Re: [announcement] SYSAPI and SYSSVC for Windows

[Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>]

Ekkehard Morgenstern <ekkehard.morgenstern@onlinehome.de> wrote:
: 
: "Georg Bauhaus" <sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de> wrote:
:> Though I think that starting with NT4, Windows has given up the nice
:> modularisation present in NT 3.51 among other things.
: 
: Not in the least. As I said, XP contains all of 2000 and all of NT.

Hm. So is it not true that they more or less have woven the shell and
the graphics subsystem into one thing?
(I know I can sort of replace explorer by cmd.exe, but then ...)
Does someone remember the "light" edition of IBM's OS/2 workplace shell
running on WfW 3.11? I remember a microsoft employee explaining
(in 1996) that the NT developers would have wished to go on with
the development of an O-O filesystem, they weren't allowed because
of the new interface ...

:> Let alone the much debated forcedness of "support" for no-copying 
:> soft/hardware, saluting the DMCA and Palladium.
:> Did someone say something like "we need more trust"?
: 
: This panicking in the face of TCPA efforts is not justified.

(Who is panicking? :-) By trust I meant to refer to honest business.
(The baker hands me a loaf of bread, I pay. X sends content to me over
an internet connection, I pay.)
Now you can't copy bread (except if you employ Jesus' trick), but
you can copy software (and music and films, no news here).
If your general attitude towards consumers contains,
"People are stupid and selfish and have a tendency to be criminals, in
 particular if they have computers (you know they get all this free stuff
 how should they have learned to pay), they sure will make illegal copies,
 everyone knows this, no use explaining that producing media content is
 work etc",
then you don't believe in a kind of business where a sufficient number
of people will see that paying is the right thing to do.
Or at least you presume it is more profitable to not believe in
paying customers.
<rant mode=OT>
This, IMHO, is what Palladium addresses.
 
: The Palladium platform will support "trusted" and "untrusted"
: operation. It just mimicks things present in MULTICS, and OS/400,
: for example, namely the possibility of providing a secure 
: environment for running applications.
: 
: The user can decide whether they want to run trusted or other apps.

The users might have an option to decide whether they want to run
"trusted" applications like media player, real player, and its ilk or not
see anything at all -- because there is little to be seen without
"trusted" programs. What other apps? In a sense, there will be trusted
programs. But the concept of a trustworthy person is not currently
preferred.  Why?
(All there is is threat, contemporary ad: "you know what the other
prisoners will do to you in jail, movie pirat, do you?"
addressing a *mass* audience, not professionally copying criminals). 

I'm glad there are some compiler vendors who seem to trust their
customers and don't use all sorts of electric circuits but a plain
contract, and payment.  Why? Might they have reason to assume that
customers aren't necessarily thiefs or fences?

Lets see whether the prices for products that cannot be copied
will adapt or whether Sony Music, Hollywood, et. al. will leave
the prices at the current level and try to, uhm, "recover".
(after all there is said to be a huge loss due to copying,
everyone in the music and films industries (including pornographic
films industries) seems to be starving, right?).
</>

-- Georg