
Halt and Catch Fire (Season 1) available on Netflix - gjkood
http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/70302182?trkid=13752289
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gregulrajani
The first season start of well with lots of cool dramatised hacking and
startup culture scenes. But near the middle of the first season it had turned
into a unbelievable soap opera with a bit of tech as a backdrop.

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randomnumber53
_Silicon Valley_ , on the other hand, is great.

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fit2rule
See, this is interesting, because I found Silicon Valley puerile and
delinquent -- too many dick jokes -- whereas Halt and Catch Fire is a little
more intelligent. Generational difference? Possibly: I grew up with computers
in the 70's.

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tiles
As an alternate opinion for this thread, this is my most highly anticipated
show this year. The drama, pacing, acting, and technical details in this show
are completely unparalleled; its strengths heavily outweigh its faults. No
other show comes close to the breadth HACF strives for.

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w-ll
In all honesty I didn't really enjoy the series. I keep watching because it
felt so alien. All the characters seamed very 1 dimensional, and the writing I
felt like it was reaching and not really selling.

If you can, watch it, make up your own mind.

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bjwbell
I felt the same. It had the surface qualities of a series about nerdy/geeky
computers in the 80s. But missed the essence. I identify much more with Mike
Judge's work in Office Space & his Silicon Valley tv series.

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sehugg
FWIW a lot of this history is covered in PBS's "Triumph of the Nerds"
documentary without the dramatic license. Kudos to the producers for
attempting to make BIOS reverse engineering look exciting, though.

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sleepychu
Though it's my understanding that they could have just booted into DOS and
performed list on the BIOS? (To get the compiled binary)

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fit2rule
"performed list" on the BIOS? How did that work, exactly?

In the very early days of the IBM PC, it wasn't so easy, alas. I guess they
could have used DEBUG.COM to get a dump, but this isn't quite "performing a
list":

[http://www.mess.org/dumping/dump_bios_using_debug](http://www.mess.org/dumping/dump_bios_using_debug)

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icpmacdo
It was one of those shows that I was watching and really enjoying then other
things got in the way and never finished the last third of the season. I'm
going to catchup right after schools done next week.

How accurate is it when they reverse engineer the computer at the beginning of
the season?

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gjkood
During the reverse engineering scene I would assume that they are reading the
BIOS which would have been stored in ROM (Read Only Memory). The ROM chip
would have the same address and read control lines like any standard memory
chip which could be read by setting the Address lines, the Memory Read, any
additional/ancillary signaling and then reading the data lines.

Once you had all the bytes read, you could in principle run this through a
Disassembler to get the actual Assembly language instructions (minus any
original comments). You would have to figure out the boundaries of code, data
etc.

I would assume in those early days, they wouldn't expect the run of the mill
hackers to be able to disassemble the stored data in ROM.

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WalterBright
The Technical Reference Manual for the original IBM PC included a listing of
the source code to the BIOS.

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odiroot
It was done on purpose, just to make it harder (sic!) to do IBM-clones, due to
legal not technical reasons.

Cringely explains that in his Accidental Empires.

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nsxwolf
Only drama I've ever seen that discussed technical details of the TI-99/4A.

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fit2rule
This show re-kindled my love for 80's music - if you haven't check it out
already, and love the soundtrack, there's an AMC playlist for the show on
Spotify .. worth using!

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jlawer
Not in .au

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icpmacdo
I assume it steals every piece of data it can but this chrome extension works
for US Netflix

[http://hola.org/](http://hola.org/)

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iLoch
I mean honestly I just bought a VPN connection. Costs me $45 a year and
(probably?) doesn't steal anything. I realized how much time I spent trying to
find mirrors and torrents for things that were widely available to stream in
the US, and decided it was more practical to spend the money.

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e12e
I don't really think it's "legal". In fact, I don't see how this is any more
or less legal than circumventing region blocks on DVDs etc. That happens to be
legal in Norway, but as I understand it would be a breach of DMCA in the US.
Not sure about Australia, but I think (?) you have just as draconian
content/copy-protection laws?

That said, see my other comment for using ssh as a socks5-proxy. YMMW which is
easier (VPN or "vpn" via ssh).

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iLoch
I'm not suggesting it's legal. The moment I can get the same content in Canada
as I can in the US without buying 100+ useless channels on TV then I'll start
paying for content. I have friends in the movie industry who are affected by
behaviour like mine, but they can talk to the MPAA if they have a problem with
it.

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ddmf
But not in the UK :(

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Zikes
Can we change the link to
[http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/70302182?trkid=13752289](http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/70302182?trkid=13752289)
so people can read the show information or add it to their queues before
deciding whether they want to watch it?

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gjkood
I just tried to change the URL but the 'edit' feature is only allowing me to
edit the Title and not the URL. Does anyone know how I can edit the URL also?

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GigabyteCoin
You'll probably never be able to do that due to security concerns.

It can be much more damanging to a website to allow arbitrary changes to the
URL posted on their homepage Vs. a string of text.

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robbiet480
Don't quote me on this, but I believe that HN previously has let me change
URLs but I did notice the same issue that gjkood mentioned on a recently
submitted link...

