dbminter

BEHOLD! The face of the beast! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:IBM_536...ont.triddle.jpg Well, one of its many faces. I worked with two of these things, the System/36 and the AS-400. The System 36 was like 700 pounds and had belt driven hard drives! The funny thing was the AS-400, meant to replace the System/36, turned out to be more difficult to use because the old code had to be rewritten for the new system, instead of just copied over.

Try and wrap your brain around this one, because, it makes no sense, and, that's what the businesses and the judges want. Is it legal to copy a DVD you purchased and own, for your own backup purposes and use? For one copy, yes, US law makes that legally expressed. But, guess what? Anything that has to break CSS to do it IS illegal because it gets around a digital protection method, and this is covered as illegal because of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. So, the copies are legal, but, USING the tools to make the copies aren't! Thus, you can have 10,000 pirated DVD's made by someone else, but, what's illegal is certain applications made them. BUT how can you tell? The copies aren't illegal, making the copies is not illegal, but, using the tools that make the copies of CSS protected discs (Or any future protections.) are illegal. Now, here's the funny part... it is therefore, according to this legal wrangling, apparently possible to do this: use a tool to make a copy of a protected disc you own, so that the copy has no protection on it, then copy the non-protected CSS disc again with a program that will not copy protected discs, such as Nero Burning ROM, just make a 1:1 copy, and burn that copy. Then, totally remove the decryption tool from your PC. Because the copies in this case aren't illegal, because the copying in this case is not illegal, only using the decrypting tool is illegal, they can't prove you used anything that gets around the DMCA. What this means in the end is a total goddamn mess! No one knows a thing about what is legal and what isn't. Because creating a decryption tool is not illegal. Possessing a decryption tool is not illegal. Merely using it is. But, you have to use to get around the protection on discs you own. The real challenge is going to be someday if someone could be used with "proof" of use of a decryption tool on a copy with the use of Implementation ID's and the like. The problem there is a person could just clam up and say they have no idea what an application might add to any such fields. Or that they have no idea of anything! In the end, there is no real legal or illegal definition of what you can do with what you own. Thus, the studios are using the ambiguity as a strong arm to push around the public and convince judges to agree with them by the mere word of the law to get around the intent of the law. All to control the selling scheme of where, how, and when people can buy DVD's. Because, as Jack Valenti openly said once, if people want a backup copy, just buy a 2nd damn DVD. And that's what the studios want, a license to steal via double dipping.

What? Banging on his door?

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Yeah, right! You're so transparent! YOU did this to me! I KNOW IT!

We have risen!

Well, who's to say that it isn't? Renamed to something else, run in the background with switches...

Okay, now, THIS wasn't funny! Got this piece of fishing, I guess, to try and get my information. i.e. one of the links goes to something that isn't a part of eBay. It says a bid I entered was cancelled. Which is strange as I've not bid on anything at all this year! So, I went by eBay proper and searched by the claimed cancelled item number. This is NOT funny, people! Whoever did it, fess up! http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...%3D50%26fvi%3D1

There's... wow... I don't even know if I can go on with it... there's... Hell, see for yourself! http://www.gccwired.com/defaultFlashStory.asp?storyid=434 Apparently, this church is desperate enough to get people to... come... in by telling them how to have better sex! What I want to know is... what the HELL must Communion be like! IF their church is hands on... I live pretty near the place. This church has but one commandment: be fruitful and multiply! With a heavy dose of Onan and his spilled seed upon the ground. You know what? This is a swiped idea! There's already a religion that draws people in with sex. They're called wicca! Apparently, this church stole the idea because it saw a good thing going in something else.

It's all I ever use. IMO, there's really no difference between them except for a few things: 1.) DVD+R is a little bit more expensive 2.) DVD+R is newer 3.) DVD+R is hyped more. And, even without facotirng in having tested them in the wild, all those things spell one thing: trying to make a silk purse of a sow's ear. My prime reason, though, is my tests with DVD+R had a problem in that any dual format burner that burned DVD+R would not play in the Panasonic stand alone DVD recorder. And, the future has proven me well. DVD+ tends to get the faster write rates, etc. first, but, they tend to be tremendously error prone. DVD-R tends to take longer before they release things like this, but, generally (It's never perfect.) they require fewer revisions to fix the bugs. So, it's really just a marginal thing: that, in the end, I choose DVD-R because it's cheaper, and the extra spent for DVD+R isn't worth it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Of course, I also remember backing Beta because it was better. Doesn't mean it will win, though.

Thursday's "amazing" deal at Office Depot: $30 off a purchase of 100 DVD-R's. Off of MEMOREX. The center isle had maybe 20 of these stacks, unsold. And, no wonder! Garbage in, garbage out.

And, naturally, after I post, yet another job offer in the area for expertise with that bloody iSeries!

I had to laugh when I saw this bundle advertised and demonstrated on ShopAtHome! For $199, they send you a Sony External DVD burner, no model listed, 50 HP DVD+R discs, and ICopyDVD's2 software. First, they showed a "Hollywood produced DVD" with numerous fingerprints on the data surface. Oh no! It must be repaired! BUT, the funny part? When the guy inserts the DVD in the drive for reading... it has a silver matte top! Hollywood produced? Yeah! Right! It's Then, this guy fires up ICopyDVD's2 and points out the screen that warns you against copying copyrighted movies. And he actually says, "Now, the software cannot tell the difference between copyrighted DVD's and those that aren't!" While he doesn't know it he openly admits that the software has a ripper in it, even if it doesn't. He's not going to know, because, he doesn't know the different between copyrighted DVD's and content protected DVD's! Most DVD's are content protected, but, not all are copyrighted. e.g. silent movies made in the 1920's and earlier have long since fallen out of copyright but may still be protected from copying. They usually aren't, because the company doesn't want to pay the licensing fee to whoever owns CSS to protect something that isn't copyrighted. e.g. public domain means that anyone can get a piece of the pie, so, the cost of protecting the disc from copying utilities with measures that always fail is more than the cost of the few people who would copy such material as it is a niche market to begin with. This next part, though, was what made me laugh out loud! This amazing "Hollywood produced DVD" was read in from the drive in a miraculous time of under 1 minute and 30 seconds! e.g. this disc was just a dummy disc created with less than a 1 GB of data, probably. Anyway, the copy burns... well, it starts to burn because, interestingly enough, you never actually SEE the burn finish nor the guy demonstrating the whole thing ever insert the new disc into any player and show that it copied. But, he did kindly point out some friendly advice: to use the bundle to make copies of your purchased Hollywood produced DVD's! That he does it all the time, so the kids can damage the copies, and he still has the new versions he bought. Yet, will the M AA go after ShopAtHome for SELLING something that not only can, in theory, copy DVD's BUT that the network FREELY recommends you do?

Let's try it again... An IBM minicomputer.

AS-400 = Application System series 400. Older more familiar versions: System 36. The AS-400 series was renamed to the iSeries in 2000 and then renamed again to System i5 this year. Anyway, it's an IBM minicomputer for general business use, also popular in governmental offices, that introduced in 1988 and still in production. Programmers love working on them because they're programmer centric and very secure machines, but, no one I know liked working with the one system we had at my last job. In fact, the biggest pain: the only way to know if a job was done after you submitted it was to list all available running programs, MANUALLY refresh the screen until it disappeared from memory, then try to find its log in the dump directory, read it, and try to decipher the messages.

After all, it's the ONLY way to even ACCESS the Hot Coffee mod, as far as I know, other than an installed HD or a possible export of a file to the memory card.

"No, no, no! It's spelled Raymond Luxury Yatch, but, it's pronounced Throat Warbler Mangrove!"

Rent it from a store and get your PS2 chipped.

Of course, the funny thing is both sides are taking this out of control. Cheney shot someone, that's news! He shouldn't have tried to keep the story down. BUT, it was an accident, and, even if the guy died, it would not have been a crime that the Vice President would need to step down for. As usual, the problem with people blinded by partisan politics, which always results from a dominating dual party system, is they are color blind: they fail to see grey.

Now, now, now. Everyone who grew up in the era of the G.I. Joe/Action Force cartoon knows that when you discuss climate control, it's always Destro and Cobra's Weather Dominator at fault! In fact, I think on the old board, I once accused Florida's Bush and King Bush II of collusion because interestingly enough, after Bush won re-election, the dreaded predicted storms didn't hit that year. So, makes you wonder... how did Louisiana vote? Did they go for Bush or for Kerry?

Actually, if that jolly swag man had had waterwings, he'd probably not have escaped the stockman and the troopers by drowning and turning himself into a singing ghost.

Of course, it also depends how you're zeroing out the drive. Writing just a zero to every area is faster than, say, the more secure wipe method of writing a 0, erase it, write a 1, erase it, write a 0, and check that the write reads 0, and repeat for 32 passes. It might just be easier to use something like Partition Magic to safely delete the partition, create a new, blank, unformatted one in the empty space, image the partition, then safely delete the new partition, create a 2nd new blank, unformatted one, and then restore the imaged partition, and safely delete it. While it seems like a lot of useless steps, the partition sizes will be small since hardly any data will be used, thus, making the restores, creations, and deletes quick. Plus, creating and deleting multiple partitions to the same area should make it very difficult to recover anything through means beyond electron tunnelling.

Here, there may be 5 offerings a year, and they all want 5 years experience either with network certification plus the 5 years or they want people to run those godawful AS-400's. (Nice machines from a programmer's end, but, nowhere near operator friendly.)

Someone doesn't know their Python routines.

So, tell me. In Australia, do jolly swag men really sit beside billabongs? Are there lots of coolibah trees?