You can not copy protect a CD. What they have done is restricted the players that will PLAY the CD. A computer can not PLAY the cd but it certainly can COPY the CD. As long as CD writers are available that write in RAW mode, you will be able to copy any CD. As long is their is LINUX, CD writers will be manufactured with RAW write capability. Almost all CDR's manufactured today have this capability, and I am fairly shure that all CDR's that are 8.8.16 or older will. Here is the URL of a company that makes a nice piece of software that will copy these CD's.
http://www.elby.org/CloneCD/english/index.htm
This software does not break the incryption so there is no problem under the DMCA. It simply does a binary image of the CD in RAW MODE. Works basically the same way as GHOST works for imaging a hard drive.
Our software writes to and reads from the registry continuously. The Registry is a convenient place to store information that is necessary to the clients business but occasionally has to be changed. Many application programs routinely make Registry changes. Items that tend to be stored in the Registry are 'Merchant ID Number', Processor ID, etc. I am not saying the the Registry is not overused, and that a lot of data that should be stored someplace else is being stored in the Registry. This is certainly true. If you look at the size of your Registry save file you will find it is huge. Everybody is storing data in the Registry and if you lock all those programs out, very little work may get done.
Boycot does not hurt enough, quickly enough. Some record companies (Universal) are currently releasing their CD's with digital rights encoding so that they will not play on a computers CD.
Solution:
1. Get a group of friends together. 2. Buy up a large number of these CD's using a real credit card (not a debit card). 3. Try to play the CD on you computer (there is no warning on the packaging stating that the play is restricted to certain types of approved players). 4. Return the CD as defective an ask for a replacement CD. 5. Return the replacement CD as defective and ask for you money back (be sure to leave the CD at the store but do not loose the receipt). If they refuse to return your money notify the Credit Card Company of the false charge. The store will receive a $20 penalty for not refunding your money plus the chargeback. There is almost always a chargeback fee anyway. If you and your friends suck up the entire inventory of a particularly hot release, fun for everyone.
There are motherboards out there with special features on the motherboard that can materially improve performance at little or no cost. The ASUS A7V motherboad supports ATA-100 drives. If you use two ATA-100 drives that are identical, the A7V has a hardware jumper on the motherboard that will set them up as RAID 0. A pair of 40G IBM ATA-100 drives gives you what appears to be a single 80G drive and it flies. PS. This motherboard is for the Athlon class processor and uses PC-133 RAM. In all a very inexpensive machine with very startling performance.
There is an important aspect of this thread that appears to be overlooked. Several very influential gentlemen in the LINUX community have declared that they will FORK any RAND approved patent. This is an open war that nobody wants including the W3C. Fragmentng the Web is likely to be very costly and benefits nobody. Companies like HP and Apple are benefiting from the work done by the open source community. The cost to them could be high if their propriatory code (tied in with GPL code) resulted in their being denied the use of GPL code.
I think the concern here is overstated, there is no reason for the server to be anonymous.
1. You are talking about the individual customer, no customer then no revinue.
2. The problem with napster is bandwidth, a busy napster server sucks up bandwidth the costs the ISP money. If the account costs more than its revenue, the the ISP is likely to shut it down. If that is not the case, the ISP has a real financial reason to leave it open.
3. You are not in business (receiving compensation for the service you are providing). Since your are providing a free service to your neighbors (fellow citizens) which has substantial legitimate use, getting any form of a jury conviction is about zero.
4. The cost of prosecuting an individual (for a corporation) far exceeds any remedy the corporation could expect to collect.
5. Bad publicity could cost the prosecutor dearly (political as well). Look at how fast Adobe backed down against Dmitry once public opinion has been aroused.
6. First Amendment rights probably apply which will also have a deterrant.
I do not think that the private citizen is at risk. Notice how much hot water the police agency in Tiawan got into when they raided a school dorm looking for napster use.
As I understand this, the software is being given away free with the advertized functionality as being an improved file (download) transfer program. Attached to the program is a Trojan that steals information (something of value) off of your computer. If the court is saying that AOL set up their site in such a way that the user would be unaware of this Trojan, then AOL is HACKING into your computer. This is a federal offense and hackers caught and convicted of hacking into other people's computers and doing no damage are receiving jail sentences. How much jail time for AOL executives (the ones that approved this Trojan) for hacking into your computer and stealing something of value.
What do you think?
NOTE: A Lousiana federal district court threw out the shrink wrap license agreement in the late 1980's. That is why we have the click agreement that you supposedly have to read. Shrink wrap license agrements have been dead for 12 years (uninforcable).
I have read most of the comments on this subject and agree with most of what has been said from a practical point of view. But what of the MORAL point of view.
When and administration at my University pulled a similar stunt, the students banned together and demonstrated that the STUDENTS run the university not the ADMINISTRATION.
Why NOT:
1. Get a group of students together with plackards and form a picket line in front of the administration building.
2. Set out booths and hand out flyers.
3. Post cartoons (political) on bulletin boards rediculing the administration.
4. Hold sit-ins in the administration building.
5. Roast marshmellows over a fire started in the waste basket in the deans office.
Thomas E. Wiles
University of California (Berkeley)
Class of 1965
They ran like the cowards they are!!!
WE ALL GRADUATED TOO!!!
You are missing something:
Say the owner of three CD's wants to make up a CD consisting of different tracks of those three CD's. As long as he owns the original, then having the copy CD is LEGAL. The recording industry wants to collect the royalty twice since ther is no GUARANTEE that the copy would be used legally. People have been doing this quite legally for forty years with real-to-real tape drives and their right to do this has been confirmed by the Supreme Court.
TOM
Don't be so shure, remember OUTPOST.
The chat room reviews of OUTPOST were so bad that everyone had to buy the game to see if it could possible be true. I know, I spend 55 dollars for a game I KNEW could not be as bad as the chat reviews. IT WAS. Look at their sales. I bet that 2/3rds of OUTPOSTS sales was to people that had to see it for themselves. What a marketing technique. May have to get MYST III just to see if it is really this bad. Then again, maby I learned my lesson the first time.
TOM
Object oriented programming lends itself to bloated code. You take an object that has most of the functionality you need, declare a child and add the last of of the functionality you need. This methodology cuts developement time and helps inexperienced programmers to write application level programs. The result, horribly bloated code. A simple program that performed an important task I wrote in Borand C++ Builder created a 190K executable. Written in Borland Pascal 7 created a 30K executable. Written in Assembly Language (yes I still can) created a 800 byte executable. That is right 190K to.8K. Microsoft's compilers are worse. The functional overhead of loading and running these routines requires cpu cycles, lots of them. I remember when Wordstar ran just fine on a 2MHZ 8080 with 20K of memory and that included room for the program, CPM operating system, and Data.
You are not going to find much as very little has been written yet. Your idea is excellent, and a text on the subject would be an excellent Doctoral thesis. I would concentrate more on the people that built computing rather than the hardware an events. There may be a biography published on Grace Hopper. She had the most influence on the Computer culture as it grew. She was the original guru. Denis Ritche and the Bell LAb boys are still alive, interviews might be possible. Ward Christenen built the basis for communication between computers (x-moden, y-modem, z-modem etc.). He gave all his work away and the distributions on 8" floppies spanned several disks, all his work. 'The Cathedral and the Bassar' (probably misspelt) by Erik Raymond is the only publication I know of that directly address computer culture. It covers about 1985 to the present but focuses on the open source community only.
Good luck
Tom
The problem here is that a great deal besides PORN is being filtered. Cyber Patrol currently censors The Register (An internationally respected high technology online NEWSPAPER). That is specifically addressed in the Constitution. Congress is barred from taking any action which inhibits freedom of the press. The Register is currently being censored by Cyber Patrol because the people at Cyber Patrol did not like an article published by The Register covering the activities of a Free Speach organization.
The answer is not clear cut and depends on the school.
At some Universities Computer Science is under the school of Computer Science and Computer Engineering is under the School of Engineering. In many cases the core courses are the same but the pheripheral courses are not. A good comparison is a Degree in Physics and a Degree in Engineering Physics. In Engineering Physics, engineering (technical) courses were substituted for German and some of the humanities. My roommate at Cal Berkley switched for Physics to Engineering Physics when he discovered he could not pass the foreign language (German).
In Computer Engineering you will probably get at least an additional 8 units of core Differential Equations plus Properties of Materials, Mechanics, and more Chemistry. If the school is very large (like Cal Berkeley) there will be multiple majors within each degree and their electives will be substantially different. For instance, subjects like communication theory (routers, gateways, switches) are more likely to be under Computer Science than Computer Engineering.
Unfortunately there is no national standard so the school's course of study must be considered. For instance both UTD (University of Texas, Dallas) and UNT (University of North Texas) give a drgree in Computer Science with almost no common subject material.
Good Luck.
I do not think so. The Patent itself has no value. The value comes from being in a position to inforce the Patent. Rambus has the finances and legal staff to support their Patent claim and therefore profit from the licensing of the Patent. The individual researcher does not have these resources and will therefore be taken advantage of. The new procedures will hurt the small innovator not help him.
The problem is not the reliability of the floppy, but the fact that students always abuse the media. The percentage of students who attempt to go through a four year COMPUTER SCIENCE program on ONE floppy disk (for all courses) in mind boggling. Head wear on floppy disks gives them a very finite life. I spend my first lecture (data structures in C++) on the need to rotate five new floppy disks, and the necessity of storing all important work on at least three of these disks. Five new floppy disks are listed as a course requirement in my sylabus. It is hopeless, not one student in 10 will heed the warning. No matter what media you use, the problem will continue. This is one lesson that can only be learned by going through an absolute disaster. Sad but true.
If it is important that the source not be traced back to you, use a spoofing sight such as www.anon.free.anonymizer.com. This site will break all trace information back to you. If the site is doing it's job, all information about who posted the item is lost when you log out.
I agree but I also consider it dangerous, particularly in Computer Science. First, laptops and a distraction on the classroom although I occasionally get a student who can take notes efficiently on a laptop. Second, students would be tempted to do their Lab assignments and projects on the laptops instead of the school's machine. A lab machine at my school can be ghosted from the server in fifteen minutes, if the student accidently wipes his laptop, all is lost. I have one assembly language exercise that requires them to store data in a sector on the ZERO track (where the MBR is stored). Write to the wrong sector and the OS is gone. Third, I told my students one semester that I would flunk the first student who turned in an assignment diskette with a virus on it. For homework #1, 18 of 28 diskettes had at least one virus on the diskette. I am of the opinion that laptops (except in special cases0 have a negative affect on education.
I do not think that there is any question that what you are doing is legal. First, you do not HAVE to purchase a new computer to buy (legally) an OEM version of WIN 95/98. The Microsoft OEM license allows any OEM to sell an OEM version of WIN 98 to any customer as long as one of three conditions is met.
1. The customer buys a new computer.
2. The customer buys a motherboard.
3. The customer buys a Hard Drive.
The sale of an OEM copy of WIN 98 can be tied to a hard drive which is an upgrade option. Since there is no licensing requirement that the hard drive pruchased has to be put in a computer (it could be used as a door stop) the OS may be moved freely from machine to machine as long as it does not run on more than one machine at a time.
A point is being missed here. There are 560 known compromised systems (there have shurely been cleaned). My guess is that there are at least 10 undetected compromised systems for every one that has been detected. If a DDos attack is being co-ordinated, we are looking at 6000 machines not 560 and most of these machines will be on T1 lines or better. The threat of a well co-ordinated attack looks very real to me.
I have noticed the same symption in Plano, TX. My ADSL download rates and general internet speed has deminished by about 30% in the last two months. Typical downloads run between 12K and 16K except very late at night. I expect it is bandwidth either through my ISP or GTE. The entire internet appears to be slowing down.
TOM
Printed manuals are still here, they are being supplied by a third party. When I wrote code in Borland Pascal (v1 -v7) and Borland C++ I typically had two reference books besides the printer manuals. Today with Delphi and Borland C++ Builder (on line documentation) I have five reference books for each costing and additional $130. As a whole, professionally published documentation is far superior as it sells on its own merits. Good ducumentation is priceless!
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Guys:
You can not copy protect a CD. What they have done is restricted the players that will PLAY the CD. A computer can not PLAY the cd but it certainly can COPY the CD. As long as CD writers are available that write in RAW mode, you will be able to copy any CD. As long is their is LINUX, CD writers will be manufactured with RAW write capability. Almost all CDR's manufactured today have this capability, and I am fairly shure that all CDR's that are 8.8.16 or older will. Here is the URL of a company that makes a nice piece of software that will copy these CD's.
http://www.elby.org/CloneCD/english/index.htm
This software does not break the incryption so there is no problem under the DMCA. It simply does a binary image of the CD in RAW MODE. Works basically the same way as GHOST works for imaging a hard drive.
TOM
Our software writes to and reads from the registry continuously. The Registry is a convenient place to store information that is necessary to the clients business but occasionally has to be changed. Many application programs routinely make Registry changes. Items that tend to be stored in the Registry are 'Merchant ID Number', Processor ID, etc. I am not saying the the Registry is not overused, and that a lot of data that should be stored someplace else is being stored in the Registry. This is certainly true. If you look at the size of your Registry save file you will find it is huge. Everybody is storing data in the Registry and if you lock all those programs out, very little work may get done.
TOM
Boycot does not hurt enough, quickly enough. Some record companies (Universal) are currently releasing their CD's with digital rights encoding so that they will not play on a computers CD.
Solution:
1. Get a group of friends together. 2. Buy up a large number of these CD's using a real credit card (not a debit card). 3. Try to play the CD on you computer (there is no warning on the packaging stating that the play is restricted to certain types of approved players). 4. Return the CD as defective an ask for a replacement CD. 5. Return the replacement CD as defective and ask for you money back (be sure to leave the CD at the store but do not loose the receipt). If they refuse to return your money notify the Credit Card Company of the false charge. The store will receive a $20 penalty for not refunding your money plus the chargeback. There is almost always a chargeback fee anyway. If you and your friends suck up the entire inventory of a particularly hot release, fun for everyone.
TOM
TOM
There are motherboards out there with special features on the motherboard that can materially improve performance at little or no cost. The ASUS A7V motherboad supports ATA-100 drives. If you use two ATA-100 drives that are identical, the A7V has a hardware jumper on the motherboard that will set them up as RAID 0. A pair of 40G IBM ATA-100 drives gives you what appears to be a single 80G drive and it flies. PS. This motherboard is for the Athlon class processor and uses PC-133 RAM. In all a very inexpensive machine with very startling performance.
TOM
There is an important aspect of this thread that appears to be overlooked. Several very influential gentlemen in the LINUX community have declared that they will FORK any RAND approved patent. This is an open war that nobody wants including the W3C. Fragmentng the Web is likely to be very costly and benefits nobody. Companies like HP and Apple are benefiting from the work done by the open source community. The cost to them could be high if their propriatory code (tied in with GPL code) resulted in their being denied the use of GPL code.
I think the concern here is overstated, there is no reason for the server to be anonymous. 1. You are talking about the individual customer, no customer then no revinue. 2. The problem with napster is bandwidth, a busy napster server sucks up bandwidth the costs the ISP money. If the account costs more than its revenue, the the ISP is likely to shut it down. If that is not the case, the ISP has a real financial reason to leave it open. 3. You are not in business (receiving compensation for the service you are providing). Since your are providing a free service to your neighbors (fellow citizens) which has substantial legitimate use, getting any form of a jury conviction is about zero. 4. The cost of prosecuting an individual (for a corporation) far exceeds any remedy the corporation could expect to collect. 5. Bad publicity could cost the prosecutor dearly (political as well). Look at how fast Adobe backed down against Dmitry once public opinion has been aroused. 6. First Amendment rights probably apply which will also have a deterrant. I do not think that the private citizen is at risk. Notice how much hot water the police agency in Tiawan got into when they raided a school dorm looking for napster use.
As I understand this, the software is being given away free with the advertized functionality as being an improved file (download) transfer program. Attached to the program is a Trojan that steals information (something of value) off of your computer. If the court is saying that AOL set up their site in such a way that the user would be unaware of this Trojan, then AOL is HACKING into your computer. This is a federal offense and hackers caught and convicted of hacking into other people's computers and doing no damage are receiving jail sentences. How much jail time for AOL executives (the ones that approved this Trojan) for hacking into your computer and stealing something of value. What do you think? NOTE: A Lousiana federal district court threw out the shrink wrap license agreement in the late 1980's. That is why we have the click agreement that you supposedly have to read. Shrink wrap license agrements have been dead for 12 years (uninforcable).
I have read most of the comments on this subject and agree with most of what has been said from a practical point of view. But what of the MORAL point of view. When and administration at my University pulled a similar stunt, the students banned together and demonstrated that the STUDENTS run the university not the ADMINISTRATION. Why NOT: 1. Get a group of students together with plackards and form a picket line in front of the administration building. 2. Set out booths and hand out flyers. 3. Post cartoons (political) on bulletin boards rediculing the administration. 4. Hold sit-ins in the administration building. 5. Roast marshmellows over a fire started in the waste basket in the deans office. Thomas E. Wiles University of California (Berkeley) Class of 1965 They ran like the cowards they are!!! WE ALL GRADUATED TOO!!!
You are missing something: Say the owner of three CD's wants to make up a CD consisting of different tracks of those three CD's. As long as he owns the original, then having the copy CD is LEGAL. The recording industry wants to collect the royalty twice since ther is no GUARANTEE that the copy would be used legally. People have been doing this quite legally for forty years with real-to-real tape drives and their right to do this has been confirmed by the Supreme Court. TOM
Don't be so shure, remember OUTPOST. The chat room reviews of OUTPOST were so bad that everyone had to buy the game to see if it could possible be true. I know, I spend 55 dollars for a game I KNEW could not be as bad as the chat reviews. IT WAS. Look at their sales. I bet that 2/3rds of OUTPOSTS sales was to people that had to see it for themselves. What a marketing technique. May have to get MYST III just to see if it is really this bad. Then again, maby I learned my lesson the first time. TOM
Object oriented programming lends itself to bloated code. You take an object that has most of the functionality you need, declare a child and add the last of of the functionality you need. This methodology cuts developement time and helps inexperienced programmers to write application level programs. The result, horribly bloated code. A simple program that performed an important task I wrote in Borand C++ Builder created a 190K executable. Written in Borland Pascal 7 created a 30K executable. Written in Assembly Language (yes I still can) created a 800 byte executable. That is right 190K to .8K. Microsoft's compilers are worse. The functional overhead of loading and running these routines requires cpu cycles, lots of them. I remember when Wordstar ran just fine on a 2MHZ 8080 with 20K of memory and that included room for the program, CPM operating system, and Data.
You are not going to find much as very little has been written yet. Your idea is excellent, and a text on the subject would be an excellent Doctoral thesis. I would concentrate more on the people that built computing rather than the hardware an events. There may be a biography published on Grace Hopper. She had the most influence on the Computer culture as it grew. She was the original guru. Denis Ritche and the Bell LAb boys are still alive, interviews might be possible. Ward Christenen built the basis for communication between computers (x-moden, y-modem, z-modem etc.). He gave all his work away and the distributions on 8" floppies spanned several disks, all his work. 'The Cathedral and the Bassar' (probably misspelt) by Erik Raymond is the only publication I know of that directly address computer culture. It covers about 1985 to the present but focuses on the open source community only. Good luck Tom
The problem here is that a great deal besides PORN is being filtered. Cyber Patrol currently censors The Register (An internationally respected high technology online NEWSPAPER). That is specifically addressed in the Constitution. Congress is barred from taking any action which inhibits freedom of the press. The Register is currently being censored by Cyber Patrol because the people at Cyber Patrol did not like an article published by The Register covering the activities of a Free Speach organization.
The answer is not clear cut and depends on the school. At some Universities Computer Science is under the school of Computer Science and Computer Engineering is under the School of Engineering. In many cases the core courses are the same but the pheripheral courses are not. A good comparison is a Degree in Physics and a Degree in Engineering Physics. In Engineering Physics, engineering (technical) courses were substituted for German and some of the humanities. My roommate at Cal Berkley switched for Physics to Engineering Physics when he discovered he could not pass the foreign language (German). In Computer Engineering you will probably get at least an additional 8 units of core Differential Equations plus Properties of Materials, Mechanics, and more Chemistry. If the school is very large (like Cal Berkeley) there will be multiple majors within each degree and their electives will be substantially different. For instance, subjects like communication theory (routers, gateways, switches) are more likely to be under Computer Science than Computer Engineering. Unfortunately there is no national standard so the school's course of study must be considered. For instance both UTD (University of Texas, Dallas) and UNT (University of North Texas) give a drgree in Computer Science with almost no common subject material. Good Luck.
I do not think so. The Patent itself has no value. The value comes from being in a position to inforce the Patent. Rambus has the finances and legal staff to support their Patent claim and therefore profit from the licensing of the Patent. The individual researcher does not have these resources and will therefore be taken advantage of. The new procedures will hurt the small innovator not help him.
The problem is not the reliability of the floppy, but the fact that students always abuse the media. The percentage of students who attempt to go through a four year COMPUTER SCIENCE program on ONE floppy disk (for all courses) in mind boggling. Head wear on floppy disks gives them a very finite life. I spend my first lecture (data structures in C++) on the need to rotate five new floppy disks, and the necessity of storing all important work on at least three of these disks. Five new floppy disks are listed as a course requirement in my sylabus. It is hopeless, not one student in 10 will heed the warning. No matter what media you use, the problem will continue. This is one lesson that can only be learned by going through an absolute disaster. Sad but true.
If it is important that the source not be traced back to you, use a spoofing sight such as www.anon.free.anonymizer.com. This site will break all trace information back to you. If the site is doing it's job, all information about who posted the item is lost when you log out.
I agree but I also consider it dangerous, particularly in Computer Science. First, laptops and a distraction on the classroom although I occasionally get a student who can take notes efficiently on a laptop. Second, students would be tempted to do their Lab assignments and projects on the laptops instead of the school's machine. A lab machine at my school can be ghosted from the server in fifteen minutes, if the student accidently wipes his laptop, all is lost. I have one assembly language exercise that requires them to store data in a sector on the ZERO track (where the MBR is stored). Write to the wrong sector and the OS is gone. Third, I told my students one semester that I would flunk the first student who turned in an assignment diskette with a virus on it. For homework #1, 18 of 28 diskettes had at least one virus on the diskette. I am of the opinion that laptops (except in special cases0 have a negative affect on education.
I do not think that there is any question that what you are doing is legal. First, you do not HAVE to purchase a new computer to buy (legally) an OEM version of WIN 95/98. The Microsoft OEM license allows any OEM to sell an OEM version of WIN 98 to any customer as long as one of three conditions is met. 1. The customer buys a new computer. 2. The customer buys a motherboard. 3. The customer buys a Hard Drive. The sale of an OEM copy of WIN 98 can be tied to a hard drive which is an upgrade option. Since there is no licensing requirement that the hard drive pruchased has to be put in a computer (it could be used as a door stop) the OS may be moved freely from machine to machine as long as it does not run on more than one machine at a time.
A point is being missed here. There are 560 known compromised systems (there have shurely been cleaned). My guess is that there are at least 10 undetected compromised systems for every one that has been detected. If a DDos attack is being co-ordinated, we are looking at 6000 machines not 560 and most of these machines will be on T1 lines or better. The threat of a well co-ordinated attack looks very real to me.
I have noticed the same symption in Plano, TX. My ADSL download rates and general internet speed has deminished by about 30% in the last two months. Typical downloads run between 12K and 16K except very late at night. I expect it is bandwidth either through my ISP or GTE. The entire internet appears to be slowing down. TOM
Printed manuals are still here, they are being supplied by a third party. When I wrote code in Borland Pascal (v1 -v7) and Borland C++ I typically had two reference books besides the printer manuals. Today with Delphi and Borland C++ Builder (on line documentation) I have five reference books for each costing and additional $130. As a whole, professionally published documentation is far superior as it sells on its own merits. Good ducumentation is priceless!