ISDN is a 911 enabled service. If it's available to anyone from your telcom company it must be available to you, at the same cost, even if it costs them installing the equipment and running lines all the way to your house.
Of course if you're refering to an isp that'll let you connect that way at a reasonable price, then things may differ a bit.
IANAL, but that's how it was explained to me.
My local (swbell at the time) would have hooked it up for $80 and less than half that a month, but my isp (earthlink) would have charged $9/hour to connect that way.
The problem is only changed a bit when you goto such schemes.
Imagine you need to re-install your game a few years after release (hd upgrade, a virus imploded windows, you ran McAfee anit-virus, etc.). IF the company still exists, and is still supporting 'activation' and your not installing on a machine you don't want on the net, you are o.k.
A lot of IF's there, I don't want to be beholden to some companies good will and financial stability to use software I've already paid for.
And since these schemes DONT prevent copies being made I don't understand how these companies keep justifying the expense to the share holders, except to assume the shareholders are largely ignorant and/or apathetic.
I've stopped using McAfee and Norton for those reasons as well as the fact that this event was the only virus like thing they were not doing yet.
I uninstalled the McAffee 90day freebe from my laptop and started having random re-boots. Some digging around showed one of thier processes STILL being loaded at boot.
Delete it and everything seems fine now. The paranoid in me wanders if that wasn't designed to make you think maybe you'd caught a virus and needed to re-install and re-pay for thier crap again.
My laptop hasn't been online except ONCE right after I bought it, and was thouroughtly checked out bye several different malware scanners right after with no problems found.
Gak preview, preiview.
I meant to say I didn't really mess with those kinds of games all that much. Never been much for sports games and the flight sims back then left me bored.
Yep, try and imagine a modern disk drive (hard floppy or cd/dvd) of any sort with a general purpose cpu as powerfull as the main sytem cpu these days.
Some people really would have Beowolf cluster of them in a raid array.
I didn't mess with it all that much, but I can recall playing both california games and f-19 that someone else had cracked (the flashing credit screen proclaiming this or that craking group were often entertainment in thier own right).
Basically it only takes ONE person to figure it out to render any so-called copy protection scheme nothing but an expensive add on that costs the shareholders money and reduce sales through ticked off customers who have to do borderline to outright illeagle things to use thier software without negative consequences.
Sorry, but I don't d/l music. I'm just not that big a music fan. Besides that I'm stuck on Dialup that get 28.8 on a GOOD day making such things a big waste of my time.
Has it occured to you someone can hold a view without direct proffit thereby or as a rationalization for thier own questionable behavior?
Or am I just being trolled?
Strange, I don't recall but ONE program that ever gave me more than a day or two's trouble on my C=64. That ONE program was the software suite/gui/os called GEOS.
Usually it was a simple matter of seing which tracks and sectors had deliberate errors and duplicating them. The 'hard ones' required time with a hex editor and checking the 'half' tracks inbetween the regular tracks (the tracks on a 1541 floppy were laid out every other increment of the stepper motor, laying out data tracks at every step wasn't a good idea because the tracks would be close enough to interfere)
The idiot code wheels of black ink on dark red or word 7 sentence 14 page 23 of the user manual type checks were easily bypassed most of the time, just find the keywords in the exe and hex edit them all to IWIN.
That sentance pretty much matches my memory, heck it got BORRING do to lack of challenge after a while.
Ahh the good old days when EA was quality game company. Thier logo alone was often enough for me to buy a game in any of the right genres.
I've dug up a C=64 emulator and such just to re-play M.U.L.E. and Earth Orbit Stations and Mail Order Monsters.
Odd bit of trivia, the original main guy behind M.U.L.E. left the biz for a while to become a gal then died a few years ago from cancer or some such. One of the reasons there was no sequal.
I'd like to see a good sequal to Earth Orbit Stations. If anyone knows of something that could qualify as such I'd love to hear about it.
Just a few months ago me and my brother both wasted a couple weeks playing alot of that game on a C=64 emulator (hitting the run full speed button and having it process turns at 2000x was nice).
With console games they can usually pay a fee to get permision to rent the game out as copying console games successfully usually requires hardware mods to the consoles and a PC to do the copying with. In addition some consoles use very non-standard discs that only resemble cds and dvds.
AHH just like farcry and doomIII on my Brother's PC, both insisted the original cd wasn't in the drive when it was.
He though his cd-rom was going out.
After some research (and a full re-install of XP at one point) it turned out the drivers for his motherboard replaced the generic windows ide drivers with ones optimized for his specific motherboard and the malware deliberately failed if asked to use anything else.
When dvd-roms first came out many copy protections schemes depended on characteristics common to most cd-roms but not dvd-roms. And again when cd burners came out (many simply detectecd a burner and refused to run JUST IN CASE!)
Go back far enough and you run into the schemes that could actually damage hardware (a couple schemes where NOTORIOUS for ramming a 1541's read/write head against the end of it's travel so much it eventually screwed up the alignment.
And current accusations have Starforce's system causing some cd-roms to fail.
Certainly one can argue that the way current systems require more use of the optical drives than would be the case otherwise speeds up the normal wear and tear thereof.
Plus all the wasted time (and risk of damage) from having to find and swap out for whatever cd is currently needed to convice a program to run.
I generally don't agree with copy protection of any sort. However what you describe here is adding value to the box beyond the bits. THIS is a very good way to make games and music and so on a better value than simply downloading it.
I remember overhearing a couple of teenagers talking, one was planning to buy some boxed set of music cd's on his next paycheck, the other one asked why as he'd long since downloaded all the songs involved. The first replied he wanted this that and the other autographed thing in the box.
In another example was the game Leather Goddes of Phobos (C=64, Infocom or EA before it became evil), a scratch and sniff text game just isn't the same as a pirated version.
In movies you have the bookends or whatever it was that came with 'ubber mega version' of each of the LOTR trillogy.
ARE YOU LISTENING *AA's and game makers. Give people reasons to buy the boxed versions instead of reasons to aviod them and you'll sell more. Spend the $$ on non digital extra's instead of malware and maybe you'll get to keep making record profits year after year.
AHH I see how it works, release without protection and some A-hole make it possible to get it free so you add some expensive, user hostile, and system harming crap which gets bypassed and defeted and now the a-hole and some people who feel justified now that they've been treated like a thief make it possible to get free copies that aren't user or system hostile.
Look I can understand and sympathise, but the answer isn't to punish the innocent and be hostile to your users.
To put it simply the problem is SOCIAL not technical. And Technical solutions to social problem of this sort are a waste.
How about releasing a demo version on p2p yourself (if that makes sense, sometimes it doesn't) and compiling the next versions with a message asking people to pay for it, esp if you promise not to care how they got it as long as they pay for itin the help-about and load up screen should be enough.
And when the company goes belly up, or decides for whatever reason to stop support of any sort or jack the price up AFTER you already paid for it.
NO thanks I don't want my PAID FOR software hostage to some comapanies whims and fortunes.
I would think that if the shareholders found out a company was spending money on something that increases liability and reduces customer satisfaction they'd be more liable.
And that's exactly what I'd tell them. It does far more harm than good to the bottom line.
No it's not. I'm not being pedantic and I do recognize the popularity of the missuse. If Your tv is stolen you are out a tv and have to buy a new one.
If your roomate makes a copy of some software you own when your out(say 3dsmax, costs more than many tv's) and leave the original you are out NOTHING.
Another significant difference is that copyright is an ARTIFICIAL constuct to encourage creation and invention for the public good, current ip laws work against this goal.
Whereas a tv is a solid tangible object.
Equating copyright infingement to actual real theft is like equating mentally undressing someone to sexual assault.
In the United States that contract is outlined in congress's power to give a monopoly to artists and inventors on thier works 'for a limited time'. That limited time part is being stretched beyond reason or intent as it the definition of that monopoly (not the constitutions wording btw, it's wording is actually a bit narrower).
This stretching and the atendant abuses and leagle shenanigans (dmca) could be what the higher level poster meant by broken contract.
If you consider 3.6 Billion degrees cold might I suggest not living in next door to Belzebub. Or come to think of it anywhere in that general neighborhood. Though should you find snow in the local forcast let us know will you.
Some other posters have directed links to what they think the energy source is, some sort of turbulence effect.
Considering the fact that they re-ran the experiment quite a few times and the magnitude of the difference I think they have a good enough set of measurments for the ballpark figure they gave. It's not as if they said 3,602,308,667.2 degrees.
Suppose only one person could figure out some scheme, that's all it takes. Even before the public internet there were the BBS's and sneakernet.
This is why for the most part copy protection schemes are snake-oil in my book. They likely cost MORE than just what thier purveyors con the phb's into spending.
This because they make the cracked version (frequently online BEFORE on shelves) more convient as they get more anal. And if you're going to download a cracked iso anyway many would decide not to buy who might otherwise.
Without this crap the software creators loose an often significant overhead in the cost of the final product and they don't alienate thier customer base.
Without 'copy protection' many loose the justification they have for getting it cracked instead of buying it.
With it the makers have one more chunk of complex code they have to debug around (without even the source I suspect most times).
With it the users have more potential (especially with agressive techniques, such as aspi layer replacement) conflicts and bugs and glitches wich means MORE tech support calls (that can cost $$) and less good-will from thier 'customers' (If you're treated like thief from the get-go are you really a customer? or just con$umer to these people).
About the ONLY possible benefit I see from this crap is that a new scheme MIGHT delay the craked versions for a few days. Now is that really worth all the extra hassle and cost to both the creator and the customer?
I'm waiting for the first successfull lawsuit when one of these schemes destroys more than $45 cdrom (as StarForce is ALLEDGED to do, it hasn't hurt my system that I'm aware of). Considering many of these schemes DELIBERATELY interfere other (legitimate) software , it's only a matter of time before the problems caused thereby cost some company enough $$ to be worth litigation.
The 1541 floppy drive for the C=64 (and vic20 and others) had the same setup trackwise.
I remember quite a few tools to add various deliberate errors(error 21 and 23 were fairly comm iirc, not that I recall what they meant) and checks for half-track and in-between sector data.
The advantage to the crackers and copy program writers was the fact that it had it's own 2kram and cpu in there (there were programs that actually used the various sounds made durring operation of the drives to play recognizeable music!). One program I frequently used allowed you to re-program a pair of 1541's and link them together into an auto-copier. One you ran it you disconnect the first drive (daisy chain setup for C=64 drives) and each time you put a disk in both drives it would copy from the first drive to the second.
Back then one of the toughest pieces of software to crack was GEOS, a graphical os and apps for the C=64. They used quite a few clever tricks both the disks and with the 6510 (clone of the 6502) as it had quite a few undocumented instructions (probably unintended, no checking for 'illeagle' opcodes in the 6510).
Acording to the article they got more out than they put in. This implies an unknown source of energy.
"One thing that puzzles scientists is that the high temperature was achieved after the plasma's ions should have been losing energy and cooling. Also, when the high temperature was achieved, the Z machine was releasing more energy than was originally put in, something that usually occurs only in nuclear reactions.
Sandia consultant Malcolm Haines theorizes that some unknown energy source is involved, which is providing the machine with an extra jolt of energy just as the plasma ions are beginning to slow down."
One of the reasons is Pepsi used to own (and still holds significant stock in last I heard) several (Pizza Hut, KFC, and Taco Bell) food chains, and most definately had no interest is selling the competitions product.
This is related to why many food establishments only sell Coke-a-Cola products. If you were a competetor of one of a pepsi owned food establishment would you support them by buying from thier parent corp?
The other reason is of course the healthy discounts eigther would give if you signed an exlusive contract.
Slashdot Mirror
ISDN is a 911 enabled service. If it's available to anyone from your telcom company it must be available to you, at the same cost, even if it costs them installing the equipment and running lines all the way to your house.
Of course if you're refering to an isp that'll let you connect that way at a reasonable price, then things may differ a bit.
IANAL, but that's how it was explained to me.
My local (swbell at the time) would have hooked it up for $80 and less than half that a month, but my isp (earthlink) would have charged $9/hour to connect that way.
Mycroft
The problem is only changed a bit when you goto such schemes.
Imagine you need to re-install your game a few years after release (hd upgrade, a virus imploded windows, you ran McAfee anit-virus, etc.). IF the company still exists, and is still supporting 'activation' and your not installing on a machine you don't want on the net, you are o.k.
A lot of IF's there, I don't want to be beholden to some companies good will and financial stability to use software I've already paid for.
And since these schemes DONT prevent copies being made I don't understand how these companies keep justifying the expense to the share holders, except to assume the shareholders are largely ignorant and/or apathetic.
Mycroft
I've stopped using McAfee and Norton for those reasons as well as the fact that this event was the only virus like thing they were not doing yet.
I uninstalled the McAffee 90day freebe from my laptop and started having random re-boots. Some digging around showed one of thier processes STILL being loaded at boot.
Delete it and everything seems fine now. The paranoid in me wanders if that wasn't designed to make you think maybe you'd caught a virus and needed to re-install and re-pay for thier crap again.
My laptop hasn't been online except ONCE right after I bought it, and was thouroughtly checked out bye several different malware scanners right after with no problems found.
Mycroft
They do ship several apps with thier product, some they developed, some third party.
Mycroft
Gak preview, preiview.
I meant to say I didn't really mess with those kinds of games all that much.
Never been much for sports games and the flight sims back then left me bored.
Mycroft
Yep, try and imagine a modern disk drive (hard floppy or cd/dvd) of any sort with a general purpose cpu as powerfull as the main sytem cpu these days.
Some people really would have Beowolf cluster of them in a raid array.
Mycroft
I didn't mess with it all that much, but I can recall playing both california games and f-19 that someone else had cracked (the flashing credit screen proclaiming this or that craking group were often entertainment in thier own right).
Basically it only takes ONE person to figure it out to render any so-called copy protection scheme nothing but an expensive add on that costs the shareholders money and reduce sales through ticked off customers who have to do borderline to outright illeagle things to use thier software without negative consequences.
Mycroft
Sorry, but I don't d/l music. I'm just not that big a music fan. Besides that I'm stuck on Dialup that get 28.8 on a GOOD day making such things a big waste of my time.
Has it occured to you someone can hold a view without direct proffit thereby or as a rationalization for thier own questionable behavior?
Or am I just being trolled?
Mycroft
Strange, I don't recall but ONE program that ever gave me more than a day or two's trouble on my C=64. That ONE program was the software suite/gui/os called GEOS.
Usually it was a simple matter of seing which tracks and sectors had deliberate errors and duplicating them. The 'hard ones' required time with a hex editor and checking the 'half' tracks inbetween the regular tracks (the tracks on a 1541 floppy were laid out every other increment of the stepper motor, laying out data tracks at every step wasn't a good idea because the tracks would be close enough to interfere)
The idiot code wheels of black ink on dark red or word 7 sentence 14 page 23 of the user manual type checks were easily bypassed most of the time, just find the keywords in the exe and hex edit them all to IWIN.
That sentance pretty much matches my memory, heck it got BORRING do to lack of challenge after a while.
Mycroft
Ahh the good old days when EA was quality game company. Thier logo alone was often enough for me to buy a game in any of the right genres.
I've dug up a C=64 emulator and such just to re-play M.U.L.E. and Earth Orbit Stations and Mail Order Monsters.
Odd bit of trivia, the original main guy behind M.U.L.E. left the biz for a while to become a gal then died a few years ago from cancer or some such. One of the reasons there was no sequal.
I'd like to see a good sequal to Earth Orbit Stations. If anyone knows of something that could qualify as such I'd love to hear about it.
Just a few months ago me and my brother both wasted a couple weeks playing alot of that game on a C=64 emulator (hitting the run full speed button and having it process turns at 2000x was nice).
Mycroft
With console games they can usually pay a fee to get permision to rent the game out as copying console games successfully usually requires hardware mods to the consoles and a PC to do the copying with. In addition some consoles use very non-standard discs that only resemble cds and dvds.
Mycroft
AHH just like farcry and doomIII on my Brother's PC, both insisted the original cd wasn't in the drive when it was.
He though his cd-rom was going out.
After some research (and a full re-install of XP at one point) it turned out the drivers for his motherboard replaced the generic windows ide drivers with ones optimized for his specific motherboard and the malware deliberately failed if asked to use anything else.
When dvd-roms first came out many copy protections schemes depended on characteristics common to most cd-roms but not dvd-roms. And again when cd burners came out (many simply detectecd a burner and refused to run JUST IN CASE!)
Go back far enough and you run into the schemes that could actually damage hardware (a couple schemes where NOTORIOUS for ramming a 1541's read/write head against the end of it's travel so much it eventually screwed up the alignment.
And current accusations have Starforce's system causing some cd-roms to fail.
Certainly one can argue that the way current systems require more use of the optical drives than would be the case otherwise speeds up the normal wear and tear thereof.
Plus all the wasted time (and risk of damage) from having to find and swap out for whatever cd is currently needed to convice a program to run.
Mycroft
I generally don't agree with copy protection of any sort. However what you describe here is adding value to the box beyond the bits. THIS is a very good way to make games and music and so on a better value than simply downloading it.
I remember overhearing a couple of teenagers talking, one was planning to buy some boxed set of music cd's on his next paycheck, the other one asked why as he'd long since downloaded all the songs involved. The first replied he wanted this that and the other autographed thing in the box.
In another example was the game Leather Goddes of Phobos (C=64, Infocom or EA before it became evil), a scratch and sniff text game just isn't the same as a pirated version.
In movies you have the bookends or whatever it was that came with 'ubber mega version' of each of the LOTR trillogy.
ARE YOU LISTENING *AA's and game makers. Give people reasons to buy the boxed versions instead of reasons to aviod them and you'll sell more. Spend the $$ on non digital extra's instead of malware and maybe you'll get to keep making record profits year after year.
Mycroft
AHH I see how it works, release without protection and some A-hole make it possible to get it free so you add some expensive, user hostile, and system harming crap which gets bypassed and defeted and now the a-hole and some people who feel justified now that they've been treated like a thief make it possible to get free copies that aren't user or system hostile.
Look I can understand and sympathise, but the answer isn't to punish the innocent and be hostile to your users.
To put it simply the problem is SOCIAL not technical. And Technical solutions to social problem of this sort are a waste.
How about releasing a demo version on p2p yourself (if that makes sense, sometimes it doesn't) and compiling the next versions with a message asking people to pay for it, esp if you promise not to care how they got it as long as they pay for itin the help-about and load up screen should be enough.
Mycroft
And when the company goes belly up, or decides for whatever reason to stop support of any sort or jack the price up AFTER you already paid for it.
NO thanks I don't want my PAID FOR software hostage to some comapanies whims and fortunes.
Mycroft
I would think that if the shareholders found out a company was spending money on something that increases liability and reduces customer satisfaction they'd be more liable.
And that's exactly what I'd tell them. It does far more harm than good to the bottom line.
Mycroft
No it's not. I'm not being pedantic and I do recognize the popularity of the missuse.
If Your tv is stolen you are out a tv and have to buy a new one.
If your roomate makes a copy of some software you own when your out(say 3dsmax, costs more than many tv's) and leave the original you are out NOTHING.
Another significant difference is that copyright is an ARTIFICIAL constuct to encourage creation and invention for the public good, current ip laws work against this goal.
Whereas a tv is a solid tangible object.
Equating copyright infingement to actual real theft is like equating mentally undressing someone to sexual assault.
Mycroft
In the United States that contract is outlined in congress's power to give a monopoly to artists and inventors on thier works 'for a limited time'. That limited time part is being stretched beyond reason or intent as it the definition of that monopoly (not the constitutions wording btw, it's wording is actually a bit narrower).
This stretching and the atendant abuses and leagle shenanigans (dmca) could be what the higher level poster meant by broken contract.
Mycroft
That last sentence pair is fairly clever, don't 100% agree (more from hope than realism sadly). I'm thinking of stealing for my sig if you don't mind.
Mycroft
If you consider 3.6 Billion degrees cold might I suggest not living in next door to Belzebub.
Or come to think of it anywhere in that general neighborhood.
Though should you find snow in the local forcast let us know will you.
Mycroft
Some other posters have directed links to what they think the energy source is, some sort of turbulence effect.
Considering the fact that they re-ran the experiment quite a few times and the magnitude of the difference I think they have a good enough set of measurments for the ballpark figure they gave. It's not as if they said 3,602,308,667.2 degrees.
Mycroft
Suppose only one person could figure out some scheme, that's all it takes. Even before the public internet there were the BBS's and sneakernet.
This is why for the most part copy protection schemes are snake-oil in my book. They likely cost MORE than just what thier purveyors con the phb's into spending.
This because they make the cracked version (frequently online BEFORE on shelves) more convient as they get more anal. And if you're going to download a cracked iso anyway many would decide not to buy who might otherwise.
Without this crap the software creators loose an often significant overhead in the cost of the final product and they don't alienate thier customer base.
Without 'copy protection' many loose the justification they have for getting it cracked instead of buying it.
With it the makers have one more chunk of complex code they have to debug around (without even the source I suspect most times).
With it the users have more potential (especially with agressive techniques, such as aspi layer replacement) conflicts and bugs and glitches wich means MORE tech support calls (that can cost $$) and less good-will from thier 'customers' (If you're treated like thief from the get-go are you really a customer? or just con$umer to these people).
About the ONLY possible benefit I see from this crap is that a new scheme MIGHT delay the craked versions for a few days. Now is that really worth all the extra hassle and cost to both the creator and the customer?
I'm waiting for the first successfull lawsuit when one of these schemes destroys more than $45 cdrom (as StarForce is ALLEDGED to do, it hasn't hurt my system that I'm aware of). Considering many of these schemes DELIBERATELY interfere other (legitimate) software , it's only a matter of time before the problems caused thereby cost some company enough $$ to be worth litigation.
Mycroft
The 1541 floppy drive for the C=64 (and vic20 and others) had the same setup trackwise.
I remember quite a few tools to add various deliberate errors(error 21 and 23 were fairly comm iirc, not that I recall what they meant) and checks for half-track and in-between sector data.
The advantage to the crackers and copy program writers was the fact that it had it's own 2kram and cpu in there (there were programs that actually used the various sounds made durring operation of the drives to play recognizeable music!). One program I frequently used allowed you to re-program a pair of 1541's and link them together into an auto-copier. One you ran it you disconnect the first drive (daisy chain setup for C=64 drives) and each time you put a disk in both drives it would copy from the first drive to the second.
Back then one of the toughest pieces of software to crack was GEOS, a graphical os and apps for the C=64. They used quite a few clever tricks both the disks and with the 6510 (clone of the 6502) as it had quite a few undocumented instructions (probably unintended, no checking for 'illeagle' opcodes in the 6510).
Mycroft
Acording to the article they got more out than they put in. This implies an unknown source of energy.
"One thing that puzzles scientists is that the high temperature was achieved after the plasma's ions should have been losing energy and cooling. Also, when the high temperature was achieved, the Z machine was releasing more energy than was originally put in, something that usually occurs only in nuclear reactions.
Sandia consultant Malcolm Haines theorizes that some unknown energy source is involved, which is providing the machine with an extra jolt of energy just as the plasma ions are beginning to slow down."
Mycroft
One of the reasons is Pepsi used to own (and still holds significant stock in last I heard) several (Pizza Hut, KFC, and Taco Bell) food chains, and most definately had no interest is selling the competitions product.
This is related to why many food establishments only sell Coke-a-Cola products. If you were a competetor of one of a pepsi owned food establishment would you support them by buying from thier parent corp?
The other reason is of course the healthy discounts eigther would give if you signed an exlusive contract.
Mycroft