[geeks] Opinions on the HP C3x00?

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Mon, Mar 27, 2006 at 11:24:46PM -0600, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> Linux is obviously going to take over the world Real Soon Now[0], and we
> should all just embrace TPM because it'll never be used for anything
> bad.  I mean, it says "trusted" right in it's name.  How could it be
> anything bad?  We're all trust-worthy, right?

Well said..........

For those that don't know (or care) Apple invested a lot of money in a
Macintosh port of Linux. In the end they decided that the GPL put them
in a position that they did not want to be in and went to *BSD.

MacOS is open source, at least the operating system part. It's called
Darwin and is both available from Apple, and opendarwin.org, along with
a centralized organization to port *BSD, Linux, and other open source
software, darwinports.org.

Aqua, the GUI, however is NOT open source. Although technicaly this would
also have been ok under the GPL, Apple reserved the right to make modules
OCO (object code only) which is required by hardware manufacturers.

Apple has never claimed that you would not be able to boot Darwin on a 
regular PC, in fact they have done it internaly since the original release
of OSX and opendarwin.org has had an X86 port probably as long as they
existed. What they did say is that some parts of the operating system
will eventualy not work without their magical DRM hardware. 

They've never specified which parts. The computers loaned to developers
when the first X86 version was released used a standard Intel motherboard.
I assume the Apple motheboards in the production machines are different,
but how different is another question.

Except for lack of a BIOS, the current machines are close enough to run
Windows XP with a boot loader hack. Something anyone can do. Windows/Vista
is supposed to install out of the box, with no hack.

IMHO, this is "testing the water". There is no question that the move to
Intel for Apple was successful, the question will be if the DRM restrictions
on parts of the operating system "works". 

Our friends in Redmond do not exist in a vacuum, I'm sure there is a DRM'ed
version of Windows Vista under development. Eventually there will be a 
version of Windows so cheap that most people who would of bootleged it,
won't bother ($100 or less). The high end version of Windows (supposedly
targeted to gamers) will very likley be DRM'ed.

Why not, in my experince developing hardware for gamers, we found out that
the real market was married men around 35, they spent more than half
of the total money on games and accessories for themselves.

The second highest group was unmarried women also around 35. I expect
that this did not mean married women did not buy or play games, only
that one copy was sold per family and the men did the shopping.

As for DRM and media, I like to believe the line from Star Wars, "The more
you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers".

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