[zimmertr]

I learned MIPS assembly in college and my team did a project to design a single-cycle CPU with it. I don't remember much but I thought it was fun though. While we're talking about nerd sh##, have any of you ever looked at the arbitrary code execution hacks people do with older video games? Fascinating stuff.

[FiveNines]

[zimmertr]

[Randito]

[zimmertr]

[Cyclopath]

[Riverside Laker]

I can't remember Assembly Language very well any more, but I still use a compass.

[Randito]

[Cyclopath]

[BigBrunyon]

Work harder not smarter!!!!!!!

[Cyclopath]

Here's a cool video on the math behind the Diffie Hellman key exchange.

[seawallrunner]

I teach undergrads in a university in BC. Some of my youngest students are having a lot of trouble with a variety of university software: the university’s learning management system, on which my course is hosted; the textbook sites from Pearson and McGrawHill, the UI of various sites that they have to visit to complete their courses. The old trope of ‘my teenager can figure out computers better than I can’ is debatable. Some of the students that I have, who hail not only from Canada but also from other countries, are having trouble with the most basic tasks. Setting up an account on a textbook site. Finding a definition on a business strategy site. Differentiating between the various forms of email and text communication on the course site and the university’s own sites. All of these have proven challenging. GenZ may well be the generation that was “born into” computers, but they are having the most trouble of all the cohorts that I have taught during the past 20+ years. Perhaps it’s overwhelm (and that was before the pandemic) from all the different UI/UXes from each site. Perhaps it’s also a certain lack of curiosity that we had - figuring out existing computer systems all in one go. Meanwhile back in the early days of PCs and computers we were getting familiar with new systems and building upon older knowledge as we went along in our journeys of discovery. Like many others here, I bought a personal computer for home when they became available, and took computer courses in undergrad and later in grad school. I developed compilers and decompilers from scratch, wrote in assembly code, and coded in Pascal and in 4GL languages when I started working. Curiosity was as prized as logic back in those days - figuring out a problem and then making code work. Nowadays I don’t see the ‘making it work’ part. Computers are now closed systems, it’s difficult to get to code level on a mac or a pc (and who would want to?). When’s the last time that any of us used the Terminal function on our macs, or went into code on our PCs? It’s not usual anymore. With greater convenience for the younger generation, the ability to code it themselves is lost - unless students take coding courses to specialize in front-end or back-end development. My students know how to use some apps and social media, but when I press them to use any other systems, they get stuck easily, their questions are basic and frustration mounts quickly.

[zephyr]

[cdestroyer]

as I recall the pgp encryption program used the public key method,dunno if it is still around.... seawallrunner probably hit it on the head...there was a comedian years ago 'father guido sarducci' whose stick was a 15 minute college education on the air..he taught you everything a college grad remember 5 years after graduating. that is the sum total of genz knowledge now about computers and their infrastructure, registers, stack, flags data/address busses,,, etc...my last association with "higher level languages" taught me that they leave holes to be exploited. .... a cpu has timing for its operands how long it takes each code to execute and back in the old days there were some code words requiring more time than a similar one and you had to make the proper choice to keep the overhead time down to a minimum and this left no holes to be exploited. programming was tight. maybe today they have tightened the compilers and code down but I still think there are holes, why else keep having to issue security upgrades?

[Bowregard]

Interesting discussion about software becoming easier to use and users becoming less adept at understanding it. A few years ago a colleague of mine who was the guru of the type of work he developed (and science behind it) decided to move across the country. He offered to continue working but the company in their infinite wisdom decided they were not going to allow him to work remotely. I guess they didn't consider that hiring a replacement with enough scientific background and experience with a language primarily used 30-45 years ago might be challenging. They quickly learned that "kids these days" (i.e. young techie types) are smart enough to understand that taking a job like that is committing yourself to obsolescence. I was the unfortunate sap who had to fill in for awhile and the shock of having to remember how far we have come regarding ease of us was extreme. I never really thought about it in the broader scale but doing so now makes me think careers in computers will become even more stratified over time as the gap between machine level processes and modern languages gets larger. There is a market in there somewhere to address that need. It's easy to look at the consumer business model and say that the whole pipeline will evolve but so long as governments and other bureaucracies exist there will always be a reason to support old stuff.