W∴ Balboos wrote:

Vague and empty.I repeat my question - spelling it out: This "anything but a weak signal" - so they'll pick it up from a km away? 100m? A car parked out front, day and night? Generalities as you've put forth are not particularly useful. And what signal is 'anything but weak'? The shows that have been watched? It's been possible to determine what channel a view is watching almost forever - drive-by vehicles for ratings. Nothing to see there - the TV, itself, is always on the same station.

Not vague nor empty. the EM field given of by your tv can be recontructed up to around 300m away with currently available equipment you can pick from any electronics store. If you want a greater distance then you need more specialised equipment. Keeping in mind that any metal within your EM bubble extends the signal. It's not a generalisation at all.

W∴ Balboos wrote:

You got into this with "by by remotely reconstructing an image from nothing but the EM radiation given off a TV set" - image of what? The TV set? Me walking buy?

Of whatever you are currently watching and any interference of that signal such as you fapping away to whatever.

W∴ Balboos wrote:

You endlessly overlook the real point of it all:   who's targeting me? What for?

I didn't miss the point at all, and I already answered that point. Anyone who wants to monitor you for whatever reason you give them. You specifically said you disable your tv's internet capability so that people cannot spy on you. There is at least one method of spying on you through your tv that does not require it to be connected, as I originally stated.

W∴ Balboos wrote:

Rephrasing that: my data requests/returns are not being spewed on a network for a bank of super-computers to sip off of at their leisure.

See point about them not being needed. You do realise that humans have an EM signature as well right?

W∴ Balboos wrote:

Get a grip: if someone wants to observe you, you're doomed. Don't forget, of course, that there is always "simple bugging"! Cheaper, too.

Bugging is more expensive than using off the shelf hardware.

W∴ Balboos wrote:

And this information will be picked up by whom? Where?

By anyone smart enough to create a receiver, for weak signals you have to be quite close, but TV is anything but a weak signal. Any electronic display can be recreated by this method. By whom? Anyone who wants to see what you do in front of your TV or what you watch.

W∴ Balboos wrote:

Like the compromise of voting ballots - what happens to the old data when the next person votes?

The same can be applied to electronic voting booths, if you want to see what button people are pressing behind the curtain. The receiver is just a tv with the tuning controls replaced with manual oscillators. Only thing needed is a knowledge of electronics. and that data can be recorded for later use. Do some reading, it's quite interesting.

W∴ Balboos wrote:

I'd be more concerned with laser-Doppler being used to eavesdrop on conversations from window vibrations.

The laser technique also doesn't require a closed window. If you aren't worried about being spied on, why did you disable the ability for your tv to connect to the internet? So you're worried about some forms of surveillance but not others? Van Eck phreaking is a whole lot easier than breaking into your tv.

W∴ Balboos wrote:

Enlighten us as to how so!

A technique that has been around since the 1940's. In the military it is called compromising emanations. To the every day it's called Van Eck phreaking, so named after the guy who first demonstrated it publicly by remotely reconstructing an image from nothing but the EM radiation given off a TV set. No internet connection needed, just someone with a little knowledge of electronics. From there your actions in front of your TV can be deduced by the amount of the EM field you are blocking and the way it is being blocked. Unless you have surgical pins or screws or some such in you, because then you're pretty screwed as they act as an amplifier.

W∴ Balboos wrote:

So - when those attempting to reach out to watch what I do in front of the TV - they'll have no connection.

No connection needed to spy on you through your tv.

richp669 wrote:

Yes but that's still software development... my point still stands.

I'm afraid it doesn't. The same can be said for any kind of engineer, software or otherwise. They are called pet projects. The only difference here is that one is formal and may involve a group, the other is informal and still may involve a group. It comes down purely to how it is run. The people whom I know that organise and run hack-a-thons, for software or hardware, do not claim ownership or anything that is created at said event. If your place of employment is trying to do that then they are in the wrong, and their products will suffer for it because there is not enough creative freedom. The game jam was simply an example of good practice.

richp669 wrote:

Are there any other industries that asks this of employees??

Yes there is. Like the hack-a-thon it is purely voluntary, it is called the global game jam, there are also local events as well. At these events you have 48 hours to create something playable that follows a particular theme or themes. At every game jam your idea is your own. it may be purchased by a larger company for further development, but you get credits. There are a number of hack-a-thons that work under the same premise. If the company you are working for lays claim to everything that an employee makes at a hack-a-thon then they are doing it wrong. Such a practice cripples creativity and fosters unwillingness to participate.

Funny thing is I didn't change my settings to begin with, the daily news emails just stopped a week ago with no explanation. I'm just not receiving anything at all, not even the notifications to replies of my posts in the lounge.

I have not had any "daily news" emails from Code Project since last week.

Loops, if statements, and equating to exact values are always the slow down point. When you are dealing with a code base where speed of execution is vital, you shouldn't even be considering using any of these, not even on a first iteration. There are some, admittedly rather niche circumstances where it's just a bottleneck to use either of those. If you have ever played around with cryptography, you'd get in the habit of just plain not using loops where they are not needed, if statements, or equating to exact values are also considered bad coding practice and should be avoided. Quite a few cryptographic sequences will for example only use a loop to retrieve raw data until the end of the file is reached, everything else is a bunch of sequentially executed linear functions. There are also not many, actually I can't think of any that use if statements, or don't use fuzzy logic to avoid the bottle neck checking the condition twice as an if statement does or of trying to equate to an exact value. I find it interesting that C++, the language of choice of most cryptographers, does not support fuzzy logic. A switch that says do this when the integer value is less than 1 is much faster than a switch that says do this if the value is exactly 0 because of the extra checks involved to ensure it is an exact value. They are both integer values so from a logic standpoint it doesn't actually matter if you are using fuzzy logic or exact logic, but from a speed of execution perspective, it matters a lot. They also will always use and re-use a bunch of global variables as well, purely for the fact that creating and initializing a variable locally then releasing the memory location back to the pool takes time, again if you are running sequences 6000+ times it's going to be a big drain to a time sensitive code base. Literally the only occasions you will find local variables are for function specific counters, and they are always statically declared for that very specific reason. Playing around with crypto code also teaches you how vital it is to keep every line of code as close to atomic as possible and keep the cache full. Cryptography not only requires a good knowledge of the language you are using, but also how compilers and even the hardware operate. There is a good reason why AES takes 18 clock cycles per byte and can encipher roughly 11 megabits/s on a 200MHz CPU and up to 700 megabits/s on a high end AMD APU. It's because all possible bottlenecks have been removed. Of course, none of that actually matters if you are an a

I skimmed through the document and thoroughly read through part 1, and I can tell you from experience, there are situations(read cryptography and other time sensitive code sequences) where a manually unrolled loop is very much the advantage. Loops take time, the more loops you have to sort through the slower your program will run. Granted in the majority of cases it doesn't matter, but I guarantee that if you write a program that has to cycle through 6000+ loops, then in the same program unroll those loops as a series of separate functions, you will notice a significant speed boost. If it can be avoided, don't use them. Another speed increase is to use a fuzzy logic switch rather than a series of if statements, again for the same reason, if statements take longer to execute. Plus it forces you to pay more attention to what you are doing. Everything I skimmed through is really situation dependant.

Someone needs to feed the trolls or they become an endangered species. Thank the universe for James Veitch.[^]

You said:

Mark_Wallace wrote:

How many ways are there to print a pixel on the screen? How many ways are there to read a character from memory? How many ways are there to connect to a wifi access point? Hint: There's one way for each.

Your hint is utterly false on two of those statements. What I am saying is an OS, while achieving the same goal, is not the same across the board, just like two of the answers to your questions. Yes there is more than one variant of machine code. Machine code is processor dependant. Motorola does not use x86 machine code, for example, nor does PowerPC, or a host of other processor fabricators you care to name. The way software is 'cooked' is, as you have already pointed out, largely dependant on the hardware that it runs on. The end result is largely the same, how that end result is achieved varies with each iteration of hardware and code. After x amount of iterations of either, it becomes largely unrecognisable when compared to the first iteration. Again, comparing win 3.x to win 8.x is like comparing apples and oranges. That is the entire point I have been making.

Mark_Wallace wrote:

I don't like answers that come from wikipedia.

Neither do I, exactly why I don't use it. To use one of your phrases "Kids these days..."

How many ways to print a pixel on a monitor? 3, one for CRT, one for LCD, one for Plasma. How many ways to read a character from RAM? Depends on the RAM architecture. How many ways are there to connect to a wifi access point? Ok you got me on that one. There is more than one type of Machine code, so your statement that there is only one that makes computers work is entirely false. The machine code that is used is dependant entirely on the architecture. Software, including base code such as is found in kernels, is ever changing with each iteration, eventually you have something that has little to no resemblance to the original. This also happens as new more efficient algorithms are discovered to perform any given task, as those new algorithms are implemented, less and less of the original code remains. As hardware undergoes an iteration, so to does the code that runs on that hardware, again after x iterations you have little to nothing left of the original. Also the code that runs on a binary computer is substantially different to code that runs on a ternary computer. By your definition it is the same thing, in practice it is not, radically so. Any variant of windows you can name prints a task bar/menu on the VDU in a different manner than Mac OS system 6, again by your definition they are the same thing. In practice they are not.

Mark_Wallace wrote:

Atcherley, they admitted that it wasn't.

Citation please.

Mark_Wallace wrote:

So was Win '95, going by that reasoning. In fact, I'd say that the vast majority of everything in Windows 10 was there in Windows 3.1.1.

No, while they all do the same thing, they do it differently. To qualify as the same thing the code base has to be identical. I am not the one who came up with the food analogy, I just extended it to include Vista when the original poster of the food analogy left it off the list.

Mark_Wallace wrote:

It is an operating system designed for devices that one holds in one hand, primarily for communications and taking photographs.   If your development machine is a device that you hold in one hand, primarily for communications and taking photographs, then you must be a pretty weird developer.

No it is not, it was designed as an operating system that can be used anywhere on any device. Similarly to iOS, it doesn't matter of it's an iPhone or an iPad or even some variants of the iPod, it is the exact same operating system. MSFT just extended the idea to include desktops and laptops as well. Win 10 takes the integration one step further by allowing you to carry jobs from one machine to the next without having to save your work somewhere and shift the files to some other machine. if I am editing a document on my laptop and I want to swap to a desktop I will be able to do that. It was even mentioned in the CodeProject daily news. The article didn't specify how to swap from one to the other on the fly, but it's an interesting idea, and one that I have no doubt people will gripe about. My development machine is a desktop, I use win 8.x on it with not one single issue. If you don't like "metro" apps then uninstall them and use the desktop variants instead, which is exactly what I did. So again, I cannot see what the big deal is regarding win 8.x, other than people being lazy. P.S. I take the weird developer comment as a compliment, so thank you :-D

The app and driver incompatibility in regards to Vista comes down to vendor laziness, no different to how it was in Vista. Vista came out, vendors scrambled to catch up. The only real thing to blame there is the length of time before it was released, vendors got lazy, thought Vista was just vapour ware that would never get released then BOOM! everyone has to scramble to catch up. You use Dell machines? Well there's your problem. They are notoriously flaky, have had numerous issues with some variant of malware being cooked into their firmware, some 95% of machines requiring after market hardware maintenance etc. There is a very big reason why Michael Dell bought out the public shares and made the company private again.

It was a complete working product, but it was not to the liking of the general public so the cooking method was changed. That's the point I am making. Vista was a complete working product, people had issues with the amount of intrusive security, so the source code was tweaked to make those security tasks less intrusive, it is no different than taking a rack of ribs, and broiling them rather than BBQing them. Vista and Win 7 is the exact same product, just cooked differently. Using your tree analogy, the trunk is MSFT, each branch is a different variant of Windows. Some branches become forked into smaller branches, others do not. Vista is a branch in the tree, win 7 was forked off Vista. Win 8.x is a new branch and Win 10 is forked off that branch, it is literally no different than going from 3 to 3.1. True, when people see a new branch they have trepidations, wether it can hold the weight etc, but when people realise the branch is stable and can hold the weight they will inevitably climb onto it and see the view is better from higher up. Honestly, I personally cannot see what the big deal regarding win 8, it was not a learning curve, the keyboard/mouse functionality is no different to any other variant of windows, the start screen is just a giant full screen start menu with slightly more functionality, that you are presented with on boot. This makes sense because the first thing people did after booting a windows machine was double click on a shortcut or go to the start menu. I really don't understand why people are griping that the process is one keystroke/mouse click shorter. If you don't like the 'metro' version of applications then unpin them and pin the desktop variants, it's a simplified variant of removing items from a win 7 start menu and creating shortcuts to others.

I'm not making excuses for anyone. A professional chef will toy around with things til they are to his liking and then he will use guinea pigs to see if other people like it. It's the same deal, and it applies to anything software related, just because people on the inside like it does not mean people on the outside will. My original reply was because listed various flavours of Windows over the years to various food stuff and someone piped in that they "forgot" Vista, but I don't think they did. As I said, Vista and Win 7 are identical under the hood, I was using the analogy someone else stated about the various flavours of Windows over the years, going from Ramen noodles to a nicely cooked fillet mignon. Quite literally Win 7 IS Vista, just cooked differently to give it wider appeal.

Or you could think of it as s chef trying to come up with a new item menu, it takes a few rounds of trial and error before you get the recipe right. That's what Vista was, the trial and error. A little to much chili. The chef experiments a bit more, and he came up with Win 7, with just the right amount of kick to it. Every chef requires guinea pigs to try out his new creations.

It actually works well with future MS tech, I cite hololens. Think about it, tapping a virtual button makes sense, you don't even have to be at the machine except for hardware maintenace, just look at it, the "menu" buttons come up, you "tap" the one you want in the virtual space and the world is at your finger tips.