the music industry has a ton of lawyers. those lawyers know that if they did that, there'd be hell to pay: it's called bad-faith negotiating, and it costs MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN COURT. a punitive damage award would be likely.
besides, the $750K is supposed to be an advance on the licensing fees. read the article.
MusicNet allegedly requires companies to commit to advance payments of as much as $750,000 before entering into licensing talks, according to Roy and others.
the music industry is full of democrats that contributed to Clinton/Gore. I suspect that's why this is happening now, not earlier.
it's weird though. you'd think that Tipper would have wanted to see an end to record sales in general. but maybe she clued in enough to figure out that the RIAA was doing its best to stop kids from getting music.
while in general I agree with the post (well kinda), I feel the deep inner need to nitpick.:)
At a place like Atari, dozens or even hundreds of people might play a game for hours before it went out the door. All that feedback went back into making the game more playable.
and yes, this explains why on the 2600, Atari's Pac-Man did very well while Sierra On-Line's Jawbreaker (playtested by virtually nobody except a few geeks at Sierra) collapsed.
I don't know about Lode Runner. (Which was an amazing game, much better than the horror which happened later, known as Super Mario.)
That said, I don't know when it went bad. I also don't think there's anything wrong with immersiveness.
The most immersive game I've ever played is Sid Maier's Alpha Centauri. It's intense. You get the what-do-you-mean-it's-sunrise effect.
The next most immersive game, I think, was Paradroid. I played that for days sometimes. (Well nights anyway:) It didn't have flashy graphics (not by today's standards) - but it did have a very intense soundtrack (even if rather low-fi on '80s equipment). And it had a fairly high level of sophistication: although all the different parts of the game were basically speed & dexterity tests, they worked differently; in particular it took a bit to get the hang of the take-over challenge screen.
the other games I miss are the construction games. Quake has tried to step up a bit with level editing, but it's just not the same. racing destruction set especially was an amazing game.
which is another complaint about the green-hat (heh, anybody else notice a similarity to a specific open-source corporate logo there?) list. no racing games. none. geesh. I spent countless hours as a teenager playing great american cross-country road race. not really the greatest game ever, I don't even know who made it. (this was in the heyday of the underground. you just got disks with games on them, had to figure out what they were when you got them.)
so anyway, tangent over, I hope. when it's all said and done, I like quake, and think it's probably the most radical thing to happen to gaming in the '90s (being as it basically introduced both OpenGL and TCP/IP gaming). what I find frustrating actually is that while gaming graphics have come very, very far in a short time, and we've seen some pretty major strides forward in the mainstream for networked play, there hasn't nearly been as much work done on either (a) simple games that function as a test of skill, or (b) storylines. I'd like to see a game on a DVD-ROM that uses the format to hold a whole world. why not?
hmm, maybe it's time for me to get back into programming after all...:)
Age of Empires / System Shock (TIE) (causes bug in numbering)
Super Mario 64
System Shock 2
Duke Nukem 3D
Age of Empires
EverQuest
Age of Empires 2: The Age of Kings
The Bard's Tale
Deus Ex
Tetris
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord
Sid Meier's Civilization 2
Final Fantasy 3
System Shock
M.U.L.E.
Star Control 2
Asheron's Call
Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
Counter-Strike
Street Fighter 2
Command & Conquer
Metal Gear Solid
Sim City
Wing Commander
X-COM: UFO Defense
Baldur's Gate
Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn
Goldeneye 007
Zork: The Great Underground Empire
Thief: The Dark Project
Ultima III: Exodus
Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny
Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time
Marathon
Planescape: Torment
Super Metroid
Quake II
Ultima Online
Empire, Wargame of the Century (and Empire Deluxe)
Total Annihilation
there are actually 51 games, due to their inability to pick a number 10 and then numbering the next one number 11. sigh.
anyway, I've never even heard of: #10 (the second one), #12, #20, #24 (huh - in there twice?), #31, #32, #35, #38 (well apart from the movie:), #46, and #50. so obviously I can't comment on those.
and I quite definitely agree that quite a few of these titles need to be on the list. ones I specifically object to:
Super Mario Brothers - what is with people? It's Donkey Kong, and it has always sucked.
Zork: The Great Underground Empire - the review describes Adventure as being strange and impossible to solve. Gee, guess the acorn doesn't fall far from the tree.
games which I think are missing:
Elite. Hello? Star Control 2 fans? There was a game before it, and it's wickedly amazing. I keep a 64 around just to play it on. You haven't lived until you've played Elite with a WICO Boss joystick that allows you to rotate the stick's base so that you can use the side-laser screens to shoot accurately.
Dungeon Keeper/Dungeon Master/Dungeon Keeper 2. The whole series is brutally addictive.
SMAC. Civ gets #3, Civ2 gets #22. Well fine. Civ2 was a slight revision of Civ: sure the computer opponents are a bit brighter, and there are some cute new technologies (submarines are fun). oh yeah, and the tech path has been changed a bit, so that people can no longer win the game any level up to about Prince or so just by knowing to develop The Wheel first, build a pile of chariots, and beat the crap out of everyone. and Pottery is now a prereq for some things, thus stopping me from only ever learning it in the 20th century (Pyramids are great:)... But SMAC is a whole new game, and it's absolutely wonderful. It deserves at least Civ2's spot.
Oh yeah. And there are no "realistic" karate games. SF2 is the only game listed, with denigrating reference to its descendants, all of which were full of people throwing fireballs and the like. Games like Karateka are totally forgotten.
I stopped playing karate games because of SF2 and its children. The goofy "special moves" are just plain, well, goofy.:)
Anyway, I think I'll go finish last night's SMAC game off now. Enjoy.:)
his judge will be picked either by a random draw (the short straw gets it:) or by another judge, a senior judge in the appropriate circuit (ninth I think).
I don't know which system the US federal court uses. but those two systems are the only ones in the western world.
and yes, I said short straw. no judge would like this case. protesters? people filling the court?
on the B point: perhaps you shouldn't. let's accept your precept at face value, and go with it. (I have doubts. I'm a Canadian. I wasn't alive for the 18th amendment, but I still have doubts.)
there are American distributors of Elcomsoft's product. they are breaking US law (according to you) on US soil and are US citizens.
how many of them are in jail?
whoops.
how many of them gave embarrassing speeches at Defcon about Adobe's security procedures?
Before going into my opinion on why people see M$ in this way, I should explain a few things first.
I am not a Micro$oft-lover; I am posting from an iMac, I own two FreeBSD machines and one Win95B machine, plus a collection of older computers.
I use some M$ products, but I avoid them as much as possible. As will be clear later on, I like Word. I have never bought any of their products, but I did once recommend that my employer buy a copy of FoxPro (which recommendation was followed up on). I am posting from IE5, though, so I can't claim total innocence.:)
I don't really have very much against closed-source code. IMO one of the problems with the hacker world is that they've become a bunch of whiners who don' t even know how to use disassemblers and decompilers anymore. If you have the code, you can figure out how it works. Sure it's hard, but there it is.
so, all that aside. People love Microsoft because their products are incredibly useful.
As programmers, we know that Microsoft products are buggy, poorly written, and often just plain stupid.
However, you try writing a book with a pen and paper. Now open, even, Word 6 running on Win 3.1 and compare. It's not hard: the M$ product wins out every time.
Or try doing some serious accounting work on a paper ledger, then open M$ Money. Damn, but, you know...
The problem, fundamentally, is that computers are too good. Computers in general are such fantastically useful tools that people love them, even when they're seriously non-optimal.
As far as I can tell, the only really strong link in the whole M$ apps network is Word. Word has so many features, I find it quite incredible. (It does have security failings and other failings, of course. But given the size of its codebase, it's actually pretty reliable, I think. Unlike, for example, IIS, which is just a little program.)
Which is why people shell out all that cash for Office, because Word is amazing, and the features it has are stuff they understand. People understand writing. They don't understand email. They like email, they just don't know how it's supposed to happen. So most of them use Outlook because it comes with their Word, and they assume that because Word is amazing, Outlook is too.
So anyway: that's my point. Computers have radically changed people's lives and made possible things that they found hard to imagine before. Even when they're running M$ operating systems, they're still fantastically useful, so nobody thinks to ask if there's something better around.
assuming these were Amiga games you were talking about, no, this is definitely mythology.
why? when you insert a floppy into an Amiga, the floppy drive activates and it scans in to read the volume name (this is to facilitate disk-swapping, something that was easier on the Amiga OS than any other OS I've ever seen) and while doing so, the head jumps over the whole disk, with the whole thing spinning pretty fast. I've actually had Amigas with enough of the case off to see what happens, and I can assure you that there just isn't a part of the disk that doesn't get touched.:)
there's big, hard cash to be made out there in medical informatics. there are only a few Trusted Suppliers of Software, and they get to charge mucho cash.
you see, the tolerance of downtime is very, very low. when a computer crashes in a hospital, people die.
the twenty grand isn't for the hardware, it's for the software. it has to be basically secure from anything but a nuclear attack.
and we all know how difficult it is to guarantee perfect software reliance, right?;)
Windows isn't free. The PC manufacturer paid something for it and passed that cost, plus a markup, onto you.
except when they didn't, of course. one of the tipoffs that this may have happened is when you buy a new computer, and the only manual that ships is a single-sheet keyboard manual.:)
I have two Windows 95 CDs, one inherited from an old computer of my mother's (which was stolen), and another which belonged to a former live-in boyfriend of a woman who I used to date.:)
I also have a CD with MS-DOS 6.22 and Win 3.11 on it, from the same ex-boyfriend of the ex-girlfriend. (Fortunately, I get along with both of them fairly well.:)
I did buy PC DOS 7 way back when IBM was still selling operating systems.
My Amigas and 8-bit computers all came with operating systems. Same for my Mac.
My other computers run FreeBSD, which I downloaded and burned...
So I guess my biggest OS expenditure has been to IBM.:)
except for games which reloaded bits of themselves.
for example, Bard's Tale. it was tricky to crack because of the fact that, at the end of each segment of the game, it went back to the drive and did the protection-check again. gah.
at the other end of the extreme, we have games like AutoDuel. AutoDuel had in some ways a kinda tricky protection scheme. there was a track on the boot floppy that was very strangely formatted (never did figure out what they did to it). anyway, it defeated all the standard disk-copy tools of the time. however, it was vulnerable in one rather surprising way.
the way it checked the protection was by trying to open a file. this file had its starting block in the Track of Doom. consequently, when the floppy drive tried to open that file, it generated an error (a 21 IIRC, and no, I don't remember what a 21 was anymore:)
so the loader would open this file, and then check its status string. if it got a 00 (for ok), then it would blow up.
however, it didn't check which error it received. if the file was not present, the drive would send back a 66, file not found, and the loader thought that was fine (hey, it's not a 00...:)
consequently, it was possible to crack this game just by using a file-by-file copier (as the copier would barf on the problem file, refuse to copy it, and therefore leave it off the duplicate). which was SOP for many people at the time, especially as a prelude to cracking the game. (copy the files, then play with them, see if you can get it to work.)
although I admit it. I saw the new Earthsea book in the bookstore a couple days ago, and I was vaguely tempted. I decided to wait for paperback though.
it's funny that Dozois of all people claims that there are still good authors out there, they're just hard to find. before he took over IAsfm, it was by far the best magazine on the market. it was edited by a woman named Shawna McCarthy, and it was amazing.
in 1984 and '85, everybody knew who all the good authors were. Shawna printed their stories. (for example, check the May '84 issue, or the June issue. all great stories.) now, Dozois edits the year's most pretentious, annoying crap, and Shawna... is editing a little-known magazine called Realms of Fantasy.
interesting. just found some good news, at least Aboriginal SF is still afloat. they're subscription-only though really, no newsstand sales to speak of. thus leaving most of the SF-reading public dependent on... Fantasy & Science Fiction. oh god.
you're not living in the US, you're living in south africa.
well, okay, they use flame throwers to protect their cars, not electricity. go here if you don't believe me. the device in the quicktime is on sale in South Africa, and has been since '98 or so.
I do remember Gunship, the first famous program called Apache.:)
it had a really innovative copy-protection routine. extremely difficult to break. (on the then-king of games, the commodore 64.) there were a few downsides. you had to have a plain-vanilla 1541 floppy drive to run it; IIRC even little things like drive alignment would cause it to not work.
it took about a year before the underground broke it. (this was at a time when the underground usually released games 2-3 months ahead of their commercial releases.)
everybody liked the broken version. why? it would run on a lot of different floppy drives, with non-optimal alignment, even on 1571s. also, it didn't wear down the head the way the commercial version did.
yeah. the commercial version killed your drive. play it for a few hundred hours, and no more drive.
university sysadmins, though? where'd you go to school?
I have seen:
what do you mean, the printer is broken? every time we come by to fix it, it's working. (that's because the students fix it. well, actually, I do. dumbass.)
what does this redundant internet connection idea mean? doesn't it just sound like a way to waste money? (only if you think of wasting money as meaning having a 24/7 internet connection, instead of just most days.:)
is having 1/3 of the ethernet drops in the library dead too many? (really. let's put in public ethernet drops, then not ever check to see if they work.)
we're so friendly, we even allow members of the public who know how to make a three-finger salute come in to our labs and run arbitrary programs on our computers. (password? why hack it? tweakUI? never heard of it...)
every night, I logon at midnight to see if any students are abusing the system. curiously, they always seem to have gone home, and there's nobody logged in. (we all know you do that, dumbass: we logout for fifteen minutes every night, because you do it ON SCHEDULE.)
the whole campus has a perfectly-functional samba server (running on donated sun hardware) that works wonders, so our faculty will set up (and pay for) a Win2K server that crashes every other week for its local data.
we have a clearly-posted hiring policy. it's really simple, there are a lot of different levels. to get in at the bottom level, you have to have a bachelor's degree in computer science, with no experience or references. (ie, one year of copying programs from the few classmates you have who can code, followed by three years of writing essays about computers.) well, if you don't have a bachelor's degree, we'll let you in with equivalent experience: at least 20 years working with computers. (oh yeah. right.)
let's leave the DECnet process running with SYSPRV, so anybody who knows how to run DCL commands over DECnet can create accounts. (don't worry if you don't know VMS. this is akin to making the root password "god":)
our best PAs (lab assistants) keep on violating the computer use policies, so we'll fire them every time we do it. however, every time we fire them, we find ourselves surrounded by lusers complaining that the printers are jammed and other things, so one week later, we'll hire them again, having made our point. (really. one guy I knew got fired six times in a term. I don't think it quite sunk in.)
so anyway. I suppose out there there must be some information technology department that knows what it's doing. but I've been in multiple schools (grad student), and I haven't seen it yet.
how about looking at the actual directive? the relevant article, below, is Article 6.
Obligations as to technological measures
Member States shall provide adequate legal
protection against the circumvention of any effective technological measures,
which the person concerned carries out in the knowledge, or with reasonable
grounds to know, that he or she is pursuing that objective.
Member States shall provide adequate legal
protection against the manufacture, import, distribution, sale, rental,
advertisement for sale or rental, or possession for commercial purposes of
devices, products or components or the provision of services which:
are promoted, advertised or marketed for
the purpose of circumvention of, or
have only a limited commercially
significant purpose or use other than to circumvent, or
are primarily designed, produced, adapted
or performed for the purpose of enabling or facilitating the circumvention of,
any effective technological measures.
For the purposes of this Directive, the
expression "technological measures" means any technology, device or
component that, in the normal course of its operation, is designed to prevent or
restrict acts, in respect of works or other subject-matter, which are not
authorised by the rightholder of any copyright or any right related to copyright
as provided for by law or the sui generis right provided for in Chapter III of
Directive 96/9/EC. Technological measures shall be deemed "effective" where
the use of a protected work or other subject-matter is controlled by the
rightholders through application of an access control or protection process,
such as encryption, scrambling or other transformation of the work or other
subject-matter or a copy control mechanism, which achieves the protection
objective.
Notwithstanding the legal protection
provided for in paragraph 1, in the absence of voluntary measures taken by
rightholders, including agreements between rightholders and other parties
concerned, Member States shall take appropriate measures to ensure that
rightholders make available to the beneficiary of an exception or limitation
provided for in national law in accordance with Article 5(2)(a), (2)(c), (2)(d),
(2)(e), (3)(a), (3)(b) or (3)(e) the means of benefiting from that exception or
limitation, to the extent necessary to benefit from that exception or limitation
and where that beneficiary has legal access to the protected work or
subject-matter concerned.
A Member State may also take such measures in
respect of a beneficiary of an exception or limitation provided for in
accordance with Article 5(2)(b), unless reproduction for private use has already
been made possible by rightholders to the extent necessary to benefit from the
exception or limitation concerned and in accordance with the provisions of
Article 5(2)(b) and (5), without preventing rightholders from adopting adequate
measures regarding the number of reproductions in accordance with these
provisions.
The technological measures applied voluntarily
by rightholders, including those applied in implementation of voluntary
agreements, and technological measures applied in implementation of the measures
taken by Member States, shall enjoy the legal protection provided for in
paragraph 1.
The provisions of the first and second
subparagraphs shall not apply to works or other subject-matter made available to
the public on agreed contractual terms in such a way that members of the public
may access them from a place and at a time individually chosen by them.
When this Article is applied in the context of
Directives 92/100/EEC and 96/9/EC, this paragraph shall apply mutatis mutandis.
this is much more in line with WIPO, though it still goes too far. but look at it. Dmitry would have a whole bunch of defenses under it. all he's gotta show is that his Advanced eBook Processor has more than a "limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent" the protection on Adobe eBooks. for example, if it had a purpose to force Adobe to respect Russian fair use law, that might well qualify.
or if Adobe eBooks violate any other European copyrights. the directive is very specific that rightsholders will allow certain uses to be made of their works. they won't use technological measures to extend copyright.
how effective it's gonna be remains to be seen. but this is a lot less bad than the DMCA.
Slashdot Mirror
hopefully, none.
the music industry has a ton of lawyers. those lawyers know that if they did that, there'd be hell to pay: it's called bad-faith negotiating, and it costs MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN COURT. a punitive damage award would be likely.
besides, the $750K is supposed to be an advance on the licensing fees. read the article.
note where it says "commit to" not "pony up."
the music industry is full of democrats that contributed to Clinton/Gore. I suspect that's why this is happening now, not earlier.
it's weird though. you'd think that Tipper would have wanted to see an end to record sales in general. but maybe she clued in enough to figure out that the RIAA was doing its best to stop kids from getting music.
while in general I agree with the post (well kinda), I feel the deep inner need to nitpick. :)
and yes, this explains why on the 2600, Atari's Pac-Man did very well while Sierra On-Line's Jawbreaker (playtested by virtually nobody except a few geeks at Sierra) collapsed.
I don't know about Lode Runner. (Which was an amazing game, much better than the horror which happened later, known as Super Mario.)
That said, I don't know when it went bad. I also don't think there's anything wrong with immersiveness.
The most immersive game I've ever played is Sid Maier's Alpha Centauri. It's intense. You get the what-do-you-mean-it's-sunrise effect.
The next most immersive game, I think, was Paradroid. I played that for days sometimes. (Well nights anyway :) It didn't have flashy graphics (not by today's standards) - but it did have a very intense soundtrack (even if rather low-fi on '80s equipment). And it had a fairly high level of sophistication: although all the different parts of the game were basically speed & dexterity tests, they worked differently; in particular it took a bit to get the hang of the take-over challenge screen.
the other games I miss are the construction games. Quake has tried to step up a bit with level editing, but it's just not the same. racing destruction set especially was an amazing game.
which is another complaint about the green-hat (heh, anybody else notice a similarity to a specific open-source corporate logo there?) list. no racing games. none. geesh. I spent countless hours as a teenager playing great american cross-country road race. not really the greatest game ever, I don't even know who made it. (this was in the heyday of the underground. you just got disks with games on them, had to figure out what they were when you got them.)
so anyway, tangent over, I hope. when it's all said and done, I like quake, and think it's probably the most radical thing to happen to gaming in the '90s (being as it basically introduced both OpenGL and TCP/IP gaming). what I find frustrating actually is that while gaming graphics have come very, very far in a short time, and we've seen some pretty major strides forward in the mainstream for networked play, there hasn't nearly been as much work done on either (a) simple games that function as a test of skill, or (b) storylines. I'd like to see a game on a DVD-ROM that uses the format to hold a whole world. why not?
hmm, maybe it's time for me to get back into programming after all... :)
Interesting... I copied the top 10 from the bit at the end where they said what the top 10 were, then went one-by-one through the rest of the list.
looks like they got it wrong :)
hey, at least I recognized most of the list.
for reference, here's the whole thing:
there are actually 51 games, due to their inability to pick a number 10 and then numbering the next one number 11. sigh.
anyway, I've never even heard of: #10 (the second one), #12, #20, #24 (huh - in there twice?), #31, #32, #35, #38 (well apart from the movie :), #46, and #50. so obviously I can't comment on those.
and I quite definitely agree that quite a few of these titles need to be on the list. ones I specifically object to:
games which I think are missing:
Oh yeah. And there are no "realistic" karate games. SF2 is the only game listed, with denigrating reference to its descendants, all of which were full of people throwing fireballs and the like. Games like Karateka are totally forgotten.
I stopped playing karate games because of SF2 and its children. The goofy "special moves" are just plain, well, goofy. :)
Anyway, I think I'll go finish last night's SMAC game off now. Enjoy. :)
you're suggesting an extremely corrupt system.
his judge will be picked either by a random draw (the short straw gets it :) or by another judge, a senior judge in the appropriate circuit (ninth I think).
I don't know which system the US federal court uses. but those two systems are the only ones in the western world.
and yes, I said short straw. no judge would like this case. protesters? people filling the court?
no thanks.
on the B point: perhaps you shouldn't. let's accept your precept at face value, and go with it. (I have doubts. I'm a Canadian. I wasn't alive for the 18th amendment, but I still have doubts.)
there are American distributors of Elcomsoft's product. they are breaking US law (according to you) on US soil and are US citizens.
how many of them are in jail?
whoops.
how many of them gave embarrassing speeches at Defcon about Adobe's security procedures?
I suspect it's the same number...
No American hacker would be denied bail?
sure...
my bank used to run IIS for its online banking environment.
several months back, they switched to IBM's Apache variant. long before Code Red. and reimplemented their ASP code as java servlets.
well, it makes me feel better anyway :)
Before going into my opinion on why people see M$ in this way, I should explain a few things first.
so, all that aside. People love Microsoft because their products are incredibly useful.
As programmers, we know that Microsoft products are buggy, poorly written, and often just plain stupid.
However, you try writing a book with a pen and paper. Now open, even, Word 6 running on Win 3.1 and compare. It's not hard: the M$ product wins out every time.
Or try doing some serious accounting work on a paper ledger, then open M$ Money. Damn, but, you know...
The problem, fundamentally, is that computers are too good. Computers in general are such fantastically useful tools that people love them, even when they're seriously non-optimal.
As far as I can tell, the only really strong link in the whole M$ apps network is Word. Word has so many features, I find it quite incredible. (It does have security failings and other failings, of course. But given the size of its codebase, it's actually pretty reliable, I think. Unlike, for example, IIS, which is just a little program.)
Which is why people shell out all that cash for Office, because Word is amazing, and the features it has are stuff they understand. People understand writing. They don't understand email. They like email, they just don't know how it's supposed to happen. So most of them use Outlook because it comes with their Word, and they assume that because Word is amazing, Outlook is too.
So anyway: that's my point. Computers have radically changed people's lives and made possible things that they found hard to imagine before. Even when they're running M$ operating systems, they're still fantastically useful, so nobody thinks to ask if there's something better around.
what, you mean like one of these?
whoops.
assuming these were Amiga games you were talking about, no, this is definitely mythology.
why? when you insert a floppy into an Amiga, the floppy drive activates and it scans in to read the volume name (this is to facilitate disk-swapping, something that was easier on the Amiga OS than any other OS I've ever seen) and while doing so, the head jumps over the whole disk, with the whole thing spinning pretty fast. I've actually had Amigas with enough of the case off to see what happens, and I can assure you that there just isn't a part of the disk that doesn't get touched. :)
there's big, hard cash to be made out there in medical informatics. there are only a few Trusted Suppliers of Software, and they get to charge mucho cash.
you see, the tolerance of downtime is very, very low. when a computer crashes in a hospital, people die.
the twenty grand isn't for the hardware, it's for the software. it has to be basically secure from anything but a nuclear attack.
and we all know how difficult it is to guarantee perfect software reliance, right? ;)
well, now you know what the price is.
except for those who only buy parts, and assemble systems.
there's a lot of us doing that.
the only prebuilt new system I've bought since, um, my amiga 1200 is my iMac.
then again, many of my computers are used anyway.
except when they didn't, of course. one of the tipoffs that this may have happened is when you buy a new computer, and the only manual that ships is a single-sheet keyboard manual. :)
yes, this really happened, to my mother. :)
I've never bought a copy of Windows.
I have two Windows 95 CDs, one inherited from an old computer of my mother's (which was stolen), and another which belonged to a former live-in boyfriend of a woman who I used to date. :)
I also have a CD with MS-DOS 6.22 and Win 3.11 on it, from the same ex-boyfriend of the ex-girlfriend. (Fortunately, I get along with both of them fairly well. :)
I did buy PC DOS 7 way back when IBM was still selling operating systems.
My Amigas and 8-bit computers all came with operating systems. Same for my Mac.
My other computers run FreeBSD, which I downloaded and burned...
So I guess my biggest OS expenditure has been to IBM. :)
except for games which reloaded bits of themselves.
for example, Bard's Tale. it was tricky to crack because of the fact that, at the end of each segment of the game, it went back to the drive and did the protection-check again. gah.
at the other end of the extreme, we have games like AutoDuel. AutoDuel had in some ways a kinda tricky protection scheme. there was a track on the boot floppy that was very strangely formatted (never did figure out what they did to it). anyway, it defeated all the standard disk-copy tools of the time. however, it was vulnerable in one rather surprising way.
the way it checked the protection was by trying to open a file. this file had its starting block in the Track of Doom. consequently, when the floppy drive tried to open that file, it generated an error (a 21 IIRC, and no, I don't remember what a 21 was anymore :)
so the loader would open this file, and then check its status string. if it got a 00 (for ok), then it would blow up.
however, it didn't check which error it received. if the file was not present, the drive would send back a 66, file not found, and the loader thought that was fine (hey, it's not a 00... :)
consequently, it was possible to crack this game just by using a file-by-file copier (as the copier would barf on the problem file, refuse to copy it, and therefore leave it off the duplicate). which was SOP for many people at the time, especially as a prelude to cracking the game. (copy the files, then play with them, see if you can get it to work.)
AutoDuel was broken so very fast :)
golden agers still writing?
Fred Pohl. um, Andre Norton I think.
does Le Guin count as Golden Age? I still think of her as new wave.
Bob Forward still publishes, I think. but he's not really golden age. way too hard.
but apart from Pohl, I don't really like the golden age survivors anyway. I'd rather be reading Cadigan or Robinson or Haldeman or Stephenson or Goonan or Niven. or when it comes to fantasy, or Brust or Gaiman or Dorsey.
although I admit it. I saw the new Earthsea book in the bookstore a couple days ago, and I was vaguely tempted. I decided to wait for paperback though.
it's funny that Dozois of all people claims that there are still good authors out there, they're just hard to find. before he took over IAsfm, it was by far the best magazine on the market. it was edited by a woman named Shawna McCarthy, and it was amazing.
in 1984 and '85, everybody knew who all the good authors were. Shawna printed their stories. (for example, check the May '84 issue, or the June issue. all great stories.) now, Dozois edits the year's most pretentious, annoying crap, and Shawna... is editing a little-known magazine called Realms of Fantasy.
interesting. just found some good news, at least Aboriginal SF is still afloat. they're subscription-only though really, no newsstand sales to speak of. thus leaving most of the SF-reading public dependent on... Fantasy & Science Fiction. oh god.
somebody give Shawna a real job. save SF.
unfortunately, the song the 1571 made didn't sound nearly as good.
it wasn't all that loud. it was pretty cool though. and it scared teachers. :)
you're not living in the US, you're living in south africa.
well, okay, they use flame throwers to protect their cars, not electricity. go here if you don't believe me. the device in the quicktime is on sale in South Africa, and has been since '98 or so.
Activision? I don't think so.
I do remember Gunship, the first famous program called Apache. :)
it had a really innovative copy-protection routine. extremely difficult to break. (on the then-king of games, the commodore 64.) there were a few downsides. you had to have a plain-vanilla 1541 floppy drive to run it; IIRC even little things like drive alignment would cause it to not work.
it took about a year before the underground broke it. (this was at a time when the underground usually released games 2-3 months ahead of their commercial releases.)
everybody liked the broken version. why? it would run on a lot of different floppy drives, with non-optimal alignment, even on 1571s. also, it didn't wear down the head the way the commercial version did.
yeah. the commercial version killed your drive. play it for a few hundred hours, and no more drive.
they never learn.
or maybe, focus on a few grammar lessons... :)
Also, Leahy's got half a clue. At least he voted against the CDA.
generally agreed about the professors.
university sysadmins, though? where'd you go to school?
I have seen:
so anyway. I suppose out there there must be some information technology department that knows what it's doing. but I've been in multiple schools (grad student), and I haven't seen it yet.
how about looking at the actual directive? the relevant article, below, is Article 6.
Obligations as to technological measures
- are promoted, advertised or marketed for
the purpose of circumvention of, or
- have only a limited commercially
significant purpose or use other than to circumvent, or
- are primarily designed, produced, adapted
or performed for the purpose of enabling or facilitating the circumvention of,
any effective technological measures.A Member State may also take such measures in respect of a beneficiary of an exception or limitation provided for in accordance with Article 5(2)(b), unless reproduction for private use has already been made possible by rightholders to the extent necessary to benefit from the exception or limitation concerned and in accordance with the provisions of Article 5(2)(b) and (5), without preventing rightholders from adopting adequate measures regarding the number of reproductions in accordance with these provisions.
The technological measures applied voluntarily by rightholders, including those applied in implementation of voluntary agreements, and technological measures applied in implementation of the measures taken by Member States, shall enjoy the legal protection provided for in paragraph 1.
The provisions of the first and second subparagraphs shall not apply to works or other subject-matter made available to the public on agreed contractual terms in such a way that members of the public may access them from a place and at a time individually chosen by them.
When this Article is applied in the context of Directives 92/100/EEC and 96/9/EC, this paragraph shall apply mutatis mutandis.
this is much more in line with WIPO, though it still goes too far. but look at it. Dmitry would have a whole bunch of defenses under it. all he's gotta show is that his Advanced eBook Processor has more than a "limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent" the protection on Adobe eBooks. for example, if it had a purpose to force Adobe to respect Russian fair use law, that might well qualify.
or if Adobe eBooks violate any other European copyrights. the directive is very specific that rightsholders will allow certain uses to be made of their works. they won't use technological measures to extend copyright.
how effective it's gonna be remains to be seen. but this is a lot less bad than the DMCA.