The CD-ROM bound into the Italian magazine Il Mio Computer, mastered with Nero Burning ROM on 4 January 2006 at 16:46:00 GMT+01:00. It is the fifteenth object measured in this collection, the third magazine cover disc, and the first that arrived as raw 2,352-byte sectors rather than as a cooked image or a copied tree — so it is the first on which the sync patterns, the address headers, the subheaders and the error-correction fields could be read at all.
Sixty-one installers of other people's software, an off-the-shelf browser shell, four freeware board games, and a database of every program the magazine had published in the previous sixteen issues. The magazine itself made 0.81 % of it.
Everything below is measured from the bytes. Each chapter opens with the measurement it rests on, and every figure in the spec sheet carries the command that reproduces it.
| volume identifier | MICO02CD (ISO 9660) / Mico02CD (Joliet) — no issue number in either |
| what it says it is | FEBBRAIO 2006, printed on the disc face and on the sleeve. The disc's own database of previous issues runs 113 → 128 with no gaps, which makes this numero 129 — a number printed nowhere on the object |
| mastered | 2006-01-04 16:46:00 GMT+01:00, by NERO BURNING ROM |
| medium | 349,462 physical sectors of 2,352, 100 % Mode 2 Form 1, zero Form 2, CD-XA on both descriptors |
| the frame | 106,236,448 bytes = 12.9252 % of the file is sync, header, subheader, EDC and ECC — and 349,462 of 349,462 EDCs verify |
| filesystems | ISO 9660 + Joliet. No HFS, no partition map, no boot record |
| files | 1,423 in both namespaces, 104 directories, 713,496,612 bytes, 1,422 distinct extents — one zero-byte file shares its neighbour's |
| the two namespaces differ by | 1,422 paths of 1,422, and 100 % of the difference is explained by one mechanical 8.3 rule. 86 names owe their uniqueness to a counter |
| what a DOS sees | every file: 0 of 1,423 records violate Level 1, maximum depth 5 |
| sectors belonging to nobody | 155, one run at the very end, all zero, and the volume descriptor claims them |
| slack | 1,263,580 bytes, 100.0000 % zero, 0 of 1,422 files dirty — which closes CLIC 02/97's Q5 against Toast |
| copy protection | 12 markers over 99 executables, 2 hits, and both are InstallShield's CompanyName after Macrovision bought them |
| absolute paths | 646 DOS-shaped from 52 build roots, of which 568 come from one product; 66 Macintosh-shaped, of which 0 are paths |
| image sha1 | c0818a7bbea879a29646ea57f0cbdb9b4a1473f3 |
| leftovers | 8,645,394 bytes, 1.2117 % |
What is on it: sixty-one installers in forty-five product directories — Paint Shop Pro X (15.25 %), FineReader 5 and 8 (24.18 %), OpenOffice.org 2.0 (11.42 %), StudioLine in two versions (18.38 %), G Data (7.72 %) — plus Firefox, Thunderbird, Java, DivX, Acrobat, Winamp, TrueCrypt, Spybot and thirty more; a seventeen-PDF price list distilled the morning of the burn; the magazine's own database of 684 previously published programs; and four freeware board games weighing 1.2664 %.
Recorded reality: 0.000000 % — measured, and blind, because 67.89 % of this object is compressed executables.
| 00 — The predictions | sixty-four bets, written before the image was opened |
| 01 — Provenance | two witnesses, and only one of them is the object |
| 02 — The spec sheet | every number, with the command that makes it again |
| 03 — The frame | 106,236,448 bytes that are not anybody's data |
| 04 — The tail | 155 sectors that carry an address and nothing else |
| 05 — Two namespaces | 1,422 extents, 1,422 paths, and not one agreement |
| 06 — The file count | 1,423 files, 45 products, and 0.81 % that is the magazine's |
| 07 — Three declarations | the card says 34, the disc says 50, the filesystem says 45 |
| 08 — Five clocks | 46.89 % of this disc happened in one second |
| 09 — The shell | a browser somebody else wrote, and a form with eleven fields and no server |
| 10 — The suppliers | thirty-five company names, and two protection hits that are a merger |
| 11 — What is inside | five formats opened, and a column that cannot see past a compressor |
| 12 — The four games | 1.2664 %, one of five boxes on the cover, and a fifth game that is only a manual |
| 13 — Absolute paths | 646, of which 568 from one product, and a holiday in Sri Lanka |
| 14 — Leftovers | 1.21 %, and a complete record of the issue before this one |
| 15 — Against the collection | nineteen objects, twenty hash lists, zero shared bytes |
| 16 — The tools | 174 scripts, sixteen written, three patched, 69 that would mislead |
| 17 — Open questions | five closed, five open, one that needs a drive |
| 18 — The scoring | 64 bets, 71.09 %, and nine misses that believed the briefing |
| 19 — Corrections | nine in the briefing, three in the tools, six of mine |
One — the frame is an eighth of the object, and it is silent. This is the first disc in this collection whose physical sectors survived, and the census is absolute: 349,462 correct sync patterns, 349,462 addresses equal to LBA + 150 in BCD, 349,462 valid EDCs, zero Form 2 sectors, zero disagreeing subheader copies. 106,236,448 bytes — 12.9252 % of the file — exist to answer the question "are these the right bytes?" and 97,849,360 of them are Reed-Solomon parity, which is thirteen times everything the magazine wrote. And on the one question this session actually needed — did the burner write the 155 blank sectors at the end, or did the dumper? — all of it is silent, because the parity of a blank sector is blank. What answered was a four-byte integer at offset 80 of sector 16: the volume-space field says 349,462, which is the whole image, so Nero counted its own padding. The expensive descriptor could not answer what the cheap one did.
Two — the two namespaces agree on everything except how to say it. Same
1,423 files, same 713,496,612 bytes, same dates, same extents — and 1,422 of
1,422 paths spelled differently. Every difference is explained by one
mechanical rule with nothing left over: uppercase, map out-of-set characters to
_, truncate to 8.3, and where that collides overwrite the tail with digits.
Twenty-nine groups collide, 115 names are inside them, and exactly 86 carry a
counter — the same 86 either way, which is the check. The worst group is sixteen
weights of one typeface all truncating to WORSTVEL.TTF. Extracted, the two
namespaces produce two directory trees with 1,400 identical hashes on each
side and none on one side only. A DOS machine can open every file on this disc
and the front end would not work at all, because the markup names its images in
Joliet spelling.
Three — the disc declares its own contents three times and the three
disagree. The printed sleeve lists 34 bullets; the disc's own HTML carries 50
entries, each with a licence and an operating system; the filesystem has 45
product directories. The four numbers on the disc face — 28 PROGRAMMI,
7 UTILITY, 4 GIOCHI, 5 PROGRAMMI COMPLETI — turn out to be counts of
directories, and together they account for all 45 with nothing left over:
11 + 4 + 13 = 28. So the face counted the disc and the back listed the products,
and the three the back omits — GTK, Java 2, Spybot — are inside the face's 28 and
have full entries in the disc's own catalogue. Of 31 printed version numbers, 21
confirm and none is contradicted; of 13 Italian-language flags, 6 confirm and
none is contradicted — the other seven are unverifiable because their
products are single compressed installers. And by the magazine's own catalogue,
33 of 50 entries are freeware, on a disc whose label says da provare.
Four — the leftovers are a complete record of last month's issue. Ten
Windows thumbnail caches, 429,568 bytes, name 154 images of which 24 are no
longer there: ten TIFF masters that existed for nineteen minutes on 20
December, screenshots of four products that never shipped, and three of Grand
Master Chess — one of them marked -ok on 28 December. Separately, the front
end carries 100 install links of which 15 point at files that are not on this
disc, five of them games. Separately again, Micodb/ is not the article
archive the briefing took it for: it is a database of 684 programs across
sixteen consecutive issues, 113 to 128, and it names those same missing
products. Three leftovers found by three different tools, all describing the same
previous issue — and the database is what dates this disc to numero 129.
Five — the shell is somebody else's and the questionnaire has no server.
IERunner.exe is a Borland-built third-party utility, Comments: TWebBrowser wrapper, (c) 2001-2002 Pavel Kilovatiy, US English — an off-the-shelf CD front
end, not the magazine's software. What it adds to a browser is two URL schemes:
one to close, one to run an installer. And CD-ROM/questionario.htm is a form
with no action and no method: 87 inputs, 40 field names, 18 radio groups,
and eleven personal-data boxes that a JavaScript function concatenates by hand
into a mailto: URL — unescaped, roughly 1,850 characters before a single text
box is filled, aimed at two named employees of the publisher, under a consent
notice citing Legge 675/96, a law repealed two years and three days earlier.
It is empty. Not one reader is inside it.
Six — Grand Master Chess is here in every form except the game. The sleeve lists its manual; the disc's own page describes «il gioco completo Grand Chess Master»; a screenshot of it ships and is displayed; the four-page Italian manual ships. The game does not. And the manual is the only one of the three that gets the name right — it is called Grand Master Chess, and both of the magazine's declarations transpose the middle two words.
Nobody wrote this disc's software. Sixty-one installers, forty-five products,
thirty-five distinct company names in the binaries, and the shell is bought
in — the magazine's own output is Micodb, eighteen HTML pages, 148 images,
seventeen price-list PDFs and three of its own articles: 5,787,518 bytes,
0.8111 %, or 0.7509 % once ten Windows thumbnail caches and one Dreamweaver
design note are taken out of it. CLIC 02/97, a different magazine from a
different publisher nine years earlier, came out at 0.82 %.
The last file written to this disc was that design note, at 14:17:54 on 4
January, in the same second as the page it belongs to. It is 402 bytes of XML
recording that somebody opened completi.htm in Dreamweaver and placed zero
ruler guides in it. Two and a half hours later Nero wrote the volume descriptor.
Three e-mail addresses on the publisher's domain sit on this object, each
appearing exactly once. One is a subscriptions desk and is quoted. Two are named
individuals whose working addresses were pressed onto a magazine cover disc so
that readers would write to them, and on this disc the name and the address
are the same string — so they are counted and never written, in docs/ and in
notes/ alike. A measurement of a cover disc that does not publish two
employees' work e-mail addresses is not less rigorous. It is more, because it has
separated the object from the people who ended up inside it.