In lieu of recent Pickover puzzles (I have an impressive backlog of those to work on), VAG sent in this curious x86 ASM nugget:
xchg bh, bl
mov di, bx
shr di, 1
shr di, 1
add di, bx
xchg bh, bl
add di, dx
The hint that VAG gives is that it has something to do with a common multimedia task. Try to figure it out.
This blog has gone a bit neglected recently in favor of my totally corporate blog. I thought I would share an email I received today, the most remarkably bold phishing scam I have ever read:
Pursuant to my senseless HD DVD purchase a few months ago, fairness demands that I give equal time to Blu-Ray now that the discs are out…
… even though you may have heard that the players aren’t available yet. Best Buy told me that the Sunday is the official day to start selling the Samsung player (no Sony in sight), though some Best Buy stores allegedly accidentally sold some prematurely.
The box copy touts 1920×1080 progressive scan video. Subtitles come in 7 varieties including English, English SDH (what’s that?), and Thai. The audio is listed as English 5.1 (uncompressed), English 5.1, and French 5.1. Presumably, the latter 2 options are compressed. The package sports the Dolby Digital logo. How is 5.1 audio stored uncompressed on these discs? If each channel were allocated 48 KHz, 16 bits/sample, that would require ~8.7 GB of the 23 GB disc for this 126-minute feature.
Anyway, for those who want to look for hidden messages in the literature accompanying the disc, see below (click any picture for a larger image).
“Primitive” might be the wrong word. What tool might I create simple, instructive pictures for a technical topic like, for example, the Understanding VC-1 Wiki page? Sometimes, a picture explains an algorithm better that a wall of bulleted text. Ideally, this would be a tool that runs under Linux and is free. Open source is is nice, on principle, but in this case I’m more interested in something that works already so I don’t have to modify it.
