Palladium. Gee, sounds...'great' *whimper*

[andrewas]

My feelings on this require words that Ziroc specificaly posted should not be used here. Of course theres no way any competent and honest government would let this bill through. In other words, were screwed.

Its also not practical for the majority still on 56K pay-per-minue dialup. Honest broadband users dont get hurt all that much by it - at least if you dont mind government computers storing what your running and posibly what your doing with it.

Pirates of course simply work around it. Modify a fritz chip and record the decryption key. Sell modified chips that either connect to a pirate server or get keys from hard drive. Lots of ways around it. Its not even substantialy harder han what they did to chip the PS2.

[The Hunter of Jahanna]

Im not worried. If this does come to pass you can cook the "Fritz chip" with a little bit of extra voltage, no chip , no problem. You can also write protect all of your programs. It a pain , but it will prevent their deletion. Also , like the article says , someone could crack the encryption. Some hacker out there with more time than most will probably take his digital sharpie marker to this thing the second it is released. All the rest of us will have to do is watch and wait. THere is also option 3 ,switch to linux!! It takes a genius to realize the simplicity of linux and how it kills windows in every way.

[Thoran]

It's just not likely to be an issue imo. With the open source community out there there's no way M$ can dictate terms of the next genereration OS so heavy handedly. Certainly they can continue to slip stuff in edgewise... but when you add it piecemeal it provides ample time to defeat the more onerous aspects. As far as defeating mass pirating they're much better off continuing allong the path they're on... providing all updates online and tightening the security links that allow users to GET those updates. The base software is going to be pirated, there's no way to avoid it, but by providing OS enhancements and upgrades through the web update mechanism they can (and likely will) start shipping crippleware that needs components downloaded accross the net to function.

[Morgeruat]

Originally posted by RevRuby: i once believed microsoft's "evil" exsisted only in the blue screen and windows xp. i am no longer disillusioned. i don;t play many games so mac would probably be my best bet. although i know some ppl experienced with linux....

IIRC there is a windows environment emulator available for Linux (no it doesn't destabilize it to the point where it crashes constantly, like windows, but it allows you to run windows only games in Linux, or other windows specific programs) of course I may have misunderstood my source...

[Vaskez]

Yeah I also have my doubts as to whether this will take off. I mean MS will try...I mean read this:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/f...alladiumwp.asp

and don't they make it sound so positive? But the guy who wrote that other article is right.
I don't see how MS expect to profit in the long run though? Millions of users will simply not buy Fritz chip machines or Windows. They will switch to Linux or use Macs/ Solaris/Silicon Graphics PCs instead. Smaller software companies will begin producing more software for these platforms as they see a demand for it and I will gladly pay for an alternative to MS. The time when people are swapping to the new platform and there is not much software for it will hopefully be short. Already much software is being produced in Windows AND Linux versions.

[Vaskez]

For now, I'm not gonna do anything except be more cautious with MS products. I'll switch Outlook express for Pine....etc....or simply block all MS products access to the net that don't specifically need it (using firewall).