What is it? Weekend Edition 8

Interesting world view you have there. Is that the result of a head injury?

Gunner

"Confiscating wealth from those who have earned it, inherited it, or got lucky is never going to help 'the poor.' Poverty isn't caused by some people having more money than others, just as obesity isn't caused by McDonald's serving super-sized orders of French fries Poverty, like obesity, is caused by the life choices that dictate results." - John Tucci,

Reply to
Gunner Asch
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Lbh cbfg gur vafgehpgvbaf ba ubj gb ebg13 qrpbqr (be rapbqr, fvapr vg vf n erirefvoyr cebprff) *va* ebg13.

Lbh zhfg ernyyl abg jnag gubfr jub qba'g xabj gb yrnea. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

No need to make it too easy on the NOOBS. ;-)

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

Sometimes I'm overly recursive.

:)

--Winston

Reply to
Winston

Think of the message as a reward, after someone spends half an hour writing a decoder in BASIC.

Heh.

--Winston

Reply to
Winston

The last decoder I wrote in basic was to disassemble the firmware OS in a Commodre 1581 disk drive.

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

I'll bet that was fun!

--Winston

Reply to
Winston

It took about half a day. What took longer as modifying the original 'Disk Doctor' to recognize the 1571 & 1581 drives. 'Disk Doctor' was a machine language sector editor written when the 1541 drive was new. I rewrote the code to identify several early IEEE-488 metal cased drives to see the 1571 & 1581 drives, and changed the display to make it more user friendly. The fun part was I used 'Disk Doctor' to rewrite a copy of itself to the same floppy on a 1541 drive.

A inventory database in Commodore basic was a lot more work. Someone wrote one in three modules, and using the lousy MPS801 printer. there was a setup/data entry module. Another to update the files, and the third to output data.

The author didn't use carriage returns or line feeds. Instead, he padded every line with extra spaces so the output was one very long line. I cleaned up the print routine, then re-wrote the rest of the program into a single, smaller program. large parts of each module were identical, or only varied by a line or two so I created multiple entry subroutines to minimize the code. :)

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

Yeah, that IS kinda strange.

Reply to
humunculus

Or -- sat down and decoded it by hand. (Not too difficult -- just tedious.)

Also -- not too difficult to write a decoder in C (or perl, or pretty much any reasonable language). Lots of ways to do it.

I don't think that I would want to try it in INTERCAL, however. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

(...)

I had to look that one up.

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"Caution! Under no circumstances confuse the mesh with the interleave operator, except under confusing circumstances!"

That is a Riot! Reminds me of Douglas Adams.

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:)

--Winston

Reply to
Winston

"For extra security, and to foil spammers, all my postings are double-rot13 encoded."

Reply to
Robert Bonomi

(...)

I can't get to a browser right now. What did Bob say? Can anybody decode this for me?

--Winston

Reply to
Winston

Kirkpatrick Sale _Rebels_Against_the_Future_ Addison-Wesley Publishing 1995.

Some English lived in towns. Some owned land or were subjects of landowners. The rest lived on public land. A big motive for turning public land into private estates was to get rich producing wool.

Large numbers of displaced Scotch and Irish ended up in America, while displaced English went to cities. Gin became popular as a cheap means of slow suicide.

Reply to
J Burns

Download the original paper on it and read that if you haven't. I remember being introduced to it at an early local computer club meeting, perhaps around 1978 or so.

Better -- it was written (in part) by one of the two programmer responsible for the original Adventure. :-)

Hmm ... I don't remember reading that in _HHGTTG_ -- some supplementary publication, or my failing memory?

Enjoy, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

(...)

That sure resonates with anyone who bashed their head against a thorough but completely useless instruction manual or 'man entry'. (Timidly raises hand.)

..Who were bright enough to warrant sunscreen and shades.

Perhaps you dismissed it as 'too improbable'. :)

See section 3.3:

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's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy Just now I realized that I want to be Douglas Adams when I grow up.

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--Winston

Reply to
Winston

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