29 Jun
2006
29 Jun
'06
9 p.m.
On 6/29/2006 at 9:02 PM Don Y wrote:
on
> I was told a story about how the Thomas Guide
people did this, naming an
> unremarkable alley in the LA area the "Mark and Brian Expressway" after
a
> rather colorful pair of morning disk jockeys.
Later when the city
decided
to redo street
signs, they used the Thomas Guide and thus ordered and
installed signs marking this particular alley.
Ha! Leave it to the gummit to take the lazy way out! :-/
>> In the 80's, video (arcade) game software was *regularly*
>> copied. Blatantly. The offenders would simply grep the binary
>> for key strings (like the title screen) and change them
>> to different text. The time required to catch the infraction,
>> get an injunction (usually the offending games were imports)
>> and have it enforced was longer than the life-cycle of the
>> game (at the time, many games were "90 day wonders").
>
> Many of these ripoffs were horridly bad, though interesting examples of
> beating on the thing until it works. For example, Donkey Kong running Galaxian
hardware. Nasty colors. Nasty sounds, but it plays more or
less
correctly.
Even more amusing are some of the lengths counterfeiters went
to in order to "appease" the anti-counterfeiting algorithms
embedded in the runtimes! The important lesson here is
never leave a go-nogo decision point in code that you
intend to protect (too easy to find those and workaround them)