The Comodore Trademark has been sold and resold in Holland in the last six years as far as I can tell both the Tulip and the Escom company have at least been holder of the trade mark and at least one of them payed no more than Fl 100,- (=$40,-) I dont know if this applied only to a dutch (benelux) trademark or the worldwide trademark. If the comodore company once again exists it is certainly not the same company that gave us the VIC & the C64. My guess is that the trademark was for grabs once more and somebody is trying to beat a few more bucks out of it. Branding a run off the mill clone with the comodore logo and supplying a couple of emulators and a special keyboard with it, truely sounds like a hype in the making. It'll blow over pretty soon. Sipke de Wal

"Richard Erlacher" <richard(a)idcomm.com> wrote: A lot of people don't seem to recognize this threat, and some people refuse to believe it even when it's pointed out. This is what Intel's processor serial number was about. Intel tried to represent that the serial number would provide some sort of benefit to the user, but in reality it was not the end user whose interests they were trying to serve. One of Intel's architects was publicly quoted as saying "The actual user of the PC -- someone who can do anything they want -- is the enemy." Intel lost that particular battle, but the war is far from over. There's now a think called the "Trusted Computing Platform Alliance.": http://www.trustedpc.org/ Such a pleasant-sounding, reassuring name. Until you think about one little detail. Trusted by *whom*? What the software companies, record companies, and movie studios want is a world in which they have complete control over what you can and can't do with their content, and TCPA is chartered with developing the technical infrastructure and standards to make it happen. However, they won't try to ram this down our throats all at once. They'll push it in small increments, and try to make us believe that each little piece is actually a good thing, or at least that it's not significant enough that we should worry about it. But if we allow them to do this, eventually we'll have computers with: * processors that compute a digital signature of the platform BIOS, and refuse to execute "unauthorized" code. * BIOSes that compute a digital signature of the operating system. * Operating systems that compute a digital signature of the BIOS (necessary to make sure that the OS isn't running on an unauthorized platform). And so on. Some cite free software as a force to prevent this kind of madness. Right now we can run both free operating systems and commercial operating systems on the same inexpensive commodity hardware (with the exception of certain peripheral devices whose manufacturers won't release hardware specifications). But eventually we might have a situation where commodity hardware can only run officially sanctioned operating systems, and hardware that is capable of running free software can't run the official stuff. As I see it, the only way this is likely to be averted is if free software develops a sufficiently broad deployment that the market for computers that can't run it is insufficient to satisfy the vendors. You probably don't want to read more of my ranting about this, but it's at http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/editorials/trusted_computing.html Eric

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Quite so! I particularly agree that all the computers of 20 years ago still do, and just as well, everything that they did 20 years ago, and that, in many cases, hasn't been improved much over the ensuing 20 years. Payroll and accounting packages still crank out the weekly checks, track the payables and receivables, and really can't improve things much by running faster. In fact, most of the processing bandwith improvements that have occurred in the last 20 years have gone for things we really didn't think we needed back then, and, quite frankly, still don't really need today. The GUI is where most of the bandwidth has gone, and to the "action-games" with their inane flash and silly sounds. Sadly, when you run the 20-year old software on the current generation of machines, it shows you how little improvement there's really been. All those gigabytes of hard disk space and hundreds of megabytes of RAM don't buy you a thing when you're running code designed for a 64K memory space. <sigh> Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: Tony Duell &lt;ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Tuesday, May 16, 2000 6:14 PM Subject: Re: Software rental, "trusted computing", etc. (was Re: Is this for real -- a new C64/128) be a each do. I good

On Tue, May 16, 2000 at 11:20:48PM -0000, Eric Smith wrote: I think in America at least there will always be enough individualists to say "over my dead body," and probably always competitors in the hardware space too. Even Intel has never had a real monopoly; and lately my perception is it's got less market share than it used to. And the free software tends to be more portable. So if Intel were to decide to cater to the "lockdown" market then maybe AMD would be selling more processors to the rest of us. Fortunately Intel's attitude towards free software is not that bad at the moment. And even if they try to lock things down the efforts of the hackers to find workarounds can't be underestimated. I think that in the long run the majority usually gets its way; and everyone knows it's better to own than to rent if one can afford it. -- _______ Shawn T. Rutledge / KB7PWD ecloud(a)bigfoot.com (_ | |_) http://www.bigfoot.com/~ecloud kb7pwd(a)kb7pwd.ampr.org __) | | \________________________________________________________________ Get money for spare CPU cycles at http://www.ProcessTree.com/?sponsor=5903

On Tue, 16 May 2000, Shawn T. Rutledge wrote: Consumers killed that attrocity known as "DIVX". We'll probably kill any other incantation of the same idea. The past few years have introduced an ominous trend towards corporations trying to increase their ability to squeeze more residual income out of their ownership of information. If it continues on this path, they will simply see an increase in piracy of their product. It reminds me of software protection in the 80s. Companies would try harder and harder each year to thwart piracy with new protection schemes that would always be broken, prompting newer and strong protection schemes that would be broken, etc. The idea of copy protection ultimately failed. What the corporations are doing now is, instead of trying to protect their information (well, except for the case of DVDs), they are trying to create more laws that will presumably allow them to extract higher penalties from big time (or not so bigtime) offendors. Sure it's ominous and, really, more obnoxious than anything. But I believe strongly enough in the open software "movement" that I think in the end the current actions by the big corporations involved in this power grab of the new economic paradigm will fail, and we'll have wondered what we were worrying about. The internet is here, and it's here to stay. It has introduced the world to an entirely new construct of freedom of information. The big corporations are screwed and they know it, and right now they are just running scared. All their current efforts will have all been in vain in due time. Sellam

On Tue, 16 May 2000, Derek Peschel wrote: My point is that I believe concepts like Open Source will make the laws moot. I believe that content will be increasingly published under "Open Source" principles and the "controlled" content will be in the minority, and not have the value that the laws currently being passed are striving to protect. It's just a trickle right now, but I hear the flood coming. I'm getting my board ready to ride that wave when it comes in, baby! :) Sellam the Prognosticator