Just because he does "tame" things doesn't mean he's not abusing his privilege as an uber-rich white dude. He's a million times better person than Musk, but this is still immature behavior that not everyone could get away with because of what they look like. But hey, he's a hacker god so blank check I guess.
Depends on the job. Cutting unistrut is far more challenging than 80/20, it weighs a lot, and the connectors are expensive because they are engineered to bear significant loads. 80/20 is a little pricier per foot but it is much, much easier to work with for applications that don't need to withstand a nuclear strike.
Not sure if the throat is large enough but a portable electric bandsaw would be able to chew through the unistrut steel and in the jobs I've used them on they are precise enough.
What an interesting theory. Talking to new hires, they learned python because that's what they were taught in school. Maybe in the 1990's when Python was competing with PERL for 2nd generation scripting languages that was the case that enthusiasts picked it up (along with Java beans, it was the 90's. :), but Python is institutional now in CS coursework.
EDIT: I just realized this was 2004. And now I agree with him.
I don't see how that could have been accidentally discovered. It is so esoteric and time consuming, that even if someone owned an arcade and could set the machine to free play, what kind of thought process from historical hacks prior to 1982 would have inspired that kind of a search space? Much like easter eggs in early Microsoft Office products from ca. 1990, I can't imagine. Like maybe trying to run down a shot counter might have been on the agenda, but those two specific aliens just cinch it for me. Now, as to whether it is a bug or not.
Looking at the forensics of the original ROM at the provided URL[0], the fix is nontrivial. It looks like a bug, IMHO. But if it is a bug, who stumbled upon it? I would think that if the author put that in there to get the high score all the time, it certainly is obfuscated enough, but he would run the risk of being discovered. Perhaps the cheat is obfuscated in order to sneak it through code review and not be fired by Namco?
What really supports the bug theory is that the flight pattern of the far left bees has to be altered to account for their location on the screen. This REALLY feels like a bug, because when I'm trying to alter a corner case in code, I can rarely see the second-order consequences without code coverage/fuzzing. This is a total code smell IMHO.
But again, how would someone even exploit this flaw without the ROM. Which leads me back to the intentional cheat by the programmer.
I'm legit ambivalent about this. But if I was pushed, I'd have to say it was an intentional cheat slipped into the code, because programmers were just too good back then.
I completely disagree; it's easy to imagine someone in the first few days of the game's availability deciding for fun that instead of beating the first level, they were going to see how long they could keep it going. At that point, the natural thing to do is kill all but one enemy, and eventually it would stop shooting, which would be very attention-grabbing.
Then of course word would spread and investigations would begin as to how to reproduce and optimize the phenomenon.
Like the movie ready player one. No one went backwards in that race? This was written by people who do not game but know the flash of it. Watch any of the thousands of vids on youtube of people doing crazy things in speed runs and you will see different.
This is something I like to bring up to programmers/designers in context of application security. And that is any assumptions on how the user is going to use said program you come up with will be broken. If you say "No one will do ______" you will likely be incorrect.
The ** is code review? Most places didn't even have version control. Version control in most game development studios was "let me copy my source files on to another 5+1/4 floppy just in case disaster happens."
If lucky to have access to a mini computer with a hard drive then you kept separate directories for backups of your code. And you got cussed out by the high priest of IT because your backups were taking up more than 500KB of drive space. Maybe you got SCCS that would happily destroy your work regularly if you breathed wrong. If your company was rich it had a fully paid up copy of RCS runing on the Perkin-Elmer mini computer with 1MB of RAM and a 200MB HDD hooked up to a data station that looked like it was stolen off the set of Silent Running along with a 32kbps serial cable to your ICE box plugged in to the arcade board. And you got cussed out by the high priest of IT because now your RCS directory was bigger than your backup directory. And then inevitably someone wasn't paying attention one day and did an 'rm -rf *' on the wrong directory and the version control repository for your project got erased.
Code merging on non-UNIX development was usually "give me your floppy and I'll re-type bits of code you changed in that text file into my text file and then I'll give you back a fresh copy of the file to work with." If you were both smart about it, you worked in separate files and just had one or two common files that you played hot potato with, which was the fashion back in the day. Or you had a nifty little tool that would concatenate all the files together and then deleted duplicate lines and kept only the last version of changed lines because we believed we were too manly to use real development tools but the real reason was the company was too tight fisted to pay for them. "Hard drives are for the weak and why do you programmers need the high quality DS/DD floppies from Fujitsu anyway!?! Look, I've got this little gadget I bought for you that'll punch a notch in the other corner so you can just flip the disc over and use the other side too."
> and not be fired by Namco?
Nobody would have gotten fired over that even if they had purposely put it in there. The QA team would have found it, severity would have been decided, and it would have probably be pushed to "eh, there's not enough bytes in the ROM to patch it, it doesn't crash the machine and we've just burned enough PROMs on the gang programmer that the cost of pulling the PROMs off of arcade boards, junking a few thousand ICs and doing over is too great." It is almost certain that someone on the QA team found the bug, wrote it up, it was discussed, and then WNF'd, and then a little later on, news about it leaked out.
This also assumes of course they had a QA team and it wasn't just Bob who took a smoke break between running his bare hand over the live wiring looms feeling for shorts and exposed wiring to kill a few burbling aliens.
That's an interesting historical perspective of a code review from 50 years ago. Especially where you state that the Q&A team would review the code and decide to patch it or not. Did I used the wrong term from the 21st century? Clearly I was hypothesizing. I'm disappointed you couldn't just inform us without being so snarky.
One man's snark is another man's war story. There was no code review because video game development, and arcade video game development was the epitome of the Wild West and the lone cowboys who had late night coding sessions trying to figuring out how to shave 173 bytes from the build by changing JMP absolute (three bytes) to BEQ/BNE relative (two bytes) without suffering a page boundary cycle penalty so they could squeeze the game into two 8K PROMs instead of two 16KB PROMs. The primary concern in arcade game development was "does this bug make the game crash or visually glitch?" and "will the player get free time?" and if the answer was "no" to both of those, the bug was relegated to WNF (will not fix). QA in most companies really was Bob on the assembly line who put little dayglo stickers on the inside and wrote his initials under below the line that read "Q.C."
This is why I'm glad to see the old guard boy's club fading into a memory, despite the loss of skills that we may never see again as a culture. It's a mixed blessing.
The "old guard boy's club" has been around a long time, and is still around. The gatekeeping/exclusionary mindset cannot die off fast enough as far as I am concerned. Unfortunately, it won't. Where ever nerds of a culture gather, there you will find them. The old guard. Arms crossed. Legs akimbo. Judging you not worthy. Thinking they are cleverer than you because they read some obscure fact on a usenet group.
It's quite different incentive when you play for free - why waste your time dodging shots when you can fight but if you were playing in an arcade, some players might try and prolong the experience and enjoy the challenge of evading shots.
"real" handwriting also gets tired so it becomes progressively worse. unless the person writes a lot. which is why you see people who write left-to-write on a blank page compress and slant upward as they go.
Who generated the heat that you measured in the calorimeter?
Gut biome bacteria consumed an amount of those calories. How many? It varies from person to person.
So calories in = calories out, but we don't know how many were used by the person, how many by the gut flora, and how many were excreted do to inability to metabolize. Ergo, hardly basic physics.
Reductionism is only useful if you know how to apply it.
You don't need to know all of these things if you are measuring input (calories in) and your output (weight on the scale every week). It hardly matters then how efficient your gut is. These are all relative values. Of course 2000 calories will look different for different people. What matters is if you have an understanding of how much calories you are putting into your system, you can now make changes and measure a response, like cutting down some calories and seeing how that affects your weight over a few weeks or months. You don't need to know all of these rates to do that.
I agree with that, as do most people. What I object to is that calories-in-calories-out is the ONLY thing at play, and people claiming "simple physics" are working against any deeper understanding of the issues. I think this side of the argument is "Just eat less and you won't be fat. Duh." What they don't understand is that if a body has a hormonal anomaly, it might need to 5000 kcal/day just meet the 1500kc/day basic metabolic rate because the other 2500 kcal is being metabolized into fat by a broken endocrine system. If they drop down to 1500 kcal/day, only 300kc of that is going towards keeping the body running. It is completely out of their control how the calories are used due to their bodies, so CIn=COut is meaningless. The obesity epidemic is not completely about eating too much (which is part of it), but is about the environmental factors impacting how bodies actually work. If it was just Cin/Cout, gastric bypass would solve the problem, but that is not available to people that are suffering such hormonal disruptions because they would just die or be eating nonstop.
It is an objective fact that caloric surpluses and deficits are fundamental to manipulating bodyweight.
Any solution will be about getting people to maintain a surplus or deficit long enough to reach their goal weight.
There are many ways to communicate that to people, but pretending or trying to convince others that it isn't true is factually incorrect and literally counter-productive to their goals.
You keep saying less is less more is more. That's a truism which is completely orthogonal to the point, yet you seem to be hung up on it to the exclusion of everything else every other commenter has said to you. Consider that just for a moment.
No its not. CICO, it's that simple. I'll get down voted by the fanatics that say it's more complicated, but it's not. Eat less and exercise more and you will loose weight. A gastric bypass is just a extreme form of this. You cannot avoid the laws of physics.
There's a reason your being down-voted, and its not a hive mind, or a conspiracy, or a personal grudge against you. That's simply what it is like to be "wrong". Saying what you said is just playing the victim card.
I'm not a victim don't worry. I have no interest in being right -- though that you think I'm playing a victim card plays into all the people that deny CICO.
But it's ok. I loose weight by exercising and eating less. Like the climate change denialists, you can lead people down the dark path if you like.
Me I'll stick with me 3kg loss of weight every month and celebrate.
One problem I always run into with rotary motion: gearing. Finding gears of the right diameter, thickness, and thread pitch is always such a stumbling block for me. Most sites that sell gears to fit their motors have a small selection, and sites that sell gears are very hard to navigate (only to find out they don't sell in quantities <1,000 units). I end up having them laser cut out of HDPE online. Wish there was an easier solution.
This was PRECISELY the problem that led me to get a 3D printer. I have successfully printed many gears using PETG for my projects. Now, they are physically bigger than metal gears for the same strength, but that hasn't been an issue in my applications. Using the wishbone-style gear teeth with 3D printing is remarkably sturdy. Of course the other way is: buy motors with (metal) gears that are close to your need - then you only need to 'transform' that motion a little bit.
I also can cut involute gears on the (mini-) lathe or mill. You want to practice this skill because being off just a little means you have a useless part. I have found 3D printing more convenient and forgiving.
Belt drives are also very annoying. Naming conventions are inconsistent and obtuse. Parts materials differ, and a whole lot of stuff seems to be custom.
in Servos and steppers, there are also weird mixes of metric and standard sizes - e.g. Nema 34 motors often have 1/2" (12.7mm) shafts with 5mm keyways. No idea why.
Finding gears or pulleys for my purposes has 100% of the time resulted in some machining and lathe work to take off the shelf parts and make them work for my applications.
The key, if you can, is to choose a NEMA standard motor, there are tons of suppliers you can get a nema gearbox from. They get pretty small, but if it's amaller than the smallest nema size I'd go to a place like stock drive components which stocks thousands of gears.
The challenge is that gear tooth geometry is often more than 2d, so laser cutting may not be the best solution for longevity. For a quick and dirty prototype it's certainly fine.
standalone gear boxes also seem to be really really expensive
what i would really love is a set of compatible gears that work from the same shank and would allow easy construction of 1:2 or 1:4 or 1:8 and i could compose. maybe some 1:1 bevels too
Stock Drive Products and Berg are the classic US small gear, bearing, and accessories suppliers. I've used those two. KHK (Kohara Gear Industry Co., Ltd, Japan) is now active in the US.
The classic Boston Gear Gearology course is no longer online at Boston Gear, but there's a copy here.[1] This gives a quick overview of the minimum you need to know about specifying gears.
It really comes down to the fact that gear shaping/cutting machines are quite specialized machines. Therefore demand a higher cost to buy (machines cost) and setup (tooling cost).
For example a single gear shaper cutter is on average $700-$1000, and that's for a pretty standard and brand new cutter.
So without taking into account actual time to set up the machine, program it, and feed it material. You are already having a high overhead. So the only real way to deal with that cost is in volume or cost.
But when looking at the hobby market, volume is out of the question (who wants to buy >1000 of one gear for a personal project) and cost is out of the question ( if it's so expensive, I might as well 3D print or laser cut or waterjet some)
If you watch enough tool teardowns (AvE, etc), most gears are sintered metal or plastic. I'm sure large industrial applications use machined gears but it looks like consumer-prosumer space goes for much cheaper fare.
standard gear cutting arbors aren't that expensive, but are often for standard module gears and the gear form is an approximation that applies to a given range of gears.
I came here to say exactly the same thing. I'd love to find a kit or gearbox than can gear up/down a simple stepper motor for Arduino projects. The HDPE laser cut is a good idea though, I'll give that a try.
Inkscape has a plugin for gear teeth pitches. I no longer have the link to it (or the install because it was 13 years ago), but I was able to cut a whole bunch of HDPE gears. THe next hard part was getting hubs to match with them. :|
Aw man, really? I still have my 5. I was hoping some day it would be a fun retro computer experience. Eh, the Lion battery will probably be dead in a decade anyway.
No billion dollar company is anywhere near as glib has the author makes them out to be. Maybe my experience varies, but the European companies I've worked with have strict cybersecurity liability, and they take every aspect of security seriously and do not just pat themselves on the back smugly, as OP portrays. Maybe this was the case in the 90's, but it sure is not the case today.
EDIT: I deleted most of my post because I found it was repeated up and down the comments which I am so relieved to see. I kept my post because I want newcomers to hear as many voices in objection to OP's outdated essay as possible.
