The New York Times is reporting that 20,000 cases in 10 countries were brought against file-sharers in Europe, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).
OMGWTF, the first time I read it as "according to the International Federation of the Pornographic Industry (IFPI)" !!!
Is there some "killer app" that has some functionality that requires in some way what Aero has to offer?
Nope, but you can be sure Microsoft will try to come up with a whole bunch of those.
If (when) they fail, you can also be sure some extremely vicious virus affecting anything but Vista will be unleashed upon the world, purely coincidentally reaching its peak during the week of Vista SP1's release.
And if that doesn't do the trick, a brutal Linux-usin' nerdy-lookin' evil-plottin' hacker might just steal parts of XP SP2's source code (say, for Notepad) and cause widespread FUD noise regarding XP's compromised security.
I understand your concern. However, I've been able to compare several otherwise (almost) identical Dell Latitude laptops, differing only in the graphics card and display size (14 vs 15). The video adapters are a GF4 4200 go (32 mb), a comparable Radeon 9000 (32 mb), and an Intel 9XX (XX = can't remember). The first two offer performance orders of magnitude better than the Intel. When you activate the power management options and set them to highest saving, however, the GF4 laptop has only a very slighly shorter battery life, and that could also be display size difference. It was no scientific benchmark by any means, but it's my impression that with power management you can switch between good performance and low power consumption on a "good" video card, while with the Intel you're stuck in low-power mode indefinitely. (I couldn't test the Radeon laptop for battery life though.)
Now if only the power-saving magic would run on Linux too:(...
I see three things resulting from this, and all three are good:
1. Old machines that won't run Vista well will be phased out with dramatically lowered prices. So if you're looking for a cheap average computer that runs any OS beside Vista, you'll have a lot of cheap options.
2. Because of the whole Aero interface noise (the toughest part of Vista in terms of system requirements), we're finally going to see mainstream laptop manufacturers putting reasonable videocards in laptops. As it currently stands, it's extremely difficult to find a reasonable laptop with a reasonable (= can play Half-life 2 just fine or better) video card in a sane price range. Right now if you want a good (not even the best) video card, you have to buy a high-end laptop which will cost you a lot, at least in Europe.
3. Behind the ubercool Aero, Vista sounds like XP with a few bugs fixed. Many people with less than high-end computers will be disappointed because they won't be able to run Aero, and will see little reason to upgrade to Vista. Now I finally have a "n00b-obvious" good argument to convinve them to swtich to Linux:). With a little luck Xgl or something similar will be a fact within an year or so, when Vista is out. And that thing will allow an ubercool desktop experience on significantly less spectacular video hardware.
This last sentence requires a clarification: Whether Linux's desktop will be able to look better than Vista's will remain to be seen. Probably not at first. I've seen Vista screenshots, and it does look amazingly beautiful, for the most part. The lower requirements, however, are there: Xgl runs beautifully on a 32mb laptop videocard (GF4), while Aero won't, judging from what I've read around the Internet.
I guess I'll be the one who dares to ask it: What are the key differences between FreeBSD and Linux? (I'm mostly interested in the technical ones.)
To me, a full-time Linux user, FreeBSD remains as that alternative exotic Unix thingy, which (because of Linux's greateness) has no reason to exist whatsoever. Disclaimer: I know I'm extremely wrong here, but I just don't know why and I hope someone will enlighten me in a friendly tone.
To put it simply: Given the existence of Linux, a technically superb and free as in speech OS, why would anyone be interested in FreeBSD [I hope you forgive me;)]?
1. Porting for another processor in this case woudl still require porting to other OS as well.
2. Who's saying anything aobut porting? Apple don't have the source code to every MS Windows app out there. I was talking about having precompiles binary Win32 code work on the different CPU / OS. When it's just the OS, it's very realistic (Wine has shown that!), but when you have a radically different CPU, binary compatibility becomes next to impossible.
Ever wondered home come popular Linux apps run on anything with a CPU inside? It's because that 0.003 percent of the population that actually have [weird device here] are able to get the code and port the app, rather than be stuck with binary simulation / virtualization.
One way Apple has survived through the yars of Microsoft monopoly (besides obivously better software) is that it has able to make its system very interoperable (as much as possible) with Windows in terms of file formats and protocols. Apple has phased-out some of its own in favor of the widely used (and not necessarily better) ones.
The single biggest incompatibility has been applications, and the single biggest reason has been the fundamentally different processor. With that out of the way, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple is seriously considering helping Windows apps run on OS X. Then it would have the best of both worlds - Unix-like (Darwin) codebase and Windows app compatibility.
So the fact that "Apple has now committed to Windows-based performance testing" is hardly surprising.
WTF?! The latency ( != speed ) of a certain brain subsystem is NOT brain speed. Why? Because, as far as I know, brain speed is not defined! That's like measuring computer speed: you could measure the performance of the computer/brain at a given task but that says nothing about its performance on a different task. What is computer speed? The frequency of the CPU, the efficiency of the CPU, the input/output throughput, or the RAM latency? The same problem holds for defining brain speed as well.
Besides, being a somewhat experienced programmer (and by no means a guru), I could write the same program and release it for free (given the same amount of probably freely available scientific knowledge and a month or two of time). Why charge $500? If you ask me, they want to cover their rather low production costs with 5 sales or so...
Also, what's that nonsense about improving something by testing it? Short of the exercise performed during the test, this makes no sense whatsoever!
So... Just like very other update to a mature platform, then ?
You probably meant "broken", not "mature". The proportion of problems that get fixed to the problems that don't is still too small to call it a "reliable" pplatform anyway. You won't believe how amny times some of my less computer-knowledgable friends or clients are afraid to apply a Windows Update patch because they (rightfully) fear that it will break more things than it might fix. (You could believe, if you stopped blindly ignoring every argument against your favorite defective OS.) To such worries I answer by teliing them it's better to upgrade anyway, and rather often, they prove me wrong.
Really ? What's the standard API for a "unix" GUI application ? How about using audio devices ? Which API should I use to make sure my hardware driver compiles on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and OS X without modifications or special cases ?
You can choose any of QT, GTK+, WXWidgets, Motif, and more. All of them will work, so pick whichever one you like best for whatever reason. For audio, you could use either ALSA or OpenAL for precise control, or Xine or GStreamer if you need multimedia features. Again, all will work. For drivers, I do not have enough knowledge to tell you (not that you want to hear me), but there's a good chance the situation is similar there too.
And is basically useless (not to mention largely ignored) for anything except trivial command line applications.
Heck, it's not at all uncommon to find trivial open source "unix" applications that only work on x86 Linux machines with particular versions of glibc.
Most "cross platform" unix source code doesn't compile on a wide range of platforms because of "standards", it does so because of the amount of work done by things like autoconf and make.
It's better to have a low-leve API that does little but does it so well that it won't need to be obsoleted by a fix 2 years from now. That way, one can (and has, more than once) build a reliable API on top of it for more complex operations. That's why the above-mentioned GUI and audio APIs are so stable as well. Autoconf and make are an automated system to adjust a generic package to the specifics of a system that is potentially different from the one next to it. These differences are not an inherent flaw. They stem from something called "choice", which I'm afraid you may not be able to grasp.
Jeez. One of the biggest hurdles to wider commercial adoption of Linux is the sheer volume of different APIs (many of which all do essentially the same thing), and you're here trying to say there's no such problem at all ?
This is not because having alternative APIs, which all work together, is bad. It's because most IT businesses think in Windows-terms - vendor lock-in and no choice whatsoever. "Unix" systems, as you call them, are not a replacement for Widnows, but an alternative, and consequently do certain things differently. Try this page for a better explanation.
Windows APIs replace and eventually obsolete each other. Linux (and Unix) APIs coexist. You can keep using the old one despite the others that coexist on that system. The guy next door might like the other one better, and use that despite the one you use is right there. You know, choice.
So... Just like every other commercial vendor ?
Microsoft has a long history of perturbing open standardts into proprietary ones to achoeve vednor lock-in. Some other vednors doing the same practise does not excuse Microsoft.
Heck, Vista will still support Win16 on 32-bit x86, an API that's around twenty years old.
Have you ever considered that this could be a problem? Sometimes in order to evolve, something has to change and drop support for obsolete technology. (There goes one more argument for having alternative APIs: if one does evolve and break some very old version of itself, it won't break too much.
I am wondering if Microsoft is equating security with product activation security.
Well, duh! What other kind of security could there be?! Don't expect that much innovation from a company which gives its OS a name for each minor point release. Please, be reasonable!
You'll all see what happens when I trademark "The"! That way, in the (TM) future you'll all have to pay me rolaylties for the (TM) use of the (TM) word "the" (TM) in any of the (TM) sentences you ever write or speak! The (TM) profits will be endless! All the (TM) people in the (TM) world will depend on the (TM) decision I make about their use of the (TM) world "the" (TM)!! Ah, the (TM) future....
I just saw Ghost In The Shell, and now I get to read this?! This is getting creepy...
BTW, will alcohol-powered muscles suffer from hangover the next morning? If not, I want my head replaced with one of these, please. And do it quietly, thank you!
But frankly I like the sound of "RE" a lot more than "RW". Repeat after me: "Bee Dee Ree" That's a lot shorter than "Bee Dee Arr Duh Bull You"
No, that is a lot shorter than "Bee Dee Aarrrrgghhh Dubya";)
The drive will be able to write to 25GB and 50GB BD-RE (rewritable) and BD-R (write once) discs. Sony will start selling 25GB BD-RE and BD-R discs in April for $20 and $25 respectively
Why the hell didn't they call the rewriteable discs BD-RW?! Has anyone heard of the work "consistency"? Now I have to explain to everyone that BD-RE is like CD-RW or DVD-RW, but for Blue Ray. Great work on the customer confusion front!
Microsot is not happy. Do you really believe they dropped EFI booting from Vista because they couldn't do it? Yeah, right.
Say I want to buy a Mac to dual-boot both systems. All Macs come with OSX, so by buying my new Mac I've bought that too. I turn it on, check it out, and suddenly I see a better OS than Windows up and running right away. I get to like it and I never buy that Windows license and don't dual boot after all, happily knowing that I could do it if it ever became necessary.
If Windows didn't run on that Mac, I'd never buy that Mac in the first place and would most likely stick to the usual PC/Windows combination. In other words, Microsoft would get my money.
(That's of course assuming I were a typical non-geek user. If I were to speak for myself, I might hesitate about the hardware (Macs look awesome!) but the software would be clearly GNU/Linux.)
Short answer: NO.
Long answer: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
On a serious note, CDs are free of (effective) DRM. When I buy an overpriced CD, I know I can play it forever, on anything, in any format of my choice. I ultimately ge the ability to listen to that music for life. I often do not (or will not, soon) ge that with an overpriced music file.
Quality is also an issue. Tell what percentage of the online music shops give away lossless music files?
CDs also are a physical object. It's important: I love the excitement of just holding that cool-looking disc of my favorite band's new album, impatient to get home and listen to it! Also, CDs can be given around as presents: compare "Happy birthday, Maria, this is the new Edguy album, you'll love it!" to "Happy birthday, Maria, this is a tiny slip of paper with a gift-certificate / unlock-code / download-coupon for the new Edguy album, you'll love it after you download it and burn on this Vertabim CD-R!". See my point?
Besides, I just love shiny things. No, the CD is alive and kicking!
This is technically a great idea, and the right way to go! However:
I may sound like a broken record here, but think about DRM. An online download could easily require authentication and even automated patching to play each time (especially on a closed hardware platform). Steam, anyone? This esentially means that whether you can play a game or not is entirely up to the mercy of whoever flips the switch somewhere out there.
This will never happen, you say. What about the following: 1. Can Sony find a reason why you shouldn't be allowed play the game? Forced obsoletion for instance? Yes. 2. Does Sony even need a reason to prevent you from playing? No. 3. Can Sony break the game with a patch that you'll be forced to install? Yes. 4. Can Sony be trusted to implement fair and reliable DRM? Hell, yeah! Right!
That's why this technology is dangerous as it is cool.
Slashdot Mirror
The New York Times is reporting that 20,000 cases in 10 countries were brought against file-sharers in Europe, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).
OMGWTF, the first time I read it as "according to the International Federation of the Pornographic Industry (IFPI)" !!!
Is there some "killer app" that has some functionality that requires in some way what Aero has to offer?
Nope, but you can be sure Microsoft will try to come up with a whole bunch of those.
If (when) they fail, you can also be sure some extremely vicious virus affecting anything but Vista will be unleashed upon the world, purely coincidentally reaching its peak during the week of Vista SP1's release.
And if that doesn't do the trick, a brutal Linux-usin' nerdy-lookin' evil-plottin' hacker might just steal parts of XP SP2's source code (say, for Notepad) and cause widespread FUD noise regarding XP's compromised security.
I mean, you never know...
I understand your concern. However, I've been able to compare several otherwise (almost) identical Dell Latitude laptops, differing only in the graphics card and display size (14 vs 15). The video adapters are a GF4 4200 go (32 mb), a comparable Radeon 9000 (32 mb), and an Intel 9XX (XX = can't remember). The first two offer performance orders of magnitude better than the Intel. When you activate the power management options and set them to highest saving, however, the GF4 laptop has only a very slighly shorter battery life, and that could also be display size difference. It was no scientific benchmark by any means, but it's my impression that with power management you can switch between good performance and low power consumption on a "good" video card, while with the Intel you're stuck in low-power mode indefinitely. (I couldn't test the Radeon laptop for battery life though.)
:( ...
Now if only the power-saving magic would run on Linux too
I see three things resulting from this, and all three are good:
:). With a little luck Xgl or something similar will be a fact within an year or so, when Vista is out. And that thing will allow an ubercool desktop experience on significantly less spectacular video hardware.
1. Old machines that won't run Vista well will be phased out with dramatically lowered prices. So if you're looking for a cheap average computer that runs any OS beside Vista, you'll have a lot of cheap options.
2. Because of the whole Aero interface noise (the toughest part of Vista in terms of system requirements), we're finally going to see mainstream laptop manufacturers putting reasonable videocards in laptops. As it currently stands, it's extremely difficult to find a reasonable laptop with a reasonable (= can play Half-life 2 just fine or better) video card in a sane price range. Right now if you want a good (not even the best) video card, you have to buy a high-end laptop which will cost you a lot, at least in Europe.
3. Behind the ubercool Aero, Vista sounds like XP with a few bugs fixed. Many people with less than high-end computers will be disappointed because they won't be able to run Aero, and will see little reason to upgrade to Vista. Now I finally have a "n00b-obvious" good argument to convinve them to swtich to Linux
This last sentence requires a clarification: Whether Linux's desktop will be able to look better than Vista's will remain to be seen. Probably not at first. I've seen Vista screenshots, and it does look amazingly beautiful, for the most part. The lower requirements, however, are there: Xgl runs beautifully on a 32mb laptop videocard (GF4), while Aero won't, judging from what I've read around the Internet.
I guess I'll be the one who dares to ask it: What are the key differences between FreeBSD and Linux? (I'm mostly interested in the technical ones.)
;)]?
To me, a full-time Linux user, FreeBSD remains as that alternative exotic Unix thingy, which (because of Linux's greateness) has no reason to exist whatsoever. Disclaimer: I know I'm extremely wrong here, but I just don't know why and I hope someone will enlighten me in a friendly tone.
To put it simply: Given the existence of Linux, a technically superb and free as in speech OS, why would anyone be interested in FreeBSD [I hope you forgive me
Two points:
1. Porting for another processor in this case woudl still require porting to other OS as well.
2. Who's saying anything aobut porting? Apple don't have the source code to every MS Windows app out there. I was talking about having precompiles binary Win32 code work on the different CPU / OS. When it's just the OS, it's very realistic (Wine has shown that!), but when you have a radically different CPU, binary compatibility becomes next to impossible.
Ever wondered home come popular Linux apps run on anything with a CPU inside? It's because that 0.003 percent of the population that actually have [weird device here] are able to get the code and port the app, rather than be stuck with binary simulation / virtualization.
One way Apple has survived through the yars of Microsoft monopoly (besides obivously better software) is that it has able to make its system very interoperable (as much as possible) with Windows in terms of file formats and protocols. Apple has phased-out some of its own in favor of the widely used (and not necessarily better) ones.
The single biggest incompatibility has been applications, and the single biggest reason has been the fundamentally different processor. With that out of the way, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple is seriously considering helping Windows apps run on OS X. Then it would have the best of both worlds - Unix-like (Darwin) codebase and Windows app compatibility.
So the fact that "Apple has now committed to Windows-based performance testing" is hardly surprising.
"focussing on the betterment of mankind" I'm laughing right now...
WTF?! The latency ( != speed ) of a certain brain subsystem is NOT brain speed. Why? Because, as far as I know, brain speed is not defined! That's like measuring computer speed: you could measure the performance of the computer/brain at a given task but that says nothing about its performance on a different task. What is computer speed? The frequency of the CPU, the efficiency of the CPU, the input/output throughput, or the RAM latency? The same problem holds for defining brain speed as well.
Besides, being a somewhat experienced programmer (and by no means a guru), I could write the same program and release it for free (given the same amount of probably freely available scientific knowledge and a month or two of time). Why charge $500? If you ask me, they want to cover their rather low production costs with 5 sales or so...
Also, what's that nonsense about improving something by testing it? Short of the exercise performed during the test, this makes no sense whatsoever!
So... Just like very other update to a mature platform, then ?
You probably meant "broken", not "mature". The proportion of problems that get fixed to the problems that don't is still too small to call it a "reliable" pplatform anyway. You won't believe how amny times some of my less computer-knowledgable friends or clients are afraid to apply a Windows Update patch because they (rightfully) fear that it will break more things than it might fix. (You could believe, if you stopped blindly ignoring every argument against your favorite defective OS.) To such worries I answer by teliing them it's better to upgrade anyway, and rather often, they prove me wrong.
Really ? What's the standard API for a "unix" GUI application ? How about using audio devices ? Which API should I use to make sure my hardware driver compiles on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and OS X without modifications or special cases ?
You can choose any of QT, GTK+, WXWidgets, Motif, and more. All of them will work, so pick whichever one you like best for whatever reason. For audio, you could use either ALSA or OpenAL for precise control, or Xine or GStreamer if you need multimedia features. Again, all will work. For drivers, I do not have enough knowledge to tell you (not that you want to hear me), but there's a good chance the situation is similar there too.
And is basically useless (not to mention largely ignored) for anything except trivial command line applications. Heck, it's not at all uncommon to find trivial open source "unix" applications that only work on x86 Linux machines with particular versions of glibc. Most "cross platform" unix source code doesn't compile on a wide range of platforms because of "standards", it does so because of the amount of work done by things like autoconf and make.
It's better to have a low-leve API that does little but does it so well that it won't need to be obsoleted by a fix 2 years from now. That way, one can (and has, more than once) build a reliable API on top of it for more complex operations. That's why the above-mentioned GUI and audio APIs are so stable as well. Autoconf and make are an automated system to adjust a generic package to the specifics of a system that is potentially different from the one next to it. These differences are not an inherent flaw. They stem from something called "choice", which I'm afraid you may not be able to grasp.
Jeez. One of the biggest hurdles to wider commercial adoption of Linux is the sheer volume of different APIs (many of which all do essentially the same thing), and you're here trying to say there's no such problem at all ?
This is not because having alternative APIs, which all work together, is bad. It's because most IT businesses think in Windows-terms - vendor lock-in and no choice whatsoever. "Unix" systems, as you call them, are not a replacement for Widnows, but an alternative, and consequently do certain things differently. Try this page for a better explanation.
Windows APIs replace and eventually obsolete each other. Linux (and Unix) APIs coexist. You can keep using the old one despite the others that coexist on that system. The guy next door might like the other one better, and use that despite the one you use is right there. You know, choice.
So... Just like every other commercial vendor ?
Microsoft has a long history of perturbing open standardts into proprietary ones to achoeve vednor lock-in. Some other vednors doing the same practise does not excuse Microsoft.
Heck, Vista will still support Win16 on 32-bit x86, an API that's around twenty years old.
Have you ever considered that this could be a problem? Sometimes in order to evolve, something has to change and drop support for obsolete technology. (There goes one more argument for having alternative APIs: if one does evolve and break some very old version of itself, it won't break too much.
I am wondering if Microsoft is equating security with product activation security.
Well, duh! What other kind of security could there be?! Don't expect that much innovation from a company which gives its OS a name for each minor point release. Please, be reasonable!
Didn't they do something like this when they sold (Q)DOS to IBM before they had anything? History does repeat itself :P
While many of us have drives > 200 gb in our desktops, laptop drives are still (on average) around 60 / 80.
Well, it doesn't have to be minor to be innovative. I found the list of new features impressive despite not being to understand half of it.
Besides, large releases are made up of many small releases, right? And we're not getting 2.7 or 2.8 anytime soon, so I might as well thank them now.
You'll all see what happens when I trademark "The"! That way, in the (TM) future you'll all have to pay me rolaylties for the (TM) use of the (TM) word "the" (TM) in any of the (TM) sentences you ever write or speak! The (TM) profits will be endless! All the (TM) people in the (TM) world will depend on the (TM) decision I make about their use of the (TM) world "the" (TM)!! Ah, the (TM) future....
I'm just writing this to congratulate and thank the Linux developer community on yet another innovative release.
That's all there is to my post - nothing interesting to say, just express my gratitude. Mod me down if you wish.
I just saw Ghost In The Shell, and now I get to read this?! This is getting creepy... BTW, will alcohol-powered muscles suffer from hangover the next morning? If not, I want my head replaced with one of these, please. And do it quietly, thank you!
But frankly I like the sound of "RE" a lot more than "RW". Repeat after me: "Bee Dee Ree" That's a lot shorter than "Bee Dee Arr Duh Bull You" No, that is a lot shorter than "Bee Dee Aarrrrgghhh Dubya" ;)
The drive will be able to write to 25GB and 50GB BD-RE (rewritable) and BD-R (write once) discs. Sony will start selling 25GB BD-RE and BD-R discs in April for $20 and $25 respectively
Why the hell didn't they call the rewriteable discs BD-RW?! Has anyone heard of the work "consistency"? Now I have to explain to everyone that BD-RE is like CD-RW or DVD-RW, but for Blue Ray. Great work on the customer confusion front!
Microsot is not happy. Do you really believe they dropped EFI booting from Vista because they couldn't do it? Yeah, right.
Say I want to buy a Mac to dual-boot both systems. All Macs come with OSX, so by buying my new Mac I've bought that too. I turn it on, check it out, and suddenly I see a better OS than Windows up and running right away. I get to like it and I never buy that Windows license and don't dual boot after all, happily knowing that I could do it if it ever became necessary.
If Windows didn't run on that Mac, I'd never buy that Mac in the first place and would most likely stick to the usual PC/Windows combination. In other words, Microsoft would get my money.
(That's of course assuming I were a typical non-geek user. If I were to speak for myself, I might hesitate about the hardware (Macs look awesome!) but the software would be clearly GNU/Linux.)
Gnome vs KDE flamewar starting in... 5...4...3...2...1...GO!!!
Are CDs dead?
Short answer: NO.
Long answer: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
On a serious note, CDs are free of (effective) DRM. When I buy an overpriced CD, I know I can play it forever, on anything, in any format of my choice. I ultimately ge the ability to listen to that music for life. I often do not (or will not, soon) ge that with an overpriced music file.
Quality is also an issue. Tell what percentage of the online music shops give away lossless music files?
CDs also are a physical object. It's important: I love the excitement of just holding that cool-looking disc of my favorite band's new album, impatient to get home and listen to it! Also, CDs can be given around as presents: compare "Happy birthday, Maria, this is the new Edguy album, you'll love it!" to "Happy birthday, Maria, this is a tiny slip of paper with a gift-certificate / unlock-code / download-coupon for the new Edguy album, you'll love it after you download it and burn on this Vertabim CD-R!". See my point?
Besides, I just love shiny things. No, the CD is alive and kicking!
I can't wait to drink my daily "Coca-cola" health potion! (oh the irony)
This is technically a great idea, and the right way to go! However:
I may sound like a broken record here, but think about DRM. An online download could easily require authentication and even automated patching to play each time (especially on a closed hardware platform). Steam, anyone? This esentially means that whether you can play a game or not is entirely up to the mercy of whoever flips the switch somewhere out there.
This will never happen, you say. What about the following:
1. Can Sony find a reason why you shouldn't be allowed play the game? Forced obsoletion for instance? Yes.
2. Does Sony even need a reason to prevent you from playing? No.
3. Can Sony break the game with a patch that you'll be forced to install? Yes.
4. Can Sony be trusted to implement fair and reliable DRM? Hell, yeah! Right!
That's why this technology is dangerous as it is cool.
Sure, just give it the usual 13 years or so to get stable.