Jay Sulzberger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >Nonsense. Let us remember what Palladium is: > >Palladium is a system designed to enable a few large corporations and >governments to run source secret, indeed, well-encrypted, code on home user's >machines in such a way that the home user cannot see, modify, or control the >running code.
There's an even simpler explanation which I tried recently on some non-techies: Palladium is a way for Microsoft to make it harder for users to install a pirated copy of Office. That is all. They understood. >From a purely economic perspectice, I can't see how this will fly. I'll pull a random figure of $5 out of thin air (well, I saw it mentioned somewhere but can't remember the source) as the additional manufacturing cost for the TCPA hardware components. Motherboard manufacturers go through redesigns in order to save cents in manufacturing costs, and they're expected to add $5 to their manufacturing cost just to help Microsoft manage its piracy problem? More to the point, there's a significant engineering overhead involved here. Look at PC power management, after years of APM and then ACPI we've now reached the situation where power management more or less works, most of the time, as long as you don't do anything more complex than suspend-to-disk. Assuming that the TCPA hardware is of the same level of complexity as ACPI, what a hardware vendor gets by going down the TCPA/Palladium track is: - More expensive products than the competition with no gain in features. - Late to market because of the extra design and testing involved. - Years of bugfixes and updates a la ACPI. In return they get: - A warm glow of satisfaction knowing that they're lending Microsoft a hand in improving their bottom line. Sounds a bit like the SET business model in which the issuing bank got to carry all the cost and liability and the aqcuiring bank got all the benfits. Peter.
