Ever meet a CD with software that required you to type in a "CD key"? Like recent Windows? Or Diablo II? That's not one-off pressing, yet each CD is unique. Marking of audio CDs can be done similarly.
CD players are consumer devices. That means less functionality. The last thing joe consumer wants to do is type in a code in their CD player. That, plus, the only way they can make CD players accept codes is if they make them large enough for a keypad. I'll stand by my accertation that SDMI files are meant to be available only via download or other electronic distribution channels.
Asking for? I don't recall people crying out "Please, please, watermark the music files!!". Why would everybody ask for that?
People haven't been asking for watermarked files, but they have been asking for the ability to download music from the internet without having to buy a CD. This is the RIAA's attempt at an answer. Something a consumer can download and do whatever they want with, listen to it wherever they want, just not redistribute the resulting files.
First, to repeat myself, watermarking is basically a tracking technique, not an access control technique. One can copy a watermarked file as much as one wants.
Second, for the situation you describe to come to pass, the music you buy must be playable only on SDMI-compliant players and nothing else. I don't like this. I don't like buying music which can be played only on "approved devices". My computer probably won't be one
Yes. I wasn't trying to insinuate that that SDMI files would be impossible to copy. It's just that there would be the possibility of repercussion if you did redistribute them. And who's to say that your computer won't be an "approved device"? If the format is deemed to be trully secure (to the standards of the cryptographic community), then the RIAA could feasibly release all the specs to the world, so that they could all make their own players, rather than having to endure some kid for the netherlands reverse engineering the format in search of loopholes.
Dream on, baby, dream on...
Can you honestly not see watermarking as a threat to anonymous filesharing? Napster has centrallized servers to shut down, so they probably won't be around that much longer anyhow. Gnutella's pretty easily trackable as it is (or at least down to IP address), which leaves Freenet. Freenet uses encryption to disguise where files reside and who's requesting files, etc, but what does that matter if the person that actually made it available to Freenet is trackable? A couple lawsuits, a couple jailterms, and people won't be so eager to share their files anymore, or at least they'll make sure that they're allowed to share them in advance...
Watermarks have nothing to do with CD's... Think about it... They're not going to do one-off pressings of their CD's unless they plan on selling them for $500-$1000 a piece... The set up charges are that much. No, they're embedding watermarks in files that they'll make available on a "pay per download" basis. Which is what everyone's been asking for, isn't it?
I remember rants around here a while back to the tune of "i wouldn't use napster if i could buy and download my music online". Well, here it is, it's coming. Is that what you really wanted? You'll be able to listen to it wherever you go, since with the watermark, copying isn't so much an issue. You can put it in your car sdmi player, your portable one, your computer, and anywhere else you go. You just won't be able to share your stuff with anyone else, friends maybe if you trust that they won't distribute your music online, but give it a couple years to sink in and Napster, Freenet, and Gnutella will be history... Or at least for people in the US who are sue-able, they will be.
No one in the states is in a 60% tax bracket... worst case, you'll get to keep $6,000.
$6,000 buys a LOT of CD's. It's also more than a couple weeks of pay. Heck, it's even enough to buy a bunch of instruments so you can form a band and produce your own music (not you specifically). Or let's see... for the more slashdot minded folk, $6000 buts a lot of "Boycott the RIAA" stickers.
I'll be sure to download whatever they supply whenever they actually get it online... just to play around with... I'll even read the terms of thier contest... what happens after that is anyone's guess...
It's all about copyrights... Linux Journal wants people to respect the GPL presumably, but since they don't agree to the terms that labels distribute their music under, they are opposed to helping create a format that causes more compliance to the label's and artists copyrights. It's all about respect, and it's a give and take sort of thing. Maybe if Linux Journal would aid them, you'd see Linux players for SMDI on the horizon... Because like it or not,thats' the direction that the industry is going in, and a bunch of linux users isn't going to stop them.
Is all this saying that if you don't have a robots.txt file, your site will be indexed, but if you have one, regardless as to what it says, your site won't be? I thought you just used robots.txt files to direct the indexers.... I'd finally added one, just to prevent bothersome 404 messages, so does that mean I won't get crawled by many engines, even though it is set to allow all of them?
I've noticed some hits from inktomi that just get the file and then go away... what's the deal?
Clock for clock disregarding everything else, yes, the PIII is faster, but that's just looking at the pipelines. It's also got the 4x faster system bus which should make up for that, and then maybe add some... Really, it's hard to jump and make an assumption about the performance of a non-shipping chip, simply because it's not yet shipping. That's all i'm saying. The Athlon could very well beat out the P4 in similar benchmarks, but we just don't have any P4's out there with which to know for sure. That's all i'm saying, here.
The P-III is at the end of it's life... it seems rather pointless to compare it's performance versus the Athlon any longer. In most cases, for this generation, the Athlon either provided superior performance, or at least equal performance, while costing a fraction of what an Intel chip would have costed...
With the P-IV on it's way and having a TON of architectural changes to itself and the rest of the subsystems, any comparison of the P-III vs Athlon should be disregarded come the Pentium 4.
I'm not AMD bashing - i've got an Athlon 700 system enroute to me as I type this, but P-3 vs Athlon seems to be beating a dead horse at this point in the game.
I think that we may have reached an "accuracy limit" with search engines until such time that people don't mind search engines leaving cookies on their hard drives, so they can examine a user's past queries and use those to try to present more relevant results for that users current query. I really think that will be the only way for them to grow, because most search terms I've seen (basically, referrer logs for my site and few other sites i've worked on) only consist of 3 or less words. It's a rarity that someone enters more than that, so that doesn't give a search engine much to work with...
However, if say google knew that I'd done searches for "albini" and "shellac" in the past, it could probably surmise that when i did a search for "big black", i'm actually looking for Steve Albini's first band, and not BIG BLACK BOOBS, et al...
I can't figure how else something like that could be accomplished without a sacrafice of our hope for privacy...
if there are 15 million AIM users, and 1/2% of them have signed onto AOL due to an AIM advertisment, that's an extra $15 million per month they'ed make. That's $180 million per year... pretty good for just another dotcom.
And in a separate reply, i just wanted to add that AOL can sneeze at the Linux and Java users of their clients, because they really can't make up too large a share... they just don't want anyone else to evolve a linux client into a win32 client without the promo's, in all likelihood. Best way to stop that is to stop any unauthorized clients from appearing...
Because Linux users and Java users (read: OS/2, *BSD, other "non-supported") OS types are in such the minority at this point, that it really doesn't bother AOL all that much that they get through... But if AOL backed down and let people develop oher AIM clients, some could be targetted towards windows, and for them, Windows is probably 90-95% of their market...
They're just attacking a potential problem before it gets out of hand, which is what most companies will start doing after witnessing what happened to the RIAA vs. Napster... No one, person or company, trully enjoys watching their IP get commandeered by someone else, unless that's what they set out to do in the first place.
If you're going to nitpick how other people comments have been moderated, I'll have to do the same. Monopoloy is a strong word that people are very joyous to toss around in the tech industry ever since Microsoft got found to be one. AOL isn't a monopoly. Or at least it hasn't legally been found to be one. They may have a large market share, but that's all that's certain. They shouldn't be ordered to open up their AIM servers unless they either go to trial on monopoly accusations, or settle to avoid a trial.
As far as i know, AOL hasn't stiffled development of anyother messaging clients that don't use AOL's servers. Yes, they do block those ones, because the only way they're generating any income from those servers is by providing advertisments. And if people can connect using clients that don't display the ads, then AOL loses money as a result of running their service.
Does that make any sense? IF you don't like them and they suck and they should drop off the face of the planet and their software is aweful and people who use AOL are too dumb to breathe, which is the overwhelming sentiment around here, why is anyone at all irked that they don't like 3rd parties using their services?
Seems like they invented it (just AIM, not the idea of messaging), they bankroll it, the promote, and they support it... and most everyone here hates them, so why not just steer the two trains away from each others paths? Or what happens if AOL is forced to open AIM to all comers, so they decide to "retaliate" by giving AOLer's push button access to IRC?:)
I thought that the GPL only requires them to make the source available to anyone who has received a binary. And that you can't charge for the source, but you can for the binary. So them putting the source available to people who don't have a binary (read: Haven't bought the device) is really just a courtesy.
That plus, their Linux Jukebox, according to the sign up page, appears to be just a binary, not source code, and it makes no representations of being GPLed. For that matter, if you do a search on the page, or just read every word, the word source doesn't appear at all. It just runs on Linux. At least that's the best i can surmise, since think geek's link seems to be broken...
Is this what other companies have to look forward to when they make products available for Linux?
No... the economy really is better, but you need to live in an area that has an actual demand for the services you provide. I used to live in Boston, so i witnessed an extremely tight job market. Got sick of it, moved to amherst, ma for a break, and occassionally look in the papers and see ads for things that say "must know ms access - $8/hr" or graphic design jobs for $10/hr. Beyond that there's no demand for anything that requires use of a computer, so no one is willing to pay anything at all near a competitive rate compared to elsewhere.
And remember, that yeah, out in Cali people may make 150% more than you, but ask what their rents are, and how much their food costs, or a drink at the bar, and then you'll see that things really aren't as skewed as you might think. When land lords and business owners realize that their clientelle have lots of disposable income, they increase their bills to cover a bit of the difference... Not all of it in all cases, but a good chunk of it, so you're stuck thinking "wow, I'm living the exact same existance on $60K/a year as I was making $40K/a year two years ago in a different city and state...
Exactly! I am 100% for patents. I just despise "bad" patents that aren't necessarily inventions, just extensions of existing public knowledge. For instance, I think that RSA was completely meritted, because though the intellegence community knew about primes and encryption for longer than RSA, but Rivest Shimir and whoever A is independantly came up with the same solution and published it to the world at large...
Amazon's one click ordering system is a farce though... it uses already invented knowledge, namely cookies, to track repeat visitors. Though no one had thought to use them in context of tracking repeat customers, it was an obvious extension of the technology...
blah blah. all i'm saying is that if someone doesn't want to be associated iwth a given patent, they just can refuse to sign the application. the patent will still be granted but one of the inventors can know in their heart that they didn't take credit for the reason that they believed otherwise...
Unless he was the sole inventor, I don't think it's required that you sign a patent application. You could probably just sign away all your rights to the invention to the company and not have your name at all involved in the patent process. That's my guess, i've never been in that situation, but generally you can sign away your rights to things at former employers. It'd be tougher if they still wanted to work there but just not sign the application.
Either sign it and be happy about it or else quit your job and forget all about it. There really aren't any other things you can do. Or you could just sign your name and underneath it write "under duress" just so you know that's the case, even though it's not...
No... Interest rates spiked at the end of the 70's due to inflation or deflation or what not. Once the card companies realized that they could charge that much interest, they never really bothered lowering them again even remotely match bank rates...
Interest rates are just profit for the card companies. they hype it up and say otherwise, but they're not really losing a dime over anything.
Plus it lends more strength to the idea that money cards, anonymous, variable in value, and secure, desperately need to be implemented, whether Big Brother likes it or not.
well, that seems to be quite a task to properly create and implement. Why don't you get on it and create such a system in a feasible manner and come back then?
And it's not like this is a big, big deal to consumers. Worst case, they pay $50. Probably won't even have to do that, since western union has money and won't flinch about reimbursing for that rather than risk a class action suit.
it'll probably just end up meaning that western union has to pay higher processing fees and take a charge off against earnings because of it. that's it.
that's lame. should a gunshot wound victim ever be held responsible for being shot because they weren't wearing a bullet proof vest? No...
Don't sit and defend the culprit just because the company didn't lock down their boxes strong enough. They might have screwed up, but that's like forgetting to lock your door. If someone breaks into your house, they're still the ones that get in trouble, not you.
naah... they need to keep that stuff, otherwise after 32 days, people could charge back all the charges to their cards and the companies would have no means of recourse or any way to attempt to show that they were not fraudulent charges...
It's not like you're advocating an "opensource/GNU rules the world" solution here, since you'd like to integrate GPG into Eudora, a non-free-as-in-speech, email program and Windows. If that (the freeness as in speech system) doesn't matter to you, current security hole aside, PGP is free for personal use, if you download it from MIT.
Interoptibility wise, GPG should gain quite a bit, since RSA released their patent into the public domain (probably an attempt at brownie points, since the patent was going to expire in 19 days anyhow). I wonder if the developers have an RSA encrytion module up their sleeves and ready to go already? Yeah, i could go look for myself, but i'm feeling rather lazy...
The thing is though, if you're not into "free as in speech" PGP has always been "free as in beer" for personal use.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh COOL! I must bookmark your site!
Ever meet a CD with software that required you to type in a "CD key"? Like recent Windows? Or Diablo II? That's not one-off pressing, yet each CD is unique. Marking of audio CDs can be done similarly.
CD players are consumer devices. That means less functionality. The last thing joe consumer wants to do is type in a code in their CD player. That, plus, the only way they can make CD players accept codes is if they make them large enough for a keypad. I'll stand by my accertation that SDMI files are meant to be available only via download or other electronic distribution channels.
Asking for? I don't recall people crying out "Please, please, watermark the music files!!". Why would everybody ask for that?
People haven't been asking for watermarked files, but they have been asking for the ability to download music from the internet without having to buy a CD. This is the RIAA's attempt at an answer. Something a consumer can download and do whatever they want with, listen to it wherever they want, just not redistribute the resulting files.
First, to repeat myself, watermarking is basically a tracking technique, not an access control technique. One can copy a watermarked file as much as one wants.
Second, for the situation you describe to come to pass, the music you buy must be playable only on SDMI-compliant players and nothing else. I don't like this. I don't like buying music which can be played only on "approved devices". My computer probably won't be one
Yes. I wasn't trying to insinuate that that SDMI files would be impossible to copy. It's just that there would be the possibility of repercussion if you did redistribute them. And who's to say that your computer won't be an "approved device"? If the format is deemed to be trully secure (to the standards of the cryptographic community), then the RIAA could feasibly release all the specs to the world, so that they could all make their own players, rather than having to endure some kid for the netherlands reverse engineering the format in search of loopholes.
Dream on, baby, dream on...
Can you honestly not see watermarking as a threat to anonymous filesharing? Napster has centrallized servers to shut down, so they probably won't be around that much longer anyhow. Gnutella's pretty easily trackable as it is (or at least down to IP address), which leaves Freenet. Freenet uses encryption to disguise where files reside and who's requesting files, etc, but what does that matter if the person that actually made it available to Freenet is trackable? A couple lawsuits, a couple jailterms, and people won't be so eager to share their files anymore, or at least they'll make sure that they're allowed to share them in advance...
Watermarks have nothing to do with CD's... Think about it... They're not going to do one-off pressings of their CD's unless they plan on selling them for $500-$1000 a piece... The set up charges are that much. No, they're embedding watermarks in files that they'll make available on a "pay per download" basis. Which is what everyone's been asking for, isn't it?
I remember rants around here a while back to the tune of "i wouldn't use napster if i could buy and download my music online". Well, here it is, it's coming. Is that what you really wanted? You'll be able to listen to it wherever you go, since with the watermark, copying isn't so much an issue. You can put it in your car sdmi player, your portable one, your computer, and anywhere else you go. You just won't be able to share your stuff with anyone else, friends maybe if you trust that they won't distribute your music online, but give it a couple years to sink in and Napster, Freenet, and Gnutella will be history... Or at least for people in the US who are sue-able, they will be.
No one in the states is in a 60% tax bracket... worst case, you'll get to keep $6,000.
$6,000 buys a LOT of CD's. It's also more than a couple weeks of pay. Heck, it's even enough to buy a bunch of instruments so you can form a band and produce your own music (not you specifically). Or let's see... for the more slashdot minded folk, $6000 buts a lot of "Boycott the RIAA" stickers.
I'll be sure to download whatever they supply whenever they actually get it online... just to play around with... I'll even read the terms of thier contest... what happens after that is anyone's guess...
It's all about copyrights... Linux Journal wants people to respect the GPL presumably, but since they don't agree to the terms that labels distribute their music under, they are opposed to helping create a format that causes more compliance to the label's and artists copyrights. It's all about respect, and it's a give and take sort of thing. Maybe if Linux Journal would aid them, you'd see Linux players for SMDI on the horizon... Because like it or not,thats' the direction that the industry is going in, and a bunch of linux users isn't going to stop them.
Is all this saying that if you don't have a robots.txt file, your site will be indexed, but if you have one, regardless as to what it says, your site won't be? I thought you just used robots.txt files to direct the indexers.... I'd finally added one, just to prevent bothersome 404 messages, so does that mean I won't get crawled by many engines, even though it is set to allow all of them?
I've noticed some hits from inktomi that just get the file and then go away... what's the deal?
Clock for clock disregarding everything else, yes, the PIII is faster, but that's just looking at the pipelines. It's also got the 4x faster system bus which should make up for that, and then maybe add some... Really, it's hard to jump and make an assumption about the performance of a non-shipping chip, simply because it's not yet shipping. That's all i'm saying. The Athlon could very well beat out the P4 in similar benchmarks, but we just don't have any P4's out there with which to know for sure. That's all i'm saying, here.
New instructions (we'll see if they get any use)
:)
400 MHz system bus (twice as fast as the Athlon)
Rambus memory
20 stage pipeline vs 10...
There are just too many changes being made to be able take a P-III's performance versus a P4's.
And yeah, and it sure does ship with a whopper of a heatsink!
The P-III is at the end of it's life... it seems rather pointless to compare it's performance versus the Athlon any longer. In most cases, for this generation, the Athlon either provided superior performance, or at least equal performance, while costing a fraction of what an Intel chip would have costed...
With the P-IV on it's way and having a TON of architectural changes to itself and the rest of the subsystems, any comparison of the P-III vs Athlon should be disregarded come the Pentium 4.
I'm not AMD bashing - i've got an Athlon 700 system enroute to me as I type this, but P-3 vs Athlon seems to be beating a dead horse at this point in the game.
I think that we may have reached an "accuracy limit" with search engines until such time that people don't mind search engines leaving cookies on their hard drives, so they can examine a user's past queries and use those to try to present more relevant results for that users current query. I really think that will be the only way for them to grow, because most search terms I've seen (basically, referrer logs for my site and few other sites i've worked on) only consist of 3 or less words. It's a rarity that someone enters more than that, so that doesn't give a search engine much to work with...
However, if say google knew that I'd done searches for "albini" and "shellac" in the past, it could probably surmise that when i did a search for "big black", i'm actually looking for Steve Albini's first band, and not BIG BLACK BOOBS, et al...
I can't figure how else something like that could be accomplished without a sacrafice of our hope for privacy...
if there are 15 million AIM users, and 1/2% of them have signed onto AOL due to an AIM advertisment, that's an extra $15 million per month they'ed make. That's $180 million per year... pretty good for just another dotcom.
And in a separate reply, i just wanted to add that AOL can sneeze at the Linux and Java users of their clients, because they really can't make up too large a share... they just don't want anyone else to evolve a linux client into a win32 client without the promo's, in all likelihood. Best way to stop that is to stop any unauthorized clients from appearing...
Because Linux users and Java users (read: OS/2, *BSD, other "non-supported") OS types are in such the minority at this point, that it really doesn't bother AOL all that much that they get through... But if AOL backed down and let people develop oher AIM clients, some could be targetted towards windows, and for them, Windows is probably 90-95% of their market...
They're just attacking a potential problem before it gets out of hand, which is what most companies will start doing after witnessing what happened to the RIAA vs. Napster... No one, person or company, trully enjoys watching their IP get commandeered by someone else, unless that's what they set out to do in the first place.
If you're going to nitpick how other people comments have been moderated, I'll have to do the same. Monopoloy is a strong word that people are very joyous to toss around in the tech industry ever since Microsoft got found to be one. AOL isn't a monopoly. Or at least it hasn't legally been found to be one. They may have a large market share, but that's all that's certain. They shouldn't be ordered to open up their AIM servers unless they either go to trial on monopoly accusations, or settle to avoid a trial.
As far as i know, AOL hasn't stiffled development of anyother messaging clients that don't use AOL's servers. Yes, they do block those ones, because the only way they're generating any income from those servers is by providing advertisments. And if people can connect using clients that don't display the ads, then AOL loses money as a result of running their service.
Does that make any sense? IF you don't like them and they suck and they should drop off the face of the planet and their software is aweful and people who use AOL are too dumb to breathe, which is the overwhelming sentiment around here, why is anyone at all irked that they don't like 3rd parties using their services?
:)
Seems like they invented it (just AIM, not the idea of messaging), they bankroll it, the promote, and they support it... and most everyone here hates them, so why not just steer the two trains away from each others paths? Or what happens if AOL is forced to open AIM to all comers, so they decide to "retaliate" by giving AOLer's push button access to IRC?
Won't you all just love AOL even more then?
I thought that the GPL only requires them to make the source available to anyone who has received a binary. And that you can't charge for the source, but you can for the binary. So them putting the source available to people who don't have a binary (read: Haven't bought the device) is really just a courtesy.
That plus, their Linux Jukebox, according to the sign up page, appears to be just a binary, not source code, and it makes no representations of being GPLed. For that matter, if you do a search on the page, or just read every word, the word source doesn't appear at all. It just runs on Linux. At least that's the best i can surmise, since think geek's link seems to be broken...
Is this what other companies have to look forward to when they make products available for Linux?
No... the economy really is better, but you need to live in an area that has an actual demand for the services you provide. I used to live in Boston, so i witnessed an extremely tight job market. Got sick of it, moved to amherst, ma for a break, and occassionally look in the papers and see ads for things that say "must know ms access - $8/hr" or graphic design jobs for $10/hr. Beyond that there's no demand for anything that requires use of a computer, so no one is willing to pay anything at all near a competitive rate compared to elsewhere.
And remember, that yeah, out in Cali people may make 150% more than you, but ask what their rents are, and how much their food costs, or a drink at the bar, and then you'll see that things really aren't as skewed as you might think. When land lords and business owners realize that their clientelle have lots of disposable income, they increase their bills to cover a bit of the difference... Not all of it in all cases, but a good chunk of it, so you're stuck thinking "wow, I'm living the exact same existance on $60K/a year as I was making $40K/a year two years ago in a different city and state...
Exactly! I am 100% for patents. I just despise "bad" patents that aren't necessarily inventions, just extensions of existing public knowledge. For instance, I think that RSA was completely meritted, because though the intellegence community knew about primes and encryption for longer than RSA, but Rivest Shimir and whoever A is independantly came up with the same solution and published it to the world at large...
Amazon's one click ordering system is a farce though... it uses already invented knowledge, namely cookies, to track repeat visitors. Though no one had thought to use them in context of tracking repeat customers, it was an obvious extension of the technology...
blah blah. all i'm saying is that if someone doesn't want to be associated iwth a given patent, they just can refuse to sign the application. the patent will still be granted but one of the inventors can know in their heart that they didn't take credit for the reason that they believed otherwise...
Unless he was the sole inventor, I don't think it's required that you sign a patent application. You could probably just sign away all your rights to the invention to the company and not have your name at all involved in the patent process. That's my guess, i've never been in that situation, but generally you can sign away your rights to things at former employers. It'd be tougher if they still wanted to work there but just not sign the application.
Either sign it and be happy about it or else quit your job and forget all about it. There really aren't any other things you can do. Or you could just sign your name and underneath it write "under duress" just so you know that's the case, even though it's not...
So, tell us please, which e-commerce site do you work at? I'd downright LOVE to order some stuff from them... Or will you not say?
No... Interest rates spiked at the end of the 70's due to inflation or deflation or what not. Once the card companies realized that they could charge that much interest, they never really bothered lowering them again even remotely match bank rates...
Interest rates are just profit for the card companies. they hype it up and say otherwise, but they're not really losing a dime over anything.
Plus it lends more strength to the idea that money cards, anonymous, variable in value, and secure, desperately need to be implemented, whether Big Brother likes it or not.
well, that seems to be quite a task to properly create and implement. Why don't you get on it and create such a system in a feasible manner and come back then?
And it's not like this is a big, big deal to consumers. Worst case, they pay $50. Probably won't even have to do that, since western union has money and won't flinch about reimbursing for that rather than risk a class action suit.
it'll probably just end up meaning that western union has to pay higher processing fees and take a charge off against earnings because of it. that's it.
that's lame. should a gunshot wound victim ever be held responsible for being shot because they weren't wearing a bullet proof vest? No...
Don't sit and defend the culprit just because the company didn't lock down their boxes strong enough. They might have screwed up, but that's like forgetting to lock your door. If someone breaks into your house, they're still the ones that get in trouble, not you.
naah... they need to keep that stuff, otherwise after 32 days, people could charge back all the charges to their cards and the companies would have no means of recourse or any way to attempt to show that they were not fraudulent charges...
It's not like you're advocating an "opensource/GNU rules the world" solution here, since you'd like to integrate GPG into Eudora, a non-free-as-in-speech, email program and Windows. If that (the freeness as in speech system) doesn't matter to you, current security hole aside, PGP is free for personal use, if you download it from MIT.
Interoptibility wise, GPG should gain quite a bit, since RSA released their patent into the public domain (probably an attempt at brownie points, since the patent was going to expire in 19 days anyhow). I wonder if the developers have an RSA encrytion module up their sleeves and ready to go already? Yeah, i could go look for myself, but i'm feeling rather lazy...
The thing is though, if you're not into "free as in speech" PGP has always been "free as in beer" for personal use.