dfox

Basically the only thing interesting about the ConcertMaster is that Carmack used it (and that it looks somewhat cool). As for the keyboard itself, it is just a basic OEM membrane keyboard and not that good one even. The speakers are lets say adequate for the time and size.

Interestingly, the speaker part and the keyboard part are completely separate. The "cable" consists of four separate cables (keyboard, power, line out, mic in) in a thin sleeve. Mine was supplied with AT plug on the keyboard cable and Y-adapter that converted PS2 into AT DIN and barell jack for the speaker power. The keyboard label indeed says it is powered by 9V DC, but I guess that never really happened as PS/2 is 5V no matter what various devices say.

Edit: And as for the supper hard to find nowadays part: I suspect that part of the reason is that the keyboard module inside the thing is ridiculously sensitive to even minor spills.

Do not do this unless you do not have any other choice. Preferrably use whatever native barcode support of the printer involved, if it does not have that, just generate the barcode as vector image or bitmap with a resolution that is a integer fraction of the printers resolution. Generating correct Code128 as a SVG is about the same amount of work as generating the correct input for some sort of barcode font (the hard part is determining the switches between character sets, not generating bars from bytes).

The fact that this is standard practice does not mean that it is not perverse. It kind of works sanely for plain Code39 (and even then you will see effects of doing that in weird places, like VAG stamping human readable VIN on a chassis, including the Code39 start/stop symbols), once you start using barcode fonts for Code128-derived symbologies (ie. UPC/EAN) the whole thing becomes a pointless exercise.

It had, another thing is that it used somewhat questionable system for CD key validation, which is stubbed out in this release (https://github.com/BohemiaInteractive/CWR/blob/main/engine/P...).

One thing is 120bit RSA (readily broken with a graphing calculator at the time of release), another thing is the provenance of the RSA implementation code in the original binary.

The most important fix in SP1 for Office 2007 was fixing exactly that in Excel. Doing ridiculous amount of 4 byte reads made it basically unusable on network filesystems.

One point is that there is no reason for the entire secret to be one element of the underlying field, it can very well be a n-tuple of elements of a smaller field, with GF(2^8) being the somewhat obvious choice if you do not expect ridiculous numbers of shares, no need to deal with bignum math.

cannot start with digit

Not only it can, but both CL and Emacs Lisp actually defines primitives with names that start with digit.

It is far from being universal. And the more annoying part of that is that there are at least 4 incompatible "standards" as to the format of the QRcode.

IIRC the really cheap Casio Organizers/DataBanks of 90's used 5x5 font. And then my ex used something like that on linux in order to fit a ridiculous amount of xterms onto 14" CRT (somewhat absurd feat with her congenital vision defect).

Gnat Studio just works on Windows.

It uses exactly the same font in the desktop version, and is probably entirely intentional.

The telling part about uselessness of that window is that the most visible difference between StarOffice 5.2 and OpenOffice.org 1.0 was that equivalent of this window was removed. It got reintroduced probably because it makes packaging LibreOffice for macOS easier.

running identical software on multiple computer systems is the name of the software-architecture game

In the railway signalling industry (which for historically obvious reasons is obsessed with reliability) there even is a pattern of running different software implementing the same specification, written by different team, running on a different RTOS and different CPU architecture.

All the magic of Smalltalk is in the development tools that work by means of introspection into the running image, writing source code in text files causes you to lose all that. Add to that the fact that Smalltalk when written as source files is quite verbose.

Smalltalk does have standard text source file format, but that format is best described as human-readable, not human-writable. The format is essentially a sequence of text blocks that represent operations done to the image in order to modify it to a particular state interspersed with "data" (mostly method source code, but the format can store arbitrary stuff as the data blocks).

One exception to this is GNU Smalltalk which is meant to be used with source files and to that end uses its own more sane source file syntax.

PostgreSQL has this: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/ecpg.html

Unles the verification routine (eg. garage) keeps some state somewhere it has no way to prevent replays.

There is this kind of webdev-adjacent niche where the model of using documentation (or even intentionally sub-par documentation) as a marketing funnel for consulting and/or "Pro" versions is a thing. These projects are somewhat vocal about vibe coding killing their business models. If these projects really create any meaningful value is another question.

If I understand the history correctly then it started as a set of C preprocessor macros.

Creating obfuscated values using integers

While that is often neat solution, do not do that by simply XORing the numbers with constant. Use a block cipher in ECB mode (If you want the ID to be short then something like NSA's Speck comes handy here as it can be instantiated with 32 or 48 bit block).

And do not even think about using RC4 for that (I've seen that multiple times), because that is completely equivalent to XORing with constant.

Security? MUCH worse.

Comparing single-purpose declarative language that is not even really turing-complete with all the ugly hacks needed to make DOM/JS reasonably secure does not make any sense.

Exactly what you can abuse in XSLT (without non-standard extensions) in order to do anything security relevant? (DoS by infinite recursion or memory exhaustion does not count, you can do the same in JS...)

It is not only that ASN.1 was there before SSL, but even the certificate format was there before SSL. The certificate format comes from X.500, which is the "DAP" part of "LDAP", L as in "Lightweight" in "LDAP" refers mostly to LDAP not using public key certificates for client authentication in contrast to X.500 [1]. Bunch of other related stuff comes from RSA's PKCS series specifications, which also mostly use ASN.1.

1] the somewhat ironic part is that when it was discovered that using just passwords for authentication is not enough, the so called "lighweight" LDAP got arguably more complex that X.500. Same thing happened to SNMP (another IETF protocol using ASN.1) being "Simple" for similar reasons.

Mostly no. You do not see the lower layers and for anything sub 1um or so the resolution is too poor anyway.

The reasoning behind the auto-locking feature is that when the doors are locked it adds to rigidity of the car and thus decreases the likelyhood of the passanger cabin collapsing on the occupants. Auto unlocking the doors would completely defeat the reason for that feature.

The actual mechanism of how the door works as kind of "configurable deformation zone" usually involves somewhat thick steel rod running down the middle of the door that on hinge side abbuts similar strength member in the chasis and on the latch side connects to the latch. The latch has two distinct positions depending on whether the door is just latched or locked and the only latched position is not strong enough to hold the potential impact forces..

The specifications document was so long that it would be difficult for anyone else to implement it properly.

In contrast to ODF specification that is long, complex and written in such a terse way that it really does only specify what is a valid ODF file and not in any way what it means. Good luck implementing that without just copying whatever LibreOffice does.

My experience with Dell is that they are not that focused on selling enterprise support (at least compared to HPE), at most they will push for bundling hardware (cables, cable trays, front covers, PERC...) that you do not really need in order to get better volume discount.

Price-wise I don't see a meaningful difference between Dell and SuperMicro (or even "non-traditional" server vendors like Asus and Gigabyte).

Modern protocols running over RS-485 UART usually use some kind of HDLC-inspired framing scheme with flag characters and byte stuffing.

But still there is a lot of stuff that uses ASCII STX/ETX and then some kind of field separators inside otherwise human readable message. Things like industrial scales, industrial barcode readers and what not usually use something like that as default output format.

That is not an overloading, that is just preserving the behavior of Tab on IBM terminals.

The mishap involves doing touch-and-go twice with an arrested landing capable version of the aircraft. The report even says that they considered doing arrested landing, but it was deemed as too much risk for the pilot (apparently the actual flight manual of F-35A advises against trying that with non-centered NLG), because the ways how that could go horribly wrong do not allow for safe ejection.

The article is somewhat sensationalistic. If you read the actual report you will find out that:

The pilot was not part of the conference call!

What froze was not hydraulic fluid for actuators (in some hydraulic line), but hydraulic fluid in the shock absorbers.

The last paragraph of the article and seems to be missing a few words and reads as the investigators blaming the people directly involved, which is essentially a complete opposite of what conclusions of the report say.

The actual report mentions that this was a concern for actually landing the plane (as opposed to touch and go), because there was real possibility that the plane would end up in attitude that can hardly be described as "roughly level".