Uh huh. So rather than owning one's own small business, being a successful entrepreneur, the new American dream is to work for a national franchise, so that you can get health insurance. How incredibly fscking sad is that? So obviously you've never been the head of a family, and had to actually think about things like that. I work at a job where I'm definitely not making as much money as I could doing it on my own, but the company pays full insurance (medical and dental) for my entire family. Another employer would have to offer me at least twice my current income for me to even consider changing jobs. Medical security doesn't mean much when you only have yourself to take care of, but it means the world when three other lives depend on you.
Wow, are you an Apple marketing exec? You've ignored the whole point of the question (as ill-advised as it is), which was to run X11 *without* running Aqua. I think just about everybody on this site knows you can run X apps under OSX.
I just felt the need to point out that (as far as I understand, anyway) the only requirement for considering oneself a Christian is that you believe Jesus was God's son, he was resurrected, and that He died for your sins. All the rest of the bible is merely history or parable, and one does not have to follow any of the original covenant with Israel to consider oneself a Christian. Just picking nits.:)
Hey, just so you know, the iPod is verrrrrry easy to hack. Check out iPodLinux and RockBox, two very different hacks for the iPod. I currently use RockBox on mine, and the only thing I ever switch back to the stock firmware for is video (which is very rare). It can play many more file formats, can look much prettier, can crossfade and do replaygain, and it can play Doom! So what if it's practically impossible to move around and shoot at the same time, it's still nifty. Plus, any time I feel like there's a feature missing or something can be improved, I can open up the source code and hack around to my heart's content.
You think this is a joke, but seriously, at my office all the salespeople have a tab of porn or five open in Firefox pretty much all day long. You'll be walking through the office and suddenly you'll hear moaning and you just roll your eyes. There's routinely a twelve-pack in the fridge, half of which is usually missing. And don't get me started on how many bowls have been smoked in the parking lot. But for all this, we are a very successful small business, and everyone here loves their job. Go figure.
q. q is how you exit man. and the funny thing is, if you run man man, you'd think it would tell you how to exit. but it doesn't. you have to read about the command line options and figure out that man actually runs the program/usr/bin/less to display man pages. so run man less, scroll about halfway through the file, and you'll find that to exit less you can hit q or Q or:q or:Q or ZZ. confusing at best. i've been a linux user for about seven years now, and that was the first time i really realized how arcane some of the commands are. i guess i'm just really used to it by now.
Okay, I'll bite. In response to 3, maybe an example of a feature they would have liked to do, rather than an over-inflated "yes". In 4, the bit at the end about tabbed browsing and NetCaptor was unprofessional, and just sounded like a pot-shot rather than something substantive. 5, he made it sound like he was going the professional route and not taking a stab at Firefox, then he goes ahead and stabs anyway (although I personally don't know what he's talking about). 6, he basically blames the problem on some other team at Microsoft, then shifts the focus to a completely different problem. Not cool. In 7, well, he just ignores the whole question and babbles about some other questions that he does have the answer too. It would have been a lot better if he had just said "I don't really know, let's move on" instead of blatantly trying to outwit the reader. Number 8, he once again ignores the question, shifts the focus to something else, and says "Oh yeah, try these guys out, they're great!" at the end. 9, he dances around the real issues that the question is trying to address and instead points out the usual "ACID2 isn't anything special!" mantra that seems to be going around, then fumbles around with the actual semantic meaning of CSS standards (CSS2? CSS3?) instead of just answering the question and taking "CSS standard" to mean what everyone else in the world means by that. So in conclusion, I really wouldn't have had a problem with one or two questions being danced around, but seven out of ten? C'mon.
I was going to moderate on this article, but I just could resist the urge to post...
So in reading his responses to the above questions, the thought struck me that this guy is a really smooth-talking PR kinda guy. Most of his answers boiled down to either "yes" or "no" with a bunch of quasi-technical words thrown in for good measure, or he completely avoided the question and either rambled about some other random crap or answered a completely different question instead. Methinks this guy (based solely on the responses posted here, mind you) belongs in the PR department, rather than heading up a software creation department. But then again, perhaps it is a common prerequisite to working as a manager at MS to have mad doublespeak skillz.
Mario is great. I've pretty much got all the games (save for 2, it's odd) memorized, especially Super Mario World. I can mindlessly get through that game, get all 96 levels, get 99 lives, get through Special, etc. and die maybe five times. Zelda I can usually sit down and play for a couple hours, but I usually get bored before beating the game. Chrono Trigger brings back so many memories, it's just great. Same with Chrono Cross, the storylines are just so interesting. And Final Fantasy VIII was my only PS1 game for a long time, so I actually enjoy it more than the other Final Fantasies (sorry, I know that's sacrilege).
fstab and grub.conf? Seriously? The default fstab that's installed is perfectly usable, only thing that needs to change is the device paths and the filesystem types. And if you're installing by following the installation guide (which is not optional), it shows you exactly what to type into grub.conf, again all you have to know is the device paths. xorg.conf is easy, run X -configure, copy the resulting file over to/etc/X11/xorg.conf, and run. If you've got an nVidia or ATI card, you'll need to change maybe two-three lines. Again, if you are reading along in the guide, it shouldn't be that difficult. I would never copy configuration files straight over between distros, there's too much chance that they might not work at all.
I fail to see how "Do it the Gentoo way or you're out of luck" can possibly be a detrimental quality. It's Gentoo, so you do things the Gentoo way. If you wanted to do things the Debian or Redhat way, you'd install Debian or Redhat. And seriously, people should really stop judging the quality of a Linux distro by how easy/hard the installer is perceived to be. There's a lot more to it than just that.
I think one reason we haven't seen too many consumer-grade 10000 rpm drives is because, as far as I have experienced, they're really damn loud. I can't imagine a non-geek being happy with a drive whose spinning noise drowns out the people in the room talking to each other.
What about those of us out here in reality who don't buy 50 games per console? I've owned at least one console from every generation since the Atari, and that was the one I probably owned the most games for, about 20. Since then, there's been this great thing called renting that, at least for me, is much more attractive. Especially with Blockbuster's no late fees, I can get a game for less than $7 for a month, play the hell out of it every day, and then take it back. Sure, if I feel like playing again later I'll have to re-rent it, but for anything other than a hardcore RPG a month is usually plenty of time to not only beat the game, but explore most of the various nooks and crannies as well. There's no way in hell I'll be buying a PS3 for more than $250, so I guess I'll just have to wait a few years. By that time, there'll actually be a lot of good games to play, so I can justify it. Whereas, the Wii costs less than that now, and probably even less in a year or so. Definitely something that's easier to stomach, for me at least.
But I wouldn't buy a 360 at 360 prices. Or a PS3 at PS3 prices. In fact, pretty much most of the people I know (not "hardcore" gamers, but people who probably play 1-2 new games per month) would never dream of spending more than $200 on a console unless it had something they absolutely can't live without on it. So far, nothing on either the 360 or the PS3 is looking that way, and there are already several games on the Wii that I am more than excited about. Plus, like an earlier poster mentioned, I have a family and kids that could really do with the extra $600 worth of food rather than a huge, do-everything-except-play-good-games black box.
Okay, I'm really sick of hearing people compare computers to consumer appliances. That comparison right there is IMHO directly responsible for most of the problems with computers nowadays. If people would stop looking at a computer like it's just a big black box that does magic stuff, and maybe stop to understand things just a little bit, probably 90% of spyware and popup ads would cease to be effective. I'm not advocating that Grandma needs to know commandline stuff or anything, but one thing that would help a lot of people out tremendously is simply to understand three things: 1) the notion of what an application is; 2) the difference between a web page and an application; and 3) a basic understanding of the file system. If users could look at a popup and notice that it has that little title bar up on top, they would realize that it's a web page rather than a real system-message-type-thing. And if users could understand the *VERY* simple layout of a file system (cmon, it works EXACTLY like a filing cabinet, what exactly is so confusing?), they might not lose their files all the time and other such nonsense.
</rant>
Have you actually heard any of Fripp's soundscapes? You'd be hard put to call them 'guitar riffs'. Very atmospheric, melodic, beautiful sounds, in fact it's hard to believe he actually makes his music with a guitar at all.
> Any religion that claims to be the 'only religion' is obviously false. You'd have to be a half-wit to miss that logical fallacy.
This doesn't make sense to me. It seems that if a religion did not claim to be the 'only religion', then why would any of its members cling to it at all? After all, if Christianity was just 'one of many' ways to God, why would people have any incentive to remain Christian? It makes more sense to infer (at least if you believe in a certain religion) that your religion must be the 'only religion', otherwise the central tenets of what 'religion' is fail.
Dude, the whole argument was about the fact that there is no MPAA lawsuit. The suit you're looking at does not, in fact, involve the MPAA in any way. RTFA, man, it talks about the fact that a bunch of individual corporations, like Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., got together and sued him without the MPAA's interference. Therefore, any reference to the MPAA suing LokiTorrent.com is a falsehood, as they were not actually involved in any suit. Or at least that's what the article says, whether or not it's the truth is another matter.
I think it's interesting that the entity Google replied directly to this editorial. Am I to believe, then, that Google has taken on a life of its own, and is now a living, speaking being, rather than just a corporate entity?
Really? Because as far as I can tell by all the information put out there by the pharmaceutical companies, birth control pills work by preventing the egg from ever being released, thus not allowing it to be fertilized. How this can be construed as abortion is beyond me.
okay, well, at least the first article makes no mention at all about "potential". this article basically points out something that should be glaringly common sense: if you use x (be it weed, alcohol, nicotine, caffiene), you are more likely to use more of x in the future. wow. and we pay people to do these studies? the second article links long-term cannibis use to slowed/impaired brain activity. i don't think anybody disputes that. the thing is though, that NO ONE CARES. the issue is not whether abusing weed is harmful. it is quite obvious that over the long term it is, as is abusing absolutely anything. there are many, many cases where people have abused caffiene and have permanently hurt their heart and such like. yet caffiene still remains perfectly legal. the issue here is whether making weed legal will reduce the damage it causes. i, for one, think it will. hell, just look at the time in history when alcohol was illegal: that was some of the worst years the us ever had. i propose that weed should be just as legal as tobacco: 18, and regulated. sure, for a few years, there might some issues, but then things will start to even out. for most people, it will lose the appeal it had when it was illegal. and for the ones who continue to abuse it, not much will change, except where they buy it. some people will abuse drugs no matter what. but a lot of people will use some common sense and not do that. alcohol is abused all the time, yet it is legal, because history proved that making it illegal was far more harmful than just punishing those who do stupid things while drinking.
You know what's funny (and a bit scary)? I didn't have WMP > 6 installed since about two years ago when I put win98 on this box. I didn't see any reason to, since I could just download the WM7/8 codecs and use them with WMP6. But just the other day, I came across a WM9 file I wanted to view, and bam, had to download WMP9, as WMP6 just refused to handle it. Pretty sleazy shit, since there's no real technical reason it shouldn't be able to. One thing: when I do buy my own 32 gigahertz 16 processor machine with 8 gig of ram (which will be in like 20 years when I can afford it on top of paying rent...), could I still not turn off TCPA and boot Linux anyway? Of course, if I can't connect to the net, that would really suck. Perhaps somebody can pry the EEPROM off a mobo, download the code, reverse engineer it, re-flash it, and put the chip back in? I assume there has to be some sort of code running in the BIOS that provides hooks to the TPM chip. So, why not modify those hooks so that whenever any application asks for authorization, the BIOS just returns true, no matter what? It sucks since every single revision of a board will have a different BIOS, but haven't hobbyists been doing that with the PS2 and the XBox with some success for some time now? Man, I have got to stop rambling so much...
Thank you for clarifying the relationship between TCPA and Palladium. That makes a bit more sense now. Now another question: can the TPA be used at all without the root authority crap? In other words, could a Linux driver be written just to shift all of the encryption over to that chip, thus speeding up SSH and such? I don't know all that much about kernel hacking, so I'm just pondering here. It seems that the TCPA faq seems to say that would work, but I don't know. Still, I'm not sure I understand why everyone is so aghast at Microsoft doing the same thing they've always been doing: namely leveraging their market share to try to get rid of competitors. As it is, I dual boot Win98 and Gentoo Linux, using Windows as little as possible, and Wine/WineX when I can. I dislike Windows very much, but I use it (as I suspect most people do) for a few applications that I really like (Cool Edit Pro, Photoshop, Revalver, Flash, Warcraft III). In the future, if indeed somehow Microsoft manages to retrofit all copies of Windows98 to use Palladium (doubtful), and I can no longer use it without MS controlling my machine, then I won't. I'll just make do without it, and write my own apps. I think rather than campaigning against TCPA/Palladium, perhaps we should start a campaign to help users remember that old Windows versions (98SE-2K-XP) don't have Palladium, and pretty much can't ever have it. Not only this, but they still run just fine, and all the software you might want will run on them. Sure, someone might laugh at me running Win98 on a 3GHz machine (dude, that's so five years ago...), but it works, right? And I think that's an equation that even Joe Average can understand, especially given the number of non-techies I know that refuse to upgrade (not worth the hassle, it still works well enough for me, etc.). So anyway, I'm digressing a bit here, but the gist of what I'm saying is that I think perhaps Microsoft underestimates the intelligence of the ordinary user. If users are informed of Palladium's true intentions (which is what we are trying to do), and also informed that there's really no particular need to upgrade at all (better yet, use Linux:), then I think users can figure out for themselves what to do. What I'm leaving out of this equation is future application developement. I wonder, then, if Photoshop 8.0 will require Palladium so nobody can download it on those 0-day WaReZ sites? Or whether Warcraft IV will require TCPA-enabled cd-drives so you can't just copy the cd and install it somewhere else? This is what bugs me. Of course, the fun thing is, even if all of this happened, it would only be about three weeks till some group of l33t hAX0Rs cracks the code and releases AMIBIOS-3.2-TCPA-PALLADIUM-FIXED-RAZOR1911.zip onto the internet...of course, by that time, even WinZIP will be TCPA-aware, and refuse to unzip the file...so you'll just unzip it in Linux to a bootable floppy, disable TCPA in the BIOS so you can boot from the "untrusted" floppy, and flash it to hell...unless...oh nevermind.
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Wow, are you an Apple marketing exec? You've ignored the whole point of the question (as ill-advised as it is), which was to run X11 *without* running Aqua. I think just about everybody on this site knows you can run X apps under OSX.
I just felt the need to point out that (as far as I understand, anyway) the only requirement for considering oneself a Christian is that you believe Jesus was God's son, he was resurrected, and that He died for your sins. All the rest of the bible is merely history or parable, and one does not have to follow any of the original covenant with Israel to consider oneself a Christian. Just picking nits. :)
Hey, just so you know, the iPod is verrrrrry easy to hack. Check out iPodLinux and RockBox, two very different hacks for the iPod. I currently use RockBox on mine, and the only thing I ever switch back to the stock firmware for is video (which is very rare). It can play many more file formats, can look much prettier, can crossfade and do replaygain, and it can play Doom! So what if it's practically impossible to move around and shoot at the same time, it's still nifty. Plus, any time I feel like there's a feature missing or something can be improved, I can open up the source code and hack around to my heart's content.
You think this is a joke, but seriously, at my office all the salespeople have a tab of porn or five open in Firefox pretty much all day long. You'll be walking through the office and suddenly you'll hear moaning and you just roll your eyes. There's routinely a twelve-pack in the fridge, half of which is usually missing. And don't get me started on how many bowls have been smoked in the parking lot. But for all this, we are a very successful small business, and everyone here loves their job. Go figure.
q. q is how you exit man. and the funny thing is, if you run man man, you'd think it would tell you how to exit. but it doesn't. you have to read about the command line options and figure out that man actually runs the program /usr/bin/less to display man pages. so run man less, scroll about halfway through the file, and you'll find that to exit less you can hit q or Q or :q or :Q or ZZ. confusing at best. i've been a linux user for about seven years now, and that was the first time i really realized how arcane some of the commands are. i guess i'm just really used to it by now.
Okay, I'll bite. In response to 3, maybe an example of a feature they would have liked to do, rather than an over-inflated "yes". In 4, the bit at the end about tabbed browsing and NetCaptor was unprofessional, and just sounded like a pot-shot rather than something substantive. 5, he made it sound like he was going the professional route and not taking a stab at Firefox, then he goes ahead and stabs anyway (although I personally don't know what he's talking about). 6, he basically blames the problem on some other team at Microsoft, then shifts the focus to a completely different problem. Not cool. In 7, well, he just ignores the whole question and babbles about some other questions that he does have the answer too. It would have been a lot better if he had just said "I don't really know, let's move on" instead of blatantly trying to outwit the reader. Number 8, he once again ignores the question, shifts the focus to something else, and says "Oh yeah, try these guys out, they're great!" at the end. 9, he dances around the real issues that the question is trying to address and instead points out the usual "ACID2 isn't anything special!" mantra that seems to be going around, then fumbles around with the actual semantic meaning of CSS standards (CSS2? CSS3?) instead of just answering the question and taking "CSS standard" to mean what everyone else in the world means by that. So in conclusion, I really wouldn't have had a problem with one or two questions being danced around, but seven out of ten? C'mon.
I was going to moderate on this article, but I just could resist the urge to post...
So in reading his responses to the above questions, the thought struck me that this guy is a really smooth-talking PR kinda guy. Most of his answers boiled down to either "yes" or "no" with a bunch of quasi-technical words thrown in for good measure, or he completely avoided the question and either rambled about some other random crap or answered a completely different question instead. Methinks this guy (based solely on the responses posted here, mind you) belongs in the PR department, rather than heading up a software creation department. But then again, perhaps it is a common prerequisite to working as a manager at MS to have mad doublespeak skillz.
- Super Mario World + AllStars (SNES)
- Zelda III (SNES)
- Chrono Trigger (SNES)
- Chrono Cross (PS1)
- Final Fantasy VIII (PS1)
Mario is great. I've pretty much got all the games (save for 2, it's odd) memorized, especially Super Mario World. I can mindlessly get through that game, get all 96 levels, get 99 lives, get through Special, etc. and die maybe five times. Zelda I can usually sit down and play for a couple hours, but I usually get bored before beating the game. Chrono Trigger brings back so many memories, it's just great. Same with Chrono Cross, the storylines are just so interesting. And Final Fantasy VIII was my only PS1 game for a long time, so I actually enjoy it more than the other Final Fantasies (sorry, I know that's sacrilege).Summary: "Blah blah blah, I'm more pretentious than you."
fstab and grub.conf? Seriously? The default fstab that's installed is perfectly usable, only thing that needs to change is the device paths and the filesystem types. And if you're installing by following the installation guide (which is not optional), it shows you exactly what to type into grub.conf, again all you have to know is the device paths. xorg.conf is easy, run X -configure, copy the resulting file over to /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and run. If you've got an nVidia or ATI card, you'll need to change maybe two-three lines. Again, if you are reading along in the guide, it shouldn't be that difficult. I would never copy configuration files straight over between distros, there's too much chance that they might not work at all.
I fail to see how "Do it the Gentoo way or you're out of luck" can possibly be a detrimental quality. It's Gentoo, so you do things the Gentoo way. If you wanted to do things the Debian or Redhat way, you'd install Debian or Redhat. And seriously, people should really stop judging the quality of a Linux distro by how easy/hard the installer is perceived to be. There's a lot more to it than just that.
I think one reason we haven't seen too many consumer-grade 10000 rpm drives is because, as far as I have experienced, they're really damn loud. I can't imagine a non-geek being happy with a drive whose spinning noise drowns out the people in the room talking to each other.
What about those of us out here in reality who don't buy 50 games per console? I've owned at least one console from every generation since the Atari, and that was the one I probably owned the most games for, about 20. Since then, there's been this great thing called renting that, at least for me, is much more attractive. Especially with Blockbuster's no late fees, I can get a game for less than $7 for a month, play the hell out of it every day, and then take it back. Sure, if I feel like playing again later I'll have to re-rent it, but for anything other than a hardcore RPG a month is usually plenty of time to not only beat the game, but explore most of the various nooks and crannies as well. There's no way in hell I'll be buying a PS3 for more than $250, so I guess I'll just have to wait a few years. By that time, there'll actually be a lot of good games to play, so I can justify it. Whereas, the Wii costs less than that now, and probably even less in a year or so. Definitely something that's easier to stomach, for me at least.
But I wouldn't buy a 360 at 360 prices. Or a PS3 at PS3 prices. In fact, pretty much most of the people I know (not "hardcore" gamers, but people who probably play 1-2 new games per month) would never dream of spending more than $200 on a console unless it had something they absolutely can't live without on it. So far, nothing on either the 360 or the PS3 is looking that way, and there are already several games on the Wii that I am more than excited about. Plus, like an earlier poster mentioned, I have a family and kids that could really do with the extra $600 worth of food rather than a huge, do-everything-except-play-good-games black box.
Okay, I'm really sick of hearing people compare computers to consumer appliances. That comparison right there is IMHO directly responsible for most of the problems with computers nowadays. If people would stop looking at a computer like it's just a big black box that does magic stuff, and maybe stop to understand things just a little bit, probably 90% of spyware and popup ads would cease to be effective. I'm not advocating that Grandma needs to know commandline stuff or anything, but one thing that would help a lot of people out tremendously is simply to understand three things: 1) the notion of what an application is; 2) the difference between a web page and an application; and 3) a basic understanding of the file system. If users could look at a popup and notice that it has that little title bar up on top, they would realize that it's a web page rather than a real system-message-type-thing. And if users could understand the *VERY* simple layout of a file system (cmon, it works EXACTLY like a filing cabinet, what exactly is so confusing?), they might not lose their files all the time and other such nonsense.
</rant>
Have you actually heard any of Fripp's soundscapes? You'd be hard put to call them 'guitar riffs'. Very atmospheric, melodic, beautiful sounds, in fact it's hard to believe he actually makes his music with a guitar at all.
> Any religion that claims to be the 'only religion' is obviously false. You'd have to be a half-wit to miss that logical fallacy.
This doesn't make sense to me. It seems that if a religion did not claim to be the 'only religion', then why would any of its members cling to it at all? After all, if Christianity was just 'one of many' ways to God, why would people have any incentive to remain Christian? It makes more sense to infer (at least if you believe in a certain religion) that your religion must be the 'only religion', otherwise the central tenets of what 'religion' is fail.
Dude, the whole argument was about the fact that there is no MPAA lawsuit. The suit you're looking at does not, in fact, involve the MPAA in any way. RTFA, man, it talks about the fact that a bunch of individual corporations, like Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., got together and sued him without the MPAA's interference. Therefore, any reference to the MPAA suing LokiTorrent.com is a falsehood, as they were not actually involved in any suit. Or at least that's what the article says, whether or not it's the truth is another matter.
I think it's interesting that the entity Google replied directly to this editorial. Am I to believe, then, that Google has taken on a life of its own, and is now a living, speaking being, rather than just a corporate entity?
Really? Because as far as I can tell by all the information put out there by the pharmaceutical companies, birth control pills work by preventing the egg from ever being released, thus not allowing it to be fertilized. How this can be construed as abortion is beyond me.
okay, well, at least the first article makes no mention at all about "potential". this article basically points out something that should be glaringly common sense: if you use x (be it weed, alcohol, nicotine, caffiene), you are more likely to use more of x in the future. wow. and we pay people to do these studies? the second article links long-term cannibis use to slowed/impaired brain activity. i don't think anybody disputes that. the thing is though, that NO ONE CARES. the issue is not whether abusing weed is harmful. it is quite obvious that over the long term it is, as is abusing absolutely anything. there are many, many cases where people have abused caffiene and have permanently hurt their heart and such like. yet caffiene still remains perfectly legal. the issue here is whether making weed legal will reduce the damage it causes. i, for one, think it will. hell, just look at the time in history when alcohol was illegal: that was some of the worst years the us ever had. i propose that weed should be just as legal as tobacco: 18, and regulated. sure, for a few years, there might some issues, but then things will start to even out. for most people, it will lose the appeal it had when it was illegal. and for the ones who continue to abuse it, not much will change, except where they buy it. some people will abuse drugs no matter what. but a lot of people will use some common sense and not do that. alcohol is abused all the time, yet it is legal, because history proved that making it illegal was far more harmful than just punishing those who do stupid things while drinking.
Does anyone have any serious numbers on how many AIX machines are out there? Do people even use AIX?
You know what's funny (and a bit scary)? I didn't have WMP > 6 installed since about two years ago when I put win98 on this box. I didn't see any reason to, since I could just download the WM7/8 codecs and use them with WMP6. But just the other day, I came across a WM9 file I wanted to view, and bam, had to download WMP9, as WMP6 just refused to handle it. Pretty sleazy shit, since there's no real technical reason it shouldn't be able to. One thing: when I do buy my own 32 gigahertz 16 processor machine with 8 gig of ram (which will be in like 20 years when I can afford it on top of paying rent...), could I still not turn off TCPA and boot Linux anyway? Of course, if I can't connect to the net, that would really suck. Perhaps somebody can pry the EEPROM off a mobo, download the code, reverse engineer it, re-flash it, and put the chip back in? I assume there has to be some sort of code running in the BIOS that provides hooks to the TPM chip. So, why not modify those hooks so that whenever any application asks for authorization, the BIOS just returns true, no matter what? It sucks since every single revision of a board will have a different BIOS, but haven't hobbyists been doing that with the PS2 and the XBox with some success for some time now? Man, I have got to stop rambling so much...
Thank you for clarifying the relationship between TCPA and Palladium. That makes a bit more sense now. Now another question: can the TPA be used at all without the root authority crap? In other words, could a Linux driver be written just to shift all of the encryption over to that chip, thus speeding up SSH and such? I don't know all that much about kernel hacking, so I'm just pondering here. It seems that the TCPA faq seems to say that would work, but I don't know. Still, I'm not sure I understand why everyone is so aghast at Microsoft doing the same thing they've always been doing: namely leveraging their market share to try to get rid of competitors. As it is, I dual boot Win98 and Gentoo Linux, using Windows as little as possible, and Wine/WineX when I can. I dislike Windows very much, but I use it (as I suspect most people do) for a few applications that I really like (Cool Edit Pro, Photoshop, Revalver, Flash, Warcraft III). In the future, if indeed somehow Microsoft manages to retrofit all copies of Windows98 to use Palladium (doubtful), and I can no longer use it without MS controlling my machine, then I won't. I'll just make do without it, and write my own apps. I think rather than campaigning against TCPA/Palladium, perhaps we should start a campaign to help users remember that old Windows versions (98SE-2K-XP) don't have Palladium, and pretty much can't ever have it. Not only this, but they still run just fine, and all the software you might want will run on them. Sure, someone might laugh at me running Win98 on a 3GHz machine (dude, that's so five years ago...), but it works, right? And I think that's an equation that even Joe Average can understand, especially given the number of non-techies I know that refuse to upgrade (not worth the hassle, it still works well enough for me, etc.). So anyway, I'm digressing a bit here, but the gist of what I'm saying is that I think perhaps Microsoft underestimates the intelligence of the ordinary user. If users are informed of Palladium's true intentions (which is what we are trying to do), and also informed that there's really no particular need to upgrade at all (better yet, use Linux :), then I think users can figure out for themselves what to do. What I'm leaving out of this equation is future application developement. I wonder, then, if Photoshop 8.0 will require Palladium so nobody can download it on those 0-day WaReZ sites? Or whether Warcraft IV will require TCPA-enabled cd-drives so you can't just copy the cd and install it somewhere else? This is what bugs me. Of course, the fun thing is, even if all of this happened, it would only be about three weeks till some group of l33t hAX0Rs cracks the code and releases AMIBIOS-3.2-TCPA-PALLADIUM-FIXED-RAZOR1911.zip onto the internet...of course, by that time, even WinZIP will be TCPA-aware, and refuse to unzip the file...so you'll just unzip it in Linux to a bootable floppy, disable TCPA in the BIOS so you can boot from the "untrusted" floppy, and flash it to hell...unless...oh nevermind.