Slashdot Mirror
Overture Search Terms Showcase Piracy Desire
swfnews guy writes: "swfnews.com (a slashcode based site) today published this article regarding how Overture's search term suggested tool can be used to see the desired piracy of a particular piece of software. I find it disturbing that more people searched for the crack for Flash Mx than for tutorials on how to use it."
Stop giving me page errors when I'm FPing.
The
everyone knows you're not going to find a hack on some search engine. we are truly living in a sad, sad world.
first post, first post, la la la la la la
we get to slashdot a slashcode!
four-oh-four
1 ounce (1 square) unsweetened chocolate, chopped
1/2 stick (1/4 cup) unsalted butter, cut into pieces
1 large egg
1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 pint coffee ice cream
Caramel Sauce as an accompaniment
In a heatproof bowl set over a pan of simmering water melt the chocolate and the butter, stirring until the mixture is smooth, and let the mixture cool. Beat in the egg, the brown sugar,and the vanilla and stir in the flour, the cinnamon,and the salt. Divide the mixture into 16 mounds, abut 3 inches apart, on buttered baking sheets and bake the brownies in the middle of a preheated 350F oven for 8 to 10 minutes, or until they are just firm. (They will flatten into disks.) transfer the brownies with a spatula to racks to cool and freeze them for 30 minutes, or until they are very firm.
Divide the ice cream, softened, among the flat sides of 8 of the brownies, spreading it smooth, and top the ice cream with the remaining brownies, flat sides down. Freeze the ice-cream sandwiches, covered, for at least 1 hour or overnight. Serve the ice-cream sandwiches drizzled with the caramel sauce.
Serves 4.
It never ceases to amaze me how easy warez is to someone with moderate computer intelligence. I saw the Star Wars Episode 2 VCD on a local, PUBLIC newsgroup 2 weeks before it came out. Total pro job, as well, photoshopped jewel case inlays, professional assembled VCD ISO, the whole nine.
Man it looks dope chilling on my cd rack, but the point is wrong is wrong.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
Free Software!!! Forget about cracks, get uncrippled, fully functional, completely hackable software for FREE!
The article author says they are concerned about about a search tool that allows people to search for cracks on software to make it easier to pirate tools.
Have the user read the slashdot posting about a half a dozen postings behind this one regarding intellectual property, then have him switch to open source.
This is not a "pro-open source rant." This is a comment about the complete lack of useful discussion this slashdot posting has considering slashdot's audience.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Time to fire up the proxy (ab)user and start trollin'!
Michael Loves Me!
Software piracy is a spiral of doom. Software developers claim that prices on software are high because of large amounts of piracy. They claim they lose lots of money because of it. People pirate software because it is so expensive. "Back in the day" just about every program was 50$. Adobe Photoshop, which is a standard program that lots of people need costs $584 at www.buy.com. That's well over what most people can afford. It's half the price of an extremely decent computer! Flash MX is $198. If these programs were say 50$, I would buy them. But since I am not a pirate, I have to suffer and not have them on my pc. I am lucky that at college I can go to certain labs and use my school's license, but most people can not.
Programs like WS_FTP have the right idea. If you are a business user or a company looking to use the software you have to pay up. But if you are a home user who isn't profiting off of the use of the software, then its absolutely free.
If companies like Microsoft, Adobe, and Macromedia provided free licenses, or even cheap sub 100$ licenses to individuals not seeking to profit from the use of the software I guarantee they would see an extreme decrease in piracy. There are those cheap people who wont pay 50$ for a very powerful piece of software, but there are a lot of people like me, college students, who can't afford a 500$ program that they need for a class.
Software price increases because of piracy and vice versa. One day it will either end where all software is pirated because nobody can afford it, or all software is cheap(er). In the end it doesn't look good for the developers.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Some pretty interesting results, if you ask me.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Now if they would just tell us which search actually returned the desired results... ;)
"I'm just here to regulate funkyness." - James Gandolfini, as Winston in The Mexican
This guy did, and there's some amusing results....
http://www.chiprowe.com/articles/searchterms.html
+anal +sandwich!?!?!?
I can't even imagine what that is.
--
Don't sweat the petty things, and don't pet the sweaty things.
I don't like Flash.
is the best windows manager ever!!
oops wrong post.
security through obscurity = modding down anti-linux posts so maybe noone will see them
A New Kind of Science Posted by timothy on Tuesday May 21 09 45AM cybrpnk2 writes The story is one of epic proportions Boy genius gets PhD from Cal Tech at age 20 is the youngest recipient ever of the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant writes the Mathematica simulation software used by millions of people makes millions of dollars in the process becomes enticed by the seductive lure of the Game of Life and goes into a decade of seclusion to discover the secrets of the universe You can catch up on the resulting speculation and hype here The years of anticipation and publication delays came to an end Tuesday May 14 2002 with Stephan Wolfram s release of his opus A New Kind of Science Read on for cybrpnk2 s review of Wolfram s much heralded work A New Kind Of Science author Stephen Wolfram pages 1197 plus 62 page index publisher Wolfram Media Inc rating 10 reviewer cybrpnk2 ISBN 1 57955 008 8 summary A long awaited treatise that cellular automations not mathematics holds the key to understanding reality First things first have I read this book Hell no and if anybody else says THEY have in the next year they re lying thru their teeth This book is so dense that if Wolfram had added a single additional page the whole thing would have imploded into a black hole That s got to be the only reason he quit writing and finally went to press I ve been waiting for years for ANKOS to come out I ordered my copy Tuesday when it was released got it on Thursday and I ve been skimming it like mad since To give you some idea of how engrossing this book is I was reading it Friday morning at 4 AM in the bathroom of a Motel 6 curled up in a bedspread on the tile floor to keep from disturbing my wife and stepdaughter during a trip to my stepson s graduation I ve got four college degrees one in math and two from MIT and bottom line this sucker s gonna take a while to digest However it s theoretically straightforward enough that anybody with a high enough level of obsession and a few years to stay glued to it can follow it in its entirety In ANKOS Wolfram certainly comes across as arrogantly cocky but in the final analysis is he a crank or a revolutionary genius Who knows but it s going to be a new nerd pastime for the next decade to argue that point ANKOS is 1250 pages divided into 850 pages of breezy exposition followed by 350 pages of fine print notes The exposition is composed of 12 chapters and the notes have about a paragraph per page of topic and name dropping technobabble to let you know where to go next for more details on whichever of Wolfram s tangents strike your fancy Topping the whole thing off is a 60 page index with thousands of entries in even smaller typeface than the notes Despite its length ANKOS is not a rigorous mathematical proof of anything as much as it is a superficial survey of a vast new intellectual landscape And what a landscape Wolfram has laid before us It s all about cellular automations which have traditionally been relegated to the realm of mathematical recreations Start with a black square in the center grid square cell on the top line of a sheet of graph paper Think up a few rules about whether a square gets colored black or white on the next line down depending on the colors of its neighbors Apply these rules to the squares on the next line of the sheet of graph paper Repeat Watch what happens Sounds simple It isn t The first short chapter outlines Wolfram s central thesis That three hundred years of mathematics based on the equals sign have failed to provide true insight into various complex systems in nature and that algorithms based on the DO loop can succeed in this endeavor where mathematics has failed The reason claims Wolfram is that deceptively simple algorithms can produce heretofore undreamed of levels of complexity He claims that while frontier intellectual efforts such as chaos theory fractals AI cybernetics and so forth have hinted at this concept for years his decade of isolation studying cellular automata has taken the idea of simple algorithms or rules embodying universal complexity to the level of a new paradigm The second chapter outlines what Wolfram calls his crucial experiment the systematic analysis of the 256 simplest rule sets for the most basic cellular automatons He discovers this universe of rules is sufficient to produce his four so called classes of complex systems order self similar nested patterns structures and most importantly true randomness The first two lead to somewhat familiar checkerboard type patterns and leaf type fractals the last two unforeseen unique shapes and unpredictable sequences Wolfram stresses that the ability of simple iterative algorithms to produce complex and unique non fractal shapes as well as truly random sequences of output is in fact a revolutionary new discovery with subtle and profound implications The third chapter expands his initial 256 rule set universe of simple algorithms with many others Wolfram has researched for years in the dead of night while others slept Rule sets involving multiple colors beyond black and white rule sets that update only one grid square instead of a whole row rule sets that embody full blown Turing machines rule sets that substitute entire sets of patterned blocks into single grid cells that tag end point grid squares with new patterns that implement registers and symbols Wolfram has examined them all in excruciating detail And no matter how complex the rule set is he explores it ends up generating still more and more unexpected complex behavior with many notable features as the rule sets are implemented This ever escalating spiral of complexity leads Wolfram to believe that cellular automatons are a viable alternative to mathematics in modeling in fact embodying the inherent complexity of the natural world In chapter four he begins this process by linking cellular automatons to the natural world concept of numbers Automatons that multiply and divide that calculate prime numbers and generate universal constants like pi that calculate square roots and even more complex numerical functions like partial differential equations Wolfram details them all Who needs conscious human minds like those of Pythagoras or Newton to laboriously work out over thousands of years the details of things like trigonometry or calculus Set up dominos in just the right way flip the first one and stand back nature can do such calculations automatically efficiently and mindlessly Chapter five broadens the natural scope of cellular automations from one dimensional numbers to multi dimensional entities Simple X Y Cartesian coordinates are left behind as Wolfram defines networks and constraints as the canvas on which updated cellular automatons flourish always generating the ever higher levels of complexity More Turing machines and fractals such as snowflakes and biological cells forming organs spontaneously spring forth So far we ve seen some really neat sleight of hand that Martin Gardner or Michael Barnsley might have written But we re only on page 200 of 850 with seven chapters to go and Wolfram is just now getting warmed up Chapter six is where Wolfram begins to lay the foundation for what he believes is so special about his insights and discoveries Instead of using rigid and fixed initial conditions as the starting points for the cellular automations he has described he now explores what happens using random and unknown initial conditions in each of his previously defined four classes of systems He finds that while previously explored checkerboard Class 1 and fractal Class 2 systems yield few surprises his newly discovered unique Class 3 and random Class 4 cellular automaton systems generate still higher levels of complexity and begin to exhibit behavior that can simulate any of the four classes a telltale hint of universality Furthermore their behavior starts to be influenced by attractors that guide them to structure and self organization With the scent of universality and self organization in the air Wolfram begins in chapter seven to compare and contrast his cellular automations to various real world topics of interest Billiards taffy making Brownian motion casino games the three body problem pachinko machines randomness is obviously a factor in all of these Yet Wolfram notes while randomness is embedded in the initiation and influences the outcomes of each of these processes none of them actually generate true randomness in the course of running the process itself The cellular automations he has catalogued particularly his beloved Rule 30 do The realization that cellular automations can uniquely serve as an initiator or generator of true randomness is a crucial insight leading to the difference between continuity and discreteness and ultimately to the origins of simple behaviors How you ask Hey Wolfram takes most of the chapter to lay it out in a manner that I m still trying to follow no way can I summarize it in a sentence or two By chapter eight Wolfram believes he has laid out sufficient rationale for why you me and everybody else should think cellular automations are indeed the mirror we should be looking in to find true reflections of the world around us Forget the Navier Stokes equations if you want to understand fluid flow you have to think of it as a cellular automation process Ditto for crystal growth Ditto for fracture mechanics Ditto for Wall Street Most definitely ditto for biological systems like leaf growth seashell growth and pigmentation patterns This is very convincing stuff tables of Mathematica generated cellular automation shapes side by side with the photos of corresponding leaves or seashells or pigment patterns found in nature Yes you ve seen this before in all of the fractals textbooks The difference between fractals and cellular automations fractals are a way to mathematically catalog the points that make up the object while cellular automations are a way to actually physically create the object via a growth process It s a somewhat subtle difference and a key Wolfram point Having established some credibility for his ideas Wolfram stretches that credibility to the limit in chapter nine where he applies his cellular automation ideas to fundamental physics It was practically inevitable he would do this his first published paper as a teenager was on particle physics and that s the field he got his PhD in from Cal Tech at age 20 before going on to write the Mathematica software program and make his millions as a young businessman Despite his solid background in physics this seems at first blush to be pretty speculative stuff He shifts his focus on the cellular automations from randomness to reversibility and describes several rule sets that both lead to complexity and are reversible This behavior is an apparent violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics From Wolfram s way of thinking if the universe is indeed some kind of ongoing cellular automation then it may well be reversible and the Second Law must not be the whole story so there must be something more we have yet to learn about the nature of the universe itself He continues extensive speculations on what this may be and how space time gravity relativity and quantum mechanics must all be manifestations of this underlying Universal Cellular Automation The rule set for this ultimate automation which Wolfram believes might ultimately be expressed as only a few lines of code in Mathematica takes the place of a mathematically defined unified field theory in Wolfram s world This is mind blowing stuff but ultimately boils down to Wolfram s opinion I have great difficulty in comprehending space and time and matter and energy as mere manifestations of some cellular automation if so what is left to be the system on which the automation itself is running I m reduced to one of Clarke s Laws The universe is not only stranger than we imagine it is stranger than we CAN imagine Wolfram shifts from Kubrick style religion back to mere philosophy in chapter ten where he explores how cellular automations are perceived by the human mind Visual image perception the human perception of complexity and randomness cryptography data compression statistical analysis and the nature of mathematics as a mental artifact are all explored The chapter ends on a discussion of language and the mechanics of thinking itself Wolfram reaches no real concrete conclusions on any of these except that once again cellular automation is a revolutionary new tool to use in achieving new insights on all of these topics Chapter eleven jumps from the human mind to the machine mind by exploring not the nature of consciousness but the nature of computation instead He goes here into somewhat deeper detail on ideas he has introduced earlier about how cellular automations can perform mathematical calculations emulate other computational systems and act as universal Turing machines He focuses on the implications of randomness in Class 4 systems and the universality embodied in systems like that of his Rule 110 His arguments lead up to a closing realization what he does not call but may one day be named Wolfram s Law The final chapter chapter twelve discusses what all of Wolfram s years of isolation and work have led him to conclude He calls it the Principle of Computational Equivalence What follows is an unavoidably oversimplified distillation of Wolfram s thoughts on the PCE If indeed cellular automations are somehow at the heart of the universe around us then the human effort to reduce the universe to understandable models and formulas and simulations is ultimately doomed to failure Because of the nature of cellular automation computation there is no way to come up with a shortcut method that will deduce the final outcome of a system in advance of it actually running to completion We can currently compute a rocket trajectory or a lens shape or a skyscraper framework in advance using mathematics merely because these are ridiculously simple human efforts New technologies based not on mathematics but instead on cellular automations like wind tunnel simulators and nanobot devices will be exciting technological advances but will not lead to a fundamentally new understanding of nature Issues that humans define as undecidability and intractability will always limit the level of understanding we will ultimately achieve and will always have impacts on philosophical questions such as predestination and free will To conclude with Wolfram s own final paragraph in the book And indeed in the end the PCE encapsulates both the ultimate power and the ultimate weakness of science For it implies that all the wonders of the universe can in effect be captured by simple rules yet it shows that there can be no way to know all the consequences of these rules except in effect just to watch and see how they unfold As noted above 350 pages of notes follow this exposition and trust me there s no way they can be summarized To mention one nugget I found amusing as I envisioned Wolfram working towards endless dawns on ANKOS he thinks sleep has no purpose except to allow removal of built up brain wastes that cannot be removed while conscious So much for dreaming So what is the bottom line on ANKOS It is a towering piece of work and an enduring monument to what a focused and disciplined intellect can achieve It is very thought provoking It will definitely lead to new work and progress on cellular automation theory and some interesting technological applications we should all look forward to with anticipation But is it the next Principia the herald of a new scientific revolution Read and decide for yourself Only time and a lot of it will tell Book Reviews Slashdot s book review section is brimming with reader submitted commentary on interesting books Here s a sampling of recent reviews read below for how you can add yours to the list For programmers check out reviews of the Zope Bible Programming Jabber and other specialized books If you re just trying to manage programmers grumpy s review of Managing Einsteins might be just what you re looking for Meanwhile keep the company afloat with lessons learned from The MouseDriver Chronicles and The Bombast Transcripts Science buff Read Tal Cohen s reaction to Rare Earth and Peter Wayner on Digital Biology Don t forget the grain of salt in Voodoo Science either His Dark Materials is one of the many Science Fiction titles that Slashdot readers have praised or panned for your pleasure And somewhere between Sci Fi and reality are books like Flesh and Machines reporting from the intersection of yesterday s fiction and current technology It s easy to submit your own reviews for consideration too Just read the Slashdot book review guidelines and then use the web submission form Update 20020427 12 50 by timothy
Widening Pages for the good of all mankind.
Serving the Slashdot community since 2002.
If Macromedia doesn't want to make flash free(as in price), I respect their righ to do so. But it's cool to see free(code and price) alternatives becoming usable. My favorite is the PHP-based FreeMovie.
Karma: Bizzare (mostly affected by varying internal caffeine levels.)
shh! Don't tell everyone they can search for warez and cracks using the search engines - or they'll all be at it!
Video Game cheats, hints a
In fact, I've got a hunch that a lot of these guys will turn out to be great Macromedia customers in a few years once they've honed their skills on the cracked version, and enter the real world of web page design where they can A) Afford the software and B) Write it off as a tax deduction.
Now, I'm not justifying the piracy, and it doesn't make it any less illegal. I just don't think its a big deal when you look at the total picture.
swfnews.com seeks swmnews.com for long term relationship. Must like long walks on the beach, holding hands, and kittens. No headgames or posers.
I wonder if Adobe could use the number of cracks downloaded for Flash MX to boost the amount they are suing Macromedia for? I don't know however, not being a law student if people who pirate your software count as your uses :-)
My blog [.net, rants, general IT]
check out the refer urls for the Macromedia weblogs:
/ referers? site=0106884&group=radio1
Macromedia Dreamweaver community manager
http://subhonker6.userland.com/rcsPublic
it is all for searches for dreamweaver cracks.
although the flash community managers site:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0106797/
doesn't have many hits on flash cracks (although it did last week).
People have been saying this since the mid-90s where we were downloading "warez" from BBS's.
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
By the companies doing one thing:
Offering noncommercial use licenses on full software products, at a NOMINAL[1] cost,
while aggressively pursuing companies that violate the noncommerical licenses.
This would allow the kids who want to play with ($software), make wacky animations, programs and such to do so without breaking the law, while charging the people that make money off of flash the full license fee.
There's even an added benefit - a lot more people will learn ($software), and will potentially become paying customers in the future (this especially applies to younger people).
Educational software is not the answer, as it's only open to students, and often times is *still* too highly priced for many people that just want to fool around.
I think piracy would be greatly reduced if the software companies would recognize that a lot of the warezing is being done because the price is too high for people that just want to 'play' and not actually do any for-profit work.
:wq
[1] under $100. Just media with PDF'd docs.
One ring to rule them all. The (_O_) in Goatse.cx
Hell yes.
My only problem with this recipe is that I would eat all the ingredients before I got em mixed together. Would you suggest doubling the recipe in this case?
--
pants ahoy
Try actually searching, and then see how much stuff there is to get a full working copy of it...
Ok, they only work on certain versions of it - but you can still find the stuff easy.
I find it disturbing that more people searched for the crack for Flash Mx than for tutorials on how to use it.
Maybe there are less people who don't know how to use flash and want to than there are who already know how, but don't have $500 to fork over for the full version. (I know I certainly fall into the second catagory...)
(and to be fair, flash has one of the better built-in tutorials for learning how to use it.)
I find it disturbing that more people searched for the crack for Flash Mx than for tutorials on how to use it
Why is that disturbing? Consider the following:
1) Lots of people already know how to use it.
2) IT COMES WITH A FUCKING TUTORIAL.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Check this out for a huge string of anti-Slashdot trolls:
http://bsd.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/20/05 21243&mode=thread&tid=122&threshold=-1
Cool, eh?
I find it disturbing that more people searched for the crack for Flash Mx than for tutorials on how to use it
Cracks are pretty easy to use, so I doubt that many people would be downloading the tutorial for it.
Flash, Photoshop, and even MS Office are all products not designed for ordinary consumers. They're just not. They're packed with features and tools for professionals, and those professionals are trying to make money with this software. The least they can do is ante up a few hours worth of their own fees to pay for the tools they use.
If you're a consumer, and you want a cheap product, the vendors are there for you. MS Office cost too much for your school papers? Get a copy of Works. Photoshop expensive for making web graphics and removing red-eye? Get Photoshop Elements for a fraction of the price.
Meanwhile, Macromedia Flash is the perfect example of a tool not targetted at consumers, period. The tutorial takes a couple of hours to get through, minimum, when you're starting from scratch, and ActionScript is hardly a walk in the park.
You say you'd buy Flash MX for $50. Well, what are you going to do with it? Goof around and build crappy animated interfaces for your web site? Or learn to use it properly and sell yourself as a Flash professional? If it's the latter, then take a class or pay for the full product, and justify the $50/hour your peers are charging. If it's the former, just learn JavaScript. It's still free.
Would it be too much to ask for the /. editors to read the items submitted and to verify that the links work? Of all things, the slashcode link was broken due to a dumb HTML error.
But these companies do have a right to set the price they want to do a transaction at;
If that means $584 for Photoshop, then that's what you need to fork over. If you don't like it... doesn't mean you have the right or privilege to download or use it.
Then there's the $89 version of Photoshop Elements.
Or you can get an older, cheaper version of Photoshop. Photoshop 5.5, 5.0, 4.0. 3.0, all worked, and continue to work today.
Or you can use gimp.
If you can't afford to use the program, you can't afford to use the program, and that's how simple it is.
If you *need* the program, then you can afford it. If a $584 copy of Photoshop allows you to earn $30,000 a year in consultation fees, you can afford Photoshop.
If you just want to put pictures on the web... use the $89 of Photoshop.
GPL Deconstructed
Yes, I would suggest even tripling the ingredients if you are a 'larger' fellow/fellowess or have a severe case of the munchies.
let's face it....sometimes you have to search fairly hard to find that crack, so you're plugging in a bunch of search terms.....crack, serial, warez, etc. So it's going to be more disproportionally represented thatn say tutorial, since pretty much everyone calls a tutorial a tutorial, and because they're easier to find. It'd be more interesting if they could some how filter out redundant search terms coming from the same address (aka this guy sent 12 searches for a crack to flash mx, but all worded differently).
Its kind of fun to see what people search for. I tried typing in "XXX". The top 4 searches were:
- free xxx
- xxx password
- free xxx picture
- free xxx movie
Seems like it's not just Flash Mx that people want for free.I find this more curious than disturbing. I guess the people who crack FlashMX already know how to use it? Or maybe it's just that people who are capable of cracking software consider themselves to be computer savvy and would rather learn it on their own than try to find tutorials. Hmm...or maybe it's a new form of advertising from Macromedia: Buy FlashMX! Easier to learn than it is to crack!
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
Please explain how an aspiring artist would NEED Photoshop? I assume you're talking about how to learn techniques and such... most of which can be learned using the Photoshop Elements product, which is much less expensive, or with a product such as Paint Shop Pro or the gimp.
The question to be asked is how many of these pirated downloads are actual lost sales. This is a study to be made. I would guess only a very small fraction. When the industry cries out for "billions" of dollars in lost sales, one can only laugh. Not only they are using full retail price (which no one has to pay), they also count every copy stolen by 13 year-olds in China. Filter out those who would never buy it any way and you may as well end up with "thousands" of dollars instead...
asta la vista, baby.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
[quote] There's even an added benefit - a lot more people will learn ($software), and will potentially become paying customers in the future (this especially applies to younger people). [/quote]
Grandpa talks: When I was young, we learned word processing with a really sophisticated piece of software called.... "Word Perfect 5.1"
I'm sorry. No paying Flash users in the future. Maybe a company like Coca Cola can invest in the future. M-Soft... Hmmm. Possible, but a company like MacroMedia?
Privacy is terrorism.
Everyone knows that lots of people who pirate software don't even use said software. I've seen people who carry around big binders of CDRs, full of anything you could ever want (even pointless stuff like old versions of Photoshop). These people collect for the sake of collecting. Sure, maybe they toyed around with 3DSMax for a half hour to make a rotating teapot, but that's about it.
Maybe it's an "elite" or "cool" factor that leads these people to collect?
Ha Haa
Most people who land on my site are looking for something free that other people don't want them to have (frequently, I suspect, a book report). And since I never have it either, people must be disappointed.
look at my logs
mahlen
On a paper submitted by a physicist colleague: "This isn't right. This isn't even wrong." --Wolfgang Pauli
Funny, I _just_ finished reading a large discussion of software licensing and anti-piracy measures over on Joel On Software:
u lt . sp?cmd=show&ixPost=8271
... Clearly music companies see these forms of music distribution as marketting as opposed to piracy, and in some ways I think that the copy protection issue with software is similar."
http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/defa
The comments run the gamut from shrewd to moronic to insane to genius. You have to go about a third of the way down to reach the posts on piracy generalities rather than specific measures.
The most interesting post is from Andrew Cross (3/5 down, no anchors to link to). In part, he says:
"we certainly don't think that listening to the radio is piracy, for thet matter recording music off the radio is not considered picracy and neither is video-taping MTV
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
Please explain how an aspiring artist would NEED Photoshop?
Everyone has to have an edge on their peers. People have an affinity towards the fastest CPU, the fastest cars, the snazziest graphics programs, the largest monitors, smallest notebooks, fastest cars, and the list of snobby features goes on ad nauseum.
Its a perfect economic model. Greed from consumers leak dozens of stolen software products into work, lobbing from the companies introduces disruptive crackdown laws, and lawyers to fan the flames of the battle.
Piracy may be a thing of the past soon. Free software has the whole piracy battle fascinating to watch. Its not like writing complex software is difficult anymore: especially now that have GHz processors, massive storage space, and unheard of bandwidth that allows gentoo and BSD installations coexist with the source code.
This encourages rapidly insane development times and bug fixes. Even non-programmers like me can fix a bug: anyone can browse through the code and follow the flow to the trouble and submit a patch. Its easier than ever before and kids are picking up on this too. People want control of their computers. It helps them create a virtual playground of intriguing possiblities.
Soon there may no longer be "piracy" as the masses learn to develop for themselves and the community around them. Such efforts seem to create superior technologies that are developed behind closed doors. Bye, bye Photoshop!
Lets stop all the whoopla about Warez. Be realistic -- it doesn't cost businesses a thing. Most people who d/l Warez wouldn't have paid the steep price for the program anyways, so companies lose no money. They're just using it as an excuse to keep prices arbitrarily high. The average person who d/l's a pirated version of PowerPoint would never fork over the absurd $300 that MS is demanding for Power Point. Come on, this is pure bullshit. Like they actually produce any REAL updates anyways. Powerpoint today is basically the same as it was in '97. I'm not willing to pay more than 50 bucks for great games -- and these are pieces of software which actually involved real work to make, which actually did evolve, and which cost a lot of money to make. If you tell me it cost Outrage a lot of money to make Descent 3, I'll buy into that argument. If you tell me it cost MS a lot of money to upgrade PowerPoint 2000 to PowerPoint XP, I say that's a load of fucking bullshit.
As for people searching for Warez via search engines, that's mostly useless. Even using cross referencing, its difficult to get a good Warez page. 99% of all "warez" pages are really fronts for pop-up porno operations. When it comes to Warez, you really need to "be in" to be able to access it.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
A poster in a previous story mentioned that at Purdue the cost to students of any Microsoft product was only $5 USD. At many colleges students are able to get say MS Office XP at a cost far cheaper than Sun's StarOffice 6.0.
But I find it ironic that the same people who claim that Microsoft is deliberately encouraging illegal copying are the ones decrying when Microsoft makes any effort to enforce their copyright. These people think nothing of constantly arguing that Microsoft's product activation for consumer products is the tool of the devil, and these were the same people who argued that Intel should not automatically enable a processor identification number.
The proper cost of software is not the cost to replicate the product once made, for that completely discounts any research and development used to create and maintain the product. The true cost is some fraction of the utility the software will provide to the customer. $600 USD is about the point at which software's utility makes it a reasonable value for a business to purchase for an employee. If anything perhaps Adobe is underpricing Photoshop.
To tie this to a previous story today, a commercial user would certainly not be able to purchase a single license for Mathematica for $100. The proper price because of the utility to the customer is more than 10 times that. On the other hand Wolfram Research provides a sharp discount for a student version of Mathematica. Idiots who claim that software should be priced at the marginal cost of making one more CD need to explain how one is supposed to support a company that can create a product such as Mathematica that is 1000 times superior to anything that free software offers.
Similar conditions apply to software that services niches such as providing accessibility for the disabled. Such software easily runs $600 and over, because that's the value to the customer. Even if there were a software patent-free world I see little chance that free software could ever come up with an equivalent to Dragon Naturally Speaking Professional or Mathematica. The reason is that an army of coders, no matter how many, can never match the expertise of top professionals such as Drs. James and Janet Baker who routinely defeated the competition at DARPA contests of voice recognition software or of Dr. Stephen Wolfram.
$600 USD priced software is hardly the bane of the industry. A product that truly meets a desperate need in an innovative way has to be priced at least that in order to develop and continuously refine the technology. Countries whose attention to software theft is lax are not where these breakthrough technologies are being developed, and software developers from those countries cannot flee to the US fast enough.
So Macromedia is probably going to file a lawsuit soon against digital pirates looking to download their files for free -- that's just GREEDY BS. The fact is, if they weren't so money-grubbing, and offered their products for reasonable prices, they would have to deal with digital pirates like me. As it stands, their software is WAY too expensive, so I prefer to download as much as I please - for free - from P2P networks. They can cry all they want about lost revenue - I wouldn't have bought their programs anyway.
I know a lot of pirates. If the software cost $5 they'd still pirate it. It doesn't matter.
Keyword Clicks/ Cost-Per- Cost/
Day Click Day
---
flash 660.0 $0.19 $123.42
crack 690.0 $0.12 $77.55
porn 1600.0 $0.24 $368.12
sex 1600.0 $0.24 $376.00
cowboy neal 0.1 $0.08 $0.02
flash mx crack <0.1 $0.11 $0.00
By that logic, I would have more success buying the keywords "cowboy neal" than with "flash mx crack." That's what scares me. Try it yourself.
But Cowboy Neal comes third!
10548 britney spear breast
5235 britney spear tit
1993 biggest tit in the world
1076 jennifer love hewitt breast
51 sarah michelle gellar breast
mogorific carpentry experiments
Uhhh.. except that if you're a musician (as opposed to a music label) you make most of your money through live concerts, and you really only make a pittance off the albums themselves.
I'm just trying to picture the guys at Macromedia live at the Arco Arena hammering out code, panties flying on stage, fans screaming...
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
These number contain no information, and most of us are sophisticated enough to know this. There was a time when Netscape and Yahoo just counted the number of times it server was hit, and used this number as a their 'user base'. We then found out that a single web page required multiple hits, so their actual user base was a fraction of that number, and in time, such service stopped purposefully reporting bogus numbers.
So, in this case, here is an article reporting clearly bogus numbers as facts. We are used to this because organizations such as the RIAA and BSA are more interesting in swaying public opinion than clearly representing facts. This article has nothing to do with piracy. It has everything to do with lying with statistics
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
One factor that often goes ignored when speaking about piracy is user expectation. Being the computer nerd at the office, and at home, I have ample oppertunity to observe newbies on their using their computers. What you notice about these new users it that they expect all the software they will ever need to be on their computer. Its happend so often but it always amazes me. A new users learns that office didn't come preinstalled on their computer. Harried they call me and ask why they can't open thier spread sheet from work. I then have to explain that office is seperate piece of software, one that they need to purchase. A related issue arrises when users start burning copies or purchased software to friends. People are social creatures. Cooperation and sharing between people are dictated, at least to an extent, by instinct. People share software, because we always share when the costs of sharing are negligable. You will never know when you need a favor. This is how we are hard-wired to think. Information assests don't conform to our ways of valuing property.
I don't need to shut up if you don't need to stop :P
"It has it's place in the world. It has its risks. And it is worth the risk."
So I'll keep preaching and you'll keep pirating. I wish there was a better term, especially since I never recall calling it 'pirating'; I just said 'download or use'.
So I'll keep telling you how wrong you are, and you can keep downloading software you haven't paid for.
GPL Deconstructed
But it's not healthy for a society to arrange things so there is such a large advantage to disobeying unenforceable rules.
It breeds disrespect for the rule of law.
People stop just obeying the law, and start calculating the odds of being caught. In competitive situations they have no choice but to weigh the chance of being caught against the chance of losing out to those who have no respect for the law.
It doesn't help that the laws are basically arbitrary and unproductive. It's cheaper to clone software than to develop it in the first place, and that's a completely legal way to destroy someone else's incentive to innovate.
So what's your ethical motivation to pay for cloneware? To encourage the useless duplication of effort? Sounds like a negative value proposition to me.
It's not good for laws to be at odds with ethics, either, for the stronger versions of the same reasons.
Piracy rampant
Everyone wants stuff for free
Wow, what a surprise
Just imagine if all those people got together and made a free program of their own from freely available code pieces. Too bad they enable those who would leave them without control of their computers instead. All that time searching and binary editing and for what? Do you really want to learn how to build an advert filled site that tracks user's search patterns for some big cheezy company?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
and it says 0.00 per day...
Nobody loves me
I should change my name to Cowboy Neal I guess, or Flash Porn Sex
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
On the other hand, the company should be proud that their program is so easy to use that no one needs a tutorial, but so good that everyone wants a copy. I'd be flattered. Pissed off, but flattered. :-)
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
This reality is so simple that people easily forget it. Information cannot simply be treated as property, any more than fire can.
Photoshop is the industry standard. If an aspiring artist ever wants to get a graphics job at design firm - knowledge of Paint Shop Pro isn't going to cut it.
If a developer wants to protect it's interests, make it impossible to use their software without paying for. It should not be illegal to distribute software or pirate it. If this was the case, then very powerful software protection systems would emerge.
There are lots of ways to do this. Internet checks for multiplayer halflife make it impossible to play halflife without buying it. If they took this system added it on to photoshop(so 2 people couldnt use the program at the same time), I guarantee EVERY single person who was serious about using it, would buy it.
I have lots of respect for developers who make sure I can't pirate their software. I've only bought software I couldn't pirate.
Turn off javascript and visit cracks.am -- the one stop shop for all your cracking needs.
None of massive storage, bandwith, nor GHz processors have made writing complex software easy. Complex software is hard and will always be hard; if a tool is introduced to make things easier, the bar for complexity will simply move and complex software will always be complex.
One part of complexity that can never change is correctness. It will always be hard (I thought about using impossible but that is only partialy right; in this sense think of hard as the equivilent of going to the moon) to prove the correctness of large program. No tool nor number of eyes can prove program correct.
Doesn't the product come with manuals? If you didn't buy the product and didn't get the manuals wouldn't you logically have to download the crack before you went looking for tutorials? It is as likely as anything else that if you purchased the whole package you wouldn't need to be searching the internet at all.
The search engine terms don't indicate anything except that among people needing to search the internet that searching for the crack was more popular than searching for the tutorials.
Coding Blog
I learned Photoshop back in highschool, and now I do some graphic design as part of my job.
3 guesses as to what graphics editor I had my employer purchase.
Perhaps, however
Last night I was fucking with
Your mom's loose pussy
Wow, you coded it so that it autoconverts "pr0n" to "porn". Cool.:)
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
Is there anything illegal about making a patch and distributing it?
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
You can find most cracks / serials via the following search engines:
o m/
http://astalavista.box.sk/
http://www.google.c
I'm not a Microsoft advocate but I do know that they often sell vast pieces of their software at third of the retail. Over here in the UK a student can pick up a copy of MS Office for £100UKP (retail it was £300).
Ok it's not super cheap but that's less than half.
and if it wasn't so WAY over-priced, people wouldn't have to pirate it to own it.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
One cannot claim to be a supporter of free speech until one has supported the right for another to speak views which one dislikes.
I despise hypocrits like you.
Quick point: the detrimental effect of piracy is compounded by the fact that warez kiddies pirate just because they can. As such I don't see any commercial solution to the problem.
---- scrm
I find it disturbing that more people searched for the crack for Flash Mx than for tutorials on how to use it.
Well, it isn't disturbing. In fact, books are still preferred way to learn something, even for people which have 100% of pirated software. They think: The fact that someone published it must mean that it is really good tutorial.
People who like this sort of sig will find this the sort of sig they like.
IMHO, there is another reason why people go looking for cracks.
It is because they are FSCK'ed off with the annoying copy protection on the legal version they have already paid for.
A friend of mine is quite into PC gaming, especial first person shooters, He has brought about 20 games in the last couple of years. (I have seen the retail boxes on his shelves).
He has also downloaded cracks for most of them.
His reason is the original copy protection is inconvenient & annoying. Most games insist that the original CD be in the drive to play, Some require all the CDs to be inserted in succession. Some games don't like his SCSI CD-ROM, and insist that it is disabled (1). When he telephoned tech support for one of the publisher's with this problem, they accused him of being a pirate, and refused to help.
Overall the copy protection detracts from his experience of using the game software, so he improves it by cracking it.
IMHO, my friend has done nothing wrong by cracking software he already owns, but by doing so he has created demand for cracks, and making it more likely that those who have not paid for games will find the cracks they are looking for.
In conclusion, the message for software publishers, is to ease up on copy protection. If users want to copy the software they will find a way, and if the protection is to annoying, ordinary users will want to remove it.
1. Apparently it is possible to create a loop back block device under Win2K using SCSI, and that might be used to emulate a real CD-ROM.
...that perhaps the majority of people who are going to pay for it maybe know where it is already? Have already dl'd the trial and just click the "click here to register" button? And that leaves the majority of people who know what they want but don't know where to find it and don't want to pay for it to search for it.
Adobe Photoshop, which is a standard program that lots of people need costs $584 at www.buy.com. That's well over what most people can afford.
Lots of people do not need the full version of Adobe Photoshop. There is a "lite" version called Photoshop Elements that has all the features of Photoshop except those related to CMYK separations. Only print artists really need CMYK; those who use Photoshop as a verb are happy with RGB and can use PS Elements, Paint Shop Pro, or (better yet) GIMP for Windows.
but there are a lot of people like me, college students, who can't afford a 500$ program that they need for a class.
That's why the United States government (and presumably other governments) provide student financial aid, primarily in the form of low-interest deferred-payment loan programs.
Will I retire or break 10K?