Thread: Thought I would never say this...

> I ask you what is the difference between a so-called 'legal' company doing this to my registry and a hacker or piece of malware or spyware?
The number of laywers involved would be the only difference IMO.

Remember Sony's DRM Rootkit?
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archive...drm_rootk.html

They're all just a bunch of crooks if they're hacking your machine to maximise their profit.

It seems the way to go is to just install each new thing in a nice clean VM all to itself, and it you detect it misbehaving, you can just blow the whole thing away then raise bloody hell with the vendor.

Originally Posted by abachler

cd audio is uncompressed, mp3 is compressed. its more than just renaming the file extension. You need an mp3 compressor.

Thanks for the info Captain Obvious, what should we do without you?

I sense an attitude problem in this thread. You kids should learn to play nice.

@Neo1: I think abachler's post was rather helpful, actually. It might be obvious to you that mp3 players often use a different format than CDs, but it seems likely that indigo0086 did not.

@indigo0086: I know the feeling. It's like this.

Code:

cat /dev/random > /dev/dsp

Originally Posted by dwks

@Neo1: I think abachler's post was rather helpful, actually. It might be obvious to you that mp3 players often use a different format than CDs, but it seems likely that indigo0086 did not.

How come? He has been a member here since late 2001, have you looked at any of his replies in the programming boards? I could imagine abachlers reply being quite offensive if you've been a member here for almost 7 years, and has got almost 1700 posts in different computer programming related topics..

But whatever, Abachler i'm sorry you have no sense of humor and lack any kind of self-irony...

How come? He has been a member here since late 2001, have you looked at any of his replies in the programming boards?

Because.

the most vile ear-burning hissing sound

Sounds like a good description of static to me. Assuming the Ethernal (Eternal?) Noob's dad has reasonably good taste in music, it sounds like it wasn't transferred properly. abachler's guess is as good as mine, or yours, as to why.

By the way . . . have you considered how abachler might feel about this? He seems to be a reasonably competent programmer too. Here's his latest post as I post this.

There are two primary methods for handlign multiple socket connections. Thread per client, or polling. Polling is by far the fastest, although most difficult to impliment. Rather than use WaitForMultipleObjects, use WaitForSingleObject() with a timeout of zero. The return value will tell you whether it returned due to timeout, or from being signlaled. You can then queue that socket for service by your worker threads.

Also, for the record . . . I didn't know that CDs don't use the same format as mp3s before reading this thread. (I don't listen to music.)
(Although I would have guessed that, based on how old mp3 players are.)

[edit] My apologies to the Ethernal (Eternal?) Noob if [s]he was indeed insulted by abachler's post. But I think that it is their place to say so if they were . . . [/edit]

Originally Posted by medievalelks

See, this is the kind of nonchalant attitude that the game companies are up against. Blame the pirates, not the pirated.

I can't. In fact, if you think about it neither can you or the companies themselves. As already noted there is an insisting lack of a proper comparative studies. And hardly there will ever be one because the margin of error expected from a "do you use pirated software?" type of questionnaire is too high to ever produce any meaningful data.

Now, if you want I can agree entirely with you if we remove the word "sales" from the whole equation. I have many things to blame pirates for; among them, a complete disrespect for other people's hard work, a latent criminal mind, but worst a dissemination of ethical falsehoods like "information should be free" or "you should only pay for quality" that spread like wildfire and defeat the notions of Capitalism and Free Market we so hard fought for.

But I cannot in any way blame piracy for a drop of sales because

• There is no such thing as a decrease in sales;
• It still lacks proof piracy affects sales when we know that piracy can on many cases lead downloaders to buy the product;
• And because - as discussed on a previous thread - some companies have openly admitted on more than one occasion piracy has served their selling intents.

What really drives me nuts on all this, if you want to know, is the disingenuousness of the companies arguing against piracy when they themselves know they not only lack the data, but also on many cases benefit from the dissemnination and exposition of their products, and irony, of the ironies, cannot claim a drop in sales when these keep rising.

But, risking speaking of more than what I know, I think Bubba intention wasn't to address this issue in particular. But instead DRMs. And only DRMs.

And DRMs have nothing to do with piracy. Let me say this again so you know this is not a typo... DRMs have nothing to do with piracy. It may sure look like that way. But what DRMs are is an attempt to end once and for all the notion of a copyright in digital content. Assuming one day a technology was developed that was unbreakable, the presence of such DRM technology would render copyright laws obsolete. And with them, the consumer rights associated with such laws.

Now, allow me the following deflection:
Because it is simply not possible to cancel copyright laws from day to night, neither it is possible to keep the laws and cancel the associated consumer rights (like that of the right to a personal backup copy), the DMCA and its sibling international laws exist for the sole purpose of legalize an otherwise illegal activity; that of developing and testing a final DRM solution.

So the DMCA is in fact giving companies green light to pursue a technology that will one day (if a solution is ever found) not only cancel our present consumer rights, but for all that matters defeat the principles behind Open Architeture that currently rules our PCs. And it is doing all this while keeping current copyright laws. The DMCA is a scam. And will hopefully very soon be revoked. I'm hoping with the next administration.

EDIT: You may not like them... but we liberals have our uses too.