[geeks] Vista cost

Sun Jan 28 14:15:15 CST 2007

On Sun, Jan 28, 2007 at 02:28:46PM -0500, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:

> If I buy this and your company goes out of business in five years, how
> will I use it ten years from now? How will I authenticate when the
> authentication servers are gone, or I'm not on the network?

This has been answered a thousand times in the past. I don't agree
with the answer but it always has been, it's your problem, not ours.

A few days ago someone posted a link to a Lisa emulator. Buried in the
docs was the fact that each Lisa had a unique set of ROM chips, with a 
serial number encoded in them. Even the operating system (called Lisa
Office System) was keyed to the machine. If your Lisa died, or you moved
your hard drive to another machine (and there were external hard drives),
you had to re-install from floppies serialized to the current
computer to get it to boot.

To cut costs, the serial number in ROM idea was dropped for the
Macintosh, but it re-appeared with the iPod. iTunes sells millions of
songs, and each one of them is encrypted with the serial
number/encryption key of the computer that downloaded them.

People have in the past backed up their songs, without their keys, and
so far Apple has been nice enough to let them download new copies
with new keys. Of course when that is a gigabyte and you have broadband,
it's not much of a deal, but what happens when it includes full length
movies purchased over 20 years?

It's not just Apple. What killed the Amiga IMHO was all those wonderful
copy protected games on floppies. The day I bought my hard drive for
my A2000, I found out that they would never run on it, and I had to
either find bootleg copies of the games, or spend 10 minutes loading them
and watching the floppy and the drive self destruct.

At that point, I decided it was not worth it. I could get the bootlegs,
but if I had to buy the game and get the bootlegs, there was something
wrong in that equation. I believe that most people felt the same way.

While I am sure that people really don't want DRM in principle, not
enough people will care enough to do anything about it.

I also want to state that I am not 100% against DRM. For example, as
being someone who almost never goes out and can not afford to go to
the library, if there was one to go to, the ability to check out an
audio book from the library web site and have it self destruct in 14 days
is very attractive. 

If someone does not want the DRM version, they are welcome to go to the
library and check out a CD or audio cassette. It's unfortunate that
in every discussion about this I have gotten into, the people who don't
want the DRM copies are unwilling to transport homebound people,
or even pickup and return tapes for them.

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
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