121–130 of 150 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, not happy about that idiocy (probably 1MB as video) burning through 10% of my monthly bandwidth on the first day of the month...
Wow, how low is your monthly download cap?? What ISP and where?
Your snake game doesn't even have food for the snake to eat? The snake just grows without eating, until the head collides with the tail somewhere? Pssh, amateur hour... /s (Just kidding this is actually super cool.)
It's Tron-ish (the post says Tron, where did you read snake?) :P
https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/227/22747.htm...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you'll have trouble. Assuming the first digit of the phone number is somewhere between 114.5 million and 115.5 million, you have 1 million potential 11 digit numbers to check. There are 10^11 sequences with 11 digits. The number of people in the USA is 3×10^8, and we can assume there is roughly 1 number per person (some people don't have a phone number and some people have more than one, but it turns out that…
It'd be a great 1 person-audience magic trick to call up all 3000 of those people and say, "Hi sjcsjc, I found your phone number in Pi".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Or the machine language expression of the most advanced expert systems, though by then the notch might be small enough that Planck’s constant got in the way. With Planck's length being roughly 10^-35m, I'd say you'd hit the limit trying to store more than 15 bytes.
How are you calculating a value of simply 15 bytes? The proposal is that the mathematical value of the ratio of the lengths of rod and the notch will deliver a value on the number line, which in effect can be of any desired length. You actually could find a number that can represent the complete contemporary knowledge of Humanity. The limitations mentioned in the above comment relate to the fact that to know you'd ar…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same has been said about Pi (3.14). If you can compute, store and search enough the digits of Pi, you can reference anything by just providing the 'start' and 'finish' locations. Unfortunately, with enough digits of Pi, the 'start' and 'finish' numbers can get quite long themselves.
The indexes will, on average, have more digits than the sequence you compress. This is true for any infinite sequence of digits, not only Pi.
Of course one can argue that all current real life compression algorithms are aiming to simulate this, and that a brute force algorithm is one of those "after turning the sun into a CPU, still won't have enough compute power to finish the problem" types of solutions.
This is a fantastic way to get into low level programming with a fun,tangible and approachable result.
back in "the day (TM)", we used to do this with ..achem ..viruses on floppies :) Putting it in a tweet is just brilliant.
anyone remember the one where it would say "smoke more weed dude"? (or something of the sort) :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are you calculating a value of simply 15 bytes? The proposal is that the mathematical value of the ratio of the lengths of rod and the notch will deliver a value on the number line, which in effect can be of any desired length. You actually could find a number that can represent the complete contemporary knowledge of Humanity. The limitations mentioned in the above comment relate to the fact that to know you'd ar…
Assuming the length of the rod is 1m, and you have a resolution of one plank length, there are 10e35 possible ratios you can express (because that's the number of possible locations of the notch). that's about 2^113, which is a number which fits in 15 bytes of information. As discussed below, if you also allow for the bar to be the size of the observable universe, this doesn't increase by much. A notch or ratio is li…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are you calculating a value of simply 15 bytes? The proposal is that the mathematical value of the ratio of the lengths of rod and the notch will deliver a value on the number line, which in effect can be of any desired length. You actually could find a number that can represent the complete contemporary knowledge of Humanity. The limitations mentioned in the above comment relate to the fact that to know you'd ar…
you can loosely think of it as writing down a number in unary where each "digit" takes 1.6 x 10^-35 m space to draw.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
you can loosely think of it as writing down a number in unary where each "digit" takes 1.6 x 10^-35 m space to draw.
But what does that have to do with the emergent ratio between the notch and the rod? There may be 10^35 possible steps, but that does not mean that the answer, the ratio of the notch and the rod, will be limited by that. The answer will come from the number line, where any irrational number can have however many trailing numbers. If the ratio of the rod and the notch is 22/7, how much information would you say that i…
As someone that develops almost exclusively in high-level languages on top of may levels of abstraction, it's nice to see what can be accomplished close to the metal. This reminds me of Steve Gibson's SpinRite, which (from what I recall) is a fully functional disk recovery utility written entirely in assembly. https://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm . Say what you want about the man, but this is something that's saved me on…
There are people that will argue until they are blue in the face that his recovery software is useless. But I have also had some success with it. Everything that he releases is amazingly tiny. It just shows how much bloat modern software tends to have.
The other argument is that the various things SR tries to "manage" (sector interleave, getting various timing parameters "perfect", etc) were only relevant with ST-506 (!!) and similar disks from the 80s/very early 90s, and that anything remotely modern (even IDE, virtually 100% of SATA) generally doesn't provide enough low-level control surface that trying to micro-manage the disk's behavior will do anything particularly special.
Of course, I'm sure each manufacturer has their own tools and widgets that can use undocumented proprietary SATA/SCSI commands to control the drive's behavior at a very low level, but those kinds of tools are a) rare as hens' teeth and b) probably very easy to break disks with due to poor UI design and lack of documentation. Chances are the most expensive data recovery centers probably have some of these tools, and more importantly the training to know how not to kill HDDs with them :P
TL;DR: Yes, SR works, but probably just as well as dd3rescue; as always, if you think a disk is this side of dead and you think you have a chance without specialized tools, just imaging it is probably the best first step, because SR and all other tools will of course stress it.
With all of this said, I really, really like SR's startup animation :3 and I agree that it's refreshingly small.