Hardly anyone will care about all of that stuff. The point of buying a Linux-preload (for most people) is to save money on the OS. If you don't save much money, people will just go with the more familiar Linux box and pirate or download the software they need. For example, there are free office suites you can download and that other stuff is hardly relevant on an average end-users desktop box.
China now allows entrepreneurs in the "communist party". They are moving employees and businesses from the state sector to the private sector as quickly as possible. They are experimenting with village elections. In other words, they are trying to shed communism without imploding as the USSR did.
They want us D-E-A-D
Oh really? I've met hundreds of Chinese people and none of them seem to want us dead. I guess they hide their hatred well.
Why the HOLY FUCKING HELL are we selling them shit?
Mostly we are buying stuff from them, not selling to them. After all, we have money, they make cheap stuff.
ht after the USSR went down the tube and the nuke threat was gone we should have bombed the living hell out of them.
I'm just going to quit now. You're obviously not worth talking to.
In what sense is XDR "forwards compatible" with XML Schema? In the sense that you can rewrite all of that Microsoft-proprietary stuff into XML Schema if you care to put in the effort?
Unicode is owned by Unicode Incorporated [unicode.org] and all of it's documents and standarts are issued under a restrictive license [unicode.org] with a unilaeral change clause:
Have you looked at the copyrights for most standards? Try to get a free copy of the SGML or EDI standards? Unicode is wide open comparitively. Plus, if you're going to complain about vendor-owned consortia, you might as well whine about the W3C itself.
You're kidding, right? Maintaining large sets of textual information is one of the oldest problems. Companies expend a metric assload of time and
effort managing their information stores, from accounting to inventory to HR and on and on. Relational databases, with a few additional bits like form
builders and report generators, let companies do that more efficiently. Instant ROI. That's a really clear business case.
"do that more efficiently." Web services are intended to allow you to connect disparate systems together _more efficiently_. This is also one of the oldest problems. To me, it therefore has a very clear business case.
All of the examples you gave, ``integrate legacy systems, purchase syndicated content (like a Reuter's feed) in a standardized form, lower the cost of EDI and get more partners into the EDI game, etc,'' are already being done on large scales with other technologies. So one is left wondering how, exactly, web services technology will help anybody do those things better than they're currently doing them.
Before there were relational databases you could manage data also. But what made relational databases so interesting was a *standard model*, *standard syntax* and *standard API*. STANDARDS. There are all kinds of ad hoc ways to glue shit together. To a corporation, "ad hoc" means "expensive" because there are no economies of scale. The HR system uses CORBA, the CRM uses COM and corporate developers must be expert in both of them to build the bridge between them.
Web Services do not allow you to do anything that you couldn't do before them. Standards never do. There was distributed hypertext before the Web and databases before SQL. But when you move to standards you get huge economies of scale and Metcalfe multipliers. That said, the standards have to be right, and today they are not.
What potential gain can justify the expense and effort required to deploy that kind of technology in place of some other technology that we're already using now.
If you deploy it as a replacement for one other technology you were already using you probably don't get much benefit. If you deploy it as a replacement for six or ten or twenty different ways of sending data over sockets then you've got an economy of scale. That's a huge opportunity. Even though I'm not a big fan of RPC, I can see that there is no good reason to have four or five different and incompatible ways to do RPC. But I think that if you go BEYOND RPC you can actually get even greater economies of scale.
I said there's no business model for using them, either. You pointed out that there are software-to-software applications for web services technologies that I hadn't thought of, which I concede, but I'm still not sure that means there's a B-to-B or B-to-C business model that requires them.
But what does that matter? What business model follows naturally from relational databases? What business model follows naturally from C++? Web services are a technology. When the technology matures, most people will use them to support their existing business models, not to create new business models. Whatever your business, you can use them to integrate legacy systems, purchase syndicated content (like a Reuter's feed) in a standardized form, lower the cost of EDI and get more partners into the EDI game, etc.
Since when do technologies have to support a new and innovative business model?
No one is disputing that RPC over the wire has its uses. The point is that no one seems particularly interested in replacing CGI,CORBA,EDI or whatever they are using already with a half baked set of standards.
First, if you think that the web services standards (half-baked though they are) describe "RPC-over-the-wire" then you are quite out of date with respect to the standards. Second, the original poster argued that there is no *problem domain* for Web services. But businesses would demonstrably love to rip out EDI, which relies on proprietary networks and inscrutable, poorly extensible file formats and CORBA, which was never adopted by Microsoft systems and did not make serious inroads onto the mainframe or into the APIs for enterprise software applications. (does SAP expose CORBA interfaces? Siebel? JD Edwards?) The point of a standard is standardization. There are twenty different not-bad ways to do middleware. That's precisely the problem. Metcalfe's law only kicks in when there are one or two dominant ways.
What does this have to do with web services? These are print newsletters.
The point is that businesses will not hestitate to buy content, even if consumers will not. If constantly knowing the price of wheat in China is important to your business, you will happily buy that information from someone and will be doubly happy if the feed is using standardized formats rather than ad hoc ones. If you want existing examples, look at the billion dollar businesses dominated by Reuters and SWIFT. Those guys are moving to XML-based technologies. (I don't know for sure whether SOAP/WSDL)
How do web services solve this problem? Web services only expose existing functionality in a new way. You either have the code available or not. The transport and negotiation methods are not the limiting factor. Once again, there are already standards for doing this stuff.
Standards nobody is using. Neither CORBA nor EDI are widely deployed at even a fraction of the businesses in North America. Part of it is their technological approaches. Part of it is politics.
I am not claiming that SOAP/WSDL will necessarily succeed. I am making the point that there is in fact a multi-billion dollar pie sitting on the table and there is no question why major software companies want to try and cut it up.
Okay, that's a good point. I was only thinking of using web services protocols for connecting desktop applications to server applications. Connecting two server applications together with web services makes a lot more sense. Thanks for the clarification.
The name of the technology sort of invites confusion. Most people seem to agree that the name is more obfuscating than clarifying but nobody has the ability to change it!
But there's basically no model for web services other than pay-for-play. FooCorp could offer their quotes through a SOAP or XML-RPC service or something, but there'd be no way to get secondary revenue from it. They'd have to just charge for the content directly, which hasn't been a very successful model on the web so far.
One of the things Web Services are designed for is what EDI has been used for on private networks. The business model is "Ford says that if we aren't compliant they won't buy from us."
Furthermore, charging for content is very rare in the consumer web but not that rare in the commercial web. There are many extremely expensive newsletters (for example) that businesses are happy to pay for. Release 1.0, Gilder's rag, etc.
I'm just speculating here, but I think web services will be much more popular in intranets than in commercial settings on the web, assuming somebody comes up with something that can be done better with web services than with a regular browser-based web app or a Java app or something.
There is really no comparison with browser based apps. Web services are for solving problems that cannot be solved with browser based apps because they do not involve human interaction. You cannot integrate CRM and accounting systems with a browser-based app.
That all said, I happen to think that current web services standards are poor. The problem domain is real and there is real money in it. The proposed solutions are lacking.
That reminds me of the time the mathies took over alt.niggers. The new FAQ pointed out that the newsgroup name was an acronym for "Number theory, Integration, Graph theory, Group theory, Enumeration, Recursion, Set theory".
I agree that the "communicator" talk is a little weird. But I still think that this is cool. First, there is a distinct possibility that IP over 802.11 will become a wireless alternative to various kinds of monopolies or oligopolies: the small number of cell providers, the small number of broadband ISPs, etc. Paired with mesh networks, there is the possibility of building a peer-to-peer grid to replace the top-down wired grid.
Another cool thing is that end-to-end packet-based systems are incredibly flexible and have no per-minute charge. You could imagine a "dual-mode" phone (I guess we're up to four modes or something by now). It could make 802.11 calls when you are near a base station and cell phone calls when you are not.
Anything that pushes the expansion of the 802.11 network is cool with me!
Re:May I Make an Observation Here?
on
Is Linux Dead?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't know about any of you folks, but I'm getting sick of the dismissive connotations of "geek."
Ummm. He didn't say anything bad about geeks. He said that Linux appeals to them and not to typical desktop users yet. That's a given!
I can't believe how hard people are scanning this article looking for the tiniest slant so that they can feel victimized by MSNBC. Some other guy was ranting about how they put the words "open source" in quotes. Sheesh, get a grip.
This article smells like a trial balloon. "We'll invite in a reporter to say nice things about us and see what public response we get." We need to make it clear that putting Microsoft-designed security/DRM hardware in our boxes is not an option and will never be.
I guess all those misleading numbers that were inadvertantly slipped into every corner of the design are just too confusing
What Americans don't understand is that people in other parts of the world don't look at the numbers of their money. It isn't because they are innumerate. It's because when you have a stack of ten bills in your wallet you can tell how much money you have WITHOUT looking at the faces only by looking at the colour of the edges. This is much more efficient. American money is much slower and more error prone. This is slashdot. I shouldn't have to explain the value of additional vectors for information in a user interface. Pick up a copy of Tufte.
Re:What needs to happen...
on
ICANN Updates
·
· Score: 2
One domain one vote is not a good idea because of the bottom feeder domain squatters. They contribute nothing to the Internet but they own a lot of domain names. They could also skew the rules in ways that profit them and not us.
I would say that the rule should be that everyone with at least one domain name gets one vote. We can tell who is who (roughly) by using whois.
They're mild parodies of what seem to be mainstream views on Slashdot. You'll find lots and lots of people arguing, for example, that record companies are evil and all music should be given away free.
What does that have to do with anything? Record companies, free music, IBM. How are these things related?
People *love* to hear that IBM is doing work to support Linux, but that the same time don't remind them that IBM is a business. They don't want to hear that.
Who are you talking about? Please cite someone complaining about the fact that IBM is a business.
They like to think that IBM is doing this out of the goodness of its heart.
Who are you talking about? You're as bad as Joel. I've never heard anyone on Slashdot say anything remotely like this.
octet
jargon, networking: Eight bits. This term is used in networking, in preference to byte, because some systems use the term "byte" for things that are not 8 bits long.
(1995-03-03)
Re:Binary Distros Are Dead
on
Is RPM Doomed?
·
· Score: 2
If binary distros are dead, does this mean binary-only software packages are dead? And if so, does this mean that commercial developers will abandon Linux and go to platforms that are more disciplined about binary backwards and forwards compatibility?
But I do care when government sponsored research into software is used by companies to make money. Last I checked, I didn't give Sun/MS/et all my tax dollars to make them richer
Heaven forbid that a corporation should benefit from tax dollars and use that money to employ people, pay dividends to pensioners and pay taxes! Better that we put intellectual property off limits to them. That makes a lot more senes.
what would really bother me about the loss of rights over my own work wouldn't be so much the money, but the loss of control over the work. if I wrote a book and someone wanted to make a movie based on the book without any credit or input from me, they could. that would bother me. I know the current system doesn't protect entirely against this sort of thing, but any system replacing copyrights must take that into account. not everything is about money (just most things).
That's a good point. In the public interest we would want to maintain the intellectual property laws that still make sense in an Internet world. For instance, pretending to invent something that you just copied should be construed as fraud. Making this explicit in a post-copyright age might require new laws. Also, you can already use trademark law to protect the title of your work. After all, trademark law exists precisely to prevent cases where one entity pretends to be another.
Also, in the Internet age we can use technological mechanisms to help. www.titleofmybook.com can provide secure hashes for "authorized" distributions. But you can only do that if you release authorized digital distributions and few media companies will do that if they are still in the "strong copyright enforcement" mindset. I know someone who has a business that will involve helping people find the "real versions" of songs but of course the record companies won't help out because they like it when the fans download the wrong data.
I think lower prices and a lesser term for copyright should be the net result of the influence of electronic publishing. Beyond that, the balance will have swung too far in the other direction, and that is unfair to the authors, artists and musicians for whose benefit this *entire argument* is being discussed.
No, the reason we are having this argument today is because technology is progressing to the point where maintaining strong copyright enforcement will require one of a) a police state, or b) crippled hardware designed to protect the interests of copyright holders. I don't want to see either of those things happen, so I see strong copyright enforcement as a dead-end. Note that the issue is much bigger than the rights of copyright holders. It is about the rights of every last individual in our society to buy the computers we want and maintain the fair use rights we have had since the invention of copyright.
So let's presume that strong enforcement is dead. In that case, the cops can either 1) look the other way when the law is broken over and over, by ordinary people or 2) change the law or 3) convince ordinary people to obey the law on the "honour system," no matter what their common sense may tell them about the legitimacy of sharing with their friends and family. I think that only one of those options is practically feasible. Nevertheless, I am open to other suggestions.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are a libertarian, I am surprised that you support government-backed monopolies at all. After all, that's what IP is!
Hardly anyone will care about all of that stuff. The point of buying a Linux-preload (for most people) is to save money on the OS. If you don't save much money, people will just go with the more familiar Linux box and pirate or download the software they need. For example, there are free office suites you can download and that other stuff is hardly relevant on an average end-users desktop box.
They are C-O-M-M-U-N-I-S-T-S
China now allows entrepreneurs in the "communist party". They are moving employees and businesses from the state sector to the private sector as quickly as possible. They are experimenting with village elections. In other words, they are trying to shed communism without imploding as the USSR did.
They want us D-E-A-D
Oh really? I've met hundreds of Chinese people and none of them seem to want us dead. I guess they hide their hatred well.
Why the HOLY FUCKING HELL are we selling them shit?
Mostly we are buying stuff from them, not selling to them. After all, we have money, they make cheap stuff.
ht after the USSR went down the tube and the nuke threat was gone we should have bombed the living hell out of them.
I'm just going to quit now. You're obviously not worth talking to.
I was speaking with a Microsoft employee on the Schema team today. He reacted in horror to the view that XDR is "upwards compatible" with XML Schema.
In what sense is XDR "forwards compatible" with XML Schema? In the sense that you can rewrite all of that Microsoft-proprietary stuff into XML Schema if you care to put in the effort?
Unicode is owned by Unicode Incorporated [unicode.org] and all of it's documents and standarts are issued under a restrictive license [unicode.org] with a unilaeral change clause:
Have you looked at the copyrights for most standards? Try to get a free copy of the SGML or EDI standards? Unicode is wide open comparitively. Plus, if you're going to complain about vendor-owned consortia, you might as well whine about the W3C itself.
You're kidding, right? Maintaining large sets of textual information is one of the oldest problems. Companies expend a metric assload of time and
effort managing their information stores, from accounting to inventory to HR and on and on. Relational databases, with a few additional bits like form
builders and report generators, let companies do that more efficiently. Instant ROI. That's a really clear business case.
"do that more efficiently." Web services are intended to allow you to connect disparate systems together _more efficiently_. This is also one of the oldest problems. To me, it therefore has a very clear business case.
All of the examples you gave, ``integrate legacy systems, purchase syndicated content (like a Reuter's feed) in a standardized form, lower the cost of EDI and get more partners into the EDI game, etc,'' are already being done on large scales with other technologies. So one is left wondering how, exactly, web services technology will help anybody do those things better than they're currently doing them.
Before there were relational databases you could manage data also. But what made relational databases so interesting was a *standard model*, *standard syntax* and *standard API*. STANDARDS. There are all kinds of ad hoc ways to glue shit together. To a corporation, "ad hoc" means "expensive" because there are no economies of scale. The HR system uses CORBA, the CRM uses COM and corporate developers must be expert in both of them to build the bridge between them.
Web Services do not allow you to do anything that you couldn't do before them. Standards never do. There was distributed hypertext before the Web and databases before SQL. But when you move to standards you get huge economies of scale and Metcalfe multipliers. That said, the standards have to be right, and today they are not.
What potential gain can justify the expense and effort required to deploy that kind of technology in place of some other technology that we're already using now.
If you deploy it as a replacement for one other technology you were already using you probably don't get much benefit. If you deploy it as a replacement for six or ten or twenty different ways of sending data over sockets then you've got an economy of scale. That's a huge opportunity. Even though I'm not a big fan of RPC, I can see that there is no good reason to have four or five different and incompatible ways to do RPC. But I think that if you go BEYOND RPC you can actually get even greater economies of scale.
I said there's no business model for using them, either. You pointed out that there are software-to-software applications for web services technologies that I hadn't thought of, which I concede, but I'm still not sure that means there's a B-to-B or B-to-C business model that requires them.
But what does that matter? What business model follows naturally from relational databases? What business model follows naturally from C++? Web services are a technology. When the technology matures, most people will use them to support their existing business models, not to create new business models. Whatever your business, you can use them to integrate legacy systems, purchase syndicated content (like a Reuter's feed) in a standardized form, lower the cost of EDI and get more partners into the EDI game, etc.
Since when do technologies have to support a new and innovative business model?
No one is disputing that RPC over the wire has its uses. The point is that no one seems particularly interested in replacing CGI,CORBA,EDI or whatever they are using already with a half baked set of standards.
First, if you think that the web services standards (half-baked though they are) describe "RPC-over-the-wire" then you are quite out of date with respect to the standards. Second, the original poster argued that there is no *problem domain* for Web services. But businesses would demonstrably love to rip out EDI, which relies on proprietary networks and inscrutable, poorly extensible file formats and CORBA, which was never adopted by Microsoft systems and did not make serious inroads onto the mainframe or into the APIs for enterprise software applications. (does SAP expose CORBA interfaces? Siebel? JD Edwards?) The point of a standard is standardization. There are twenty different not-bad ways to do middleware. That's precisely the problem. Metcalfe's law only kicks in when there are one or two dominant ways.
What does this have to do with web services? These are print newsletters.
The point is that businesses will not hestitate to buy content, even if consumers will not. If constantly knowing the price of wheat in China is important to your business, you will happily buy that information from someone and will be doubly happy if the feed is using standardized formats rather than ad hoc ones. If you want existing examples, look at the billion dollar businesses dominated by Reuters and SWIFT. Those guys are moving to XML-based technologies. (I don't know for sure whether SOAP/WSDL)
How do web services solve this problem? Web services only expose existing functionality in a new way. You either have the code available or not. The transport and negotiation methods are not the limiting factor. Once again, there are already standards for doing this stuff.
Standards nobody is using. Neither CORBA nor EDI are widely deployed at even a fraction of the businesses in North America. Part of it is their technological approaches. Part of it is politics.
I am not claiming that SOAP/WSDL will necessarily succeed. I am making the point that there is in fact a multi-billion dollar pie sitting on the table and there is no question why major software companies want to try and cut it up.
Okay, that's a good point. I was only thinking of using web services protocols for connecting desktop applications to server applications. Connecting two server applications together with web services makes a lot more sense. Thanks for the clarification.
The name of the technology sort of invites confusion. Most people seem to agree that the name is more obfuscating than clarifying but nobody has the ability to change it!
But there's basically no model for web services other than pay-for-play. FooCorp could offer their quotes through a SOAP or XML-RPC service or something, but there'd be no way to get secondary revenue from it. They'd have to just charge for the content directly, which hasn't been a very successful model on the web so far.
One of the things Web Services are designed for is what EDI has been used for on private networks. The business model is "Ford says that if we aren't compliant they won't buy from us."
Furthermore, charging for content is very rare in the consumer web but not that rare in the commercial web. There are many extremely expensive newsletters (for example) that businesses are happy to pay for. Release 1.0, Gilder's rag, etc.
I'm just speculating here, but I think web services will be much more popular in intranets than in commercial settings on the web, assuming somebody comes up with something that can be done better with web services than with a regular browser-based web app or a Java app or something.
There is really no comparison with browser based apps. Web services are for solving problems that cannot be solved with browser based apps because they do not involve human interaction. You cannot integrate CRM and accounting systems with a browser-based app.
That all said, I happen to think that current web services standards are poor. The problem domain is real and there is real money in it. The proposed solutions are lacking.
More complete account for the history books. http://isomorphisms.addr.com/blogger/2000_06_18_ar chive.html#381702
That reminds me of the time the mathies took over alt.niggers. The new FAQ pointed out that the newsgroup name was an acronym for "Number theory, Integration, Graph theory, Group theory, Enumeration, Recursion, Set theory".
I agree that the "communicator" talk is a little weird. But I still think that this is cool. First, there is a distinct possibility that IP over 802.11 will become a wireless alternative to various kinds of monopolies or oligopolies: the small number of cell providers, the small number of broadband ISPs, etc. Paired with mesh networks, there is the possibility of building a peer-to-peer grid to replace the top-down wired grid.
Another cool thing is that end-to-end packet-based systems are incredibly flexible and have no per-minute charge. You could imagine a "dual-mode" phone (I guess we're up to four modes or something by now). It could make 802.11 calls when you are near a base station and cell phone calls when you are not.
Anything that pushes the expansion of the 802.11 network is cool with me!
I don't know about any of you folks, but I'm getting sick of the dismissive connotations of "geek."
Ummm. He didn't say anything bad about geeks. He said that Linux appeals to them and not to typical desktop users yet. That's a given!
I can't believe how hard people are scanning this article looking for the tiniest slant so that they can feel victimized by MSNBC. Some other guy was ranting about how they put the words "open source" in quotes. Sheesh, get a grip.
This article smells like a trial balloon. "We'll invite in a reporter to say nice things about us and see what public response we get." We need to make it clear that putting Microsoft-designed security/DRM hardware in our boxes is not an option and will never be.
from the way it looks to me, this system will actually protect your priacy and provide a decent amount of security
What gives you this impression? Why would you trust Microsoft to get security right after getting it wrong so many times?
I guess all those misleading numbers that were inadvertantly slipped into every corner of the design are just too confusing
What Americans don't understand is that people in other parts of the world don't look at the numbers of their money. It isn't because they are innumerate. It's because when you have a stack of ten bills in your wallet you can tell how much money you have WITHOUT looking at the faces only by looking at the colour of the edges. This is much more efficient. American money is much slower and more error prone. This is slashdot. I shouldn't have to explain the value of additional vectors for information in a user interface. Pick up a copy of Tufte.
One domain one vote is not a good idea because of the bottom feeder domain squatters. They contribute nothing to the Internet but they own a lot of domain names. They could also skew the rules in ways that profit them and not us.
I would say that the rule should be that everyone with at least one domain name gets one vote. We can tell who is who (roughly) by using whois.
They're mild parodies of what seem to be mainstream views on Slashdot. You'll find lots and lots of people arguing, for example, that record companies are evil and all music should be given away free.
What does that have to do with anything? Record companies, free music, IBM. How are these things related?
People *love* to hear that IBM is doing work to support Linux, but that the same time don't remind them that IBM is a business. They don't want to hear that.
Who are you talking about? Please cite someone complaining about the fact that IBM is a business.
They like to think that IBM is doing this out of the goodness of its heart.
Who are you talking about? You're as bad as Joel. I've never heard anyone on Slashdot say anything remotely like this.
octet jargon, networking: Eight bits. This term is used in networking, in preference to byte, because some systems use the term "byte" for things that are not 8 bits long. (1995-03-03)
http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=ocIf binary distros are dead, does this mean binary-only software packages are dead? And if so, does this mean that commercial developers will abandon Linux and go to platforms that are more disciplined about binary backwards and forwards compatibility?
But I do care when government sponsored research into software is used by companies to make money. Last I checked, I didn't give Sun/MS/et all my tax dollars to make them richer
Heaven forbid that a corporation should benefit from tax dollars and use that money to employ people, pay dividends to pensioners and pay taxes! Better that we put intellectual property off limits to them. That makes a lot more senes.
what would really bother me about the loss of rights over my own work wouldn't be so much the money, but the loss of control over the work. if I wrote a book and someone wanted to make a movie based on the book without any credit or input from me, they could. that would bother me. I know the current system doesn't protect entirely against this sort of thing, but any system replacing copyrights must take that into account. not everything is about money (just most things).
That's a good point. In the public interest we would want to maintain the intellectual property laws that still make sense in an Internet world. For instance, pretending to invent something that you just copied should be construed as fraud. Making this explicit in a post-copyright age might require new laws. Also, you can already use trademark law to protect the title of your work. After all, trademark law exists precisely to prevent cases where one entity pretends to be another.
Also, in the Internet age we can use technological mechanisms to help. www.titleofmybook.com can provide secure hashes for "authorized" distributions. But you can only do that if you release authorized digital distributions and few media companies will do that if they are still in the "strong copyright enforcement" mindset. I know someone who has a business that will involve helping people find the "real versions" of songs but of course the record companies won't help out because they like it when the fans download the wrong data.
I think lower prices and a lesser term for copyright should be the net result of the influence of electronic publishing. Beyond that, the balance will have swung too far in the other direction, and that is unfair to the authors, artists and musicians for whose benefit this *entire argument* is being discussed.
No, the reason we are having this argument today is because technology is progressing to the point where maintaining strong copyright enforcement will require one of a) a police state, or b) crippled hardware designed to protect the interests of copyright holders. I don't want to see either of those things happen, so I see strong copyright enforcement as a dead-end. Note that the issue is much bigger than the rights of copyright holders. It is about the rights of every last individual in our society to buy the computers we want and maintain the fair use rights we have had since the invention of copyright.
So let's presume that strong enforcement is dead. In that case, the cops can either 1) look the other way when the law is broken over and over, by ordinary people or 2) change the law or 3) convince ordinary people to obey the law on the "honour system," no matter what their common sense may tell them about the legitimacy of sharing with their friends and family. I think that only one of those options is practically feasible. Nevertheless, I am open to other suggestions.