Here is a paper that discusses some of the issues:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html
There are quite a few other discussions out there on the topic
But in quick, Palladium gives various people the "right" to walk right
into to your computer without a search warrant and snoop around as they
see fit.
This has serious implications beyond the usual concerns over where
those MP3s came from. Given that the federal government just recently
passed some lukewarm legislation to protect some of our privacy rights,
this effectively gives Microsoft and others the right to come in, look
over that private info a corporation has about you and do what they
will with it.
The upshot is that a lot of corporations are looking at how much they
will have to budget for defending themselves against the coming
lawsuits (since there are some various constitutional issues at stake,
this will be a bloody vicious fight too) and deciding 'nope, ain't
gonna spend that money.' It is cheaper to switch to Linux or some other
platform, retrain all of the folks using them, convert the legacy
stuff, etc. than it is to pay the liability claims that are coming. Add
to that Microsoft's really unusual new licensing scheme for software
and it just plain costs too much money to use Windows.
Jerry
On Tuesday, January 7, 2003, at 06:26 PM, Allan Atherton wrote:
> Jerry Yeager <jerry at browseryshop.com> wrote:
>> Wait until Palladium gets going, then you will be seeing many
>> corporations
>> leaving Windows for either Linux or Mac desktop systems. ... A serious
>> AppleWorks upgrade (rather than update) would put Apple in well with
>> the
>> corporate users who would still be able to use the .doc format for
>> quite some
>> time. As it is now, AppleWorks can translate (with the help of
>> MacLinkPlus for
>> OS-X) many of the .doc files.
>
> I used Windows all day long for ten years, in a corporate highly
> networked
> environment with nationwide offices, i.e. the Fed govt. And what you
> are
> saying does not make sense to me. What is Palladium, and why in the
> world
> would corporations want to lose their investment in Windows programs
> and
> Office and isolate themselves?
>
> After the years of Wordstar and WordPerfect, Word and the other Office
> programs prevailed and have spread throughout the world to become the
> lingua
> franca of business.
>
> I don't see why corporations would change their OS, all their software
> and
> their hardware. Aside from the incredible cost and sheer difficulty,
> they
> would be unable to communicate very well for a long time. They also
> use a
> lot of very special software for budgeting and management that is has
> been
> written just for them at incredible cost.
>
> For documents, translation by MacLinkPlus is no substitute for the true
> cross platform transparency of Office. Translation requires software,
> updates, progress bars, and cleaning up formatting that does not always
> translate so well. The documents that I produced and exchanged in the
> business world could be a hundred pages long and highly formatted with
> all
> kinds of imbedded stuff, taking a huge investment to prepare. One does
> not
> mess around with "translations". Translations are not trustworthy.
>
> For communications, the usefulness and power and complexity of
> Microsoft
> Outlook Exchange is incredible, and I don't think there is anything
> like it
> in the Mac world. It goes beyond email.
>
> I just don't think the future of Mac lies in pulling away and
> competing with
> Office and Microsoft. AppleWorks ... it could go the way of
> BeagleWorks.
>
> Allan Atherton
>
>
>
> | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will
> | be January 28. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>.
>
>
>
| The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will
| be January 28. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>.
