If I were to pirate movies, I'd buy the DVD release and copy it to VHS from the video out.
FYI: this won't work without additional hardware. I bought a stand-alone DVD player recently and tried to hook it up through my VCR for playback (old TV -- no video in or S-VHS, coax only.)
Result: horrible quality. Unstable picture, color cycling, etc...
From the "Troubleshooting" section of my DVD player manual:
Symptom: Poor quality playback when player is connected to a VCR.
Cause: This player uses a "copy protection" method [their quotes] that will cause loss in playback quality.
When I lived with my parents (years ago) I converted a bit of the basement into my room, I had the cieling covered with loosely draped reflective mylar emergency blankets. I put an old color wheel (the kind for the old style metallic christmas trees -- some of the old farts will remember) in the corner pointing up, along with a high powered fan that I could tilt up. Add to this that the walls were all black with some old HP3000 pizza boards nailed up, a couple black lights and the effect was amazing.
We don't make fun of the customer who doesn't understand why he needs a new init string in his modem.
Well, who would, if that's all there is to it? You make fun of the customer who, after being told he needs a new init string for his modem says to you "I don't want to do that, make it work some other way." You HAVE to make fun of him, or you'd KILL him.
I have absolutely nothing against clueless users. They will learn, given time and inclination. The second bit is the bit that usually isn't there. I run up against the attitude "Idon'tknowcomputersandIdon'twannalearnwahhhh" so often it makes me sick.
If you don't deal with these sorts of situations in a healthy way (ie, laugh a little) then all sorts of nastyness can creep in and you'll find yourself getting a little snippy or somtimes even downright shitty with your customers. Now, what's worse: a little harmless fun-poking behind the customers back or losing a customer because you've been crabby with them?
One last thing: I have bad news for all you touchy-feely "protect the newbie" types, most of the people that make these sorts of mistakes don't MIND when you laugh at them. Unlike the uptight geeks (like myself) that hang out on/. and that have been made fun of all their lives, a lot of "lusers" have learned to laugh at themselves. They don't need protection.
Windows NT's first incarnation was as version 3.51. I *still* have customers running it. It had the old Windows 3.x interface, and was (is) a huge bitch to support. I've moved a lot of these people to Linux (most were simply file and print servers) recently, but I've got a few not for profit orgs as customers and they can't afford to change at the moment.
However, and this is WAY offtopic, one of my customers, the Mathews-Dickey Boys Club in St. Louis got $60kUS worth of MS software donated to them by Microsofts' community outreach program. That blew me away.
Yes, this is a "fight to save our individual freedoms." The way I see it is we have several concurrent issues:
1) The legality of reverse engineering.
2) The legality of linking to information that's "questionable."
3) 1st ammendment protection of code.
This isn't simply about watching a movie on our Linux boxen (the only reason I would is because my TV is 13" while my monitor is 17":) it's about not letting this case set a seriously horrible precident.
What that means: if this injunction is granted, and the court decides to grant it permanantly it opens up the possibility that other big-business types could bar other free software projects (for example: Microsoft could get an injunction against the reverse-engineering efforts of the WINE authors.)
The other, much more frightening IMO, possibility is that linking could become illegal. Imagine a worst case scenario: You post a link to a buddys site from yours, your buddy posts a link to a porn site, that porn site has a link to child-porn. You could be held liable. Yes, that's an extreme example, but that seems to be what could happen if this precident is set.
So yes, while on the face of it it may seem petty, it's a bit deeper than what you seem to think it is.
One thing I'd like to see is some captions on the pictures. I can guess who some of the people are by context, and I *know* who some of the people are (RMS is rather, um, recognizable...:) but I just can't place a lot of the people in these pictures.
Perhaps I'm looking at the wrong URL, if so, sorry...
Read "Dreams of a Final theory" by Stephen Weinberg.
It won't explain what's going on currently (it's kinda old, high-energy physics wise) but it will explain what the hell the Grand Unified Theory (GUT) or in some circles the Theory of Everything (TOE) is. It's a "to the point" sort of book, but a lot of it is about the SSC fiasco (most of the sentiments I share about that, BTW.) We spend way too much money going up and down in LEO. That money could be better spent looking at a TOE (GUT) that could take us OUT of LEO. (For those that don't know, LEO == Low Earth Orbit.)
You know, I follow this stuff pretty closely. I'm no physicist, nor do I pretend to be one, but I don't know how anyone can even pretend to possibly predict what we're going to know at a given time. (Yes, I've read the article.) There have been a few theories posited in the past that attempted to unify all the forces, some of them promising, but IMO, we're not going to know much unless we can do more EXPERIMENTING.
We lost the SSC, which would have told us a lot, and we're probably not going to have any accelerators for quite a while that can prove or disprove any of these theories. While the math may look good, even elegant, it's all hogwash unless we can DO something with it, some sort of experimental verification.
Personaly, I'd like to see an accelerator built around the Earth, now there we could hit some energies that could show us some really neat stuff, but we're more concerned with ketchup viscoscity tests here in the US than we are fundimental science. Bah, yeah, I'm bitter.
Anyway, any physicists out there who would care to share with us some of the more recent inroads we've made here? What have we seen? I haven't heard much about the Higgs boson since "The God Particle" (any armchair physicists out there should check that book out) and not much at all about high energy physics in general. Is there anything happening?
I'm rambling again, someone put a sock in my mouth...
Ok, so because the DVD developers stiffed Linux we had some enterprising minds try and fill the void. And NOW they bitch. Had they the foresight to supply the software to begin with, it would have taken a bit longer for this to happen (did anyone ever have any doubts that it wouldn't? I didn't think so) and The Man would have been able to squeeze much more money out of Joe Consumer.
So, what happens now? I predict "DVD2" -- no change in technology, other than the fact that they'll have new encrypted keys. It'll still get broken, but their new developer contract may hold the next guy liable (which may still happen in this case, I'd imagine) for such a gaff as not encrypting the key. It'll still be 40 bit though.
We need a verb that means "broken into by a script kiddie," so as to differentiate from "broken into by an intelligent security expert" (which I'll continue to call "hacked") and from "breaking the copy protection of" (which I'll continue to call "cracked."
I don't think we need to invent terms. Invented labels invariably either 1) don't catch on or 2) become self-parodies. Languages evolve naturaly, when a sufficient portion of the population collectively "decides" that a new term is warrented. Why can't we just say what happened:
A web page was (defaced/altered) by an unauthorized person?
Yeah, it's bland, but it gets the point across without falling into this whole cracker/hacker (f)lamewar again.
To get back to the article, I personly find it disheartening that this poor kid (I assume) who's been playing around is worried about being arrested for what amounts to causing someone to take five minutes to restore a backup. Yes, his actions are immature, and yes there's too much of this kind of thing going on, but fuck, the punishment should fit the crime. He deserves detention or summer school, not jail-time.
Ok, Ok, I'm wrong. I just did a check at freshmeat and it clearly states it's licensed under the GPL. Sue me.:) In that case, I'd strongly suggest this package. I *do* remember reading somewhere that it was not GPL, and I'd appreciate any clarification as to if they've changed their licencing policy of if I'm simply insane.
It's licensed under GPL and written nearly completely in perl.
FYI: OCS is *not* licensed under the GPL. It is a commercial product and Obsidian Systems requires you to pay them if it's used in a commercial environment. I do not know the details for the licence, their site is too slow and I'm an impatient person. I invesigated this package as an option for my company, and I found it to be a very decent stable package but a couple of things put me off: 1) it only runs under RedHat, and 2) my boss would never pay.:) It's good points are that, while it is commercial, the source is included (it's Perl!) and you can modify it to your hearts content. I don't know how they plan to support it if you vary too much, but that's their problem....
"It is kinda weird that he'de choose Linux before he had chosen an interface, so you sure have a point there"
Goddamn, this is like some crazed version of the telephone game. The guy doesn't mention Linux once in his short statement. He simply asked if there was "some simple OS/GUI" that any of us could recommend.
Yes, all the same ol' arguments are rehashed here (if they'd never seen a computer...blah blah blah.) Well, what you have to realize here is that while a WIMP interface might work well for us, something else entirely might work for ol' grandpa. Perhaps some sort of interface based on walking uphill to school every day through snow, who knows. Point is, is there anything DIFFERENT out there as far as user interfaces go that just might be more intuitive than the average windowing interface?
We had a fire on Christmas one year. Faulty electrical wiring behind the stove lit it up, the house was totaly destroyed. We were off at relatives at the time. I can't believe it but the firemen risked their lives to throw presents outside trying to save our Christmas. I can tell you though that nothing in my life has been more heartbreaking than sorting through all of those presents and trying to clean them up so my four year old neice could have something. Yes, they are life changing experiences -- if you think you're paranoid about security on your Linux box then well, you've got nothing on those of us who have had fires in our homes. We all seem to turn into Fire Marshal Bill.
Hemos & Nate: I don't have much, but I've got some boards, ram, duplicate Floyd CD's, books, etc. It's a bitch starting over, but you get there, I'm sure the community would respond if you have any specific requests, especially for those things that insurance can't replace (I lost my PDP/11 programming manual (among other things), just try to find one of those:/)
Ok, I can export binaries, but not "machine readable source code". Simple fix, write your code, wrap it up in an encrypted binary, do a./lameusgovtextrastep (or whatever) and there ya go... I wouldn't be distributing source, I'd be distributing a binary that generated source.
It need not be said that this whole thing is incredibly stupid, and I'm ashamed of my government, I mean really -- "We don't trust our people" is essentially what they're saying. It doesn't need to be this way, we (at this point still) have voices and an organized effort would probably be enough to sway some influential congressbots into behaving reasonably. Maybe I ask too much.
"PS - If you've had good or bad experiences, please post them. A friend of mine is about to register and wants to know which company to go with. Price, quality, etc. - post the details. It will help us all."
Ok, here ya go... my company recently upgraded bandwidth, our old provider couldn't handle what we were doing, we changed our DNS to a new company through NIS. This has been over a month now, and our DNS is _still_ pointing to the old servers. I've been sending an email per day to NIS with absolutely no response at all. Nothing. This is service? No, this is bullshit -- and there's nothing I can do. We can't receive email (the MX records are still pointing to the old provider, and we're doing our own mail in-house now but our old provider has dropped us) people can't get to our web-site (for similar reasons) and all in all nothing is working except being able to browse, etc. Anyone have any idea what I can do in this situation?
Re:Mars Trilogy Didn't Grab Me
on
Antarctica
·
· Score: 1
Hey, let's get further and further off topic. While I enjoyed both Antartica and Neuromancer (Antartica mostly because I've always been facinated with the place, Neuromancer because I was too young to know better:) neither hold a candle to Tad Williams _Otherland_ series. I've been debating about writing up a review of this book, but perhaps I'll wait till I'm done with _Mountain of Black Glass_ -- yes, Williams is traditionally a fantasy writer, but he takes a stab at "cyberpunk" sf in this series, and while it's not traditional Gibson or even Stephenson it's still a very realistic, entertaining read (except for the hokey "twist" bit...) Oh hell, I'm babbling now.
Slashdot Mirror
If I were to pirate movies, I'd buy the DVD release and copy it to VHS from the video out.
FYI: this won't work without additional hardware. I bought a stand-alone DVD player recently and tried to hook it up through my VCR for playback (old TV -- no video in or S-VHS, coax only.)
Result: horrible quality. Unstable picture, color cycling, etc...
From the "Troubleshooting" section of my DVD player manual:
Symptom: Poor quality playback when player is connected to a VCR.
Cause: This player uses a "copy protection" method [their quotes] that will cause loss in playback quality.
Resolution: Do not connect player to VCR.
When I lived with my parents (years ago) I converted a bit of the basement into my room, I had the cieling covered with loosely draped reflective mylar emergency blankets. I put an old color wheel (the kind for the old style metallic christmas trees -- some of the old farts will remember) in the corner pointing up, along with a high powered fan that I could tilt up. Add to this that the walls were all black with some old HP3000 pizza boards nailed up, a couple black lights and the effect was amazing.
We don't make fun of the customer who doesn't understand why he needs a new init string in his modem.
/. and that have been made fun of all their lives, a lot of "lusers" have learned to laugh at themselves. They don't need protection.
Well, who would, if that's all there is to it? You make fun of the customer who, after being told he needs a new init string for his modem says to you "I don't want to do that, make it work some other way." You HAVE to make fun of him, or you'd KILL him.
I have absolutely nothing against clueless users. They will learn, given time and inclination. The second bit is the bit that usually isn't there. I run up against the attitude "Idon'tknowcomputersandIdon'twannalearnwahhhh" so often it makes me sick.
If you don't deal with these sorts of situations in a healthy way (ie, laugh a little) then all sorts of nastyness can creep in and you'll find yourself getting a little snippy or somtimes even downright shitty with your customers. Now, what's worse: a little harmless fun-poking behind the customers back or losing a customer because you've been crabby with them?
One last thing: I have bad news for all you touchy-feely "protect the newbie" types, most of the people that make these sorts of mistakes don't MIND when you laugh at them. Unlike the uptight geeks (like myself) that hang out on
Windows NT's first incarnation was as version 3.51. I *still* have customers running it. It had the old Windows 3.x interface, and was (is) a huge bitch to support. I've moved a lot of these people to Linux (most were simply file and print servers) recently, but I've got a few not for profit orgs as customers and they can't afford to change at the moment.
However, and this is WAY offtopic, one of my customers, the Mathews-Dickey Boys Club in St. Louis got $60kUS worth of MS software donated to them by Microsofts' community outreach program. That blew me away.
Yes, this is a "fight to save our individual freedoms." The way I see it is we have several concurrent issues:
:) it's about not letting this case set a seriously horrible precident.
1) The legality of reverse engineering.
2) The legality of linking to information that's "questionable."
3) 1st ammendment protection of code.
This isn't simply about watching a movie on our Linux boxen (the only reason I would is because my TV is 13" while my monitor is 17"
What that means: if this injunction is granted, and the court decides to grant it permanantly it opens up the possibility that other big-business types could bar other free software projects (for example: Microsoft could get an injunction against the reverse-engineering efforts of the WINE authors.)
The other, much more frightening IMO, possibility is that linking could become illegal. Imagine a worst case scenario: You post a link to a buddys site from yours, your buddy posts a link to a porn site, that porn site has a link to child-porn. You could be held liable. Yes, that's an extreme example, but that seems to be what could happen if this precident is set.
So yes, while on the face of it it may seem petty, it's a bit deeper than what you seem to think it is.
One thing I'd like to see is some captions on the pictures. I can guess who some of the people are by context, and I *know* who some of the people are (RMS is rather, um, recognizable...:) but I just can't place a lot of the people in these pictures.
Perhaps I'm looking at the wrong URL, if so, sorry...
Read "Dreams of a Final theory" by Stephen Weinberg.
It won't explain what's going on currently (it's kinda old, high-energy physics wise) but it will explain what the hell the Grand Unified Theory (GUT) or in some circles the Theory of Everything (TOE) is. It's a "to the point" sort of book, but a lot of it is about the SSC fiasco (most of the sentiments I share about that, BTW.) We spend way too much money going up and down in LEO. That money could be better spent looking at a TOE (GUT) that could take us OUT of LEO. (For those that don't know, LEO == Low Earth Orbit.)
You know, I follow this stuff pretty closely. I'm no physicist, nor do I pretend to be one, but I don't know how anyone can even pretend to possibly predict what we're going to know at a given time. (Yes, I've read the article.) There have been a few theories posited in the past that attempted to unify all the forces, some of them promising, but IMO, we're not going to know much unless we can do more EXPERIMENTING.
We lost the SSC, which would have told us a lot, and we're probably not going to have any accelerators for quite a while that can prove or disprove any of these theories. While the math may look good, even elegant, it's all hogwash unless we can DO something with it, some sort of experimental verification.
Personaly, I'd like to see an accelerator built around the Earth, now there we could hit some energies that could show us some really neat stuff, but we're more concerned with ketchup viscoscity tests here in the US than we are fundimental science. Bah, yeah, I'm bitter.
Anyway, any physicists out there who would care to share with us some of the more recent inroads we've made here? What have we seen? I haven't heard much about the Higgs boson since "The God Particle" (any armchair physicists out there should check that book out) and not much at all about high energy physics in general. Is there anything happening?
I'm rambling again, someone put a sock in my mouth...
Ok, so because the DVD developers stiffed Linux we had some enterprising minds try and fill the void. And NOW they bitch. Had they the foresight to supply the software to begin with, it would have taken a bit longer for this to happen (did anyone ever have any doubts that it wouldn't? I didn't think so) and The Man would have been able to squeeze much more money out of Joe Consumer.
So, what happens now? I predict "DVD2" -- no change in technology, other than the fact that they'll have new encrypted keys. It'll still get broken, but their new developer contract may hold the next guy liable (which may still happen in this case, I'd imagine) for such a gaff as not encrypting the key. It'll still be 40 bit though.
We need a verb that means "broken into by a script kiddie," so as to differentiate from "broken into by an intelligent security expert" (which I'll continue to call "hacked") and from "breaking the copy protection of" (which I'll continue to call "cracked."
I don't think we need to invent terms. Invented labels invariably either 1) don't catch on or 2) become self-parodies. Languages evolve naturaly, when a sufficient portion of the population collectively "decides" that a new term is warrented. Why can't we just say what happened:
A web page was (defaced/altered) by an unauthorized person?
Yeah, it's bland, but it gets the point across without falling into this whole cracker/hacker (f)lamewar again.
To get back to the article, I personly find it disheartening that this poor kid (I assume) who's been playing around is worried about being arrested for what amounts to causing someone to take five minutes to restore a backup. Yes, his actions are immature, and yes there's too much of this kind of thing going on, but fuck, the punishment should fit the crime. He deserves detention or summer school, not jail-time.
Ok, Ok, I'm wrong. I just did a check at freshmeat and it clearly states it's licensed under the GPL. Sue me. :) In that case, I'd strongly suggest this package. I *do* remember reading somewhere that it was not GPL, and I'd appreciate any clarification as to if they've changed their licencing policy of if I'm simply insane.
It's licensed under GPL and written nearly completely in perl.
:) It's good points are that, while it is commercial, the source is included (it's Perl!) and you can modify it to your hearts content. I don't know how they plan to support it if you vary too much, but that's their problem....
FYI: OCS is *not* licensed under the GPL. It is a commercial product and Obsidian Systems requires you to pay them if it's used in a commercial environment. I do not know the details for the licence, their site is too slow and I'm an impatient person. I invesigated this package as an option for my company, and I found it to be a very decent stable package but a couple of things put me off: 1) it only runs under RedHat, and 2) my boss would never pay.
"It is kinda weird that he'de choose Linux before he had chosen an interface, so you sure have a point there"
Goddamn, this is like some crazed version of the telephone game. The guy doesn't mention Linux once in his short statement. He simply asked if there was "some simple OS/GUI" that any of us could recommend.
Yes, all the same ol' arguments are rehashed here (if they'd never seen a computer...blah blah blah.) Well, what you have to realize here is that while a WIMP interface might work well for us, something else entirely might work for ol' grandpa. Perhaps some sort of interface based on walking uphill to school every day through snow, who knows. Point is, is there anything DIFFERENT out there as far as user interfaces go that just might be more intuitive than the average windowing interface?
We had a fire on Christmas one year. Faulty electrical wiring behind the stove lit it up, the house was totaly destroyed. We were off at relatives at the time. I can't believe it but the firemen risked their lives to throw presents outside trying to save our Christmas. I can tell you though that nothing in my life has been more heartbreaking than sorting through all of those presents and trying to clean them up so my four year old neice could have something. Yes, they are life changing experiences -- if you think you're paranoid about security on your Linux box then well, you've got nothing on those of us who have had fires in our homes. We all seem to turn into Fire Marshal Bill.
:/)
Hemos & Nate: I don't have much, but I've got some boards, ram, duplicate Floyd CD's, books, etc. It's a bitch starting over, but you get there, I'm sure the community would respond if you have any specific requests, especially for those things that insurance can't replace (I lost my PDP/11 programming manual (among other things), just try to find one of those
Ok, I can export binaries, but not "machine readable source code". Simple fix, write your code, wrap it up in an encrypted binary, do a ./lameusgovtextrastep (or whatever) and there ya go... I wouldn't be distributing source, I'd be distributing a binary that generated source.
It need not be said that this whole thing is incredibly stupid, and I'm ashamed of my government, I mean really -- "We don't trust our people" is essentially what they're saying. It doesn't need to be this way, we (at this point still) have voices and an organized effort would probably be enough to sway some influential congressbots into behaving reasonably. Maybe I ask too much.
"PS - If you've had good or bad experiences, please post them. A friend of mine is about to register and wants
to know which company to go with. Price, quality, etc. - post the details. It will help us all."
Ok, here ya go... my company recently upgraded bandwidth, our old provider couldn't handle what we were doing, we changed our DNS to a new company through NIS. This has been over a month now, and our DNS is _still_ pointing to the old servers. I've been sending an email per day to NIS with absolutely no response at all. Nothing. This is service? No, this is bullshit -- and there's nothing I can do. We can't receive email (the MX records are still pointing to the old provider, and we're doing our own mail in-house now but our old provider has dropped us) people can't get to our web-site (for similar reasons) and all in all nothing is working except being able to browse, etc. Anyone have any idea what I can do in this situation?
Hey, let's get further and further off topic. While I enjoyed both Antartica and Neuromancer (Antartica mostly because I've always been facinated with the place, Neuromancer because I was too young to know better :) neither hold a candle to Tad Williams _Otherland_ series. I've been debating about writing up a review of this book, but perhaps I'll wait till I'm done with _Mountain of Black Glass_ -- yes, Williams is traditionally a fantasy writer, but he takes a stab at "cyberpunk" sf in this series, and while it's not traditional Gibson or even Stephenson it's still a very realistic, entertaining read (except for the hokey "twist" bit...) Oh hell, I'm babbling now.
--J(K)