The other problem is that getting the data off the tape is the easy part; what do you do with those ZX Spectrum word processor files that you recovered from tape?
I got some old files from the early 90s off a backup CD recently. Word wouldn't open the Word files, so I had to install an old copy of Word from the Windows 3.0 days and save them out in a format that Open Office could import, and nothing I found could import the Ventura Publisher files. OK, those are mostly in ASCII text, but they're ASCII with formatting and separate style information so, while they could be recovered from that, doing so would be a long and complicated task if I had thousands of them.
"Slick Willy got a blowjob and it was the end of the world"
No, he committed perjury. Wasn't he disbarred for that?
"King George starts a war, usurps our freedoms, potentially stole 2 elections...well...that doesn't make as good sensationalist dirty gossip story so noone cares."
The Democrats now run Congress; why aren't they impeaching Bush?
Ah, because most of them voted for Bush's War, and neither side wants to get into the habit of impeaching Presidents as they don't want theirs to be tossed out of office.
"I don't know if darren@yahoo.com is the same as darren@gmail.com."
Um, yes. I have many different email addresses precisely so people know know that 0123456@hotmail.com is the same person as 0123456@gmail.com.
What a strange world he must live in if he thinks we actually _WANT_ everyone to know everything we do and to search all information that's available. Still, if he's that trusting, maybe he'll buy the bridge I have for sale.
"Without any security notices to suggest otherwise, that's a pretty reasonable assumption to make isn't it?"
Why? Do AMD even release full errata lists for their chips?
Every chip of this complexity has bugs and probably lots of them. If Theo had said that he's checked the AMD list and it didn't have any exploitable bugs then that would be a reason to consider them, but without even knowing what bugs they might have, why would you assume they're any safer?
Maybe Intel should stop releasing these lists and then no-one would even know about them.
"This is going to be a big deal for shared hosting environments for example."
True, but that depends on how easily they could be exploited in the real world, rather than in the theoretical world. From what I remember, one was about incorrect behaviour when your code runs off the end of a 4GB boundary; certainly that might be exploitable, but not on any system which can't run >4GB of code.
I skimmed through the bugs which the author said really scared him and didn't see anything that looked easy to exploit from a user program. Yes, if you want total security on your system then they'd be scary, but if it's almost impossible to exploit then it really doesn't matter to anyone much outside the most secret parts of the government (and, even then, bribing people would probably be an easier way of stealing secrets).
"I wouldn't be surprised if businesses like that started switching to AMD hardware."
"Some of the bugs are so dangerous that it doesn't matter WHAT operating system you're running, code could be written that could attack the entire system."
Indeed. For example, 'rm -rf ~'
I can see that a number of these bugs could potentially be exploited by evil code running on your machine. But if you have evil code running on your machine, you're already in deep crap.
"The onus is on Reiser to come up with evidence - where is the chair? explain the blood, why was the car washed?"
Hint: there's this concept we have called 'innocent until proven guilty'.
I couldn't be arsed to read more than a couple of pages of the article with its silly format, but what's so surprising about finding traces of your SO's blood, or in washing your car?
Maybe he is guilty, I have no idea; but it's up to the police to prove that he is, not for him to prove that he's innocent.
Who needs Word? Explorer.exe is enough to make me violent... I lost count of the number of times I had to kill that bastard piece of 'software' over the weekend when it locked up or starting sucking up 100% of the CPU time on one processor.
"I actually surprised the launch codes for our nukes, and the secret recipe for Coke, aren't on the front page of the DHS website, hightlighted with the flash tag."
In a typical example of government's excellent security policies, the launch codes apparently used to be all zeros until the mid 70s. I read an article about this a couple of years back, apparently they weren't changed until some military guys pointed it out to the right people in Congress and then managed to convince those politicians that, no, they weren't joking.
Because then people are forced to pay for crap nationalised healthcare that they don't want, _AND_ for health insurance for the healthcare they do want. Why the hell would the people who end up having to pay for these things (i.e. the middle class) want to have to pay _twice_ to have two systems?
You can't allow people to 'opt out' of the nationalised system into private insurance, because the very people who want a 'free' nationalised system are the ones who won't have to pay for it.
The NHS would collapse tomorrow if we were allowed to 'opt out'. It's been one of the greatest destroyers of wealth in the history of the world, and should be closed down ASAP.
Indeed: these things are getting to be an appalling nuisance. If I see a site that use them I increasingly just say 'fuck it' and leave; particularly the sites that keep asking for another one every few pages.
Meanwhile, having an automated system feed them to Chinese people on $0.50 an hour can't be too hard, and they'll have at least as good a chance of getting the correct result as I do.
"DRM ensures that software is only used by people who are allowed to use it: Those who payed for it."
Can you name one piece of mainstream software which can only be used by those who paid for it?
"Instead, encourage DRM that works."
There is no DRM that works. The only kind of DRM that comes close to working is something like Steam, which provides real benefits to the users (e.g. download to any computer, auto-patching, easy purchasing)... and I believe that's been cracked for those who don't want to pay for their games.
Companies have been foisting DRM on us for decades, going back at least as far as the absolutely retarded 'copy protection' scams of the 1980s which required nonsense like sticking a prism over the TV screen to read some corrupted text. I'm not aware of a single DRM scam which hasn't been broken, and the 'toughest' have often been rapidly broken precisely because they were so freaking annoying to users who paid for the software.
Surely after trying and failing for decades, smart people would accept that the whole thing is stupid and move on?
"Economics 101: price depends on supply and demand. The supply of media on the internet is effectively infinite. Therefore, the only "reasonable price" is zero."
Economics 102: there are costs associated with searching for a file on the Net, downloading it and then discovering that it's either crap quality or takes forever to download, or that it's actually a goatse video and not Natalie Portman porn.
The 'reasonable price' is the amount that buyers are willing to pay to avoid those costs. Which is rather more than zero... but much less than $1 a song.
"The people who care aren't the ones in charge, unfortunately."
They won't be in charge for long if they destroy the West's computers. I doubt China will be rushing to destroy theirs in order to make Western IP Barons rich.
"If people were not willing to pay even the $1 rental rate they can get now, then the quality of movies will suffer."
You mean there'll be even more shitty movies than there are today?
In any case, much of the budget of the average Hollywood movie goes to the 'stars'; they could halve the cost of the average movie by simply not paying $20,000,000+ to this week's famous names for a few weeks work. Much of the rest goes on CGI, which gets cheaper all the time for the same quality level.
"Please. That justification for leeching didn't work when you were five, and it doesn't work now."
People want media files they can use on any of their media devices at decent quality with a convenient download rate at a reasonable price. Companies who provide that will make a lot of money, because users will be willing to pay that for something they could otherwise download for free.
That companies refuse to sell customers what they want is their problem, not ours.
"But for that possibility to negate the goal of the DRM: enough people have to *know* that they can download it, and be willing to take the risk, and the distributors have to insulate themselves enough from law enforcement, etc. etc. etc."
Your granny probably doesn't want to download the latest Britney Spears album from whatever the current P2P system is. Anyone who does want to download it probably already knows where to get it from.
I honestly don't understand why you don't get this. This is the same kind of idiocy the media companies were spouting about cassette tapes and VHS; which both turned out to be massive sources of income for the same retarded companies who originally opposed them.
"First of all, why criticize DRM and not the consumer practices that necessitate its use?"
You mean the fact that media companies won't make their products easily available to the public to download at a reasonable price?
"For DRM to "work", it's not necessary that it make piracy impossible, only that it reduce it to sufficiently low levels that the production of the work is still profitable."
But it can't work, because only one person has to crack the DRM on a file and put it on the Net, and the rest of the world's population can download it. We're not living in the 70s when people had to borrow records and tapes from their friends and neighbors, you know.
The only way I can see in which DRM can possibly 'work' is by totally crippling all the computers on the planet. Some people might just consider general-purpose computers just a little teeny bit more important than record company profits.
Yeah, I haven't used Purify in a few years, but when I tried it out it seemed very effective and found some bugs that would have been hard to track down otherwise. We didn't use it in the end because, at least at that time, it didn't like us dynamically generating machine code... otherwise it was better than anything else we tried; for normal C and C++ code it should work well.
"Jason Bergman (of 2K Games) a few years back posted [shacknews.com] that the problem with Steam is that it represents the "super hardcore" market (i.e., the people who play high-end first person shooters) and so it's not really representative of the rest of the market (that also spends most of the money)."
Yeah, that'll be why so many Steam gamers have FX5200 cards, 40% of them use AGP systems, and most of them run their monitors at 60Hz.
I'm continually surprised at how low-spec so many systems are in the Steam surveys.
"Rather than asking if a given law is good or bad, he asks if it follows the original intentions of the Founding Fathers, which gets in the way of any rational debate."
What nonsense; at least 90% of modern laws go against 'the original intentions of the Founding Fathers'.
Who, BTW, included in the Constitution an implicit assumption that Americans would own private warships (see 'letters of marque and reprisal'), and would be appalled at the idea of Americans being denied the right to own personal weapons.
Slashdot Mirror
The other problem is that getting the data off the tape is the easy part; what do you do with those ZX Spectrum word processor files that you recovered from tape?
I got some old files from the early 90s off a backup CD recently. Word wouldn't open the Word files, so I had to install an old copy of Word from the Windows 3.0 days and save them out in a format that Open Office could import, and nothing I found could import the Ventura Publisher files. OK, those are mostly in ASCII text, but they're ASCII with formatting and separate style information so, while they could be recovered from that, doing so would be a long and complicated task if I had thousands of them.
"Slick Willy got a blowjob and it was the end of the world"
No, he committed perjury. Wasn't he disbarred for that?
"King George starts a war, usurps our freedoms, potentially stole 2 elections...well...that doesn't make as good sensationalist dirty gossip story so noone cares."
The Democrats now run Congress; why aren't they impeaching Bush?
Ah, because most of them voted for Bush's War, and neither side wants to get into the habit of impeaching Presidents as they don't want theirs to be tossed out of office.
"Why? Seriously, why should my chair have some unique identifier, and why should you need to search it?"
So your phone can tell you whether it's safe to sit down, silly. It will buzz green if the chair is under your ass, and red if it's not.
That way we can all surf pr0n all day safe in the knowledge that our phones will run the rest of our lives for us.
"I don't know if darren@yahoo.com is the same as darren@gmail.com."
Um, yes. I have many different email addresses precisely so people know know that 0123456@hotmail.com is the same person as 0123456@gmail.com.
What a strange world he must live in if he thinks we actually _WANT_ everyone to know everything we do and to search all information that's available. Still, if he's that trusting, maybe he'll buy the bridge I have for sale.
"Without any security notices to suggest otherwise, that's a pretty reasonable assumption to make isn't it?"
Why? Do AMD even release full errata lists for their chips?
Every chip of this complexity has bugs and probably lots of them. If Theo had said that he's checked the AMD list and it didn't have any exploitable bugs then that would be a reason to consider them, but without even knowing what bugs they might have, why would you assume they're any safer?
Maybe Intel should stop releasing these lists and then no-one would even know about them.
"This is going to be a big deal for shared hosting environments for example."
True, but that depends on how easily they could be exploited in the real world, rather than in the theoretical world. From what I remember, one was about incorrect behaviour when your code runs off the end of a 4GB boundary; certainly that might be exploitable, but not on any system which can't run >4GB of code.
I skimmed through the bugs which the author said really scared him and didn't see anything that looked easy to exploit from a user program. Yes, if you want total security on your system then they'd be scary, but if it's almost impossible to exploit then it really doesn't matter to anyone much outside the most secret parts of the government (and, even then, bribing people would probably be an easier way of stealing secrets).
"I wouldn't be surprised if businesses like that started switching to AMD hardware."
You're assuming that AMD chips are any better.
"Some of the bugs are so dangerous that it doesn't matter WHAT operating system you're running, code could be written that could attack the entire system."
Indeed. For example, 'rm -rf ~'
I can see that a number of these bugs could potentially be exploited by evil code running on your machine. But if you have evil code running on your machine, you're already in deep crap.
"It's also one of those concepts which looks great on paper, but is sadly shown as so much idealistic BS in the real world."
Only if you believe it's better to send innocent people to jail than let guilty people go free.
"The onus is on Reiser to come up with evidence - where is the chair? explain the blood, why was the car washed?"
Hint: there's this concept we have called 'innocent until proven guilty'.
I couldn't be arsed to read more than a couple of pages of the article with its silly format, but what's so surprising about finding traces of your SO's blood, or in washing your car?
Maybe he is guilty, I have no idea; but it's up to the police to prove that he is, not for him to prove that he's innocent.
"Hardly. President Johnson announced it's existence in 1964, I saw pictures of one back in the mid 70's, and it wasn't retired until 1998."
:).
Yeah, but it first flew in 1927. The official date is just a coverup
"On the Wii you actually mimic the motions. I guess that's their problem."
:).
You know, a Wii Zombie Chainsaw Massacre game might actually get me to buy a console
Who needs Word? Explorer.exe is enough to make me violent... I lost count of the number of times I had to kill that bastard piece of 'software' over the weekend when it locked up or starting sucking up 100% of the CPU time on one processor.
"I actually surprised the launch codes for our nukes, and the secret recipe for Coke, aren't on the front page of the DHS website, hightlighted with the flash tag."
In a typical example of government's excellent security policies, the launch codes apparently used to be all zeros until the mid 70s. I read an article about this a couple of years back, apparently they weren't changed until some military guys pointed it out to the right people in Congress and then managed to convince those politicians that, no, they weren't joking.
"Why not have both?"
Because then people are forced to pay for crap nationalised healthcare that they don't want, _AND_ for health insurance for the healthcare they do want. Why the hell would the people who end up having to pay for these things (i.e. the middle class) want to have to pay _twice_ to have two systems?
You can't allow people to 'opt out' of the nationalised system into private insurance, because the very people who want a 'free' nationalised system are the ones who won't have to pay for it.
The NHS would collapse tomorrow if we were allowed to 'opt out'. It's been one of the greatest destroyers of wealth in the history of the world, and should be closed down ASAP.
Indeed: these things are getting to be an appalling nuisance. If I see a site that use them I increasingly just say 'fuck it' and leave; particularly the sites that keep asking for another one every few pages.
Meanwhile, having an automated system feed them to Chinese people on $0.50 an hour can't be too hard, and they'll have at least as good a chance of getting the correct result as I do.
"DRM ensures that software is only used by people who are allowed to use it: Those who payed for it."
Can you name one piece of mainstream software which can only be used by those who paid for it?
"Instead, encourage DRM that works."
There is no DRM that works. The only kind of DRM that comes close to working is something like Steam, which provides real benefits to the users (e.g. download to any computer, auto-patching, easy purchasing)... and I believe that's been cracked for those who don't want to pay for their games.
Companies have been foisting DRM on us for decades, going back at least as far as the absolutely retarded 'copy protection' scams of the 1980s which required nonsense like sticking a prism over the TV screen to read some corrupted text. I'm not aware of a single DRM scam which hasn't been broken, and the 'toughest' have often been rapidly broken precisely because they were so freaking annoying to users who paid for the software.
Surely after trying and failing for decades, smart people would accept that the whole thing is stupid and move on?
"Economics 101: price depends on supply and demand. The supply of media on the internet is effectively infinite. Therefore, the only "reasonable price" is zero."
Economics 102: there are costs associated with searching for a file on the Net, downloading it and then discovering that it's either crap quality or takes forever to download, or that it's actually a goatse video and not Natalie Portman porn.
The 'reasonable price' is the amount that buyers are willing to pay to avoid those costs. Which is rather more than zero... but much less than $1 a song.
"The people who care aren't the ones in charge, unfortunately."
They won't be in charge for long if they destroy the West's computers. I doubt China will be rushing to destroy theirs in order to make Western IP Barons rich.
"If people were not willing to pay even the $1 rental rate they can get now, then the quality of movies will suffer."
You mean there'll be even more shitty movies than there are today?
In any case, much of the budget of the average Hollywood movie goes to the 'stars'; they could halve the cost of the average movie by simply not paying $20,000,000+ to this week's famous names for a few weeks work. Much of the rest goes on CGI, which gets cheaper all the time for the same quality level.
"Please. That justification for leeching didn't work when you were five, and it doesn't work now."
People want media files they can use on any of their media devices at decent quality with a convenient download rate at a reasonable price. Companies who provide that will make a lot of money, because users will be willing to pay that for something they could otherwise download for free.
That companies refuse to sell customers what they want is their problem, not ours.
"But for that possibility to negate the goal of the DRM: enough people have to *know* that they can download it, and be willing to take the risk, and the distributors have to insulate themselves enough from law enforcement, etc. etc. etc."
Your granny probably doesn't want to download the latest Britney Spears album from whatever the current P2P system is. Anyone who does want to download it probably already knows where to get it from.
I honestly don't understand why you don't get this. This is the same kind of idiocy the media companies were spouting about cassette tapes and VHS; which both turned out to be massive sources of income for the same retarded companies who originally opposed them.
"First of all, why criticize DRM and not the consumer practices that necessitate its use?"
You mean the fact that media companies won't make their products easily available to the public to download at a reasonable price?
"For DRM to "work", it's not necessary that it make piracy impossible, only that it reduce it to sufficiently low levels that the production of the work is still profitable."
But it can't work, because only one person has to crack the DRM on a file and put it on the Net, and the rest of the world's population can download it. We're not living in the 70s when people had to borrow records and tapes from their friends and neighbors, you know.
The only way I can see in which DRM can possibly 'work' is by totally crippling all the computers on the planet. Some people might just consider general-purpose computers just a little teeny bit more important than record company profits.
Yeah, I haven't used Purify in a few years, but when I tried it out it seemed very effective and found some bugs that would have been hard to track down otherwise. We didn't use it in the end because, at least at that time, it didn't like us dynamically generating machine code... otherwise it was better than anything else we tried; for normal C and C++ code it should work well.
"Jason Bergman (of 2K Games) a few years back posted [shacknews.com] that the problem with Steam is that it represents the "super hardcore" market (i.e., the people who play high-end first person shooters) and so it's not really representative of the rest of the market (that also spends most of the money)."
Yeah, that'll be why so many Steam gamers have FX5200 cards, 40% of them use AGP systems, and most of them run their monitors at 60Hz.
I'm continually surprised at how low-spec so many systems are in the Steam surveys.
"Rather than asking if a given law is good or bad, he asks if it follows the original intentions of the Founding Fathers, which gets in the way of any rational debate."
What nonsense; at least 90% of modern laws go against 'the original intentions of the Founding Fathers'.
Who, BTW, included in the Constitution an implicit assumption that Americans would own private warships (see 'letters of marque and reprisal'), and would be appalled at the idea of Americans being denied the right to own personal weapons.
"AACS is broken."
No it's not, because they'll release yet another key next week. People have to keep breaking it until the underlying algorithm is broken.
CSS, on the other hand, is totally, utterly and irrevocably broken.
"Basically, it shows that general purpose computing (hardware/network) isn't yet up to the task of rampantly distributing the full-resolution product"
What's so difficult about downloading and playing 1080-line HD video on a PC with a half-decent broadband connection?