Adam Goodman points me at this TCPA / Palladium FAQ and an article over at The Register.

Here's a bit of the FAQ that struck me:

12. Scary stuff. But can't you just turn it off?

Sure - one feature of TCPA is that the user can always turn it off. But then your TCPA-enabled applications won't work, or won't work as well. It will be like switching from Windows to Linux nowadays; you may have more freedom, but end up having less choice. If the applications that use TCPA / Palladium are more attractive to the majority of people, you may end up simply having to use them - just as many people have to use Microsoft Word because all their friends and colleagues send them documents in Microsoft Word.
Yuck. Microsoft and the media industry are saying "you don't have to play the game, but if you do play you're gonna play by our rules."

Posted by jzawodn at June 29, 2002 08:35 PM

Reader Comments
# shadowhawk said:

When this garbage comes on the market, I'm switching to Linux!

on July 2, 2002 08:41 AM
# beltorak said:

I already did; i made the plunge when i heard that M$ is stopping support for everything except the XP line of non-O/S in 2003; and that since 1997 M$ has been dying to force users to pay an annual subscription fee for use of the non-O/S; and of course the registration....

You want a relatively painless switch? tryout redhat or mandrake. AbiWord can read ".doc" files (at least it does for W-98, and I have convinced my wife to NEVER upgrade past W-98, but she still refuses to switch to linux.... grr. owell.); Linux can read the NT filesystem (write is still dangerous), and read/write FAT filesystems. And it runs fine on old hardware (a 386 w/4 MB RAM will stretch the limits of usablility, but what does XP require? pentium2 or later??).

-t.

on July 27, 2002 09:47 PM
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