I still say it's Microsoft's fault. Their operating system is insecure from the ground up; it's not fit for the purpose for which it is sold.
Suppose a company made central heating boilers that could be made to explode by plugging the condensate drain -- which, in most buildings, is on the outside, with the air intake and exhaust. Now in actual fact the problem would most likely be with the sequence controller (since a blocked condensate drain is usually detected by interfering with the flame sense) which is usually supplied to the boiler manufacturer by a third party. Anyway, plumbers install these boilers and kids soon discover how to blow them up by plugging the condensate drain with chewing gum and running away.
Well, it's still the boiler maker's fault. Not the chewing gum maker's fault. Gas appliances are supposed to fail safely under the most likely fault conditions, and a blocked condensate drain is one of those likely fault conditions.
An operating system that executes arbitrary code without the user's permission is like a gas boiler that will explode if the condensate drain is blocked. It may not actually kill anyone, it may not destroy anyone's house, but interfering with a computer can still have dire consequences, depending upon what that computer is being used for. Don't apologise for Microsoft making computers too easy to interfere with. It's been going on long enough now to be considered deliberate.
The blame for this lies entirely at the feet of Microsoft.
Who created the Operating System which will execute arbitrary code -- for that matter, arbitrary code which ought to require administrator privileges -- without the say-so of the user? Microsoft did.
That is the problem. For sure, they had a reason to do that -- they wanted to hide "difficult" decisions from the user in order to make their operating system beginner-friendly. Their model seems to be "Programmers know what they are doing, users don't." Unfortunately for everyone concerned, that has well and truly bitten them in the arse.
If Vista is more secure than Windows XP, then it will necessarily be harder to use. The only way it could be more secure than XP while remaining as easy to use, is if only certain trusted parties are allowed to write software for it. (Which is effectively what you've almost got with some OSes; anyone is allowed to write software, but software distributors -- who may well be independent of the software creators -- maintain a catalogue of what is "safe", based on their own judgement after reading the Source Code. Tech-savvy users can check the Source Code for themselves. Non-tech-savvy users know they can rely on the software distributor's judgement. Any distributor who does a bad job by distributing dangerous software loses custom.) But that would create a monopoly, or at best a cartel.
Even easier, just wire an ammeter in series with the refrigerator. If the current consumption drops when the door is closed, then you can suppose the light is going off.
One time, I borrowed a brand new and very expensive digital amp/volt/ohm meter from university and took it home to my shared student flat with the intent to perform this very experiment. I set the fridge thermostat to defrost (so the motor would be off), unplugged the fridge from the wall and removed the screw and fuse from the mains plug. Then I pushed the booby-trapped plug into an (unplugged) extension lead, and plugged the extension lead into the wall (switched off at the socket). With no fixing screw, the only way to get the plug back out of the socket would be to force something like a knife in behind it, and it was the old style of plug with brass pins all the way (no plastic insulation around the centimetre nearest the plug, as you see today for the exclusive benefit of people trying to force plugs out of sockets with knives); so I really wanted that extension lead in circuit, just to make things easier when my experiment was concluded.
I held the test probes of the AVO onto the fuseholder contacts (the live pin, and the brown wire to the fridge) in the dismantled plug; made sure my fingers were clear of anything that would become live; made sure again that my fingers were out of harm's way; and flicked the switch on the wall socket where the extension lead was plugged in.
With hindsight, I probably should also have made sure that the AVO was set to measure AC current, not resistance, before commencing the experiment.
This isn't a troll, it's a genuine question: Is there any real reason to actually install Adobe Acrobat? I'm using gPDF {there's also a kPDF} and that seems to work fine for dislaying PDFs. And it's i-tal.
Heh. Reminds me of the time I convinced someone that he could connect two 15V zener diodes in parallel to get 7.5V. I also convinced him that BY8424s {a ceramic-packaged diode with a PIV of several kV} were static-sensitive.
I'm seriously considering making a cash donation to the GNASH project, if it will help hurry them along.
Flash is a pain. It's closed-source, therefore you're stuck with what Adobe will give you. {Nonetheless, I keep e-mailing and asking them for the source code anyway; just on the basis that sooner or later, some underling might cock up bigtime and unthinkingly hand it over.} It's also risky because, without reading the source code, there's no way to know what the hell it's doing. For all you know it could be..... well, it could be doing anything!
Most Linux distributions have 32-bit libraries in/lib and 64-bit libraries in/lib64. Debian {which starts out, quite reasonably IMHO, assuming all the software you're going to be running is Open Source} is designed as a pure 64-bit system, with just 64-bit libraries in/lib;/lib64 is just a symlink to/lib. It's possible to set up a chroot environment for running most 32-bit software {i.e., not the few programs that won't run at all in 64-bit mode} with just 32-bit libraries, so keeping the 64-bit system "pure". Ubuntu created a/lib32 for 32-bit libraries, to enable some 32-bit software to run without being confined to a chroot. This works with Ubuntu.debs and Ubuntu and Debian.dsc/.tar/.diff sets, but is prone to break if you install poor-quality pre-compiled software which stomps over/lib and/usr/lib.
If you are going to install closed-source software, for crying out loud don't install it system-wide (i.e. as root). In a chroot is probably best.
Yes, exactly. That's one half of the problem. The other half is that there is no way for the player to be sure where its output is going. Whatever tests it is performing in order to try, can be subverted: for instance, there is no way for a person armed with only a voltmeter to tell whether two terminals on an impenetrable black box are connected to a battery or a DC adaptor. As far as the recorded medium is concerned, the display equipment to which the player is connected -- and maybe even the player itself -- is an impenetrable black box.
Imagine something like a sawn-off cathode ray tube neck, which could be connected to any TV set in place of the real tube. The connections which would normally go to the red, green and blue grids instead go to a simple circuit of resistors and op-amps which produces an output at the standard levels of 5V into an open circuit / 1V into 75 ohms. The connections which would normally go to the horizontal and vertical scan coils go to another op-amp circuit which detects sudden changes and produces a negative-going field and line sync signal. These outputs can be fed straight into the RGB inputs of any other TV set or a DVD recorder. All this circuitry will fit comfortably onto a postcard-sized piece of breadboard; and it will defeat any copy protection scheme now known or ever to be invented, as long as it ultimately results in the display of a watchable picture on a TV set.
Also, the scrambled video intended for decoding by a modified human brain should be susceptible to machine decoding..... if you can work out how. Which you probably can, from the training sequence.
Yeah, but the "holy grail" of copy protection schemes is never going to be invented, because it's mathematically impossible. Not just supremely difficult (like factoring a multi-digit number) but actually impossible (like creating energy out of nowhere). If it can be rendered perceptible, it can be copied. Whatever tests it uses to check that it is being viewed legitimately, can be subverted. Even if the player contacts an outside agent for authorisation, the outside agent can be spoofed. Whatever process is employed to trick the copy-protection mechanism, it only needs to be done once. After that, an unlimited number of unprotected copies can be made.
The only thing that might work as an unbreakable copy-protection scheme is to have the decryption performed within the brain of the viewer, so there is never an unencrypted version of anything anywhere. And I can think of only one way to do this: you would have to give the user mind-enhancing drugs and "train" them, with a short film, to perform the decryption. The movie itself would be displayed encrypted, and only viewable by someone trained to decrypt it -- which ability they would naturally lose as the effects of the drug wore off. For future watchings, or party viewings, more pills would be required. (This would suit the studios, as every instance of viewing must be paid for -- someone who watches a movie at a friend's house represents a lost opportunity to sell a movie. This creates a new business model: give away "unwatchable" movies for free and charge for the pills that make them watchable.) If you combined the psychotropic with another substance which reacts with growth hormone to produce nausea or other undesirable effects, you might be able to get enforced age-restriction into the bargain.
One question nobody is answering: How much of the retail price of media is accounted for by copy-protection?
And another: What if original media were sold cheaply enough that it would not be economically viable to make pirate copies?
The USB part is easy enough to replicate; you can just get a USB protocol analyser and work out what's going on. Also, the code that talks to the USB device ought to be easy to isolate. Since the disc can't be in both the drive and the USB port at the same time, the authentication must necessarily be a one-time process rather than a continuous process. This should not be at all hard to spoof.
You have to wonder whether this wasn't deliberately invented on purpose in order to fool media companies (who see a pirate lurking behind every bush) into handing over stupid sums of money for a useless "copy prevention" system that will not, in fact, prevent anything from being copied.
Trolltech..... restricted what source they released under GPL. Specificly [sic], Qt3 for Windows wasn't GPL'd.
Not important. There was a GPLed version of Qt3. That can legally be ported to Windows, Mac OSX, Amiga; hell, even the ZX Spectrum if anybody was mad enough to try. Admittedly it was written for Unix-like systems (with consequent assumptions about the underlying OS), but that should not have been an obstacle to a sufficiently-determined hacker. The very existence of a commercial version proves it's possible. The lack of a Windows port of GPL'd QT suggests to me that there was no hacker with sufficient determination.
You try keeping a separate fork of a major project where NONE of the top developers will help you, and see how far you'd get.
Been done. Not by me personally, but it's been done. GNU is exactly such an independent "fork" of Unix. As things have turned out, many of the GNU tools have effectively displaced the original Unix tools even in commercial distributions, though they were never accepted into the "official" Unix source tree.
[Y]ou describe Windows programemrs [sic] as incompetent and apathic.
Well, that is exactly what Windows programmers themselves have demonstrated so far! Just about every Open Source application begins its life on an Open Source OS and then gets ported to Windows. It's very rare that someone begins writing an Open Source application on Windows which then gets ported to the various Open Source OSes. You can't deny that most applications originally written for Windows seem to be closed-source.
Maybe it's because Open Source Believers have just dumped Windows already and started using Open Source OSes.
You're arrogant, uninformed, elitist, stupid and can't even spell, you shouldn't be calling anyone names.
We could use this tiny artificial hand to assemble an even tinier artificial hand..... which we could then use to assemble an artificial hand which was tinier still..... and so on, and so on, until we're down to the scale of manipulating individual atoms!
Qt4 is available for Windows under the GPL (unlike previous versions which were GPL on Linux/Mac, but commercial only on Windows)
Bollocks. GPL does not allow programmers to impose platform restrictions. The only thing which ever prevented anyone from porting QT to Windows was the incompetence / antipathy to Open Source of Windows programmers.
There's a problem with cameras' raw formats. They're kept very, very secret because they would reveal some information the manufacturer would rather you didn't know.
Digital cameras are sold by the number of pixels in the image file, not the sensor array. When you download a "3072x2048" JPEG image from your "6 megapixel" camera, what you're downloading may well have 6 million pixels in it -- but it has been interpolated up from the raw data supplied by the sensor. The JPEG compression hides the interpolation artefacts well.
Basically, in order to parse the RAW data then you need to know exactly how many pixels are in the image sensor and which ones are responding to which colour. There might well only be 0.5 million pixels each for red and blue and 1 million green pixels in the actual sensor array. Each sensor can see more than 256 levels, though. These 2 million pixels (each with only partial colour information) are expanded to 6 million full-colour pixels, with the rounding errors caused by reducing to 256 colour levels distributed among adjacent pixels. And then the image is subjected to lossy compression, which disguises.
If anyone was allowed to see the raw data format, it would be obvious that the claim of "6 million pixels" is somewhat mendacious. But with no sanctions available against the cheap fly-by-nights who make preposterous claims, even reputable camera manufacturers are forced to play the bullshitting game.
Re:Yes: I, a KDE fan, can't use KWord: no Word imp
on
KOffice 1.6 Released
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· Score: 1
KOffice's file format is documented {it's actually the same as OpenOffice's file format}, and in fact the actual source code used to put together and take apart its documents is readily available -- with no obligations, except that you must respect the authors' wishes for it to remain Open Source. If Microsoft don't want to use it, that's hardly the KDE team's fault.
Imagine a conversation like this:
Electricity board: We can supply you 230 volts, 50 cycles a second.
Customer: But I want 110 volts, 16.7 cycles!
Electricity board: What for?
Customer: Home-made kit. Can't tell you any more than that -- it's a secret.
Electricity board: Home-made? Well, why on earth didn't you ask what we supplied before you built anything to plug into it?
Customer: I have standardised on 110 volts, 16.7 cycles. I chose some very nice, expensive power transformers, but they are wound for a 110 volt supply. And I designed all my timing circuits to expect 1000 positive-going pulses per minute, which is 16.7 cycles a second.
Electricity board: But why?
Customer: Well, everyone else is using 230/50. I don't want to be like everyone else!
Re:Openoffice draining KOffice (Hurd effect)
on
KOffice 1.6 Released
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· Score: 0, Troll
Not quite.
OpenOffice.org is released under the LGPL, which allows people to steal the hard work put in by their contributors in order to make closed-source forks (strictly, the source for the application as a whole may be Closed but the source for any LGPL parts must remain Open). KOffice is released under the full-on, take-no-prisoners GPL, which insists for every fork to be Open Source.
It's possible that using part of OpenOffice.org in KOffice might allow closed-source derivatives of KOffice.
Even if that weren't the case, OpenOffice.org is so badly coded as to require rewriting from scratch before it is used for anything.
QT has been available under an Open Source licence for Windows ever since QT for Unix went under the GPL; there was never anything stopping anyone from porting it. Apart, that is, from an apparent general aversion in the Windows camp towards Free Software. Oh, they like their free-as-in-beer downloads, but they are all spyware-infested closed source applications and you end up paying with your bandwidth, your CPU cycles and the overall usability of your computer. Letting someone else look at the source code is anathema to the average Windows programmer. After all, they never got to look at the source code of their Operating System, so why should they let anyone look at the source code for their applications?
Industrial parts are bought by specification, not by brand name. A product design engineer might call for an M8x50 bolt, a 4.7K ohm 0.25 watt resistor, a quarter-turn ball valve with 22mm. compression fittings, an NPN transistor with a gain of 50 in a TO3 package or a 15x40mm. ball-bearing. Several manufacturers may make items that fit the specifications the engineer requires. Only the purchasing department really care where a part actually comes from. When required in small quantities (to build prototypes, for example), common industrial parts are almost always supplied through catalogues; the company's purchasing department will usually buy directly from the supplier when sufficient quantities are required to deal directly, but often the supplier is the same one who supplied the catalogue.
Computer components, of course, fit the definition of industrial parts made to conform to specifications. Of course, only part of the specification is fixed: a graphics card must have the right connectors to fit the motherboard and the monitor, but there is considerable leeway in performance and price. A machine used mostly for running OO.o and Firefox needn't have as fancy a graphics card as one used for CAD or gaming. The Internet has enabled the collation of component specifications on a wider scale even than most catalogues can manage, thereby allowing anyone to choose from several interchangeable alternatives. When coupled with independent reviews, this gives ordinary people a very powerful tool for weighing up the alternatives.
Unless you can offer your customers something that your competitors can't, there's no reason for them to be loyal to a brand anymore.
Edison did not invent electricity. He re- invented the filament light bulb (which had already been invented a year or so previously by Joseph Swan), which turns most of the energy fed to it into heat (and only a very tiny portion into visible light). Given that almost every other conceivable solution for turning electricity into visible light is better, the filament light bulb is an invention which really should be consigned to the dustbin of history as soon as possible.
But that's nothing to do with what Edison was like. It's simply because his invention is, by modern standards, crap. Shame on anyone who is still using filament bulbs.
A couple of years ago I bought a music CD..... it was Avril Lavigne, "Under My Skin" and I bought it specifically because it featured copy-prevention (CDS200) and I wanted it for the "h4x0r challenge factor". (I had a brief fantasy in which the Managing Director of the record company receives an unlabelled CD-R in a plain brown envelope, and upon further investigation discovers it to be a copy of Under My Skin. Initial puzzlement that someone managed to foil the copy-protection turns to shock as he realises..... he wasted his money on the copy-protection scheme! Detectives are called in, but the CD and envelope are conspicuously free of fingerprints.)
Needless to say I was rather disappointed to find that, as far as my setup was concerned, the disc didn't seem to be copy-protected at all -- it ripped just fine using the same software I had ever used! Rather like a Sudoku puzzle with only 9 blank squares, only a bit less intellectually fulfilling. The reverie was nice while it lasted, though, and probably ever-so-slightly better than the equivalent amount spent on drugs.
In my experience, DVD-minus-R discs are totally unreadable on anything, even the machine that wrote them in the first place. Stick to DVD+plus+R and you'll be fine. Millions of TV-recorders can't be wrong!
Yes, but bear in mind that some countries (Europe and Britain) have tough consumer-protection laws. It would be entirely legal to import a copy of Windows or Office meant for use in the third world {i.e. former European colonies where they speak European languages such as English and French} and sold for the equivalent of 1 or thereabouts, into Europe -- and in fact it would be illegal for Microsoft to try and stop them. All DVD players on the Continent are deregionalised, for the same reason -- and when Britain gets a prime minister who doesn't like the taste of American Presidential Cock, all DVD players here will be deregionalised too (unless we get kicked out of the EU, in which case I'll be on the Channel ferry and brandishing a one-way ticket quicker than you can say "51st state").
Also, I bet you any money you like that every "localised" version of Windows / Office will still insist to use US Letter (216x279) as the default paper size.
Slashdot Mirror
I still say it's Microsoft's fault. Their operating system is insecure from the ground up; it's not fit for the purpose for which it is sold.
Suppose a company made central heating boilers that could be made to explode by plugging the condensate drain -- which, in most buildings, is on the outside, with the air intake and exhaust. Now in actual fact the problem would most likely be with the sequence controller (since a blocked condensate drain is usually detected by interfering with the flame sense) which is usually supplied to the boiler manufacturer by a third party. Anyway, plumbers install these boilers and kids soon discover how to blow them up by plugging the condensate drain with chewing gum and running away.
Well, it's still the boiler maker's fault. Not the chewing gum maker's fault. Gas appliances are supposed to fail safely under the most likely fault conditions, and a blocked condensate drain is one of those likely fault conditions.
An operating system that executes arbitrary code without the user's permission is like a gas boiler that will explode if the condensate drain is blocked. It may not actually kill anyone, it may not destroy anyone's house, but interfering with a computer can still have dire consequences, depending upon what that computer is being used for. Don't apologise for Microsoft making computers too easy to interfere with. It's been going on long enough now to be considered deliberate.
I fixed a Microsoft Exchange server once. I installed Debian and Exim on it.
The blame for this lies entirely at the feet of Microsoft.
Who created the Operating System which will execute arbitrary code -- for that matter, arbitrary code which ought to require administrator privileges -- without the say-so of the user? Microsoft did.
That is the problem. For sure, they had a reason to do that -- they wanted to hide "difficult" decisions from the user in order to make their operating system beginner-friendly. Their model seems to be "Programmers know what they are doing, users don't." Unfortunately for everyone concerned, that has well and truly bitten them in the arse.
If Vista is more secure than Windows XP, then it will necessarily be harder to use. The only way it could be more secure than XP while remaining as easy to use, is if only certain trusted parties are allowed to write software for it. (Which is effectively what you've almost got with some OSes; anyone is allowed to write software, but software distributors -- who may well be independent of the software creators -- maintain a catalogue of what is "safe", based on their own judgement after reading the Source Code. Tech-savvy users can check the Source Code for themselves. Non-tech-savvy users know they can rely on the software distributor's judgement. Any distributor who does a bad job by distributing dangerous software loses custom.) But that would create a monopoly, or at best a cartel.
..... or "Strange bacteria sustain themselves without sunlight".
Even easier, just wire an ammeter in series with the refrigerator. If the current consumption drops when the door is closed, then you can suppose the light is going off.
One time, I borrowed a brand new and very expensive digital amp/volt/ohm meter from university and took it home to my shared student flat with the intent to perform this very experiment. I set the fridge thermostat to defrost (so the motor would be off), unplugged the fridge from the wall and removed the screw and fuse from the mains plug. Then I pushed the booby-trapped plug into an (unplugged) extension lead, and plugged the extension lead into the wall (switched off at the socket). With no fixing screw, the only way to get the plug back out of the socket would be to force something like a knife in behind it, and it was the old style of plug with brass pins all the way (no plastic insulation around the centimetre nearest the plug, as you see today for the exclusive benefit of people trying to force plugs out of sockets with knives); so I really wanted that extension lead in circuit, just to make things easier when my experiment was concluded.
I held the test probes of the AVO onto the fuseholder contacts (the live pin, and the brown wire to the fridge) in the dismantled plug; made sure my fingers were clear of anything that would become live; made sure again that my fingers were out of harm's way; and flicked the switch on the wall socket where the extension lead was plugged in.
With hindsight, I probably should also have made sure that the AVO was set to measure AC current, not resistance, before commencing the experiment.
There has been a single pixel camera available for a long time, under the part number ORP12.
This isn't a troll, it's a genuine question: Is there any real reason to actually install Adobe Acrobat? I'm using gPDF {there's also a kPDF} and that seems to work fine for dislaying PDFs. And it's i-tal.
Heh. Reminds me of the time I convinced someone that he could connect two 15V zener diodes in parallel to get 7.5V. I also convinced him that BY8424s {a ceramic-packaged diode with a PIV of several kV} were static-sensitive.
I'm seriously considering making a cash donation to the GNASH project, if it will help hurry them along.
..... well, it could be doing anything!
/lib and 64-bit libraries in /lib64. Debian {which starts out, quite reasonably IMHO, assuming all the software you're going to be running is Open Source} is designed as a pure 64-bit system, with just 64-bit libraries in /lib; /lib64 is just a symlink to /lib. It's possible to set up a chroot environment for running most 32-bit software {i.e., not the few programs that won't run at all in 64-bit mode} with just 32-bit libraries, so keeping the 64-bit system "pure". Ubuntu created a /lib32 for 32-bit libraries, to enable some 32-bit software to run without being confined to a chroot. This works with Ubuntu .debs and Ubuntu and Debian .dsc/.tar/.diff sets, but is prone to break if you install poor-quality pre-compiled software which stomps over /lib and /usr/lib.
Flash is a pain. It's closed-source, therefore you're stuck with what Adobe will give you. {Nonetheless, I keep e-mailing and asking them for the source code anyway; just on the basis that sooner or later, some underling might cock up bigtime and unthinkingly hand it over.} It's also risky because, without reading the source code, there's no way to know what the hell it's doing. For all you know it could be
Most Linux distributions have 32-bit libraries in
If you are going to install closed-source software, for crying out loud don't install it system-wide (i.e. as root). In a chroot is probably best.
Yes, exactly. That's one half of the problem. The other half is that there is no way for the player to be sure where its output is going. Whatever tests it is performing in order to try, can be subverted: for instance, there is no way for a person armed with only a voltmeter to tell whether two terminals on an impenetrable black box are connected to a battery or a DC adaptor. As far as the recorded medium is concerned, the display equipment to which the player is connected -- and maybe even the player itself -- is an impenetrable black box.
..... if you can work out how. Which you probably can, from the training sequence.
Imagine something like a sawn-off cathode ray tube neck, which could be connected to any TV set in place of the real tube. The connections which would normally go to the red, green and blue grids instead go to a simple circuit of resistors and op-amps which produces an output at the standard levels of 5V into an open circuit / 1V into 75 ohms. The connections which would normally go to the horizontal and vertical scan coils go to another op-amp circuit which detects sudden changes and produces a negative-going field and line sync signal. These outputs can be fed straight into the RGB inputs of any other TV set or a DVD recorder. All this circuitry will fit comfortably onto a postcard-sized piece of breadboard; and it will defeat any copy protection scheme now known or ever to be invented, as long as it ultimately results in the display of a watchable picture on a TV set.
Also, the scrambled video intended for decoding by a modified human brain should be susceptible to machine decoding
Yeah, but the "holy grail" of copy protection schemes is never going to be invented, because it's mathematically impossible. Not just supremely difficult (like factoring a multi-digit number) but actually impossible (like creating energy out of nowhere). If it can be rendered perceptible, it can be copied. Whatever tests it uses to check that it is being viewed legitimately, can be subverted. Even if the player contacts an outside agent for authorisation, the outside agent can be spoofed. Whatever process is employed to trick the copy-protection mechanism, it only needs to be done once. After that, an unlimited number of unprotected copies can be made.
The only thing that might work as an unbreakable copy-protection scheme is to have the decryption performed within the brain of the viewer, so there is never an unencrypted version of anything anywhere. And I can think of only one way to do this: you would have to give the user mind-enhancing drugs and "train" them, with a short film, to perform the decryption. The movie itself would be displayed encrypted, and only viewable by someone trained to decrypt it -- which ability they would naturally lose as the effects of the drug wore off. For future watchings, or party viewings, more pills would be required. (This would suit the studios, as every instance of viewing must be paid for -- someone who watches a movie at a friend's house represents a lost opportunity to sell a movie. This creates a new business model: give away "unwatchable" movies for free and charge for the pills that make them watchable.) If you combined the psychotropic with another substance which reacts with growth hormone to produce nausea or other undesirable effects, you might be able to get enforced age-restriction into the bargain.
One question nobody is answering: How much of the retail price of media is accounted for by copy-protection?
And another: What if original media were sold cheaply enough that it would not be economically viable to make pirate copies?
It won't work.
The USB part is easy enough to replicate; you can just get a USB protocol analyser and work out what's going on. Also, the code that talks to the USB device ought to be easy to isolate. Since the disc can't be in both the drive and the USB port at the same time, the authentication must necessarily be a one-time process rather than a continuous process. This should not be at all hard to spoof.
You have to wonder whether this wasn't deliberately invented on purpose in order to fool media companies (who see a pirate lurking behind every bush) into handing over stupid sums of money for a useless "copy prevention" system that will not, in fact, prevent anything from being copied.
Maybe it's because Open Source Believers have just dumped Windows already and started using Open Source OSes. Which word did I mis-spell?
I can see an obvious application!
..... which we could then use to assemble an artificial hand which was tinier still ..... and so on, and so on, until we're down to the scale of manipulating individual atoms!
We could use this tiny artificial hand to assemble an even tinier artificial hand
There's a problem with cameras' raw formats. They're kept very, very secret because they would reveal some information the manufacturer would rather you didn't know.
Digital cameras are sold by the number of pixels in the image file, not the sensor array. When you download a "3072x2048" JPEG image from your "6 megapixel" camera, what you're downloading may well have 6 million pixels in it -- but it has been interpolated up from the raw data supplied by the sensor. The JPEG compression hides the interpolation artefacts well.
Basically, in order to parse the RAW data then you need to know exactly how many pixels are in the image sensor and which ones are responding to which colour. There might well only be 0.5 million pixels each for red and blue and 1 million green pixels in the actual sensor array. Each sensor can see more than 256 levels, though. These 2 million pixels (each with only partial colour information) are expanded to 6 million full-colour pixels, with the rounding errors caused by reducing to 256 colour levels distributed among adjacent pixels. And then the image is subjected to lossy compression, which disguises.
If anyone was allowed to see the raw data format, it would be obvious that the claim of "6 million pixels" is somewhat mendacious. But with no sanctions available against the cheap fly-by-nights who make preposterous claims, even reputable camera manufacturers are forced to play the bullshitting game.
KOffice's file format is documented {it's actually the same as OpenOffice's file format}, and in fact the actual source code used to put together and take apart its documents is readily available -- with no obligations, except that you must respect the authors' wishes for it to remain Open Source. If Microsoft don't want to use it, that's hardly the KDE team's fault.
Imagine a conversation like this:
Electricity board: We can supply you 230 volts, 50 cycles a second.
Customer: But I want 110 volts, 16.7 cycles!
Electricity board: What for?
Customer: Home-made kit. Can't tell you any more than that -- it's a secret.
Electricity board: Home-made? Well, why on earth didn't you ask what we supplied before you built anything to plug into it?
Customer: I have standardised on 110 volts, 16.7 cycles. I chose some very nice, expensive power transformers, but they are wound for a 110 volt supply. And I designed all my timing circuits to expect 1000 positive-going pulses per minute, which is 16.7 cycles a second.
Electricity board: But why?
Customer: Well, everyone else is using 230/50. I don't want to be like everyone else!
Not quite.
OpenOffice.org is released under the LGPL, which allows people to steal the hard work put in by their contributors in order to make closed-source forks (strictly, the source for the application as a whole may be Closed but the source for any LGPL parts must remain Open). KOffice is released under the full-on, take-no-prisoners GPL, which insists for every fork to be Open Source.
It's possible that using part of OpenOffice.org in KOffice might allow closed-source derivatives of KOffice.
Even if that weren't the case, OpenOffice.org is so badly coded as to require rewriting from scratch before it is used for anything.
QT has been available under an Open Source licence for Windows ever since QT for Unix went under the GPL; there was never anything stopping anyone from porting it. Apart, that is, from an apparent general aversion in the Windows camp towards Free Software. Oh, they like their free-as-in-beer downloads, but they are all spyware-infested closed source applications and you end up paying with your bandwidth, your CPU cycles and the overall usability of your computer. Letting someone else look at the source code is anathema to the average Windows programmer. After all, they never got to look at the source code of their Operating System, so why should they let anyone look at the source code for their applications?
What makes you think I have a car?
Brand names hardly matter anymore.
Industrial parts are bought by specification, not by brand name. A product design engineer might call for an M8x50 bolt, a 4.7K ohm 0.25 watt resistor, a quarter-turn ball valve with 22mm. compression fittings, an NPN transistor with a gain of 50 in a TO3 package or a 15x40mm. ball-bearing. Several manufacturers may make items that fit the specifications the engineer requires. Only the purchasing department really care where a part actually comes from. When required in small quantities (to build prototypes, for example), common industrial parts are almost always supplied through catalogues; the company's purchasing department will usually buy directly from the supplier when sufficient quantities are required to deal directly, but often the supplier is the same one who supplied the catalogue.
Computer components, of course, fit the definition of industrial parts made to conform to specifications. Of course, only part of the specification is fixed: a graphics card must have the right connectors to fit the motherboard and the monitor, but there is considerable leeway in performance and price. A machine used mostly for running OO.o and Firefox needn't have as fancy a graphics card as one used for CAD or gaming. The Internet has enabled the collation of component specifications on a wider scale even than most catalogues can manage, thereby allowing anyone to choose from several interchangeable alternatives. When coupled with independent reviews, this gives ordinary people a very powerful tool for weighing up the alternatives.
Unless you can offer your customers something that your competitors can't, there's no reason for them to be loyal to a brand anymore.
Edison did not invent electricity. He re- invented the filament light bulb (which had already been invented a year or so previously by Joseph Swan), which turns most of the energy fed to it into heat (and only a very tiny portion into visible light). Given that almost every other conceivable solution for turning electricity into visible light is better, the filament light bulb is an invention which really should be consigned to the dustbin of history as soon as possible.
But that's nothing to do with what Edison was like. It's simply because his invention is, by modern standards, crap. Shame on anyone who is still using filament bulbs.
A couple of years ago I bought a music CD ..... it was Avril Lavigne, "Under My Skin" and I bought it specifically because it featured copy-prevention (CDS200) and I wanted it for the "h4x0r challenge factor". (I had a brief fantasy in which the Managing Director of the record company receives an unlabelled CD-R in a plain brown envelope, and upon further investigation discovers it to be a copy of Under My Skin. Initial puzzlement that someone managed to foil the copy-protection turns to shock as he realises ..... he wasted his money on the copy-protection scheme! Detectives are called in, but the CD and envelope are conspicuously free of fingerprints.)
Needless to say I was rather disappointed to find that, as far as my setup was concerned, the disc didn't seem to be copy-protected at all -- it ripped just fine using the same software I had ever used! Rather like a Sudoku puzzle with only 9 blank squares, only a bit less intellectually fulfilling. The reverie was nice while it lasted, though, and probably ever-so-slightly better than the equivalent amount spent on drugs.
In my experience, DVD-minus-R discs are totally unreadable on anything, even the machine that wrote them in the first place. Stick to DVD+plus+R and you'll be fine. Millions of TV-recorders can't be wrong!
Yes, but bear in mind that some countries (Europe and Britain) have tough consumer-protection laws. It would be entirely legal to import a copy of Windows or Office meant for use in the third world {i.e. former European colonies where they speak European languages such as English and French} and sold for the equivalent of 1 or thereabouts, into Europe -- and in fact it would be illegal for Microsoft to try and stop them. All DVD players on the Continent are deregionalised, for the same reason -- and when Britain gets a prime minister who doesn't like the taste of American Presidential Cock, all DVD players here will be deregionalised too (unless we get kicked out of the EU, in which case I'll be on the Channel ferry and brandishing a one-way ticket quicker than you can say "51st state").
Also, I bet you any money you like that every "localised" version of Windows / Office will still insist to use US Letter (216x279) as the default paper size.