO2 per prius as a very hard limit. Probably WAY the heck less. How much further? Who knows.
In comparison, if it runs 150K-miles, at 60 MPG, thats 2.5K-gallons of gas, at 20 pounds of CO2 per gallon of gas, thats a cool 50K-pounds of CO2 out the tailpipe. Of a car that only weighs 3000 pounds.
From a purely economic standpoint, the prius can't be much fitter or much worse than a plain ole car. If it were, either the entire industry would have cut over, or it would have gone out of business. So its probably about the same. The only difference is buying GM detroit iron means you'd send an extra $5K to Saudi Arabia, where they spend it on one way airplane tickets landing in our skyscrapers, whereas buying Toyota hybrids means you'd send an extra $5K to Japan where they spend it on creepy animated films of women and tentacles, and, apparently, not on extra tall reactor tsunami seawalls. Personally I am better off with more tentacle pr0n than collapsing skyscrapers, and so is the planet due to less wasted CO2. So if you want to go far enough in your CO2 analysis, you have to budget in the CO2 effects of the middle eastern war for oil, or "the crusades" or whatever its called now.
You can do this math estimating in your head, but it still doesn't really answer the problem. Quoting paid PR spokesmen from both sides doesn't really answer anything either.
Does an obese cat in a giant hamster wheel count as a flywheel? No? What if I just hooked up a DC generator to it and dangled some liver on a stick? How many Watts could I get?
One horsepower is about the average sustained power output of a horse (imagine that!). There are always substantial energy conversion losses, and a fat cat is non-optimal compared to a born and bred working horse, so I feel comfortable saying you'll get about 500 watts per horsepower.
Long term power output probably scales as weight, short term probably as surface area. A fat cat probably weighs more than 10 pounds and a hard core work horse probably weighs more than 1000 pounds. So I feel confident that you'll get somewhat less than 1/100th of a horsepower out of a fat cat.
Doing all the estimating in my head, I think it very realistic for a fat cat to sustainably long term generate about 5 watts. Enough to charge an ipod or run a cablemodem or an ethernet switch. A bit weak to run a giant modern laptop, but enough to slowly charge it....
If you could herd a hundred cats, like those crazy cat ladies, you could probably run a nice big screen TV off catpower.
What happens if the 'digital ants` are hijacked by the .cyber->terrorists :)
This will be the inevitable outcome. Random software is not allowed inside, or at least we put a measurable although microscopic effort into it. Digital ants are allowed in. Therefore they will be the infection vector of the future. "who watches the watchers"
A much more interesting story than a bunch of increasing marketing numbers by a company that benefits from increasing numbers, would be an explanation of how they made up these numbers...
It seems that $300,000 to $400,000 and up is not unheard of in the financial industry
I've "heard of" people completing a couple week certification course getting a $75000/yr job in IT because they now have an A+ cert and there are huge shortages of personnel. Of course I "heard of" that exclusively in TV and radio commercials by for-profit schools charging outrageous fees. The reality of it is the typical BS degree holder can hope for and possibly even get a $8/hr helpdesk job; The cream of the crop will do better, but then again, they always do. Such is to be expected toward the end of the educational-industrial complex bubble. How reliable are the reports of $400K/yr cobol coders and $75K/yr A+ cert password resetters and what kind of numbers are we talking about? I can totally see a CEO's son getting a really special deal, but thats just an anecdote compared to the other 300 million citizens and non-citizens here.
Maybe 1943 is a brand name?
Or maybe it's the name of the game. "1943" was quite a popular game long before you were born, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and video games were played in strange darkened rooms called "Arcades".
LOL I expect that stuff I did in the 80s such as computers would be considered "old" now, but I expected Old Arcade Machines as in "Bringing Old Arcade Machines Into the Internet Age" to mean something like an ancient (to me) electromechanical pinball machine. Other than being in somewhat higher res and having somewhat better sound, most modern arcade games have not changed much since the 80s, so I didn't think of them as meeting the "old" criteria.
See how "1943" is in italics?
English has rules, you know. Titles get italics.
From a five-digit ID, at that. Maybe it's just been too long since fourth grade for you.
I thought it was a young whipper-snapper using the more modern rule of "italics means emphasis" as in 1943 is really F-ing old if you were born post 2000. Now you kids get off my lawn....
then it comes down to whether you are doing a more "technical" introduction to computer programming, or a more "abstract" introduction to computer science.
In other words, are you trying to provide training, or provide education? Either are fine, just don't confuse the two or try to mix them up.
Standard /. car analogy is in the field of automotive suspension components you can either:
1) Train the kid to replace the shocks on one specific 1998 GM model, noting that other cars are of course different, but all are vaguely similar. If the kid is looking for a mechanics job at a GM dealership, this is experience is valuable, but if at a Toyota dealership, this experience is mostly (yet not entirely) useless.
2) Educate the kid to simulate the car suspension parts using a computer and differential equations, and then run the simulated car over simulated cobblestones at various speeds, potholes of various depths, etc, and try to tune the suspension for either smoothest ride or most traction. This is a useful experience for a future engineering employee of any wheeled vehicle manufacturer.
To give a concrete example, consider the something as simple as basic mathematics
A much better example would be the mandatory standard /. car analogy. Combustion is a chemical process. Cars burn gas. Therefore teaching drivers ed is part of the continuum of chemistry training.
I did a quick Excel class in my freshman year; it had pointed me to various features that I simply hadn't dealt with while stumbling through the program on my own.
An Excel class was a requirement for CS where I went... It was extremely hard core, not noob how to add a column of numbers, but absolutely crazy excursions into the strangest depths. Stuff so useless all I can remember is the names, like pivot tables and such. They were giving us an "easy" environment to learn how to push the boundaries, learn how to "hack" or "grok" or whatever name you want to call it, how to read manuals, how to search the internet, how to experiment and figure it out yourself. Also we were told the Excel class taught us what its like to learn a certification ... endless hours of stuff you'll never use, but confidence building that you'll know all there is to know about the subject. It was strangely interesting. I can say with certainty that about 99% of the capabilities of Excel are both unknown to well over 99.9% of users, and also 100% completely useless.
We also did something I've never seen outside of school, probably because I don't do financial programming, we drew simple financial "programs" in flowchart form inside excel, and then inserted formulas so the flowchart "worked", and then "debugged" with various input data. Obviously not much control flow is possible, but I remember an ultra-simplified income tax flowchart that used IF statements to insert 1 or 0 multiplication coefficients to simulate control flow, kinda.
hacked an old 1943 arcade machine..... lets him read the full contents of the Z80 logic board's memory
Us original Z80 era guys are old, but not 1943 old. There's got to be an intermediate step between 1943 and now, like it was rebuilt in the 80s.
Maybe 1943 is a brand name?
Frighteningly, I knew one such person in Canada. A sociopathic, psychopathic, manic-depressive, evil genius, and unrestrained by the legal impediments which would limit a sane person's actions. Acts of violence repeatedly went unpunished by the criminal system, and attempts for redress were rejected by the civil courts. The legal system was trumped by the certificate of incompetence.
I expected a politician joke a the end of this, what a let down.
Maybe a new Wonders list is needed...the Seven Wonders of the Digital World? ;o)
I nominate Debian