Microsoft Pwnd: All Your Documents Are Belong to Us
,----[ Quote ]
| When copyrighted materials are scanned into the Pwnd, you can rest
| assured your valuable intellectual property will remain secure.
| Users can only read what is on the screen three times before the
| digital version of the scan is deleted, and users will be directed,
| when docked, to a docking program in Windows XP that will allow
| them to purchase the document they tried to steal. A special
| integrated webcam records the position of the user's eyes to
| determine the number of times the document has been read. (Please
| note the term "webcam" does not mean the device can be used to
| communicate via video on the web.)
`----
http://www.lowendmac.com/lite/06/1127.html
Speaking of pwned:
http://johnnykonline.com/stuff/sfx/posters/zune.jpg
Related:
Vista and British Library put da Vinci online
,----[ Quote ]
| Microsoft and the British Library have digitised two of Leonardo da
| Vincis' notebooks.
|
| [...]
|
| The British Library has created an updated version of its application
| called "Turning the Pages" which allows people to browse parts of
| its 150 million piece collection via a web browser. We heard how
| this works better using Vista.
`----
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/30/vinci_notebooks_vista/
Publish And Perish
,----[ Quote ]
| Alexander Rose, the executive director of the futurist Long Now
| Foundation, worries about the impermanence of digital information.
| "If you save that computer for 100 years, will the electrical plugs
| look the same?" he asks. "The Mac or the PC--will they be around?
| If they are, what about the software? " So far there's no business
| case for digital preservation--in fact, for software makers like
| Microsoft, planned obsolescence is the plan.
|
| "The reality is that it's in companies' interest that software should
| become obsolete and that you should have to buy every upgrade,"
| Rose says. We could be on the cusp of a turning point, though, in the
| way businesses and their customers think about digital preservation.
| "Things will start to change when people start losing all of their personal
| photos," Rose said.
`----
http://www.forbes.com/2006/11/30/books-information-preservation-tech-media_cx_ee_books06_1201acid.html?partner=yahootix
http://tinyurl.com/yyjqoh
Windows Vista Product Guide: Free to Download, $149 to Read
,----[ Quote ]
| 'Windows Vista Product Guide' was released in two formats:
|
| Microsoft Office Word 2007
| The standard .doc format isn't good enough, you need to be able to
| read a .docx file, so all those users of Office XP are just plain
| out of luck on
| this one.
|
| XPS
| What the heck is XPS? I hadn't heard of it before now, (a quick
| Google tells me XPS is Microsoft's proprietary rival to PDF)
| but apparently you need a special reader for it (which is
| kindly enough built into Vista, but nothing else).
`----
http://itsvista.com/2006/12/windows-vista-product-guide-free-to-download-149-to-read/
Microsoft Office lock-in and the deal with Novell
,----[ Quote ]
| It details how Microsoft has built into Vista the "trusted
| computing" ability to lock down Office files via DRM such that
| no unauthorized document reader will be able to decrypt and
| read them. This is perhaps one of the biggest hidden weapons
| Microsoft has in its arsenal that could sabotage Linux and
| OpenOffice.org if Microsoft succeeds in its attempt to plug
| SUSE and all Novell's "interoperability" bonuses.
`----
http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000142
|
|
