Tag: machines

Cracking safes “encrypted to 512 thingies”

Go read the latest BOFH story from El Reg:-

“It is! I had to take my laptop to the dealer to get it setup for this safe, and it would apparently take ALL the computers in the world over TEN YEARS to break into this safe.”

“Well, no time to lose then!” I say, making to leave.

“Are you suggesting you could break into this safe?” the Boss asks. “They use these to store Government secrets!”

“You mean secrets like how the Weapons of Mass Destruction disappeared?”

आवाज़ की दुनिया के दोस्तो

These days I use my computer as an alarm clock. Today the alarm did not go off. When I woke up, I saw that the video that I use as an alarm was playing, but there wasn’t any sound. I thought that probably I had muted the sound by mistake.

Later, I tried to run Winamp but there wasn’t any sound – or rather, there was a feeble sound from the left side of the speaker. I tried maximizing the volume, but the volume did not change! I though I had somehow blown my speakers. I uninstalled a few programs that I had installed recently – no change! I did a System Restore – no change! I went to the HP site and downloaded the latest drivers. As I was about to install the new drivers – I noticed something lying near the left side of my laptop – earphones !!

The earphones were plugged in and of course the sound was feeble and from the left side! I plugged them out and there was sound. Now I know what mghatiya must have felt!

Reboot the Universe

Stumbled across this piece:~

Jack Chalker wrote a series about the Well of Souls, a planet-sized computer which runs the math that creates reality.

One interesting character is the only authorized root user. No matter what he does, the computer will not let him die. Every outrageous coincidence of adventure fiction can and will happen to keep him alive. He’s pretty sick of it.

The climax of the series is when someone independently discovers enough of the relevant technology to corrupt the data structures of reality. The only cure is to reboot the universe, which caused a lot of dramatic conflict because there was no way to save the universe’s state


http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66105&cid=6091835
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/05/31/2224253&mode=nested