DCTI has been jawing about a better authentication scheme (read: getting one) for years. It was being discussed when I "joined" DCTI some year(s) ago. Maybe they'll "invent" public key crypto in a few years. *grin* I don't know what they may be scheming over in the inner circle since I've not been part of that circle for some time now.
As for odd client builds, one of the coders needs the hardware/OS to get a client built. They usually will not "login and build a client" on the fly -- it's way to easy for the host to snag the source that way. When I had access to the full sources, I'd build a client on everything I could get it copied onto -- to date, I think I'm still the only one with a multithreaded SCO client:-) As long as the OSes that the majority of people are using have clients, then what's the push to support 10 machines? (and then the client for that obscure OS doesn't get updated for a year...)
Having seen the source code, you're not really missing anything. The code that actually does the work is publically available. As for the buffer and network code, who cares; that stuff is pretty easy to whip together. The only magic is the "crypto" used for the block storage. (it's about as much crypto as CSS is and far simpler. I'm really surprised someone has reverse engineered it yet. I shudder to think what will happen when someone does and publishes it.)
what ad banners have you seen during your current surfing session?
Umm, those damned eye magnet X10 Camera banner ads. And the banner ad(s) at the top of the/. pages as it's the only thing viewable (for ages) until the </table> is processed.
Exactly my point, it doesn't matter what kind of fortress your box is in, when it falls into a river of lava, it won't matter much how many generators, UPSen, or redundant T3's the site has if you don't have a backup that's not also in that river.
This is my friend Murphy. I'll let you two get aquanted.
ISDN Depending on where you are, ISDN can be damned cheap or damned expensive. You get a limited choice of bandwidth (56k up to 128k)
IDSL Just about as expensive as ISDN but 16k faster *grin*
SDSL WAY cheaper than a T1. DSL can run higher than T1 speeds depending on technology and distance to the CO.
Frame Relay - Fractional T1 Cheap compared to a dedicated T1 and you can change the bandwidth up or down with relative ease.
Frame Relay - Full T1 w/CIR (burstable) Also cheaper than a dedicated T1 and gives you most of the bandwidth of a T1 most of the time depending on the area, Telco, and ISP
Colocation is an odd bit of voodoo. Finding the right match can be difficult for a startup. There are usually throughput limits on co-lo setups. And, colo can end up just as expensive as a full T1 pulled into your kitchen. Of course, there's also co-lo services out there cheaper than most dialup accounts:-) (I hate looking for colo space.)
If I didn't know what my needs would be initially or what my growth would look like, I'd look at SDSL; it's not that expensive and provides a reasonable bandwidth (you may qualify for full T1 but only buy 384k and change it as you need to.)
These things vary from place to place, so definately shop around.
Power consumption and heat generation for two. Plus, soon you won't be able to find any PII's around.
I would agree RAID is overkill for a startup. What little speed and protection you want from RAID can be done just as well and sufficiently fast in software (just about any OS can do software RAID.)
My advice is to keep backups more than investing time or effort in RAID. Of course, if you need 100% availablity, then you are beyond the average/. commenter:-)
The risks of physical location are not important -- well, so long as you don't co-lo on a phone pole in a dark alley on the bad side of town. Hard drives DO fail; power spikes DO occur; rats, mice, slugs, roaches, etc. etc....
And then there's the "you can have the box back when it's been deguased" situations. [rare, but you're only paranoid until you can prove everyone's out to get you.]
According to Ted Hooban, CDNOW's director of digital products, the firm is not out to use the patent as an offensive weapon.
Bullshit! Then why did you go to all the trouble to get a bloody patent? That's the only reason anything gets patented these days. It's not like a web interface to cdrecord is anything earth shatteringly novel that it warrants a patent to protect it. CDNOW want's (needs?) a patent so it can milk a mini-monopoly on customized music CDs. Plus, it makes the company look more profitable -- after all, a merger is pending.
Time to go read the fine print. Does the patent cover track-at-once, session-at-once, and/or disk-at-once recording?
Well, err, uhm... *cough* Thin-X *cough* (That's the closest link I can find. I guess their PR department hasn't been saying much.)
I think SCO has something like this too.
Re:Totally OT - Cheesecake ads
on
Copyright!
·
· Score: 1
As a guy, I find them intrusive and out of place. Of course, I'm genetically programmed to notice them so I cannot ignore them -- they always catch my eye.
They look too much like porno ads. And they give off the impression one should use them to spy on people -- i.e. "get your ''Home Porn Shop'' here."
But, as far as marketing, most of the internet is male. [I guess that's what makes prono sites so profitable.]
I don't think so. Stand alone units don't have to go through the same CSS song-and-dance to get the decryption keys -- it can read them directly from the disk in a "secure" fashion. (unlike passing over the IDE bus and around a computer's memory where anything can see them.)
I don't know about Japanese laws, but the US export restriction is on ENCRYPTION technology, NOT decryption. (Distributed.net has been doing this for several years.)
This would only prove to be a roadblock for US companies making DVD recording hardware. That hardware would have to be made outside the US for non-US users. Those made in the US would not be exportable. Plus, if the encryption technology were developed on US soil, then it could never leave the US... legally.
Depending on configuration and phase of the moon, there have been reports of 2-8% increase in performance by using the backend scaler in the G-series cards from Matrox.
Matrox cards may suck royally for playing most games, but this is one place where they rule.
Actually, they "released" someone elses driver. They didn't write it and they gave no support to the person writing it. (This was argued on the LiVid mailing list.)
Linux certainly has it's place in the world. And it's gotten much better over the decade. I'm not saying it's the desktop of the new millenium or that it will or even should replace windows as a desktop OS. Here's two of my real-world successes using linux...
After I graduated from college, I coasted for awhile (8 months to be exact) by working there in the data aquistion and controls lab as a "research programmer." A friend and fellow graduate now in graduate school, was working on his thesis research. This entailed collecting data from several tension meters on an industrial sewing machine (fwiw, the machine that sews the pleats of blue jeans.) He started out writing his code in DOS with Borland C as that's what he had a driver for and DOS is "easy" to program. His code worked fine for small tests, but proved to be unusable when collecting usable amounts of data (over 1M and well over the 64k segment limit.) Plus, DOS was not able to give the kind of pseudo-realtime feedback he needed -- DOS took too long to get around to actually doing anything.
SO, he switched to windows. He also had drivers for windows and his C code could be compiled as a windows console app and not have the memory limits of a real-mode DOS crapplication. Of course, windows (3.1, 95 was just released then) proved to be even worse as it's interrupt response time usually cost us a few data points:-( It was at this point that I offered Linux as a possibility -- even in light of no driver.
We (me, my boss, him, and his advisor) agreed to give linux a chance if we could get a driver for the card. We had already developed a driver for a similar card (CIO-DAS16/330?) that was the starting point for my building a driver for his card (CIO-DAS1600/12). [Note: Computer Boards was very helpful in getting both drivers going. They released the ASM source to part of the 330 driver.] There were a few serious problems with the linux solution -- all of them problems with the driver and the hardware -- but in about two months, there was a functional driver (still had problems which I fixed by request of someone else using my driver two years later) and everyone was happy. He got his data and eventually graduated:-) [I actually returned some months after moving on to fix a small problem with that driver -- completely sans the thought of being paid.]
---
After my coasting period, I went to work for an ISP that was, at the time, a "small fry", regional player -- they grew alot in later years and fell prey to the corp. "merge-a-thon". When I started there, all the real audio and virtual web hosting content was handled on an SGI. [We moved the web stuff to sparc5 clones (axil-245's) running apache 0.4(?)] The SGI was horrible at real audio encoding. It did a perfect job of recording audio and actually serving it, but it took several lives out of the machine to encode anything.
The parent company from whom all money flows handed down a budget to upgrade the real audio hardware. (We were merely "keepers of the machine.") I and a coworker were tasked to "redesigned the whole damn thing" which meant real audio and web. To boil down six months of theoretical proof-of-concept and bullet-proofing, we compared the speeds of the SGI to that of linux on a 486dx4-100, P75, and PP200, as well as NT on the P75 and PP200 -- all of them out ran the SGI by a good margin.
We were staring at the screen in disbelief after the linux/PP200 run:-) The next day, I had a signed PO for two PP200 systems from VA:-) (still 1/10th the cost of the SGI.)
Over 3 years later, both of those machines are still running -- recording, encoding, and serving. They ran for 498 days -- right through huricane Fran -- before they were shutdown to be moved. I upgraded the installation to a recent kernel and the G2 server a few months ago. [again, without a thought of payment. And I don't work there any more.]
---
As you can read, I tend to stand behind my work. (Ask WebSource1 about a little hard drive failure for a very visable web server we've all visited:-))
IMO, you can keep those toys (esp. Rocky Horror)...
I thought you were gonna say something about the size of Texas with that "possession" bit. That reminds me of a Galleger(sp?) show from a stop in Texas where he had an air-horn (you know, from a semi) "'cause ever'thing in Texas is BIG."
Walker: Wisconsin Ranger? Do they have Rangers in Wisconsin? Who are they supposed to be protecting us from, Canadians? (*grin* we let them in without a passport.) Of course, "we" watched Picket Fences.
And Texas grows their own hamburger, what's your point?
I, for one, would love to see some market research on this sort of thing. It's my belief that game piracy is actually increasing sales of games. The majority of people who download a game either delete it (archive it for posterity -- I did spent a week collecting it:-)) or go buy it. Had these people never been exposed to the game, then they would likely never have bought it.
Once someone buys one game from some game shop, they are generally more likely to look at the other games that place had made. This only furthers the amount of money generated from game sales.
Of course, there aren't any numbers on any of this and likely never will be. But I can dream...
Microsoft is the worst example you could've picked. "companies that make money from Microsoft"? That's certainly an elite group of people. Microsoft is in business to make money for Microsoft. They don't care about customers; they only care about competition -- as long as people have little choice but to use Microsoft products, then Microsoft doesn't care. [Government regulation will ultimately fail in light of this.]
Case in point, look at your Windows CDs closely. How much do you think the duplicator made off those disks? It would appear, to save a fraction of a penny per disk, they cut back the amount of aluminium used in making the disk. You only need to read it once (at 1x), right? I've got three win95 CDs. I had to merge those three disks and burn my own to be able to reliably read the damn thing -- I seem to need to reinstall 95 about once a month. (Right now, my 98 machine will not boot with the video capture driver loaded -- all I did was install IE5. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it replaced half the OS.)
As you allude in the end, if you make something worth paying for, then people will be much more likely to actually pay for it. I "borrow" software all the time -- much less now-a-days as I don't have the time to care about what new shit is on the market. I don't buy software I've never used. You can not return opened software products. If there's no "demo" and no one I know has a copy, then I have no other option but to find something else, do without, or steal a copy.
I never buy games I've never seen/played -- most places have learned this and offer demos.
The lack of source hasn't prevented that in the past. However, if the source were public, then there would be many more "idiots" flooding the network -- it would appear some people have nothing better to do.
> i can't declare it as a loss on my financial reports (yes, i am a corporation) because there's no way to know how many sales were actually lost due to cracks.
That's an interesting point... if you could get some data on the number of downloads of the crack(s) from the sites distributing them, then you'd be able to file them as losses.
That would certainly be an inventive tax trick:-) Of course, the people downloading (and using) the crack(s) would not like being tracked like this in the slightest. Then again, the IRS most likely wouldn't accept it if you were ever audited.
At any rate, making copies of commercial content is bad, immoral, unethical, and illegal. However, people still do it -- speeding is unsafe and illegal, but people still do it all the time. I don't think this is really the point, however. As has been said more times than I care to count, we (the linux dvd community in general) don't want to copy the bloody DVD; we simply want to view the movie for which we've paid our good money. It's not our fault the DVD Forum failed to use a system with any hope of preventing duplication beyond blocking any access at all to the disk. Of course, it's been suggested CSS was never intended to prevent copying, but to prevent "fair-use."
You can make up your own mind on the legality... there's arguements on all sides. The only reason I bought a DVD was for tinkering and the volume of data a _data_ DVD will hold (I've got way too many CDs as it is.) I hold DVD in the same light as I2O, Diamond, and Creative. [I refuse to do business with Diamond ever as they refused to release any docs on their gfx hardware for years.]
There's a company called Lodgepole in Washington state (USA) that sells brand new alpha systems. VA Research used to sell them. There are other places out there...
NECX'sOutlet Center has 400MHZ Digital Server 3300's still in stock. Ignore the fact that they are the "UK" model. It takes exactly 5 seconds to convert it to "US" -- i.e. flip the power supply input voltage to 110 instead of 220 and plug in any US type IBM power cord. The UK model keyboard is a little weird by US standards, but you can use whatever PS/2 keyboard you want.
Of course, it's sans disk and RAM:-( Adequate SCSI hard drives are not expensive (4G is more than enough.) RAM, being 3.3V ECC EDO DRAM DIMMs, is a small problem. I ordered mine from The Outpost.
Excuss me? What does CSS have to do with this? The H+ is an MPEG decoder. It doesn't talk to the drive at all. It's up to the OS and/or software to read the data from the DVD-ROM and get it to the H+.
The only things they cannot release are the fancy navigation and sub-picture stuff "protected" by the NDA. But as far as decoding an MPEG data stream, there's nothing at all restricting them from releasing docs. Hell, Zoran gave LiVid docs for their DVD support chip(s) -- of course, the zoran hardware can do CSS between the chip and the drive on it's own as I understand it.
Of course, Sigma's statement was before CSS what outed.
Slashdot Mirror
DCTI has been jawing about a better authentication scheme (read: getting one) for years. It was being discussed when I "joined" DCTI some year(s) ago. Maybe they'll "invent" public key crypto in a few years. *grin* I don't know what they may be scheming over in the inner circle since I've not been part of that circle for some time now.
:-) As long as the OSes that the majority of people are using have clients, then what's the push to support 10 machines? (and then the client for that obscure OS doesn't get updated for a year...)
As for odd client builds, one of the coders needs the hardware/OS to get a client built. They usually will not "login and build a client" on the fly -- it's way to easy for the host to snag the source that way. When I had access to the full sources, I'd build a client on everything I could get it copied onto -- to date, I think I'm still the only one with a multithreaded SCO client
Having seen the source code, you're not really missing anything. The code that actually does the work is publically available. As for the buffer and network code, who cares; that stuff is pretty easy to whip together. The only magic is the "crypto" used for the block storage. (it's about as much crypto as CSS is and far simpler. I'm really surprised someone has reverse engineered it yet. I shudder to think what will happen when someone does and publishes it.)
what ad banners have you seen during your current surfing session?
/. pages as it's the only thing viewable (for ages) until the </table> is processed.
Umm, those damned eye magnet X10 Camera banner ads. And the banner ad(s) at the top of the
Exactly my point, it doesn't matter what kind of fortress your box is in, when it falls into a river of lava, it won't matter much how many generators, UPSen, or redundant T3's the site has if you don't have a backup that's not also in that river.
This is my friend Murphy. I'll let you two get aquanted.
ISDN
Depending on where you are, ISDN can be damned cheap or damned expensive. You get a limited choice of bandwidth (56k up to 128k)
IDSL
Just about as expensive as ISDN but 16k faster *grin*
SDSL
WAY cheaper than a T1. DSL can run higher than T1 speeds depending on technology and distance to the CO.
Frame Relay - Fractional T1
Cheap compared to a dedicated T1 and you can change the bandwidth up or down with relative ease.
Frame Relay - Full T1 w/CIR (burstable)
:-) (I hate looking for colo space.)
Also cheaper than a dedicated T1 and gives you most of the bandwidth of a T1 most of the time depending on the area, Telco, and ISP
Colocation is an odd bit of voodoo. Finding the right match can be difficult for a startup. There are usually throughput limits on co-lo setups. And, colo can end up just as expensive as a full T1 pulled into your kitchen. Of course, there's also co-lo services out there cheaper than most dialup accounts
If I didn't know what my needs would be initially or what my growth would look like, I'd look at SDSL; it's not that expensive and provides a reasonable bandwidth (you may qualify for full T1 but only buy 384k and change it as you need to.)
These things vary from place to place, so definately shop around.
Power consumption and heat generation for two. Plus, soon you won't be able to find any PII's around.
/. commenter :-)
I would agree RAID is overkill for a startup. What little speed and protection you want from RAID can be done just as well and sufficiently fast in software (just about any OS can do software RAID.)
My advice is to keep backups more than investing time or effort in RAID. Of course, if you need 100% availablity, then you are beyond the average
ALWAYS keep off-site backups.
...
The risks of physical location are not important -- well, so long as you don't co-lo on a phone pole in a dark alley on the bad side of town. Hard drives DO fail; power spikes DO occur; rats, mice, slugs, roaches, etc. etc.
And then there's the "you can have the box back when it's been deguased" situations. [rare, but you're only paranoid until you can prove everyone's out to get you.]
According to Ted Hooban, CDNOW's director of digital products, the firm is not out to use the patent as an offensive weapon.
Bullshit! Then why did you go to all the trouble to get a bloody patent? That's the only reason anything gets patented these days. It's not like a web interface to cdrecord is anything earth shatteringly novel that it warrants a patent to protect it. CDNOW want's (needs?) a patent so it can milk a mini-monopoly on customized music CDs. Plus, it makes the company look more profitable -- after all, a merger is pending.
Time to go read the fine print. Does the patent cover track-at-once, session-at-once, and/or disk-at-once recording?
Well, err, uhm... *cough* Thin-X *cough* (That's the closest link I can find. I guess their PR department hasn't been saying much.)
I think SCO has something like this too.
As a guy, I find them intrusive and out of place. Of course, I'm genetically programmed to notice them so I cannot ignore them -- they always catch my eye.
They look too much like porno ads. And they give off the impression one should use them to spy on people -- i.e. "get your ''Home Porn Shop'' here."
But, as far as marketing, most of the internet is male. [I guess that's what makes prono sites so profitable.]
I don't think so. Stand alone units don't have to go through the same CSS song-and-dance to get the decryption keys -- it can read them directly from the disk in a "secure" fashion. (unlike passing over the IDE bus and around a computer's memory where anything can see them.)
I don't know about Japanese laws, but the US export restriction is on ENCRYPTION technology, NOT decryption. (Distributed.net has been doing this for several years.)
... legally.
This would only prove to be a roadblock for US companies making DVD recording hardware. That hardware would have to be made outside the US for non-US users. Those made in the US would not be exportable. Plus, if the encryption technology were developed on US soil, then it could never leave the US
Depending on configuration and phase of the moon, there have been reports of 2-8% increase in performance by using the backend scaler in the G-series cards from Matrox.
Matrox cards may suck royally for playing most games, but this is one place where they rule.
Actually, they "released" someone elses driver. They didn't write it and they gave no support to the person writing it. (This was argued on the LiVid mailing list.)
Linux certainly has it's place in the world. And it's gotten much better over the decade. I'm not saying it's the desktop of the new millenium or that it will or even should replace windows as a desktop OS. Here's two of my real-world successes using linux...
:-( It was at this point that I offered Linux as a possibility -- even in light of no driver.
:-) [I actually returned some months after moving on to fix a small problem with that driver -- completely sans the thought of being paid.]
:-) The next day, I had a signed PO for two PP200 systems from VA :-) (still 1/10th the cost of the SGI.)
:-))
After I graduated from college, I coasted for awhile (8 months to be exact) by working there in the data aquistion and controls lab as a "research programmer." A friend and fellow graduate now in graduate school, was working on his thesis research. This entailed collecting data from several tension meters on an industrial sewing machine (fwiw, the machine that sews the pleats of blue jeans.) He started out writing his code in DOS with Borland C as that's what he had a driver for and DOS is "easy" to program. His code worked fine for small tests, but proved to be unusable when collecting usable amounts of data (over 1M and well over the 64k segment limit.) Plus, DOS was not able to give the kind of pseudo-realtime feedback he needed -- DOS took too long to get around to actually doing anything.
SO, he switched to windows. He also had drivers for windows and his C code could be compiled as a windows console app and not have the memory limits of a real-mode DOS crapplication. Of course, windows (3.1, 95 was just released then) proved to be even worse as it's interrupt response time usually cost us a few data points
We (me, my boss, him, and his advisor) agreed to give linux a chance if we could get a driver for the card. We had already developed a driver for a similar card (CIO-DAS16/330?) that was the starting point for my building a driver for his card (CIO-DAS1600/12). [Note: Computer Boards was very helpful in getting both drivers going. They released the ASM source to part of the 330 driver.] There were a few serious problems with the linux solution -- all of them problems with the driver and the hardware -- but in about two months, there was a functional driver (still had problems which I fixed by request of someone else using my driver two years later) and everyone was happy. He got his data and eventually graduated
---
After my coasting period, I went to work for an ISP that was, at the time, a "small fry", regional player -- they grew alot in later years and fell prey to the corp. "merge-a-thon". When I started there, all the real audio and virtual web hosting content was handled on an SGI. [We moved the web stuff to sparc5 clones (axil-245's) running apache 0.4(?)] The SGI was horrible at real audio encoding. It did a perfect job of recording audio and actually serving it, but it took several lives out of the machine to encode anything.
The parent company from whom all money flows handed down a budget to upgrade the real audio hardware. (We were merely "keepers of the machine.") I and a coworker were tasked to "redesigned the whole damn thing" which meant real audio and web. To boil down six months of theoretical proof-of-concept and bullet-proofing, we compared the speeds of the SGI to that of linux on a 486dx4-100, P75, and PP200, as well as NT on the P75 and PP200 -- all of them out ran the SGI by a good margin.
We were staring at the screen in disbelief after the linux/PP200 run
Over 3 years later, both of those machines are still running -- recording, encoding, and serving. They ran for 498 days -- right through huricane Fran -- before they were shutdown to be moved. I upgraded the installation to a recent kernel and the G2 server a few months ago. [again, without a thought of payment. And I don't work there any more.]
---
As you can read, I tend to stand behind my work. (Ask WebSource1 about a little hard drive failure for a very visable web server we've all visited
IMO, you can keep those toys (esp. Rocky Horror)...
I thought you were gonna say something about the size of Texas with that "possession" bit. That reminds me of a Galleger(sp?) show from a stop in Texas where he had an air-horn (you know, from a semi) "'cause ever'thing in Texas is BIG."
Walker: Wisconsin Ranger? Do they have Rangers in Wisconsin? Who are they supposed to be protecting us from, Canadians? (*grin* we let them in without a passport.) Of course, "we" watched Picket Fences.
And Texas grows their own hamburger, what's your point?
rofl...
That is one of the most wacked out things I've seen in ages. (I'll have to archive that when I get home.)
I, for one, would love to see some market research on this sort of thing. It's my belief that game piracy is actually increasing sales of games. The majority of people who download a game either delete it (archive it for posterity -- I did spent a week collecting it :-)) or go buy it. Had these people never been exposed to the game, then they would likely never have bought it.
Once someone buys one game from some game shop, they are generally more likely to look at the other games that place had made. This only furthers the amount of money generated from game sales.
Of course, there aren't any numbers on any of this and likely never will be. But I can dream...
They do it all the time :-)
Anyone remember STAC software? Drvspace == stacker. STAC sued; Microsoft bought them and then closed the company.
Microsoft is the worst example you could've picked. "companies that make money from Microsoft"? That's certainly an elite group of people. Microsoft is in business to make money for Microsoft. They don't care about customers; they only care about competition -- as long as people have little choice but to use Microsoft products, then Microsoft doesn't care. [Government regulation will ultimately fail in light of this.]
Case in point, look at your Windows CDs closely. How much do you think the duplicator made off those disks? It would appear, to save a fraction of a penny per disk, they cut back the amount of aluminium used in making the disk. You only need to read it once (at 1x), right? I've got three win95 CDs. I had to merge those three disks and burn my own to be able to reliably read the damn thing -- I seem to need to reinstall 95 about once a month. (Right now, my 98 machine will not boot with the video capture driver loaded -- all I did was install IE5. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it replaced half the OS.)
As you allude in the end, if you make something worth paying for, then people will be much more likely to actually pay for it. I "borrow" software all the time -- much less now-a-days as I don't have the time to care about what new shit is on the market. I don't buy software I've never used. You can not return opened software products. If there's no "demo" and no one I know has a copy, then I have no other option but to find something else, do without, or steal a copy.
I never buy games I've never seen/played -- most places have learned this and offer demos.
The lack of source hasn't prevented that in the past. However, if the source were public, then there would be many more "idiots" flooding the network -- it would appear some people have nothing better to do.
Actually, I'm surprised someone hasn't disassembled the buffer processing code, yet.
> i can't declare it as a loss on my financial reports (yes, i am a corporation) because there's no way to know how many sales were actually lost due to cracks.
:-) Of course, the people downloading (and using) the crack(s) would not like being tracked like this in the slightest. Then again, the IRS most likely wouldn't accept it if you were ever audited.
That's an interesting point... if you could get some data on the number of downloads of the crack(s) from the sites distributing them, then you'd be able to file them as losses.
That would certainly be an inventive tax trick
At any rate, making copies of commercial content is bad, immoral, unethical, and illegal. However, people still do it -- speeding is unsafe and illegal, but people still do it all the time. I don't think this is really the point, however. As has been said more times than I care to count, we (the linux dvd community in general) don't want to copy the bloody DVD; we simply want to view the movie for which we've paid our good money. It's not our fault the DVD Forum failed to use a system with any hope of preventing duplication beyond blocking any access at all to the disk. Of course, it's been suggested CSS was never intended to prevent copying, but to prevent "fair-use."
You can make up your own mind on the legality... there's arguements on all sides. The only reason I bought a DVD was for tinkering and the volume of data a _data_ DVD will hold (I've got way too many CDs as it is.) I hold DVD in the same light as I2O, Diamond, and Creative. [I refuse to do business with Diamond ever as they refused to release any docs on their gfx hardware for years.]
There's a company called Lodgepole in Washington state (USA) that sells brand new alpha systems. VA Research used to sell them. There are other places out there...
See also: my previous comment
NECX's Outlet Center has 400MHZ Digital Server 3300's still in stock. Ignore the fact that they are the "UK" model. It takes exactly 5 seconds to convert it to "US" -- i.e. flip the power supply input voltage to 110 instead of 220 and plug in any US type IBM power cord. The UK model keyboard is a little weird by US standards, but you can use whatever PS/2 keyboard you want.
:-( Adequate SCSI hard drives are not expensive (4G is more than enough.) RAM, being 3.3V ECC EDO DRAM DIMMs, is a small problem. I ordered mine from The Outpost.
Of course, it's sans disk and RAM
I think that's a safety feature. Mildly annoying, but I can live with it.
Excuss me? What does CSS have to do with this? The H+ is an MPEG decoder. It doesn't talk to the drive at all. It's up to the OS and/or software to read the data from the DVD-ROM and get it to the H+.
The only things they cannot release are the fancy navigation and sub-picture stuff "protected" by the NDA. But as far as decoding an MPEG data stream, there's nothing at all restricting them from releasing docs. Hell, Zoran gave LiVid docs for their DVD support chip(s) -- of course, the zoran hardware can do CSS between the chip and the drive on it's own as I understand it.
Of course, Sigma's statement was before CSS what outed.