Years back I bought a solar powered calculator that does hex and octal. (Actually, I bought six, since they were on closeout sale for a couple of bucks each. I gave four to coworkers, and took one of the remaining two home.) Whenever I run into one of those bit pattern problems (like funky subnet masks), I reach for the calculator.
This week, while working on some problem that required radix conversion, the teamate I was pairing with reached for... the Windows calculator. The words "but ..." had nearly made it out my mouth when he pulled down the View menu and selected Scientific. Suddenly, there was a calculator that could do radix conversions. Right there in front of me where I'd never noticed it, because I'd never had the need or urge (or curiosity) to pull down the View menu to see what the options were.
Makes me wonder what else is hiding in plain sight.
People like most animals use search patterns when looking for things. If we find "X" in location "1", we expect to find other "X-like" things in "1-like" locations. We don't even bother looking for "X-like" things in "2-like" locations. As a gerneral rule it's pretty efficient, books live in book cases, CDs in CD racks and so on.
The problem with life is that unless you are a hacker and are constantly taking things to bits to find out how things work, you have a pretty poor set of experiences, and so your search patterns are weak. Many people are amazed by the fact that I can fix computer problems, the truth isn't that I didn't know the solution, I knew the right things to try and I quickly found the solution. For example I did know that Windows Calculator has an extended scientific mode, but if I didn't I would have still proded it to see if it could be switched into a more advanced mode.
Poor user interface design and exceptionally bad education probably help to explain why 80% of windows machines are infected with something nasty. Though we all know that Windows has some really fundamental design flaws, I'm sure if 95% of systems were running *nix with untrained people, there would still be plenty of problems.
You can easily hide something in plain view, intentionally or otherwise, and most people will easily miss it, that's something illusionists and criminals have known for a long time.
$ echo "16 i 9A p" | dc
154
$ echo "154 16 o p" | dc
9A
