Repost of what I said: (sorry, I keep everything F/O these days)
Back when I was an undergrad the guy who taught me about Unix kernel internals, Vax machine language, buffer overflows, and doing naughty-ish things with VMS worked out the internal encoding used by the vending machines near the all-night terminal room (well, the one where you could get out to talk to other places... ;)) It wasn't straightforward (bit 0 for tea, bit 1 for coffee, bit 2 for sugar, bit 3 for hot etc) - there were lots of strange interdependencies and so on.
His triumph was saying "and 693 (or whatever) will give you strong cold fizzy soup with extra sugar". And it did. And he consumed it.
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Date: 2008-05-12 04:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-12 04:28 pm (UTC)The context was in discussion about last week's Dr. Who. I only really linked back to give credit.
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Date: 2008-05-12 05:38 pm (UTC)... tomato soup with sugar? Well, yes, I know there's some in the Heinz Cream of Tomato, but still, two sugars?
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Date: 2008-05-12 08:59 pm (UTC)Back when I was an undergrad the guy who taught me about Unix kernel internals, Vax machine language, buffer overflows, and doing naughty-ish things with VMS worked out the internal encoding used by the vending machines near the all-night terminal room (well, the one where you could get out to talk to other places... ;)) It wasn't straightforward (bit 0 for tea, bit 1 for coffee, bit 2 for sugar, bit 3 for hot etc) - there were lots of strange interdependencies and so on.
His triumph was saying "and 693 (or whatever) will give you strong cold fizzy soup with extra sugar". And it did. And he consumed it.