Re: Windows Vista - worst OS yet?

On Fri, 12 Jan 2007 21:31:17 -0800, "Paul Hovnanian P.E."
<paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Gave us:

I think all this DRM stuff is going to cause the PC industry to fork at
both the hardware and software level. If I want to build applications
for the (as yet nonexistent) integrated home multimedia/TV/gaming
platform, I'm going to have to comply with the specifications dictated
by Hollywood. On the other hand, if I want to build apps for
office/engineering/internet use, why should I maintain an expensive DRM
compliance infrastructure?

I think the PC will split into two separate architectures:

One, optimized for entertainment systems, will have all of the DRM
hardware built in. But, in order to ensure the security of the protected
content, the software API will be restricted to 'authorized'
applications developers willing to sign all the NDAs, expose their
technology to entertainment industry audits and submit to trusted
applications digital signing protocols. Access to the internet must be
restricted to trusted services, because anything unknown must be assumed
to be hostile to he rights of the protected content on the platform.

The other, optimized for productivity, will be an open system,
accessible to all developers. The only filtering or blocking will be
against known hostile agents (spyware, spam, etc.) but newly developed
apps or protocols will be allowed and assumed to be benign until proven
otherwise. The hardware need not have protected data paths with
encryption (and the performance penalties that implies) because the
content hosted on the system is assumed to be owned (or made available
to) the system's users with little or no restriction. Securing users
from access to their own content is pointless. Tools and documentation
for development on such a platform will be freely available and bear no
onerous licensing restrictions. The barriers to entry for software
developers on such a system will be much lower than those for the secure
platform in terms of both cost and up front licensing requirements. So,
for applications that don't require DRM, their cost and time to market
will be much lower.


The problem the industry content owners are trying to thwart is high
quality A/V content copying and theft, and or even bit-for-bit theft
of high quality A/V content.

Keeping a PC from being able to do that in the future will not be
easy as processing capacity in both computing and graphics increases.

I like your model, but stifling a PC's capacity to snatch such
content is also cutting down on their ability to perform high end 2-D,
3-D, and video routines and rederings.

I think that software that is capable of copying such content is
where DRM should be, and in now way should it be some native routine
in the OS as it is such a mutative world.
.

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