Found a glitch in Maemo 5's terminal...strange characters
 

1. Run "head /dev/urandom"
2. Enter some lowercase characters
3. WTF :confused:

Re: Found a glitch in Maemo 5's terminal...strange characters
 

this happens in any linux based terminal...
try to cat a binary source...

Re: Found a glitch in Maemo 5's terminal...strange characters
 

Oh I see, a terminal reset fixes it. Guess it's normal then.

Re: Found a glitch in Maemo 5's terminal...strange characters
 

normal. it is supposed to be that way and any good tty/pty implementation is like that. type "reset".
some chars ought to trigger different modi.

Re: Found a glitch in Maemo 5's terminal...strange characters
 

Yeah, what you're seeing with urandom is just a stream of random 8-bit characters vomiting out on the terminal, which then tries to interpret the characters as output. Since VT100/ANSI/etc all depend on several ways to encode controls, there's a likely chance that random characters coming from urandom will trigger an escape code sequence that causes a mode-change of some sort. Hence, you get the symptoms of the funky terminal. :)

Re: Found a glitch in Maemo 5's terminal...strange characters
 

let me see let me see :D

Re: Found a glitch in Maemo 5's terminal...strange characters
 

for a start:
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Text-Terminal-HOWTO.html

Re: Found a glitch in Maemo 5's terminal...strange characters
 

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Re: Found a glitch in Maemo 5's terminal...strange characters
 

If you stare at that posting long enough, there's no secret message!

Re: Found a glitch in Maemo 5's terminal...strange characters
 

lets see if one tries it with /dev/random
...

Re: Found a glitch in Maemo 5's terminal...strange characters
 

I wonder if anything legible ever comes of trying to run a "strings /dev/urandom"

Re: Found a glitch in Maemo 5's terminal...strange characters
 

strings /dev/urandom > /dev/pts/14
and wait ...

and if you have no luser at disposal for that you can allway ask john to find something in it.

Re: Found a glitch in Maemo 5's terminal...strange characters
 

No, no no. Pipe /dev/urandom into the midi synth!
Admittedly, you'd probably have to make a converter that converts 8 or 16 bit chunks to midi-compatible symbols, but I bet it'd sound awesome!

Re: Found a glitch in Maemo 5's terminal...strange characters
 

aplay /dev/urandom

for some cool white noise to lull you to sleep. Or maybe not.

Re: Found a glitch in Maemo 5's terminal...strange characters
 

I used to do that for a while until I started thinking that I was hearing the voice of Megatron (G1) trying to broadcast coded messages.

Re: Found a glitch in Maemo 5's terminal...strange characters
 

Statistically it should, if you try it enough times (cf Infinite monkey theorem). Might get better results with /dev/hwrng.

Re: Found a glitch in Maemo 5's terminal...strange characters
 

you could also get all photos taken in the world at any size. (bigger sizes means exponentially more nonsense to be filtered away....)

e: or even first ever fully distortion-less full detail photo of a yeti ;)

Re: Found a glitch in Maemo 5's terminal...strange characters
 

yes. actually i was refering more to that post:
http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=870876&postcount=8

if you give such a output to a wide public you can be sure that all the folks try to make some sense out of it and at least one comes up with a theory about its meaning. its not the monkey who types something but the human who tries to make some sense out of it,
.... well boils down to 42 in the end ...

Re: Found a glitch in Maemo 5's terminal...strange characters
 

Yeah, you really do need infinite monkeys. The thing is, the space is really really really large. Never mind high-res photos, even something as small as a monochrome 16x16 icon has enough permutations that even if you have every person on the planet scan 1000 of these every second there's not enough time to go through more than a tiny fraction of them before the end of the universe.

Re: Found a glitch in Maemo 5's terminal...strange characters
 

actually i do argue against that.
see maths is /full/ of errors and many are connected with infinity.

infinity is something humans can't grasp and have no way of proofing what happens when it comes to infinity. you would have to stop beeing human and become something godlike standing above the system to describe it. and thats been prooven: that we cannot proove it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6...eness_theorems

what they do now is still calucalate on theories based on more fundamental theories that have been prooven wrong.

it's a funny assumption they make that with infinite tries every possibility neccessarily occurs if they all have the same probability.

actually i do not think that every possible combination will occur by only giving freedom of infinite combinations. you would need something that ensures that /all/ possibilities /have/ to occur. there is no such restriction so some may never occur: we have that possibillity too.

still there is a high probability that something that makes sense comes out with random symbol combinations. for that you do not need infinite tries. you only need a brain that associates symbols with something.
my 2c

Re: Found a glitch in Maemo 5's terminal...strange characters
 

one addition to that:
if you take a dice and dice a lot of times every number usually occurs equally often. you need a lot of bad luck to never dice one of the numbers with 6 choices: still it's possible.

but if you take a infinite sided dice: it is a whole other story. thats were the funny assumptions start.

but(to be clear): if you have a /set/ of numbers you want to see dicing with the infinte sided dice you have a good probability that one of the numbers from the set occurs if the set is /big/ enough. the bigger the set the better your chances to see one occur even with finite tries. and with the monkey: it's higher for every "letter" comes from a finite set. and you can give a finite set of combinations that may occur trying to form your "word". say the word is "eat". then you have codesize^3(ascii would be 255^3 ) combinations which is finite. with such finite probabilities you can calculate(thats a lower limit for the prob. , taking the "n out of m" in addition to that prob. increases a lot ...) . so you can give a probability but you don't know if it occurs even with infinite tries.

Re: Found a glitch in Maemo 5's terminal...strange characters
 

I absolutely love the fact that this conversation took a completely different path away from the original post. :) I am most amused.

Re: Found a glitch in Maemo 5's terminal...strange characters
 

why another path? this completely on topic :P

see?

Re: Found a glitch in Maemo 5's terminal...strange characters
 

Technically it's not an assumption, but a theorem with a specific proof. All it states is that as the number of tries approaches infinity the probability of any particular outcome not occuring approaches zero.

But that's just the theory. In practical terms we are constrained by lack of appropriate hardware, ie a universe of infinite dimensions to contain the proverbial infinite monkeys and typewriters, infinite mass to make them and/or an infinite lifetime to let them bang away on the keys. To quote the article:

And of course the also the pesky matter of noticing when interesting outcomes occur - do you know what your /dev/random produced last week?

Re: Found a glitch in Maemo 5's terminal...strange characters
 

If you had infinite monkeys, why would you need infinite time? Surely if you want to reproduce the works of Shakespeare, you would only need exactly as much time as it takes one monkey to type them out at a constant speed from start to finish without making mistakes.

Re: Found a glitch in Maemo 5's terminal...strange characters
 

that was my point all such proofs are errors in maths. proofen to be wrong in the thrties. see the links i provided(turing is easier to understand for computer folks i guess).

too your last sentence. i simplify what i statet:

you can state(calculate): within x tries you will find y occurences of z with a probability of p. as long as x is finite if its infinite you can't. and yes you can be on the ods of the probability: the one who gets the whole night the same number(look at it as a special poem - instead shakspeare - consisting of always the same letter).

example:
the code "eat" has the same probability to occur as the term "www" or the term " ". and so
if you take 7 letters the term "weather" has the same probability to occur as the term "......."

at least his is how we usually define "random" wich is also just a man made definition.

Re: Found a glitch in Maemo 5's terminal...strange characters
 

thats simple:
1. zaphod beeblebrox doesn't care about what they have to tell so they have to wait for an infinite amount of time.
2. for real: the probability that in a large number of "monkeys" many of them produce the same output is way higher then the probability that one gets a specified ouput. you need to increase the number of tries and not the monkeys. (thats the thing with the birthday)

-> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem