A Serendipity of programmers. Jeremy Thomson. PickBASIC Bourneshell Procomm+ .bat C

Acorn Archimedes 305. A great machine for hacking about in both the hardware and software sense. Great BBC basic with inline ARM assembler. I remember changing a magazine mandelbrot program to do 64 bit arithmetic. Lots of folks hacked the !Sprites files so icons for programs were unrecognisable on 'hackers' machines. Matthew Broadbent of the Auckland Acorn Users Group created a sound sampler by attaching resistors to the parallel port lines. A binary chop style algorithm established the analog to digital value. I hacked the ST-506 cable to split the cylinders of a big external Hard Drive so it looked like two disks (too many cylinders). I've never messed with my subsequent PCs like I messed with the Archimedes.

I am a set of distortions of spacetime. Jeremy Thomson

I would have thought torrents would be a good way of getting your internet connections revoked by your ISP? I haven't used torrents at all since anti-piracy three-strikes law came into effect here in NZ. Sure there might be legit reasons for P2P file sharing, but it must raise a red flag on the ISP servers. Have I been needlessly cautious?

Fractal Extreme runs twice as fast in 64 bit mode. Possibly because of the eight extra 128 bit SIMD registers available in 64 bit mode (XMM8-XMM15). Taking days to generate Mandelbrot zoom movies I upgraded to Win7 64 bit specifically for this speedup.

Honestly, they've probably found clay. Clay needs water to form so that's a pretty big deal.

More than enough for Mandelbrot sets and a lot of other CPU intensive fractal generation.

You may want to check out www.FractalForums.com. The people that wrote mandelbulb (mandelbox?) hang out there and may be a source of programming knowhow. I'm user panzerboy there, I've written a few plugins for FractalExtreme. I use that to make zoom movies which I post on YouTube as CommandLineCowboy. FractalExtreme is somewhat limited in its colouring, its strictly iteration count indexing into a 228 element palette table. I often do multiple renders with different palettes and mappings layering the results. If you check out my latest videos you'll see that you can still accomplish quite a lot with simple iteration count colouring. Your 'average of all iterations' comment intrigues me. In Fractal Extreme you can hold Shift and Ctrl and click on the initial mandelbrot set to see the 'iteration paths'. Values in the M-set spiral inwards around a central point which would be your average value. The values outside the set with high iteration counts buzz around a point before going outside the window. Again that average would the central point only slightly altered by the last few iterations. So I'm thinking you may not need all the iterations to find the axis of the spirals.

There's a lot of code in the DEA algorithm to set bits from seemingly random bits in a source 64 bit block. Thinking about it the string binary might actually be more efficient that bitwise binary. Setting Bit 53 to the value of bit 17 in string binary is a simple byte to byte copy. In Bitwise operations its simple enough to specify in C by what might the assembly code look like? It would have to load the word containing the source bit. Do a TST if the bit is set or not. Branch to separate setting or unsetting logic. Load the destination word. OR the destination bit if setting, AND the compliment of the bit if unsetting. That has got to end up being more intructions than a simple byte to byte transfer. I think that was the whole point of the DEA algorithm, it was to computationally inefficient and time consuming.

I worked on a system where the DEA encryption program used stings of '0's and '1's instead of trying to work out the possibly more efficient bitwise operations. That code was initially written in DataBASIC on a Pick system. In Pick all numbers are just ASCII strings, they get converted implicitly when you do an arithmetic expression but when assigned to a variable they are converted to ASCII string. It works fine and it sure makes the files easy to edit as all numbers are their ASCII representation. The Pick system was much too slow for encryption. Pick works well in an I/O bound system, the DataBASIC actually running as an interpreted P-Code. Fine for today's Mega-Fast systems doing Java but it was slow on 20Mhz 68020 systems. So the encryption was re-implemented on a PC-XT under C. The binary as strings logic was kept, and a good thing too. Several years later we upgraded to UniData running on a Motorola 88K, running under Unix. That C code for the encryption could now run on the same box as the 'system', no need for a clunky comms connection to a PC. And the C code ported just fine. I hate to think what that conversion would have been like from 16 bit ints to 32 bit with big endianess instead of little on the 8088. There was another upgrade to 64bit Alpha, again that would have needed the code adjusting for another increase in the size of integers. Not doubt that system is now running on XEONs, a change in endianess again, irrelevant to the binary as string code.

I could buy a 486SX PC for the price of an Archimedes CD-ROM drive back in the day. Turnabout is fair play, so now the economies of scale that favoured the PC over every other computer work for this little cell-phone SOC based computer. I hope RISCOS gets a new breath of life, there may be unused educational software moldering on the shelves of UK schools. "Your project Timmy is to port Zarch onto the Rasberry Pi". Actually, that could happen anyway, isn't David Braben involved in the RasbPi project?

For business needs strings are fine. I've programmed in Pick for over 20 years. Its only data type the multivalued variable length array is just a delimited string. So I don't have a problem at all with Web provided data being text.