!rant
Has anyone been paying attention to what Google's been up to? Seriously!

1) Fuchsia. An entire OS built from the ground up to replace Linux and run on thin microcontrollers that Linux would bog down — has GNU compilers & Dart support baked in.

2) Flutter. It's like React Native but with Dart and more components available. Super Alpha, but there's "Flutter Gallery" to see examples.

3) Escher. A GPU-renderer that coincidentally focuses on features that Material UI needs, used with Fuchsia. I can't find screenshots anywhere; unfortunately I tore down my Fuchsia box before trying this out. Be sure to tag me in a screenshot if you get this working!

4) Progressive Web Apps (aka Progress Web APKs). Chrome has an experimental feature to turn Web Apps into hybrid native apps. There's a whole set of documentation for converting and creating apps.

And enough about Google, Microsoft actually had a really cool announcement as well! (hush hush, it's really exciting for once, trust me)...
Qualcomm and Microsoft teamed up to run the full desktop version of Windows 10 on a Snapdragon 820. They go so far as to show off the latest version of x86 dekstop Photoshop with no modifications running with excellent performance. They've announced full support for the upcoming Snapdragon 835, which will be a beast compared to the 820! This is all done by virtualization and interop libraries/runtimes, similar to how Wine runs Windows apps on Linux (but much better compatibility and more runtime complete).

Lastly, (go easy guys, I know how much some of you love Apple) I keep hearing of Apple's top talent going to Tesla. I'm really looking forward to the Tesla Roof and Model 3. It's about time someone pushed for cheap lithium cells for the home (typical AGM just doesn't last) and made panels look attractive!

Tech is exciting, isn't it!?

Today, I learned the shortest command which will determine if a ping from your machine can reach the Internet:

ping 1.1

This parses as 1.0.0.1, which thanks to Cloudflare, is now the IP address of an Internet-facing machine which responds to ICMP pings.

Oh, you can also use this trick to parse 10.0.0.x from `10.x` or 127.0.0.1 from `127.1`. It's just like IPv6's :: notation, except less explicit.

Got a 0 for a question in the midterm of a microprocessor course(x86). I Went to the lecturer fuming with rage and explained to her my work and its 100% correct, therefore I should get full marks for it. She agreed but only gave me half the marks because I did not follow the solution that was in the text book. In my head: "Bitch I don't even have the textbook nor do I want to argue with your kind". I was so enraged I just stood up and left her office. Needless to say, I didn't get the A I deserved. FML

Back when I was in school (about 15 years old) and I played games, I had a particularly favourite game that I would play. It was a lesser known strategy game made by a single hobbyist Dev.

I was already known in the community for making some mods for the game and chatbots.

What most people didn't know was that I had made a map hack and various other cheats that made it significantly easier to win by reverse engineering the game and modifying the x86 assembly in ollydbg.
One thing in particular I had been working on at the time was a game replay editor. I had reverse engineered the saved game (replay) format and was able to replay them, edit them and generate them.

During one particular match, a person in the community particularly annoyed me and I edited the saved game to change what his moves were and the words he spoke. It made him look a bit like an idiot but IMHO was only a slight exaggeration of the truth.
I posted the game replay on the forums and everyone was in hysterics about the crazy things he did and said in the replay.
As no one knew I had this capability they all believed the replay and even the guy in the replay couldn't believe it himself and didn't understand what happened. He just kept telling everyone it didn't happen and the 'truth is in the pudding'.

Although I originally intended to tell everyone what I did, I never did and whenever the guy entered in to a game everyone would laugh about it and say 'the truth was in the pudding'.

He was no longer annoying me and it sort of made me feel like a god at the time.
So that's my wk65.

Watch your git commit messages, you never konw when a webhook might publish the whole thing to Slack...

An honest question:
Why is 64 bit x64
and 32 bit x86?

Damn you, Sublime! I love you, but for fuck's sake, why don't you provide syntax highlighting for x86 assembly? :(

Noob: Your pc? 32 bit or 64?
Me : x64
Noob: Haha, mine's x86 😎
Me: 😓

Yesterday, my girlfriend caught a virus. There were 5+ running programs, in program files, program files x86, system32, basically everywhere. The virus modified chrome, firefox, edge (and even installed a false uc browser assuming we had one), there are many entries at startup programs, also running daemons, once you kill one of them, the others detect it and replicate their killed fellows. Tried to run a linux live usb disk for a cleanup, but the computer hibernates instead of shutdown, making modifications on disk risky.

I spent hours trying to suppress the processes, do a manual cleanup and antivirus search. It looked all cleaned up, then I reinstalled chrome, and now it switches its homepage everytime I open it, it also injects batch arguments to desktop link forum chrome (deleting it manually does not help, it comes back). I'm a linux guy, and in a few hours, I hated windows more than ever.

If anybody knows the authors, I *really* want to meet them. I promise I'm not going to punch them, but kneel down, bow my head in respect, and say "teach me master."

Learning Assembly x86 with a reverse engineering book.

Magic.

I'll buy it on my deathbed, i promise!

This year's golden hammer at my company: async

Learn x86

Microsoft's Azure team understands.

Oh JavaScript... can you seriously not even increment the exponent of a float without barfing?

*siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh*

I have to stop being awake until 3 AM coding when I have to be at work at 6..

OK< been a long time user of Unity.

Tried the latest update as I and others were enthusiastic about creating a joint project of gamers and developers.

As I was building up a started website and we were getting things with Unity ready...BOOM,. They Fuck up the installs.

Not just a minor thing here or there but not finding its own Fucking file locations where it installs shit. You try and say, Hey Unity you fucking twat, install here in this folder.

Boom again, it installs part of it there, and then continues installing shit everywhere else it wants to. Then the assholes at Unity give this Bullshit claim "the bug has been fixed."

Just reinstall.

Fuck you, its never that simple, You have to delete all sorts of fucking files to make sure conflicts from a previous corruption isn't just loaded on top of so it does not fuck up later.

So we did all that from programs, program data, program(x86), AppData Local, Local Low, and Roaming.

For added measure we manually removed all the crap from the registry folders (that was a pain but necessary), and then ran a cleaner to make sure all the left over shit was gone.

Thinking, OK you shit tech MoFo's we are clean and here we go.

HOLY SHIT BALLS, Its fucking worse with the LTS version it recommends and Slow as Fuck with their most recent version which is like 2020 itself, and insane piece of fucking bloated garbage and slower than a brick hard shit without fruit.

So we were going to all go post on the forums, and complain the fix section isn't fixed for shit.

Fuck us running backwards naked through a field of razor grass. Its so overloaded with complaints that they shut down further posts.

What makes this shit worse is we cannot even get the previous fucking versions of the editor before all this to work where our only option is without using the fucking Hub demand is just install 2018.

great if we started coding and testing in that. We cannot get shit where we were at back on track because you cannot fucking backward load an exported saved asset file.

Unity's suggestion? Start over.

Our Suggestion? Stop fucking smoking or using whatever fucking drug you assholes are on, you fucking disabled the gear options so we can resolve shit ourselves, and admit you did that shit and other sneaky piece of shit back stabby, security vulnerable data leak bullshit things to your end users.

Listen to your fucking experienced and long time users and get rid of the Fucking backward stepped hub piece of shit everyone with more brains than whatever piss ant pieces of shit praised that the rest of us have hated from day fucking one!

And while fixing this shit like it should be fucking fixed if you shit head bastards want to continue to exist as a fucking company, overhaul the fucking website or get the fuck out of business with now completely worthless SHIT.

Phew:
Suffice it to say....

We are now considering dealing with the learning curve and post pone our project going with unreal just because of these all around complete fuck ups that herald back to shit games of versions 3.0 and earlier.

I've just managed to add the ability to call functions to my compiler. Currently, the capabilities are rather limited but I am pleased with it.
It keeps the schematics of the source code well enough that it can handle
recursive calls.
:D
On the Image, you can see the program's output (left), the generated x86_64 assembly, and the source code of the compiled program (bottom).

Intel x86

node_modules

Q: How to be a malware analyst without having a knowledge on x86 ASM?
A: Start learning 32 bit ASM instead.

Maintaining a legacy Apache x86 PHP application that is coded in a way that it requires windows as an operating system.

Oh wait thats my job

Best email of the year so far, from a "reputable" IT supplier.

I had asked for numerous copies of x86 and x64 copies of Windows 7.

Clarification email came back "I can't find an 84 bit copy of Windows. Can you clarify?"

Not sure that mail will be beaten this year. They weren't even looking for an 86 bit version.

Unfortunately I just had to explain rather than play along for a few hours as time limited.

FML.

What you are expected to learn in 3 years:

power electronics,
analogue signal,
digital signal processing,
VDHL development,
VLSI debelopment,
antenna design,
optical communication,
networking,
digital storage,
electromagnetic,
ARM ISA,
x86 ISA,
signal and control system,
robotics,
computer vision,
NLP, data algorithm,
Java, C++, Python,
javascript frameworks,
ASP.NET web development,
cloud computing,
computer security ,
Information coding,
ethical hacking,
statistics,
machine learning,
data mining,
data analysis,
cloud computing,
Matlab,
Android app development,
IOS app development,
Computer architecture,
Computer network,
discrete structure,
3D game development,
operating system,
introduction to DevOps,
how-to -fix- computer,
system administration,
Project of being entrepreneur,

and 24 random unrelated subjects of your choices

This is a major called "computer engineering"

College student here.
What are the most important skills/assets one should bring to the workplace? As a developer and a colleague.

GodDAMN, C# 7.0 is so ridiculously feature packed. I can pattern-match inside a predicate on an exception filter. Want to catch ONLY NHibernate's exceptions caused by a SQL timeout? Boom:

catch (GenericADOException adoEx) when (adoEx.InnerException is SqlException sqlEx && sqlEx.Number == -2) { return Failure("timeout"); }

Too many night shifts.

But it's done.

After the last migrations my emotional state is... Questionable.

VM migrations between different CPU vendors and generations leading to segfaults because of unsupported X86 extensions.... Thx for doing that at 23 o'clock after 8 hours of work....

Forgetting a left over NIC in a virtual machine, creating a routing loop, leading to very erratic behaviour and fun things.

Someone forgot to check the '"Unique" box, mass spawning a cluster of VMs with same MAC adresses....

DNS fuckery since someone thought that reboot would flush the cache of an DNS server.... Nope most DNS servers have persistent caches. You'll have to flush manually.

And let's not forget the joy of the 12 plus pages of when and where to move VMs, harddrives and VLAN configuration.

Oh migrations are such a festival of joy.

Finally done with that shit -.-

Me: hmmmm it's a pain in the ass building my program and having to rebuild it everytime I want to swap to my Chromebook (going from x86 to ARM64), I really wish they could develop an OS that is essentially a VM so you would compile once and have the OS' VM later do the heavy lifting

My brain: hey Alex, that sounds like a great idea, you deserve a coffee for that!

Me: yes I do... Wait... Coffee... Cup of jo... Java.... WAIT! This sounds like what Java was intended to be!!!!!

My brain: oh dear god... Time to fucking bury this thought to never be discussed again!!!!!

What's the lesson to learn here? If it looks like Java, sounds like Java and acts like Java, beat it over the head and bury it 6 feet down :-3

I just wanted to get this off my chest.
There we go, that time is finally coming: all of my friends are starting to look for jobs; we are all about to graduate, but i feel no desire to move forward... I wish i had their optimism, but all i feel is terror and panic every time they bring up the topic...

I have no plan, no idea of what might happen, and i don't feel like i am particularly competent in anything: I do not have much to offer to society, surely not in terms of technical skills: i'm a real shitty programmer with the attention span of a goldfish.
I am passionate about a bunch of topics, but i am not competent at them in any meaningful way: I like reading about x86 Assembly or Operating System design, but if you'd ask me to write them i wouldn't be able to really. Its all superficial, i read these things for fun but i never really accomplished anything.

And i know this is all in my head, that as soon as i find anything its probably gonna be fine, i just wish i had the enthusiasm and drive that people around me seem to have, instead of acting like a little bitch :)

X86 or X64. Well, from what I understand, there's no fucking X in front of 64. X86 refers to instruction sets for *86 professor architectures, not bits. Am I justified in this? Is "x64" willful mislabeling?

Idk why I had the idea to research how sockets work in X86 Assembly. I’ve just been weirdly obsessed with low level stuff recently.

Edit: and obsessed with network programming.

Okay so my brother in law has a laptop that is... To put it mildly, chockful of viruses of all sort, as it's an old machine still running w7 while still being online and an av about 7 years out of date.

So my bro in law (let's just call him my bro) asked me to install an adblock.

As I launched chrome and went to install it, how ever, the addon page said something like "Cannot install, chrome is managed by your company" - wtf?

Also, the out of date AV couldn't even be updated as its main service just wouldn't start.

Okay, something fishy going on... Uninstalled the old av, downloaded malware bytes and went to scan the whole pc.

Before I went to bed, it'd already found >150 detections. Though as the computer is so old, the progress was slow.

Thinking it would have enough time over night, I went to bed... Only to find out the next morning... It BSoD'd over night, and so none of the finds were removed.

Uuugh! Okay, so... Scanning out of a live booted linux it is I thought! Little did I know how much it'd infuriate me!

Looking through google, I found several live rescue images from popular AV brands. But:
1 - Kaspersky Sys Rescue -- Doesn't even support non-EFI systems

2 - Eset SysRescue -- Doesn't mount the system drive, terminal emulator is X64 while the CPU of the laptop is X86 meaning I cannot run that. Doesn't provide any info on username and passwords, had to dig around the image from the laptop I used to burn it to the USB drive to find the user was, in fact, called eset and had an empty password. Root had pass set but not in the image shadow file, so no idea really. Couldn't sudo as the eset user, except for the terminal emulator, which crashes thanks to the architecture mismatch.
3 - avast - live usb / cd cannot be downloaded from web, has to be installed through avast, which I really didn't want to install on my laptop just to make a rescue flash drive
4 - comodo - didn't even boot due to architecture mismatch

Fuck it! Sick and tired of this, I'm downloading Debian with XFCE. Switched to a tty1 after kernel loads, killed lightdm and Xserver to minimize usb drive reads, downloaded clamav (which got stuck on man-db update. After 20 minutes... I just killed it from a second tty, and the install finished successfully)

A definitions update, short manual skimover, and finally, got scanning!

Only... It's taking forever and not printing anything. Stracing the clamscan command showed it was... Loading the virus definitions lol... Okay, it's doing its thing, I can finally go have dinner

Man I didn't know x86 support got so weak in the couple years I haven't used Linux on a laptop lol.

Fuck AT&T syntax for x86 assembly.
That is all.

Visual Studio 2022 compiles our internal c++ cmake project as a mix of x86 and x86_64 binaries, then fails to link.

VS 2019 correctly compiles everything as x86_64.

No idea why. And, obviously, it's not a documented problem.

Writing x86 assembly code in VS Code feels so weird. I mean, I'm using something that's built using crazily high level languages (JS, HTML, CSS), on top of a mammoth runtime environment (Node, V8), which is itself sitting on a modern and sophisticated operating system (Antergos), and I'm writing code that shifts bits and bytes around in memory in order to get one part of my C program to run just a little faster. Wow.

I think I'm a good developer. I have pretty decent debugging skills, including pulling apart disassembled x86 and other architecture code.

I'm fascinated by how things work.

But almost everything is catered for by a library. Or has already been done.

I find it enjoyable to create a library or program myself, but get disheartened when I find some library or program that is written seemingly very well, compared to my own code. And then I start to think I'm not a good developer after all.

Sort of relates to my previous rant about repeatedly rewriting code.

Applies to me doing programming as a hobby but probably affects my code at work as well... I just can't help but think my code is probably awful compared to what someone else might write.

...then I see incredibly ugly, messy, badly written code by other people and I feel better...

I suppose it is like an artist who sees amazing works but cannot paint to that standard, but is well beyond drawing stick figures with crayons.

Sounds like a trivial problem but it probably impedes my progress with a lot of things.

protected static new readonly

// just no

I never had this happen using TFS...

I don’t know what’s so attractive about this bad boy released ten years ago, but I just… want it? By the way, it runs on x86.

>Running modular program
>One module fails to run
module.start(module.ALL_FAILED)
>Traceback ends with:
>"Your Opus executable is x64, your Python version is x86"
*looks at Raspberry Pi*
"Uh... no?"
>recompiles Opus codec for good measure
>error persists
"Alright, what kinda bullshit..."
>skims file
try:
codecProcessor.load("Opus","libopus-0.dll")
except osError:
errorHandler("processorMismatch")

so, uh... i'm on Linux, so, uh... no. This'll also show this error on Windows if this is missing, too. A simple repoint fixed it, though.

(Warning: This rant includes nonsense, nightposting, unstructured thoughts, a dissenting opinion, and a purposeless, stupid joke in the beginning. Reader discretion is advised.)

honestly the whole "ARM solves every x86 problem!" thing doesn't seem to work out in my head:

- Not all ARM chips are the same, nor are they perfectly compatible with each other. This could lead to issues for consumers, for developers or both. There are toolchains that work with almost all of them... though endianness is still an issue, and you KNOW there's not gonna be an enforced standard. (These toolchains also don't do the best job on optimization.)

- ARM has a lot of interesting features. Not a lot of them have been rigorously checked for security, as they aren't as common as x86 CPUs. That's a nightmare on its own.

- ARM or Thumb? I can already see some large company is going to INSIST AND ENFORCE everything used internally to 100% be a specific mode for some bullshit reason. That's already not fun on a higher level, i.e. what software can be used for dev work, etc.

- Backwards compatibility. Most companies either over-embrace change and nothing is guaranteed to work at any given time, or become so set in their ways they're still pulling Amigas and 386 machines out of their teeth to this day. The latter seems to be a larger portion of companies from what I see when people have issues working with said company, so x86 carryover is going to be required that is both relatively flawless AND fairly fast, which isn't really doable.

- The awkward adjustment period. Dear fuck, if you thought early UEFI and GPT implementations were rough, how do you think changing the hardware model will go? We don't even have a standard for the new model yet! What will we keep? What will we replace? What ARM version will we use? All the hardware we use is so dependent on knowing exactly what other hardware will do that changing out the processor has a high likelihood of not being enough.

I'm just waiting for another clusterfuck of multiple non-standard branching sets of PCs to happen over this. I know it has a decent chance of happening, we can't follow standards very well even now, and it's been 30+ years since they were widely accepted.

A full 4 level page table on x86_64 is over around 687 GB in size. Allocating it fixed size obviously won't work...

So now when allocating virtual memory pages for an address space I sooner or later have to allocate one page to hold a new page table... which has to be referenced by the global page table for me to use... where there isn't any more space... which is exactly the reason we allocated a new page in the first place... so I'm fucked basically

Whenever anyone asks me why I dislike C++ I'm just going to point to this current app I'm working. Had a unit test with an extern method declaration that had 7 or 8 different parameters. No big. Problem is that the ACTUAL definition of the method had 1 less parameter than the extern declaration. It worked perfectly fine in x86. Ported to x64, compiled fine, hard crash at runtime. Debugger not a super lot of help. Took me a couple days to figure that one out. Also I am broke so I can't even drink the pain away. Neat.

Just created a CLUSTERED INDEX -- knowingly and intentionally -- for the first time. I feel like a frickin' sorcerer.

I've been BSing my skillset for so long to myself, it's a veritable toolbox of mixed knowledge but no complete sets...

I wonder if it's too late for me to catch up or if I will ever actually complete any learning...

I am yet to finish learning

Html
CSS
PHP
Ruby
C#
ASM I can do i386 but not x86
VB
Pascal if you can believe
C
C++
Java
JS
Python
Powershell
Bash

My main skill is basically just remembering anything I do, including code syntax and example code fragments well enough to quote at people which makes me a lazy learner.

Y'all know when you first hear about interrupts? Maybe on an arduino or something when you're just getting started and learning?

Yea after suffering enough trying to get ISRs running on an x86 just to get keyboard input going, I can safely and securely confirm it's all going downhill.

I love you all.

Fuck off OneDriveSetup.exe, nobody asked you to install anything. This "i7" is only dual-core, and I need both of them to run my code, kthx.

ECMAScript is everywhere, so I thought: Let's do even more inappropriate and insane things with it ;)

...Like using Duktape (small ECMAScript engine) and exposing LoadLibrary/GetProcAddress along with some helper routines to describe the routine's argument types and return type, and finally providing a routine to invoke those routines.

It's a very rough prototype that can handle up to 4 arguments in a 64-bit Windows environment.

Next "todo" is structure handling which will initially be a case of stuffing data into a Buffer() object.

I'm not sure what exactly I'm trying to do with it or why...

Just got intern to “help me” on project. Told him to install nodeJs and run ‘npm install’ inside project folder that he pulled from git.

He ended up running ‘npm install’ inside C:\Program Files (x86)\nodejs

Don’t have slightest clue how he got this idea, ... I just wanted to smash my head through window by that point. Similar shit repeated whole day long.

Today: FUCK RADARE

5 minutes later: FUCK GHIDRA

2 minutes later: God bless both of these wonderful programs, and I finally think I understand what is going on.

2 minutes later: Fuck this, I hate everything, I'm going back to studying hardware shit.

worst dev tech ever for me was intel x86 assembler. I developed on motorola 68k before and i loved it. x86 was horror.

In these dark times, it's inspiring to see that a country as insignificant as Australia can demonstrate to us how things can always get worse.

By passing a law mandating that encryption must be broken, in secret (like the US's National Security Letters), at the demand of the Government, the two biggest parties have colluded to destroy Australia's tech sector.

This is the same government that has been whining endlessly about using Huawei LTE equipment in Australian infrastructure "because it might be secretly compromised". Now the same is true of Australian equipment, by law.

My favourite part of all this is how there will be firmware updates for devices sold in Australia, in order to comply with the new law. How well do you think those backdoors will be secured? How thoroughly do you expect them to be tested, given Australia's population of only 25 million?

How can any Australian company expect customers to trust them now?

I got this in the shop today: a fully-working XP POS AiO with an x86 processor. 2.2GHz Celeron dual-core, 2GB RAM, 150GB HDD. Y'all can have it for free, but no company will ship it, so you gotta come get it.

Dammit! I don't know how many times I've typed "mov x y" in my terminal tonight...

I finally gave in and set an alias for it.

Damned x86 assembly...

When I was an apprentice in a small company, ...

my boss told me that his company would never ship release builds, because the "evil optimization option" is responsible for breaking his code.
My first thought was that it wouldn't make any sense at all. The default option for code optimization is always set to zero.
After investigating his code, I found out that he didn't care to properly initialize his variables. The default compiler option for debug builds did implicitly initialize all variables to zero. After that I've confronted him with the fact that implicit null initialization does not conform to the standard of C and C++. He didn't believe me what I was saying and he was questioning my knowledge about C and C++. He refused to fix his code to this day, so he keeps building his libraries and applications always in debug mode.
Bonus fact: He would never build 64-bit applications, because his serialization functions do get incompatible with exisiting file formats.

Why the fuck do coding blogs insist on using themes with a 600px content column, then use code samples that are 3x wider than that? The whole reason I have a widescreen monitor is to not _have_ to scroll, jackass!

Let's write a web application in x86 assembly...

I've read that devRant is using javascript and the likes, what I'm wondering is how one uses javascript for android apps. I know PhoneGap exists, but I also read that there is some performance issues with it. what does devRant use?

Worst architecture I've seen is Intel's x86 and AMD's x86_64.

Change my mind.

Just realised I've been looking for an x86 based laptop to install Linux on just for around the house...

Been looking at buying a brand new one and only now just remembered I have an old 2009 MBP...

Let's break out the elementary OS USB and breathe some life in this baby!

First "computer" : Electronika BK. Had some fun with table software and some basic

first X86 : Intel 80286 with wooping 1MB of ram and 40 MB hard drive.

First fun experiance :

Me : "I'm gonna clean folders"
Me : "What are these files on the c: ? I'll move them into a folder"
(Youknow like io.sys, autoexec.bat)
Reboots :
Computer : "Please insert a boot drive"
Me : "The what now?"
Needed some help to fix it.
At least I learnt how boot loader works and wrote my own small thingy in asm

So, the future of Apple is ARM, huh? So people are gonna have to maintain, like, SEVEN toolchains for Mac? What, we've got one or two for Mac OS <10.0, 2 PPC OSX chains that are version-dependent, 2 x86 version-dependent x86, Catalina x86 and now Catalina ARM too?

(These are to memory, if i'm wrong please correct me.)

i often do tech support in chat rooms in my free time (because i like spreading good will,) so here's a tech horror story

"""

"hey, can you help me fix something?"

sure?

"so i dug my old XP machine out of my closet and replaced the bad Ethernet card with a different one and when i plug in the ethernet cable the PC bluescreens."

# oboi

did you install the drivers? Sounds like it needs drivers

"no"

then install them

"no"

why not?

"it doesn't need any"

why do you say that?

"it said \"This device is set up and ready to use.\" in the balloon in the corner"

it has generic drivers to deal with devices before the real drivers can be found

"shouldn't they work?"

some devices need the extra support provided by the intended drivers, so the generic ones cause issues in those cases

"ok, well, where do I find them?"

do you have a model number?

"yes, it's " # scrubbed for... privacy? i dunno

gimme a few minutes

<insert 45 minutes of aggressive Googling for (str(DEVICE_MODEL_NUMBER) + " xp drivers")>

alright i have the drivers, go here:
# again, removed for... idk.

"they don't work"

# oh here we go

why not?

"These drivers are not compatible with your system architecture."

what version of XP are you using?

"XP Pro"

x86 or x64?

"x64"

# fucking...

ok so this is gonna get real complicated real fast: use x86 XP or I can't help you, none exist for x64 XP.

"oh ok"

<User left the IRC channel.>

"""

Why the FUCK did I decide to get this EXPENSIVE ASS MECHANICAL KEYBOARD before examining it to see if its software had non-windows support? THE SHIT IS WINDOWS ONLY AND IT WON'T RUN IN WINE!!! Okay, sure, there's an SDK, a C++ SDK. So I decide to download it and then... the "ReadMe.txt" looks like this:

(§@) Example•ÿø˝§∫®Á:
1.Ωd®“∞ı¶Êƒ“
2.Ωd®“Source Code;
3.Ωd®“ª°©˙
(§G) SDK •ÿø˝§∫≤[
1. CoolerMaster LED Table.xls : LED Øx∞}™Ì(6 row x 22 Column)
2. SDK Function.doc :¥£®—™∫®Á¶°ª°©˙
3. x86•ÿø˝: ∞ ∫A≥sµ≤®Á¶°Æw°B Lib¿…§Œº–¿Y¿…
3. x64•ÿø˝: 64 bit ∞ ∫A≥sµ≤®Á¶°Æw°B Lib¿…§Œº–¿Y¿…

I FEEL FUCKING CHEATED! WHAT THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO NOW?!?!?!?!? THIS SHIT HAS NO VISIBLE DOCUMENTATION!!!

!rant from a support guy

I was tasked to migrate an Exchange 2003 server (yes, those are still used) for an upcoming Office 365 deployment. There are no direct upgrade path from one another, as far as we know

My task was to export PSTs from mailboxes. Great, a native tool exist for that in 2003 (exmerge). But only for less than 2 GB mailboxes because ANSI/Unicode! Half of our mailbox busts that limit. Oh, it seems Exchange 2007 has a PowerShell command for exporting to PST as well! But pre-SP3, that command relies on a local installation of Outlook on the server (DAFUQ), and has been superseded by another "standalone" powershell command. So I install a bogus Windows 2012 server only for that purpose, with Exchange Management Tools (which, by the way, is bundled with the Exchange installation setup and REQUIRES to have IIS installed on the target machine. Also, if you install ONLY the Exchange 2007 Management Tools and wish to uninstall them afterwards, you can't because the uninstaller wants me to select an Exchange Role to remove, which are all unchecked in my tools-only setup). Never worked, and Google-fu says that the newer Exchange 2007 New-MailboxExportRequest command seems to have removed Exchange 2003 support.

So i'm back to installing a pre-SP3 Exchange 2007. Then the older Export-Mailbox powershell command whines about 64bits and 32bit incompatiblity-- actually I ***HAVE*** to have the whole OS/software stack 32bit ONLY. Don't ask me why!

Some article I found says I could fire up an XP virtual machine for that, I go for Win 7 x86. "Sorry, Microsoft Exchange won't be installed on a workstation environment because reasons." All right then, let's go for an old Windows Server 2003 x86. Have you tried to boot this up in an Hyper-V environment where mouse and keyboard support for Windows Server 2003 are apparently optional? No keyboard AND mouse events sent to the guest machine at all.

* Sigh *, let's use a Windows Server 2008, but WATCH OUT! Microsoft has discontinued x86 support on their W2008 R2 release, so non-R2 for me. Even then, mouse event wasn't sent until I installed guest additions.

After all, export-mailbox ended up working, but that costed me two days of banging my head against the wall. (Oh, and I take internal calls inbetween as well...)

And that's why I aspire to be a programmer. Thank you for nothing, Microsoft!

Trying to install Linux on an HP Stream 7 has been way more difficult than it should have been, even when you take into account that it's a 32-bit processor with a 32-bit EFI!

First off, the only thing I've been able to get it to boot right of the bat is Android x86 and BlissOS... kind of. You would think that Android x86 would be perfect for a tablet, right? Nope, performance sucked sooooo bad.

After reading some forums, I was finally able to get Ubuntus to load up... with the limiting factor being no on-screen keyboard.

So... at the moment I guess I'm stuck with a useless Windows tablet, and probably will be for a long time (you know, since 32-bit architecture is being dropped)

Guys help... I need a new chromebook and can't decide on a chromebook pro or chromebook plus... Is having x86 architecture worth the extra $120? :-/

Was so excited about Linux coming to the Chromebook plus.... And there is no x86 compatability layer...

They built an ARM layer for the android apps on x86 but nothing for Linux... Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck

Is there something you find genuinely cool and would recommend ? Some webpage, program, OS, library or anything ?

I mean hey. There are SO MANY reaaaally cool things I didn't know until last few months.. Things I'd be so grateful for if I knew them earlier. I'll list some of them and I just know you have few of yours too. Feel free to educate the rest!

Processing - Program so fun to code in + CodingTrain(YTB channel)
Microcorruption.com - so freaking awesome if you wanna learn hacking / assembly (not x86 necessarily)
LiveOverflow - cool hacking channel
Radare - cool cmd Linux disassembler
vim-adventures.com - LEARN VIM (not just how to quit it) LITERALLY by playing a game!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
slashdot - stay updated , like really
"BEST-WEBSITES-A-PROGRAMMER-SHOULD-VISIT" - GUYS THIS! Sorry for caps but search this on GitHub and you will fucking die of happiness of how freaking useful links there are and no bullshit to dig through , just pure awesomeness. REALLY
HandBrake - Top media converter without bullshit and bloat stuff in it
Calibre - Best eBook management software capable of literally everything ebooks related. Kindle is a bloated joke compared to this
QubesOS - You know you can have every OS running at once - you have a Linux but are playing win games. Yup. It's there. Free
Computerphile - You all know it, it's just for completeness
Khan Academy - Same
VulnHub - download vulnerable VMs and hack them, or learn by reading writeup on how to do it!
Valgrind - MUST HAVE for C/C++ programmers
Computer Science crash course videos

That's all I can think of from top of my head but hey, there's more to it so definitely add your 2 cents!

Last thing, if nothing, just check the websites on GitHub, that's lifechanger

Looking forward to see some cool links & recommendations!

Lodash, Rimraf, Grunt, Gulp... I'm still not convinced that our frontend guy isn't just playing Pokémon Go all day

In a Computer Systems class, we had a project to debug and buffer-overflow a program written in x86 Assembly. There were 2 mandatory problems we had to figure out, but the teacher told us there were 6 in total that can be solved. Not only did I complete all 6 on the next day (the project was due 2 weeks from then), I also noticed something looked weird in the code, so I investigated and found a hidden 7th problem and solved that too. Only one in the class to do so, and the teacher said I was the best student in any of her classes this year.

Just had a thought: Instead of LLVM modeling and optimizing an IR and then backends having to optimize again for actual machine code lowering, wouldn't it be possible to unite both under one unified system?

If you model everything as one huge and complex state machine with a bunch of predefined "micro ops", couldn't you write an optimizer which lowers to the mathmatical presentation of the target platform's instructions?

I.e. the actual identities of the instructions don't matter. What matters is that the input ir is `(x + 3) & 0xff` and the optimizer tries to fit a sequence of instructions to that so that it "solves the system". It doesn't know x86 `andb`; it knows that `andb` takes an input, maybe truncates it, does a bitwise or, and stores the output into a reg

That way you wouldn't have to write complex target dependent backends. Just declare the sequence of actiosn each instruction does and llvm would automatically be able to produce very high quality machine code

I think there's a phd worth of research here but helllll no I'm not touching compilers again lol

I have one Windows and one Apple M1 computer. Our project runs old docker containers and can't upgrade easily. I decided to run the x86 versions of containers on there and use them from my network. Corporate Windows has port blocking so I decided to install linux to a usb drive. I loaded a live install distro and installed it to a second USB drive.
The internal nvme laptop drive somehow had its partition table wiped along the way. I can see files on there in a partition restore tool but alas it isn't becoming bootable again from uefi after doing partition table restore. 😭

> be me, working on small addition to enormous feature branch
> build system in flux due to reorganization started a month ago, not quite solid yet, but mostly works
> f_branch gets master merged into it sometime last week
> bossman makes "minor" change to build system and edits master to match
> doesn't merge changes into f_branch
> bossman goes on holiday for a week
> no permission to merge master changes into f_branch
> linter barfs
> npm barfs
> build server barfs
> mfw I can't even deploy to our testing environment

mov al, [var]

var db 07h

Error on line 1: undefined operation size.

Silly me defining a byte, using mov on a byte-wide register with said byte-wide variable. What size it could be, the byte-wide variable is soo fucken unknown i'm so sorry.

My face when I went to install Oracle’s JDK 9 on a 32-bit Windows 7 laptop and found they don’t support it anymore:

:/

- I have done this, this and this. I'm an amazing programmer even though i copied it from SO.

- Allright, could you explain this part since you did not write one single comment.

- (insert generic bullshit excuse)

you don't think he's the one getting the internship amd the summer job since he's the loudest? dear god, my fist, his face.

Googled for about 2 hours now and can't get this shit working. Trying to launch the Android Wear Emulator through Android Studio using KitKat 4.4 API. I created a new device within the device manager using 512 MB RAM and 128 MB VM. Square Display.

I am running on osx 10.11 El Capitan on Software Acceleration (because hardware doesnt even boot to the android logo). I get the following error when running using ./emulator:

Error while connecting to socket '127.0.0.1:1970': 61 -> Connection refused
emulator: ASC 127.0.0.1:1970: Retrying connection. Connector FD = 25

What does it mean? I couldnt find an asnwer on the net.

When I tried to install Android x86 on a partition on my production machine, and by mistake installed it using GPT on my MBR machine.
I pulled 2 all nighters to fix that.
That was when I learned about GPT and MBR.
Fml.

Goddamn, Windows' idea of symlinks is completely broken. It's like they faked it at the UI level, but if your build process wants to copy the file? Too bad, it's not real so you can't copy it.

More an opinion here, feel free to disagree and explain why...

The Surface Pro X has me excited but really angry at the same time for the same reason. The fact we are seeing a flagship consumer grade ARM based computer being pushed out by such a massive company is amazing, I personally hope that ARM takes over x86 and hope this might encourage people to look at ARM as a legitimate platform to develop for and hope it also bleeds into the Linux world (sick of only finding distributions designed for servers).

But I am annoyed because it's being treated as just another computer and no one is actually looking at the bigger picture with an open mind, plus it's also more than likely going to be treated as an after thought rather than looked at like a legitimate project.

I die a little inside every time I see
mov reg,0

A big development company needed summer interns, the job required java and the likes and it was the first big interview i've had. This wasn't a problem, i thought, until i got there. worth noting is that Im still in school and and the last time i used java extensivly was a year prior to the interview. I completly blanked on the, rather basic, questions. needless to say, I didnt get it.

Just found out a LOCK CMPXCHG has about the same latency as a simple DIV...

my life was a lie

Damn lots of you knew this shit before turning of age.
I didn't code a single line until I went to college.
I tried to, but it was just too fucking complicated and I didn't understand a thing. Tried to grasp how to use some tools like Unity or an Adventure Maker of sorts and something called Flix for Flash games. Didn't understand shit.
I decided to study systems engineering due to a career aptitude test I took hoping somehow that way I could learn sthg.
First thing I was taught was bash.
When I realised I already knew enough to code a whole text adventure from scratch with such a simple language I felt really hyped.
Always loved text and graphic adventures.
Afterwards I was taught the Z80 assembly language and how CPU registers worked and it blew my fucking mind.
That was the first half-year.
Then I was taught C. And boy was it hard. Didn't get how memory was being handled until the very end.
I happened to be one of the few passing a stupidly complicated semifinal test with triple indirection pointers.
That felt goood.
Learning other languages afterwards was a piece of cake. C#, Java, X86 assembly, C++...
It was a hard door to open. Fucking heavy. But now nothing seems black magic anymore and boy isn't that something to be proud of! :D

The Surface RT failed because of the lack of apps available. At least that’s what I heard.

Why didn’t Microsoft make a x86 compatibility emulator like Apple did when they were moving away from the PowerPC architecture?

Sure x86 apps would be slower, but if they distributed the ARM version of windows as well, made it available for the Raspberry Pi and all sorts of devices, I fell that would be a huge drive from ARM based processors.

The DirectX, Windows forms..etc. libraries could be recompiled by Microsoft, which would make graphically intensive programs run faster too. Did Microsoft just not think of a compatibility layer? Or is there some obvious reason I’m missing?

Can someone explain me how a global discriptor table is implemented in a kernel? My problem is basicly that I want to build a kernel that can run seperate programs in userland. But I don't quite understand how the GDT and LDT should be implemented.

Well, not best experience per se, but most memorable one.

So I am accepted to CS program at the university - happy days!

First lecture of the first day of the first semester in the first year...

...It just had to be that guy. He was famous for for his strictness among the faculty as we later found out.

But, the lecture. It's 8.25 am, I am making my way into auditorium, and it's filled with freshmen like me, of course. Instead of cheerful chatter noise I hear literally silence. What the? I catch the glimpse of the blackboard - the professor is there, hard at work writing out some stuff that can't comprehend. Double checked the name of the lecture - computer architecture.

8.30 - so it begins, I remember taking a place along the front rows in order to see more clearly. Professor turns to us and just starts the lecture, saying that he'll introduce himself later at the end and there is no time to waste. OK...

And he just dumps the layout of x86 computer architecture and a mixture of basic ASM jargon on us WITHOUT TURNING TO US FOR LIKE 30 MINS while writing things out on the blackboard.

The he finally turns 180 degrees very quickly, evaluates our expression (I know mine was WTF is this I don't even understand half the words), sighs, turns back and continues with the lecture.

!rant

My stock hp 2000-369wm notebook laptop with 4GBmem won't boot (from USB) ReactOS, RemixOS, or Android-x86

2005, after I tried to program my computer to be quicker. By the time I realized that it was impossible, I was hooked.

Those who know x86 assembly and real mode, what'd I do wrong here?

mov cx,0000
.loop
mov ax,e823
mov bx,1
add cx,1
int 15 ; supposed to be undocumented CMOS raw write on my mobo if bx!=0,ax=e823
test cx,00ff
jne .loop
ret

The JNE doesn't ever trigger, so I end up always returning no matter what cx is. I'm testing if the undocumented writes actually work, and cl is supposed to be 00-FF as it's the address to write bx to in CMOS. I'm running in real mode, if it matters.

think all of this impulsive OS booting is burning out my old laptop,

RemixOS - partially boots then gets stuck on a black screen
Android-x86 - won't boot past a black screen either
Windows 7 - i infected that shit so quickly lmao
Windows 10 - i'm not disgracing my old laptop with that
Xubuntu - boots, but my tablet configurator dosen't start properly wrapped in wine (Shenzen HUION only has Win and Mac drivers), and i am an artist
Gamedrift - haven't tried
ReactOS - Last time i checked, it won't boot but i should try again

any other suggestions?
super low specs on that old laptop

Opus is an amazing codec, but did Soundcloud really have to switch to it with a bitrate of 64kbps? even 80kbps would have been worlds better.

Bandwidth isn't _that_ expensive, even post-neutrality.

You know what's more fun than debugging a SQL stored prodecure?

Debugging a SP which CATCHes all errors and instead returns an error code. Because exceptions are scary...

started to mess around with Scala last night, man it was easy to get in to the flow

the people in Ops
all have space heaters, but we
don't have the power

Seriously though, building management needs to turn up the heat by like 3°C. And install new breakers. And fix the shitty wiring.

when I get the assignment of debugging my group members uncommented Java Swing application, I seriously have to untangle that mess for days

It looks like Microsoft are back to their old tricks, specifically the DirectX 9 naming scheme. Naming releases after Northern Hemisphere seasons and repeating words never gets old and/or confusing!

Who's looking forward the "Winter (2018) Creator's Update"?

TIL all x86-compatible CPUs have ISA support and the ability to be reset by the keyboard controller via A20 line, all thanks to not wanting to alienate a single person who refuses to upgrade.

you can put ISA or AGP devices straight onto the fucking LPC bus and it'll work on most CPUs. Y'know, on the same bus as the TPM in most?

you already know i'm gonna put a floppy controller, a parallel port, and an IDE controller on the PCI-e bus with an ISA daughterboard

2codepaths1function

Javascript is a lot easier when you remember that there's a convenient REPL that is never further than an F12 away

Using ReSharper is like becoming enlightened, or de-brainwashing oneself to see true reality. Of my entire dev team, I'm the only one who can see the fnords!

Unused identifiers, badly sorted modifiers, unused property setters, redundant `this`/namespace, redundant casts... Surely if they could see them too, such code would not survive!

VESA is driving me crazy.

I'm trying to set my video mode via VESA functions which works, the QEMU window size changes, ton of more space.

Problem now however is that I have no idea where in the name of god the goddamn framebuffer starts.

Apparently it's address is located withing the mode info block which I have successfully queried and stored in ES:DI.

Problem now is getting this info block into my 32-bit kernel.

I tried smacking it on the stack which only produces hot garbage.

Essentially it goes like this

[...make sure pointer to block is stored within ES:DI...]

mov ebx, [ES:DI]

[Switch to 32 bit mode, ebx is not erased by doing so]

;Set up stack
mov ebp, 0x90000
mov esp, ebp

call kernel_main
jmp $

kernel_main takes this pointer as an argument, hence why I've pushed it onto stack:
main(uint32_t *ptr);

When I try accessing it however by doing the following:
vbe_mode_info_block* info_block = (vbe_mode_info_block)ptr;

And then try accessing the in the member 'framebuffer' using 'info_block->framebuffer' it's giving me hot garbage.

I'm probably doing something obvious wrong.
Frustrating.
I'm gonna try passing ES and DI seperately and converting them to a real mode address by doing addr = (ES*0x10)+DI;

MAYBE MAYBE MAYBE

<noRant>
UDOO x86 Ohr Raspberry Pi3?
</noRant>

CONFLATE: a general-purpose lossy compression scheme for binary data.

Office manager just mandated that our standing desks would have a "cable pouch" installed at the rear for cable management. My cable tray **was** the neatest of everyone in dev, now it's unscrewed on the floor and all my cables plus the laptop charger are hanging loose, because notmyjob.jpg and contractors generally DGAF.

Oh, and they didn't install it flush with the rear of the desk, presumably because they didn't want to take off my laptop stand. So it's right in the way of my feet when I'm sitting.

Nothing that I can't fix with a screwdriver in my own time, fortunately.

When I found out on x86 you can switch back to real mode without restart to use bios services again. Just do your bit of printing and then switching back to protected mode. That was fun :) *sigh*

Visual Studio's Test Explorer is a piece of shit.

Maybe the user wants to repeat the last test run without rebuilding? No can do. Maybe the user didn't add or remove any tests, but just needs to rebuild without running test discovery again? Nah. Maybe the user just needs to discover tests from THE ONLY ASSEMBLY WHICH WAS REBUILT? Too frickin' bad.

A 120-second turnaround (30 to build, 90 to discover) just to _start_ a test run is bloody atrocious. Especially when VS decides to run test discovery twice in a row for no given reason.

*sigh*...

I'd use ReSharper's runner, but unfortunately it isn't capable of running xUnit v2 tests when you've designated a custom XUnitTestFramework.

Triple faults be like

I have failed my computer organization and architecture module because i didn't understand assembly language.
Anyone with links to the best x86 assembly programming please share.

it puts the binding redirect in the app.config
or else it gets the FileNotFoundException again

I suppose the modern equivalent to waiting around code compiling is building the bloody Docker images. Vastly exacerbated by the requirement of an X86 image on ARM hardware.

FML 🙃

What is the best source for learning x86 asm and binary exploitation? Got any recommendations for me? (books?) I already know godbolt.org I'd also be interested in optimisation.

I'm looking for a project idea in cyber-security...
Any ideas?

I'm good with x86 assembly, c, c++, python and shell scripting.
I'm very well versed with Linux operating systems and basic networking stuff.

I'm willing to learn new concepts

I wish the U.S. didn't "pasteurize" eggs, because without that, eggs are shelf-stable, which would mean I could keep them in a basket on my countertop and label it "npm"

Update on the HP Stream tablet:

I finally realized that I could have a microSD card in the device with the Onboard package on it to install on a LiveUSB in order to install anything.

Due to another 'ranter's suggestion, I started with all the Debian spins, but none of them had a graphical .deb package installer (which is really strange).

I finally went back to Ubuntu MATE, which does have the Onboard application already installed (which I'm not sure why I didn't notice that the first time), and it's now officially installing...

More updates at 11.

SHIT I FORGOT I HAVE TO SIMULATE INSTRUCTIONS UPDATING THE MOTHER FUCKING FLAGS REGISTER

sigh android x86 in vbox is evil. its basically like running one of their phones.