Burbank Airport used to get recognizable celebrities to record the canned public announcements in their own style. I seem to recall Joan Rivers, Henny Youngman, Jerry Seinfeld, etc. It took some of the edge off while you waited around, at least for a bit. Don't know if this continues.
Relatedly, there's a steganographic opportunity to hide info in machine code by using "XOR rax,rax" for a "zero" and "SUB rax,rax" for a "one" in your executable. Shouldn't be too hard to add a compiler feature to allow you to specify the string you want encoded into its output.
You can do better. X86 has both "op [mem], reg" and "op reg, [mem]" variants of most instructions, where "[mem]" can be a register too. So you have two ways to encode "xor eax, eax", differing by which of the operands is in the "possible memory operand" slot, the source or the destination.
This one would be a fun challenge in a ctf, or maybe more appropriate for a puzzle hunt – most people would look at the dissassembly and not at the actual bytes and completely miss the binary encoding
That could be a style metric, too. Time spent reversing MS-DOS viruses in my youth showed me assembler programmers very clearly have styles to their code. It's too weak for definitive attribution but it was interesting to see "rhymes" between, for example, the viruses written by The Dark Avenger.
But they left S, X, and Z rotationally symmetric, so if you choose a non-palindrome vanity plate with only those characters, you can mount it upside-down and fool plate-readers.
Well, ackchyually, the first releases of FrameMaker were created on Sun 3/50 workstations with 4MB of (unexpandable, soldered-in) RAM on a 16Mhz 68020. Most customers had the same model, and could work on modestly-sized documents with ease.
But it's not a lot of space for documents of hundreds of pages, so typical customers who were using FrameMaker to write user manuals for their products had to use "book" files to tie together individually edited chapter files. Then, once in a while you'd have to push the "generate" button on the book to get all the page numbers consistent between chapters, all the cross-references updated, and generate the updated Table Of Contents, Index, etc. You're welcome.
But there's a potential degenerate case where Chapter 1 might have a forward reference to Chapter 2 ("see page 209"), but due to some editing in Chapter 2, the referenced material now on page 210. Well, in some fonts, "209" is wider than "210" (since "1" can be skinny). So, during the Generate operation, the reference becomes "see page 210". But there's some tiny chance that this skinnier text changes the including paragraph to have one less line, so there's some tinier chance that Chapter 1 takes one less page, so Chapter 2 starts one page earlier, and now the referenced material is back on page 209. So now we're in a loop.
This was such an unlikely edge case that nobody else noticed that it even existed, much less that it was detected. I didn't bother with a fancy error message; it would just give a little one-word popup: "Degenerate". Years later, mild panic ensues when a customer calls in, irate that the software is calling them a degenerate. (And it wasn't even a real example, just some other bug that triggered it.)
You are saying that because the word processing and publishing software hasn't moved forward since those days, in fact it has moved backward. You can thank Microsoft's monopoly for this.
Colossus: The Forbin Project is simply a renamed release of The Forbin Project, a few months after the later had a poor opening. Didn’t help the box office much. I liked it, back when it was easy to dismiss as an impossible dystopia.
Waymo halted service in San Francisco as of Saturday at 8 p.m., following a power outage that left approximately 30% of the city without power. The autonomous cars have been causing traffic jams throughout the city, as the vehicles seem unable to function without traffic signals.
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