Hi Jan, Sorry you took it as criticism. My comments were intended more
as clarification, and were not aimed at refuting anything you said.
I did some systems programing a long time ago when if you wanted your
toy microcomputer to do anything but word processing you pretty much had
to write the stuff yourself including such exotic software as reliable
disk operating systems <grin>.
I knew the guy who wrote Multi-Dos for the TRS-80 computers back then.
He was probably the best systems programmer I have ever met and it was
just a hobby for him, his day job being an engineer for Ford Motor
Company. Wish I could remember his name, tall black guy (doesn't that
blow some stereotypes). He actually reverse engineered MS Basic. His
version was 4 times smaller and ran about 12 times faster on the same
computer (now memory is so cheap and processors are so fast they don't
worry about that kind of thing much). His office had the walls of a room
about the size of a large living room lined with file cabinets. Each
file folder had the flow chart, psuedo code, and machine code of one
subroutine in it. Circa 1979-80?, now that would all probably fit on one
CDROM and certainly on a DVD. How times change.
graywolf
http://www.graywolfphoto.com
http://webpages.charter.net/graywolf
"Idiot Proof" <==> "Expert Proof"
-----------------------------------
Jan van Wijk wrote:
Hi graywolf,
On Sun, 26 Feb 2006 11:37:29 -0500, graywolf wrote:
I think a point is being missed here. Any digital file can be edited!
Of course it can, I did not say otherwise ...
I am a system programmer (like you I think), and actually
reverse engineering data-formats and data-recovery
is my main business :-)
What I meant to say is that there are no commercial (or open source)
products that do it, mainly because it does to make much sense ...
Just because there is not a readily available cheap commercial product
for that particular file does not mean the file can not be edited by an
expert. In the old days when software was sold on floppy disks, and the
companies kept coming up with protection schemes to keep you from
copying the disk we (generic we --while I wrote such a program myself in
Z-80 machine code, I did not make it publicly available) developed a
program that would copy the disck bit by bit including the copy
protection part, or would allow you to edit particular bits on the disk
to eliminate the copy protection.
So if someone wanted to produce a camera-raw file that had bogus
information in it, it would not be a difficult problem. And once done
there would be no way in the world for anyone to prove it was not an
original file except by a confession by the person who had edited it.
To so many people software is some kind of magic. It is not. Almost
anyone can learn to write it and edit it if they are willing to make the
effort and take the time.
Certainly, allthough reverse-engineering RAW camera formats
without any documentation is quite a challenge since some
non-linear transformations are involved ...
Regards, JvW
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Jan van Wijk; http://www.dfsee.com/gallery
