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Comment by kotaKat | Hacker News Reader

Precarious hard drive IDE cable-swap-while-running gang here. Sitting there wondering if I was going to kill something with both the family PC splayed open on the dining room table and the Xbox splayed open on the dining room table, with a Linux live CD in hand…

I still can’t believe Bert would have ever cheated on Ernie[1].

[1] http://archiv.sega-dc.de/phoenix.maxconsole.net/docs/bertern...

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People with the skills to design these things impress the hell out of me. The ability to reverse it to then understand it well enough to create these exploits are impressive.

Also, I hate fonts. My two least favorite parts of using computers are fonts and printers. Even in the old days of System 7-9 pre-OS X, fonts would prevent a system from booting. Many a times, I had to reboot without loading extensions, move out fonts, and then reboot because some font I just "borrowed" was corrupt. Even then, I was flabbergasted that a font could crash a computer. The more things change, the more they stay the same it appears.

That link just unlocked a core memory I haven't thought about since I was 17 years old, so thanks for that!

In the context of how that hack works, I'd argue that Bert and Ernie are working together to tag team the Xbox dashboard. Rather than cheating, seems broadly consensual to me, at least as far as Bert & Ernie are concerned.

Yep my electronics engineer dad was like "you cannot do this" but it worked! He got me to put an aligator clip wire from case to case so the grounding would at least be joined?

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