The Plague wiped out 1/3 of the European population. Smallpox wiped out huge numbers (not sure of exact number) of American Indians. A theoretical disease more virulent and infectious than both of those, combined with the relative inability to treat or cure it as with the HIV virus, and we could see similar genetic culling as with the chimps.
It's quite possible for a disease to be too virulent to become a plague. What you often tend to find is that both disease causing organisms and their hosts tend to adapt to each other. It isn't in the parasite's interest to kill it's host.
Strep is becoming immune to our anti-biotics. We don't know how to treat West-Nile yet. Ear-infections, urinary tract infections are becoming resistant. Lots of human illnesses are becoming resistant to our treatments.
It's at least partly due to overuse of such chemicals. Hospitals can easily become breedings grounds for very tough bacteria.
As soon as a cure or effective treatment for one disease is created, somehow a bigger badder uglier disease pops up somewhere.
Or possibly one which was around all the time, but now has a big pool of potential victims, who would otherwise have died of the disease which is now treatable.
It is about time some one comes up with an unhackable security standard.
Such a thing is impossible, anyone wanting to try would be better off putting their energy into something which stands some chance of actually working.
WinRar is $29 and WinZip is $29. Yet they are incredibly heavily pirated.
Most likely that simply demonstrates that $29 for a compression utility is excessive.
Therefore, that software being too expensive is crap. $29 isn't too much money.
It's a lot more than gzip or bzip. It's also a lot for something which costs virtually nothing to duplicate and distribute, with most of the actual costs being covered by the "customer". Possibly quite a bit of the $29 actually goes to cover the cost of processing the payment.
Why do people think that it is possible to make bits uncopyable? Have we not been over this before? Has this changed since the last time we went over it?
The problem is that the people comming up with these schemes don't understand and probably don't want to understand.
I am not even going to bother reading the article for this 'technology.'
It isn't technology, not even advanced technology being precieved as "magic" in order to make this work you'd need to use actual magic.
A design for digital copy protection is like a design for a perpetual motion machine - It may be interesting to look at, but you know from the start it is impossible to build.
I suspect that the people doing the building know this full well. But if someone keeps offering them silly amounts of money to design perpetual motion machines is it any suprise that they will come up with something flash looking.
Wouldn't the key have to be burned into the CD anyway? So the program could read it in the first place. Doesn't this mean that bit-by-bit burners would copy it fine?
This is probably the more difficult way to do it. Probably easier to have such a program treated like one with a regular dongle and the cracked version written to a perfectly normal CD. Then the cracked version is actually more valuable to regular users since they don't need to mess around inserting a CD.
They spend thousands only to have it hacked in the first month by some 16 year old kid.
Or even they spend millions and it's cracked in week. Security is not a function of the amount of money spent. Especially with DRM which is the software equivalent of trying to make pi equal 3.
I think what these copy protection people are forgetting, whilst spending these millions of dollars in research on anti piracy techniques is that at the end of the day, the data STILL NEEDS TO BE READ in order for it to be of any use to anybody.
This is the basic problem behind any of these DRM ideas. No matter if the data involved is sound, video or software. Effectivly these people are spending money on something which fundermentally cannot work. They are probably throwing more money into this black hole than could ever be lost to "piracy". When the real answer to piracy is to price such the economies of mass producing CDs mean that it costs more to burn copies than to buy a regular copy. In the same way that people don't tend to photocopy books.
I have a floppy with an old program that contained some kind of copy protection. Even when installed on the harddisk, the program could not run without the floppy in the drive.
This sounds very much a rehash of the same idea. Wonder if they will try to patent it, even with this obvious prior art...
But when the floppydrive stopped working I had to do something. Actually I didn't modify the program, instead I just modified the floppydriver to return the values expected by the program.
I don't even think this is illegal. (If I thought so I wouldn't be talking loud about it on slashdot.)
If this is isn't illegal expect the appropriate lobbying groups to be given revised orders.
but the real question is would these people really buy a legite copy if they had to? Or would the reaction be similar to what is going on with the RIAA and "un-copyable" CD's? Has anyone actually proven that making a CD uncopyable will do anything good?
With quite a bit of the "warez community" having software is about status. Quite likely some crackers want these kind of schemes, because when they crack something like this they get lots of kudos. Quite likely the selling price also affects the warez value. But they probably never would have bought the program at any price.
If I can read the contents of the disk, I can write it to another disk. If I can't read it (with my existing hardware and software) then it's broken.
Not only that you can probably quite easily find parts of the data which are readable, but which break the relevent specs in some way or other. This sort of thing has been tried before, it's more likely that crackers will just treat such software in the same way as that which uses a hardware dongle. From the user POV having to always have the CD in the drive is far more hassle than something which simply plugs into parallel, USB or even PCI. This is the second "CD dongle" idea posted to/. in a week.
But how does this differ from the keys on a dvd you have to circumvent when you rip them?
It's more like the old software which requires the original floppy disk. Which uses some non standard format. Thing is that the hardware much be capable of reading whatever this format might be. There is also the problem of how do you put what amounts to a serial number on a random part of a pressed CD, which is rather harder to do than with a recordable CD.
The dissenting states wanted IE completely removed from the computer. Which would have taken MSHTML.DLL with it, which would have broken countless other programs that use MSHTML.DLL to do HTML rendering.
In which case it should be possible to replace MSHTML.DLL with another rendering library.
"Why are people willing to pay $10 for a burger at some fancy restaurant when you can get one from a roach coach for $1.25?"
Interestingly when someone actually researched matters they discovered that standards were actually likely to be higher with the latter than the former. Because the former can afford to pay fines, give freebies to anyone they manage to give food poisoning to, etc. The latter need only mess up once and they are out of business.
In other words, if you think it will cost $5K, charge $15K.
Except that the cost you might well need to consider is the cost of the most likely method of performing the task. Even if that isn't the method you plan to use.
You see the competitor's price, and you think "Why is this 3 times more?" The client saw your price and thought "Why is this 3 times less?" If the client sought other bids were closer to the 15K mark, then your price would really stand out as unusually (and perhaps suspiciously) low. (Conversely, if all the other bids were closer to the 5K mark, then the 15K would stand out as unusually high.)
It's quite possible to end up with differing prices where there are different ways of reaching the same goal. Sometimes an inobvious method can simply be cheaper or quicker than the obvious. e.g. the cheapest way to transport a locomotive can be by road, rather than rail.
I've stopped (mostly) thinking about how much it will cost me to do something,
The actual cost of software is proportianal to how different it is to some you already have available. But nothing else works in quite this way, problem is that many people want software to have the same economic properties as either a manufactured product or piece of construction, whilst it sometimes can look similar (especially to the latter when it comes to assembling a system) the rules involved are rather different.
Someone to blame when things go wrong, you can't sue OS developers, they don't have any money. (Do they ever sue these vendors? Nope.)
You are actually even less likely to be able to sue proprietary software vendors. It's in the EULA that you can't, odds on if you tried the BSA would round PDQ.
Support, you can always call their support number, what are you going to do with OS software? (Yea, i know how crazy this sounds, and I've tried to explain, but they think those monkeys on the teir 1 support are worth paying 15K a year for)
Do they require a phone number, one which gets answered, one where you have a reasonable chance of speaking to a human being?
Also, capital costs (such as software) can be depreciated over time to realise tax savings for a company whereas an employee is a cost centre -- he costs the same each month and will until he leaves.
Thing is that quite a bit of software ends up being an ongoing, rather than capital cost anyway. Especially as Microsoft wants to push a subscription model.
If they got one bid in radically below the going rate for the work they will probably think there is somthing wrong with the bid, either they are cutting corners or they are pulling a fast one.
Because that is easier to believe than that the rest might be overcharging or that the real costs of whatever is involved have taken a nose dive. (The latter is very possible with software, especially with open source, which constantly adds to a pool of available software.)
They will have already set aside a budget for teh project so it really isn't a big issue to them payin less but they will worry about the quality on a lower bid. It probably comes from a building mentality whereby if you see a builder giving yo ua low quote you will worry about the quality of teh bricks and craftsmen he has.... Unfortuantley people don't realise software doesn't work to the same mirco model....
Most specifically that you cannot simply clone bricks and building materials. (Not outside of Star Trek.) Nor can you simply clone a whole building and alter it a bit; partially clone bits of different buildings and weld them together; etc. So you get costs proportional to the amount of new work which needs doing. With there being a bigger pool of existing work available using open source.
One main reason (but not the only reason) why companies will pay too much for software is because the don't understand software development values and what makes something easy or hard to develop.
Software has the property that it costs virtually nothing to duplicate. Altering existing software can be a lot cheaper than designing from scratch. This means that something once difficult and costly can become utterly trivial. Thing is that physical construction dosn't have this property. However skilled the builder there is a finite time required to construct a certain type of building. Things arn't helped by the proprietary software industry pretending that software behaves like a physical object.
Surely the higher prices the development firms charge act as some sort of insurance policy? If you're producing software for a large company, and it goes wrong, your development company will be sued for ALOT of money.
Except that rich companies are more likely to be able to find loopholes in the law to protect their assets from litigation.
At my company [part of a global publishing company] bids are also evaluated against known metrics. They do a function point count, figure the number of hours and then budget accordingly based on staffing and timeline.
Assuming the metrics are accurate and up to date. Especially in a fast moving field. Possibly you have a situation where you are comparing designing a proprietary system from scratch with adapting an open source system. The former is not only a larger task but also has all sorts of complex IP ownership and licencing issues to address, which simply don't exist in the latter case.
Slashdot Mirror
The Plague wiped out 1/3 of the European population. Smallpox wiped out huge numbers (not sure of exact number) of American Indians. A theoretical disease more virulent and infectious than both of those, combined with the relative inability to treat or cure it as with the HIV virus, and we could see similar genetic culling as with the chimps.
It's quite possible for a disease to be too virulent to become a plague. What you often tend to find is that both disease causing organisms and their hosts tend to adapt to each other. It isn't in the parasite's interest to kill it's host.
Strep is becoming immune to our anti-biotics. We don't know how to treat West-Nile yet. Ear-infections, urinary tract infections are becoming resistant. Lots of human illnesses are becoming resistant to our treatments.
It's at least partly due to overuse of such chemicals. Hospitals can easily become breedings grounds for very tough bacteria.
As soon as a cure or effective treatment for one disease is created, somehow a bigger badder uglier disease pops up somewhere.
Or possibly one which was around all the time, but now has a big pool of potential victims, who would otherwise have died of the disease which is now treatable.
It is about time some one comes up with an unhackable security standard.
Such a thing is impossible, anyone wanting to try would be better off putting their energy into something which stands some chance of actually working.
WinRar is $29 and WinZip is $29. Yet they are incredibly heavily pirated.
Most likely that simply demonstrates that $29 for a compression utility is excessive.
Therefore, that software being too expensive is crap. $29 isn't too much money.
It's a lot more than gzip or bzip. It's also a lot for something which costs virtually nothing to duplicate and distribute, with most of the actual costs being covered by the "customer".
Possibly quite a bit of the $29 actually goes to cover the cost of processing the payment.
Maybe if they didn't inflate the price of software so much it wouldn't be pirated so often.
They could probably afford to reduce the price quite a bit if they didn't try to chase the impossible
If they really want to pirate it, they will.
Remember also that there is "piracy" from people simply to claim they have a copy of an expensive, "un-crackable", etc program.
Why do people think that it is possible to make bits uncopyable? Have we not been over this before? Has this changed since the last time we went over it?
The problem is that the people comming up with these schemes don't understand and probably don't want to understand.
I am not even going to bother reading the article for this 'technology.'
It isn't technology, not even advanced technology being precieved as "magic" in order to make this work you'd need to use actual magic.
A design for digital copy protection is like a design for a perpetual motion machine - It may be interesting to look at, but you know from the start it is impossible to build.
I suspect that the people doing the building know this full well. But if someone keeps offering them silly amounts of money to design perpetual motion machines is it any suprise that they will come up with something flash looking.
Wouldn't the key have to be burned into the CD anyway? So the program could read it in the first place. Doesn't this mean that bit-by-bit burners would copy it fine?
This is probably the more difficult way to do it. Probably easier to have such a program treated like one with a regular dongle and the cracked version written to a perfectly normal CD.
Then the cracked version is actually more valuable to regular users since they don't need to mess around inserting a CD.
They spend thousands only to have it hacked in the first month by some 16 year old kid.
Or even they spend millions and it's cracked in week. Security is not a function of the amount of money spent. Especially with DRM which is the software equivalent of trying to make pi equal 3.
I think what these copy protection people are forgetting, whilst spending these millions of dollars in research on anti piracy techniques is that at the end of the day, the data STILL NEEDS TO BE READ in order for it to be of any use to anybody.
This is the basic problem behind any of these DRM ideas. No matter if the data involved is sound, video or software.
Effectivly these people are spending money on something which fundermentally cannot work. They are probably throwing more money into this black hole than could ever be lost to "piracy". When the real answer to piracy is to price such the economies of mass producing CDs mean that it costs more to burn copies than to buy a regular copy. In the same way that people don't tend to photocopy books.
I have a floppy with an old program that contained some kind of copy protection. Even when installed on the harddisk, the program could not run without the floppy in the drive.
This sounds very much a rehash of the same idea. Wonder if they will try to patent it, even with this obvious prior art...
But when the floppydrive stopped working I had to do something. Actually I didn't modify the program, instead I just modified the floppydriver to return the values expected by the program.
I don't even think this is illegal. (If I thought so I wouldn't be talking loud about it on slashdot.)
If this is isn't illegal expect the appropriate lobbying groups to be given revised orders.
but the real question is would these people really buy a legite copy if they had to? Or would the reaction be similar to what is going on with the RIAA and "un-copyable" CD's? Has anyone actually proven that making a CD uncopyable will do anything good?
With quite a bit of the "warez community" having software is about status. Quite likely some crackers want these kind of schemes, because when they crack something like this they get lots of kudos. Quite likely the selling price also affects the warez value.
But they probably never would have bought the program at any price.
If I can read the contents of the disk, I can write it to another disk. If I can't read it (with my existing hardware and software) then it's broken.
/. in a week.
Not only that you can probably quite easily find parts of the data which are readable, but which break the relevent specs in some way or other.
This sort of thing has been tried before, it's more likely that crackers will just treat such software in the same way as that which uses a hardware dongle.
From the user POV having to always have the CD in the drive is far more hassle than something which simply plugs into parallel, USB or even PCI. This is the second "CD dongle" idea posted to
But how does this differ from the keys on a dvd you have to circumvent when you rip them?
It's more like the old software which requires the original floppy disk. Which uses some non standard format.
Thing is that the hardware much be capable of reading whatever this format might be. There is also the problem of how do you put what amounts to a serial number on a random part of a pressed CD, which is rather harder to do than with a recordable CD.
The dissenting states wanted IE completely removed from the computer. Which would have taken MSHTML.DLL with it, which would have broken countless other programs that use MSHTML.DLL to do HTML rendering.
In which case it should be possible to replace MSHTML.DLL with another rendering library.
"Why are people willing to pay $10 for a burger at some fancy restaurant when you can get one from a roach coach for $1.25?"
Interestingly when someone actually researched matters they discovered that standards were actually likely to be higher with the latter than the former. Because the former can afford to pay fines, give freebies to anyone they manage to give food poisoning to, etc. The latter need only mess up once and they are out of business.
In other words, if you think it will cost $5K, charge $15K.
Except that the cost you might well need to consider is the cost of the most likely method of performing the task. Even if that isn't the method you plan to use.
You see the competitor's price, and you think "Why is this 3 times more?" The client saw your price and thought "Why is this 3 times less?" If the client sought other bids were closer to the 15K mark, then your price would really stand out as unusually (and perhaps suspiciously) low. (Conversely, if all the other bids were closer to the 5K mark, then the 15K would stand out as unusually high.)
It's quite possible to end up with differing prices where there are different ways of reaching the same goal. Sometimes an inobvious method can simply be cheaper or quicker than the obvious. e.g. the cheapest way to transport a locomotive can be by road, rather than rail.
I've stopped (mostly) thinking about how much it will cost me to do something,
The actual cost of software is proportianal to how different it is to some you already have available. But nothing else works in quite this way, problem is that many people want software to have the same economic properties as either a manufactured product or piece of construction, whilst it sometimes can look similar (especially to the latter when it comes to assembling a system) the rules involved are rather different.
Someone to blame when things go wrong, you can't sue OS developers, they don't have any money. (Do they ever sue these vendors? Nope.)
You are actually even less likely to be able to sue proprietary software vendors. It's in the EULA that you can't, odds on if you tried the BSA would round PDQ.
Support, you can always call their support number, what are you going to do with OS software? (Yea, i know how crazy this sounds, and I've tried to explain, but they think those monkeys on the teir 1 support are worth paying 15K a year for)
Do they require a phone number, one which gets answered, one where you have a reasonable chance of speaking to a human being?
Occasionally, organizations invite bidders to the table just to keep the incumbent honest or maybe they just liked your competition better.
Another reason would be to put on a show for auditors.
Also, capital costs (such as software) can be depreciated over time to realise tax savings for a company whereas an employee is a cost centre -- he costs the same each month and will until he leaves.
Thing is that quite a bit of software ends up being an ongoing, rather than capital cost anyway. Especially as Microsoft wants to push a subscription model.
If they got one bid in radically below the going rate for the work they will probably think there is somthing wrong with the bid, either they are cutting corners or they are pulling a fast one.
Because that is easier to believe than that the rest might be overcharging or that the real costs of whatever is involved have taken a nose dive. (The latter is very possible with software, especially with open source, which constantly adds to a pool of available software.)
They will have already set aside a budget for teh project so it really isn't a big issue to them payin less but they will worry about the quality on a lower bid. It probably comes from a building mentality whereby if you see a builder giving yo ua low quote you will worry about the quality of teh bricks and craftsmen he has.... Unfortuantley people don't realise software doesn't work to the same mirco model....
Most specifically that you cannot simply clone bricks and building materials. (Not outside of Star Trek.) Nor can you simply clone a whole building and alter it a bit; partially clone bits of different buildings and weld them together; etc.
So you get costs proportional to the amount of new work which needs doing. With there being a bigger pool of existing work available using open source.
One main reason (but not the only reason) why companies will pay too much for software is because the don't understand software development values and what makes something easy or hard to develop.
Software has the property that it costs virtually nothing to duplicate. Altering existing software can be a lot cheaper than designing from scratch. This means that something once difficult and costly can become utterly trivial.
Thing is that physical construction dosn't have this property. However skilled the builder there is a finite time required to construct a certain type of building.
Things arn't helped by the proprietary software industry pretending that software behaves like a physical object.
Surely the higher prices the development firms charge act as some sort of insurance policy? If you're producing software for a large company, and it goes wrong, your development company will be sued for ALOT of money.
Except that rich companies are more likely to be able to find loopholes in the law to protect their assets from litigation.
At my company [part of a global publishing company] bids are also evaluated against known metrics. They do a function point count, figure the number of hours and then budget accordingly based on staffing and timeline.
Assuming the metrics are accurate and up to date. Especially in a fast moving field.
Possibly you have a situation where you are comparing designing a proprietary system from scratch with adapting an open source system. The former is not only a larger task but also has all sorts of complex IP ownership and licencing issues to address, which simply don't exist in the latter case.