- Crack the program you already have a license for yourself. - Find the spec for the format and write your own converter. - Pay someone to do either of the above.
I can't imagine the file format is that hard to reverse-engineer if there are already multiple third parties out there selling converters.
It appears that most anyone who created multimedia with Director and audio from Sound edit in the early 1990's has prior art for many of those "inventions"
I was thinking the same thing. I don't have the old Director files anymore, at least that I can find, but I did stash some screenshots away. I was 16 or 17 at the time, so the design is amateur, but functional:
Futureshock, the unfinished successor with a GUI for configuration and playlist editing (the original read a text file in the program folder to get its playlist).
The best part was that at the time, I was absolutely convinced that I had made a valuable commercial product, despite it being more or less exactly what Director/Shockwave was intended to allow you to do. I even managed to sell two licenses. I guess what I *should* have done was patent it, then wait a decade and sue Apple.
My understanding is that in common English, "or" is the inclusive variety. That's why the logical operation for inclusive OR isn't called something like "IOR."
If they mean XOR, they should append "but not both" or clarify it in some equivalent way.
more than a few people think that the whole site is part of another viral marketing campaign by Microsoft and Bungie, this time for Halo 3.
They seem to really be stretching to make that connection.
I read the post where this was "revealed," and the "evidence" was:
- The "O" in the company logo looks vaguely like the Xbox 360 logo. - Some of the squiggles in the Steorn concept art look vaguely like some of the squiggles in the Halo 3 concept art.
VM's are sluggish for everything, not just 3d. I run windows in VMWare all the time. It's serviceable, but not the same... and that's running locally, not over a network.
Are you running a version of VMWare from years ago on outdated hardware?
We use many VMWare-hosted servers at work. The only time I've ever seen them be less responsive than a physical server was back in the olden days when someone tried to host too many virtual servers on one physical server.
This game has been in "development hell" almost as long as Duke Nukem Forever (since 1999)
Longer than that. I've been told that they were working on it while the original Blood Omen was still in development. That would mean it's been going since 1996 or so.
I really wish they would just pick a version and release it, and preferably include all the previous unreleased, unfinished versions as bonus material. I'm still disappointed that they didn't include the deleted bits from the N64 version of Eternal Darkness with the Gamecube version.
I've never had bluescreen or OS crash issues, but I've had two PCs now where the ATI system tray control panel utility thing crashes every time it runs, so I can't access any of the fancy desktop features of the Radeon 7000s I've been using, whether I had one or both in the system.
This is on XP Pro SP2. My old system started out as SP1 and it had the same problem then. I have no third-party crap like Explorer replacements, or even screensavers. It's my work PC, so it's got Office, Visual Studio, The GIMP, Programmer's File Editor, Foobar2000, and that's essentially it. It's not even a random beige box PC, it's an HP corporate desktop model. It's about as non-abnormal as a Windows machine can get.
Meanwhile, on my home PCs I've had three variants of the TNT2, a GeForce, a GeForce 3, a GeForce 4 TI4600, and a GeForce 7600GT (not in that order). The only driver issue I've ever had is that the newer ForceWare drivers can't deal with older DirectX titles like the original Soul Reaver. I've never had them bluescreen, never had the control panel applet crash.
So, can you answer the question: why were they using XP, when the obvious choice would have been Linux in this application? Did they get a grant?
Maybe they were using something like.NET that has a nice dev environment on Windows?
I haven't looked into embedded devices much, but I've seen some cool stuff that can be done quickly and easily on the new Windows CE Mobile Device Thing Edition 5 or whatever they're calling it these days. It was nothing Earth-shattering, but it was enough to show off the potential.
How is this insightful at all? He obviously doesn't know what he's talking about. They didn't modify it slightly, they pretty much screwed the whole thing up. Butchered it, if you will.
Kind of like what the makers of Shadowrun did to Gibson and Tolkien's work?
Well, the Intellivision was backwards-compatible with Atari VCS games first, via an add-on unit.
All of those add-ons (for the Intellivision, the Colecovision, and the 5200) were literally the Atari 2600 hardware (or a copy of it) in a box that used the power input and video output of the console they connected to. AFAIK all of them even had seperate joystick ports, so you had to have 2600 joysticks too, in addition to the ones for the main console (although with the Colecovision you could swap over the Coleco controllers, since they're pin-compatible IIRC).
You might as well consider any game console theoretically compatible with any other, as long as someone is willing to hack the video and power connections together and put the "expansion module" in a box that matches the other one.
It's possible that you're wrong, and the product really is performing poorly for them, and not because of a legitimate reason like "the server is slow because so many people are using it simultaneously."
I have been on both sides in situations like this where the service provider or vendor was wrong. I've made the mistake of jumping to conclusions when I couldn't replicate the problem, or when I thought the customer was being unreasonable. I've also had to deal with people who were clearly making the same mistake, and it cost them any future business from me.
My advice would be that if they're still convinced it's a problem, either go see it in person (if this is an expensive product), or offer them a full refund.
Putting locks on the doors is not paranoia - indeed it prevents paranoia.
Putting locks on doors is a reasonable preventative measure that keeps honest people from opening them. It does not "stop industrial espionage."
TFA is Slashdotted, but the impression I get from the summary is that it's written from the mentality of trying to have a workplace that's protected against *dishonest* employees. Completely protecting against them is impossible. Making it extremely difficult for them to commit industrial espionage is possible, but the result is a workplace that isn't very fun - I know someone who used to work at the NSA, which obviously has similar protection concerns, and I'd never be able to put up with the level of surveillance and security they have.
I'm with CmdrTaco - hire people you think you can trust. If you're proven wrong, fire them. Don't give people access to sensitive data until they've proven that they're trustworthy, and if you have something that can't leak outside the company no matter what, don't put it somewhere that anyone else can get to it.
I never quite understood how that photo-magnification/voice-recognition machine that Deckard uses could reveal an object that's behind ANOTHER object in the original (apparently 2-dimensional) photo.
I don't know how much processing power it would take, but if I were going to write software like that, it would:
- Build up a basic 3D model of the room based on what's visible in the photo. - "Sketch in" the missing parts using a combination of interpolation and looking at cast shadows. - Map the known colours from the photo onto the 3D model. - Look for reflections in shiny objects and reverse-project them onto what appears to be the source.
Maybe it could do a couple of passes, going back and forth building up various possible models and using the synthetic data to re-interpret the original image.
I imagine the result would usually be pretty fuzzy, but so was what he got out of the machine in the film.
Sure there's GIMP, but it doesn't have the capabilities many photgraphers need.
I'm reasonbly sure that it has most or all of the capabilities the vast majority of hobbyist and semi-pro photography users need (and a few that Photoshop doesn't). Figuring out how to use them is another matter. I don't know what it is about the interface, but it just doesn't seem right to me. I always have trouble finding things, and I'm a reasonably technical person with many years of experience working with most types of computer software.
If I were to make a guess, it would be that - like a lot of OSS software - the UI was designed by the same people who did the behind-the-scenes code. The functionality is there, it's just not accessible through an intuitive UI. The file dialogues are what I'm really thinking of here. They do everything a file dialogue should, but the way they're laid out is confusing and nonstandard (at least for a Windows app). They also don't automatically remember things like where I have a habit of saving my files.
The two big omissions I can think of are that it doesn't seem to import Photoshop text layers properly, and it doesn't seem to have the combine-to-HDR functionality that's in CS (2?). I am also not a big fan of the keyboard shortcuts, but that's probably because I've used Photoshop for so many years.
I know it's missing some important professional printing features, but I'd be curious to hear from some better photographers than me if it's not got something they're after besides HDR.
A friend of mine wanted to wipe a hard disk from within Windows. Something that you could do with a simple 'dd' comand in Linux/BSD.
A wipe as in formatting the drive? You can do that from the Computer Management admin tool. The old FORMAT dos command probably works too. Of course, you can't use them on the system drive that you booted from, but I doubt a commercial tool can do that on Windows either.
Windows certainly has shortcomings if you're used to handy Unix command line tools like tr, but being unable to format drives isn't one of them.
Seriously, this is called "style" and the Register has one where they make the title sensational, humorous, or both, under the apparently unreasonable assumption that you'd actually bother to read the article within if you wanted to know what the story was.
This used to be true, but not any more.
About a year ago, they published an increasingly schizophrenic series of articles attacking some dot-com CEO type of guy. They made truly bizarre, nasty claims about him that were completely fabricated.
Ever since then, I haven't bothered reading anything they publish.
In the pilot, we learn that the entire defense network of the human society could be deactivated by one single numeric code.
Uh, no. All we learn in the pilot is that with the assistance of a highly-placed mole, it's possible to compromise the defense network. The specifics are never shown. That seems reasonable enough to me. Once you've broken through the perimeter of a network, it's generally much easier to compromise the machines that are inside.
since scientist was the only one who had the code
Whoever wrote the article you're quoting must have either barely been paying attention, or got some bizarre non-English translated version with the dialogue screwed up. Nowhere in the series is it claimed that only Baltar had the level of access that the Cylons used.
Anyone who thinks the characters aren't intelligent enough should take a look around themselves. We live in a world populated by people who would react the same way in that type of situation.
I happen to think that Crusade had big potential based on the popularity of the Techno-Mages among fans.
I actually thought that was one of its weakest aspects. The Techno-Mages were the dorkiest characters in a sci-fi series evar. I cringed when they appeared in an episode of B5, and it only got worse in Crusade. They also had the most melodramatic, over-the-top, overblown dialogue and delivery of any characters in the B5 universe.
I'm with the GP. Crusade as it was shown was awful. Legend of the Rangers was abysmal. JMS can blame TNT for Crusade (although things like the atonal crap soundtrack were his doing AFAIK), but Legend of the Rangers shows that it wasn't just their fault. I hope that this spinoff turns out well, but the evidence leads me to believe that it won't.
Slashdot Mirror
As it stands I'm not sure what I'll do.
You could:
- Crack the program you already have a license for yourself.
- Find the spec for the format and write your own converter.
- Pay someone to do either of the above.
I can't imagine the file format is that hard to reverse-engineer if there are already multiple third parties out there selling converters.
It appears that most anyone who created multimedia with Director and audio from Sound edit in the early 1990's has prior art for many of those "inventions"
I was thinking the same thing. I don't have the old Director files anymore, at least that I can find, but I did stash some screenshots away. I was 16 or 17 at the time, so the design is amateur, but functional:
InterlocK(tm) VF-2S(tm) Shockwave Streaming Audio (the copyright for the song being played says 1996, but I would have had the player up and running in 1995).
Futureshock, the unfinished successor with a GUI for configuration and playlist editing (the original read a text file in the program folder to get its playlist).
The best part was that at the time, I was absolutely convinced that I had made a valuable commercial product, despite it being more or less exactly what Director/Shockwave was intended to allow you to do. I even managed to sell two licenses. I guess what I *should* have done was patent it, then wait a decade and sue Apple.
The word you didn't read was OR.
My understanding is that in common English, "or" is the inclusive variety. That's why the logical operation for inclusive OR isn't called something like "IOR."
If they mean XOR, they should append "but not both" or clarify it in some equivalent way.
Make art because you love it, not because you love money. If you love something, set it free!
I'm sure your employer would appreciate it if you applied the same philosophy to whatever line of work you're in.
more than a few people think that the whole site is part of another viral marketing campaign by Microsoft and Bungie, this time for Halo 3.
They seem to really be stretching to make that connection.
I read the post where this was "revealed," and the "evidence" was:
- The "O" in the company logo looks vaguely like the Xbox 360 logo.
- Some of the squiggles in the Steorn concept art look vaguely like some of the squiggles in the Halo 3 concept art.
VM's are sluggish for everything, not just 3d. I run windows in VMWare all the time. It's serviceable, but not the same... and that's running locally, not over a network.
Are you running a version of VMWare from years ago on outdated hardware?
We use many VMWare-hosted servers at work. The only time I've ever seen them be less responsive than a physical server was back in the olden days when someone tried to host too many virtual servers on one physical server.
This game has been in "development hell" almost as long as Duke Nukem Forever (since 1999)
Longer than that. I've been told that they were working on it while the original Blood Omen was still in development. That would mean it's been going since 1996 or so.
I really wish they would just pick a version and release it, and preferably include all the previous unreleased, unfinished versions as bonus material. I'm still disappointed that they didn't include the deleted bits from the N64 version of Eternal Darkness with the Gamecube version.
Thirded.
I've never had bluescreen or OS crash issues, but I've had two PCs now where the ATI system tray control panel utility thing crashes every time it runs, so I can't access any of the fancy desktop features of the Radeon 7000s I've been using, whether I had one or both in the system.
This is on XP Pro SP2. My old system started out as SP1 and it had the same problem then. I have no third-party crap like Explorer replacements, or even screensavers. It's my work PC, so it's got Office, Visual Studio, The GIMP, Programmer's File Editor, Foobar2000, and that's essentially it. It's not even a random beige box PC, it's an HP corporate desktop model. It's about as non-abnormal as a Windows machine can get.
Meanwhile, on my home PCs I've had three variants of the TNT2, a GeForce, a GeForce 3, a GeForce 4 TI4600, and a GeForce 7600GT (not in that order). The only driver issue I've ever had is that the newer ForceWare drivers can't deal with older DirectX titles like the original Soul Reaver. I've never had them bluescreen, never had the control panel applet crash.
So, can you answer the question: why were they using XP, when the obvious choice would have been Linux in this application? Did they get a grant?
.NET that has a nice dev environment on Windows?
Maybe they were using something like
I haven't looked into embedded devices much, but I've seen some cool stuff that can be done quickly and easily on the new Windows CE Mobile Device Thing Edition 5 or whatever they're calling it these days. It was nothing Earth-shattering, but it was enough to show off the potential.
How is this insightful at all? He obviously doesn't know what he's talking about. They didn't modify it slightly, they pretty much screwed the whole thing up. Butchered it, if you will.
Kind of like what the makers of Shadowrun did to Gibson and Tolkien's work?
They will assume that Microsoft is busy preparing a brand new code base (based on FreeBSD plus .NET and DirectX, let's say)
I'm sold. Where do I sign up to pre-order? That would be so many times more awesome than the reality of Vista.
Well, the Intellivision was backwards-compatible with Atari VCS games first, via an add-on unit.
All of those add-ons (for the Intellivision, the Colecovision, and the 5200) were literally the Atari 2600 hardware (or a copy of it) in a box that used the power input and video output of the console they connected to. AFAIK all of them even had seperate joystick ports, so you had to have 2600 joysticks too, in addition to the ones for the main console (although with the Colecovision you could swap over the Coleco controllers, since they're pin-compatible IIRC).
You might as well consider any game console theoretically compatible with any other, as long as someone is willing to hack the video and power connections together and put the "expansion module" in a box that matches the other one.
Sorry, the title was supposed to read "Stenography >> Encryption"
You should probably use a bit-rotation method instead of just a shift.
Maybe I'm just old and don't think War=Fun.....
But WarGames (the movie) *is* fun, and that's where the name comes from.
It's possible that you're wrong, and the product really is performing poorly for them, and not because of a legitimate reason like "the server is slow because so many people are using it simultaneously."
I have been on both sides in situations like this where the service provider or vendor was wrong. I've made the mistake of jumping to conclusions when I couldn't replicate the problem, or when I thought the customer was being unreasonable. I've also had to deal with people who were clearly making the same mistake, and it cost them any future business from me.
My advice would be that if they're still convinced it's a problem, either go see it in person (if this is an expensive product), or offer them a full refund.
Putting locks on the doors is not paranoia - indeed it prevents paranoia.
Putting locks on doors is a reasonable preventative measure that keeps honest people from opening them. It does not "stop industrial espionage."
TFA is Slashdotted, but the impression I get from the summary is that it's written from the mentality of trying to have a workplace that's protected against *dishonest* employees. Completely protecting against them is impossible. Making it extremely difficult for them to commit industrial espionage is possible, but the result is a workplace that isn't very fun - I know someone who used to work at the NSA, which obviously has similar protection concerns, and I'd never be able to put up with the level of surveillance and security they have.
I'm with CmdrTaco - hire people you think you can trust. If you're proven wrong, fire them. Don't give people access to sensitive data until they've proven that they're trustworthy, and if you have something that can't leak outside the company no matter what, don't put it somewhere that anyone else can get to it.
I never quite understood how that photo-magnification/voice-recognition machine that Deckard uses could reveal an object that's behind ANOTHER object in the original (apparently 2-dimensional) photo.
I don't know how much processing power it would take, but if I were going to write software like that, it would:
- Build up a basic 3D model of the room based on what's visible in the photo.
- "Sketch in" the missing parts using a combination of interpolation and looking at cast shadows.
- Map the known colours from the photo onto the 3D model.
- Look for reflections in shiny objects and reverse-project them onto what appears to be the source.
Maybe it could do a couple of passes, going back and forth building up various possible models and using the synthetic data to re-interpret the original image.
I imagine the result would usually be pretty fuzzy, but so was what he got out of the machine in the film.
and with longer flying time than the Skywalker backpack.
Actually, that one has a flight time of twenty to thirty seconds, which is why it's only used as a gimmick at e.g. sports arenas.
A wipe, as in zeroing out the disk.
So... a full format? Since there's no evidence that anything more than that provides additional security on modern systems?
Sure there's GIMP, but it doesn't have the capabilities many photgraphers need.
I'm reasonbly sure that it has most or all of the capabilities the vast majority of hobbyist and semi-pro photography users need (and a few that Photoshop doesn't). Figuring out how to use them is another matter. I don't know what it is about the interface, but it just doesn't seem right to me. I always have trouble finding things, and I'm a reasonably technical person with many years of experience working with most types of computer software.
If I were to make a guess, it would be that - like a lot of OSS software - the UI was designed by the same people who did the behind-the-scenes code. The functionality is there, it's just not accessible through an intuitive UI. The file dialogues are what I'm really thinking of here. They do everything a file dialogue should, but the way they're laid out is confusing and nonstandard (at least for a Windows app). They also don't automatically remember things like where I have a habit of saving my files.
The two big omissions I can think of are that it doesn't seem to import Photoshop text layers properly, and it doesn't seem to have the combine-to-HDR functionality that's in CS (2?). I am also not a big fan of the keyboard shortcuts, but that's probably because I've used Photoshop for so many years.
I know it's missing some important professional printing features, but I'd be curious to hear from some better photographers than me if it's not got something they're after besides HDR.
A friend of mine wanted to wipe a hard disk from within Windows. Something that you could do with a simple 'dd' comand in Linux/BSD.
A wipe as in formatting the drive? You can do that from the Computer Management admin tool. The old FORMAT dos command probably works too. Of course, you can't use them on the system drive that you booted from, but I doubt a commercial tool can do that on Windows either.
Windows certainly has shortcomings if you're used to handy Unix command line tools like tr, but being unable to format drives isn't one of them.
I don't agree with their rules for myself, but I think these rules can help protect me from bad parents.
Part of being an adult is having the ability to live in a world where people aren't all exactly like how you want them to be.
Part of being a good parent is teaching your children how to deal with living in that same world.
Seriously, this is called "style" and the Register has one where they make the title sensational, humorous, or both, under the apparently unreasonable assumption that you'd actually bother to read the article within if you wanted to know what the story was.
This used to be true, but not any more.
About a year ago, they published an increasingly schizophrenic series of articles attacking some dot-com CEO type of guy. They made truly bizarre, nasty claims about him that were completely fabricated.
Ever since then, I haven't bothered reading anything they publish.
In the pilot, we learn that the entire defense network of the human society could be deactivated by one single numeric code.
Uh, no. All we learn in the pilot is that with the assistance of a highly-placed mole, it's possible to compromise the defense network. The specifics are never shown. That seems reasonable enough to me. Once you've broken through the perimeter of a network, it's generally much easier to compromise the machines that are inside.
since scientist was the only one who had the code
Whoever wrote the article you're quoting must have either barely been paying attention, or got some bizarre non-English translated version with the dialogue screwed up. Nowhere in the series is it claimed that only Baltar had the level of access that the Cylons used.
Anyone who thinks the characters aren't intelligent enough should take a look around themselves. We live in a world populated by people who would react the same way in that type of situation.
I happen to think that Crusade had big potential based on the popularity of the Techno-Mages among fans.
I actually thought that was one of its weakest aspects. The Techno-Mages were the dorkiest characters in a sci-fi series evar. I cringed when they appeared in an episode of B5, and it only got worse in Crusade. They also had the most melodramatic, over-the-top, overblown dialogue and delivery of any characters in the B5 universe.
I'm with the GP. Crusade as it was shown was awful. Legend of the Rangers was abysmal. JMS can blame TNT for Crusade (although things like the atonal crap soundtrack were his doing AFAIK), but Legend of the Rangers shows that it wasn't just their fault. I hope that this spinoff turns out well, but the evidence leads me to believe that it won't.