Of course, in some/many cases the so-called pretend solution is good enough. Even an extremely primitive deterrent is infinitely better than no deterrent at all, and is enough to prevent e.g. bulk access in the case of computers.
How odd, in the LC2 and Performa 475 days (8 or 9 years ago?) our Apples never worked the way you describe. When you inserted a disk it didn't know, it offered the option to format it for you, along with an eject button should that not be what you had in mind. And IIRC disks that were in the drive when the computer was booted were automatically ejected after it was determined they weren't boot disks. I don't think I used the paper clip more than once or twice in 2 or 3 years, and I don't recall why I used it... it might have been just because I was curious how that worked.
Pretty sure since I've been playing a lot of CS:S the last few days and my CD is god knows where. It is in the changelogs if you know what to look for, if I recall correctly it was something like "fixed problems with safedisk", which I'm sure they wrote with an amused grin on their face considering the way they fixed it.
Let's not go into the whole Steam flame war here.:) But just FYI, the CD-check has been removed from HL2 (or at least CSS) a month or two back - I agree it was annoying.
BTW I never knew Cohen was involved in Steam, or rather, I probably did know at some point and forgot about it. So maybe you're better informed than I am and clients do send data after all. But that'd be contrary to information I looked up before posting - yep, I actually do that... sometimes.;)
Steam? As in Valve's distribution mechanism? That Steam, at least, doesn't do anything like that. There is no P2P mechanism in steam, clients are pure clients. Updates are downloaded from a network of mirrors distributed geographically ("Total Available Bandwidth: 14,635.00Mbps"). Come to think of it, I wonder what protocol is used to transfer data from the content servers... it might be some Steam-proprietary protocol, but chances are it's simply HTTP or FTP.
Anyway, maybe you're thinkink of Blizzard's World of Warcraft. They used to rely heavily on BitTorrent to transfer the beta client and major updates. These days, it seems that all updates are downloaded from the servers, at least from the looks of it. Maybe that will change with the next major update. (And maybe it's different in the US, I'm in the EU.) That was a disaster for me and many other people, because Blizzards were too dumb to limit the upstream either manually or by some sort of algorithm, which lead to extremely slow downloads on asynchronous connections. You could extract the.torrent file, though, and download with your favorite client, which I did getting, oh, about 1000x the download rates.
That's a fairly complex process, which is already an excellent deterrent. It doesn't seem very hard to counteract, either. Actually, I can't really fathom how it would work.
(1) You send the blog server a request for the web site containing the form. (2) The server generates a captcha with an associated hash and sends it to you along with the form. (3) You send a request with the decoded captcha, the hash and the form data attached.
Now the process you described would take captcha + hash you receive in 2, and get the decoded image from wherever. Later on, he goes on with 3, using the decoded text. Now my first idea would limit the time that could pass between 2 and 3, and I think that's a viable suggestion - at worst, an innocent poster will surpass the limit because he takes too long to create a post, but that's not a problem, we'll just send him a new captcha which he can decode within seconds.
But in any event, when you try to do 3 (ie post your spam) a normal human will have to do 2 (ie get the form) before that, so the server would know which captcha he sent you last, and sending the hash and decoded text for any other captcha wouldn't work. A script doesn't have to do 2 before doing 3, because a script doesn't manually fill out a form, but that alone is an odd behavious a server could be programmed to pick up. Sending any other decoded captcha than the one received in 2 is ineffective, if step 2 is skipped, then there is no legal captcha and no post. This would prevent "farming" blogs for captchas to be decoded and used at a later stage.
Sorry if I'm not overly clear (to say the least), I hope at least the time limit argument is simple enough to be understood.
Why don't blogs just use reverse turing tests, e.g. images containing text unreadable to computers as a verification to stop automated comment spam? It's not that tedious, and you could do it once per session or something like that.
I'm not an Apple geek, but from what I read here, OS X itself makes use of AltiVec everywhere it makes sense. That's one application everyone will run 100% of the time. Also, Apple's libraries many/some applications use are optimised for AltiVec. From the sounds of it, AltiVec is used more than its x86 counterparts.
Unprotected WIFI coverage of the EU is very near 100%.
Are you kidding? You've got to be. Unprotected wifi coverage isn't anywhere close to 100% (percent of what, anyway? area? population?) in densely populated urban areas, not to mention everywhere else.
GPRS/UMTS are available everywhere.
That's pretty much true if you mean GPRS or UMTS. GPRS is available pretty much everywhere in the EU, as far as I know. UMTS certainly is not; here in Germany it's available in most urban areas, but not in all rural or suburban areas. And of course, both GPRS and UMTS are freakishly expensive, at least from where I am standing.
That said, the situation isn't much different in the US, is it. I don't know what Wi-Fi explosion the grandparent is referring to, the coverage certainly isn't 100% (but then he never claimed that) and I don't see it going there.
Hm? I linked to a specific screenshot, also linked to in the story. Image subtitle: "The default CDE 1.6 Solaris desktop." While many of the other screens are Gnome-ish, this one isn't. But that's beside the point anyway, Gnome would look terrible with that background, too - hell, Mac OS X and Enlightenment would.
What the heck - are they kidding? The default desktop background looks like on of those 3D images, which is to say it looks like ass. Maybe there's a subliminal message, I don't know, but I certainly wouldn't want that as my desktop background. Of course, the fact that CDE is running on top of it doesn't help. Sorry if I seem harsh, I'm still not sure if it's a joke. OTOH maybe I'm the only one who doesn't like it...
It supports ISO and BIN/CUE. The latter covers most of the games you might download off the net. It probably doesn't support either CloneCD or Alcohol, but that isn't exactly surprising, and burning cloned images is a difficult enough job that I wouldn't entrust it to any third party app anyway.
Yes... so what? "The law" is a linguistic shorthand; it's generally well understood to refer to a specific set of laws typically defined by the respective government. When I sit at the dinner table and say "Please hand me the potatoes", I'm also referring to a specific set of potatoes, not all the conceivable potatoes.
Along the lines of your argument, a 30 GB 3.5in 7200 rpm drive should be a lot slower than an 80 GB 2.5in 5400 rpm drive, due to the difference in density. Well, the review I was referring to did not test a 30 GB 7200 rpm drive, but I did quote the numbers for a 10,000 rpm drive, and despite the capacity difference, it was almost three times as fast. Figuring in the advantage of a higher rpm, at 7200 rpm it probably would still be twice as fast. Sorry, I just don't see your argument holding water given those numbers. It also goes against my daily experience. That said I obviously agree with your other points, like I've said in my first post to this thread, I wouldn't put one of those mad 10krpm drives in my subnotebook, either.
I referred to "average sustained transfer rate (read)", I thought that was pretty explicit. This is not some overall drive performance number. They got the number by reading the whole drive from first to last sector, a standard testing method to get this kind of number as far as I am aware.
As I said, the standard laptop drives were about half as fast as the standard desktop drives throughout the test. WRT comparing drives of the same size, that's hard when there are so few desktop hard drives available in 60 or 80 GB. For what it's worth, a SCSI 10kprm 3.5in HD (Maxtor Atlas 10K V) with 70 GB was nearly THREE times as fast as some of the 2.5in HDDs. 71.8 MB/s - nice! And the fastest drive in the test is a 35GB SCSI 15krpm drive (Fujitsu MAU3036NC) with a mean sustained read of 77 MB/s - 3.5in, obviously.
It's just a cool thing to do with an HD-based MP3 player. Chances are you'll have them with you most of the time, especially with the mini-sized devices, and with ~5 GB you probably can spare 100 to 500 MB for a small Linux install. With a flash MP3 player that might be half of your total memory. And in contrast to a CD-based Linux you are working with writable storage - this needn't be limited to rescue operations, you could carry around your $HOME with you, or your $HOME plus a minimal working system to use wherever you find an USB port and a reset button.
I'm considering buying an iPod mini - actually, I'm pretty much decided, I don't know why I don't go ahead and buy it already - and I was wondering how well this works. We had the article on booting Apples a couple of days ago, but that was over Firewire. The most important issue is how well the iPod firmware and iTunes deal with this. That's true for other devices, too - some HD MP3 players don't even register as mass storage devices anymore; from what I gather Microsoft's PlaysForSure prohibits this or something, and I don't know how well their firmware would react to such underhanded stealing of HD space.
Dungeon Keeper? Isn't this really just another D&D style game, just played from the DungeonMaster's perspective? Could have been fun, but hardly innovative.
Erm, no. It's nothing even close to that. It's an RTS, if you've played Evil Genius, well that's basically Dungeon Keeper 3. You characterised the other two games better, but still in a way that makes me wonder whether you played them for more than an hour. He also produced Theme Park and Syndicate, BTW - Bullfrog was just an amazing company.
Also, and you might already know this, there actually was a Populous 3. IIRC Molyneux wasn't involved, but it was a fun game.
Hm. The WON servers maintained the master server list your client queried to get the list of active servers, and internet servers were supposed to authenticate clients CD keys with the WON server before allowing them to play. I'm fairly certain it wasn't possible to run two games with same CD key at least at some point (around when TFC was still big and CS 0.6 started to become popular - man those were the days). Maybe there were cracks, I don't know, but out of the box it wouldn't work.
Valve shut down the WON servers in favour of Steam some time ago, I think originally they were maintained by Sierra.
Many things you say are true, but with respects to speed you are simply wrong. You say in another comment that you don't have any hard data - well, I'm looking at hard data, namely the current issue of the German computing mag c't. The average sustained transfer rate (read) of the 5400 rpm 2.5in drives are within 20 to 30 MB/s, while the 7200 rpm 3.5in drives routinely transfer at 45 to 55 MB/s, with 10krpm and 15krpm drives scoring even higher, obviously. And in a recent test on StorageReview a 10krpm (!) 2.5in HD targeting servers doesn't fare very well, either.
Yes, well, obviously pirating HL1 single player/LAN was trivial, but IIRC playing on official Internet WON servers was impossible for most of the time. How the managed to fuck that up in HL2 I don't know, but apparently they did. Maybe they fixed it by now, like I said, I never had to try.
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Of course, in some/many cases the so-called pretend solution is good enough. Even an extremely primitive deterrent is infinitely better than no deterrent at all, and is enough to prevent e.g. bulk access in the case of computers.
How odd, in the LC2 and Performa 475 days (8 or 9 years ago?) our Apples never worked the way you describe. When you inserted a disk it didn't know, it offered the option to format it for you, along with an eject button should that not be what you had in mind. And IIRC disks that were in the drive when the computer was booted were automatically ejected after it was determined they weren't boot disks. I don't think I used the paper clip more than once or twice in 2 or 3 years, and I don't recall why I used it... it might have been just because I was curious how that worked.
You're right, of course. Thanks.
Pretty sure since I've been playing a lot of CS:S the last few days and my CD is god knows where. It is in the changelogs if you know what to look for, if I recall correctly it was something like "fixed problems with safedisk", which I'm sure they wrote with an amused grin on their face considering the way they fixed it.
Let's not go into the whole Steam flame war here. :) But just FYI, the CD-check has been removed from HL2 (or at least CSS) a month or two back - I agree it was annoying.
;)
BTW I never knew Cohen was involved in Steam, or rather, I probably did know at some point and forgot about it. So maybe you're better informed than I am and clients do send data after all. But that'd be contrary to information I looked up before posting - yep, I actually do that... sometimes.
This is basically what Steam does.
.torrent file, though, and download with your favorite client, which I did getting, oh, about 1000x the download rates.
Steam? As in Valve's distribution mechanism? That Steam, at least, doesn't do anything like that. There is no P2P mechanism in steam, clients are pure clients. Updates are downloaded from a network of mirrors distributed geographically ("Total Available Bandwidth: 14,635.00Mbps"). Come to think of it, I wonder what protocol is used to transfer data from the content servers... it might be some Steam-proprietary protocol, but chances are it's simply HTTP or FTP.
Anyway, maybe you're thinkink of Blizzard's World of Warcraft. They used to rely heavily on BitTorrent to transfer the beta client and major updates. These days, it seems that all updates are downloaded from the servers, at least from the looks of it. Maybe that will change with the next major update. (And maybe it's different in the US, I'm in the EU.)
That was a disaster for me and many other people, because Blizzards were too dumb to limit the upstream either manually or by some sort of algorithm, which lead to extremely slow downloads on asynchronous connections. You could extract the
That's a fairly complex process, which is already an excellent deterrent. It doesn't seem very hard to counteract, either. Actually, I can't really fathom how it would work.
(1) You send the blog server a request for the web site containing the form. (2) The server generates a captcha with an associated hash and sends it to you along with the form. (3) You send a request with the decoded captcha, the hash and the form data attached.
Now the process you described would take captcha + hash you receive in 2, and get the decoded image from wherever. Later on, he goes on with 3, using the decoded text. Now my first idea would limit the time that could pass between 2 and 3, and I think that's a viable suggestion - at worst, an innocent poster will surpass the limit because he takes too long to create a post, but that's not a problem, we'll just send him a new captcha which he can decode within seconds.
But in any event, when you try to do 3 (ie post your spam) a normal human will have to do 2 (ie get the form) before that, so the server would know which captcha he sent you last, and sending the hash and decoded text for any other captcha wouldn't work. A script doesn't have to do 2 before doing 3, because a script doesn't manually fill out a form, but that alone is an odd behavious a server could be programmed to pick up. Sending any other decoded captcha than the one received in 2 is ineffective, if step 2 is skipped, then there is no legal captcha and no post. This would prevent "farming" blogs for captchas to be decoded and used at a later stage.
Sorry if I'm not overly clear (to say the least), I hope at least the time limit argument is simple enough to be understood.
Why don't blogs just use reverse turing tests, e.g. images containing text unreadable to computers as a verification to stop automated comment spam? It's not that tedious, and you could do it once per session or something like that.
I'm not an Apple geek, but from what I read here, OS X itself makes use of AltiVec everywhere it makes sense. That's one application everyone will run 100% of the time. Also, Apple's libraries many/some applications use are optimised for AltiVec. From the sounds of it, AltiVec is used more than its x86 counterparts.
Unprotected WIFI coverage of the EU is very near 100%.
Are you kidding? You've got to be. Unprotected wifi coverage isn't anywhere close to 100% (percent of what, anyway? area? population?) in densely populated urban areas, not to mention everywhere else.
GPRS/UMTS are available everywhere.
That's pretty much true if you mean GPRS or UMTS. GPRS is available pretty much everywhere in the EU, as far as I know. UMTS certainly is not; here in Germany it's available in most urban areas, but not in all rural or suburban areas. And of course, both GPRS and UMTS are freakishly expensive, at least from where I am standing.
That said, the situation isn't much different in the US, is it. I don't know what Wi-Fi explosion the grandparent is referring to, the coverage certainly isn't 100% (but then he never claimed that) and I don't see it going there.
Hm? I linked to a specific screenshot, also linked to in the story. Image subtitle: "The default CDE 1.6 Solaris desktop." While many of the other screens are Gnome-ish, this one isn't. But that's beside the point anyway, Gnome would look terrible with that background, too - hell, Mac OS X and Enlightenment would.
Okay, I can accept that. Sorry about the off-hand remark. But do you also like that desktop background?
What the heck - are they kidding? The default desktop background looks like on of those 3D images, which is to say it looks like ass. Maybe there's a subliminal message, I don't know, but I certainly wouldn't want that as my desktop background. Of course, the fact that CDE is running on top of it doesn't help. Sorry if I seem harsh, I'm still not sure if it's a joke. OTOH maybe I'm the only one who doesn't like it...
It supports ISO and BIN/CUE. The latter covers most of the games you might download off the net. It probably doesn't support either CloneCD or Alcohol, but that isn't exactly surprising, and burning cloned images is a difficult enough job that I wouldn't entrust it to any third party app anyway.
Yes... so what? "The law" is a linguistic shorthand; it's generally well understood to refer to a specific set of laws typically defined by the respective government. When I sit at the dinner table and say "Please hand me the potatoes", I'm also referring to a specific set of potatoes, not all the conceivable potatoes.
All significant AOL users do. It stands for America Online.
AOL Europe's ~5 million customers might feel different. On a sidenote, it's marketed as AOL here, no "America" attached.
Not that I disagree with your main point.
Huh?! You're just out to get me!! Here, have some money!
Along the lines of your argument, a 30 GB 3.5in 7200 rpm drive should be a lot slower than an 80 GB 2.5in 5400 rpm drive, due to the difference in density. Well, the review I was referring to did not test a 30 GB 7200 rpm drive, but I did quote the numbers for a 10,000 rpm drive, and despite the capacity difference, it was almost three times as fast. Figuring in the advantage of a higher rpm, at 7200 rpm it probably would still be twice as fast. Sorry, I just don't see your argument holding water given those numbers. It also goes against my daily experience. That said I obviously agree with your other points, like I've said in my first post to this thread, I wouldn't put one of those mad 10krpm drives in my subnotebook, either.
Or maybe you just don't do that. Not an option with kids or other pets around, of course. ;)
I referred to "average sustained transfer rate (read)", I thought that was pretty explicit. This is not some overall drive performance number. They got the number by reading the whole drive from first to last sector, a standard testing method to get this kind of number as far as I am aware.
As I said, the standard laptop drives were about half as fast as the standard desktop drives throughout the test. WRT comparing drives of the same size, that's hard when there are so few desktop hard drives available in 60 or 80 GB. For what it's worth, a SCSI 10kprm 3.5in HD (Maxtor Atlas 10K V) with 70 GB was nearly THREE times as fast as some of the 2.5in HDDs. 71.8 MB/s - nice! And the fastest drive in the test is a 35GB SCSI 15krpm drive (Fujitsu MAU3036NC) with a mean sustained read of 77 MB/s - 3.5in, obviously.
It's just a cool thing to do with an HD-based MP3 player. Chances are you'll have them with you most of the time, especially with the mini-sized devices, and with ~5 GB you probably can spare 100 to 500 MB for a small Linux install. With a flash MP3 player that might be half of your total memory. And in contrast to a CD-based Linux you are working with writable storage - this needn't be limited to rescue operations, you could carry around your $HOME with you, or your $HOME plus a minimal working system to use wherever you find an USB port and a reset button.
I'm considering buying an iPod mini - actually, I'm pretty much decided, I don't know why I don't go ahead and buy it already - and I was wondering how well this works. We had the article on booting Apples a couple of days ago, but that was over Firewire. The most important issue is how well the iPod firmware and iTunes deal with this. That's true for other devices, too - some HD MP3 players don't even register as mass storage devices anymore; from what I gather Microsoft's PlaysForSure prohibits this or something, and I don't know how well their firmware would react to such underhanded stealing of HD space.
Dungeon Keeper? Isn't this really just another D&D style game, just played from the DungeonMaster's perspective? Could have been fun, but hardly innovative.
Erm, no. It's nothing even close to that. It's an RTS, if you've played Evil Genius, well that's basically Dungeon Keeper 3. You characterised the other two games better, but still in a way that makes me wonder whether you played them for more than an hour. He also produced Theme Park and Syndicate, BTW - Bullfrog was just an amazing company.
Also, and you might already know this, there actually was a Populous 3. IIRC Molyneux wasn't involved, but it was a fun game.
Hm. The WON servers maintained the master server list your client queried to get the list of active servers, and internet servers were supposed to authenticate clients CD keys with the WON server before allowing them to play. I'm fairly certain it wasn't possible to run two games with same CD key at least at some point (around when TFC was still big and CS 0.6 started to become popular - man those were the days). Maybe there were cracks, I don't know, but out of the box it wouldn't work.
Valve shut down the WON servers in favour of Steam some time ago, I think originally they were maintained by Sierra.
Many things you say are true, but with respects to speed you are simply wrong. You say in another comment that you don't have any hard data - well, I'm looking at hard data, namely the current issue of the German computing mag c't. The average sustained transfer rate (read) of the 5400 rpm 2.5in drives are within 20 to 30 MB/s, while the 7200 rpm 3.5in drives routinely transfer at 45 to 55 MB/s, with 10krpm and 15krpm drives scoring even higher, obviously. And in a recent test on StorageReview a 10krpm (!) 2.5in HD targeting servers doesn't fare very well, either.
Yes, well, obviously pirating HL1 single player/LAN was trivial, but IIRC playing on official Internet WON servers was impossible for most of the time. How the managed to fuck that up in HL2 I don't know, but apparently they did. Maybe they fixed it by now, like I said, I never had to try.