The Apple II was (and still is) also good to produce copy-proteced disks for computers with a floppy controller of the Western Digital family. Format a track with the WD controller, put the floppy into an Apple, write the same track with the Apple "controller" (it is actually just a shift register) for a brief moment and interrupt the procedure so that only a small fraction of the track gets overwritten. The Apple does not care about the index hole and starts to write at a random location. With a bit of luck you overwrite just a fraction of a sector written by the WD controller. Repeat until you succeed. The Apple writes the data with a different clock frequency than the WD controller. Thus every time you read the prepared disk with a WD controller, the WD controller's pll oscillator fails to synchronize with the bits of the manipulated sector on the floppy. Consequently the controller produces random information, plus a checksum error, every time you try to read the manipulated sector, very much like a hole punched into the floppy disk. From the outside the disks looks perfectly fine. And there is no way to duplicate that without a lot of effort, certainly not with a standard controller. This scheme still works today for PCs. The PCs floppy controller is just a clone of a NEC controller, which itself is a clone of the WD controller.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/writely-so. html "Writely, a collaborative word processor that runs in a web browser." WYSIWYG is nice, but is it the most important thing for a collaborative word processor that runs in a web browser? Maybe for you. Compatibility and simplicity is more important for me.
This is technical nonsense. Just because you have been told that these are your only options does not mean it is true. I am sure you believe the whole web would not function anymore without AJAX, javascript, java, Macromedia flush, Active X, you name it.
Microsoft ActiveX was never a necessity for the web. Neither were cookies or javascript. Same about Macromedia flash etc.. It is all about the ignorance of people who do not know how to develop HTML-based web applications. And you seem to be one of those poor minds.
Writely is not supported, and probably won't run on*:
* IE 5 (Mac) or IE 4 (Windows)
* Netscape 4
* Opera
* Safari
Regardless of your browser type, you must:
* Enable cookies
* Enable Javascript
In other words, it requires junk like cookies and javascript, and it does not function with every web browser not with every operating system. Curious, wasn't the web about open document access? Must have been a long, long time ago.
> In the late '80s and early '90s, the games industry could do little more than ask nicely that you not pirate their wares.
What? I was able to put a 16 byte sector inside a 256 byte sector, which itself was located inside a 1024 byte sector, on a floppy, in the late 70's. Even the best copy programs had a hard time to crack that. I have produced things like that and I have seen others doing similar things. Most people could not copy such games. And hey, there were always people who knew how to do it and there will always be such people.
How about information of people whose credit card number was fetched from insecure software, like Microsoft IIS? Somehow I doubt that iBill would have removed those people from their database.
No, PostIdent (Deutsche Post) and certified mail are two totally different services Certified mail is an optional feature of PostIdent, though. PostIdent is about authentication, not certified mail.
The whole thing is not about better support, privacy, security, whatsoever. People are using the Internet since two decades. No, those who deploy such software and restrictions only want to secure their jobs. It is that simple.
The Postal Service in Germany offers a service called PostIdent. Customers and third parties can rely on this service. I am sure there is a post office in your neighborhood. Why is this service not available in the US?
Well, they only produce the isolinear chips for Star Fleet. Seriously, the NAND flash memory stores the data immediately. It is a perfect write cache, because it does not forget the data. Almost perfect, because its write cycles are limited. But a more reliable file system would do the trick, too. Journaling is one way of making things more reliable. But, you have a good point. It is important that some data get written ASAP onto the medium. Unfortunately Linux file systems are not exactly the right choice if this is of importance for you. VMS would be a much better alternative. In order to utilize these hybrid disks it is also important to ensure that the important data gets written immediately, and that the hybrid disk knows which data needs to be cached in the flash memory. The disk allocation tables and directories are obviously important. But some databases might be important too. Bottom line is, the disks simply cannot be smart enough to handle all file systems and all applications. Therefore I agree with you, the whole thing is pointless. It would be much easier to back up some of the computers power lines with a battery, as part of the power supply, not as external UPS (stupid HV-LV-HV-LV conversion - HV=High voltage 110/230V, LV=3.3-12V). There are a few power supplies available which do exactly that (internal LV backup).
Too bad that wonderful tools like this one have to be produced for the military. Wouldn't it be great if such a mule could assist use when we have to move? Moving all those boxes is just back-breaking work. Oh well, I guess I have to ask my friends again. Nevertheless, great stuff, well done!
Why do you think regulations are bad? Just because the government levels the market does not mean it is bad. In France people elect the government. People do not vote for companies, especially not when you deal with monopolies like the MPAA and RIAA.
I have no cable or satellite program anymore. COX was such a money sink and all I got was commercials, fake news, religious bullshit, screwed history and science channels, sometimes an old movie, no sex, and PBS (public TV in the US). Well, I still can get PBS for free via antenna, but I do not need it. I use the saved money to buy used DVDs. This is a lot cheaper. If one day the DRM nightmare kicks in, then I say good bye to movie discs, too. Radio is only interesting for me when I drive long distances, let's say more than 100 km. If the RIAA screws up radio, then I replace it with an MP3 player, as long as that works. I can also drive my car without radio, thanks. In fact when traffic gets bad I turn it off. There are so many things I can do instead of watching TV or listening to music, I really do not depend on products from the MPAA or RIAA. Customers only need to adapt. If the industry adapts, good for them. If not, life is still good without them.
Actually they only control the ratio of French over other languages. I know there is a lot of good music in the world. Most of it is not in English. Now, how frequently does your radio station in the US (except for NPR) broadcast something in a language other than English?
Globalization, outsourcing, all that focuses on free trade. Free trade is good, as long as the rules are fair. But there is one important component missing: the freedom to choose where you like to life and work. While trading on a global scale becomes easier, we are still forced to deal with immigration laws from the past centuries in every country. There is even no transition phase in sight which might give us a bit more freedom. As long as we have closed borders, in both directions, we will find that companies exploit our lack of freedom.
And the public only sees an increase of the entire budget, which includes a significant decrease for science and a remarkable increase of subsidy measures for the aerospace industry, not to mention the waste of money for faith-based initiatives.
This may be true for scientists who already established a research program. And it will be difficult to get them back. Those who have tenure will make it somehow until retirement. But students, postdocs and young professors are already facing serious problems. Students are not stupid. If they find that science has no future, then they will do something else. Some numbers are already at an all-time low, like the number of physics students. Most universities in the US have fewer physics students of any age than graduate students at universities in Europe or Asia. It will take a while until the economy feels the impact. When it is too late, we will find that scientists cannot be simply created.
Slashdot Mirror
The Apple II was (and still is) also good to produce copy-proteced disks for computers with a floppy controller of the Western Digital family. Format a track with the WD controller, put the floppy into an Apple, write the same track with the Apple "controller" (it is actually just a shift register) for a brief moment and interrupt the procedure so that only a small fraction of the track gets overwritten. The Apple does not care about the index hole and starts to write at a random location. With a bit of luck you overwrite just a fraction of a sector written by the WD controller. Repeat until you succeed. The Apple writes the data with a different clock frequency than the WD controller. Thus every time you read the prepared disk with a WD controller, the WD controller's pll oscillator fails to synchronize with the bits of the manipulated sector on the floppy. Consequently the controller produces random information, plus a checksum error, every time you try to read the manipulated sector, very much like a hole punched into the floppy disk. From the outside the disks looks perfectly fine. And there is no way to duplicate that without a lot of effort, certainly not with a standard controller. This scheme still works today for PCs. The PCs floppy controller is just a clone of a NEC controller, which itself is a clone of the WD controller.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/writely-so. html
"Writely, a collaborative word processor that runs in a web browser."
WYSIWYG is nice, but is it the most important thing for a collaborative word processor that runs in a web browser? Maybe for you. Compatibility and simplicity is more important for me.
Everything is in place since the introduction of forms some five years ago (HTML 4).
This is technical nonsense. Just because you have been told that these are your only options does not mean it is true. I am sure you believe the whole web would not function anymore without AJAX, javascript, java, Macromedia flush, Active X, you name it.
I see absolutely no connection between someone's desire to use javascript or cookies and someone's desire to use an online office suite.
Microsoft ActiveX was never a necessity for the web. Neither were cookies or javascript. Same about Macromedia flash etc.. It is all about the ignorance of people who do not know how to develop HTML-based web applications. And you seem to be one of those poor minds.
Why not? I see enough applications of this idea. Just because the technical implementation is bad doesn't mean the whole idea is worthless.
Of course, why not?!
And what kind of idiot mods my posting about a software compatibility issue as flamebait?
From the Writely web site:
What browsers does Writely support?
Writely will work wherever you have access to the Internet via a Windows or Macintosh computer with one of these browsers:
* IE 5.5+ (Windows)
* Mozilla 1.4+ (Mac & Windows)
* Firefox 1.0.6+ (Mac & Windows)
Writely is not supported, and probably won't run on*:
* IE 5 (Mac) or IE 4 (Windows)
* Netscape 4
* Opera
* Safari
Regardless of your browser type, you must:
* Enable cookies
* Enable Javascript
In other words, it requires junk like cookies and javascript, and it does not function with every web browser not with every operating system. Curious, wasn't the web about open document access? Must have been a long, long time ago.
> In the late '80s and early '90s, the games industry could do little more than ask nicely that you not pirate their wares.
What? I was able to put a 16 byte sector inside a 256 byte sector, which itself was located inside a 1024 byte sector, on a floppy, in the late 70's. Even the best copy programs had a hard time to crack that. I have produced things like that and I have seen others doing similar things. Most people could not copy such games. And hey, there were always people who knew how to do it and there will always be such people.
How about information of people whose credit card number was fetched from insecure software, like Microsoft IIS? Somehow I doubt that iBill would have removed those people from their database.
No, PostIdent (Deutsche Post) and certified mail are two totally different services Certified mail is an optional feature of PostIdent, though. PostIdent is about authentication, not certified mail.
The whole thing is not about better support, privacy, security, whatsoever. People are using the Internet since two decades. No, those who deploy such software and restrictions only want to secure their jobs. It is that simple.
The Postal Service in Germany offers a service called PostIdent. Customers and third parties can rely on this service. I am sure there is a post office in your neighborhood. Why is this service not available in the US?
e =6394w aybar&page=0019allproducts
http://www.deutschepost.de/dpag?lang=de_DE&xmlFil
http://www.usps.com/all/welcome.htm?from=homedoor
5% of all security advisories cause ophthalmitis.
Well, they only produce the isolinear chips for Star Fleet.
Seriously, the NAND flash memory stores the data immediately. It is a perfect write cache, because it does not forget the data. Almost perfect, because its write cycles are limited. But a more reliable file system would do the trick, too. Journaling is one way of making things more reliable. But, you have a good point. It is important that some data get written ASAP onto the medium. Unfortunately Linux file systems are not exactly the right choice if this is of importance for you. VMS would be a much better alternative. In order to utilize these hybrid disks it is also important to ensure that the important data gets written immediately, and that the hybrid disk knows which data needs to be cached in the flash memory. The disk allocation tables and directories are obviously important. But some databases might be important too. Bottom line is, the disks simply cannot be smart enough to handle all file systems and all applications. Therefore I agree with you, the whole thing is pointless. It would be much easier to back up some of the computers power lines with a battery, as part of the power supply, not as external UPS (stupid HV-LV-HV-LV conversion - HV=High voltage 110/230V, LV=3.3-12V). There are a few power supplies available which do exactly that (internal LV backup).
Too bad that wonderful tools like this one have to be produced for the military. Wouldn't it be great if such a mule could assist use when we have to move? Moving all those boxes is just back-breaking work. Oh well, I guess I have to ask my friends again.
Nevertheless, great stuff, well done!
Why do you think regulations are bad? Just because the government levels the market does not mean it is bad. In France people elect the government. People do not vote for companies, especially not when you deal with monopolies like the MPAA and RIAA.
I have no cable or satellite program anymore. COX was such a money sink and all I got was commercials, fake news, religious bullshit, screwed history and science channels, sometimes an old movie, no sex, and PBS (public TV in the US). Well, I still can get PBS for free via antenna, but I do not need it. I use the saved money to buy used DVDs. This is a lot cheaper. If one day the DRM nightmare kicks in, then I say good bye to movie discs, too. Radio is only interesting for me when I drive long distances, let's say more than 100 km. If the RIAA screws up radio, then I replace it with an MP3 player, as long as that works. I can also drive my car without radio, thanks. In fact when traffic gets bad I turn it off. There are so many things I can do instead of watching TV or listening to music, I really do not depend on products from the MPAA or RIAA. Customers only need to adapt. If the industry adapts, good for them. If not, life is still good without them.
Actually they only control the ratio of French over other languages. I know there is a lot of good music in the world. Most of it is not in English. Now, how frequently does your radio station in the US (except for NPR) broadcast something in a language other than English?
Everybody in the European Union, about 460 million people.
Most people in the US have forgotten how much this country owe the French for their sacrifice.
A bit of history: http://xenophongroup.com/mcjoynt/caphenry.htm
Globalization, outsourcing, all that focuses on free trade. Free trade is good, as long as the rules are fair. But there is one important component missing: the freedom to choose where you like to life and work. While trading on a global scale becomes easier, we are still forced to deal with immigration laws from the past centuries in every country. There is even no transition phase in sight which might give us a bit more freedom. As long as we have closed borders, in both directions, we will find that companies exploit our lack of freedom.
And the public only sees an increase of the entire budget, which includes a significant decrease for science and a remarkable increase of subsidy measures for the aerospace industry, not to mention the waste of money for faith-based initiatives.
This may be true for scientists who already established a research program. And it will be difficult to get them back. Those who have tenure will make it somehow until retirement. But students, postdocs and young professors are already facing serious problems. Students are not stupid. If they find that science has no future, then they will do something else. Some numbers are already at an all-time low, like the number of physics students. Most universities in the US have fewer physics students of any age than graduate students at universities in Europe or Asia. It will take a while until the economy feels the impact. When it is too late, we will find that scientists cannot be simply created.