Yes. My comment down thread touches on this, but this video really does highlight where things can go.
Teachers get the time to figure out the kids. Once they do that, they can mentor and build that kid into the great person they can be, well educated, capable.
Looking back on my own primary school education, which happened in the 70's and 80's, the best education I got was from those teachers who delivered the material well, often relating it to real life things, or concepts that I could understand, and those that took the time to understand who I was, even if I didn't yet. They were the mentors. They helped to change my life for the better. They teased out things they saw and developed them. They are the ones I did contact long after school to say, "thanks."
I can understand teachers -- educators in general getting a bit nervous over something like Kahn Academy. After all, who really needs teachers when kids can just plug in and get smart?
But the thing is, a vast majority of kids won't do that. Some of them can't. Others can, but won't be self-aware and self-directed enough to do that. For most kids, we need teachers at a minimum, and we really need mentors big. A short story:
In High School, I was exposed to Apple ][ computers. There is an Apple//e on my desk that I use regularly to this day. (Electronics, retro programming, writing) We had some programmed instruction material on disks that was supposed to teach us about the computers. Most everybody was new as the computers were only there for a year or two before I showed up.
Basically, the whole idea was to have the teacher shepard the students through the material, answering questions, etc... and most importantly, just make sure they do it. Anyone could do this, given a dry run or two, and some supplementary material to prep on. In fact, as a student, I did exactly that as part of some project.
That's what the teachers fear, and they are right about it too. The thing is, we've been fixated in the US, on test scores and other hard metrics to a point where we totally ignore the real education. Class time is planned down to small increments, test score stakes have been raised right along with requirements in such a way as to dictate what happens in the classroom, and this denies the educator the opportunity to actually educate!
Now, back to that story! These problems were not really manifesting themselves during my time. Some changes could be seen, but for the most part, my High School education was robust, as it happened before we really started the ugly changes. A few of us found out that we could type ctrl-c on the keyboard and break the flow of the BASIC program contained on the disks! Of course, it didn't take long to LIST the program, and then change it, saving it back onto the disk, which we did.
Back then, material would be contained on copied floppies with those floppies distributed each day from the stack. One never really got the same floppy, and students would sometimes carry their own data floppy too, depending on what they were doing. A group of four of us modified that program, with the goal of introducing some jokes in the hopes of the floppy shuffle putting them in the hands of other students! It worked great! The day after we did it, one of us got the modified disk, no fun, but three other students got them too, and the laughter triggered questions leading back to us!
Now, why do we need educators? How does mentoring play out in this digital age where we've got so much information available? This is why:
That teacher, who doubled as the geometry teacher, took us aside and talked about it. He could have disciplined us at that time, really impacting lives, but he didn't. Instead, we got assigned a different track. Our requirement for that year was to learn all we could. We had to decide to do something, state why, then actually do it. If we did that, we got the A grade. If we didn't, we were back in the planned track, just doing the rote exercises, and probably a B grade, because he knew better.
That year changed my life, and that of my four friends! We went from running games to cracking them. We learned binary math the hard way, having just the computer, some photocopied reference material a
Great curio. It runs forever on a set of AA batteries, and I've written a few BASIC programs to show it off. Once in a great while, I'll take notes on it, transferring back to PC via serial cable.
Love the keyboard, and the BASIC environment is the last OS type code that Bill Gates wrote.
Yeah, same here. Great value, and everybody knew it. If they didn't, it only took a quick, "hey look at this!" demo to seal the deal. Notably, Apple still leverages software in tandem with hardware today. It's a compelling model. Not the cheapest, but very high value overall.
The only other company, I can think of right away, that did this was SGI. IRIX came with a nice set of basic multimedia tools.
I've got a project going to put a modern micro-controller into it. There are times when I will write on it too. The keyboard just brings back a wonderful state of mind and many memories of happy times.
Like another contributor up thread mentions, I owe a lot to a Mr. Krouse, who put a few of us on the machines and encouraged us to "go boldly forth", and we did! Figuring out binary math on the blackboard, typing in 6502 assembly language into the monitor to make fast little subroutines, and sounds. Shape tables. Then there was Copy II+ Yeah baby! We had some of everything floating around the school.
Text adventures were the best. I still enjoy playing them. Heh, I've not looked, but those need to be on the smartphones yesterday. Hook 'em early.
LOGO, PASCAL, CP/M...
Artifacting. When I was a kid, the Apple graphics fascinated me. Other computers had a different look to them, well generally. It turns out Woz exploited NTSC to get color. The 3.58 Mhz color carrier present on composite video signals limits overall luma resolution. Small pixels end up getting translated into both luma and color because of their high frequency content. The phase between them and the reference color signal dictates which color will be seen.
Pixel position on the screen equates to color, in other words. Additionally, on all but the very first revision Apple ][ computers, the 7th bit in the high-res graphics screen would trigger a 1/2 pixel phase shift, creating the first "color cell" type graphics to be seen. Of course, that also introduced color clashing...
My first Apple experience was on the monochrome green or amber screen monitor. They had a fairly high image persistence too. I want one for some stuff today, for that exact reason. Man! We are tossing the CRT's at an amazing rate, driving up the cost considerably. I regret getting rid of my old one now, but I digress.
Simple on or off pixels made a lot of sense, until that Apple was connected to a TV where the color fringing on text could be seen, and a whole lot of it could be seen on the 80 column text! That triggered a lot of learning about TV signals, and artifacting on just about every machine I've been on since. If it outputs to TV, I've tried artifacting on it. Lots of fun.
Some of us in high school proposed making up a character set to provide for moderate resolution color graphics. Non user definable characters was seen as a clear disadvantage after we saw what the Atari, Commodore, and other machines could do. My CoCo also had a fix character set, BTW.
The number of variations on artifacted pixels ended up being quite high, with some impressive images possible. Before the Beagle Brothers software came out, we had written a simple painter program in Applesoft and were creating some fairly nice images, though many of those ONE DOT AT A TIME. When displayed on an 80's era TV, colors were seen all over the place, creating pretty solid pixel artists out of some of us.
(not me, I kind of sucked)
When double-high resolution graphics hit the scene, it became apparent that the 1Mhz 6502 wasn't really enough to fully exploit the machine capability. Until that time though, I was stunned at what people managed to do with the Apple. The other machines had faster CPU's, or better graphics chips, not just some hard-wired TTL thing, and that made for more appealing visuals in most cases, but... The Apple was a well rounded experience, and the funny thing about them was most owners had a good setup. Games saw good ports, and the experience, even the wierd audio from clicking the speaker was very good.
So much software for the Apple...
The best though? The machine was laid bare. It shipped with ROM listings, and the slots and pins inside just screamed, "hack me!", and the built in monitor said, "program me!"
Those years spent learning how to get an Apple to do stuff were responsible for my professional work today. We learned so much!
You will love them, they will love you, and the right breed with a little training won't love the people you don't love.
I prefer labs actually. Chocolate and Yellow are my favorites, but the breed over all is a great family / watch dog type breed. There are others, and they vary.
I've seen the following policy make a significant impact on piracy and it did so in a revenue positive way.
The licensing scheme was changed to one that was not so easily cloned. A simple MAC address or DISKID won't cut it. Hash a few factors and put some work into the hash so it makes sense after users do basic things that users do. Where the hash will fail, offer new licenses under update contract or something, and they just deal. That stuff costs a little, and they need to respect the license, and you need to service them when things happen.
From there, you know it will get cracked right? So let that happen!
When the system operates normally, all is good. That's a paying customer, entitled to their use rights, privacy and all that jazz. They have a maintenance contract that gets them license service too, accounting for dead machines and what not. In practice, setup and licensing isn't typically onerous, and the problems with that hash have been few.
So, if it's crackable, what's the deal?
For somebody who has cracked the software, it works just great! But, it also collects use info, and the data needed to identify the machine, and it sends it home, in the form of a running log, and it's done in a sporadic way too. The user isn't going to know, unless they are really looking. That's the twist. A paying user is entitled to their use and privacy, information security, etc... no worries. The infringing user? There are no expectations of any kind. Leverage that.
This monitor capability is built into the software on various levels, and it watches for various license use cases and stays silent to respect the users who bought in and are getting their stuff done, seeing the value. Where the software is operating on an unknown use case, it phones it in.
What has been the impact?
For paying users, none really. Everybody was informed, and we had a few folks call in wanting to know details. We provided them, and they have no worries.
For the infringers, it's been quite interesting. I've been involved with this kind of software for years, and casual piracy has always been at issue, but it's not really a revenue problem. People get up to speed in various ways, and one of those is running some stuff to get experience for a job. Education versions are out there, as are trials, and they are not hard to get, and they are basically full featured too. That was a nice balance, because...
Some of the infringers are a revenue problem. The people running stuff for hobby, learning, etc... weren't prospects because the economics are not there. However, we have found that a pretty fair number of prospects do choose to run stuff to profit, and they often do so without the owner of the business even aware!
Over time, instances of piracy that were resolved were few, and those were often done by local sales who were in the know, and deals got done. Last year alone, the instances of infringers who stepped up to buy a license after being tagged hard were very high.
Typical response is to analyze the log, research the entity infringing, have legal draft it up, then send out the letter. That can very easily be cookie cutter, based on a few use cases derived from the logs. From there, the people infringing are made aware of the problem, and the assumption is some kind of error, or management issue at first. That's easy. Buy a license, or licenses depending, and from there, become a customer, no worries, no discussion. Easy.
If it needs to escalate, various things are done, always offering the simple out of a license at list, with full contract rights, and renewals, etc... no penalties.
The vast majority of people will get the letter, phone up sales, and just buy in as if nothing happened. I think that's the key there. They have the out, and when they take it, it's a good experience, the same good experience everybody gets. They need to know the remedy is complete. Just get on the bus, an
I do not work for an oil company. I do not own a hybrid car, but people close to me do. I've had some quality behind the wheel time and cost metrics because of that. My preference would be we move well away from oil. It is time, and that time can't come quickly enough! Alcohol would work nicely too. Brazil does that, having some where near 40 percent of it's cars running on alcohol. When I can get an electric car that is a net gain, I'll gladly drive one. Hoping they sort things out soon.
At this time, hybrid cars are not the money saver people believe they are. They might not ever be! All electric, or alternative fuel may well prove out to be the best option. I don't know and eagerly await new tech to evaluate.
For me, the ROI on the hybrid doesn't warrant buying one. If I were in a different scenario, I would consider one just to support the overall advancement of transportation tech, but I'm not.
Lots of people buy them to save money, and that's not going to be a favorable experience in many cases, which should explain my post nicely enough now.
Having sorted that out, you do know I can counter with snide stuff right? Do you actually DRIVE your hybrid? How long have you had it?
I've owned mine since 120K miles or so, over a period of 15 years..12 / mile inclusive. Cheap ass and very efficient.
It would be a smart wager to say you won't see the same cost metric over a similar period with similar mileage, which was the secondary point of my post.
Yep. Nice MPG on that one. And the mechanical engine construction out of that time? Out of this world good. Bet yours doesn't burn oil yet either. Mine goes the 5K without being down after 320K + miles. Insane.
(goes off to read the differences in Civic engines, care to share that engine specification? I'm shopping for a second lean car for kids)
Frankly, when I get 10 percent bigger wheels for it, I expect to hit near 50MPG on freeway. It's an old engine, throttle body delivery, with a simple mod or two to flatten out the timing advance system, allowing for more "sweet spot" time at cruise, with some small performance trade-off when driving at full driver demand.
I've had this car for way too many years, and total cost is about.12 per mile, inclusive of everything I've ever spent on it.
The ROI on Hybrids do not make sense at this time. Cool, if you want to early adopt and advance things, but not cool, if the goal was actually saving money on your driving.
If I could get new gears created at a cost that makes sense, I would skip the wheels and mod the rear end to put the torque curve more toward economy, stretching the gears out to make 5th cruise only, easily getting 50 MPG.
IMHO, hybrid cars suffer from complexity right now, and battery weight / performance metrics still are a bit too crappy to make any longer term sense. If we improve batteries, we can reduce complexity, significantly improving the hybrid value proposition. Still a ways off.
Maybe if we improve batteries in general, we could go with all electrics for many use cases too. Either is ok, and I could use either, given the value is really there. Today it isn't.
Wrap each lesson up into a primer, where that "advanced language" is broken down to basic terms. Core material can then be leveraged in multiple ways where people who do see it differently, or who can expand on what is there are free to do so.
out there now. When you were playing Kirk, kids could get a real chemistry set, for example. Now it's a lot different, and that desire to "boldly go where no man has gone before" seems blunted, constrained and discouraged. Much better to play in the sand box with the other kids.
When you were playing Kirk, I was a free range kid doing all manner of things, and yes that includes blowing stuff up. Now free range kids are increasingly rare as we consider that bad parenting, or they are "at risk", or some other fear based thing.
Have you noticed these changes? What do you think about them?
***And you kick a lot of ass Mr Shatner. I enjoy watching your antics. When I see or hear about you, I generally associate that with good times.
I agree increasing the liability would seriously impact cost. We might try and actually get them to fully disclose all known risks, or something like that as a nice split the middle. I personally hate it when I get snagged on software that doesn't do what it says it does, or worse, does something it does not say it does.
The torts on health care are a entirely different animal, and equating those is trolling in my book.
You can make the case for software liability being bad, without trying to make the case that we need to reform torts in health care. And you should, because torts in health care are not the cost driver. private insurers operating on VERY THICK operating costs, and poor distribution of risk / poor management of resources is what drives our costs up so high.
We pay twice what France does per person, and we don't cover everybody, and we don't use our resources wisely. Torts are a minor league part of that.
Outcomes in France are better, and in fact outcomes in most modern nations doing either regulated private insurance, or nationalized programs are better, and their costs are significantly lower than ours are too.
We can put that money into much needed infrastructure, alternative energy build outs and conversions, and small business.
After a time, that pays off nicely, at which point, the wealthy people have something to buy with the money they have, getting a return on the tax just like they did last time.
Remember kids, "your money" is only worth what "your nation" is.
I work with the producer of this software in a close enough capacity that I would know otherwise.
There is somebody right now doing expensive battle in court, currently headed toward a loss. The data is factored, and matched against the user-base, which is known, and under signed contract. Quite simply, a false positive is damn near impossible, because the data exists to know who is authorized and who isn't. Every single seat is known globally. Not hard to sort out the false positives, and if it's a marginal case, I'll bet they don't bother because there are plenty of solid ones.
There is a slip of paper shipped with each box, and that is presented in binary form with original distributions of the software informing people of the system, and the basics of how it works. Authorized use sends NO data. It's authorized use. Wouldn't want the people who paid and are using things properly dealt a bad hand, now would we?
It's really a nice piece of work. If you are authorized, you've read and signed a real contract, not some EULA, so the terms are clear, limiting the kinds of legal you mention. Having done that, your software won't be sending anything as it's operating on a known license authorization. Those are actually quite difficult to get wrong and have the software function. Somebody has to modify the software to execute a unauthorized use, and that's the trigger right there. And since there is no signed contract in place, there can be no expectation of fit, form and function can there? See how that works? Brilliant, if you ask me.
And this isn't DRM. The subtle bit here is simply detecting and communicating unauthorized use. The user will experience no difference in functionality, the cracks out there will still work, etc... Nothing prevents the unauthorized use. Said use is simply communicated with enough data to make the case cut 'n dried.
Been through a few of these now, and it's quite potent.
Oh, and as for your threats of dumping the software? This stuff costs some significant money. Nobody using it would even think twice about the authors dealing with piracy. Nobody cares, because they being the users who are authorized and such, have exactly zero worries. Again, no data is communicated. Non issue.
So far, the few who have had serious firewall setups, and who are pissed about it, appear to not have serious enough firewall setups, which is why they are pissed, with most of their effort fixated on how the data got out in the first place, and not on the unauthorized use part of things.
The way I see it, if you go and grab some binary, particularly a complex and expensive one, crack it, or get a crack from somebody, you pretty much are asking for it, right? I know I would be, and frankly, have never let anything out on the net like that, early adopter of VM technology for a lot of reasons, that being one of them, as this kind of thing has been out there now for a number of years. Data gets tagged too, just so you know, but only when it's unauthorized data, generated on a unauthorized use session. When that data gets communicated, well you get the idea.
All that said, there are still outs. Just keep it a learning experience, off the net for good, data isolated, maybe moved into neutral formats when desired, and the piracy can happen as it always has, leaving the door open for people who learn that way to do so. Hell, I did in the early 80's, and a lot of people I know did. Still can happen.
But, what isn't going to be practical is business use for profit under that scheme.
Your rant is a lot like the guy with the "secure" system, finding out it isn't, caught with pants down, running software unauthorized, more than it does anything else, because again, the authorized users are known, all of them, accounted for, under contract, with no worries at all, actually experiencing a easier get up and running experience than the pirates and their cracks and keygens are.
The twist is the phone home only happens on unauthorized uses, and it does so by vetting both the license and the software instance running.
Compliant users, authorized to use, have nothing phoned home, ever. Non-compliant, unauthorized users do get the phone home, and it's been quite effective.
They get a letter stating the use, user name, place, time, number of instances and a lot of other stuff. That same letter lets them know they can buy a license and how to do so.
We've seen everything from a quick, "oh shit" and a license purchase, to raving mad letters demanding to know exactly how that info got out of their network! Hilarious actually.
Going forward, the only way to realistically pirate is to do it off line, in a VM.
Thanks. That's it really. I've read and contributed since near the beginning, and I wish you good things to come, and lots of family time. Only comes once you know.
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Yes. My comment down thread touches on this, but this video really does highlight where things can go.
Teachers get the time to figure out the kids. Once they do that, they can mentor and build that kid into the great person they can be, well educated, capable.
Looking back on my own primary school education, which happened in the 70's and 80's, the best education I got was from those teachers who delivered the material well, often relating it to real life things, or concepts that I could understand, and those that took the time to understand who I was, even if I didn't yet. They were the mentors. They helped to change my life for the better. They teased out things they saw and developed them. They are the ones I did contact long after school to say, "thanks."
I can understand teachers -- educators in general getting a bit nervous over something like Kahn Academy. After all, who really needs teachers when kids can just plug in and get smart?
But the thing is, a vast majority of kids won't do that. Some of them can't. Others can, but won't be self-aware and self-directed enough to do that. For most kids, we need teachers at a minimum, and we really need mentors big. A short story:
In High School, I was exposed to Apple ][ computers. There is an Apple //e on my desk that I use regularly to this day. (Electronics, retro programming, writing) We had some programmed instruction material on disks that was supposed to teach us about the computers. Most everybody was new as the computers were only there for a year or two before I showed up.
Basically, the whole idea was to have the teacher shepard the students through the material, answering questions, etc... and most importantly, just make sure they do it. Anyone could do this, given a dry run or two, and some supplementary material to prep on. In fact, as a student, I did exactly that as part of some project.
That's what the teachers fear, and they are right about it too. The thing is, we've been fixated in the US, on test scores and other hard metrics to a point where we totally ignore the real education. Class time is planned down to small increments, test score stakes have been raised right along with requirements in such a way as to dictate what happens in the classroom, and this denies the educator the opportunity to actually educate!
Now, back to that story! These problems were not really manifesting themselves during my time. Some changes could be seen, but for the most part, my High School education was robust, as it happened before we really started the ugly changes. A few of us found out that we could type ctrl-c on the keyboard and break the flow of the BASIC program contained on the disks! Of course, it didn't take long to LIST the program, and then change it, saving it back onto the disk, which we did.
Back then, material would be contained on copied floppies with those floppies distributed each day from the stack. One never really got the same floppy, and students would sometimes carry their own data floppy too, depending on what they were doing. A group of four of us modified that program, with the goal of introducing some jokes in the hopes of the floppy shuffle putting them in the hands of other students! It worked great! The day after we did it, one of us got the modified disk, no fun, but three other students got them too, and the laughter triggered questions leading back to us!
Now, why do we need educators? How does mentoring play out in this digital age where we've got so much information available? This is why:
That teacher, who doubled as the geometry teacher, took us aside and talked about it. He could have disciplined us at that time, really impacting lives, but he didn't. Instead, we got assigned a different track. Our requirement for that year was to learn all we could. We had to decide to do something, state why, then actually do it. If we did that, we got the A grade. If we didn't, we were back in the planned track, just doing the rote exercises, and probably a B grade, because he knew better.
That year changed my life, and that of my four friends! We went from running games to cracking them. We learned binary math the hard way, having just the computer, some photocopied reference material a
It's not "free" to the person who paid.
Now the company, always hungry for that quarterly number sees it as "free" because they aren't getting anything now.
That is the cost of undervaluing service to buy market share and those costs need to be carefully considered, or things like this happen.
Yep, that's about where I ended up too. Nice post.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100
You can see many of his early ideas in how the thing operates.
Great curio. It runs forever on a set of AA batteries, and I've written a few BASIC programs to show it off. Once in a great while, I'll take notes on it, transferring back to PC via serial cable.
Love the keyboard, and the BASIC environment is the last OS type code that Bill Gates wrote.
Yeah, same here. Great value, and everybody knew it. If they didn't, it only took a quick, "hey look at this!" demo to seal the deal. Notably, Apple still leverages software in tandem with hardware today. It's a compelling model. Not the cheapest, but very high value overall.
The only other company, I can think of right away, that did this was SGI. IRIX came with a nice set of basic multimedia tools.
. now!
I've got a project going to put a modern micro-controller into it. There are times when I will write on it too. The keyboard just brings back a wonderful state of mind and many memories of happy times.
Like another contributor up thread mentions, I owe a lot to a Mr. Krouse, who put a few of us on the machines and encouraged us to "go boldly forth", and we did! Figuring out binary math on the blackboard, typing in 6502 assembly language into the monitor to make fast little subroutines, and sounds. Shape tables. Then there was Copy II+ Yeah baby! We had some of everything floating around the school.
Text adventures were the best. I still enjoy playing them. Heh, I've not looked, but those need to be on the smartphones yesterday. Hook 'em early.
LOGO, PASCAL, CP/M...
Artifacting. When I was a kid, the Apple graphics fascinated me. Other computers had a different look to them, well generally. It turns out Woz exploited NTSC to get color. The 3.58 Mhz color carrier present on composite video signals limits overall luma resolution. Small pixels end up getting translated into both luma and color because of their high frequency content. The phase between them and the reference color signal dictates which color will be seen.
Pixel position on the screen equates to color, in other words. Additionally, on all but the very first revision Apple ][ computers, the 7th bit in the high-res graphics screen would trigger a 1/2 pixel phase shift, creating the first "color cell" type graphics to be seen. Of course, that also introduced color clashing...
My first Apple experience was on the monochrome green or amber screen monitor. They had a fairly high image persistence too. I want one for some stuff today, for that exact reason. Man! We are tossing the CRT's at an amazing rate, driving up the cost considerably. I regret getting rid of my old one now, but I digress.
Simple on or off pixels made a lot of sense, until that Apple was connected to a TV where the color fringing on text could be seen, and a whole lot of it could be seen on the 80 column text! That triggered a lot of learning about TV signals, and artifacting on just about every machine I've been on since. If it outputs to TV, I've tried artifacting on it. Lots of fun.
Some of us in high school proposed making up a character set to provide for moderate resolution color graphics. Non user definable characters was seen as a clear disadvantage after we saw what the Atari, Commodore, and other machines could do. My CoCo also had a fix character set, BTW.
The number of variations on artifacted pixels ended up being quite high, with some impressive images possible. Before the Beagle Brothers software came out, we had written a simple painter program in Applesoft and were creating some fairly nice images, though many of those ONE DOT AT A TIME. When displayed on an 80's era TV, colors were seen all over the place, creating pretty solid pixel artists out of some of us.
(not me, I kind of sucked)
When double-high resolution graphics hit the scene, it became apparent that the 1Mhz 6502 wasn't really enough to fully exploit the machine capability. Until that time though, I was stunned at what people managed to do with the Apple. The other machines had faster CPU's, or better graphics chips, not just some hard-wired TTL thing, and that made for more appealing visuals in most cases, but... The Apple was a well rounded experience, and the funny thing about them was most owners had a good setup. Games saw good ports, and the experience, even the wierd audio from clicking the speaker was very good.
So much software for the Apple...
The best though? The machine was laid bare. It shipped with ROM listings, and the slots and pins inside just screamed, "hack me!", and the built in monitor said, "program me!"
Those years spent learning how to get an Apple to do stuff were responsible for my professional work today. We learned so much!
Some days, I'm crappy, bur
attention.
Post up more of these, and I'll gladly change that.
Maybe two.
You will love them, they will love you, and the right breed with a little training won't love the people you don't love.
I prefer labs actually. Chocolate and Yellow are my favorites, but the breed over all is a great family / watch dog type breed. There are others, and they vary.
Nobody here is going to like this, but...
I've seen the following policy make a significant impact on piracy and it did so in a revenue positive way.
The licensing scheme was changed to one that was not so easily cloned. A simple MAC address or DISKID won't cut it. Hash a few factors and put some work into the hash so it makes sense after users do basic things that users do. Where the hash will fail, offer new licenses under update contract or something, and they just deal. That stuff costs a little, and they need to respect the license, and you need to service them when things happen.
From there, you know it will get cracked right? So let that happen!
When the system operates normally, all is good. That's a paying customer, entitled to their use rights, privacy and all that jazz. They have a maintenance contract that gets them license service too, accounting for dead machines and what not. In practice, setup and licensing isn't typically onerous, and the problems with that hash have been few.
So, if it's crackable, what's the deal?
For somebody who has cracked the software, it works just great! But, it also collects use info, and the data needed to identify the machine, and it sends it home, in the form of a running log, and it's done in a sporadic way too. The user isn't going to know, unless they are really looking. That's the twist. A paying user is entitled to their use and privacy, information security, etc... no worries. The infringing user? There are no expectations of any kind. Leverage that.
This monitor capability is built into the software on various levels, and it watches for various license use cases and stays silent to respect the users who bought in and are getting their stuff done, seeing the value. Where the software is operating on an unknown use case, it phones it in.
What has been the impact?
For paying users, none really. Everybody was informed, and we had a few folks call in wanting to know details. We provided them, and they have no worries.
For the infringers, it's been quite interesting. I've been involved with this kind of software for years, and casual piracy has always been at issue, but it's not really a revenue problem. People get up to speed in various ways, and one of those is running some stuff to get experience for a job. Education versions are out there, as are trials, and they are not hard to get, and they are basically full featured too. That was a nice balance, because...
Some of the infringers are a revenue problem. The people running stuff for hobby, learning, etc... weren't prospects because the economics are not there. However, we have found that a pretty fair number of prospects do choose to run stuff to profit, and they often do so without the owner of the business even aware!
Over time, instances of piracy that were resolved were few, and those were often done by local sales who were in the know, and deals got done. Last year alone, the instances of infringers who stepped up to buy a license after being tagged hard were very high.
Typical response is to analyze the log, research the entity infringing, have legal draft it up, then send out the letter. That can very easily be cookie cutter, based on a few use cases derived from the logs. From there, the people infringing are made aware of the problem, and the assumption is some kind of error, or management issue at first. That's easy. Buy a license, or licenses depending, and from there, become a customer, no worries, no discussion. Easy.
If it needs to escalate, various things are done, always offering the simple out of a license at list, with full contract rights, and renewals, etc... no penalties.
The vast majority of people will get the letter, phone up sales, and just buy in as if nothing happened. I think that's the key there. They have the out, and when they take it, it's a good experience, the same good experience everybody gets. They need to know the remedy is complete. Just get on the bus, an
I do not work for an oil company.
I do not own a hybrid car, but people close to me do. I've had some quality behind the wheel time and cost metrics because of that.
My preference would be we move well away from oil. It is time, and that time can't come quickly enough!
Alcohol would work nicely too. Brazil does that, having some where near 40 percent of it's cars running on alcohol.
When I can get an electric car that is a net gain, I'll gladly drive one. Hoping they sort things out soon.
At this time, hybrid cars are not the money saver people believe they are. They might not ever be! All electric, or alternative fuel may well prove out to be the best option. I don't know and eagerly await new tech to evaluate.
For me, the ROI on the hybrid doesn't warrant buying one. If I were in a different scenario, I would consider one just to support the overall advancement of transportation tech, but I'm not.
Lots of people buy them to save money, and that's not going to be a favorable experience in many cases, which should explain my post nicely enough now.
Having sorted that out, you do know I can counter with snide stuff right?
Do you actually DRIVE your hybrid?
How long have you had it?
I've owned mine since 120K miles or so, over a period of 15 years. .12 / mile inclusive. Cheap ass and very efficient.
It would be a smart wager to say you won't see the same cost metric over a similar period with similar mileage, which was the secondary point of my post.
Yep. Nice MPG on that one. And the mechanical engine construction out of that time? Out of this world good. Bet yours doesn't burn oil yet either. Mine goes the 5K without being down after 320K + miles. Insane.
(goes off to read the differences in Civic engines, care to share that engine specification? I'm shopping for a second lean car for kids)
cheap ass.
Frankly, when I get 10 percent bigger wheels for it, I expect to hit near 50MPG on freeway. It's an old engine, throttle body delivery, with a simple mod or two to flatten out the timing advance system, allowing for more "sweet spot" time at cruise, with some small performance trade-off when driving at full driver demand.
I've had this car for way too many years, and total cost is about .12 per mile, inclusive of everything I've ever spent on it.
The ROI on Hybrids do not make sense at this time. Cool, if you want to early adopt and advance things, but not cool, if the goal was actually saving money on your driving.
If I could get new gears created at a cost that makes sense, I would skip the wheels and mod the rear end to put the torque curve more toward economy, stretching the gears out to make 5th cruise only, easily getting 50 MPG.
IMHO, hybrid cars suffer from complexity right now, and battery weight / performance metrics still are a bit too crappy to make any longer term sense. If we improve batteries, we can reduce complexity, significantly improving the hybrid value proposition. Still a ways off.
Maybe if we improve batteries in general, we could go with all electrics for many use cases too. Either is ok, and I could use either, given the value is really there. Today it isn't.
Seriously, it's going to grow as structured. Soon we will be enduring their crap on every form of transportation there is.
one could just do meta-Kahn academy.
Wrap each lesson up into a primer, where that "advanced language" is broken down to basic terms. Core material can then be leveraged in multiple ways where people who do see it differently, or who can expand on what is there are free to do so.
Looks to me like they are wanting to model "files" after "things", essentially abstracting away basic computing.
It will make IP much more of a reality than it is today.
Lessig was right on with "Code".
out there now. When you were playing Kirk, kids could get a real chemistry set, for example. Now it's a lot different, and that desire to "boldly go where no man has gone before" seems blunted, constrained and discouraged. Much better to play in the sand box with the other kids.
When you were playing Kirk, I was a free range kid doing all manner of things, and yes that includes blowing stuff up. Now free range kids are increasingly rare as we consider that bad parenting, or they are "at risk", or some other fear based thing.
Have you noticed these changes? What do you think about them?
***And you kick a lot of ass Mr Shatner. I enjoy watching your antics. When I see or hear about you, I generally associate that with good times.
Thanks for a lot of great tunes, and a minor-sub culture I enjoy very much.
it's not equatable to the torts on health care.
I agree increasing the liability would seriously impact cost. We might try and actually get them to fully disclose all known risks, or something like that as a nice split the middle. I personally hate it when I get snagged on software that doesn't do what it says it does, or worse, does something it does not say it does.
The torts on health care are a entirely different animal, and equating those is trolling in my book.
You can make the case for software liability being bad, without trying to make the case that we need to reform torts in health care. And you should, because torts in health care are not the cost driver. private insurers operating on VERY THICK operating costs, and poor distribution of risk / poor management of resources is what drives our costs up so high.
We pay twice what France does per person, and we don't cover everybody, and we don't use our resources wisely. Torts are a minor league part of that.
Outcomes in France are better, and in fact outcomes in most modern nations doing either regulated private insurance, or nationalized programs are better, and their costs are significantly lower than ours are too.
We can put that money into much needed infrastructure, alternative energy build outs and conversions, and small business.
After a time, that pays off nicely, at which point, the wealthy people have something to buy with the money they have, getting a return on the tax just like they did last time.
Remember kids, "your money" is only worth what "your nation" is.
I work with the producer of this software in a close enough capacity that I would know otherwise.
There is somebody right now doing expensive battle in court, currently headed toward a loss. The data is factored, and matched against the user-base, which is known, and under signed contract. Quite simply, a false positive is damn near impossible, because the data exists to know who is authorized and who isn't. Every single seat is known globally. Not hard to sort out the false positives, and if it's a marginal case, I'll bet they don't bother because there are plenty of solid ones.
There is a slip of paper shipped with each box, and that is presented in binary form with original distributions of the software informing people of the system, and the basics of how it works. Authorized use sends NO data. It's authorized use. Wouldn't want the people who paid and are using things properly dealt a bad hand, now would we?
It's really a nice piece of work. If you are authorized, you've read and signed a real contract, not some EULA, so the terms are clear, limiting the kinds of legal you mention. Having done that, your software won't be sending anything as it's operating on a known license authorization. Those are actually quite difficult to get wrong and have the software function. Somebody has to modify the software to execute a unauthorized use, and that's the trigger right there. And since there is no signed contract in place, there can be no expectation of fit, form and function can there? See how that works? Brilliant, if you ask me.
And this isn't DRM. The subtle bit here is simply detecting and communicating unauthorized use. The user will experience no difference in functionality, the cracks out there will still work, etc... Nothing prevents the unauthorized use. Said use is simply communicated with enough data to make the case cut 'n dried.
Been through a few of these now, and it's quite potent.
Oh, and as for your threats of dumping the software? This stuff costs some significant money. Nobody using it would even think twice about the authors dealing with piracy. Nobody cares, because they being the users who are authorized and such, have exactly zero worries. Again, no data is communicated. Non issue.
So far, the few who have had serious firewall setups, and who are pissed about it, appear to not have serious enough firewall setups, which is why they are pissed, with most of their effort fixated on how the data got out in the first place, and not on the unauthorized use part of things.
The way I see it, if you go and grab some binary, particularly a complex and expensive one, crack it, or get a crack from somebody, you pretty much are asking for it, right? I know I would be, and frankly, have never let anything out on the net like that, early adopter of VM technology for a lot of reasons, that being one of them, as this kind of thing has been out there now for a number of years. Data gets tagged too, just so you know, but only when it's unauthorized data, generated on a unauthorized use session. When that data gets communicated, well you get the idea.
All that said, there are still outs. Just keep it a learning experience, off the net for good, data isolated, maybe moved into neutral formats when desired, and the piracy can happen as it always has, leaving the door open for people who learn that way to do so. Hell, I did in the early 80's, and a lot of people I know did. Still can happen.
But, what isn't going to be practical is business use for profit under that scheme.
Your rant is a lot like the guy with the "secure" system, finding out it isn't, caught with pants down, running software unauthorized, more than it does anything else, because again, the authorized users are known, all of them, accounted for, under contract, with no worries at all, actually experiencing a easier get up and running experience than the pirates and their cracks and keygens are.
The twist is the phone home only happens on unauthorized uses, and it does so by vetting both the license and the software instance running.
Compliant users, authorized to use, have nothing phoned home, ever. Non-compliant, unauthorized users do get the phone home, and it's been quite effective.
They get a letter stating the use, user name, place, time, number of instances and a lot of other stuff. That same letter lets them know they can buy a license and how to do so.
We've seen everything from a quick, "oh shit" and a license purchase, to raving mad letters demanding to know exactly how that info got out of their network! Hilarious actually.
Going forward, the only way to realistically pirate is to do it off line, in a VM.
Rob,
Thanks. That's it really. I've read and contributed since near the beginning, and I wish you good things to come, and lots of family time. Only comes once you know.
atariREALLYSUCKS.com
Ford missed it.