The sheer evil of Longhorns hardware integrated copyright protection measures makes Longhorn a completely unacceptable operating system.
In short, Longhorn supposedly will include "production to bio-hardware" DRM protection. Every subsystem, including the monitor, will have to support DRM.
Apparently Microsoft is not in the business of pleasing their customers. There is no possible way it is in the customers interest to give in to thjis kind of DRM.
More and more, Longhorn seems like the most gigantic attempt at corporate suicide since IBM decided to see if it still owned the PC platform. On the other hand, Microsoft have some assurance that this kind of thing goes down smoothly with consumeres, since people are storming to buy iPods, a device with similarly non-consumer friendly "protections" built in. Digital rights is mainly a geek fest. Digital consumption is not.
From engadget:
To be fair – it’s not just Microsoft. The next generation of digital content will, by and large, be protected to the display. Recently Toshiba released their HD-DVD specifications and have dictated HDMI/HDCP as a display requirement for playing back high-definition content. Most expect Blu-ray to have similar restrictions.
So bad news comes from many places. It's just that the PC platform is supposed to be the 2-way interactive platform that we control and that media is supposed to converge to that platform. The dream for that convergence is not the same horrible conditions under which media is controlled in television and the movie business and the music business, but rather new media drive by the values of the open 2-way platform. So bad news is bad news.
All I feel like doing is quoting Jason Calacanis' talk at Reboot:
DON'T LET THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS KICK YOU AROUND
Posted by Claus at July 17, 2005 09:33 PM | TrackBack (0)