The open PC is dead - start praying, says HD guru General IP Issues3/7/2001; 5:41:57 PM

'Hale Landis maintains the ata-atapi.com website, and has been working for open standards for twenty five years. He has been a participant in the ANSI X3/NCITS Technical Committees that developed the ATA and ATA/ATAPI standards since 1990, and works as a consultant and provider of test software. 'His chilling, deeply pessimistic view is that the good times are over. The fight for an open hardware platform is very real, and the power has swung from the PC leaders to the entertainment industry. It's a valuable strategic view from the trenches of the T.13 committee, where the fight over copy control mechanisms continues. It was posted to the private T.13 mailing list, and we cite it here with permission....'

'Basically your "general purpose personal computer", aka "home computer", is history.... So have fun fighting the battle against CPRM and alike but please do not be surprised when you fail, after all the war has been lost, long live the new world order: proprietary devices, proprietary interfaces, copy protection, limited functionality, and prepare you credit card accounts for all those monthly rental and service charges you will be paying for every "computer controller consumer electronics device" you use.'