I understand all you kids don't remember this, but let's have a history lesson.
I understand that you think you know what you are talking about and that because of it, you think I am a kid. On the contrary I was banging on keys in the late 70's.
What you are saying it just not true. Copy protection never went away. Some cracking groups have been around *since* the 80's and have never stopped releasing cracks in all that time. How can this be if copy protection "took a break" as you say. The reality is that you are the one that apparently took a break are missed a good chunk of copy protection history and have since them imagined an alternate reality to fill in the gaps.
FACT: Civ4 shipped with DRM, yet people keep saying that they purchased all the previous CIV's, includes Civ4, but will not buy Civ5 because it has DRM.
FACT: They just have Steam Hate, a wide-spread group-think that surfaced around the time of Half-Life 2's release, and at the time had nothing to do with DRM. Since then those original reasons for hating Steam are gone, so now they rationalize their Steam hate as the more-encompassing "DRM Hate".. when the reality is that DRM never stopped them before and it has been much more insidious than Steam will ever be (Steam doesnt HIDE, FUCK WITH THE OS, or SCAN YOUR SYSTEM FOR UNAPPROVED SOFTWARE.. Like the DRM that comes with Civ4 retail.. the DRM everyone seems to approve of)
Needing the original disk is completely in the control of the end-user.
Fail. You don't know how SafeDisc works because if you did, you would know that having the original disc doesnt help over an extended period of time. The tricks it uses leverage deficiencies of the hardware (the drive) at the time.
With Steam however, the publisher has control and can pull the plug whenever they want for whatever reason they want.
Fail. We are talking about the copy protection not working any more, not the game. Steam has every reason to keep updating its DRM to work on newer systems and this effects ALL steam games both new and old. So when was that last SafeDisc patch? Never? Thats right. You never ever got one, and now Civ4 retail fails to work on Win7. What happens when you can't download the no-cd patch anymore? Game stops working forever? Thats right. Meanwhile my STEAM copy of Civ4 works flawlessly on Win7 when I installed it.
So you are cool with copy protection rootkits (like specifically the SafeDisc rootkit installed by the retail copy of Civ4) that wont work on future OS's unless the publisher releases a patch that negates the need for the rootkit (but leaves in on your system anyways), but you arent cool with an honest DRM system that is up front about the terms.
Gotcha. You just think its cool to have blanket-hate for "DRM" because others also think its cool to have such blanket-hate.
And there is such a thing as encouraging bad practice by publishers. I've played every Civ game up to now, but I can get on with my life without Civ V.
Why doesnt the Civ4 rootkit concern you, but the Civ5 DRM does?
..oh, I get it.. you think CD checks with kernel mode rootkits are cool. You *like* finding the CD, hoping that your drive will still read it, and hoping that a newer OS doesnt change the driver model so that the older kernel root kits like the one found in Civ4 wont work any more.... you LIKE that, right?
I picked up a years subscription of Pandora One several months ago. I get an endless stream of great music (at 192kbps) 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, with no advertising at all, for the very moderate cost. I don't think that I have ever skipped a song "because it sucked." Every song on my stations are great.
The Candian music service is "simply copy music from others." They've already paid for the right to do so (built in to the price of all blank media) and are protected from lawsuits for doing so.
Pandora is amazing. Create a "Pink Floyd" radio station and not only do you get lots of Pink Floyd songs, but also a seemingly endless series of songs that Pink Floyd fans will usually also like. Right now its playing a great song by Stealers Wheel, a band most people have never heard of.
In practice, "small government" means slower growth of the federal budget, which always grows.
Sure, it grew quite a bit under Bush Jr for the short period where republicans had all 3 branches locked up, but look what happened when the Democrats got that same unchallenged power: They literally put the pedal to the metal with regards to budget increases. It has never grown at this rate in my lifetime, and in fact, I could probably argue that its grown more in the past 2 years than it did in the previous 12 combined.
We need competing forces making and challenging spending decisions, so we are far better off if the Republicans take over a branch of government as soon as possible. That doesnt mean that things will suddenly be "OK" again, but right now we are paving a highway to hell with overtime crews working nights and weekends. I'd much prefer that that highway to be paved at the Reagan/Bush Sr/Clinton/Bush Jr rates.
Version 10: Up to SSE4.2 paths for 32-bit Intel, only 386 path for non-Intel.
Version 11: Up to AVX paths for 32-bit Intel, only 386 path for non-Intel.
Version 12: Up to AVX paths for 32-bit Intel, only 386 path for non-Intel.
The story is similar with the Vector Math Library.. If (!GenuineIntel) { run shitty 25 year old code path }
The fact that AMD's could run unoptimized code faster than the netburst optimized code is only testimonial to how crappy the netburst design was.
FACT: Intel's compiler is more than happy to selectively test for each of SSE, SSE2, and SSE3 at runtime and will use the best path it can, if and only if the vendor ID is "GenuineIntel." If it is not "GenuineIntel", then it runs a 80386 codepath intead. Thats right.. you heard me.. it runs a codepath for 25 year old CPU's.
Stop making excuses for the bullshit that is Intel's compiler shenanigans.
These 6 core AMD's can be clocked over 4ghz on the stock cooler....and I know its stable. Been running a 1055T at 4.1ghz for several months now.. stock heat sink and fan.
Yes you can overclock Intel chips, but you can overclock AMD chips too. I'm sorry for you that Intel ships with such a crappy heat sink and fan that you have to buy another set to break 4ghz.
The fact remains that Intel's comparable-performing chips are more expensive. Put together a shopping list for the best basic system's (motherboard, CPU, power supply, and case) for each of the $300, $400, $500, $600, and $700 price points. You just wont be able to match AMD's performance for the same cost. I know, I recently tried.
..and just to be clear, all these Thuban's are insanely overclockable... so dont try to pull that "I can overclock Intel" card... its weak grasping.
AMD's system with regards to AMD-V (hardware virtualization) is real simple. All the chips they continue to make support hardware virtualization except the Sempron's, and a few of those also support AMD-V.
All Athlon 64's, Athlon II's, Phenom's, and Phenom II's...
Some of the older Turions didnt support it, but it will probably be hard to find one for sale. Essentially, just get any Phenom II.. its got AMD-V.
10 years from now, I will have at some point purchased the game during one of Steams big discount weekends for 75% off and wont care about "owning" vs "renting."
The previous two civ's retailed with copy protection as well, yet here we have a long list of people who say that while they gladly chowed down on that copy protection, that this one cannot be swallowed. What we have here is group-jerk. "DRM is bad, mmkay".. "yeah! DRM is bad!".. "Hell yeah I hate Steam!".. didn't stop you folks before.. "Yeah Civ3 rocked!".. "I have all the other CIV games"..
I gladly take Phone-Home-Once over the insane mess that was CD Checks. There is no SecuROM, Tages, or SafeDisc on my system. All I've got is Steam. If you installed CivIV from the retail CD, well then you've got some shit infecting your kernel to implement SafeDisc or whatever they first used.
You thought that without Steam, that multi-million dollar game you purchased didn't have DRM? What are you, fucking stupid?
Are you seriously saying that you got a $1 raise that, because of the step function in the tax table, caused you to receive less net pay? WTF? Even if it was a $50 raise, you'd have higher net pay.
I said nothing about me, at all, and the fact that you are willing to jump to that conclusion tells me something about you.
You called someone a liar while making assertions that are demonstrably incorrect. While that doesn't make you a liar, it does make you someone that (a) talks out his ass (b) when exposed as someone who talks out his ass, jumps to wild conclusions about the person who did the exposing.
Here is a few little tips. First, you don't call people liars when you have no fucking idea what you are talking about. Really. You need to be sure of your facts before you do this.
If you "heard" that things were different than what others are saying, you could actually say that you "heard" or "thought" so.. rather than declaring things you "heard" as fact. This may come as a shock to you, but most people take great care in expressing themselves accurately, while you on the other hand say shit that even you know that you do not know. If you dont fucking know, then dont act like you do and dont talk like you know. I know you didnt know because I do fucking know the facts on this one. I have the 2009 tax schedule right in front of me.
$39999 in income, federal tax is $6181.
$40000 in income, federal tax is $6194.
$40049 in income, federal tax is $6194.
$40050 in income, federal tax is $6206.
..this goes on both before and after, at every single $50 increment. Every single time, $1 more in income costs the person moving up a bracket some money.
It can affect your witholdings, but cannot actually increase your (federal) taxes.
I cant believe this bullshit you guys keep repeating. Did you not keep your 2009 tax schedule for you to look in it?
A simple example: For a single person who makes $39999, his federal income tax is $6181. For a person who makes $40000, his federal income tax is $6194. A $1/year raise in this single example can cost a person $12.
This story is true at every single $50 increment. $1/year more costs the person money.. EVERY SINGLE TIME IN PUSHES THEM TO THE NEXT $50 INCREMENT!
I could understand you guys saying this complete fucking bullshit if it was like.. only 1 income level.. but it isn't.. its at every single fucking $50 plateau in income.
We arent dealing with a percentage tax here. We are dealing with a tax schedule. It happens. Really. Don't be a fucking moron. Get your tax schedule out and look.
If you dont pay your taxes then sooner or later people with guns come to your door, demand the money, and if you dont fork it over they then lock you up in a building with violent people.
Its much more like a protection racket than stealing.
For a *nix admin it's far more difficult to clean up after somebody who had root access rather then somebody who did not.
Not in this little place we call reality.
In reality you never know if they had root access or not, so regardless of whether they did or did not, you must assume that they did..
This idea that OS's that make an effort to protect their own files are somehow easier to clean up is absurd. The act of running malware, no matter how unprivileged its session, means the whole machine now cannot be trusted.. and any user with access that is up to no good, also means the whole machine cannot be trusted. The airlock is only good when it remains closed.
Your arguments about compression arent precisely true. Its true for archives but not true for a wide array of todays general purpose compression algorithms that use high order arithmetic encoding, and are bijective.
The bijective class of compressors are ones where any arbitrary stream is a valid input for the decompressor.
If you think that you can find entropy that isnt squeezed out of text with algorithms like PAQ, then you can also eliminate it and improve PAQ and win some cash offered by the Hutter prize. We are talking about algorithms that compress English text to about 1 bit per character for large inputs.
The question is not if there is a pattern, but rather if the pattern is distinguishable from random without knowing precisely the pattern to expect (not just what algorithm was used, but also what key)
This is most certainly the case of all high quality encryption methods. If you don't know the key then the pattern just isnt distinguishable. There is no "Hello! I'm AES!" bits.
There is a simple set of tests to confirm this to within any degree of error you want. Begin by encrypting many sets of arbitrary data of whatever length concerns you and then verify that the probability of a given output bit being 0 (or 1) is 50% (within the margin of error you care about.) Then go on to confirm that the correlation between any of the bits is approximately 0 (again within the margin of error you care about.)
Specifically, there is no test to confirm that a given stream is AES encrypted, unless you succeed in decrypting it and can identify that you did in fact succeed.
It only indicates the software has higher value than the risk of being [caught] using it without paying.
Do we really want to go down this road? A criminal can manipulate his risk so that it is arbitrarily small because he has control over when*, where, and how. The worst kind of criminals from a societal standpoint are those that effectively calculate their risk/reward ratio to gain real long term advantages at the expense of others (society itself.)
So in this case its just Petty Piracy instead of an Organized Crime Racket. Have you heard the term 'Death by a thousand pinpricks?'
I'm not saying that I agree with current copyright laws. I'm just saying that a pirate that factors in where he stands on risk/reward is worse for society than one that doesn't.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand all you kids don't remember this, but let's have a history lesson.
I understand that you think you know what you are talking about and that because of it, you think I am a kid. On the contrary I was banging on keys in the late 70's.
.. when the reality is that DRM never stopped them before and it has been much more insidious than Steam will ever be (Steam doesnt HIDE, FUCK WITH THE OS, or SCAN YOUR SYSTEM FOR UNAPPROVED SOFTWARE .. Like the DRM that comes with Civ4 retail .. the DRM everyone seems to approve of)
What you are saying it just not true. Copy protection never went away. Some cracking groups have been around *since* the 80's and have never stopped releasing cracks in all that time. How can this be if copy protection "took a break" as you say. The reality is that you are the one that apparently took a break are missed a good chunk of copy protection history and have since them imagined an alternate reality to fill in the gaps.
FACT: Civ4 shipped with DRM, yet people keep saying that they purchased all the previous CIV's, includes Civ4, but will not buy Civ5 because it has DRM.
FACT: They just have Steam Hate, a wide-spread group-think that surfaced around the time of Half-Life 2's release, and at the time had nothing to do with DRM. Since then those original reasons for hating Steam are gone, so now they rationalize their Steam hate as the more-encompassing "DRM Hate"
Needing the original disk is completely in the control of the end-user.
Fail. You don't know how SafeDisc works because if you did, you would know that having the original disc doesnt help over an extended period of time. The tricks it uses leverage deficiencies of the hardware (the drive) at the time.
With Steam however, the publisher has control and can pull the plug whenever they want for whatever reason they want.
Fail. We are talking about the copy protection not working any more, not the game. Steam has every reason to keep updating its DRM to work on newer systems and this effects ALL steam games both new and old. So when was that last SafeDisc patch? Never? Thats right. You never ever got one, and now Civ4 retail fails to work on Win7. What happens when you can't download the no-cd patch anymore? Game stops working forever? Thats right. Meanwhile my STEAM copy of Civ4 works flawlessly on Win7 when I installed it.
I've owned every Civ game since the original.
So you are cool with copy protection rootkits (like specifically the SafeDisc rootkit installed by the retail copy of Civ4) that wont work on future OS's unless the publisher releases a patch that negates the need for the rootkit (but leaves in on your system anyways), but you arent cool with an honest DRM system that is up front about the terms.
Gotcha. You just think its cool to have blanket-hate for "DRM" because others also think its cool to have such blanket-hate.
And there is such a thing as encouraging bad practice by publishers. I've played every Civ game up to now, but I can get on with my life without Civ V.
Why doesnt the Civ4 rootkit concern you, but the Civ5 DRM does?
..oh, I get it.. you think CD checks with kernel mode rootkits are cool. You *like* finding the CD, hoping that your drive will still read it, and hoping that a newer OS doesnt change the driver model so that the older kernel root kits like the one found in Civ4 wont work any more.... you LIKE that, right?
Agree.
I picked up a years subscription of Pandora One several months ago. I get an endless stream of great music (at 192kbps) 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, with no advertising at all, for the very moderate cost. I don't think that I have ever skipped a song "because it sucked." Every song on my stations are great.
The Candian music service is "simply copy music from others." They've already paid for the right to do so (built in to the price of all blank media) and are protected from lawsuits for doing so.
Agree.
Pandora is amazing. Create a "Pink Floyd" radio station and not only do you get lots of Pink Floyd songs, but also a seemingly endless series of songs that Pink Floyd fans will usually also like. Right now its playing a great song by Stealers Wheel, a band most people have never heard of.
In practice, "small government" means slower growth of the federal budget, which always grows.
Sure, it grew quite a bit under Bush Jr for the short period where republicans had all 3 branches locked up, but look what happened when the Democrats got that same unchallenged power: They literally put the pedal to the metal with regards to budget increases. It has never grown at this rate in my lifetime, and in fact, I could probably argue that its grown more in the past 2 years than it did in the previous 12 combined.
We need competing forces making and challenging spending decisions, so we are far better off if the Republicans take over a branch of government as soon as possible. That doesnt mean that things will suddenly be "OK" again, but right now we are paving a highway to hell with overtime crews working nights and weekends. I'd much prefer that that highway to be paved at the Reagan/Bush Sr/Clinton/Bush Jr rates.
That doesnt effect the standard library, or the extended libraries.
From Agner Fog's Blog
Version 10: Up to SSE4.2 paths for 32-bit Intel, only 386 path for non-Intel.
Version 11: Up to AVX paths for 32-bit Intel, only 386 path for non-Intel.
Version 12: Up to AVX paths for 32-bit Intel, only 386 path for non-Intel.
The story is similar with the Vector Math Library.. If (!GenuineIntel) { run shitty 25 year old code path }
Bullshit.
The fact that AMD's could run unoptimized code faster than the netburst optimized code is only testimonial to how crappy the netburst design was.
FACT: Intel's compiler is more than happy to selectively test for each of SSE, SSE2, and SSE3 at runtime and will use the best path it can, if and only if the vendor ID is "GenuineIntel." If it is not "GenuineIntel", then it runs a 80386 codepath intead. Thats right.. you heard me.. it runs a codepath for 25 year old CPU's.
Stop making excuses for the bullshit that is Intel's compiler shenanigans.
These 6 core AMD's can be clocked over 4ghz on the stock cooler. ...and I know its stable. Been running a 1055T at 4.1ghz for several months now.. stock heat sink and fan.
..and just to be clear, all these Thuban's are insanely overclockable... so dont try to pull that "I can overclock Intel" card... its weak grasping.
Yes you can overclock Intel chips, but you can overclock AMD chips too. I'm sorry for you that Intel ships with such a crappy heat sink and fan that you have to buy another set to break 4ghz.
The fact remains that Intel's comparable-performing chips are more expensive. Put together a shopping list for the best basic system's (motherboard, CPU, power supply, and case) for each of the $300, $400, $500, $600, and $700 price points. You just wont be able to match AMD's performance for the same cost. I know, I recently tried.
AMD's system with regards to AMD-V (hardware virtualization) is real simple. All the chips they continue to make support hardware virtualization except the Sempron's, and a few of those also support AMD-V.
All Athlon 64's, Athlon II's, Phenom's, and Phenom II's...
Some of the older Turions didnt support it, but it will probably be hard to find one for sale. Essentially, just get any Phenom II.. its got AMD-V.
I can build a new one for $150.
10 years from now, I will have at some point purchased the game during one of Steams big discount weekends for 75% off and wont care about "owning" vs "renting."
.. "yeah! DRM is bad!" .. "Hell yeah I hate Steam!" .. didn't stop you folks before .. "Yeah Civ3 rocked!" .. "I have all the other CIV games" ..
The previous two civ's retailed with copy protection as well, yet here we have a long list of people who say that while they gladly chowed down on that copy protection, that this one cannot be swallowed. What we have here is group-jerk. "DRM is bad, mmkay"
I gladly take Phone-Home-Once over the insane mess that was CD Checks. There is no SecuROM, Tages, or SafeDisc on my system. All I've got is Steam. If you installed CivIV from the retail CD, well then you've got some shit infecting your kernel to implement SafeDisc or whatever they first used.
You thought that without Steam, that multi-million dollar game you purchased didn't have DRM? What are you, fucking stupid?
Are you seriously saying that you got a $1 raise that, because of the step function in the tax table, caused you to receive less net pay? WTF? Even if it was a $50 raise, you'd have higher net pay.
I said nothing about me, at all, and the fact that you are willing to jump to that conclusion tells me something about you.
You called someone a liar while making assertions that are demonstrably incorrect. While that doesn't make you a liar, it does make you someone that (a) talks out his ass (b) when exposed as someone who talks out his ass, jumps to wild conclusions about the person who did the exposing.
Here is a few little tips. First, you don't call people liars when you have no fucking idea what you are talking about. Really. You need to be sure of your facts before you do this.
If you "heard" that things were different than what others are saying, you could actually say that you "heard" or "thought" so.. rather than declaring things you "heard" as fact. This may come as a shock to you, but most people take great care in expressing themselves accurately, while you on the other hand say shit that even you know that you do not know. If you dont fucking know, then dont act like you do and dont talk like you know. I know you didnt know because I do fucking know the facts on this one. I have the 2009 tax schedule right in front of me.
The site is wrong. Did you NOT keep your 2009 tax schedule? Really? You didn't keep all records related to your taxes? Really? Are you that stupid?
If you're in the US, you're a liar.
For a single person.. 2009 tax schedule.
..this goes on both before and after, at every single $50 increment. Every single time, $1 more in income costs the person moving up a bracket some money.
$39999 in income, federal tax is $6181.
$40000 in income, federal tax is $6194.
$40049 in income, federal tax is $6194.
$40050 in income, federal tax is $6206.
It can affect your witholdings, but cannot actually increase your (federal) taxes.
I cant believe this bullshit you guys keep repeating. Did you not keep your 2009 tax schedule for you to look in it?
A simple example: For a single person who makes $39999, his federal income tax is $6181. For a person who makes $40000, his federal income tax is $6194. A $1/year raise in this single example can cost a person $12.
This story is true at every single $50 increment. $1/year more costs the person money.. EVERY SINGLE TIME IN PUSHES THEM TO THE NEXT $50 INCREMENT!
I could understand you guys saying this complete fucking bullshit if it was like.. only 1 income level.. but it isn't.. its at every single fucking $50 plateau in income.
We arent dealing with a percentage tax here. We are dealing with a tax schedule. It happens. Really. Don't be a fucking moron. Get your tax schedule out and look.
Taxation is not theft either.
You are right.
If you dont pay your taxes then sooner or later people with guns come to your door, demand the money, and if you dont fork it over they then lock you up in a building with violent people.
Its much more like a protection racket than stealing.
For a *nix admin it's far more difficult to clean up after somebody who had root access rather then somebody who did not.
Not in this little place we call reality.
In reality you never know if they had root access or not, so regardless of whether they did or did not, you must assume that they did..
This idea that OS's that make an effort to protect their own files are somehow easier to clean up is absurd. The act of running malware, no matter how unprivileged its session, means the whole machine now cannot be trusted.. and any user with access that is up to no good, also means the whole machine cannot be trusted. The airlock is only good when it remains closed.
Your arguments about compression arent precisely true. Its true for archives but not true for a wide array of todays general purpose compression algorithms that use high order arithmetic encoding, and are bijective.
The bijective class of compressors are ones where any arbitrary stream is a valid input for the decompressor.
If you think that you can find entropy that isnt squeezed out of text with algorithms like PAQ, then you can also eliminate it and improve PAQ and win some cash offered by the Hutter prize. We are talking about algorithms that compress English text to about 1 bit per character for large inputs.
You are not precisely correct.
The question is not if there is a pattern, but rather if the pattern is distinguishable from random without knowing precisely the pattern to expect (not just what algorithm was used, but also what key)
This is most certainly the case of all high quality encryption methods. If you don't know the key then the pattern just isnt distinguishable. There is no "Hello! I'm AES!" bits.
There is a simple set of tests to confirm this to within any degree of error you want. Begin by encrypting many sets of arbitrary data of whatever length concerns you and then verify that the probability of a given output bit being 0 (or 1) is 50% (within the margin of error you care about.) Then go on to confirm that the correlation between any of the bits is approximately 0 (again within the margin of error you care about.)
Specifically, there is no test to confirm that a given stream is AES encrypted, unless you succeed in decrypting it and can identify that you did in fact succeed.
In the former Soviet republics, Opera is #1 in many cases.
..and this is just a short sampling of the former Soviet republics. Its #1 in more of them, and where it isn't #1 its often a close #2.
#1 in Uzbekistan
#1 in Ukraine
#1 in Georgia
#1 in Belarus
Yeah but this thing is named herpes.. its a new fourth strain too.
It only indicates the software has higher value than the risk of being [caught] using it without paying.
Do we really want to go down this road? A criminal can manipulate his risk so that it is arbitrarily small because he has control over when*, where, and how. The worst kind of criminals from a societal standpoint are those that effectively calculate their risk/reward ratio to gain real long term advantages at the expense of others (society itself.)
So in this case its just Petty Piracy instead of an Organized Crime Racket. Have you heard the term 'Death by a thousand pinpricks?'
I'm not saying that I agree with current copyright laws. I'm just saying that a pirate that factors in where he stands on risk/reward is worse for society than one that doesn't.
* Could be "never."