Fooling Around // Software Production Line

Another interesting piracy case (conversation continued):

IP: 194.150.135.xxx
IP location: Russian Federation [RU] - Barnaul
IP owner: Altai Telecommunication Company
IP assigned to: Altai Telecommunication Company

This guy has been using our hi-end software product with generated registration key for several months. But due to certain peculiarities of pirated software finally the registration was purchased. Thank you, dude. However it did not seem to be his decision to pay for software just because he was expected to, it more seemed that he liked it and wanted to finally have it working with no odds…

Our software is going to be presented at ISC West 2006, this will be an excitingly great exposure of the product!

Microsoft® VCBuild for Visual Studio® .NET 2003 and stuff. I should have known this long ago already.

Some time ago I came across Pedro F. Felzenszwalb website, a image/video segmentation method he proposed in his paper “Efficient Graph-Based Image Segmentation”. Finally I could find some time to jot down an implementation of DirectShow filter to see the method live. It all look like this:

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There has been an interesting discussion about distribution of a nice book recently. One of the members wanted to share the electronic version of the book between discussion group members and, rather expectedly, it was a beginning of a flame about legel side of the action. Undoubtedly, the book is very well know within professional community as well as the authors, but the price tag is over $100 which is far more hurting for people leaving outside of top 20 of countries, if counted by GNP.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/OpenCV/message/36236

Opions are very much different:

Basically, what you did is perfectly all right by all means. I do want to get into legal issues, since what is lawfull on one part of Planet does not have to be on the other. Let’s just look at the bottom line of their concern and that is money. First at all if you really want to make serious money than doing academic research and/or writing books (such as or pattern recognition) for mainly scientific audience is lost cause right from the start. Pattern recognition is not some hollywood or show bussines material and everyone with at least tiny litte bit common sense should not have problem comprehend it, including those holy law upholders. I sincerly doubt that Dudas book have potential to turn into sceanrio for new sequel of Lord of the Rings or new Madonna CD.

In summary, you are saying that it’s in the interests of technical authors to have their books pirated, and anyone who disagrees with you is a hard core hypocrite puritan cheater and liar. Thank you for providing this assistance to the OpenCV community.

The discussion was also fowarded to the authors of the book. I am very intrigued to find out their own points of view and I am really unsure if they sincerely consider this pirating unacceptable.
The book itself: at amazon.com, at one of the co-authors website.

http://euroross.blogspot.com/2006/03/warning.html

I don’t know if you shop at Wal-Mart, but this may be useful to know. I am posting this to warn you of something that happened to me, as I have become a victim of a clever scam while out shopping. This happened to me and it could happen to you.

Here’s how the scam works: Two seriously good looking 18-year-old girls come over to your car as you are packing your shopping in the trunk. They both start wiping your windshield, with a rag and Windex, with their breasts almost falling out of their skimpy t-shirts. It is impossible not to look.

When you thank them and offer them a tip, they say “No” and instead ask you for a ride to another Wal-Mart. You agree and they get in the back seat. On the way, they start having sex with each other. Then one of them climbs over into the front seat and performs oral sex on you, while the other one steals your wallet.

I had my wallet stolen last Tuesday, Wednesday, twice on Thursday, again on
Saturday, and also yesterday.

Stay safe, it’s a real jungle out there…

Basically it’s an offtopic here, but the passage is great!

PdhMakeCounterPath is not a new API, however seems to be buggy as it returns wrong value in pcchBufferSize parameter…