If you don't want to publish your source, you should have that option, but since you are defeating the purpose of copyright (which is to enlarge the public domain), you shouldn't benefit from it.
Well, besides the fact that the purpose of copyright is not to enlarge the public domain, but to give incentives to authors to create works, copyright was never intended to be used for software in the first place. Software is the description of an algorithm, if anything it should be covered by patent laws, not copyright laws.
The moral authority for the Gnu license is derived from precisely the same source that provides the moral authority for copyright law: the inherent property rights of creators.
Absolutely not. I'm sure RMS would say that it's immoral to distribute binaries without distributing source regardless of whether or not you are the creator of that software.
You're oversimplifying. I can't use "any format I want" I have to know the format the tape was written in 40 years ago.
You misunderstood me. What I meant is that the person who encoded the data 40 years ago could have used any format on that tape. Knowing that it's a 7-track tape doesn't help very much on the software end of things. It's necessary information for the hardware, but that's about it.
And, given your obvious ignorance of even the existence of 7- and 9- track tapes, I defy you to lay your hands on the specs and tell me how to read the data off them.
Reading data off tapes isn't the job of software. What I said above is that once you've gotten the data off the actual media, it's not going to be a problem to read the formatted data, certainly not for something as ubiquitous as for instance ISO-9660. There will almost surely be software 200 years from now which can read ISO-9660, and if not it'll be relatively trivial to write some.
You seem to be talking about the physical disk formats here, which is something altogether different. I agree it's probably going to be a pain in the ass to get a CD-ROM reader even just 50 years from now. Even if you have the CD-ROM reader, IDE and SCSI will likely be hard to come by. But let's say you have a working computer with a CD-ROM drive and a serial port (I think support for null-modem serial connections is going to be around for a long time to come, at least on specialized hardware, and the technology is simple enough to build in your garage if it really came to that). Once you've got that connection to transfer the raw bit streams, I just don't see how it's going to be difficult to read the data, regardless of the file format, so long as you've got a spec.
I'll even give you a hint: They don't even use ASCII, and may not use EBCIDIC.
A quick google search suggests the standard usage was 6-bit bytes plus 1 bit parity. Unless these tapes were written to by some really exotic hardware, that's what format they'll be in (reading of this data is probably handled by the hardware, though). Of course it's not ASCII or EBCDIC, as they use 8-bit bytes. You can't really say much more about 7-tracks in general. The character set might be BCDIC, but then again, it might not. If it is BCDIC, it's trivial to convert that to ASCII. Of course that just gets you a character stream. Now you've still gotta figure out the higher level formatting. But none of it is difficult, so long as you know what the format is in the first place.
Think for a moment - substitute "7 track tape" for "cd rom", now tell me how you would find out what file format was used.
I would assume you can use any file format you want on a "7 track tape".
The redbook definition is certainly more widely disseminated than the encoding methods for 1960's tape storage but you're still underestimating the skills a person needs to read the CD is also capable of finding, reading, understanding and coding to the redbook standard.
As long as we're talking purely of software, I don't think I am. In fact, you probably won't even have to write any code, someone somewhere will likely have kept and up to date standard which runs on current machinery. Alternatively, there will almost certainly be an intel processor emulator (software, a la bochs) available, and you can just plug current software into that. For something as ubiquitous as the CD I just find it impossible to believe that someone somewhere isn't going to keep around software to support it. The big problem is communicating the bit stream.
Give me a bitstream from a 7-track along with a rough idea of what format it's in, and I'm sure I could extract the majority of the information. And this is with today's technologies - I fully expect in 50 years we'll have the natural language processing technology for computers to read and understand the specs themselves.
the only "isp" that's adding bandwidth before subscribers is google.. they haven't got any (yet), but when they do.. those lucky bastards will have sub-zero pings to frag the night away.
So when Google Wifi goes into effect, are they going to automatically increase your bandwidth every second like they do with email storage space?
You could have recorded your voice to record almost 100 yrs ago and still have no problem finding a record player to play it on so I'd be willing to bet you have 100+ years left in CDs.
The thing is, I could probably build a crude record player in my garage. Do you think the average person is going to have the tools to build a CD player in their garage in 100+ years? Sure, this won't be a problem for really valuable data, but for less valuable data it might not be worth it to go through the trouble.
This of course assumes that the CD itself lasts 100+ years. I'm sure this isn't true for a non-pressed CD.
Important information should be copied periodically, certainly at the point where you upgrade from one system to another.
But they've never seen a CD before - except in old movies - and, even if they found a suitable disk drive, how will they run the software necessary to interpret the information on the disk?
I've never understood the software argument. These formats are well documented and short of a global cataclysmic disaster, they're not going to be lost. A programmer could whip up software to read the format in less than a day, or more likely by that time a computer can be fed a standards document and figure out the format all by itself. Even if the format is proprietary, if it's well distributed then someone will have software that can read it, and this can be reverse engineered to find out the algorithm.
It's not like software formats are that complicated. If you can read the bitstream, it's generally going to be trivial to read the content. The only problem in this regard might be an exotic proprietary format which was intentionally designed to be difficult to read.
Because in many places, using extension cords/power strips* permanently is against code.
And hooking up a standard UPS to your circuit isn't?
Well, that would be a circuit breaker, wouldn't it?
Yep, not sure where I said it wasn't.
"Not just a longer length of wire, it's also splitting a single outlet into multiple loads."
And a power strip isn't?
I wouldn't recommend hooking up a power strip to a UPS either.
"Even if it can, by increasing the distance of the cable you're increasing the potential interference."
And extension cords won't?
Sure they will, though not nearly as much. Using an extension cord on a UPS isn't the best idea, you should really plug in all your devices directly if you can.
I think the "official Slashdot position" is that patents, like copyrights, are not bad, but they are abused. Plenty of us believe that all patents, like all copyrights, are bad, but we're in the minority, even on Slashdot.
Depends on the form of compression, I suppose, but you could probably create a compressed file where the garbage content uncompressed to other garbage content which was then removed (for instance, a compressed tarball where the garbage content was was in a single file which was subsequently ignored). If the decompressor gives an error while decompressing, then it isn't a very good compression algorithm, because that bit stream could have been dedicated to something valid instead of something invalid).
As a really really simple example, imagine your compression algorithm is huffman coding. If the substitute data in each copy comes out to an integer number of uncompressed characters, then the rest of the file will be unaltered. If you can generate an unlimited number of substitutes, it's not very difficult to generate one which uncompresses without screwing up the rest of the file. Other compression algorithms work differently, of course, for example a gzipped file would probably have to be generated by hand to ensure that there were no backreferences to the modified data, but I believe gzip is a block algorithm, so in theory that makes things even easier.
The GFCI exists to protect against electrocution by way of detecting ground faults and shutting down.
And a ground fault can't cause a fire?
A GFCI, even if generally a good idea, is only needed in situations where ground faults are likely. Like wherever there's water. Which, hopefully, is not one's server room.
I assume the UPS would be installed at the circuit breaker panel, not in the server room. If you're going to put it in the circuit room, what's the point? Just plug the stuff directly into the UPS using extension cords if necessary. Between the breaker panel and the server room there is plenty of possibility of a ground fault. If a rat bites a wire or a flood comes, that's going to cause a ground fault, right? Also, because you have to run the wires to the UPS and back to the wall, the wires are likely going to be more out in the open increasing the chances of something bad happening. I suppose you could put the UPS in a box on the wall next to the breaker panel and use high quality wire between the two boxes, so maybe it is overkill, but a GFCI circuit breaker is cheap enough, we're talking what about $50?
A GFCI does not limit current, and does not protect against fire.
It does if you use one of those GFCI circuit breakers that you install in your panel box, which does limit current and does protect against fire (any GFCI is going to protect against some types of fires).
And: "Not supposed to"? I think you already discredited yourself, but I'll bite anyway. It'll work fine - it's just a longer length of wire.
Not just a longer length of wire, it's also splitting a single outlet into multiple loads. I can't imagine the UPS can provide well conditioned power to multiple devices through a single circuit. Even if it can, by increasing the distance of the cable you're increasing the potential interference.
You can have your privacy, but when your house burns down and takes your neighbor's homes with it and they find this... you are going to be in a world of hurt with your insurance companies and probably the police.
I didn't say you should be able to do something unsafe. I'm just saying you shouldn't have to have Big Brother check off on it.
Regardless of whether or not the idea has merit or is valid or even could be done safely, wiring a UPS into the breaker box is most assuredly against electric code and in the event of an inspection or investigation wouldn't even come close to being a violation that is plausibly deniable.
Like I said, if you're going to rent or sell the house, then you're going to need an inspection, and all bets are off. But until then, as long as what you're doing is safe, it's probably within the electric code, and certainly should be.
C'mon, how likely is it that the house is going to burn down from something electrical not related to the system you set up? That's a bit too much paranoia there.
It is safe: If someone does something stupid, the panel's fuse pops before the UPS does. No smoke. No fire.
I wouldn't rely on a fuse, but rather put a GFCI in at the panel. Now one concern I'd have is whether or not the UPS can handle all that power going through a single socket. You're not even supposed to hook up a single splitter or extension cord to most UPSes. Hooking up an entire circuit likely won't work.
Don't even think about doing this without talking to your city's electrical inspector.
I would think in the US the constitutional right to privacy would preclude Big Brother from getting involved in this, as long as you don't sell or rent the house, anyway. Besides, it's not like the govt. is going to find out. Personally I'd talk to someone who knows what they're talking about, but not necessarily the city's electrical inspector, since it's just a temporary and easily removable hack.
It's a 32 bit copy of XP Pro and I'm building an AMD64 system.
I'd think Bochs would have no problem handling this. It'd be a little slow maybe, but fast enough to run Quicken.
in any case I wouldn't have wanted to ditch the license from my old box. I might have the desire to pull it out of the closet once in awhile and play some old games.
Not sure what you mean by this. Are you saying if you install Windows on the second box and then pull the old box out of the closet that Microsoft is going to send the copyright police to your house to arrest you? Or is it some sort of morality thing that you think it's wrong to have two copies of Windows installed if you only paid for one license, even if you're only using one copy at a time? Or you're talking about some physical limitation?
Short of writing my own replacement for Quicken (not very likely) what are my options?
Personally I use a hacked up version of SQL-Ledger. But personally I think Quicken is a piece of shit, and that GNUCash is a poor copy of it. SQL-Ledger isn't great either, but you have easy access to the raw ledger, and can program the other stuff you need on top of that.
For your purposes, it seems like you just want the cheapest thing that can perform at the level of Quicken, so I'd say try out GNUCash and see if that does the trick and if not then use Quicken and your old copy of Windows (I don't understand where the $80-200 comes into play, as you already have a copy of Windows on your old system).
"Perfect DRM" is a system that allows the user to "play back" a digital media object of some kind (music file, video, e-book -- it doesn't matter what), but does not allow the user to directly access the data it contains.
It is impossible because there is no way of preventing the user from simulating the behaviour of the viewing system and copying the data from there.
That's not even the main purpose of DRM, let alone the only purpose. The purpose of DRM is not to allow some data to be accessed at all, whether "directly" or directly. Anyway, I suppose it's theoretically impossible to create something which will only interact with humans and not with computers, but for theory isn't really what's important here, it's reality. DRM doesn't have to stop any theoretical attack. It just has to make it significantly more expensive to attack than the value of the content that's being protected.
think most publishers would settle for "cracking the DRM" to be as hard/expensive for e-books as it is for dead tree ones, and that's not hard at all as long as you control the hardware.
Not good enough. The problem is that there's a per-copy cost associated with copying dead tree books, whereas for digital books that cost is tiny.
You've misunderstood me. I was talking about the total cost. Besides, a dead-tree book can be converted to digital form and copied exactly the same. One thing that DRM has to provide to be useful is that getting a digital copy of an e-book is as difficult as getting a digital copy of a dead-tree one.
Plus, you only need to crack the DRM once and you'll have access to all of the data from all of the books that use it.
Depends on how the DRM is implemented, and in what way you "crack" it. It's quite possible that you'll be able to crack one title but not all of them.
This can then go onto a p2p network of some kind and then you only need one person to crack the DRM in the world.
You assume the crack involves merely software, but this is unlikely. Have they even figured out how to crack XBox without modifying the hardware? Again you're confusing theoretical possibilities with reality.
People do photocopy books; it's just not enough of a problem for the publishers because it's a time consuming and expensive process that makes one copy, so not many people do it.
What are you talking about? Once you've made a single copy of a book it's almost certainly trivial to scan in that copy and distribute copies all over the world. Yes, in that same sense it's theoretically possible to create a device which simulates a human eye and is able to scan in a copy of an e-book. But to assume more is true is incorrect. In a well designed system, the easiest way to get the raw data will be harder than just scanning in a dead-tree book.
I think the main issue on which we disagree is the number of book that will be scanned in and run through OCR software, and on the quality of the resulting ebooks.
Actually I don't think that's particularly relevant, because non-ebooks can already be scanned in.
Since downloading A Song of Ice and fire, I have downloaded pirated copies of 40ish books, and have been able to find copies of almost every book I have looked, by a wide variety of authors.
Out of curiousity, where are you getting them? I've looked for a number of books I was interested in reading and so far have only been successful with one (and I wound up borrowing the book from my father anyway because reading books on my laptop isn't particularly fun).
But when (if) ebooks readers improve enough that ebooks become mainstream, I don't see how you will be able to prevent people from using them to read the same pirated books the can downloaded right now.
Well, that's just another type of DRM techonology, and it's actually a much much easier one to implement. The readers simply refuse to display anything which isn't signed or encrypted or whatever. Sure, there will be hardware hacks and mod chips, but the number of people willing to hack hardware is much smaller than those willing to download a pirated copy off the internet.
Even if all of the official ebook readers (the ones that can read the DRM protected ebooks) do not allow you to read arbitrary files, a PDA still will.
At the point where the vast majority of the book-reading public has a PDA, and those PDAs are acceptable for book-reading to most of them, then I suppose that DRM has become somewhat useless, at least for books without a significant amount of non-textual content (you can watermark plain text, but you can't do a whole lot without severely screwing up the content). Of course, by then traditional book publishers will probably have a great struggle making a profit off such a book anyway, and will have to turn to more interactive features to provide as an add-on to get people to actually pay for their books.
We're not there yet, though, not by a longshot. I'm not sure we ever will be; most people don't have much of a need for a PDA beyond a cell-phone, and most cell-phones are heavily restricted and too small for book-reading. If an e-book technology is really going to take off, it'll probably be designed specifically for e-book reading. Most people, even those who read a lot, don't carry books with them everywhere they go. There's no sense in having them carry around a book-reader.
How much time and effort do people spending cracking software?
I don't see the relevance of that question. Obviously any DRM that would be useful couldn't be cracked by a single person working in her spare time. It also sounds like you're presuming that a crack of a single copy amounts to a crack of the entire system. That might be true with most software released today, but there's no mathematical law that every piece of software distributed must be identical, and there isn't a mathematical law which says that it's easy to replicate hardware.
I'll tell you what. You tell me how I can turn off the DRM in my cell phone so that I can run unsigned software. Sure, there's Get Around Get It Now, but that only lets you upload gifs and midis. Even just to do that you've gotta buy an expensive hardware cable. What if the e-book companies removed the hardware connection entirely, and made a deal with the cell-phone companies to distribute their content? You think people are going to set up cell-phone towers in their homes just to put a cracked e-book on their device?
How do you plan to watermark plain text?
Since when is a book just plain text? It is of course possible to watermark plain text. It is watermarked the same way as anything else, you make changes to each copy. But even if plain text copies of the book did leak out, you can't call the DRM technologies useless. A lot of people would gladly pay for a formatted version of an e-book which works on their viewing device even though they can get a plain text version that they can view on their desktop computer. Again, back to the cell phone example, how many people buy ringtones when they could easily download the same audio file free of the internet?
Except that it isn't infeasible at all, it happens all of the time. The latest harry potter book, for example, was scanned, OCR'd, and on the internet within 24 hours of being released.
And how many copies did it sell? Even for the most popular of titles which this would be done for, it doesn't produce a perfect copy, especially if you plan to remove any watermarking. DRM doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to make copying an electronic book as hard as copying a dead tree one.
Except that once a single person, anywhere in the world, breaks that DRM and post the unprotected content to the internet, the game is over.
Why? Because you define it as such? The purpose of DRM is not to win a game. The purpose is to decrease the amount of piracy. A plain text copy, most likely with significant typographical errors, of the absolute most popular books, isn't going to significantly affect things. And as DRM techniques get better (and as more money gets put into the design of the systems), even that could be stopped for all but the most expensive of attacks.
When a friend who I had loaned the books to asked me a question about the series I couldn't answer, I decided that I would buy the ebooks. Unfortunately for me, I discovered that I couldn't get them in a format I could read on Linux. So instead, I turned to my favorite p2p file sharing network, and within 10 minutes had all 3 books in html format on my hard drive.
So for you and all 5 people in the world like you DRM is a loss. But for everyone like you how many normal people are there who don't want to read a book with a web browser?
Even if they produce Perfect Content Lockdown, I could simply set up a digitial camera in front of the ebook reader, and take a shot of every new page as I scroll through the ebook. I'd then run the shots through a standard text reader program, and convert it to a text file in whatever format I like.
And how much would it cost to do that? And what would be the incentive? And what happens when your copy contains a watermark which allows the authorities to trace the cracked copy straight back to you?
Your "crack" could be done just as easily with dead tree books - it's just as infeasible. DRM doesn't have to work against every single attack, it only has to be more expensive to crack than the value of the content.
What exactly is "perfect DRM", and how is it a mathematical impossibility?
Imperfect DRM will be cracked, eventually, if enough people care about it. It only needs to be cracked once and it is then nearly useless.
I think most publishers would settle for "cracking the DRM" to be as hard/expensive for e-books as it is for dead tree ones, and that's not hard at all as long as you control the hardware. Of course, with e-books you can easily add watermarking to help identify the crackers, that's something that's not at all feasible with dead tree books.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't want to publish your source, you should have that option, but since you are defeating the purpose of copyright (which is to enlarge the public domain), you shouldn't benefit from it.
Well, besides the fact that the purpose of copyright is not to enlarge the public domain, but to give incentives to authors to create works, copyright was never intended to be used for software in the first place. Software is the description of an algorithm, if anything it should be covered by patent laws, not copyright laws.
The moral authority for the Gnu license is derived from precisely the same source that provides the moral authority for copyright law: the inherent property rights of creators.
Absolutely not. I'm sure RMS would say that it's immoral to distribute binaries without distributing source regardless of whether or not you are the creator of that software.
You're oversimplifying. I can't use "any format I want" I have to know the format the tape was written in 40 years ago.
You misunderstood me. What I meant is that the person who encoded the data 40 years ago could have used any format on that tape. Knowing that it's a 7-track tape doesn't help very much on the software end of things. It's necessary information for the hardware, but that's about it.
And, given your obvious ignorance of even the existence of 7- and 9- track tapes, I defy you to lay your hands on the specs and tell me how to read the data off them.
Reading data off tapes isn't the job of software. What I said above is that once you've gotten the data off the actual media, it's not going to be a problem to read the formatted data, certainly not for something as ubiquitous as for instance ISO-9660. There will almost surely be software 200 years from now which can read ISO-9660, and if not it'll be relatively trivial to write some.
You seem to be talking about the physical disk formats here, which is something altogether different. I agree it's probably going to be a pain in the ass to get a CD-ROM reader even just 50 years from now. Even if you have the CD-ROM reader, IDE and SCSI will likely be hard to come by. But let's say you have a working computer with a CD-ROM drive and a serial port (I think support for null-modem serial connections is going to be around for a long time to come, at least on specialized hardware, and the technology is simple enough to build in your garage if it really came to that). Once you've got that connection to transfer the raw bit streams, I just don't see how it's going to be difficult to read the data, regardless of the file format, so long as you've got a spec.
I'll even give you a hint: They don't even use ASCII, and may not use EBCIDIC.
A quick google search suggests the standard usage was 6-bit bytes plus 1 bit parity. Unless these tapes were written to by some really exotic hardware, that's what format they'll be in (reading of this data is probably handled by the hardware, though). Of course it's not ASCII or EBCDIC, as they use 8-bit bytes. You can't really say much more about 7-tracks in general. The character set might be BCDIC, but then again, it might not. If it is BCDIC, it's trivial to convert that to ASCII. Of course that just gets you a character stream. Now you've still gotta figure out the higher level formatting. But none of it is difficult, so long as you know what the format is in the first place.
Think for a moment - substitute "7 track tape" for "cd rom", now tell me how you would find out what file format was used.
I would assume you can use any file format you want on a "7 track tape".
The redbook definition is certainly more widely disseminated than the encoding methods for 1960's tape storage but you're still underestimating the skills a person needs to read the CD is also capable of finding, reading, understanding and coding to the redbook standard.
As long as we're talking purely of software, I don't think I am. In fact, you probably won't even have to write any code, someone somewhere will likely have kept and up to date standard which runs on current machinery. Alternatively, there will almost certainly be an intel processor emulator (software, a la bochs) available, and you can just plug current software into that. For something as ubiquitous as the CD I just find it impossible to believe that someone somewhere isn't going to keep around software to support it. The big problem is communicating the bit stream.
Give me a bitstream from a 7-track along with a rough idea of what format it's in, and I'm sure I could extract the majority of the information. And this is with today's technologies - I fully expect in 50 years we'll have the natural language processing technology for computers to read and understand the specs themselves.
the only "isp" that's adding bandwidth before subscribers is google.. they haven't got any (yet), but when they do.. those lucky bastards will have sub-zero pings to frag the night away.
So when Google Wifi goes into effect, are they going to automatically increase your bandwidth every second like they do with email storage space?
Even in your own life you (and with you I mean one, in general) can wish for something back that you'd thrown out, right?
Sure, but not nearly as often as I wish I had thrown something away sooner.
You could have recorded your voice to record almost 100 yrs ago and still have no problem finding a record player to play it on so I'd be willing to bet you have 100+ years left in CDs.
The thing is, I could probably build a crude record player in my garage. Do you think the average person is going to have the tools to build a CD player in their garage in 100+ years? Sure, this won't be a problem for really valuable data, but for less valuable data it might not be worth it to go through the trouble.
This of course assumes that the CD itself lasts 100+ years. I'm sure this isn't true for a non-pressed CD.
Important information should be copied periodically, certainly at the point where you upgrade from one system to another.
But they've never seen a CD before - except in old movies - and, even if they found a suitable disk drive, how will they run the software necessary to interpret the information on the disk?
I've never understood the software argument. These formats are well documented and short of a global cataclysmic disaster, they're not going to be lost. A programmer could whip up software to read the format in less than a day, or more likely by that time a computer can be fed a standards document and figure out the format all by itself. Even if the format is proprietary, if it's well distributed then someone will have software that can read it, and this can be reverse engineered to find out the algorithm.
It's not like software formats are that complicated. If you can read the bitstream, it's generally going to be trivial to read the content. The only problem in this regard might be an exotic proprietary format which was intentionally designed to be difficult to read.
1) Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto.
2) Any non-star outside the solar system which can be observed orbiting a star.
Definition 2 might need some work, though.
He didn't say it was limited to the solar system. Every star in the galaxy would be considered a planet, because they all orbit our sun.
Because in many places, using extension cords/power strips* permanently is against code.
And hooking up a standard UPS to your circuit isn't?
Well, that would be a circuit breaker, wouldn't it?
Yep, not sure where I said it wasn't.
"Not just a longer length of wire, it's also splitting a single outlet into multiple loads."
And a power strip isn't?
I wouldn't recommend hooking up a power strip to a UPS either.
"Even if it can, by increasing the distance of the cable you're increasing the potential interference."
And extension cords won't?
Sure they will, though not nearly as much. Using an extension cord on a UPS isn't the best idea, you should really plug in all your devices directly if you can.
I think the "official Slashdot position" is that patents, like copyrights, are not bad, but they are abused. Plenty of us believe that all patents, like all copyrights, are bad, but we're in the minority, even on Slashdot.
Depends on the form of compression, I suppose, but you could probably create a compressed file where the garbage content uncompressed to other garbage content which was then removed (for instance, a compressed tarball where the garbage content was was in a single file which was subsequently ignored). If the decompressor gives an error while decompressing, then it isn't a very good compression algorithm, because that bit stream could have been dedicated to something valid instead of something invalid).
As a really really simple example, imagine your compression algorithm is huffman coding. If the substitute data in each copy comes out to an integer number of uncompressed characters, then the rest of the file will be unaltered. If you can generate an unlimited number of substitutes, it's not very difficult to generate one which uncompresses without screwing up the rest of the file. Other compression algorithms work differently, of course, for example a gzipped file would probably have to be generated by hand to ensure that there were no backreferences to the modified data, but I believe gzip is a block algorithm, so in theory that makes things even easier.
The GFCI exists to protect against electrocution by way of detecting ground faults and shutting down.
And a ground fault can't cause a fire?
A GFCI, even if generally a good idea, is only needed in situations where ground faults are likely. Like wherever there's water. Which, hopefully, is not one's server room.
I assume the UPS would be installed at the circuit breaker panel, not in the server room. If you're going to put it in the circuit room, what's the point? Just plug the stuff directly into the UPS using extension cords if necessary. Between the breaker panel and the server room there is plenty of possibility of a ground fault. If a rat bites a wire or a flood comes, that's going to cause a ground fault, right? Also, because you have to run the wires to the UPS and back to the wall, the wires are likely going to be more out in the open increasing the chances of something bad happening. I suppose you could put the UPS in a box on the wall next to the breaker panel and use high quality wire between the two boxes, so maybe it is overkill, but a GFCI circuit breaker is cheap enough, we're talking what about $50?
A GFCI does not limit current, and does not protect against fire.
It does if you use one of those GFCI circuit breakers that you install in your panel box, which does limit current and does protect against fire (any GFCI is going to protect against some types of fires).
And: "Not supposed to"? I think you already discredited yourself, but I'll bite anyway. It'll work fine - it's just a longer length of wire.
Not just a longer length of wire, it's also splitting a single outlet into multiple loads. I can't imagine the UPS can provide well conditioned power to multiple devices through a single circuit. Even if it can, by increasing the distance of the cable you're increasing the potential interference.
You can have your privacy, but when your house burns down and takes your neighbor's homes with it and they find this... you are going to be in a world of hurt with your insurance companies and probably the police.
I didn't say you should be able to do something unsafe. I'm just saying you shouldn't have to have Big Brother check off on it.
Regardless of whether or not the idea has merit or is valid or even could be done safely, wiring a UPS into the breaker box is most assuredly against electric code and in the event of an inspection or investigation wouldn't even come close to being a violation that is plausibly deniable.
Like I said, if you're going to rent or sell the house, then you're going to need an inspection, and all bets are off. But until then, as long as what you're doing is safe, it's probably within the electric code, and certainly should be.
C'mon, how likely is it that the house is going to burn down from something electrical not related to the system you set up? That's a bit too much paranoia there.
It is safe: If someone does something stupid, the panel's fuse pops before the UPS does. No smoke. No fire.
I wouldn't rely on a fuse, but rather put a GFCI in at the panel. Now one concern I'd have is whether or not the UPS can handle all that power going through a single socket. You're not even supposed to hook up a single splitter or extension cord to most UPSes. Hooking up an entire circuit likely won't work.
Don't even think about doing this without talking to your city's electrical inspector.
I would think in the US the constitutional right to privacy would preclude Big Brother from getting involved in this, as long as you don't sell or rent the house, anyway. Besides, it's not like the govt. is going to find out. Personally I'd talk to someone who knows what they're talking about, but not necessarily the city's electrical inspector, since it's just a temporary and easily removable hack.
It's a 32 bit copy of XP Pro and I'm building an AMD64 system.
I'd think Bochs would have no problem handling this. It'd be a little slow maybe, but fast enough to run Quicken.
in any case I wouldn't have wanted to ditch the license from my old box. I might have the desire to pull it out of the closet once in awhile and play some old games.
Not sure what you mean by this. Are you saying if you install Windows on the second box and then pull the old box out of the closet that Microsoft is going to send the copyright police to your house to arrest you? Or is it some sort of morality thing that you think it's wrong to have two copies of Windows installed if you only paid for one license, even if you're only using one copy at a time? Or you're talking about some physical limitation?
Short of writing my own replacement for Quicken (not very likely) what are my options?
Personally I use a hacked up version of SQL-Ledger. But personally I think Quicken is a piece of shit, and that GNUCash is a poor copy of it. SQL-Ledger isn't great either, but you have easy access to the raw ledger, and can program the other stuff you need on top of that.
For your purposes, it seems like you just want the cheapest thing that can perform at the level of Quicken, so I'd say try out GNUCash and see if that does the trick and if not then use Quicken and your old copy of Windows (I don't understand where the $80-200 comes into play, as you already have a copy of Windows on your old system).
"Perfect DRM" is a system that allows the user to "play back" a digital media object of some kind (music file, video, e-book -- it doesn't matter what), but does not allow the user to directly access the data it contains.
It is impossible because there is no way of preventing the user from simulating the behaviour of the viewing system and copying the data from there.
That's not even the main purpose of DRM, let alone the only purpose. The purpose of DRM is not to allow some data to be accessed at all, whether "directly" or directly. Anyway, I suppose it's theoretically impossible to create something which will only interact with humans and not with computers, but for theory isn't really what's important here, it's reality. DRM doesn't have to stop any theoretical attack. It just has to make it significantly more expensive to attack than the value of the content that's being protected.
Not good enough. The problem is that there's a per-copy cost associated with copying dead tree books, whereas for digital books that cost is tiny.
You've misunderstood me. I was talking about the total cost. Besides, a dead-tree book can be converted to digital form and copied exactly the same. One thing that DRM has to provide to be useful is that getting a digital copy of an e-book is as difficult as getting a digital copy of a dead-tree one.
Plus, you only need to crack the DRM once and you'll have access to all of the data from all of the books that use it.
Depends on how the DRM is implemented, and in what way you "crack" it. It's quite possible that you'll be able to crack one title but not all of them.
This can then go onto a p2p network of some kind and then you only need one person to crack the DRM in the world.
You assume the crack involves merely software, but this is unlikely. Have they even figured out how to crack XBox without modifying the hardware? Again you're confusing theoretical possibilities with reality.
People do photocopy books; it's just not enough of a problem for the publishers because it's a time consuming and expensive process that makes one copy, so not many people do it.
What are you talking about? Once you've made a single copy of a book it's almost certainly trivial to scan in that copy and distribute copies all over the world. Yes, in that same sense it's theoretically possible to create a device which simulates a human eye and is able to scan in a copy of an e-book. But to assume more is true is incorrect. In a well designed system, the easiest way to get the raw data will be harder than just scanning in a dead-tree book.
I think the main issue on which we disagree is the number of book that will be scanned in and run through OCR software, and on the quality of the resulting ebooks.
Actually I don't think that's particularly relevant, because non-ebooks can already be scanned in.
Since downloading A Song of Ice and fire, I have downloaded pirated copies of 40ish books, and have been able to find copies of almost every book I have looked, by a wide variety of authors.
Out of curiousity, where are you getting them? I've looked for a number of books I was interested in reading and so far have only been successful with one (and I wound up borrowing the book from my father anyway because reading books on my laptop isn't particularly fun).
But when (if) ebooks readers improve enough that ebooks become mainstream, I don't see how you will be able to prevent people from using them to read the same pirated books the can downloaded right now.
Well, that's just another type of DRM techonology, and it's actually a much much easier one to implement. The readers simply refuse to display anything which isn't signed or encrypted or whatever. Sure, there will be hardware hacks and mod chips, but the number of people willing to hack hardware is much smaller than those willing to download a pirated copy off the internet.
Even if all of the official ebook readers (the ones that can read the DRM protected ebooks) do not allow you to read arbitrary files, a PDA still will.
At the point where the vast majority of the book-reading public has a PDA, and those PDAs are acceptable for book-reading to most of them, then I suppose that DRM has become somewhat useless, at least for books without a significant amount of non-textual content (you can watermark plain text, but you can't do a whole lot without severely screwing up the content). Of course, by then traditional book publishers will probably have a great struggle making a profit off such a book anyway, and will have to turn to more interactive features to provide as an add-on to get people to actually pay for their books.
We're not there yet, though, not by a longshot. I'm not sure we ever will be; most people don't have much of a need for a PDA beyond a cell-phone, and most cell-phones are heavily restricted and too small for book-reading. If an e-book technology is really going to take off, it'll probably be designed specifically for e-book reading. Most people, even those who read a lot, don't carry books with them everywhere they go. There's no sense in having them carry around a book-reader.
How much time and effort do people spending cracking software?
I don't see the relevance of that question. Obviously any DRM that would be useful couldn't be cracked by a single person working in her spare time. It also sounds like you're presuming that a crack of a single copy amounts to a crack of the entire system. That might be true with most software released today, but there's no mathematical law that every piece of software distributed must be identical, and there isn't a mathematical law which says that it's easy to replicate hardware.
I'll tell you what. You tell me how I can turn off the DRM in my cell phone so that I can run unsigned software. Sure, there's Get Around Get It Now, but that only lets you upload gifs and midis. Even just to do that you've gotta buy an expensive hardware cable. What if the e-book companies removed the hardware connection entirely, and made a deal with the cell-phone companies to distribute their content? You think people are going to set up cell-phone towers in their homes just to put a cracked e-book on their device?
How do you plan to watermark plain text?
Since when is a book just plain text? It is of course possible to watermark plain text. It is watermarked the same way as anything else, you make changes to each copy. But even if plain text copies of the book did leak out, you can't call the DRM technologies useless. A lot of people would gladly pay for a formatted version of an e-book which works on their viewing device even though they can get a plain text version that they can view on their desktop computer. Again, back to the cell phone example, how many people buy ringtones when they could easily download the same audio file free of the internet?
Except that it isn't infeasible at all, it happens all of the time. The latest harry potter book, for example, was scanned, OCR'd, and on the internet within 24 hours of being released.
And how many copies did it sell? Even for the most popular of titles which this would be done for, it doesn't produce a perfect copy, especially if you plan to remove any watermarking. DRM doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to make copying an electronic book as hard as copying a dead tree one.
Except that once a single person, anywhere in the world, breaks that DRM and post the unprotected content to the internet, the game is over.
Why? Because you define it as such? The purpose of DRM is not to win a game. The purpose is to decrease the amount of piracy. A plain text copy, most likely with significant typographical errors, of the absolute most popular books, isn't going to significantly affect things. And as DRM techniques get better (and as more money gets put into the design of the systems), even that could be stopped for all but the most expensive of attacks.
When a friend who I had loaned the books to asked me a question about the series I couldn't answer, I decided that I would buy the ebooks. Unfortunately for me, I discovered that I couldn't get them in a format I could read on Linux. So instead, I turned to my favorite p2p file sharing network, and within 10 minutes had all 3 books in html format on my hard drive.
So for you and all 5 people in the world like you DRM is a loss. But for everyone like you how many normal people are there who don't want to read a book with a web browser?
Even if they produce Perfect Content Lockdown, I could simply set up a digitial camera in front of the ebook reader, and take a shot of every new page as I scroll through the ebook. I'd then run the shots through a standard text reader program, and convert it to a text file in whatever format I like.
And how much would it cost to do that? And what would be the incentive? And what happens when your copy contains a watermark which allows the authorities to trace the cracked copy straight back to you?
Your "crack" could be done just as easily with dead tree books - it's just as infeasible. DRM doesn't have to work against every single attack, it only has to be more expensive to crack than the value of the content.
Perfect DRM is a mathematical impossibility.
What exactly is "perfect DRM", and how is it a mathematical impossibility?
Imperfect DRM will be cracked, eventually, if enough people care about it. It only needs to be cracked once and it is then nearly useless.
I think most publishers would settle for "cracking the DRM" to be as hard/expensive for e-books as it is for dead tree ones, and that's not hard at all as long as you control the hardware. Of course, with e-books you can easily add watermarking to help identify the crackers, that's something that's not at all feasible with dead tree books.