Those autoscripts may even detect a SCO product and refuse to compile. nmap's author does this deliberately and by now other projects may do so as well. Other projects will probably not merge fixes for SCO problems unless they are general enough to be a benefit for other platforms.
Some will say this tarnishes FOSS ideals. Helllllooooo! SCO wants to kill FOSS and unilateral disarmament is foolish. I'm in favor of any ethical way of isolating SCO and it's users. If the users find this inconvienient, they can pressure SCO to mend fences.
I used to be a Mandrake user in the 7 and 8 release period. My experience with it was not good. Supermount and flaky end user tools made me feel like I was running Windows 98 again. Perhaps they have improved things since then but going to Debian was like a breath of fresh air.
Yes, I had to learn more to make things work. Thing is, once I had them working they stayed working. My other complaint was that the Mandrake system of mirrors wasn't terribly reliable. I had no idea where next week's updates were coming from. The early urmpi was no treat either.
One of these days, I may try it again on a spare box. The improvement I want to see is that when I admin it, the tools work correctly and the configuration proves reliable. Upgrading and updating should be nearly flawless. If oopsies do happen, it shouldn't require hair pulling to fix them. I got into Linux for reliablity first and ease of use second (still important but not paramount). If I had wanted the opposite, I wouldn't have bothered.
Someone buys up stock after market hours every night. ESPECIALLY if there has been bad news starting a downward trend. Some of the folks over at Groklaw call this "painting a stock". The usual reason to paint a stock is that insiders want to inflate the value of the stock before doing a massive dump. In this case, SCO's benefactor is seeking to preserve their credibility.
You can expect the stock price to return to somewhere around $16 a share before the week is out. Watch the stock tomorrow morning after trading starts. It will have recovered some value overnight and will spike up until the price lands somewhere between 15 and 16.
It would be something of a desparation move if they did. Right now, OSes and Office suites provide two distinct and large profit streams. It is common opinion that Windows and Office are the only things making MS money. In any case, that is where they make most of their money.
Sure they could integrate at least a significant portion of Office into Windows to kill nascent competition. But this would reduce them to one primary profit center that would be smaller than the two separate ones. I suppose they could sell an "Advanced Office Funtionality" package but it wouldn't be as profitable. It couldn't be. They would have to integrate at least as much functionality as OpenOffice provides and not significantly raise the price of Windows.
It might even make things easier on their competition. Since OpenOffice functionality becomes the basic benchmark, their competitors would know to explicity target the what the "Advanced Functionality" product provides.
If nothing else, such an integration move would tell me that Open and StarOffice have caused MS significant pain.
Re:If this shipped with Lindows instead...
on
AOL's $299 PC
·
· Score: 1
I am surprised that AOL doesn't push a discount Linux PC.....Maybe that's how AOL works now, tho. It's just like the Time-Warner merger. Spend billions of dollars on what could create an incredible business, and then fuck it all up.
Not too long ago, they made a deal with MS to base their browser around MSHTML and friends. They also cut the Mozilla team loose (in a highly classy way I must add). AOL is not going into the compete-with-MS business anymore than they have to. At worst, they'll cut AOL loose if they go too long without making a profit. TW are not dreamy idealists out to take down MS.
There are right ways and wrong ways to make money from Open Source. However valuable Mozilla is to us, it wasn't doing them any good. In their eyes, "trying to get something" out of that would be throwing good money after bad.
There is one thing I could plausibly see them trying. Use something like a Knoppix CD to "try out" AOL without installing anything on your PC. If you like it then you can get the "full" Windows version.
This device is not intended to replace an iPod. It is intended to be a permanent part of a home entertainment system. iPods typically don't come with a remote for instance and do go missing when your wife goes out. The only thing it has in common with the iPod is that it plays compressed music. Don't get me wrong, iPods are cool but are not the first idea that is going to occur to me if I want to add a music player to my entertainment system.
I like the idea of a finished, small, and featureful device that uses the music already on your computer on your big stereo. The problem is that this thing costs waaaaay to much. I'd pay a hundred for it, a hundred 125 tops.
I've heard that it is possible to make Ethernet cables with no transmit lines. Basically, you can write to a box connected that way but that box can't talk back. The best you could do then if there was a vulnerability is crash the syslog process on the dropbox.
...and don't treat operating systems like religious belief systems.
I really don't want to be a smartass here but could this be a case of the pot calling the kettle black? You don't seem at all Overly Critical when something bad happens to Windows. Indeed, your posting history is largely criticisms of Linux. I could exchange every instance of Windows and Linux in a typical posting of yours and you would come off exactly like one of the "Linux religious fanatics" you claim to be above.
You also seem to think the most vocal and rabid Linux users are typical users. Every community has extra obnoxious members and Windows is not exempt from the vocal religious fanatic problem. And yet, no one speaks of obnoxious Windows users being the biggest problem dragging Windows down. Could it be that telling amorphous groups like "Windows users" or "Linux users" how to behave is a largely useless activity? Could it even be that "the way members of foo act" is in no way a valid criterion for assessing a technology?
When are we going to see TV ads showing how cool KDE or Gnome can be in comparison to boring old Windows? Start doing feature comparisons, etc...
"I believe that KDE filemanager is much more realistic than Windows filemanager. Look at them side by side and I think you'll agree that KDE is the more intelligent choice."
The BSD license may be for friendly for companies that want to use FOSS but it usually isn't for companies that participate in FOSS. What's business friendly about a competitor taking your stuff, adding secret sauce to it, and then freezing you out of a market you may have created?
A local car dealership in Columbus Ohio has some hilarious ads. In the commercials, their cars have a button on the dash labeled "Trunk Monkey". In one of them, a guy is stuck in traffic while a road rager keeps yelling for him to get out of his car so the road rager can hurt him. The guy presses the "Trunk Monkey" button and a chimp (not a monkey technically...spare me) with a crowbar climbs out of the trunk and clouts the the road rager. In another one, a woman has been pulled over by the cops and the chimp tries to bribe the cop with money then a doughnut. The ad ends with the monkey being hauled off in a cruiser. The one I saw the other day had kids egg the wrong car in traffic. Out jumps the chimp, who chases them down and makes them wash the egg off the windshield. The ads tout that the dealership offers "innovations" like a "Trunk Monkey" that the other dealerships don't.
The spots don't make me want to buy a car but the spots are hilarious. They're easily the funniest commercials I've seen in years.
The age of the technophobic teacher that laughs over her lack of understanding of technology MUST come to an end, just like it has been for most of the workforce.
It will but it will take another generation. A teacher with 30 years in more than likely will not take to technology at all. This teacher is also safe from any attempt to mandate a minimum level of competency with technology. Seniority counts for a lot in public education. It counts in ways that many people in the corporate workforce have never been exposed to. Corporate workplaces can mandate at least minimum proficiency with productivity apps on pain of termination. This is not true in the public schools. Strong political forces will keep it that way for the forseeable future.
This problem will simply have to solve itself as younger teachers and administrators come into the system. It's happening already. A child going through the elementary system now will have at least one and maybe two teachers who can use technology effectively. The situation is a little better in Middle and High school. The teachers tend to be older and more technophobic but the students have more than one teacher each day. The teachers who are more proficient tend to gravitate to the classes that make heavier use of computers. A student there will get at least two tech clueful teachers a day. (at least in places I've worked.)
As time goes on, teachers will become more tech proficient. Not up to geek levels mind you but they will know enough to use the tech in appropriate ways.
There is a huge difference between law and morality. An 18 year old being with his 17 year old girlfriend doesn't hold a candle to raping a 5 year old. "The law is the law." doesn't even begin to justify giving that 18 year old the same treatment as the child fucker. It gets even stupider when the 18 and 17 year get married and have kids.
The law may not recognize the criminal's sense of ethics but those who make the laws should damn well have some ethics. This type of sex law has no recognition of degree and is profoundly unethical even if it does meet some twisted definition of morality.
There's sex offenders and then there's sex offenders. I have no problem with a guilty as sin child sodomizer being plastered all over this thing. But you also hear of 17 year olds being charged by overzealous DAs for being with their 16 year old girlfriends. Such "offenders" will be lumped in with the child fuckers and corpse zombies.
This thing doesn't sound it recognizes there are levels of sex offense.
Those secrets will frequently be embedded within the OS upon which they base their box.
Then a GPLed OS is the wrong place to do it. If embedded manufacturers want an (almost) restriction free kernel there are at least three BSD forks for them to play with.
If the anger of the community pushes for the enforcement of the GPL in these early stages they'll just pick up their toys and go find another playground to play in.
The community gets angry. The reactions of GPL copyright holders have been mostly levelheaded. The FSF handles this sort of thing...quietly...all the time. I'm all for not pouring vitriol on embedded developers. However, I don't favor softpedaling the licenses because of market or mindshare goals. Uneven enforcement of copyrights can be used as a defense in court. If you softpedal violations then you are in danger of not being able to enforce your copyrights at all. There is no point in using the GPL or any other license if you don't intend to defend your intentions.
The license is just as valid and has as much force as any proprietary license. This is not public domain or BSD code. The license means nothing if it is not enforced. "Free or not free" is a false dichotomy. It is free to use within certain parameters. Those parameters must be respected. Period.
Yow, there was actualy a/. interview of some guy at Pheonix a while back, and he clearly said that the TC stuff would be an option that motherboard makers could chose to implement or not.
I remember that interview. He danced around the primary issue which is "Will you make a motherboard that will refuse to boot non-MS signed bootloaders or kernels?". Basically all mobo manufacturers will implement this stuff (Longhorn Certified!) and part of the specs will specify that it is mandatory. The customer won't be able to do without it.
To prove that to yourself, check out an NTSC screen capture on a modern PC monitor - They look like tiny little pictures with horrible graininess.
True but NTSC video viewed on analog NTSC monitors isn't that bad. There's some inherent analog antialiasing when the signal is viewed as originally designed.
Viewing such a signal on a computer monitor is a lot like listening to early CD or CDs of early stuff. They have stickers that warn you that "limitations of the original source material may be audible". On most turntables (I know, I know but most people don't have audiophile rigs. They have cheezy Symphonic type stuff.) and cassette decks noise inherent to the formats obliterated studio recording artifacts.
Anyway just how high can my expectations really get? I wouldn't mind having an uber-leet home THX set up to watch Lord of the Rings on but I could cheerfully watch Officespace on a cheezy VHS rig. A few movie might somewhat justify ultra quality. Most won't.
"Reverend Darl, is it really too late? What about Microsoft? What about over at Sun?"
"It's too late my daughter. Even Microsoft and Sun have turned their backs on us. It's too late. This is a cruel and unjust world. We are surrounded by host of hippies. They are all against us. There is not much time my corrupt children. Form orderly lines and drink the potion. We will extort freely in the next world......"
They refuse to realise that targeting all aspects of PC usage is necessary to unseat the giant in Redmond.
I think the vendors could care less in the long run about unseating MS. Unseating MS is an idealist's goal not a business one. As long as they make enough money to justify what they're putting into Linux then they'll be happy. Taking a few percent of MS' markets would be serious money to all of these companies and MS could still claim victory. I don't see MS going away anytime soon. I'd love to see it happen but it won't.
The worst case scenario for MS is diversification from Office/Windows. In the long run, it's better for their corporate survival anyway. They'll still be around 10 or 20 years from now. They probably won't be the company everyone loves to hate either.
Actually I think the vocal minority wanted "consolidation".
The rest of us wanted healthy competition. I'd hate for corporate America to standardise Linux distributions like Microsoft have standardised the intel personal computer.
Regardless, everyone wants or should want interoperability. That means the object models must have a way to pass data and pointers back and forth. It means lots of fit and polish thing like the applications not looking or acting jarringly different from one another. When all is said and done, applications are king. Neither of the desktops possesses all of the best apps. Most of us run a mixture and we want them to work together.
It fine if you don't want consolidation but things like unified theme sets and standardized ways to cut and paste more than just text are not evil.
I agree with you that Treacherous Computing is not about any benefit to end users whatsoever. However, a generalized form of DRM would have non-evil uses. I not thinking of the content industry's idea of a "trusted platform". I'm thinking of a built in crypto accellerator that the hardware owner possesses every key to.
Gentoo users would love it. The machine could sign every binary generated by the build processes with the owner's private machine key. No binary without that signature would run. It doesn't have to just be user compiled stuff either. What if you could add your favorite distro's package signing key to the machine's keyring? You could delegate trust in running binaries. Not bad. And no, it won't protect against vulnerable code with overflow vulnerabilities and so forth. It would still have value against trojans. Come to think of it, such hardware could work hand in hand with a new executable format. How about segmented binaries that have multiple checksums embedded? An exploit that messes up a binary running in place could fail such a check and trigger at worst a blue screen or kernel panic. Such a scheme would be expensive on current hardware but a CPU with a built in crypto engine could likely do it with a minimal performance hit. The OpenBSD guys and the Secure Linux guys could have a lot of fun with something like that.
Theres other cool things that could be done with a really ubiquitous hardware crypto engine. Done correctly, E-Mail crypto could be vastly easier to mass adopt. Maybe it could even be used the way crypto accellerators are used on web servers....just cheaper and far more commonplace.
Its a pity that none of this is what "they" have in mind.
Slashdot Mirror
Those autoscripts may even detect a SCO product and refuse to compile. nmap's author does this deliberately and by now other projects may do so as well. Other projects will probably not merge fixes for SCO problems unless they are general enough to be a benefit for other platforms.
Some will say this tarnishes FOSS ideals. Helllllooooo! SCO wants to kill FOSS and unilateral disarmament is foolish. I'm in favor of any ethical way of isolating SCO and it's users. If the users find this inconvienient, they can pressure SCO to mend fences.
I used to be a Mandrake user in the 7 and 8 release period. My experience with it was not good. Supermount and flaky end user tools made me feel like I was running Windows 98 again. Perhaps they have improved things since then but going to Debian was like a breath of fresh air.
Yes, I had to learn more to make things work. Thing is, once I had them working they stayed working. My other complaint was that the Mandrake system of mirrors wasn't terribly reliable. I had no idea where next week's updates were coming from. The early urmpi was no treat either.
One of these days, I may try it again on a spare box. The improvement I want to see is that when I admin it, the tools work correctly and the configuration proves reliable. Upgrading and updating should be nearly flawless. If oopsies do happen, it shouldn't require hair pulling to fix them. I got into Linux for reliablity first and ease of use second (still important but not paramount). If I had wanted the opposite, I wouldn't have bothered.
Someone buys up stock after market hours every night. ESPECIALLY if there has been bad news starting a downward trend. Some of the folks over at Groklaw call this "painting a stock". The usual reason to paint a stock is that insiders want to inflate the value of the stock before doing a massive dump. In this case, SCO's benefactor is seeking to preserve their credibility.
You can expect the stock price to return to somewhere around $16 a share before the week is out. Watch the stock tomorrow morning after trading starts. It will have recovered some value overnight and will spike up until the price lands somewhere between 15 and 16.
It would be something of a desparation move if they did. Right now, OSes and Office suites provide two distinct and large profit streams. It is common opinion that Windows and Office are the only things making MS money. In any case, that is where they make most of their money.
Sure they could integrate at least a significant portion of Office into Windows to kill nascent competition. But this would reduce them to one primary profit center that would be smaller than the two separate ones. I suppose they could sell an "Advanced Office Funtionality" package but it wouldn't be as profitable. It couldn't be. They would have to integrate at least as much functionality as OpenOffice provides and not significantly raise the price of Windows.
It might even make things easier on their competition. Since OpenOffice functionality becomes the basic benchmark, their competitors would know to explicity target the what the "Advanced Functionality" product provides.
If nothing else, such an integration move would tell me that Open and StarOffice have caused MS significant pain.
I am surprised that AOL doesn't push a discount Linux PC.....Maybe that's how AOL works now, tho. It's just like the Time-Warner merger. Spend billions of dollars on what could create an incredible business, and then fuck it all up.
Not too long ago, they made a deal with MS to base their browser around MSHTML and friends. They also cut the Mozilla team loose (in a highly classy way I must add). AOL is not going into the compete-with-MS business anymore than they have to. At worst, they'll cut AOL loose if they go too long without making a profit. TW are not dreamy idealists out to take down MS.
There are right ways and wrong ways to make money from Open Source. However valuable Mozilla is to us, it wasn't doing them any good. In their eyes, "trying to get something" out of that would be throwing good money after bad.
There is one thing I could plausibly see them trying. Use something like a Knoppix CD to "try out" AOL without installing anything on your PC. If you like it then you can get the "full" Windows version.
This device is not intended to replace an iPod. It is intended to be a permanent part of a home entertainment system. iPods typically don't come with a remote for instance and do go missing when your wife goes out. The only thing it has in common with the iPod is that it plays compressed music. Don't get me wrong, iPods are cool but are not the first idea that is going to occur to me if I want to add a music player to my entertainment system.
I like the idea of a finished, small, and featureful device that uses the music already on your computer on your big stereo. The problem is that this thing costs waaaaay to much. I'd pay a hundred for it, a hundred 125 tops.
I've heard that it is possible to make Ethernet cables with no transmit lines. Basically, you can write to a box connected that way but that box can't talk back. The best you could do then if there was a vulnerability is crash the syslog process on the dropbox.
...and don't treat operating systems like religious belief systems.
I really don't want to be a smartass here but could this be a case of the pot calling the kettle black? You don't seem at all Overly Critical when something bad happens to Windows. Indeed, your posting history is largely criticisms of Linux. I could exchange every instance of Windows and Linux in a typical posting of yours and you would come off exactly like one of the "Linux religious fanatics" you claim to be above.
You also seem to think the most vocal and rabid Linux users are typical users. Every community has extra obnoxious members and Windows is not exempt from the vocal religious fanatic problem. And yet, no one speaks of obnoxious Windows users being the biggest problem dragging Windows down. Could it be that telling amorphous groups like "Windows users" or "Linux users" how to behave is a largely useless activity? Could it even be that "the way members of foo act" is in no way a valid criterion for assessing a technology?
He must be made to pay, a la Kenneth Lay, for his hubris.
The only problem with that is that Kenneth Lay hasn't paid. At most, they're going to hang a minor board executive and pin the whole thing on him.
I'd rather see him pay a la King Louis XIV.
swiiiiisssh! thump! spurt!
When are we going to see TV ads showing how cool KDE or Gnome can be in comparison to boring old Windows? Start doing feature comparisons, etc...
"I believe that KDE filemanager is much more realistic than Windows filemanager. Look at them side by side and I think you'll agree that KDE is the more intelligent choice."
Chill people it's a joke......
The BSD license may be for friendly for companies that want to use FOSS but it usually isn't for companies that participate in FOSS. What's business friendly about a competitor taking your stuff, adding secret sauce to it, and then freezing you out of a market you may have created?
A local car dealership in Columbus Ohio has some hilarious ads. In the commercials, their cars have a button on the dash labeled "Trunk Monkey". In one of them, a guy is stuck in traffic while a road rager keeps yelling for him to get out of his car so the road rager can hurt him. The guy presses the "Trunk Monkey" button and a chimp (not a monkey technically...spare me) with a crowbar climbs out of the trunk and clouts the the road rager. In another one, a woman has been pulled over by the cops and the chimp tries to bribe the cop with money then a doughnut. The ad ends with the monkey being hauled off in a cruiser. The one I saw the other day had kids egg the wrong car in traffic. Out jumps the chimp, who chases them down and makes them wash the egg off the windshield. The ads tout that the dealership offers "innovations" like a "Trunk Monkey" that the other dealerships don't.
The spots don't make me want to buy a car but the spots are hilarious. They're easily the funniest commercials I've seen in years.
The age of the technophobic teacher that laughs over her lack of understanding of technology MUST come to an end, just like it has been for most of the workforce.
It will but it will take another generation. A teacher with 30 years in more than likely will not take to technology at all. This teacher is also safe from any attempt to mandate a minimum level of competency with technology. Seniority counts for a lot in public education. It counts in ways that many people in the corporate workforce have never been exposed to. Corporate workplaces can mandate at least minimum proficiency with productivity apps on pain of termination. This is not true in the public schools. Strong political forces will keep it that way for the forseeable future.
This problem will simply have to solve itself as younger teachers and administrators come into the system. It's happening already. A child going through the elementary system now will have at least one and maybe two teachers who can use technology effectively. The situation is a little better in Middle and High school. The teachers tend to be older and more technophobic but the students have more than one teacher each day. The teachers who are more proficient tend to gravitate to the classes that make heavier use of computers. A student there will get at least two tech clueful teachers a day. (at least in places I've worked.)
As time goes on, teachers will become more tech proficient. Not up to geek levels mind you but they will know enough to use the tech in appropriate ways.
There is a huge difference between law and morality. An 18 year old being with his 17 year old girlfriend doesn't hold a candle to raping a 5 year old. "The law is the law." doesn't even begin to justify giving that 18 year old the same treatment as the child fucker. It gets even stupider when the 18 and 17 year get married and have kids.
The law may not recognize the criminal's sense of ethics but those who make the laws should damn well have some ethics. This type of sex law has no recognition of degree and is profoundly unethical even if it does meet some twisted definition of morality.
There's sex offenders and then there's sex offenders. I have no problem with a guilty as sin child sodomizer being plastered all over this thing. But you also hear of 17 year olds being charged by overzealous DAs for being with their 16 year old girlfriends. Such "offenders" will be lumped in with the child fuckers and corpse zombies.
This thing doesn't sound it recognizes there are levels of sex offense.
Those secrets will frequently be embedded within the OS upon which they base their box.
Then a GPLed OS is the wrong place to do it. If embedded manufacturers want an (almost) restriction free kernel there are at least three BSD forks for them to play with.
If the anger of the community pushes for the enforcement of the GPL in these early stages they'll just pick up their toys and go find another playground to play in.
The community gets angry. The reactions of GPL copyright holders have been mostly levelheaded. The FSF handles this sort of thing...quietly...all the time. I'm all for not pouring vitriol on embedded developers. However, I don't favor softpedaling the licenses because of market or mindshare goals. Uneven enforcement of copyrights can be used as a defense in court. If you softpedal violations then you are in danger of not being able to enforce your copyrights at all. There is no point in using the GPL or any other license if you don't intend to defend your intentions.
The license is just as valid and has as much force as any proprietary license. This is not public domain or BSD code. The license means nothing if it is not enforced. "Free or not free" is a false dichotomy. It is free to use within certain parameters. Those parameters must be respected. Period.
Yow, there was actualy a /. interview of some guy at Pheonix a while back, and he clearly said that the TC stuff would be an option that motherboard makers could chose to implement or not.
I remember that interview. He danced around the primary issue which is "Will you make a motherboard that will refuse to boot non-MS signed bootloaders or kernels?". Basically all mobo manufacturers will implement this stuff (Longhorn Certified!) and part of the specs will specify that it is mandatory. The customer won't be able to do without it.
To prove that to yourself, check out an NTSC screen capture on a modern PC monitor - They look like tiny little pictures with horrible graininess.
True but NTSC video viewed on analog NTSC monitors isn't that bad. There's some inherent analog antialiasing when the signal is viewed as originally designed.
Viewing such a signal on a computer monitor is a lot like listening to early CD or CDs of early stuff. They have stickers that warn you that "limitations of the original source material may be audible". On most turntables (I know, I know but most people don't have audiophile rigs. They have cheezy Symphonic type stuff.) and cassette decks noise inherent to the formats obliterated studio recording artifacts.
Anyway just how high can my expectations really get? I wouldn't mind having an uber-leet home THX set up to watch Lord of the Rings on but I could cheerfully watch Officespace on a cheezy VHS rig. A few movie might somewhat justify ultra quality. Most won't.
"Reverend Darl, is it really too late? What about Microsoft? What about over at Sun?"
"It's too late my daughter. Even Microsoft and Sun have turned their backs on us. It's too late. This is a cruel and unjust world. We are surrounded by host of hippies. They are all against us. There is not much time my corrupt children. Form orderly lines and drink the potion. We will extort freely in the next world......"
They refuse to realise that targeting all aspects of PC usage is necessary to unseat the giant in Redmond.
I think the vendors could care less in the long run about unseating MS. Unseating MS is an idealist's goal not a business one. As long as they make enough money to justify what they're putting into Linux then they'll be happy. Taking a few percent of MS' markets would be serious money to all of these companies and MS could still claim victory. I don't see MS going away anytime soon. I'd love to see it happen but it won't.
The worst case scenario for MS is diversification from Office/Windows. In the long run, it's better for their corporate survival anyway. They'll still be around 10 or 20 years from now. They probably won't be the company everyone loves to hate either.
What's wrong with Liv Tyler standing doing anything? I could watch her all day and fuck her all night.
Let's not even go there. Hot grits and petrification lay in that direction.
Actually I think the vocal minority wanted "consolidation".
The rest of us wanted healthy competition. I'd hate for corporate America to standardise Linux distributions like Microsoft have standardised the intel personal computer.
Regardless, everyone wants or should want interoperability. That means the object models must have a way to pass data and pointers back and forth. It means lots of fit and polish thing like the applications not looking or acting jarringly different from one another. When all is said and done, applications are king. Neither of the desktops possesses all of the best apps. Most of us run a mixture and we want them to work together.
It fine if you don't want consolidation but things like unified theme sets and standardized ways to cut and paste more than just text are not evil.
I agree with you that Treacherous Computing is not about any benefit to end users whatsoever. However, a generalized form of DRM would have non-evil uses. I not thinking of the content industry's idea of a "trusted platform". I'm thinking of a built in crypto accellerator that the hardware owner possesses every key to.
Gentoo users would love it. The machine could sign every binary generated by the build processes with the owner's private machine key. No binary without that signature would run. It doesn't have to just be user compiled stuff either. What if you could add your favorite distro's package signing key to the machine's keyring? You could delegate trust in running binaries. Not bad. And no, it won't protect against vulnerable code with overflow vulnerabilities and so forth. It would still have value against trojans. Come to think of it, such hardware could work hand in hand with a new executable format. How about segmented binaries that have multiple checksums embedded? An exploit that messes up a binary running in place could fail such a check and trigger at worst a blue screen or kernel panic. Such a scheme would be expensive on current hardware but a CPU with a built in crypto engine could likely do it with a minimal performance hit. The OpenBSD guys and the Secure Linux guys could have a lot of fun with something like that.
Theres other cool things that could be done with a really ubiquitous hardware crypto engine. Done correctly, E-Mail crypto could be vastly easier to mass adopt. Maybe it could even be used the way crypto accellerators are used on web servers....just cheaper and far more commonplace.
Its a pity that none of this is what "they" have in mind.
When you're talking about something small, an extra inch is a big deal.
y .
Must...resist...urge..to..post...lowbrow...repl