"to outlaw general purpose computers"

[Jack Lloyd]

On Tue, 2 Jul 2002, Eric Cordian wrote:

[...]

I agree that making them mandatory requirements for new machines will do
more than enough, without having to bother to make old machines illegal.

> > Not even counting your computers, and my computers, and 500 million
> > computers already out in the U.S. alone, there are the designs of
> > processors like Pentium 4, Athlon, McKinley, Thoroughbred, Duron, etc.,
> > _none_ of which are of this Valenti-friendly TCPA form. None of the
> > hundreds of millions of systems now being prepared for sale are of this
> > form. Saying that general purpose computers lacking TCPA/DRM will be
> > "outlawed" is silly.
>
> Such functionality will be placed in a dedicated chipset apart from the
> microprocessor initially.  How many computers made 10 years ago are around
> today?

Plenty. Most are so old as to be virtually useless by modern standards, but
hey.

> How many made today will be around 10 years from now?

Even more. And I think it likely that they will be more useful than
currently 10 year old machines, as well.

Why do I think that? Mostly because Intel/AMD/Dell/co are having such an
awful time trying to sell the latest and greatest whiz-bang stuff. Back 'in
the day', virtually _any_ speed increase was worth buying. But at this
point, unless you've got something really special in mind, you can often
stay a generation or two (or three) back without any problems at all. Also,
pretty much any machine made in the last couple of years is fast enough to
do real time audio capture and compression. Real time video still requires
something fairly high end, but give it a year.

Not to say that having DRM hardware will not be a total pain the ass. Just
that mass-scale piracy will still be very much possible. But I suppose they
already know that.

-Jack