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Piracy is not theft! It's competition! :)
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This comment was 'unlocked' using a torrent from TPB. Sew me, Swedish court!
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I "borrowed" this comment from another site, but changed it just enough to avoid copyright issues.
(You knew it was coming, stop it with the sighing already.)
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Blatent? Mark's wordmanship strikes again!
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Gets out the needle and starts using this comment thread to sew Whippo up
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The pen may be mightier that the sword but the keyboard's really feeble
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I wonder if they sold an UNlock for UNlock.
I fail to see the WTF regardless. It is perfectly legitimate to want to remove crippleware "features" from a legally acquired program, especially in an era predating the DMCA.
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This thread has its own 1-MByte of memory. Hidden and write-protected. How else could you develop that really large response, where the grammar nazis would otherwise take up most of memory?
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Todays WTF reveals your young age... Clearly you have no computer experience from the 80s. Back then, most software came on slow 5.25" floppies that took forever to load. But could you put the software that you paid for on your 20MB $2000 hard drive to speed things up? Noooooo... because the disks where copy-protected.
This is worse than games that require you to insert the CD to start the game. This is software that doesn't run from the hard disk at all.
Keep in mind that this is software for people who legitimately bought the software. If you got a pirated version the copy protection was already removed in the first place. Trust me, DRM is nothing new.
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Being able to copy DBase III into ramdisk so that you can store your data on a floppy disk was essential when you only had one floppy drive available and swapping disks constantly was not a slow and tedious option.
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Ah, those were the days, when copy protections were nothing more than a 5 minute inconvenience. Worth noting though, as others have already mentioned, the impetus for doing this was not traditionally piracy - it was so you could install the software on your shiny new 15MB hard disk.
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The real WTF is all those words. I don't have time to read about technology. By the time I've finished the ad, the technology is outdated. I need big fonts emphasizing numbers in improper metrics due to their choice of capitalizing all letters.
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Exactly. When the copy protect gets in the way of making legitimate use of the product it's quite reasonable to want to zap it.
One of my requirements before buying a game is to make sure the no-CD patches are out. No point in risking a scratched disk or incompatibilities with the copy protect. (This isn't just a myth perpetrated by the pirates, it's happened to me.)
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The Atron ad doesn't seem like much of a WTF as claimed. What does seem odd is that is a rather glowing endorsement of this product, and the hardware level debugger sounds like a wonderful idea, at yet a Google search of "Atron corp" reveals a whopping 14 hits, most of which appear to be CV type information. One is a .mil housed IT manufacturer list that claims Atron Corp was part of "Mohawk Data Sciences Corp." Yet computerhistory.org claims that this Mohawk company (which did produce a board called the Atron 501) ran into financial troubles in the late 1970s and was eventually folded into other firms. Since that is before the publication of this Ad, I doubt the relationship is correct.
Now how am I going to grease my lightning? I was all set up to put in a Puchase Order and everything!
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"What are those silly interrupts doing?"
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I don't need a lesson as to why developers copy-protect their demo executables - I know exactly why they do it. But it is absolutely no excuse for the net result of innocent and honest users getting stung by non-functioning software.
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Wow! You must be psychic or something!
Seriously. I was sighing as I read the "stop it" part.
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I once downloaded a free demo and I never managed to install it. Why? Because even tho I told it to install on the D: drive, it tried to go in C:\Windows.... I didn`t have a C: on that computer, windows was on D:.
So I never bothered with that game further. Don`t developers know there's an envrionment variable for the OS path?
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FTFY
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Oh what I'd do to be able to run Symphony from a Bernoulli Box.
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Look you, I've had it with your attempts to play WoW on 640x480! ;)
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Insert disk with \COMMAND.COM
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Actually, the last ad holds some merit. I don't know how annoying the copy protection was back in the day, but nowadays I almost always use no-CD cracks on my legal PC games because the disk-check takes too long.
It's funny how we that bought the software have to wait 30 seconds for a game to load to the main screen while a pirated game loads instantly to the main screen (literally). I also hate having the disk in the tray.
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Until you lost the game's manual. Then you were fucked.
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I like the quote in the first article. "Cleverly written code is, by definition tight, recursive, and terribly complex" Cleverly written code is simple and elegant.
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"It's supposed to work on Lotus 1-2-3, dBase III, Framework, Symphony, Paradox, and several others." But does it?
I find it awesome though that these guys managed to make a business of essentially selling cracks. I wonder if you could still get away with such an angle today (outside of DMCA-infested countries of course). DRM does tend to make things anywhere from annoying to completely unusable.
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I've actually even seen game companies remove CD checks from their games due to pressure from the players. Supreme Commander for instance was such a case. Took about a month after release or so and they released a patch that removed the CD check.
CD Checks are about the damn dumbest thing out there ever. They made sense in the days when hard drives barely had a couple gigs of storage.
These days however? CD drives are SLOW compared to a standard hard drive. Even worse compared to WD Raptors and let's not compare against WD Raptors in a RAID 0.
And seriously, in this day and age a couple hundred bucks will buy how many TB of storage? I seriously don't need to keep any data on the CD or DVD.
Many times what I'll even do is make copies of the disk onto my drives and mount them rather than using the physical disk. Protects the disk and is much faster too.
This is actually one reason why for the most part I either only buy games via steam or via direct2drive. No CD check to deal with when you don't even get the game on a CD in the first place.
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As long as you're locating old computer ads, do you think you can find Microsoft's old ads for Microsoft Windows saying that programs written for microsoft windows will have future compatibility regardless of what else happens?
I'd love to see if someone could hit them for violating implied warranties.
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"Order by telephone today!"
Remember when you had to call and actually speak to someone to order software? Yeah me neither.
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What about the "software unlocker"? I recall there was a shareware one back in 1996 which could be found legally via any major shareware repository of the era e.g. the infamous Simtel archive. Game Locksmith or something like that, aimed at games, and there was a similar one for applications. I even used it to unlock a couple of (legally) acquired games that used a hard-to-copy floppy disk.
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I don't know, there're a lot of things you can say about Microsoft, but this one is actually pretty true. Most Windows apps from back in the day, if they were coded reasonably decently, still run at least on XP, often even Vista. It's a big part of why the OS sucks donkey balls, but it's true.
Try the same with most other OSes and you'll either find that they don't exist anymore or that they ditched compatibility with legacy apps in favour of progress.
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on the second ad: So they couldn't be bothered to make an accompanying pseudo-3CPO?
on the third ad: Whenever copy protection software becomes a major pain in the ass to people who have legitimately purchased the product, it becomes a WTF. CD keys annoy the hell out of legitimate consumers and are actually a reason that a significant group of casual, non-technically-competent gamers were driven away from the PC gaming market to consoles. I know that's pathetic, but it does seem to be one of the major reasons why PC gaming has gained the reputation as being difficult/requiring a lot of technical knowledge and being only for computer geeks, while consoles seem to have the reputation of eminent usability to the masses.
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The copy-protection thing I actually understand. A lot of software copy protection in the early days was a real defecit to usability, and given the cost of the software and the fact that the disks wore out through normal use, so having had to deal with such software and the disks, I can genuinely say that that product probably had at least as many people buy it for truly legitimate purposes rather than to simply duplicate software.
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Hmm, the only game I have that uses manual-based copy protection is Warcraft: Orcs & Humans... which is a particularly funny example, because the manual doesn't match the copy protection questions in most cases. Someone re-edited the manual while the copy protection guys weren't looking. (I was sooo happy when Warcraft II needed none of that =)
I have a few games that shipped with a list of codes printed on a dark red paper, though. ...yes, Commodore 64 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games. ...Don't throw the assembly book at me!
Edit: Oh damn, I do have more games that have manual-based copy protection. Ultima VI and VII. I didn't remember that at first, because in both cases, the budget versions didn't have full manuals and only shipped with a list of copy protection questions and answers. Yay!
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Long, long ago I was actually part of a team that wrote and sold an anti copy-protection (CP) product. Even though, as a software seller, we would face the same piracy problems as anyone else, we had little "moral" problem with what we were doing.
First, part of our range allowed software designed to the loaded off compact cassette to run from disk. This was clearly something the owner should be allowed to do, even though CP frequently prevented it, and quite frequently the only way to have the software on disk was to bypass the CP and copy it there.
Another product we sold was a disk-to-disk copier. The decision to market one of these came about shortly after the release of a major, one might even say elite, new game. The game was available on cassette and 5.25" disk, so obviously the disk version was the one to buy, even at the large premium incurred.
The game came on the cheapest diskette we had ever seen, lacking even the reinforcing ring in the middle. Even though, as a seller, we knew that high-quality branded disks were available for less than 50c each in bulk to the trade, this disk must have been a 5c job, on a product selling for $30. Sure enough, one of the discs lasted about two weeks of hard play before splitting, whereupon the shop wouldn't exchange it since it had been opened, and the company declined to replace it, insisting that the fault was "wear and tear" and we should buy another. Instead we spent a weekend picking their CP apart and made ourselves nice, secure copies on good quality disks.
Intrigued, one of the team picked up a computer magazine, and rang several companies advertising in it asking where to send "his copy" of their product that had stopped working to get a replacement. Not one offered to replace a defective disk, even when he complained he hadn't had it more than a couple of months. We also noticed that more than one home computer magazine advised saying that your software hadn't worked "out of the box" in order to get a replacement.
Yes, breaking the CP on disk products could encourage piracy, but since we had discovered that many if not most companies were selling shoddy products at overinflated prices and refusing to replace any that turned out to be defective, we didn't much care. We weren't the ones breaking the law; what we were selling was no more illegal than a twin tape-deck.
And no, our disk copier wouldn't copy itself, but it did come with an address you could send it to and receive a free replacement, no questions asked.
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You'll be fighting liars in the quadrangle for the next dozen or so WTF articles. Which is no bad thing, really.
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Your post actually brings back fond memories of my work developing an ALC driver using code from the DEC Rainbow. The Rainbow wasn't exactly a bad idea; it was an i8086 machine, after all. It suffered from two problems: Ken clearly had no real interest in the market it was aimed at, so "compatibility" was limited to, well, the i8086.
The other one was that you had to pay DEC to format the disks for you. Younger readers may raise their eyebrows at such stupidity. The general screw-the-customer attitude is, however, still quite common.
Paradigm failure. Exactly why would you not want the customer to copy the disk copier?Was this fear of recursion, or just plain hypocritical greed?
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I can only agree on the copy protection. Those copy protection removers came in handy not only for installing programs on hard disks (which I didn't even have in the beginning), but mostly for simply making backups of those expensive floppies. Am I only allowed to use the program for as long as their floppy doesn't wear out? Does the fact that piracy exists, give those manufacturers the right to prevent me, the legitimate buyer, from securing my software? No it doesn't.
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Darn straight! Back in the 80's, I used Lotus 1-2-3 extensively. It had some "superlock" copy protection that would only let you install it to your hard drive once. If you wanted to move it to another computer, you'd have to run a special uninstaller utility to simultaneously remove it from your hard drive and re-enable installation from the floppy.
Woe unto you if your hard drive dies. You can't install onto the new drive, because the floppy think it's already been installed. And you can't run the uninstaller because the old drive is dead. And Lotus customer support was useless - you'd end up having to buy another copy for several hundred dollars.
Programs to break the protection were extremely welcome, legitimately used, and perfectly legal (since this was before the DMCA and courts deciding to enforce shrink-wrap licenses.)
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Besides, the man has awesome podcast-fu.
May the tablet be with you!
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This made me laugh out loud
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Ah yes, more brain-dead entries from the "old = LOL" theme.