4 ms·
I presume his intention was to show off the Microsoft easter egg, but because it had been removed, it did not have the expected results. I don't think there was
by barbecue_sauce 5y ago
I presume his intention was to show off the Microsoft easter egg, but because it had been removed, it did not have the expected results. I don't think there was any intention to have a detrimental effect on the machine.
- kragen 5y agoAlso hanging a computer is not sabotage unless it's doing something like moving a robot arm at the time. You just have to reboot it. For the PET this takes under a second.
- sitkack 5y agohttps://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/osdi04/tech/full_papers/candea/candea.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/osdi04/tech/full_papers/...
- kragen 5y agoYes, automatically restarting a subsystem can be much faster than a second, but you can't type a new BASIC command much faster than that anyway.
- sitkack 5y agoSo the basic interpreter could wake up, run, persist it state back to flash and shut the machine down between every keypress. That microreboot paper is in my top-k list. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=18263420374964189912&as_sdt=5,48&sciodt=0,48&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1826342037496418991...
- kragen 5y agoYup, although not on the PET, which didn't have Flash. On a modern computer you might be interested in minimizing power consumption, and probably on-chip SRAM is a cheaper place to persist the between-keystrokes state than Flash, which is usually ruinously power-hungry NOR. You can keep CMOS SRAM alive on microwatts from a coin-cell battery for many years, as you probably know. Or were you thinking about persisting consistent state for failure recovery after a power failure? What's your top-k list? Armando Fox's crash-only software paper is also very inspiring.
- sitkack 5y agoI had a response here but I think FF ate it. Weird. Top-k was my dorky way of saying top 10 paper list. Anyway, I don't have a formal top-10 (k) list of papers I think are interesting. These two papers definitely changed the way I think and to me that was the profound self-aware meta-effect. I realized that papers can change your mind, so that is my primary criteria for interestingness. The results are amazing too, in certain fields, like Astrophysics/Biology they are answering the big questions. But the little stuff down here, these facts are staring us right in the face all the time. The new mental model or device that allowed us to see that new fact is the real innovation in human cognition. The x-rays allowed us to see inside, but the act of seeing inside enabled us to realize what other things can we "see inside of". In a way, ML is a digital x-ray, enabling us to "see inside of" things we wouldn't think about even asking. So on the top-k list, anything by Hofstadter. Esp "Analogy as the Core of Cognition" and the papers by https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Z4y_Z3sAAAAJ https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Z4y_Z3sAAAAJ and all the videos by Robert Sapolsky. Omissions are not a sleight. :)
- kragen 5y agoI see! Thank you!
- jeffbee 5y agoYou wouldn't even need to go that far. You could use the PET's RUN/STOP key.
- kragen 5y agoCould be, how was that implemented? I thought maybe the hang was more severe than that.