Well, to play Devil's Advocate for a moment... Ding! Ding! Diing! Hey, extra ball!
Um... where was I...? Boycotting is a proud American tradition. There is nothing wrong with boycotting any product for any reason (sane, insane or completely mental). It's a form of free speech and is part of our American Way!
When, of course, you force others to join you against their will (e.g., jamming the TV station signal) does it become wrong.
If the poster wants to boycott anything related to clamheads, then let him or her. Of course, you couldn't pay me to miss out on all those "Welcome Back, Kotter" reruns.
I boycott all states who have drunken philanderers as Senators.
...and the point of SO is?
on
Sim-Dud?
·
· Score: 1
No.
Was I the only one who saw ads for the Sims Online and could not possibly see the point. It's an online version of real life, but with butt-ugly graphics. Picking up women on the computer (and let's face it, that's all the ads ever dwell on) seems to be a completely pointless activity with no reward. This game could only appeal to complete social outcasts who are also not very smart nor discriminating in their entertainment.
Then again, the same could be said for a lot of TV...
You're describing communism, as I understand it. Under socialism, the government owns the means of production, which means it can pretty much do what it wants with it... the reason I called it pseudo-socialist is that while the government does not own media companies, the companies are pushing for their continued existence (at least in their current archaic form) to be mandated by law. It is certainly not a free-market situation any way you look at it.
Regardless, I think we are trying to say the same thing with different words.
No they are not socialists, but they are pursuing a sort of pseudo-socialist agenda by attempting to get their distribution monopoly enshrined and enforced by law.
Let's face it, the media companies are largely obsolete and are looking to the government to protect them despite their irrelevancy rather than pursuing a business strategy not developed in the 19th century.
It's the same as the inevitable pressure that the oil companies will apply if and when fuel-cell-powered cars become a reality. I would have liked to see Bush create an Apollo like program to develop a cost-effective fuel-cell (or other alternative energy source) automobile in the next 10 years. It would take a small fraction of the money sunk into Apollo (or the current space program), I would bet, and bolster opinion on Bush's environmental record, and have real and positive impacts if acheived.
I know that 90% of programmers out there are hacks, posers or wannabes, but there doesn't seem to be any way to convince an employer that I'm better than they are, even though I am (and have been told so by people whose opinions matter).
Sometimes it's worse. I quit a job after 15 months, because I was constantly getting in trouble for trying to fix the cause of the problems rather than the symptoms.
I was working on a 300,000-line Windows application, and I am not exaggerating here, it was about 5/6 redundant code. 100-line functions would be copy-and-pasted a dozen times and two lines changed in each. Plus, there were numerous executables to this project and often the same code (with minor variations of course) would exist in different executables.
It was originally written in Borland C++ and the back-end was ported to Visual C++, but all the utility and support functions still existed in _both_ the Borland code and Microsoft code. Worse, they were not identical. Even worse, there was substantial use of STL, which doesn't work the same in Borland C++ (which is an ancient version... circa 1996) and Visual C++.
That and the fact that using strcpy would have been a step up in maintaining buffer integrity, usually they just copied buffers and if one #define was different from a dozen others in completely different places, memory would be toast and we all know how that manifests.
Worse, there was UI code written by someone who completely confused parent windows and base classes, such that the child window classes had all the data elements for the parent window, because they were derived from the parent window class!
I spent an entire week once reviewing every single memcpy, etc, in the entire codebase (which was spaghetti-code in the extreme) just to eliminate all the buffer overruns I was discovering. THe program used a database with about 100 tables (a nightmare of redundancy in itself) and there was a several thousand-line include file of all the field sizes, maintained by hand (with plenty of typos). Eventually, I wrote a util to generate that include file automatically, which of course wasn't appreciated.
I was trying to overcome these difficulties while being barraged with support calls, sometimes critical because this was software to manage access control systems for buildings, meaning I spent 80% of my time fighting fires. You know, situations like: "Our system is down... you need to fix this bug because we've had to hire guards for each door until we can get it back up again." There was only one other person working with me, and he quit in disgust and was not replaced for about 3 months.
Finally, after stuggling mightily (in time, effort and at the expense of emotional well-being) to overcome the sheer incompetence put into this project (parts of which were 10 years old), I finally gave notice after it looked like my unscrupulous boss (who wrote a lot of this code) was doing everything he could to make it look like my fault to the client (even though they knew better and really liked working with me, precisely because I was not a BS-artist)... and after 15 years over never needing more than two weeks to find good work, I have been unemployed since May 2002.
especially when most companies would be lucky to achieve one sigma of successes.
You also have to be seriously wary of a "concept" when its website has, as its first link, a place to buy logo tee-shirts. This sounds like a Dilbert cartoon.
I hope the program doesn't include large banners that say "Quality".
Here's hoping public response has progressed beyond "oh no! did he say nuclear?!"
Yeah, more likely the public response will be "Oh no! Did he say noo-kyoo-lar?!"
Seriously though, we put a man on the Moon 8 years after Kennedy announced his plan, and since much of that technology is still in use, I don't see it being out of the question to make Mars by 2010.
But it's not just Disney's descendants... it's Michael Eisner and all the other servants of Satan, erm, stockholders of Disney.
Face it, the corporations won big. "Steamboat Willie" will still be copyrighted in 2525, if man is still alive, and Fair Use has been dealt a great blow.
I can't speak for Ami Pro, but 1-2-3 never made the transistion to Windows effectively, and while Word Perfect, did, it took years, by which time Office was the de facto standard. From what I've heard, serious users prefer Word Perfect to Word by a light-year even now. I personally avoid Word whenever possible... but as a hard-core nerd who rarely deals with business correspondance, etc, WordPad has always been sufficient for me.
Borland also used the "competetive upgrade" strategy liberally, but they ended up trying to compete with Microsoft in all fields and spreading themselves too thin. Despite their problems, I had always preferred Borland's development tools up until around 1996. They've done some neat stuff since, but I stick with Visual C++ these days (version 6, not version 7).
A number of these are just common sense, applicable to all programming.
I found a small software vendor who included the price in the URL of theproduct you are ordering. I was able to modify the prices in the shopping cart at will, of course I did not try to exploit that, but I e-mailed both the vendor and the people who made the shopping cart.
Neother seemed particularly concerned. The vendor responded that all orders are eyeballed by people, problems wouldn't occur. I suppose if you changed all the prices to 1 cent, sure. But what if you just gave yourself a nice little discount?
The fact of the matter is that a lot of developers (and even users) don't seem really concerned (at least until someone screws them over...).
Palladium sounds well and good for Microsoft's stratgey of global domination, user oppression and maintaining its own security and power, but the biggest reason that viruses and trojans exist in the Windows world is Microsoft's software itself. It is not without reason that Microsoft Office is sometimes referred to as the Microsoft Virus Developer's Kit.
How will Palladium protect me against opening a Word document with a malicious macro in it. Since Microsoft allows all applications access to the whole OS, how can it protect against viruses created with its own tools? Must macros now be signed? If so, then the only macros will be the stock ones created (and signed) by Microsoft.
How will Palladium stop a user from clicking on an attachment that runs a batch file that deletes files from his system (I'm sorry, Microsoft will never pull off a version of Windows that can't be crippled or ruined with a well placed "echo y | del *.*"). Must batch files now be signed?
If a virus trashes all my user data (which Pd may or may not protect), but the OS is still intact, how does that actually help me, the user, except that I probably won't have to reinstall Windows?
Will compilers be completely banned? Or perhaps Microsoft will allow compilers on their system to only generate code that runs in a sandbox like Java and has no significant access to Win32? Will end users be limited to the useless little widgets, like the ones that seemed to be the only products of Java for the first several years?
Given Microsoft's track record on pricing, not only will Free Software be endangered or destroyed, but so will shareware, and perhaps small software companies. I guess everyone will disappear except the large power software vendors (and then only those Microsoft chooses to play with).
If Microsoft decided to play unfair again, will we have to wait another 10 years and then sit through years of pointless litigation only to have a judge wag his finger at MS and frown, while repeating "Bad company, don't do that again.", swat their behind playfully and send them on their way?
Recall that Microsoft created their Windows monopoly by actions taken starting in the early 90's (and earlier!) and well-publicized for years and years before the government got involved (and then got involved over matters that were peripheral to the real reason Microsoft was a monopoly in the first place). Bundling the browser was peanuts compared to the undocumented nature of the most powerful parts of Windows 3.1. Strongarming OEM's was bad, but it doesn't hold a candle to the fact that no one, except Microsoft, could write decent office software or software development tools for Windows for years because of Microsoft's secrecy with information on how to correctly use their OS.
Microsoft releasing Palladium is like Bill Clinton moving into a college girls' dorm. Microsoft can declare all the good intentions they want, but at the end of the day, the tempation to abuse, and the advantages of abusing, this power will be overwhelming.
Not to mention error messages that are as hard to read as binary dumps.
STL is an efficient, but inelegant and needlessly cryptic solution that solves a problem without utilizing the reason C++ exists: object-oriented programming.
I have to declare a different iterator object type for every object type I want to iterate? Yeah, that's as elegant as the place I worked at that printed out Excel spreadsheets, and sent the printouts to India to be keyed in.
My experience with STL leads me to believe that it owes its existence more to the fact that the people who made it and understand it can tell you how clever they are than it being a good solution.
I've been refining a C++ collection library for years, and while it may be slightly less efficient than STL, and it certainly isn't as flexible or complete when it comes to some of the really obscure and complex needs that can come around, it's orders of magnitude easier to learn and use.
And it doesn't use templates, which only exist because apparently true and proper OOP is just too hard for some people. There is nothing you can do with templates that you can't do without them, just as well and just as efficiently, making the feature, in my opinion, unnecessary and redundant.
Well, this is Microsoft. They don't have much Fu, and they always have a F-U attitude.
I had the opportunity to work with an ex-Microsoft developer for a few months. He was incredibly sharp and had worked on the NT kernel and SQL Server in his 6 years at MS. I gave him a hard time about MS, much of which he agreed with. His reponse to my many questions of "Why is so-and-so so bad?" or "Why doesn't X work well?" is that "The smart people weren't working on that."
I suggested that given Microsoft's size and resources they should have enough smart people to go around, but he said that wasn't true.
It provides a computing platform on which you can't tamper with the applications, and where these applications can communicate securely with the vendor.
Sounds good so far...
The obvious application is digital rights management (DRM):
Which, of course, is only of value to the seller.
Disney will be able to sell you DVDs that will decrypt and run on a Palladium platform, but which you won't be able to copy.
Which means I have to buy new hardware to play the new media. This is consistent for a company that will only sell their old movies "for a limited time" to artificially and capriciously drive up demand.
The music industry will be able to sell you music downloads that you won't be able to swap.
Yeah, but I'll need a computer to play them. No listening in the car anymore... unless I buy more new, expensive, and needlessly complex hardware.
They will be able to sell you CDs that you'll only be able to play three times, or only on your birthday.
No they won't. I would never buy such a product. Of course, the analog hole still exists. I've got a video capture card that does great analog audio capture. I've used it to make nice digital copies of casette recording I made as a kid.
All sorts of new marketing possibilities will open up.
Especially given that companies will deceive, if not downright lie to you. All kinds of new ways to screw the consumer. Of course, all these new electronics gizmos you will _have_ to buy will be complicated to use and prone to malfunctions (at least as first, but always harder to use than their pre-DRM counterparts). You don't need a degree in UI design to play a Victrola, but how many people can use all the features of their stereos or DVD players these days? How much fun will people have when not understanding your hardware prevents you from playing your media? ("I bought this 3-use DVD from Disney (a subsudiary of Evilco) but I only watched the first 30 minutes three times, because my mother called, the power went out, one of the kids wet his pants, etc, etc. Now I can't finish it...")
TCPA / Palladium will also make it much harder for you to run unlicensed software.
So much for software development, one of my hobbies. So much for Open Source software. Oh you say I can become a licensed software provider? For a "nominal" annual fee? Whoopie! I'll pay for that! NOT!
Pirate software can be detected and deleted remotely. It will also make it easier for people to rent software rather than buying it; and if you stop paying the rent, then not only does the software stop working but so may the files it created.
So now companies can take over your computer and arbitrarily delete things. I'm sure that will _always_ work correctly and _never_ be misused, because everyone is completely competent and honest. We should always take every opportunity to give complete strangers control over us, because they know what's best.
For years, Bill Gates has dreamed of finding a way to make the Chinese pay for software: Palladium could be the answer to his prayer.
Not if they keep using Windows 2000 on existing hardware. Recall that these days the primary driving force for selling the latest and greatest hardware is 1.) Microsoft's (and others) increasingly bloated and inefficient software, and 2.) gaming. I use c. 400 MHz processors and don't feel like I'm missing out for 90% of what I do.
There are many other possibilities. Governments will be able to arrange things so that all Word documents created on civil servants' PCs are `born classified' and can't be leaked electronically to journalists.
Remember that joke about the dumb blonde photocopying her monitor to print out her document?
Auction sites might insist that you use trusted proxy software for bidding, so that you can't bid tactically at the auction. Cheating at computer games could be made more difficult.
And that will _never_ be compromised, because it's never happened in the past.
There is a downside too.
No, really?
Sure, there will be some benefits, but as with everything in modern life, the trade-off will be much more complexity and hassle to do things that were formerly simple, and still more aspects of your life will be subject to being screwed up by the ineptness or malice of a complete stranger.
It could be worse. Norway actually had to pass legislation to change the tax law so you wouldn't be liable for more than 100% of your income. Apparently it was happening all too often.
Slashdot Mirror
Esperanto's been around for about 120 years, but it caught on about a tenth as well as the metric system in the U.S.
However, a film was made entirely in Esperanto in 1965 starring none other than William Shatner. I belive it was called "Incubus".
Props to Shatner learning all those lines practically like rote.
Well, to play Devil's Advocate for a moment... Ding! Ding! Diing! Hey, extra ball!
Um... where was I...? Boycotting is a proud American tradition. There is nothing wrong with boycotting any product for any reason (sane, insane or completely mental). It's a form of free speech and is part of our American Way!
When, of course, you force others to join you against their will (e.g., jamming the TV station signal) does it become wrong.
If the poster wants to boycott anything related to clamheads, then let him or her. Of course, you couldn't pay me to miss out on all those "Welcome Back, Kotter" reruns.
I boycott all states who have drunken philanderers as Senators.
No.
Was I the only one who saw ads for the Sims Online and could not possibly see the point. It's an online version of real life, but with butt-ugly graphics. Picking up women on the computer (and let's face it, that's all the ads ever dwell on) seems to be a completely pointless activity with no reward. This game could only appeal to complete social outcasts who are also not very smart nor discriminating in their entertainment.
Then again, the same could be said for a lot of TV...
You're describing communism, as I understand it. Under socialism, the government owns the means of production, which means it can pretty much do what it wants with it... the reason I called it pseudo-socialist is that while the government does not own media companies, the companies are pushing for their continued existence (at least in their current archaic form) to be mandated by law. It is certainly not a free-market situation any way you look at it.
Regardless, I think we are trying to say the same thing with different words.
No they are not socialists, but they are pursuing a sort of pseudo-socialist agenda by attempting to get their distribution monopoly enshrined and enforced by law.
Let's face it, the media companies are largely obsolete and are looking to the government to protect them despite their irrelevancy rather than pursuing a business strategy not developed in the 19th century.
It's the same as the inevitable pressure that the oil companies will apply if and when fuel-cell-powered cars become a reality. I would have liked to see Bush create an Apollo like program to develop a cost-effective fuel-cell (or other alternative energy source) automobile in the next 10 years. It would take a small fraction of the money sunk into Apollo (or the current space program), I would bet, and bolster opinion on Bush's environmental record, and have real and positive impacts if acheived.
I stand corrected.
Faramir was Boromir's brother. Denethor was his father.
Finally, someone who remembers the TRUE origin of FemBots! Mike Myers is a hack.
Go to the fallback position:
Microsoft == bad.
Of course (at least in my opinion) Microsoft isn't all bad, but their business practices certainly are.
Thanks for the sympathy.
I know that 90% of programmers out there are hacks, posers or wannabes, but there doesn't seem to be any way to convince an employer that I'm better than they are, even though I am (and have been told so by people whose opinions matter).
Sometimes it's worse. I quit a job after 15 months, because I was constantly getting in trouble for trying to fix the cause of the problems rather than the symptoms.
I was working on a 300,000-line Windows application, and I am not exaggerating here, it was about 5/6 redundant code. 100-line functions would be copy-and-pasted a dozen times and two lines changed in each. Plus, there were numerous executables to this project and often the same code (with minor variations of course) would exist in different executables.
It was originally written in Borland C++ and the back-end was ported to Visual C++, but all the utility and support functions still existed in _both_ the Borland code and Microsoft code. Worse, they were not identical. Even worse, there was substantial use of STL, which doesn't work the same in Borland C++ (which is an ancient version... circa 1996) and Visual C++.
That and the fact that using strcpy would have been a step up in maintaining buffer integrity, usually they just copied buffers and if one #define was different from a dozen others in completely different places, memory would be toast and we all know how that manifests.
Worse, there was UI code written by someone who completely confused parent windows and base classes, such that the child window classes had all the data elements for the parent window, because they were derived from the parent window class!
I spent an entire week once reviewing every single memcpy, etc, in the entire codebase (which was spaghetti-code in the extreme) just to eliminate all the buffer overruns I was discovering. THe program used a database with about 100 tables (a nightmare of redundancy in itself) and there was a several thousand-line include file of all the field sizes, maintained by hand (with plenty of typos). Eventually, I wrote a util to generate that include file automatically, which of course wasn't appreciated.
I was trying to overcome these difficulties while being barraged with support calls, sometimes critical because this was software to manage access control systems for buildings, meaning I spent 80% of my time fighting fires. You know, situations like: "Our system is down... you need to fix this bug because we've had to hire guards for each door until we can get it back up again."
There was only one other person working with me, and he quit in disgust and was not replaced for about 3 months.
Finally, after stuggling mightily (in time, effort and at the expense of emotional well-being) to overcome the sheer incompetence put into this project (parts of which were 10 years old), I finally gave notice after it looked like my unscrupulous boss (who wrote a lot of this code) was doing everything he could to make it look like my fault to the client (even though they knew better and really liked working with me, precisely because I was not a BS-artist)... and after 15 years over never needing more than two weeks to find good work, I have been unemployed since May 2002.
There's a moral here, but it escapes me.
Thank you, Wally.
p.s. At first glance I thought the title of the article was "Is Six-Sigma frying Your IT Department?" Mental Freudian slip?
especially when most companies would be lucky to achieve one sigma of successes.
You also have to be seriously wary of a "concept" when its website has, as its first link, a place to buy logo tee-shirts. This sounds like a Dilbert cartoon.
I hope the program doesn't include large banners that say "Quality".
Here's hoping public response has progressed beyond "oh no! did he say nuclear?!"
Yeah, more likely the public response will be "Oh no! Did he say noo-kyoo-lar?!"
Seriously though, we put a man on the Moon 8 years after Kennedy announced his plan, and since much of that technology is still in use, I don't see it being out of the question to make Mars by 2010.
Excellent. Identifying and isolating the problem are important first steps. Next is setting it on fire.
+1 Funny
I wish you could mod _up_ replies to your posts.
But it's not just Disney's descendants... it's Michael Eisner and all the other servants of Satan, erm, stockholders of Disney.
Face it, the corporations won big. "Steamboat Willie" will still be copyrighted in 2525, if man is still alive, and Fair Use has been dealt a great blow.
IIRC, the Tellurites (big shaggy piggy folks) on Star Trek: TOS were from Epsilon Indi (or is it Indii).
I'd verify all this, but most of my Star Trek nerdophernalia is packed in a box somewhere.
I can't speak for Ami Pro, but 1-2-3 never made the transistion to Windows effectively, and while Word Perfect, did, it took years, by which time Office was the de facto standard. From what I've heard, serious users prefer Word Perfect to Word by a light-year even now. I personally avoid Word whenever possible... but as a hard-core nerd who rarely deals with business correspondance, etc, WordPad has always been sufficient for me.
Borland also used the "competetive upgrade" strategy liberally, but they ended up trying to compete with Microsoft in all fields and spreading themselves too thin. Despite their problems, I had always preferred Borland's development tools up until around 1996. They've done some neat stuff since, but I stick with Visual C++ these days (version 6, not version 7).
A number of these are just common sense, applicable to all programming.
I found a small software vendor who included the price in the URL of theproduct you are ordering. I was able to modify the prices in the shopping cart at will, of course I did not try to exploit that, but I e-mailed both the vendor and the people who made the shopping cart.
Neother seemed particularly concerned. The vendor responded that all orders are eyeballed by people, problems wouldn't occur. I suppose if you changed all the prices to 1 cent, sure. But what if you just gave yourself a nice little discount?
The fact of the matter is that a lot of developers (and even users) don't seem really concerned (at least until someone screws them over...).
Palladium sounds well and good for Microsoft's stratgey of global domination, user oppression and maintaining its own security and power, but the biggest reason that viruses and trojans exist in the Windows world is Microsoft's software itself. It is not without reason that Microsoft Office is sometimes referred to as the Microsoft Virus Developer's Kit.
How will Palladium protect me against opening a Word document with a malicious macro in it. Since Microsoft allows all applications access to the whole OS, how can it protect against viruses created with its own tools? Must macros now be signed? If so, then the only macros will be the stock ones created (and signed) by Microsoft.
How will Palladium stop a user from clicking on an attachment that runs a batch file that deletes files from his system (I'm sorry, Microsoft will never pull off a version of Windows that can't be crippled or ruined with a well placed "echo y | del *.*"). Must batch files now be signed?
If a virus trashes all my user data (which Pd may or may not protect), but the OS is still intact, how does that actually help me, the user, except that I probably won't have to reinstall Windows?
Will compilers be completely banned? Or perhaps Microsoft will allow compilers on their system to only generate code that runs in a sandbox like Java and has no significant access to Win32? Will end users be limited to the useless little widgets, like the ones that seemed to be the only products of Java for the first several years?
Given Microsoft's track record on pricing, not only will Free Software be endangered or destroyed, but so will shareware, and perhaps small software companies. I guess everyone will disappear except the large power software vendors (and then only those Microsoft chooses to play with).
If Microsoft decided to play unfair again, will we have to wait another 10 years and then sit through years of pointless litigation only to have a judge wag his finger at MS and frown, while repeating "Bad company, don't do that again.", swat their behind playfully and send them on their way?
Recall that Microsoft created their Windows monopoly by actions taken starting in the early 90's (and earlier!) and well-publicized for years and years before the government got involved (and then got involved over matters that were peripheral to the real reason Microsoft was a monopoly in the first place). Bundling the browser was peanuts compared to the undocumented nature of the most powerful parts of Windows 3.1. Strongarming OEM's was bad, but it doesn't hold a candle to the fact that no one, except Microsoft, could write decent office software or software development tools for Windows for years because of Microsoft's secrecy with information on how to correctly use their OS.
Microsoft releasing Palladium is like Bill Clinton moving into a college girls' dorm. Microsoft can declare all the good intentions they want, but at the end of the day, the tempation to abuse, and the advantages of abusing, this power will be overwhelming.
Not to mention error messages that are as hard to read as binary dumps.
STL is an efficient, but inelegant and needlessly cryptic solution that solves a problem without utilizing the reason C++ exists: object-oriented programming.
I have to declare a different iterator object type for every object type I want to iterate? Yeah, that's as elegant as the place I worked at that printed out Excel spreadsheets, and sent the printouts to India to be keyed in.
My experience with STL leads me to believe that it owes its existence more to the fact that the people who made it and understand it can tell you how clever they are than it being a good solution.
I've been refining a C++ collection library for years, and while it may be slightly less efficient than STL, and it certainly isn't as flexible or complete when it comes to some of the really obscure and complex needs that can come around, it's orders of magnitude easier to learn and use.
And it doesn't use templates, which only exist because apparently true and proper OOP is just too hard for some people. There is nothing you can do with templates that you can't do without them, just as well and just as efficiently, making the feature, in my opinion, unnecessary and redundant.
Well, this is Microsoft. They don't have much Fu, and they always have a F-U attitude.
I had the opportunity to work with an ex-Microsoft developer for a few months. He was incredibly sharp and had worked on the NT kernel and SQL Server in his 6 years at MS. I gave him a hard time about MS, much of which he agreed with. His reponse to my many questions of "Why is so-and-so so bad?" or "Why doesn't X work well?" is that "The smart people weren't working on that."
I suggested that given Microsoft's size and resources they should have enough smart people to go around, but he said that wasn't true.
It provides a computing platform on which you can't tamper with the applications, and where these applications can communicate securely with the vendor.
Sounds good so far...
The obvious application is digital rights management (DRM):
Which, of course, is only of value to the seller.
Disney will be able to sell you DVDs that will decrypt and run on a Palladium platform, but which you won't be able to copy.
Which means I have to buy new hardware to play the new media. This is consistent for a company that will only sell their old movies "for a limited time" to artificially and capriciously drive up demand.
The music industry will be able to sell you music downloads that you won't be able to swap.
Yeah, but I'll need a computer to play them. No listening in the car anymore... unless I buy more new, expensive, and needlessly complex hardware.
They will be able to sell you CDs that you'll only be able
to play three times, or only on your birthday.
No they won't. I would never buy such a product. Of course, the analog hole still exists. I've got a video capture card that does great analog audio capture. I've used it to make nice digital copies of casette recording I made as a kid.
All sorts of new marketing possibilities will open up.
Especially given that companies will deceive, if not downright lie to you. All kinds of new ways to screw the consumer. Of course, all these new electronics gizmos you will _have_ to buy will be complicated to use and prone to malfunctions (at least as first, but always harder to use than their pre-DRM counterparts). You don't need a degree in UI design to play a Victrola, but how many people can use all the features of their stereos or DVD players these days? How much fun will people have when not understanding your hardware prevents you from playing your media? ("I bought this 3-use DVD from Disney (a subsudiary of Evilco) but I only watched the first 30 minutes three times, because my mother called, the power went out, one of the kids wet his pants, etc, etc. Now I can't finish it...")
TCPA / Palladium will also make it much harder for you to run unlicensed software.
So much for software development, one of my hobbies. So much for Open Source software. Oh you say I can become a licensed software provider? For a "nominal" annual fee? Whoopie! I'll pay for that! NOT!
Pirate software can be detected and deleted remotely. It will also make it easier for people to rent software rather than buying it; and if you stop paying the rent, then not only does the software stop working but so may the files it created.
So now companies can take over your computer and arbitrarily delete things. I'm sure that will _always_ work correctly and _never_ be misused, because everyone is completely competent and honest. We should always take every opportunity to give complete strangers control over us, because they know what's best.
For years, Bill Gates has dreamed of finding a way to make the Chinese pay for software: Palladium could be the answer to his prayer.
Not if they keep using Windows 2000 on existing hardware. Recall that these days the primary driving force for selling the latest and greatest hardware is 1.) Microsoft's (and others) increasingly bloated and inefficient software, and 2.) gaming. I use c. 400 MHz processors and don't feel like I'm missing out for 90% of what I do.
There are many other possibilities. Governments will be able to arrange things so that all Word documents created on civil servants' PCs are `born classified' and can't be leaked electronically to journalists.
Remember that joke about the dumb blonde photocopying her monitor to print out her document?
Auction sites might insist that you use trusted proxy software for bidding, so that you can't bid tactically at the auction. Cheating at computer games could be made more difficult.
And that will _never_ be compromised, because it's never happened in the past.
There is a downside too.
No, really?
Sure, there will be some benefits, but as with everything in modern life, the trade-off will be much more complexity and hassle to do things that were formerly simple, and still more aspects of your life will be subject to being screwed up by the ineptness or malice of a complete stranger.
Sign me up!
It could be worse. Norway actually had to pass legislation to change the tax law so you wouldn't be liable for more than 100% of your income. Apparently it was happening all too often.
The next version will be "Windows FU".