WinHEC 2005: Day 2
by Derek Wilson & Jarred Walton on April 27, 2005 8:45 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Auxiliary Displays
Another item we took a little closer look at on day 2 was the auxiliary display demonstration. The premise of the auxiliary display is to provide some amount of useful content to a user while his or her computer is powered down. With the auxiliary display being tied directly into power and Longhorn providing the capability for the display to access certain content on the system, we can have email clients, schedulers, and even media players running while the system is off.
Preliminary auxiliary display drivers have already been provided to IHVs by Microsoft, and we hope to see many different implementations come out of this idea. The major use Microsoft has in mind for this technology is in the lid of notebooks in order to deliver even faster access to mobile data. If Microsoft can eventually get the auxiliary display to access wireless network interface cards, they will be able to display whether or not a wireless access point is in range as well as the signal strength.
Some of the concept designs we saw were not as interesting as we would have liked. The few that looked intriguing combined Bluetooth devices and auxiliary display technology to produce kind of interactive remotes for the PC.
Our favorite idea built around the auxiliary display is as a diagnostic tool for the server environment. The auxiliary display isn't restricted to power off usage, and it can be used as a fast, lightweight interface to headless servers in a corporate environment. Monitoring the status of a system where the auxiliary display is built as a diagnostic tool could help make system administrators' lives easier. This is especially true in cases where systems have crashed/hardlocked and the admin needs to find out what went wrong. As auxiliary displays will be tied to the SMBus and will always be powered, system designers have the opportunity to add some excellent diagnostic and management tools to their products.
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JarredWalton - Wednesday, April 27, 2005 - link
Going along with what Derek said but in a different vein, let's say the technology industries spend billions of dollars on a system that appears to be safe in order to please the content providers. When the system still ends up being cracked/hacked/bypassed (which I feel is inevitable), why bother in the first place? DeCSS has been cracked for years. Why is MS talking about layers of protection over the coming years? Because they already assume/know that the earlier efforts will be bypassed!Have the sales of DVDs suddenly plummeted because people can create their own illegal copies? Why doesn't everyone just download the content off the Internet and burn it to a 25 cent DVD? Maybe it's just that it's too difficult and time consuming? The large retail outlets like Wal-Mart and Target however are selling more DVDs than ever - at slightly lower prices than before. It's a case of supply and demand, and I just don't think there are that many people looking to steal content. They want a fair price, and $20 for a $1 item is probably too high.
I also don't think a lot of people like paying the RIAA and MPAA a large amount of money when the artist gets practically nothing. Or purchasing a $15 CD for the one track on the CD that's worth listening to. That's a different story, though.
DerekWilson - Wednesday, April 27, 2005 - link
To quote #7: "...and everyone and their grandma are perfectly happy to never purchase "content" again.""We've seen what happens when the barriers to theft get drastically lowered, and what happens is the providers take it in the ass. "
This is absolutely untrue. Remember those decreased sales the RIAA reported? They were decreased units shipped to retail outlets (who are carrying less now that online retail is taking off). Point of sale numbers for the record industry has been record setting recently -- even during their reported downturn. It is also a very flawed system to report a free download as the loss of a sale. I can't even begin to count the ways this is illogical.
The argument is easily made (and always glossed over) that high availability of free content increases sales of the very same. There are hundreds of reasons this is true, but I'll keep this short and just point to the numbers: the RIAA has been doing better than ever since Napster came along with multiple landmark years for high record sales.
I have no doubt that we would see increased sales if iTunes and Napster dropped DRM. And not because people want to pirate the songs and resell them.
Which brings me to a point. The only people content providers should go after are the pirates who *sell* content for which they do not own the copyright. The mistake the RIAA and MPAA make is to think the average person is as greedy as they are.
But regardless of these facts, even if freely available content hurt the content providers, they have no right to limit the rights of everyone in order to eliminate the illegal activity of a vast minority of for profiet pirates (who are the only ones the content provider should have a real claim against). We don't remove knives from the kitchen because they can be used to kill. It is absurd to think that we need to eliminate all vehicles for possible illegal activity when legal functional and important uses of the same are abundant.
Legally, making personal copies of copyrighted material is appropriate. I would really like to have backup copies of my content in order to perserve the content that I purchased. I would rather store my movies on my computer after having bought them on phsycial media so that I can keep the disk elsewhere in case of a crash. Or it would be nice to burn electronically purhcased media to something physical for the same purpose. But content providers make this impossible because they simply do not understand the market.
And it's not even most artists that take up the cause of DRM and copy protection ... it's the beurocracy that makes money by simply facilitating the distribution of the content.
I don't have a problem with content providers making money. I'd like to see them make more. That's why I want them to drop the copy protection and DRM nonsense and start just selling content to a market that is so thirsty for it they have taken matters into their own hands.
TheGee - Wednesday, April 27, 2005 - link
Can Iwatch TV dad? Hang on while I go through the menu system to set it up for you whilst I play these tunes in the bathroom record that HDTV program to hard disk. Save that film on the DVD brecorder and.........f*ck whats that blue screen for?Turin39789 - Wednesday, April 27, 2005 - link
#7 a law that is unenforceable is not a legitimate lawBrian23 - Wednesday, April 27, 2005 - link
If Longhorn has media protection in it, I won't use it. Period. And that's not because I use illegal downloads. I just don't want someone to tell me I can't rip my CD and play it back on my iRiver.Poser - Wednesday, April 27, 2005 - link
My personal experience is that most consumers don't really give a damn about the interests of the content providers and are, when the opportunity exists, unapologetic theives. Remove limits on content access (via the 'net), limits on quality (via digital copying), and limits from technical ability (via easy to use programs), and everyone and their grandma are perfectly happy to never purchase "content" again.I'm continually surprised to see content providers so maligned for trying to protect their material from copying. We've seen what happens when the barriers to theft get drastically lowered, and what happens is the providers take it in the ass.
The existence of iTunes isn't proof that people "want" to pay for content, it's evidence that people really like easy to use software with slick functionality. And maybe even proof that lawsuits really do scare people into taking the legal route. If an illegal but free version of iTunes existed with the same ease-of-use, speed, iPod integration, availability to the clueless masses, and if on top of that there were no threats of legal recourse -- how popular would the legal, pay-per-song version be?
ElFenix - Wednesday, April 27, 2005 - link
that alphastation was ridiculously faster and less expensive than the 486 server, and yet alpha died. RIP alphaProviaFan - Wednesday, April 27, 2005 - link
Thanks for the article!This content protection BS is making me seriously consider other software (and possibly hardware) platforms. While Linux would be ok for most of what I do, it lacks a bit on the digital imaging side (no easy, fast, and reliable way to run the latest version of Photoshop). Does anyone know what Apple's stance on hardware content "protection" is?
DerekBaker - Wednesday, April 27, 2005 - link
106MB hard disk?LoneWolf15 - Wednesday, April 27, 2005 - link
Man, those old systems really take me back.I used to call that Acer Aspire case "what happened when an Acer engineer had too many beers while watching Apollo 13 one weekend". I also remember drooling over the Compaq P90 desktop when that came out, and when that SystemPro 486 was top-end hardware.
Thanks for the memories. Reminds me of the first system I actually built rather than bought (386DX/20MHz with a whopping huge 8MB of RAM and 106GB hard disk).