From: Jim Witte (jswitte_at_bloomington.in.us)
Date: Wed Sep 01 2004 - 12:22:01 PDT
> can't believe none of you sods have [k]racked this one yet - yeah yeah
> don't
> bitch about piracy, i've heard it all. fact still remains that at a
> hefty 50
No one has kracked it yet for a simple reason I would think: no one
wants to. Maybe you don't understand just how difficult the ATA driver
was to write: from what I know from Paul, the driver is at least 50
*thousand* lines of C++ code, and half or two third of the work was
reverse-engineering the way the various TFlashStore and related classes
works, and it changes (at least) one of the system ROM classes in RAM
at runtime. Paul has been developing it for three years. I think 50
Euros is a bargain, especially when compared to the price-difference
between linear and ATA flash cards (and that linear flash cards are
increasingly hard to find). How much do you think Apple would have
charged for this as an addon?
> euros, its bout the price i'd pay for a (new)ton; in fact, if i had 50
> euros to
> throw around, i'd proaly have bought a 32mb flashram card! and for
> that matter,
> if piracy were such a big deal, none of us would be makin copies of
> photoshop,
> office x, etc, etc, rite? the way i figure, if the author (oh, please!
> spare me
Not that I necessarily condone piracy of Photoshop, Office, etc, but
there's a difference there - PS costs at least $500 retail ($150-300
academic or upgrade), Office costs between $100-400 (except for OEM
copies and licensing deals with businesses).
> the sob stories about his wakeful nites); if the jerk had any sense,
> he'd have
> charged 5 euros instead of 50, with a 500 strong user base here itself
> on
Maybe so. I'd be interested to see whether the economic elasticity
of that works out to a higher total revenue for Paul. I doubt it -
after a while, everyone with a Newton will have the ATA driver, so it's
just a matter of time. 50 Eu. is quite reasonable, even with the
exchange rate to the US..
Would you pay $100 (Driver+exchange factor+cost of 64 or 128MB flash
card) for the ability to turn your Newton in the high-capacity,
passable (in terms of sound quality) MP3 player? (Especially when
considering that if the MP3 driver were rewritten in assembly instead
of C++, it might get even more efficient - must email Eckhart about
this..)
> newtontalk, that's a whopping 2500 euros at least, more than what
> he'll make at
> 50 euros per head!
Pending cost-benefit analysis..
Jim
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