Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/johnband/sbbs.johnband.org/index.php:1) in /home/johnband/sbbs.johnband.org/wp-includes/feed-rss2-comments.php on line 8
Comments on: AOL? Windows? Never heard of ’em… http://sbbs.johnband.org/2005/06/aol-windows-never-heard-of-em/ As fair-minded and non-partisan as Torquemada. Wed, 07 Mar 2012 07:16:20 +0000 hourly 1 By: Chris B http://sbbs.johnband.org/2005/06/aol-windows-never-heard-of-em/#comment-4429 Fri, 10 Jun 2005 16:20:00 +0000 http://sbbs.johnband.org/?p=1142#comment-4429 DRM

Files aren’t described by users as DRM-poisoned for nothing.

Read

http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/history.communications2.pdf

It’s frankly an excellent piece of analysis.
The issue with DRM is that is tries to prevent the whole point of networking people / machines etc., which is to facilitate information exchange. For that reason and that reason alone I will not buy any DRM locked shit. Before someone points out I’m using XP which is DRM protected, who said I bought it? Which brings me to my second point, DRM is and always can be broken, anything that feeds information to me in a human processable format can be duplicated irrespective of DRM funkiness, which removes the whole argument for having DRM in the first place.

]]> By: Matt Daws http://sbbs.johnband.org/2005/06/aol-windows-never-heard-of-em/#comment-4403 Fri, 10 Jun 2005 07:01:00 +0000 http://sbbs.johnband.org/?p=1142#comment-4403 I think he’s partly right about AOL: they did start off as a company providing much more than simply internet access, and were vaguely forced by market pressures into being little more than an ISP. For example, their custom browser (being a port of Mozilla) is surely on its way out.

You’ve got a very good point about WinNT though: outside of specalist server markets, it is the defacto standard, and it hasn’t changed beyond recognition in the way AOL has.

Quite an interesting article though: especially the points about DRM on email etc.

]]>