Far from displaying your superior intellect, You embarass yourself. "such as it were" is a traditional phrase in english literature and writing. Try to read more than "learning perl" and the "python cookbook", you might find it eye opening, such as it were.
Kafka said, "You become what you hate". The collorary is you hate what you wish you could be. The thing is I don't know which direction to apply these lemmas.
How does it compare to flash MTBF. Or between Manufacturers? If the ratio of actual to stated MTBF is the same for all hard disks that's fine I guess since I know how to divide by 15. But if it varies between manufaruters or between alternative technologies (dvd, harddrive, flash drive, metal film drive, tape) then this matters a great deal as one will make the wrong choices or pay way too much for reliability not gained.
unless they warantee this, which none do, the spec is meaningless, and they might as well lie.
with a 25 decimal key, to find a collision would require something on the order of a trillion tries. If the key space is alpha numberic then more. if the key space is heavily (and predictably) shorterned by patterns in the keys (like alternating letters and numbers or checksums, date codes, special activation sets..), then the number could be less. This number also depends modestly on how many keys are issued, so figure that extimate is withing a factor of 1000 of the work load
One poster on the crack forum wrote "5 hours and i got 3 legit keys." at 20K/hour that's only 100,000 tries or 33,000 per key. So apparently despite having a 25 digit key space, Microsoft's algorithmic validity check allows 1 in every 33,000 keys. What where they thinking?
As I pointed out in the post above the chance of a randomly generated working activation- key colliding with a legitimate keys is probably worse odds than 1 in a trillion. So this will probably never ever happen by chance.
However, chance might not play a role here. Given this colossal stupidity one also assumes they did something dumb like make the decoded keys have some sort of sequential pattern too, so given enough keys one might be able to figure out how to actually generate keys directly. In that case MS will have a problem with the key-collisions with legitimate keys because people could deliberately generate those.
Why would deliberately generating legitimate keys be a good idea for a cracker? Well, if you do generate a random activation key, it will activate the product but Microsoft will also be able to determine that it's one that it did not issue. So the moment vista phones home or you try to do a system update, or install any piece of software from MS that can check the key (e.g. office), microsoft is gonna shut your genuine ass down. On the other hand if you were to generate a key that coincided with a legitimate key, then MS won't know you filtched it. So there's an incentive to see if MS also made the patterns predictable.
You could of course try to live off line. but that level of piracy is not a threat to MS.
All that said my guess is that this is not possible. If I were creating these keys what I woul dhave done would be to use public key encryption. I'd take the integers 1 to 1 billion, and encrypt them with my private. The the Vista copy caries the public decode key. To validate the vista installer decrypts the user supplied key. If it's a number between 1 and billion, you've been validated. MS can now issue up to 1 billion copies of the software with distinct keys.
The keys are nominally 25 digits long. It can try 10,000 keys every 30 minutes. Even if there is some checksum redundancy in the key itself 25 digits, especially if they include alpha characters, is a huge key space. I would have guessed that only a teeny tiny fraction of the key space was allowed but apparently not!
But I don't see any danger that a cracked key and a legit key would collide in that large a key space. The birthday attack (see wikipedia) tells you the probability of a collision is equivalent to a 12 digit key, which i'd assume must be nearing one in a trillion.
Since the program obviously has some algorithmic test of the key validity. MS blew it by making this space so promiscuously large that a 20,000key/hour guesser could crack it.
This is a lot like Walmart: by being a huge conduit for DVDs walmart can demand lower prices from the producers. They can't demand higher prices from the consumers however.
Apple does not own the content it sells by iTMS. So the monopoly here is not on the music itself or even the right to sell music. the DRM is only a weak gate between consumers and their music since the one apple chose is so porous (burn it). The strong gate is between the content owners and their ability to sell music for iPods. So the restraint is really on the content owners not on the consumers.
To them selling the content is a loss leader for selling ipods. The last thing they want to see is the price of music go up.
Apple's big fear is that if there are other stores that can sell to the iPod market the content owners will yank it from apple's pricing model and go to a more extractive one. Apple would not really care that iTMS was less busy, but they would care that the distinguishing simplicity of use of the ipod ecosystem was gone: contrast: 1) just go to one store and there's all the content you want and it transfers to your ipod automatically 2) have 12 different places to search and pricing models each serving a different store.
so I'm saying that like walmart the apple monopoly is 1) aligned with consumer interests 2) the impact of the monopoly is on the content owners ability to raise prices not the consumers. 100% of the monopoly leverage to keep prices down comes from the inability of the content owners to access the ipod market without using apple.
So yes it is a monopoly but not in the direction we usually think of monopolies: they are not exploiting the consumer but rather the producers. It's a tad like the way a big conduit like walmart can screw the producers. Since I'm a consumer I'm in favor of it. Unlike walmart, I don't think it's hurting the nation to screw the producers.
Counterintuitively, apple DRM being exclusive to apple's store is good for the consumer while being bad for the music industry companies. here me out.
Imagine apple opened up it's DRM to other stores. Now Sony goes to store B, C and D, which are rivals, and says we'll let the first one of you agree to our new rules have exclusive access toour top artists. Namely we want you will charge $7.99 and bundle them in sets of 5. No more singles and no more $1 songs.
Well duh, one of them will Kowtow. And it won't be apple which will sputter along trying to enforce the $1-single song rule.
Thus the only thing keeping the status quo which we all like ($1 songs and ability to buy singles) is apple's exclusive control of it's DRM. The moment that vanishes the Music INdustry has us in its claws.
So pray that apple does not open it's DRM to other stores.
Now on the flip side if all music is sold without DRM, well then there's another enformcement mechanism. If the music industry charges too much and forces song bubdling too much then Gnapster like trading services make a comeback, made all the easier by the lack of DRM on a much large song base.
So Jobs I think was right, but for different reasons than he stated. The most consumer freindly situation is that DRM be apple only or not at all. Apple is a good watch dog in this case because they profit from keeping song prices and tersm consumer freindly since that favors iPod sales as long as there is DRM. Second, they make a good watchdog because they are not threatened if DRM entirely vanishes. THe only thing threatening them is if the Music industry starts dictating higher prices and bundling songs because that will move sales off to crappy user unfreindly sites and diminsh the appeal of the ipod.
I'v already tested this on my computer. here's the facts. 1) at idle on normal web pages safari consumes much LESS cpu time than other browsers 2) if you run a cpu intensive script background it is not slowed by safari in any measurable way.
in the macenstein article they too noted that cpuintensive tasks like quicktime were not slowed but memory intensive tasks like photoshop were. Also they noted that the in memory and virtual memory footprints were several fold higher for safari than for firefox.
clearly this is a no brainier. Safari is using more memory and doing so in a demanding way. I don't know why but I assume it probably has something to do with how it handles the back-forward cache, fast page compoaition, and images. Maybe there's some memory leak too, since safari's offtprint grows during the day.
But this is utterly unsurprising. If you run a big memory app like photshop you already know better than to be running other apps that consume memory.
The only problem I've had with safari is not this but there are just some webpages that don't seem to comlicated that make it grind to a halt and use 60% of the cpu. One example is pricegrabber.com.
It's not enough to store the data, you also have to make the data recognizable. After all 100 years from now how do you know where to look to read the data? The biggest problem is that non-coding dna is not selectively preserved.
>Outside my window the entire canyon is 80% dead trees.
Better watch out. The next forest fire will take care of them. Oddly enough, it turns out dead trees are not easily susceptible to forest fires. Forest fires get explosively hot from the burning branches and needles and those are the first to go on dead trees. Then as they rot they actually take on more water.
No kidding colorado and New Mexico are being ravaged by bark beetles. Outside my window the entire canyon is 80% dead trees. I'm not exagerating. that's the official figure. It's expected many ski areas in colorado will be baren within the decade. he last few winter cycles have not been cold enough.
On the flip side, the birds look chubbier. But they will leave when the trees are all gone. And after all the trees fall over in ten years the rocky baren mountain sides will look handsome. Right now they look uggly with all the black limbess sticks.
Gazooks, what if this gets loose on the beaches. It's a cinch people with eroding beaches threatening buildings will be injecting this stuff along shorelines.
Considering that in our legal systems two wrongs don't make a right vigilante justice like this should be punished. Yeah, let's form a vigilante posse and punish him!
In contrast with the MP3 format, which requires royalty payments on distributed content, no licenses or payments are required to be able to stream or distribute content in AAC format. This reason alone makes AAC a much more attractive format for distributing content, particularly streaming content (such as Internet radio).
by the way that's the first two sentences of the wikipedia article you cite.
When was MP3 ever considered unencumbered? MS is just saying that it got its licence from Fraunhofer like everyone else..
is that were Linux and mplayer and vlc paid for their library licenses?
Well yes MS got their apparently insufficient licenses from frauhauffer. But Alcatel now says they want 250 times that price right now in lost pastrevenue. The court only ordered then a mere 100 times the amount MS paid to Fraunhoffer. No statement of what the fee for then next ten years is going to be if MS wants to keep using it. And why should they since they have WMA since lack of an mp3 player won't change whether people buy Vista or not.
Worse! it also means MP3 players are unlicensed and you'll now have to use AAC. Too bad for everyone who locked themselves in to a proprietary non_DRM format that will soon lack any new players. Seriously... Can you imagine that ipods are immune to this lawsuits consequences?
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But I found it funnier than a fart in a phonebox.
Far from displaying your superior intellect, You embarass yourself. "such as it were" is a traditional phrase in english literature and writing. Try to read more than "learning perl" and the "python cookbook", you might find it eye opening, such as it were.
Kafka said, "You become what you hate". The collorary is you hate what you wish you could be. The thing is I don't know which direction to apply these lemmas.
That's beautiful. #GGGG power.
unless they warantee this, which none do, the spec is meaningless, and they might as well lie.
what does one do with 0.708'th of a license key ;-)
with a 25 decimal key, to find a collision would require something on the order of a trillion tries. If the key space is alpha numberic then more. if the key space is heavily (and predictably) shorterned by patterns in the keys (like alternating letters and numbers or checksums, date codes, special activation sets..), then the number could be less. This number also depends modestly on how many keys are issued, so figure that extimate is withing a factor of 1000 of the work load
As I pointed out in the post above the chance of a randomly generated working activation- key colliding with a legitimate keys is probably worse odds than 1 in a trillion. So this will probably never ever happen by chance.
However, chance might not play a role here. Given this colossal stupidity one also assumes they did something dumb like make the decoded keys have some sort of sequential pattern too, so given enough keys one might be able to figure out how to actually generate keys directly. In that case MS will have a problem with the key-collisions with legitimate keys because people could deliberately generate those.
Why would deliberately generating legitimate keys be a good idea for a cracker? Well, if you do generate a random activation key, it will activate the product but Microsoft will also be able to determine that it's one that it did not issue. So the moment vista phones home or you try to do a system update, or install any piece of software from MS that can check the key (e.g. office), microsoft is gonna shut your genuine ass down. On the other hand if you were to generate a key that coincided with a legitimate key, then MS won't know you filtched it. So there's an incentive to see if MS also made the patterns predictable.
You could of course try to live off line. but that level of piracy is not a threat to MS.
All that said my guess is that this is not possible. If I were creating these keys what I woul dhave done would be to use public key encryption. I'd take the integers 1 to 1 billion, and encrypt them with my private. The the Vista copy caries the public decode key. To validate the vista installer decrypts the user supplied key. If it's a number between 1 and billion, you've been validated. MS can now issue up to 1 billion copies of the software with distinct keys.
But I don't see any danger that a cracked key and a legit key would collide in that large a key space. The birthday attack (see wikipedia) tells you the probability of a collision is equivalent to a 12 digit key, which i'd assume must be nearing one in a trillion.
Since the program obviously has some algorithmic test of the key validity. MS blew it by making this space so promiscuously large that a 20,000key/hour guesser could crack it.
Ah! someone finally gets what I was saying.
Oh yeah that would go over big! All the stores colluding on price. I give it a week before the record industry sued.
Apple does not own the content it sells by iTMS. So the monopoly here is not on the music itself or even the right to sell music. the DRM is only a weak gate between consumers and their music since the one apple chose is so porous (burn it). The strong gate is between the content owners and their ability to sell music for iPods. So the restraint is really on the content owners not on the consumers.
To them selling the content is a loss leader for selling ipods. The last thing they want to see is the price of music go up.
Apple's big fear is that if there are other stores that can sell to the iPod market the content owners will yank it from apple's pricing model and go to a more extractive one. Apple would not really care that iTMS was less busy, but they would care that the distinguishing simplicity of use of the ipod ecosystem was gone: contrast: 1) just go to one store and there's all the content you want and it transfers to your ipod automatically 2) have 12 different places to search and pricing models each serving a different store.
so I'm saying that like walmart the apple monopoly is 1) aligned with consumer interests 2) the impact of the monopoly is on the content owners ability to raise prices not the consumers. 100% of the monopoly leverage to keep prices down comes from the inability of the content owners to access the ipod market without using apple.
So yes it is a monopoly but not in the direction we usually think of monopolies: they are not exploiting the consumer but rather the producers. It's a tad like the way a big conduit like walmart can screw the producers. Since I'm a consumer I'm in favor of it. Unlike walmart, I don't think it's hurting the nation to screw the producers.
Imagine apple opened up it's DRM to other stores. Now Sony goes to store B, C and D, which are rivals, and says we'll let the first one of you agree to our new rules have exclusive access toour top artists. Namely we want you will charge $7.99 and bundle them in sets of 5. No more singles and no more $1 songs.
Well duh, one of them will Kowtow. And it won't be apple which will sputter along trying to enforce the $1-single song rule.
Thus the only thing keeping the status quo which we all like ($1 songs and ability to buy singles) is apple's exclusive control of it's DRM. The moment that vanishes the Music INdustry has us in its claws.
So pray that apple does not open it's DRM to other stores.
Now on the flip side if all music is sold without DRM, well then there's another enformcement mechanism. If the music industry charges too much and forces song bubdling too much then Gnapster like trading services make a comeback, made all the easier by the lack of DRM on a much large song base.
So Jobs I think was right, but for different reasons than he stated. The most consumer freindly situation is that DRM be apple only or not at all. Apple is a good watch dog in this case because they profit from keeping song prices and tersm consumer freindly since that favors iPod sales as long as there is DRM. Second, they make a good watchdog because they are not threatened if DRM entirely vanishes. THe only thing threatening them is if the Music industry starts dictating higher prices and bundling songs because that will move sales off to crappy user unfreindly sites and diminsh the appeal of the ipod.
in the macenstein article they too noted that cpuintensive tasks like quicktime were not slowed but memory intensive tasks like photoshop were. Also they noted that the in memory and virtual memory footprints were several fold higher for safari than for firefox.
clearly this is a no brainier. Safari is using more memory and doing so in a demanding way. I don't know why but I assume it probably has something to do with how it handles the back-forward cache, fast page compoaition, and images. Maybe there's some memory leak too, since safari's offtprint grows during the day.
But this is utterly unsurprising. If you run a big memory app like photshop you already know better than to be running other apps that consume memory.
The only problem I've had with safari is not this but there are just some webpages that don't seem to comlicated that make it grind to a halt and use 60% of the cpu. One example is pricegrabber.com.
It's not enough to store the data, you also have to make the data recognizable. After all 100 years from now how do you know where to look to read the data? The biggest problem is that non-coding dna is not selectively preserved.
Better watch out. The next forest fire will take care of them.
Oddly enough, it turns out dead trees are not easily susceptible to forest fires. Forest fires get explosively hot from the burning branches and needles and those are the first to go on dead trees. Then as they rot they actually take on more water.
planned spinoffs include
Dancing with Spock
Federation Idol
Transparent Aluminum Chef (with shatner)
Richard Simons Kilingon Workout
More?
I heard the working title of it was going to be "LOST in Space"
No kidding colorado and New Mexico are being ravaged by bark beetles. Outside my window the entire canyon is 80% dead trees. I'm not exagerating. that's the official figure. It's expected many ski areas in colorado will be baren within the decade. he last few winter cycles have not been cold enough. On the flip side, the birds look chubbier. But they will leave when the trees are all gone. And after all the trees fall over in ten years the rocky baren mountain sides will look handsome. Right now they look uggly with all the black limbess sticks.
Gazooks, what if this gets loose on the beaches. It's a cinch people with eroding beaches threatening buildings will be injecting this stuff along shorelines.
Well yes. But apparently the Mp3 is pretty damn expensive. which takes us right back to my original post.
by the way that's the first two sentences of the wikipedia article you cite.
is that were Linux and mplayer and vlc paid for their library licenses?
Well yes MS got their apparently insufficient licenses from frauhauffer. But Alcatel now says they want 250 times that price right now in lost pastrevenue. The court only ordered then a mere 100 times the amount MS paid to Fraunhoffer. No statement of what the fee for then next ten years is going to be if MS wants to keep using it. And why should they since they have WMA since lack of an mp3 player won't change whether people buy Vista or not.
Worse! it also means MP3 players are unlicensed and you'll now have to use AAC. Too bad for everyone who locked themselves in to a proprietary non_DRM format that will soon lack any new players. Seriously... Can you imagine that ipods are immune to this lawsuits consequences?