Or there was the old classic, Bard's Tale. It had this crazy system where every time you went up to the next level, you were supposed to look up a word in the manual. It would say, "Page 34, Line 14, Word 3" or somesuch, and then you would type "kobold" or whatever.
They had some kind of encoding system, possibly primitive encryption (I never cracked it), built into the disk-reading program, which made it really tough to crack - except if you altered the code after loading. Change one BEQ to a BNE and you were on your way, and since I had a Snapshot cartridge, that was pretty easy... (Snapshot was a C=64 hacker device. It had eighteen billion cool features. However, one of the best was a built-in disassembler on the ROM, which you could activate by pressing a button. Presto, your machine would suspend itself, and you could alter memory at will. Odds are it was actually quicker for me to run the disassembler than it would've been to look up the word.:)
Or how about Autoduel? One of the dumbest copy-protection schemes I ever saw. There was one track, which was formatted in some funky way, on the floppy. The physical protection was practically uncrackable. However, the checking routine... The way in which the program checked to make sure the copy-protection was still there was it tried to load a file, whose directory listing indicated it was on the broken track. If the disk drive returned an error message, the game thought "Oh good, I haven't been broken" and continued to boot. I cracked it accidentally, by copying all the files that didn't have errors in them onto another floppy. The booting mechanism tried to load the aforementioned error-prone file, got a 66 FILE NOT FOUND error, and happily booted. It didn't check the error message, it just wanted to make sure that 00 OK didn't come back. Zounds.
Especially when one considers the cheapness of Leo Brodie books. Assuming it was a reasonably standard system, you could just go grab Starting Forth and use that.:)
And besides... Copy-protect Forth? Why? Even back in the '80s, FIG-Forth was pretty common and free. (Yes, before the Free Software Foundation and gcc, Forth people had free compilers.)
However, I will re-explain. A trojan installs itself after having convinced the user that something else is going on. That would be "when the user isn't looking." Ok?:)
I note that Infocom seems to have disappeared. They must've been hurt pretty hard by the backlash, right?
Oh wait, no. Infocom was the only company that didn't copy protect their software back then.
And wait, look here. Sierra, Activision, Electronic Arts... all still going.
Now, that doesn't mean the copy-protection was effective. By the late '80s, many games were being released on the pirate scene before they made it to stores (Elite, for one.) But some of them tried.
The only game I knew that actually had copy-protection that worked (sort of) was Gunship, which I think was Microprose - and they're still going. Even though Gunship's protection was so insane that it didn't work on about half of all 1541 floppy drives at the time (if your heads were slightly misaligned, it would keel over and die), somehow the company survived.
I'm capping with Final Cut Pro, i.e. to QuickTime, using the mostly-free DV codec which aims to mimic DV.
My capture drives are all external FireWire drives, and mounted in a rack. So cooling is not a big issue, although they do heat the area around them nicely.:)
And yeah, defragging is essential. But that's better at 7200RPM than 5400 too. (Naturally.) And yeah, dedicated partitions are also essential.
But I wish I had enough drive space to have seperate capture/edit partitions. But even then... copying the 12GB or so for an hour-length capture across is going to be kinda painful at 5400RPM.
But yeah, ultimately I think the only reasonable way to deal with large-scale capture needs is external drives mounted in racks, because of the heat issue. Unless you've got some kind of psycho water-cooling system set up, and even then... racks are a simpler technology, fewer things can go wrong:)
Yes, exactly. What precisely is the point of playing Quake-descended games on a screen whose size is measured in the single digits in centimeters?
No. I think they're solving The Wrong Problem. What we need are cellphones with holographic projectors built-in. This would particularly be cool with the newer videophones. Imagine, you call somebody up, and their face appears in the air before you. And what's more, you could play <game foo> and amaze everybody at the bus stop!
Mm-hm. But the first full install of Win95 (which was released later) did contain IE. And what's more, IE3 was not in the Plus Pack, which was what I was really objecting to, as I didn't have the silly/stupid thing.
Well, that explains why all those anti-government types like the ACLU, the EFF, and every reader of this website:) are always harping on about the separation of church of state...
Okay, now this one just can't go by. IE3 came with Win95. The Plus Pack contained a bunch of extra add-ons for Win95. The most commonly used feature in Plus! was the theme support.
However, I never had a copy of Plus. I did at one point have a copy of Win95 that had had its IE3 surgically removed (it was easy - just change one line in a configuration file. I forget how to do it now, I've been Windows-free for so long:)
However, people are using viruses to install things like open-relay SMTP servers on computers. The POSIX security framework will make it harder to launch executables that perform that type of action.
What's more, in order for a mailer to launch an executable program, you'd need a mailcap entry that included a reference to/bin/sh. The real problem is Windows' broken way of launching applications, by treating them as just lost cousins of document files.
Jeez, some people's kids. It is an open tournament, and it is British: but only in the U.S. do you have double opens (the U.S. Open in both tennis and golf).
The French Open is not referred to as Roland Garros. Roland Garros was a French war hero (um, WWII? WWI? not sure). There's a tennis complex in Paris named after him. This complex is where they play the French Open. However, when somebody says they're watching tennis at Roland Garros, they could mean they're watching the French playing in the Davis Cup. It's like saying you're watching Madison Square Garden: You're probably watching the Knicks, but you could be watching somebody or something else too.
5400rpm is technically fast enough to capture DV, if everything works alright. The problems usually crop up when the drive is significantly fragmented (which unfortunately tends to happen a lot if you use it for editing).
I've capped to 5400rpm drives, and I don't like it. Going to the 7200rpm drive makes the capture much more reliable: fewer dropped frames.
The 7200rpm drive also makes life that much nicer when editing. You don't have to wait quite so long when you're throwing all those huge files around in Final Cut.
And besides, nobody ships 5400rpm drives anymore. 7200rpm is the minimum, at least for new drives.
Yes, Wimbledon is an open tournament, and has been since the '70s. (For the
uninitiated, non-tennis-fan, which I'm guessing is like 99% of/.: An open
tournament is one in which players don't need invitations to play. It used
to be that Wimbledon and the other three majors, the U.S. Open, the French
Open, and the Australian Open, you had to swing an invite from the
organizing committee. During the '70s, this policy was generally reversed.
Now, players can compete in the qualifying tournament, or qualify for the
main draw based on their tour ranking. But that's another story.)
IBM
actually uses pretty much the same software for Wimbledon, the French, the
U.S. Open, and the Aussie. They're just bragging about Wimbledon because
it's the most popular of the four, and consequently has the site that gets
the most hits.
7200 RPM is quick enough to capture a DV stream; I know, because that's exactly what I use to capture DV.:) But it blows away chunks of drive space; 1 GB = 5 minutes of capture. Each 400GB drive would give you about 30 hours of raw footage. That could help a lot.
Hmmm, good point. You could defeat it by giving the HD an internal battery, though, similar to the watch batteries that keep your CMOS time accurate. All it would need would be enough power to allow the cache to flush itself out in the event of a power failure.
Yeah. That's why sometimes you get multilevel caching.
Personally, if I had a 100MB cache, I'd want to cache the cache. Unless the 100MB cache is in DDR RAM, not stored on the drive. Now that'd be sweet. But Seagate, not known for its history of high-performance drives, probably isn't doing that.
Actually, AIM Talk already uses a direct connection, as well as the image chat mode. Only simple instant messages are sent through via the main server; the other services (hint: anything which the help files say might be blocked by your firewall) mostly use direct TCP connections.
I know this because I read my SOCKS server logs.:)
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No, but I'm not a user. I was speaking of the Lesser Life Forms. :)
They had some kind of encoding system, possibly primitive encryption (I never cracked it), built into the disk-reading program, which made it really tough to crack - except if you altered the code after loading. Change one BEQ to a BNE and you were on your way, and since I had a Snapshot cartridge, that was pretty easy... (Snapshot was a C=64 hacker device. It had eighteen billion cool features. However, one of the best was a built-in disassembler on the ROM, which you could activate by pressing a button. Presto, your machine would suspend itself, and you could alter memory at will. Odds are it was actually quicker for me to run the disassembler than it would've been to look up the word. :)
Or how about Autoduel? One of the dumbest copy-protection schemes I ever saw. There was one track, which was formatted in some funky way, on the floppy. The physical protection was practically uncrackable. However, the checking routine... The way in which the program checked to make sure the copy-protection was still there was it tried to load a file, whose directory listing indicated it was on the broken track. If the disk drive returned an error message, the game thought "Oh good, I haven't been broken" and continued to boot. I cracked it accidentally, by copying all the files that didn't have errors in them onto another floppy. The booting mechanism tried to load the aforementioned error-prone file, got a 66 FILE NOT FOUND error, and happily booted. It didn't check the error message, it just wanted to make sure that 00 OK didn't come back. Zounds.
Especially when one considers the cheapness of Leo Brodie books. Assuming it was a reasonably standard system, you could just go grab Starting Forth and use that. :)
And besides... Copy-protect Forth? Why? Even back in the '80s, FIG-Forth was pretty common and free. (Yes, before the Free Software Foundation and gcc, Forth people had free compilers.)
However, I will re-explain. A trojan installs itself after having convinced the user that something else is going on. That would be "when the user isn't looking." Ok? :)
I note that Infocom seems to have disappeared. They must've been hurt pretty hard by the backlash, right?
Oh wait, no. Infocom was the only company that didn't copy protect their software back then.
And wait, look here. Sierra, Activision, Electronic Arts... all still going.
Now, that doesn't mean the copy-protection was effective. By the late '80s, many games were being released on the pirate scene before they made it to stores (Elite, for one.) But some of them tried.
The only game I knew that actually had copy-protection that worked (sort of) was Gunship, which I think was Microprose - and they're still going. Even though Gunship's protection was so insane that it didn't work on about half of all 1541 floppy drives at the time (if your heads were slightly misaligned, it would keel over and die), somehow the company survived.
Quite right. It is, in fact, a trojan, i.e. something which pretends to be something else, which installs itself when the user isn't looking.
My capture drives are all external FireWire drives, and mounted in a rack. So cooling is not a big issue, although they do heat the area around them nicely. :)
And yeah, defragging is essential. But that's better at 7200RPM than 5400 too. (Naturally.) And yeah, dedicated partitions are also essential.
But I wish I had enough drive space to have seperate capture/edit partitions. But even then... copying the 12GB or so for an hour-length capture across is going to be kinda painful at 5400RPM.
But yeah, ultimately I think the only reasonable way to deal with large-scale capture needs is external drives mounted in racks, because of the heat issue. Unless you've got some kind of psycho water-cooling system set up, and even then... racks are a simpler technology, fewer things can go wrong :)
Well, unless you've got a projector, and the resulting 8-foot screen. :)
No. I think they're solving The Wrong Problem. What we need are cellphones with holographic projectors built-in. This would particularly be cool with the newer videophones. Imagine, you call somebody up, and their face appears in the air before you. And what's more, you could play <game foo> and amaze everybody at the bus stop!
Or maybe not. :)
Mm-hm. But the first full install of Win95 (which was released later) did contain IE. And what's more, IE3 was not in the Plus Pack, which was what I was really objecting to, as I didn't have the silly/stupid thing.
You know, like a gift. If somebody gives you something, and later on, somebody else takes it, then it's still theft, because that thing was yours ;)
Well, that explains why all those anti-government types like the ACLU, the EFF, and every reader of this website :) are always harping on about the separation of church of state...
However, I never had a copy of Plus. I did at one point have a copy of Win95 that had had its IE3 surgically removed (it was easy - just change one line in a configuration file. I forget how to do it now, I've been Windows-free for so long :)
However, people are using viruses to install things like open-relay SMTP servers on computers. The POSIX security framework will make it harder to launch executables that perform that type of action.
What's more, in order for a mailer to launch an executable program, you'd need a mailcap entry that included a reference to /bin/sh. The real problem is Windows' broken way of launching applications, by treating them as just lost cousins of document files.
Jeez, some people's kids. It is an open tournament, and it is British: but only in the U.S. do you have double opens (the U.S. Open in both tennis and golf).
The French Open is not referred to as Roland Garros. Roland Garros was a French war hero (um, WWII? WWI? not sure). There's a tennis complex in Paris named after him. This complex is where they play the French Open. However, when somebody says they're watching tennis at Roland Garros, they could mean they're watching the French playing in the Davis Cup. It's like saying you're watching Madison Square Garden: You're probably watching the Knicks, but you could be watching somebody or something else too.
I've capped to 5400rpm drives, and I don't like it. Going to the 7200rpm drive makes the capture much more reliable: fewer dropped frames.
The 7200rpm drive also makes life that much nicer when editing. You don't have to wait quite so long when you're throwing all those huge files around in Final Cut.
And besides, nobody ships 5400rpm drives anymore. 7200rpm is the minimum, at least for new drives.
That'd probably just about do it. :)
IBM actually uses pretty much the same software for Wimbledon, the French, the U.S. Open, and the Aussie. They're just bragging about Wimbledon because it's the most popular of the four, and consequently has the site that gets the most hits.
7200 RPM is quick enough to capture a DV stream; I know, because that's exactly what I use to capture DV. :) But it blows away chunks of drive space; 1 GB = 5 minutes of capture. Each 400GB drive would give you about 30 hours of raw footage. That could help a lot.
Hmmm, good point. You could defeat it by giving the HD an internal battery, though, similar to the watch batteries that keep your CMOS time accurate. All it would need would be enough power to allow the cache to flush itself out in the event of a power failure.
Personally, if I had a 100MB cache, I'd want to cache the cache. Unless the 100MB cache is in DDR RAM, not stored on the drive. Now that'd be sweet. But Seagate, not known for its history of high-performance drives, probably isn't doing that.
But it's not a 3.5" drive. Now that'd be something :)
Well, of course, most BitTorrent users do use their own IPs. But wardriving is becoming more popular.
I know this because I read my SOCKS server logs. :)
The FCC needs to approve any buyouts of radio stations. They would laugh themselves silly if, say, Sony tried to buy one.