What? An article called "history of copy protection" without any word about protections used on C64, Atari and Amiga?
Nothing about interrupts-based and sync-based protections, encryption, memory fillers, etc?
Nothing about the Rob Northern jokes, that were funny toys for Atari crackers?
Fortunately, protections were not limited to PCs.
People who use to spend nights playing with MonST and ADebug would love to have at least one word about that in an article called "history of copy protection".
Yes, I'm getting old, but the Atari ST/Amiga days are still my best memories, the best time I ever had in my life as a computer geek.
The GfA-Basic, Omikron Basic and the Fast Basic on Atari were really good, and except OO aspects, those BASICs don't lack anything that Python has.
Not suitable for large projects?
There were commercial games written in GfA and Omikron. There were complex utilities. There were demos (self-promotion: check out the Bee Forol Demo by Sector One).
The change has already been incorporated to DragonFlyBSD and FreeBSD.
OpenBSD is good at fixing this kind of bug
on
The 25-Year-Old BSD Bug
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This is not the first time the OpenBSD time does an excellent job at finding obscure bugs that were lying around for one or two decades in every BSD derivative. Congratulations !
Well, I tried ZFS on FreeBSD and after a few severe crashes (the last tries were 3 weeks ago on FreeBSD 7-STABLE), this is a combo that I will never put any production data on. At least no until a few years of stabilization.
Yes, FreeBSD has ZFS, but it's experimental for a reason. So no need to avocate this yet.
The only serious platform for ZFS yet is still Solaris, and Indiana is a welcome release.
I've also a lot of hopes in DragonflyBSD's HAMMER filesystem.
Seriously. When someone searches for Tesco, and they are looking for Tesco (a safe assumption), they'll click the SEARCH RESULT that matches, not the AD for Safeway. Tesco shouldn't want people clicking their ads (and if theirs is the only ad, it is easier to confuse with a search result) - because they are then paying Google for hits that they were already going to get. I second this.
However, having a trademark doesn't mean that you get the first search result. It depends on SEO and homonyms.
It doesn't work with Linux emulation either. Dies with "absurd stack bottom value".
The only way is to run Qemu and another operating system, boehm-gc / neko even works on windows.
Cool, however it would be better if software working on Linux were also working on FreeBSD.
boehm-gc is totally broken when using threads on FreeBSD SMP. And it's still totally broken on FreeBSD 7.
The Neko virtual machine is in ports, but it's unuseable due to this, I don't even understand why it's in the ports tree. Was it ever tested before being imported?
makes is crash with a corrupted stack. It works on every other operating system. It seems to work on an UP FreeBSD system, but on a FreeBSD 7 SMP system, it crashes, crashes, crashes.
In any library or operating system, there is undocumented stuff. Why? Because those APIs are internals APIs. They might have public interfaces, but if the developers see them as moving targets, they won't document them and provide documented wrappers. In their own apps, they can use the undocumented shortcuts because if the API changes, they will be easily able to adapt their software.
Third parties want stable APIs, even if they are wrappers against faster APIs. This is what is documented. Documenting the lower-level APIs would be bad, it would introduce too much breakage if anything changes after an OS upgrade.
The number of available packages is not about quality, it's a pissing contest. Or, given the number of available software, Windows is way, way, way better. FreeBSD and Debian users just like to say that for advocacy when they are out of real points.
How many packages are up to date, optimized, carefully tested, integrated, and actively used and maintained? That's the point. And I prefer one good piece of software to 10 pieces of software that are needed to complete the same task.
That's said, there's a lot of broken packages in Fink and in Macports. Less, but working packages would be way better.
I'm a big Linux and BSD fan for a long time. OSX was just like Windows to me. Something not fun, something closed-source, something commercial, etc. Hacking the kernel and userland tools was the thing I was having a lot of fun with.
But when the first Mac Mini was released, I bought one. Why? Just to try it, because it was a nice-looking small device, because it wasn't very expensive, and because I could install OpenBSD on it and use it as a replacement for my Soekris Net4801. It was never bought in order to replace my PC.
The PC was a brand new AMD64, it had very fast disks, plenty of memory... The PC hardware was way more powerful than the Mac Mini.
Anyway, I started to play a bit with OSX. And more. And more. OSX is very simple to use. It just works. That Mac Mini was a revolution, as if I rediscovered computers. I realized that I was previously spending more time in installing, upgrading, googling, hacking, etc. software than using that software. For the first time, I used pre-build software, pieces of puzzle that were ready and designed to work together... I felt no more interest in understanding how all that software works because that was no more needed in order to use it. I discovered a new pleasure with using a computer.
And while the PC hardware was way more powerful than the G4 Mac Mini, the Mac Mini became my main computer. And the PC became a test server / build machine / Windows machine (for some devices than unfortunately require Windows, for pro audio software and in order to test web sites with Internet Exploder).
I recently upgraded the Mac Mini to an Alu iMac. The PC ditched. Why? That alu Imac is just the perfect computer I've ever dreamt of. With VMWare Fusion, it perfectly runs Linux, *BSD, XP and Vista, i386 and amd64 versions, in parallel with OSX. That's a perfect developpment environment.
It was also a revolution for my daughter and my girlfriend. They used the PC before. They played with tons of KDE and Gnome software. They had fun, but no more than that. Since the switch to the Mac Mini, even with no additionnal software (only iLife and some freeware games) they had *real* fun. I recently had them try Ubuntu Gutsy, and they hated it, they said it was a giant step back. Although I use it at work, I share their feelings. Using Gutsy (not installing it, using it for real) without Google is difficult. Using OSX out of the box, without any help from the internet is possible. You might think it doesn't matter, but yes, it does. It means that the later is a desktop operating system.
For a server, I don't see the point in OSX, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, good'ol times.
And a funny thing is that a lot of games used to just plug Rob's code like this:
bsr rob_northern_check
tst.w d0
bne.s crash_me
There was even no need to look at what Rob's protection did in order to bypass it.
But yes, his little tricks and messages were fun. He probably had as much fun writing protections as we had to crack them.
What? An article called "history of copy protection" without any word about protections used on C64, Atari and Amiga?
Nothing about interrupts-based and sync-based protections, encryption, memory fillers, etc?
Nothing about the Rob Northern jokes, that were funny toys for Atari crackers?
Fortunately, protections were not limited to PCs.
People who use to spend nights playing with MonST and ADebug would love to have at least one word about that in an article called "history of copy protection".
Yes, I'm getting old, but the Atari ST/Amiga days are still my best memories, the best time I ever had in my life as a computer geek.
You obviously don't know what we are talking about.
PHP has just wrappers for basic libc functions for locale support and wrappers for basic iconv functions.
Strings are not object in PHP, strings are just a sequence of bytes. PHP strings store no info about the charset.
Sure, you can reencode strings, but that's reinventing the wheel. Things are getting better with PHP6, though.
A Beowulf cluster of Google's data centers ?
Then you didn't understand that BASIC evolved.
The GfA-Basic, Omikron Basic and the Fast Basic on Atari were really good, and except OO aspects, those BASICs don't lack anything that Python has.
Not suitable for large projects?
There were commercial games written in GfA and Omikron. There were complex utilities. There were demos (self-promotion: check out the Bee Forol Demo by Sector One).
BASIC=spaghetti code is a cliché. When I dig into some PHP and Python code nowadays, there is still plenty of horrible code that no one but the original author can actually understand. Not that BASIC code was always elegant, but it was just the same thing: anyone could write either elegant code or horrible code, regardless of what the language looks like.
Check out libpuzzle : http://libpuzzle.pureftpd.org/project/libpuzzle
It's also designed to quickly find similar images, even out of millions of images. The documentation describes a possible indexation technique (as suggested in the original paper):
http://download.pureftpd.org/pub/pure-ftpd/misc/libpuzzle/doc/README
Images are stored as 544-bits signatures by default.
I once received a spam for a p0rn site. Accessing that site required to enter a Captcha code "in order to avoid bandwidth steal".
A Captcha for a p0rn site?! How much do you bet that the Captcha was actually proxied from another site, like a webmail?
Can SSD disks also fail without any prior notice?
Is there any company able to recover data on a damaged SSD disk yet?
Sorry but... what are the "Web 2.0 builtins"? I saw none... or is it "goto"?
The change has already been incorporated to DragonFlyBSD and FreeBSD.
This is not the first time the OpenBSD time does an excellent job at finding obscure bugs that were lying around for one or two decades in every BSD derivative. Congratulations !
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of floppy disk cannons?
Well, I tried ZFS on FreeBSD and after a few severe crashes (the last tries were 3 weeks ago on FreeBSD 7-STABLE), this is a combo that I will never put any production data on. At least no until a few years of stabilization.
Yes, FreeBSD has ZFS, but it's experimental for a reason. So no need to avocate this yet.
The only serious platform for ZFS yet is still Solaris, and Indiana is a welcome release.
I've also a lot of hopes in DragonflyBSD's HAMMER filesystem.
SVG of course, stupid typo.
If SVN was working in common browsers, that news would be boring.
However, having a trademark doesn't mean that you get the first search result. It depends on SEO and homonyms.
Interesting flaw.
However, don't ORMs (and database-independant abstraction layers like AdoDB) protect against this?
Unfortuately kQemu is as stable as nitroglycerine on FreeBSD, so this is not an option, either.
Back to Linux.
It doesn't work with Linux emulation either. Dies with "absurd stack bottom value". The only way is to run Qemu and another operating system, boehm-gc / neko even works on windows.
Yes, PR121336
Cool, however it would be better if software working on Linux were also working on FreeBSD.
boehm-gc is totally broken when using threads on FreeBSD SMP. And it's still totally broken on FreeBSD 7.
The Neko virtual machine is in ports, but it's unuseable due to this, I don't even understand why it's in the ports tree. Was it ever tested before being imported?
Just creating a thread:
$loader.loadprim("std@thread_create", 2)(function(z) { $print(z) }, "OK");
makes is crash with a corrupted stack. It works on every other operating system. It seems to work on an UP FreeBSD system, but on a FreeBSD 7 SMP system, it crashes, crashes, crashes.
In any library or operating system, there is undocumented stuff. Why? Because those APIs are internals APIs. They might have public interfaces, but if the developers see them as moving targets, they won't document them and provide documented wrappers. In their own apps, they can use the undocumented shortcuts because if the API changes, they will be easily able to adapt their software. Third parties want stable APIs, even if they are wrappers against faster APIs. This is what is documented. Documenting the lower-level APIs would be bad, it would introduce too much breakage if anything changes after an OS upgrade.
If you need raw speed, try MonetDB.
MonetDB/SQL is way faster than MySQL in almost every scenario.
The number of available packages is not about quality, it's a pissing contest. Or, given the number of available software, Windows is way, way, way better. FreeBSD and Debian users just like to say that for advocacy when they are out of real points. How many packages are up to date, optimized, carefully tested, integrated, and actively used and maintained? That's the point. And I prefer one good piece of software to 10 pieces of software that are needed to complete the same task. That's said, there's a lot of broken packages in Fink and in Macports. Less, but working packages would be way better.
I'm a big Linux and BSD fan for a long time. OSX was just like Windows to me. Something not fun, something closed-source, something commercial, etc. Hacking the kernel and userland tools was the thing I was having a lot of fun with.
But when the first Mac Mini was released, I bought one. Why? Just to try it, because it was a nice-looking small device, because it wasn't very expensive, and because I could install OpenBSD on it and use it as a replacement for my Soekris Net4801. It was never bought in order to replace my PC.
The PC was a brand new AMD64, it had very fast disks, plenty of memory... The PC hardware was way more powerful than the Mac Mini.
Anyway, I started to play a bit with OSX. And more. And more. OSX is very simple to use. It just works. That Mac Mini was a revolution, as if I rediscovered computers. I realized that I was previously spending more time in installing, upgrading, googling, hacking, etc. software than using that software. For the first time, I used pre-build software, pieces of puzzle that were ready and designed to work together... I felt no more interest in understanding how all that software works because that was no more needed in order to use it. I discovered a new pleasure with using a computer.
And while the PC hardware was way more powerful than the G4 Mac Mini, the Mac Mini became my main computer. And the PC became a test server / build machine / Windows machine (for some devices than unfortunately require Windows, for pro audio software and in order to test web sites with Internet Exploder).
I recently upgraded the Mac Mini to an Alu iMac. The PC ditched. Why? That alu Imac is just the perfect computer I've ever dreamt of. With VMWare Fusion, it perfectly runs Linux, *BSD, XP and Vista, i386 and amd64 versions, in parallel with OSX. That's a perfect developpment environment.
It was also a revolution for my daughter and my girlfriend. They used the PC before. They played with tons of KDE and Gnome software. They had fun, but no more than that. Since the switch to the Mac Mini, even with no additionnal software (only iLife and some freeware games) they had *real* fun. I recently had them try Ubuntu Gutsy, and they hated it, they said it was a giant step back. Although I use it at work, I share their feelings. Using Gutsy (not installing it, using it for real) without Google is difficult. Using OSX out of the box, without any help from the internet is possible. You might think it doesn't matter, but yes, it does. It means that the later is a desktop operating system.
For a server, I don't see the point in OSX, though.